Boardgame News

Jennifer Schlickbernd: Ask Ms. Meeples – Bringing Attention to the Unknown

Thu, 12/02/2010 - 1:40am

Ask Ms. Meeples – Bringing Attention to the Unknown

After a lot of thought, I have decided not to write about African Americans in board gaming. This is a subject I care a lot about, but that I cannot in any way speak about as some kind of expert or even as one knowledgeable about the reasons. At some point I'd like to have a serious discussion on this issue. However, this column would not be appropriate for that discussion.

So as you can see, the column is not running every two weeks as was the case previously. Unfortunately with the lack of questions, it's difficult for me to create columns. This week's one is something that came up because of my acquisition of a lot of releases from Spiel 2010. And I think in the future, that's how the column is going to be. When I have something I think would be interesting to write about in social gaming, I'll write about it. If people send me questions, I'll answer them. Otherwise, you may not hear from me for a while.

This column is about how to get a game to the table that is not a "hot" game or a highly rated game or the game that some awesome reviewer is raving about. No, I'm not going to be writing about how to get your best friends to play Candy Land, but instead how to convince your friends to play something like Namibia or Mines of Zavandor.

My friend Lorna is a connoisseur of board games. And by that I mean that she doesn't just look at the hyped games or the popular games; rather, she examines games in a way that appeals to her. She likes a lot of games that other people have never heard of and probably won't ever hear of unless they read her lists or hang out with her. The good news for Lorna is that her friends are willing to take a chance on playing games with her – but not all of us are as fortunate.

Many game groups will look at a game that's not on the BoardGameGeek hot list, not ranked in the top 100 or not bearing a rating of at least 7 with deep suspicion. "Well, if it's so good, why doesn't everybody like it?" "I've never even heard of this game" "It's ugly!" And this is totally understandable. People seek to maximize their leisure time. They don't want to spend four hours playing a lousy game filled with arguments over the rules or mind-numbing boredom. At the same time, our hobby is still a hobby of surprises and not every great game will get the marketing it deserves. Also some games fit some people really well and others not so well. Some of my favorite games are ones that hardly anyone likes. (Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean comes to mind here.)

So you've skimmed the rules or you saw a demo or read a geeklist entry about a game, but you figure that your group may be skeptical. The first thing you need to do is to read the rules thoroughly if they are available. The next thing you need to do is to focus on why you think the game will be fun, so that when you introduce it, you can give the game some context. You may also want to do a couple of the following, too, if you think it's going to be a real problem or you seriously want to play. Try to think of some popular game that the game reminds you of. If you get a chance, play a few solitaire turns to get a feel for the game.

Like Lorna, once you establish a good record with games that are not as well known, your group will be more willing to give them a shot. And this effort is well worth it. Sometimes the hyped games are just that – hype. And sometimes a particular game is a great fit for a specific group. I'm going to be introducing Namibia to my group this weekend. I think some will like it and some will not, but I'm confident that those who like strategy games will at least find something in it that's mentally engaging and entertaining.

Send questions to msmeeples@gmail.com. Happy Holidays!

Categories: Game News

Board 2 Pieces, November 30, 2010

Tue, 11/30/2010 - 4:00am

Categories: Game News

Matt Thrower: The Long and the Short of It

Mon, 11/29/2010 - 12:00am

The Long and the Short of It

When I was young and freshly unleashed upon the world of boardgame columnists, burning with points to prove and issues to argue, one of the concepts that I did to death was the idea that Ameritrash games owe a huge debt to Euros. In spite of my flogging the subject to death, I still feel it's worth resurrecting from time to time. Not least to remind people in the Ameritrash camp that no matter how many times we justifiably chant "boring Euro-clone", it's a self-evident truth that back in the early 90's, AT games were in very much as bad a state as Euros are now. The market was glutted with tedious, unimaginative game which all copied stale mechanics from one another. It took exposure to the first wave of German games to hit the US, with their fresh approach to mechanics, to revivify the genre. That, and the gradual creeping boredom with Magic: the Gathering that a lot of gamers were experiencing after playing it for several years.

Indeed so great is the mechanical debt that the games I love owe to the games I hate (generalisations, obviously) that I wouldn't think it was that much of a step too far to think of virtually every successful thematic game released in the last decade as a form of hybrid. The trick has been borrowing mechanical innovations from the European paradigm and re-shaping them - and in some cases improving them - in order to fit a more demanding and rigid thematic mould. However it would be misleading to imagine that mechanics are the only thing that Ameritrash games have borrowed from Eurogames. Indeed I'm starting to suspect that in the long run they might actually prove to have been the least important lesson that up-and-coming thematic designers learned from the first wave of German games to hit Britain and America.

Just like a common set of criticisms can be levelled at the bulk of Euros on the market today, a similar common set of criticisms could be levelled at the Ameritrash glut of yesteryear. Chief amongst them was that there was too much "process chrome" for lack of a better word - resources in terms of game time and complexity that were being sucked into doing very little except making extremely minor thematic improvements and which offered no mechanical interest and indeed often detracted from the strategy of the game. Take the road-racing game Dark Future for example: a rule book of around 80 pages, much of which was taken up with detail you were never likely to need, such as carefully differentiation between side-on and end-on collisions. The result was that what should have been a fast, exciting tactical combat game was slow and boring. Or The Warlock of Firetop Mountain board game which borrowed a mechanic from the game book on which it was based of having each player randomly roll a skill score and make that score the basis of much the game mechanics with no thought at all of the effect it might have in a competitive instead of a solo environment.

(The reason all the games I'm ragging on here are Games Workshop titles is simply because they were, in the main, the games I was playing in the 80's not because GW was especially guilty: all the board game publishers and designers of the era were at it).

Mechanical improvements on these problems was a huge leap forward. It wouldn't take a lot of house-ruling with modern mechanical concepts to turn The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain in to something worth playing, for example. These games were often quite complicated and long, after all, and so ensuring that there was strategic interest in every hour of the game play was a massive improvement on what came before. But in doing this, early adopter hybrid designers missed a trick: mechanics aren't the only potential improvement that can be learned from Eurogames, only the most universal one.

In the past I've often been quick to criticise Eurogames that appear to be short and simple just for the sake of being short and simple - i.e. for no better reason that that was what their target demographic demanded. But that doesn't make them bad things in and of themselves. A successful Civilization-style game probably needs to run for several hours at least in order to provide the sense of epic scope that the genre demands, and it also probably needs a reasonably hefty rulebook in order to offer sufficient realism to draw the players in. Certainly no good civilization game has yet been published which manages to skimp on these requirements. But why should a dungeon crawl game or a sci-fi combat game necessarily take a long time or be extremely complicated? The requirement seems to have been borrowed by the early Ameritrash game designers from the role-playing games that gave rise to board game offshoots. RPG's tend to be long and complex and so the board games they spawned imitated them. And that's the way it's been ever since for, in many cases, no good reason.

Improving the mechanics of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is certainly one way of making it better, but in the same vein the problems it has with potentially massive differentials in randomly-generated player power would be a lot less problematic if the game were shorter or simpler to play. If you're going to invest less than an hour in learning and playing a game then really, it doesn't matter if the game is unbalanced or overly random: you can just sit back, relax and let the other cool stuff the game does well (such as reminding you of a misspent youth reading Fighting Fantasy books) come to the fore. Indeed in many ways this is, in my opinion, a rather better solution than carefully balancing the mechanics to make it a more strategic game. Highly random games can be tremendously fun and exciting after all, especially if they do something else (like theme) extremely well.

In the rush to make our beloved Ameritrash titles mechanically deeper and more strategic whilst attempting to retain the hard connections to theme that is such an essential part of the appeal of the genre, this alternative route seems to have been relatively overlooked, at least until recently. Over the past few years a new breed of short, simple Ameritrash game has emerged from underneath the auspices of the excellent new-wave hybrids that marked the first part of the last decade. Castle Ravenloft is the most recent example and it's predecessors include such illustrious company as Nexus Ops, Betrayal at House on the Hill and Last Night On Earth. What marks these games out is not just their quick and simple play but the fact that, for the most part, they've been massive commercial and critical successes. The reason, I don't doubt, is because they managed to simultaneously be fun and accessible whilst retaining the same essential thematic and narrative connections that their longer and more complex brethren managed. If a zombie game looks, feels and plays like a zombie game then mechanically who cares whether it's as simple as Last Night On Earth or as complex as Dawn of the Dead - the latter of which was a failure precisely because the bloated mechanics it employed in an effort to be as true as possible to its source material led to turgid, tedious game play.

Just to re-interate in case someone has missed the point: this is not a rant against long or complex games. Some of my favourite games are both long and complex and often a good weight of rules and a hefty play time are important if the game is going to succeed at its design goals. However, just as it's long been a particular mantra of mine that game designers should approach a new title with specific mechanical or thematic goals in mind that are rather more concrete than ephemeral concepts like "must play in under an hour", the reverse is also true. In other words if you can make a game about, say, evolution and get it to retain its core concepts and still play in under an hour, then there's no good reason not to trim off that excess fat. With the benefit of hindsight it strikes me as being incredible that it's taken this long for fans and designers of American style games to learn this important lesson. I suspect that some of the flak that the older publishers in the genre, such as Fantasy Flight, have been getting recently may be because they've only just come round to this same realisation: but recent releases that sit comfortably within my criteria such as Space Hulk: Death Angel and Cadwallon: City of Thieves to sit alongside their more epic games demonstrate that the corner has been turned. Very definately better late than never.

Categories: Game News

Itai Perez: A Comparison of Wine Games from Spiel 2010

Sun, 11/28/2010 - 1:00am

A Comparison of Wine Games from Spiel 2010

(Editor's note: Itai Perez originally wrote this article in French. He's translated the article and newly edited it for publication on Boardgame News. Thanks much, Itai! —WEM)

While the theme of grape cultivation and wine-making was rarely used until now, for 2010 we've seen a real flowering of games on vineyards and wine, with several on display at Spiel 2010. Now that the rules for most of these games are available, I thought it would be interesting to make a comparison to see what distinguishes these games. To my knowledge there are five games coming out in 2010 on this subject:

• King's Vineyard: An American game from David Haslam and Sandeep Kharkar by Mayday Games for 2-4 players with an announced duration of 45 minutes.
• Toscana: A Finnish game from Paul Laane by Aqua Games for 2-5 players with an announced duration of 45 minutes.
• Grand Cru: A German game from Ulrich Blum by eggertspiele for 2-5 players with an announced duration of 90 minutes.
• Vinhos: A Portuguese game from Vital Lacerda, published by What's Your Game? and other publishers in localized versions (including IELLO for French) for 2 to 4 players with an announced duration of 2 hours 30 minutes.
• Vendimia: A Chilean game from Alberto Abudinen and Diego Benavente from Aldebaran Games and AZ Games for 2 to 4 players with an announced duration of 60 minutes. (As the rules are not yet available for this game – only a video in Spanish – I will not incorporate this latest game in my comparison.)

Moreover, having not played any of these games – instead having just read their rules – this article won't include a review, only a comparison of their respective mechanisms. Rumors say that there is also Castles of Burgundy from Stefan Feld and alea, but for now, apart from an interpretation of the title, it doesn't really seem that wine-making is the theme of this game.

Anyway, we can already notice that this offer is particularly cosmopolitan (authors from five countries and two continents) and diverse (45 min to 2.5h), even if their theme is similar. But what about their mechanisms? This is what I will try to show you.

So how to proceed? I will first briefly present each game, to give you their strong points and then I will follow with a detailed comparison.

• King's Vineyard: This one is, I think, the simplest of the lot. In fact, it focuses solely on growing grapes. The wine appears only in the shape of the victory points (glasses, bottles and barrels). Players play royal winemakers, and the king delights in visiting his vineyard. According mostly to aesthetic criteria, he will give merit points to his growers. Whoever has the most after the last visit of the king wins.

The main mechanism of the game is running a hand of cards. Each player has cards that are either vineyards or special cards. The vines have three characteristics: grain color, length at maturity, and being sweet or not. Players must choose which vines to plant and when, the goal being to have, at the time of the visit of the king, the most mature vineyards in the same color and same length to have a maximum of victory points.

• Toscana: This game is, I think, the one in the group where the theme is the weakest. It is primarily a game of economic management: the objective is to earn a maximum of money. In each of the seven rounds, players will have to make three different actions, but they choose the order in which they'll do them: hiring, winemaking and trading wine.

Hiring will enable a player to get a new worker that will allow to activate a vineyard: there is a mini map with square fields representing vineyards and lakes (giving white wine, red wine, rosé, champagne or water). Putting a worker in there will enable you to appropriate it and later to use it to produce wine. This action also enables you, if you can afford it, to hire a specialist who will be able to influence wine prices.

Winemaking will enable the player to use his vineyards (and lakes) to produce wine (or water) by putting water cubes at their corners.

Trading allows you to either buy a type of wine (or water) or sell anything that you want.

The prices of the different wines and water will fluctuate from one round to another depending on supply and demand, the use of specialists, and a wine tasting held at the end of each round where each player will be able to decide to lower or raise the price of a type of wine. At the end of seven rounds, everyone sells everything he has in stock at the current market price and the richest player wins the game.

The two previous games were relatively light. Now comes something more heavy. The two following games are big management games, where you will need some reflection, but the rendering of the theme appears to be high.

• Grand Cru: This game seems, like Toscana, more economically oriented, but its greater complexity enables it to take better into account the specificities of the theme.

At the beginning of the game, players simultaneously decide what will be their starting capital, corresponding to the number of loans they will take. The goal of the game is to be the richest at the end of the game, the latter being triggered when a player has managed to pay its debts.

At each turn, players can perform actions among nine possible: four concern the purchase of tiles (vineyards or improvements) that are purchased in an auction: auction a tile, raise the bid on a tile, buy the tile at auction (if nobody outbid you) or buy it directly (by paying the highest price). You can also increase the demand for a wine (and thus its price), sell a wine (which will lower its price), harvest a vineyard, use an improvement, or pass.

Players will take actions in this manner freely until one of them finishes harvesting all of his vineyards (which can happen only after the fourth round of actions). Then the end of year phases start: sales are estimated, which will give players prestige points. These points will then enable them to perform new actions during a new round of special actions (each of which can be done only once). Players will then be able to become the first player, to have a late vintage, to make special deliveries, to sell a young wine, to sell grape juice, to have new growth, to increase demand, or to exchange their prestige for money. Finally, the wine matures, everyone pays their interests, and players can either repay their loans or take new ones.

As said before, if a player manages to repay his loans (or conversely if a player goes bankrupt), the end of the game is triggered and the richest player wins (the value of vineyards and wines in stock being taken into account).

• Vinhos: This game is also complex, perhaps even more than Grand Cru. While economic management is included, it is less central than in Toscana or Grand Cru. The goal is to earn not money but prestige, which can be obtained by a player filling his bank account but also by exporting wine or by distinguishing oneself during the wine fairs.

The game is played over six rounds. In each round, players will be able to perform two actions among nine: buy vineyards, cellars or wineries, hire enologists, sell wine to local businesses, export wine, make banking transactions (deposit / withdraw money from his account, invest or disinvest), hire wine experts, or pass (which serves as a press release announcing what wine will be presented at the next fair).

But unlike Grand Cru, these actions are not chosen entirely freely. The game actually uses a variant of Mac Gerdts' rondel that the author calls a quadrel. Actions are arranged in a square 3 by 3. To choose an action the player must move his pawn. If one moves toward an action that is not adjacent or an action where another player already has a pawn or an action where the tax collector pawn is, additional fees must be paid. (All these conditions are of course cumulative.) And the obligation for a player to move his pawn makes it impossible to carry twice the same action.

Then the players will pay or receive their interests (depending on their level of investment, they can be negative or positive), pay the wages of their enologists, and finally produce their wines.

During production, the quality of each wine is determined, taking into account the quality of facilities in the estate (number of vineyards, wineries, enologists and the and weather conditions of the year.

During the third, fifth and sixth rounds, there is an additional phase which is the wine fair. There, each player must present a wine whose value depends on its quality, its age and the reputation of the vineyard's region. Each wine will be presented according to some quality features (appearance, aroma, taste and alcohol content) and will yield a number of fair points to the player who presented it. Victory points are awarded according to the classification of fair points (which is cumulative from fair to fair). By sending barrels of this wine to influential people (provided that it meets their wishes at that time), players can obtain certain benefits, and in the end of the game particular multipliers increasing their points of victory.

Now that I've finished a quick presentation of the four games, I am going to do a point-by-point comparison. I've tried to select specific topics and explain how each game deals with each one.

1) Text in the game

Originally I wrote this for French-speaking people, who would want to know how much text there is in these games to know whether they can buy the English or German version. In case someone is interested (as perhaps you could buy a German version by mistake), I'll leave this part in. Anyway, as you'll see, on all four games, there is almost only the rules that need to be translated.

• King's Vineyard: The three types of "special actions" cards contain a short text summing up what they do. It is simple and can be easily explained and memorized, so it should not be a problem. There is no other text on the game components.
• Toscana: No text on the game components.
• Grand Cru: No text on the game components.
• Vinhos: No text on the game components except a few thematic words in Portuguese on the board ("banco de vinho" for the bank, "feira nacional de cinho portugues" for the fair)

2) Grapes and wine in the game – which of their characteristics are used?

• King's Vineyard: The game is centered on grapes culture. The wine is present in the game only in the shape of victory points (glass, bottle and barrel). There are several grape colors in the game: black, red, rosé, green and also hybrid vines with muticolored grapes.
• Toscana: Four wine types are present in the game: red, white, rosé and champagne. They are used to hire workers and experts (who are payed with wine and not money). The price of these wines (and water) fluctuates according to supply and demand (and the players' actions) between the same values (0 and 7) which means you can easily find yourself with water more expensive than champagne, for instance.
• Grand Cru: Five types of wine are present in the game: Gamay (green), Syrah (yellow), Merlot (red), Cabernet sauvignon (purple) and Pinot noir (dark blue). The maturing is taken into account, and it is different depending of the types of wine. Gamay can be drunk as soon as it is put in the bottle, and will mature badly (after three years you can't drink it anymore), while Merlot will need to mature five years before it can be sold. The more a wine needs to mature, the more its price rannge is high (even though it fluctuates according to supply and demand). The specialised actions at the end of the year enable a player to sell a young wine or even grape juice.
• Vinhos: The wines in the game are from eight different regions from Portugal, and for each of these you can have white wine or red. Each region has a unique characteristic giving a specific game bonus. The wine quality is also calculated depending on several elements. At the time it is put in the bottle, the production value is detemined by the year, weather and the Estate buildings (number of vineyard, wineries and enologists). Then when it is sold, the wine value is calculated with this production value, a maturing bonus and a bonus coming from the region renown. A cellar is necessary in the Estate for the wine to improve when maturing. However there is no wine differentiation. In this area, like in Grand Cru, all the wines mature in exactly the same way.

3) How to get vineyards and vines

• King's Vineyard: At the start of the game each player owns a vineyard (his playing area). The vines are drawn cards which can then be planted in the plant phase.
• Toscana: The game board contains an empty vineyards grid at the start of the game. The players then get the ownership of vineyards by hiring a worker (with the hire action) and putting it in a free vineyard.
• Grand Cru: Every player owns a player board showing a vineyard with 12 spaces at the start of the game. They will be able in the action phase to buy in an auction (with the auction, raise the bid, buy at auction and buy directly actions) vines and improvements that they will put in there. This player board also contains a cellar.
• Vinhos: Every player has a player board with four estates. Each estate has three spaces which can be filled with vineyards or wineries. This board also has a warehouse which can during the game be replaced by a cellar. The vineyards can be bought for the price indicated on the tile by a player with the buy vineyard action. On the main board, on a map representing Portugal regions, a four vineyard stack (which can each be of white or red grapes) is put on each region. The player can choose any region during his purchase, but he has to take the tile on the top of the stack.

4) Grape culture, harvest and wine production

• King's Vineyard: This game is based on this part, which is very detailed. Every turn is made of different phases: wilt (the mature wines wilt progressively), harvest (you remove a vine from the game, which is mandatory for completely wilted vines; note that the amount of harvested vines determines who wins if the players are tied), plant (plant a new vine with the appropriate card), grow (grow your vines) and mature (a vine reaching its maturation size matures). There is no wine production in this game.
• Toscana: When the wine production action is chosen, the player puts water cubes in corners near his vineyards. Each player vineyard with a water cube in a corner (or at two corners for abandoned vineyards) produces a wine (or water) cube, with the type of wine depending on the vineyard type.
• Grand Cru: When a vine is bought, after it has been put at auction, it is added in the player vineyard and a wine cube of a corresponding type is put on it. Then the harvest action enables the player, by paying 1 franc, to harvest one of his vines and to take the wine cube and put it in his cellar. At the end of the year, all player harvested vines receive another cube which will be possibly harvested in the next turn.
• Vinhos: The production happens automatically at the end of each turn. Each player estate with at least one vineyard will produce wine of the appropriated type (white or red) and with a value calculated by adding the weather modifier of the year (from -2 to +2) and those of the estate installation (+2 for a vineyard, +1 for a winery and +2 by enologist). A tile with the correct color face up (white or red) and with a value equals to that of the wine will then be put by the player in the estate warehouse or cellar.

(Part 2, covering economic management, victory objectives, randomness, interaction and components, still to come.)

Categories: Game News

Dale Yu: Busstop the Boardgame - Japon Brand - Essen Spiel 2010

Fri, 11/26/2010 - 4:03pm

Busstop the Boardgame - Japon Brand - Essen Spiel 2010

Busstop the Boardgame

Publisher: Japon Brand

Ages: 8+

Players: 2-5

Time: 15-20 mins

Times Played: 3 games plus demo at stand in Essen

Busstop box

[Author's note: This is one in a series of many game reports from the Spiel 2010 crop of games. While I would normally not write reviews without playing a game at least three times, I have decided to write my initial thoughts down in order to be able to get to more games in a timely fashion. I realize that some games have complexities/subtleties that only are evident after multiple plays – and as such, I will make a point to always outline my level of experience with the game. Finally, while I will always make an effort to describe the rules to the game, the descriptions here are not meant to be comprehensive nor complete – just enough for the reader to get a feel for the game and how it works. DY]

 

Every year at Essen, I always anticipate heading to the Japon Brand booth to see what they might have for offer.  I am always amazed by the variety of games that Takerube-san and his partners are able to bring over.  There are games of all styles, and the number of games seems to increase every year.  For example, among this year’s offerings were: String Railway (light train game), Aisopos (abstract), Cat and Chocolate (party game), Mai Star (card game), Bus Stop (Set collection game), Catch Out (bluffing game), Hau La (dexterity/art), and at least 7 more games that I didn’t even get a chance to try!

 

I try to keep on top of the offerings by reading the BGN Essen Preview as well as monitoring BGG to see what will be available.  However, no matter how diligent I try to be, there are always one or two games that I haven’t heard about until I get a demo at the Japon Brand booth.  On our first (of many) trips to the Japon Brand stand this year, we were able to meet Kai Fujiwara, the designer of Busstop, and learn the game from him.  I had not read much about the game, so I didn’t know what to expect.  I’m glad that we took the time to learn about this one as Busstop may be my favorite game thus far from Japon Brand (though I still have at least 2 more to play for the first time!)

 

Busstop is a fast-paced set collection game played over 10 rounds.  Each round takes maybe 1-2 minutes, so you can see that the whole game doesn’t take long at all.  You pla the role of a bus company owner, and you are trying to transport the most passengers during the 10 rounds of the game.  The catch here is that you start with only two buses in your fleet, and for reasons only known to Japanese bus lines, each bus will only accept one type of passenger.  There are 5 types available in the game: babies, children, schoolgirls, businessmen and grandmas as well a few extraterrestrials which act as wild cards.

 

Each round, five passenger tiles are drawn at random from the supply.  They are arranged on the the bus stop board in the order they they are taken out of the bag.  These tiles will be distributed using the numbered tiles that each player has (more on this later).  Each player starts the game with an identical set of 10 tiles numbered 1 thru 10: babies are 1-2, children are 3-4, schoolgirls are 5-6, businessmen are 7-8, and grandmas are 9-10.  One tile will be played each round, and each tile will be played once over the course of the game.

 

After the random tiles are placd on the bus stop board, the start player (the conductor) will choose one of his tiles and show everyone which tile he is going to play.  Then, the rest of the players will secretly and simultaneously select one of their tiles.  The numbered tiles are then placed on the top row of the bus stop board in order from low to high.  Ties are broken in clockwise order from the conductor.

 

One of the tiles will cover up the picture of the conductor.  This player takes the conductor tile, and he will be the start player for the next round.  Then, starting with the leftmost numbered tile (the lowest numbered tile), the tiles are distributed.  Each position gets a different choice of tiles.  This leftmost player can choose any of the tiles from the top row, and he must also take the leftmost random tile.  The second player only gets to choose a remaining tile from the top row.  The third player gets to be the start player next round, gets to choose one of the remaining tiles in the top row as well as getting three tiles from the bottom row – as directed by the arrows.  Finally, the highest numbered tile gets the remaining tiles in the top and bottom rows.

 

The player boards - 4P on the top, 2P/3P on the bottom

All of the tiles in the top row will be of the five main types – as they always come from the player sets.  The majority of the tiles in the bottom row are also of these 5 types, though there are a few special tiles that can be found as well.  There is one VIP tile of each passenger type which is worth 3 points (instead of the base value of 1 point).  There are also 5 lime-green extraterrestrial tiles which can be used as wild tiles.

 

Once the tiles are distributed, then each player takes his new tiles and places them on his personal board.  The passenger tiles can be placed in a bus or in the queue.  At the start of the game, each player has the bottom-most two buses available (a 5-seater and a 4-seater).  There is also a queue area which surrounds the bus parking lot. If this queue ever gets to space 9, your third bus (a 3-seater) becomes available for use.  All tiles must be placed somewhere each round.  Remember that each bus only holds one type of passenger, so you must choose carefully which type of passenger you are going to put into your bus!   You also need to pay attention to the order that you place people into the queue – because once a tile is in the queue – it doesn’t ever change position with any other tile!

 

Player board

If a bus ever gets completely filled – all spaces within it are taken by matching tiles or extraterrestrials – it immediately departs the station and a brand new empty bus takes its place.  The “delivered” passengers are taken from the board and placed in a scoring pile, and then you immediately start placing new passengers in this empty bus.  If you choose to take tiles from the queue, you must start from the head of the line and must still keep to the rule that only one type of passenger can be in a bus.  Once all of the tiles are placed by the players, the next round begins.  Whichever player holds the conductor tile chooses a number tile and reveals it to the other players, and the game goes on…

 

The game ends after 10 rounds, and scoring is fairly simple.  You score +1 point for each regular passenger tile and +3 points for every VIP tile that you “delivered”.  Extraterrestrial tiles score nothing.  Additionally, any passengers which remain on unfilled busses score nothing.  Any regular tiles left in the queue are worth -2 points, and VIPs left in line score -6 points!  The player who has the most points wins.

 

The game plays as quickly as you would think.  There is a fair bit of strategy to be had in the choosing of the numbered tiles but it doesn’t really take that much time to choose which numbered tile you want to play.  In most rounds, you usually know which positions will allow you to pick desired tiles in the bottom row.  Sometimes it’s easy to get to the desired upper row location, though it can get harder near the end of the game as your supply of numbered tiles dwindles and you might not be able to play the number you’d like to be able to play.  In fact, one of the things you have to get used to is that your final few turns are about dealing with the tiles that you end up picking up because you don’t necessarily have as much control as you’d like because your supply of number tiles is so small.

 

Of course, the conductor doesn’t have a lot of control over where his tile ends up during any turn because his choice is known to all the other players before they choose their tiles, but the rest of the table has to try to figure out which tile they can play to get the tiles they need.  Which tiles you end up getting is of paramount importance because of the rule that each bus only takes one type of passenger.  There are plenty of times when it seems best to land in the spot where you only get one tile so that you can manage your queue better.

 

There addition of a third bus when your queue gets up to 9 tiles is an interesting mechanism.  If you can build your queue appropriately (hopefully with the first three tiles matching each other), you can then have the advantage of the extra bus.  The catch here is that you won’t have many turns to use the third bus because your queue doesn’t usually grow by more than 1 or 2 each round, but it’s still a viable strategic option.  If nothing else, you can use the spaces on the extra bus to get people out of the queue and into a bus where they will at least not negatively affect your final score.

 

The components are well-done, and everything feels quite sturdy.  In fact, this may be the heaviest weight (densest) cardboard pieces I’ve seen in a long while.  Despite it’s small size, it’s a <u>heavy</u> game due to the cardboard!  The tiles have held up thus far to wear, and since I’ve played it with my kids a few times, it’s good to see that the game is durable enough to withstand their attention.

 

It should be noted that there are two additional rules which can be added to the game – however, having tried them both, I think that I will stick to the basic rules as both of the additional rules didn’t seem to add much to the game.  The first extra rule is the special passenger bonus rule – each player is designated a different type of passenger that they will score double points for at the end of the game.  This seemed to cut down on competition for tiles as each player tended to try to specifically collect their special type of passenger.  This may have been a bit of weird group think though when we tried it, so I’ll have to try it again sometime and see how it goes.

 

The second extra rule uses special end-game bonus tiles – worth 5 points at the end of the game – however, these bonuses did not seem well balanced.  In a game where regular scoring is often in the 20s, this large bonus can often decide a game – and they don’t seem to be well balanced enough to use regularly.  Each color has its own bonus condition: 1) All buses empty at the end of the game, 2) A total of seven or more people left on buses at the end of the game, 3) Only 2 buses used in the game (queue never got to 9), 4) Three or fewer passenger types delivered, 5) Deliver the most extraterrestrials.   Our group just didn’t like the arbitrariness that these bonus tiles gave to the game.

 

One workaround that we had to come up with was a good system to choose the tiles on the top row.  There were times when we would forget the order of the tiles in the top row – because they can sometimes be collected by players earlier in turn order.  After this happened a few times, we just made sure that we went over the player order before we started to choose tiles off the top row.

 

Other than that, Busstop is a well designed game that my group has enjoyed thus far.  It is more of a filler than a main course, but one that I think we will come back to in the foreseeable future.  The rules are easy to teach – I think that I got my kids playing in their first game in under 3 minutes.  And, though the overall game length is short, there are enough decisions to be made along the way to keep it interesting. 

 

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor

Categories: Game News

Daily News Dump for Nov. 26

Fri, 11/26/2010 - 2:21pm

The wrap:

• The winners of the 2010 Deutscher Lernspielpreis have been announced:

• For age 3: Schollenhüpfen, by Meike Maßholder and Marco Gutmayer (Oberschwäbische Magnetspiele)
• For age 6: Wo war's?, by Roberto Fraga (Ravensburger)
• For age 9: Creationary (LEGO)
• In the category of unreleased games: Donnerwetter, by Kirsten Hiese

• Designer Michael Schacht has published a convention report for the annual Spieletreff Sauerland in German and English on his blog, with a pic of his 2011 release Mondo from Pegasus Spiele slyly stuck in among other images.

• Alderac Entertainment Group has a new deck-building game coming in 2011 called Nightfall. Details later.

• Czech Games Edition has posted German rules for Space Alert: The New Frontier in the downloads section of its site. Those who picked up the expansion at Spiel 2010 can now give it a go...

• In addition to holding an after-Thanksgiving sale, Flying Frog Productions has posted a Last Night on Earth: Advanced Abilities Supplement that's available exclusively on its site. (HT: Andy Tinkham)

Categories: Game News

Seize Your Turn Link Round-up for the Week of Nov. 22

Fri, 11/26/2010 - 8:00am

(Editor's note: Kevin runs the site Seize Your Turn, and his weekly link round-up will now appear on Boardgame News in addition to his own site. More for you to read, should you care to do so... —WEM)

Couldn’t keep up with this past week’s board game news? Did some of my tweets fly by without you catching them? No worries! All of it is compiled here to insure you didn’t miss a thing!

Boardgame Reviews

• 221B Baker Street (classic, deductive mystery game) [via Held Action]
• Acquire (one of the strategy games that started it all, real estate/stock from 1960′s) [via BG Reviews by Josh]
• Alien Frontiers (kickstarter game about space colonization, the pieces look like candy!) [via Hiew]
• Alien Frontiers (another review of this game) [via Dice Hate Me]
• Chicago Express (train themed, auction and stock mechanism, grow train track) [via BG Reviews by Josh]
• Eclipse prototype (influence, resource management, and space)
• Germantown (“a hex-and-counter war game for 2 players”) [via G*M*S Magazine]
• Godzilla- Kaiju World Wars (use Japanese monster to stomp around the city, kinda fun/cool) [via The Gaming Gang]
• Guardians of Graxia (my take reading this is play the video game, same w/ less math) [via Drake's Flames]
• High Society (an auction game that punishes you for mistakes made early) [via The Gaming Gang]
• Inca Empire (beautiful, road building, slight cooperative element) [via Memoirs of a Board Gamer]
• Leaping Lemmings (Run them off the cliff or eat them with hawks! A gateway family game!) [via The Gaming Gang]
• Pirate’s Cove (explore the islands and kick pirate booty) [via BG Reviews by Josh]
• Vicious Fishes (cute tile laying game, first one from Tom Vasel) [via Bruno Faidutti]
• Yinsh (abstract, no luck involved, rings, rows, and jumping) [via BG Reviews by Josh]

e-Boardgame Reviews

• Ra on the iPhone (seems to be a decent implementation) [via MetaGames]
• Viva Il Re on the iPhone (quick filler, but not much depth)

Boardgame Video Reviews

• Dice Tower Reviews: Aztec Market, Crokinole, Lemming Mafia Review, Small World Expansions, and Toscana
• Top 100 Board Games of All Time – # 26 – # 30, # 31 – # 35, # 36 – # 40, # 41 – # 45

Other News/Tweets

• Critical Gamers’ 2010 Holiday Gift Guide – Board and Card Game Gift Ideas (not the same as my list) [via Critical Gamers]
• Errata: Beware the Syndicate (don’t gang up on a player unless the game is intended to leverage diplomacy) [via GFBRobot]
• Catan vs. Monopoly (why Euro-strategies rock, inspired by an ESPN.com writer) [via Pinebars]
• Interview w/ Richard Denning, Designer of The Great Fire of London 1666, & Medusa Games [via Boardgames in Blighty]
• Find a New Game App (website to help you find more games to spend money on!) [via Held Action]
• Have you heard the term “Serious Games“? If not, read this… I’ve been watching this concept grow wings [via Pinebars]
• RT @michaelmindes @StarNet No batteries req’d: Startup here is all about board games http://bit.ly/cFajLj – Tasty Minstrel in local paper
• RT @darlok21: my best and worst of #bggcon2010 (new games) http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/61259/the-best-and-worst-of-bgg-con-2010
• Invest wisely, buy board games [via The Board Game Family]
• RT @mayfairgames: The Washington Post posted a video story on The Settlers of Catan™ – http://fb.me/NJai9oID

This game news round-up was originally published via tweets by @seizeyourturn.

Categories: Game News

Kris Hall: Castle Ravenloft as a Kid's Game

Fri, 11/26/2010 - 1:00am

Castle Ravenloft as a Kid's Game

I wouldn't have bought Castle Ravenloft if I didn't have children.  I don't have too much interest in dungeon crawl games, but one of my daughters liked Descent and asked to play it even when we didn't have time for a two or three hour game.  When I learned that CR might be a good quick-playing equivalent, my interest was aroused. 

The purchase turned out to be at least moderately wise.  My daughters (both in elementary school) have enjoyed the game and I can think of several features that makes it a good family game.

First, it is fully co-operative.  No one has to play the dungeon-master or Evil Overlord in Castle Ravenloft.  Players win or lose together.  I have found from playing Ghost Stories that my girls don't mind losing as long as Daddy loses along with them.  In fact, in CR the game ends if one of the player characters dies.  Everyone makes it back out the dungeon door or no one does.  This is good for family peace.

Second, the game doesn't take too long.  Our scenarios have lasted roughly about an hour.  Maybe some of the more complicated later scenarios take longer but we haven't reached them yet.  So far the game has not worn out its welcome.

Third, much of the important game information is contained on cards.  This makes each player's special information and monster statistics easily accessible. 

In case you haven't visited BGG in the last six months, I'll spend a moment to discuss the mechanisms at the heart of Castle Ravenloft (published by Wizards of the Coast).   The game doesn't have a board.  Instead, each player on his turn draws either a card which describes that turn's challenges, or draws a tile which is added to the map-tiles that make up the castle floor plan.  Each new tile comes with a monster or foe which must be defeated.  Monsters have different abilities and hit points and can range mere pests to major dangerous boss villains.  Depending on the scenario, players may have to keep exploring until they find a particular tile, recover a special artifact, or destroy an especially formidable bad guy. 

Does the game have flaws?  Well, the playability means that the game lacks detail.  Although the game has a high toy factor with lots of plastic critters, many of the monsters seem to differ in only a tiny detail or two.  Likewise, the dungeon tiles mostly seem the same except a few that contain crypts.  Devoted role-playing gamers may find this lack of detail a turn-off.

But this lack of detail, and quick-playing mechanisms are what make CR a good kid-friendly game for my family.  If we haven't played the game as often as Ghost Stories it may simply be that my daughters don't find board games as appealing as their latest electronic Pokemon games.  But if we do eventually make our way through the many scenarios, I suppose I'll be checking out the inevitable expansions that will be heading our way in 2011.

Categories: Game News

Daily News Dump for Nov. 25

Thu, 11/25/2010 - 3:20pm

Everytime I get away from Boardgame News for a few days and reflect on the site from a metaphorical distance – what's covered on the site, how it's covered, how the site is designed, and so forth – I think about what to change.

One aspect of the design that's frustrated me is how the Twitter feed of news links is separate from the site itself. When the site was redesigned in mid-2010, it initially included a Twitter sidebar so that the material was at least visible on the site, so that those interested in reading BGN didn't have to subscribe to something else, too, but the content wasn't searchable on the site – and given how much server space was sucked up by the sidebar, it had to vanish to try to keep everything else functioning.

After tweeting a few items today, I realized that I should take another stab at doing a daily (or mostly daily) news dump that would consist of links and barebone descriptions of what you'd find on the other end of these links. Items that deserve more space or about which I have something more to add than "here it is" will be pushed into their own news post. That's the plan anyway – as always, I'll surely figure out something "better" down the road!

• Big Daddy's Creations has released a new version of Neuroshima Hex! Says BDC's Marek Panczyk, "We've changed a lot of stuff that users asked as to be changed, made AI even more challenging, and fixed a lot of bugs." For a visual summary, turn to this video trailer.
• French website Tric Trac has announced the ten nominees for the Tric Trac d'Or 2010. Lots of goodness there, with Havana being the most surprising title included.
• Flying Frog Productions has posted the rulebook (PDF) for Invasion from Outer Space. (HT: Andy Tinkham)
• FRED Distribution has just received its Railways of the World reprint, so that should be hitting U.S. stores soon. Yin Yang has also arrived. A reprint of Roll Through the Ages will arrive early in 2011, and reprints of Through the Ages and Defenders of the Realm should arrive in Q1 2011. (Note that the second printing of Defenders of the Realm is due in December 2010, but is mostly sold out at the publisher level, thus necessitating another reprint in the near future.)
• Designer Richard Borg talks about the new version of Battle Cry coming from Avalon Hill/Wizards of the Coast in late November 2010.
• Clever Mojo Games has reported progress toward the second printing of Alien Frontiers, which will once again be available mostly direct through CMG (and not through distributors), although retailers will be able to place orders for multiple copies. CMG notes that the game will be sold "at a special price with two free pre-order bonus items," with those who picked up the first edition being able to get said bonus items, too. An Alien Frontiers app is also being developed for the iPad, reusing the art from the game and including both solo and pass-and-play options.

Categories: Game News

Shannon Appelcline: Co-op Interviews: Richard Launius & Arkham Horror

Thu, 11/25/2010 - 1:00am

Co-op Interviews: Richard Launius & Arkham Horror

Last month I started a discussion of co-op games with an article I called "Gaming Evolution: Co-Op Games, Part One: Honored Ancestors". It talks about some of the primordial co-op games which helped to create the genre in the 1980s and 1990s. Before I move on to more recent games, I'm going to be publishing a couple of interviews with some of the designers of those co-op originators, to further document the games that the modern co-op boom ultimately looks back to as its foundation.

This month I'm talking to Richard Launius. He's best known for his design of Arkham Horror. He was thus perhaps the first entrant in the "American co-op" subgenre of games which is best represented in the modern day by Fantasy Flight Games ... who not by chance counts Arkham Horror among their stable of American co-op games.

At some time in the future, I'd like to talk with Richard more about his more recent release, Defenders of the Realm. This time I focused on his original design of Arkham Horror, the revision by Fantasy Flight, and how the co-op genre has changed in the almost 25 years since Arkham Horror was first published. If you're not familiar with Arkham Horror, you may want to look at my review of FFG's second edition.

An Interview with Richard Launius about Arkham Horror

Shannon Appelcline: Why did you decide to use co-operative game play when you designed Arkham Horror?

Richard Launius: I actually stumbled into it. I thought the Cthulhu Mythos was a very rich storytelling world and at the time the only game experience available to it was through the role-playing game by Chaosium. I wanted to create a game that a group of people could play together without a gamemaster, or a single individual could play alone since much of my gaming at this time of my life was solitaire play. So, I started to bring the Lovecraft world into a board game with various locations and encounters that would challenge any number of players. The challenge was creating encounters that would act as a gamemaster in the game so the players could just focus on their play and their personal adventure.

SA: Were there any existing games or activities that influenced the co-operative elements in Arkham Horror?

RL: The primary cooperative elements were spawned from role-playing games, the most influential being Call of Cthulhu. I loved the idea of a group of players facing overwhelming horrors that slowly (and sometimes quickly) drive them toward the brink of insanity and sure death. Once the idea came to me that the board would act as the gamemaster in the game, the rest of the adventure elements begin to fall in place, and along with that more cooperative game play. I do want to give credit to the Charlie Krank, Lynn Willis, and Sandy Peterson at Chaosium as they tied many of the elements together in final development of the 1st Edition of Arkham Horror which prompted even more cooperative play related to the players collectively closing all of the gates for the victory.

SA: Is there anything in Fantasy Flight Games' new edition of Arkham Horror that you particularly liked?

RL: Fantasy Flight Games brought so much to the Arkham Horror design both in terms of the graphic look of the game, and from Kevin Wilson who is just a fantastic person and game designer. Kevin's changes to the monster movement, the sliding hero skills, and the further development of the Great Old Ones slumber and awakening abilities were amazing.

In my updating of the game from the first edition that Kevin was working from, I had already decided that I wanted a final battle with the Great Old Ones and had created it where different Great Old Ones could be used in the game, but Kevin really took this to the next level with slumber abilities effecting game play, not just the end game combat.

One of the other major changes that Kevin and Fantasy Flight brought to the game was prompted by Christian Peterson. Chris thought that we should do cards for all encounters (the original game used encounter charts) and while challenging at first because of the many locations, Kevin and I came up with the idea of placing multiple encounters on each card which has worked very well. The move to cards has enabled several expansions to introduce more story and challenges for the players.

SA: You've recently developed a new co-op game, Defenders of the Realm, released over 20 years after Arkham Horror. How do you feel like the genre has changed in those years?

RL: I am glad to see that the genre has grown over the years. For the most part I break cooperative games into 3 categories:

1) Cooperative Puzzle games like Pandemic or Space Alert. Cooperative puzzle games to me present one or more situations that must be resolved in specific time. Often these cooperative games lend themselves to an overlord or boss player directing the others on their turns. These type of games are challenging and interactive, but to me often the actions for each turn are more scripted than I prefer.

2) Cooperative Traitor games like Battlestar Galactica, Betrayal on House on a Hill, and Shadow over Camelot fall into this genre. Additionally the one against many fall into this category for me – games like Fury of Dracula, Middle Earth Quest, and Descent. While all are fun games, and the traitor aspect centers around cautious to paranoid cooperative activities, the true key to a successful gaming session is reliant on how devious the traitor player(s) or villain player manages the game.

3) Pure Cooperative like Arkham Horror, Castle Ravenloft, and Defenders of the Realm. Pure cooperative games rely on the players working for a common goal against a board and game system that will shift each game and while all of the three types of cooperative games are rich in theme and story, this is the cornerstone to play in a pure coop. For me, pure coops rely upon the world, theme, story and overall game experience to make the game both fun and challenging. They create an adventure in which the experience of playing it is more important than winning or losing.

While I enjoy playing all of the games listed above, and all 3 cooperative genres, it is the Pure Cooperative game that intrigues me the most. And as you know - this is just one person's opinion, I am not criticizing any of these 3 Coop genres.

SA: How do you design pure co-operative games of this sort?

RL: I've developed the following cooperative design guidelines when I design games:

1) Create a challenging AI in the game to force players to work together on strategy and not one player becoming the overlord directing all players on their turn (puzzle solving). This means that multiple good moves appear for every player on their turn, limiting the advice to multiple strategies.

2) The Board setup and play should have a number of random elements that constantly change from game to game making each experience different for the players, even though the game mechanics stay the same.

3) While I do not lean toward a traitor element or one against many in cooperative design, I do like the idea of victory for all granting a champion player - the best of the winners. This element, depending on the type of players can make for interesting game play, but it should always be an optional rule.

4) I believe cooperative games need to be strong in theme, a story coming out of the game that the players create as they play. This story should be something that the players enjoy from the game that goes far beyond winning or losing - and something that is remembers by them long after the game is over. Therefore all my designs always start with theme and work from that foundation.

5) The game should be highly expandable - the ability to add more story and more challenges to the game for the players, keeping it a fresh and fun experience is essential to a cooperative game since it does not have the intellect and changing strategies launched by an opposing player to challenge the cooperative gamers.

6) Last, but not least - the game must be fun.

After I work out all the details above, I build the game engine and play it, then change it, play it and change and play it again and again until I reach the level of challenge and story I think the game needs, using the mechanics I think work best with the theme to deliver the experience I believe cooperative players want in their games. At least the experience I want in the game and I am thankful others want that kind of game as well.

SA: Thanks very much for the insights into the past and present of co-operative games!

Around the Corner

I have more to say on the topic of cooperative games, and I plan to do so over the coming months with more articles on their evolution and more interviews with top cooperative designers. If there's anything you'd particularly like to see on the topic, let me know. I'd also be fascinated to hear how you differentiate co-op games. Richard's puzzle games, traitor games, and pure co-op are not too far from my own classifications of Euro co-op, against the enemy co-op, and Anglo-American co-op. So, what other ways do you divide them up?

And with that said, let me direct you to my reviews of the last few weeks. Most notably given the context, you should take a look at a review of Richard's newest, Defenders of the Realm. I've also recently reviewed: Charon Inc., Innovation, and Nuns on the Run.

Now go eat a turkey for me.

Categories: Game News

Tom Rosen: The Year of Surprises

Tue, 11/23/2010 - 6:00pm

The Year of Surprises

It turns out my board game research abilities are worthless.  A few weeks ago I created a list of the top 20 games coming out of Essen 2010 that I needed to try.  Fortunately I always try to remain flexible at BGG.CON and open to trying games that hadn’t hit my radar before.  In the end, none of my top 4 games of the 2010 releases that I have tried so far were on my list of anticipated titles or even considered for the list.  Many of the games I’d been eagerly anticipating on my list were in fact quite good, but the truly great games in which I see a lot of potential were a handful of games that came out of nowhere for me.

Back in November 2008, I ranked all of the Essen releases that I had tried up to that point in my November Madness column, so I'm going to go ahead and try the same system this time as well.  I'll include a few sentences about each game, along with the number of plays on which my opinion so far is based since many of these are preliminary impressions based on only a couple plays.  So without further ado, let's get to the games!

1. Dominant Species (2 plays) - Leading contender for my Game of the Year for 2010.  Quite a surprise from GMT and the designer of Combat Commander.  Combines the system from Age of Empires III with two distinct layers of area majority and variable player powers to amazing effect.  Instantly purchased.




2. Sun, Sea & Sand (1 play) - Corné van Moorsel has designed some very good games in StreetSoccer and Factory Fun, but this may be his best yet.  The theme did nothing for me originally, but it is tied in nicely with the mechanics and components, all of which together quickly won me over.  Expand your resort to attract tourists to earn money to further expand your resort.  In practice it's great fun and convinced me to buy the game.




3. 20th Century (1 play) - The third and final game on the list that I have already run out and purchased.  By the "other Vladimir" who did League of Six and Shipyard, but surpassing both.  I think of 20th Century as a strange hybrid of Alhambra with Through the Ages and Antiquity.  Players are buying tiles to build in their own area, which provide money, science, and culture each turn that is tracked on a chart, all the while fighting against garbage and pollution that are piling up.  It just works and all comes together beautifully.




4. String Railway (2 plays) - Zany Japanese games can be wonderful fun and this one is just that.  I'm strongly hoping for a U.S. release, perhaps by Z-Man.  This is just what it sounds like - a train game played with string.  Before the game you setup the boundaries of the board with string, along with a string river and string mountain.  During the quick game you simply draw a tile representing a building or destination, place it anywhere and lay a string of your color connecting various tiles to earn points.  That's it, place a tile and a string each turn, and the game ends when you run out of string five turns later.  Remarkably it's really a rail game that works very well and is very fun.




5. Antics! (2 plays) - The first game that was actually on my list of games to try and the best of the bunch that I'd been anticipating.  Easily the best Fragor game yet.  The mechanics of building your own ant hill (reminiscent of Java or Taluva) are very clever and help each player to distinguish his or her own strategy and approach to the game.  I personally find the board art rather distracting and difficult to read and am hoping for a reprint with cleaner graphics.  A top notch game though that will almost certainly be one of my nominees for 2010 Game of the Year.




6. Mord im Arosa (2 plays) - Zoch games are often silly fun and this one is no exception.  Here's hoping for a U.S. release, perhaps by Rio Grande.  I think of this one as a calmer version of Igloo Pop.  Instead of a frenetic listening game, this one is a more relaxed listening game.  Players are dropping cubes into a tower and trying to hear on what level the cubes land.  Thematically players are trying to link evidence of a murder to their opponents and clean up evidence tying themselves to the crime, which actually ties in surprisingly well with the gameplay.




7. London (1 play) - Martin Wallace's foray into the world of card games masquerading as a board game.  London has the feeling of San Juan or Race for the Galaxy as players must similarly pay to play cards by discarding other cards from their hand.  However, this time the cards you pay with become available to opponents in a draw pool.  The cards have various icons and abilities as in other modern card games, but they boil down to essentially earning you money and victory points.  The theme of rebuilding London after the Great Fire is actually present in the gameplay and the cards representing well-known sites in London is a nice bonus.  Given the lack of player interaction, I recommend three players rather than four to reduce downtime.




8. Fresco (3 plays) - This year's DSP winner is growing on me with successive plays.  The inclusion of the three "advanced" modules is a necessity in my mind as without them the game is simply boring.  Fresco is turning out to be a clever game in the classic German mold and a solid family option.  I received a copy as a gift and while I probably wouldn't have purchased the game, I'm happy to have it and break it out with the right crowd.




9. 7 Wonders (3 plays) - Here's where we get into the games where I'm undecided about whether to purchase the game.  The ones above here seem worthwhile of a spot in my collection, but the next few need further consideration.  7 Wonders is the card drafting game that is really nothing like Dominion, Race for the Galaxy, etc. but is often compared to them because it's another involved modern card game.  It's more like Fairy Tale than anything else.  I've enjoyed the game, but it's really fairly simple at its heart and makes me wonder whether I'll still enjoy it after 10 plays.  The fact that it plays up to 7 players is also a bit of a gimmick as the drafting is better with fewer players where the cards cycle back around.




10. Kaigan (Inotaizu) (1 play) - I was excited to try Kaigan after reading Scott Tepper's Road to Ascora articles - Part 1 and Part 2.  The production was very well done with great art and components.  The game itself was interesting, but the primary mechanic of playing action cards into groups for selection by players (a la Coloretto) seemed a bit too chaotic for my tastes.  Perhaps with greater experience this half of the game would be easier to comprehend and control, but as it is I think I need a few more plays before I'm convinced.




11. Troyes (1 play) - The "clever dice game" that took Essen 2010 by storm was indeed clever but also a bit disappointing.  I'm still interested in playing it again, but my two issues were: (a) players could not effectively plan on other people's turn because your plans are very often disrupted, which leads to significant downtime even for normally fast players; and (b) secret scoring cards are dealt to each player at the start with a few put back in the box, all cards are revealed at the end and scored for all players, but you only know your own, and don't know which 3 out of the other 5 will score.  I might prefer to reveal the scoring cards halfway through the game like how players must make bonus scoring selections partway through Shipyard.




12. Norenberc (1 play) - Andreas Steding's new game, who came out of nowhere last year with the smash hit Hansa Teutonica.  Be warned that Norenberc feels nothing like Hansa Teutonica, except that it similarly does have a wide variety of end game scoring possibilities and you don't really need to bother with all of them, but rather seem to be able to specialize which is nice.  Otherwise the game is completely different in that it is a more classic stock market game of buying various goods low and selling high.  I'd like to try it again, but am not sure the game offers enough new to merit owning.




13. Tikal II (1 play) - This game doesn't really share anything with Tikal besides its name, but I suppose that fits with the new trend of branding unrelated games to ride the success of others (e.g., Power Grid: Factory Manager, Havana).  Tikal II had an interesting action selection method and interesting diverse scoring methods, but there was nothing in the game that really grabbed me and I found the board difficult to read making planning movement tough.  I'll gladly play again and it may very well grow on me.  If nothing else, sailing pirogues is amusing.




14. Luna (1 play) - Stefan Feld's odd "moon priestess" game that I'm presuming Alea passed on before it landed at Hall Games, just like Rosenberg's Loyang last year which I gather Lookout passed on.  I was afraid Hall might become known for putting out great designer's mediocre games, but Luna was actually more interesting than the rules suggested (and Merkator is even worse than Loyang as mentioned below).  Luna was an extremely incremental game, in that players had to do many small actions to build up to and accomplish their ultimate objective of scoring points.  It was sometimes difficult to remember from turn to turn where you were at in your five or six long string of actions that you'd planned to get you from point A to point B, but in the end there were interesting choices to be made.  There was nothing new or exciting here, but a purchasing decision either way will have to wait pending another play.  Like 51st State below, this is a "menu game" where you do one of about 10 to 12 different possible actions on your turn, which makes me wonder what was wrong with choosing from 3 to 4 actions back in the 1990s when Knizia was in his prime (a la Stephensons Rocket or Tigris & Euphrates).




15. 51st State (1 play) - Convoluted is the adjective that comes to mind.  More icons than Race for the Galaxy is another important note to mention.  51st State, by Ignacy Trzewiczek who designed the fantastic Stronghold, shows promise but is remarkably difficult to play correctly and is a game that you have to slog through the first few times.  It also desperately needs player aids to identify the icons and list the numerous actions available on your turn.  I talked to many people who had similar experiences working their way through the game and never really feeling like they had everything right.  Perhaps this one will shine for those that climb their way up the steep learning curve, but be ready for a tough climb.




16. Travel Blog (1 play) - Vlaada Chvatil took the year off from publishing heavy games, but instead published Travel Blog and Sneaks & Snitches this year, while promising potentially two heavy games next year.  I haven't tried Sneaks & Snitches yet, but Travel Blog was actually more fun than I expected.  Now we're into the games that I don't intend to buy, but Travel Blog would be a good educational tool, as it tests players' geographical knowledge of the location of countries and states on a map in a fast-paced and entertaining manner.




17. Asara (1 play) - Did not strike me as Kramer & Kiesling's best game ever as Bruno Faidutti has suggested it might be.  Asara wasn't bad, but it wasn't noteworthy or memorable either.  The potentially clever and unique mechanic of using cards for the worker placement element and requiring players to follow suit was less interesting in practice than in theory, although could be applied in another game to better effect.  Otherwise it was a straightforward tower building game reminiscent of Knizia's similarly uninspiring Palazzo.




18. Rummelplatz (Fun Fair) (1 play) - Eggertspiele's 15th Anniversary game was hilarious in a convention setting, but not a game that I can imagine playing again.  It's composed of 8 separate mini-games and was certainly amusing, but it struck everyone playing as more of a one-and-done affair than anything else.  I loved that I came in dead last in the game, but won because I drew the winning gem from the bag on my first pull.  That was pretty classic and I totally called it!




19. K2 (2 plays) - I suppose Poland isn't full of infallible game designs after all.  They've brought us excellent games such as Stronghold and Neuroshima Hex, but others such as Witchcraft, K2, and 51st State leave something to be desired.  I've tried K2 on the "hard" side of the board and it's still fairly boring.  The first two-thirds of the game is just pretty lame and uninteresting.  The end of the game gets a bit more interesting as long as the players haven't dozed off by this point, but this is one mountain I think I'm done climbing.




20. Castle Ravenloft (1 play) - I kept wishing I was playing Descent: Journeys in the Dark when I was playing Castle Ravenloft.  I know this game is shorter, but so what.  I'd much rather play a great 3-4 hour game than a bunch of okay one-hour games.  Wizards of the Coast just simplified this game too much to hold my interest.  Ravenloft seems destined to always sit squarely in Descent's shadow.




21. Lords of Vegas (1 play) - So many dice, so much randomness, total chaos, and yet a bit of fun sneaks in there as well.  I suppose the mechanics fit the theme of developing casinos and it's certainly the antithesis of the German-style Vegas Showdown, but it's not a game I see myself ever wanting to play again.  I think there's a reason people tend to only play craps when there's money on the line and that's what this essentially is.




22. Merkator (1 play) - Le Havre on steroids this most decidedly is not.  More like Le Havre on ambien.  What Merkator really felt like was Traders of Genoa with the heart of the game removed.  Players are simply acquiring "contracts" dictating a location on the board and a set of colored cubes that need to be delivered.  You get the cubes, go to the place, and receive some money that you use to buy victory points.  Then you do it again and again and again.  Rosenberg's Le Havre is great and Agricola is good, but Merkator is just utterly unremarkable.  It's not bad per se because it functions smoothly, but it's a game that steadfastly refuses to stand out in any way.




23. Furstenfeld (1 play) - Yet another spreadsheet game by Friese.  Not as bad as Power Grid: Factory Manager certainly, but it still doesn't really qualify as a game in my book when it has been distilled this far down to simply doing computations.  I don't see how this can be remotely fun or enjoyable, but since games like this keep coming out then I know someone out there must love them and to each his own.




24. Felinia (1 play) - Slapping a furry animal on the cover of your game may win you the Spiel des Jahres, but it's not going to win me over to this mundane affair.  It's really a shame that Schacht's Boss Kito came in last the previous time I made this sort of list and that Felinia suffers the same fate, considering how great Hansa, China, and Coloretto are.  Let's just hope that the SDJ jury isn't as enamored with cats as they are with panda bears.

There are still a handful of noteworthy Essen releases that I have not had a chance to try yet.  Those include: Key Market, Navegador, Sid Meier's Civilization, Cleopatra's Caboose, Sneaks & Snitches, and all of the many wine games (i.e., Vinhos, Grand Cru, King's Vineyard, and Toscana).  I'm most interested in trying Navegador, Key Market, and Sid Meier's Civilization as soon as possible to see where they rank in this hierarchy as I'm hopeful about all of them.

For anyone who might be curious, other than these new 2010 releases, the other games I played at BGG.CON were: the always amazing Die Macher, the aged and decrepit Dark Tower, and a bunch of large dexterity games such as Spinball, Weykick, Piratenbillard, Crokinole, Le Passe-Trappe, and PitchCar.  The dexterity games are definitely a big treat of BGG.CON.

Lastly, in case categories are more your thing and assuming that actions/money speak louder than words, I'll go ahead and break down all of the new games into the following categories:

A) Games I have already purchased:

• Dominant Species
• Sun, Sea & Sand
• 20th Century

B) Games I am likely to purchase:

• String Railway
• Antics!
• Mord im Arosa
• London

C) Games I am undecided about purchasing:

• 7 Wonders
• Troyes
• Kaigan
• Norenberc
• Tikal II
• Luna
• 51st State

D) Games I do not plan to purchase:

• Asara
• Travel Blog
• Rummelplatz
• K2
• Castle Ravenloft
• Merkator
• Furstenfeld
• Felinia

So many surprises and so many great games this year.  It's amazing to not see a single German designer anywhere in categories (A) and (B) above, but I'm still having fun going back and acquiring the old German classics that I missed originally, such as Stephensons Rocket which I recently picked up, so I can still keep a nice balance between this diverse set of new games and exploring the tried and true ancestors of this new wave.

Categories: Game News

Memoir '44 – Winter Wars

Tue, 11/23/2010 - 2:34pm

Reviewed game:  Break Out the Mittens – It's Time for Winter Wars in Memoir '44

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Six, against three different opponents

I am not an impartial reviewer when it comes to Memoir '44 – in fact, I'm not sure how anyone who hadn't played the game before could adequately review the newest expansion of this WWII Command & Colors game system. (If you need my curriculum vitae, you can read the opening paragraphs of my review of Memoir '44: Breakthrough from May of 2010.) In short, I'm a huge fan of the game.

That said, even the long-time fans of Memoir '44 want to know whether the Winter Wars expansion – which focuses on the Battle of the Bulge (Unternehmen "Wacht am Rhein" to the German army) – is worth their hard-earned dollars...

In order to do that, I'll borrow the format from my previous Memoir '44 review and answer a number of questions, hopefully giving you enough information and opinion to make a good decision regarding Winter Wars.

Do I need to own a bunch of other expansions to play this expansion?

There are ten new scenarios included with this expansion:

• Six standard scenarios that require only a single base game and Winter Wars to play... though the Winter/Desert Board will make them look a great deal nicer. (An aside: the Winter/Desert Board is possibly the least important expansion offered in the Memoir '44 system – it's purely cosmetic. Still, I find myself really enjoying that the board looks right and am glad I picked it up.)
• Four Breakthrough scenarios that require a single base game, the Breakthrough maps expansion or the blank Breakthrough map from the Campaign Bag, a copy of the Eastern Front expansion (for more needed winter terrain) and, of course, Winter Wars.

What do I get?

The first thing you notice when you open the box is the chunk of terrain (80 double-sided tiles!) and the required badges and markers needed to play the scenarios in the booklet.

Then you realize that there's a lot of cards in there:

• The 80-card Breakthrough command deck to be used specifically for Breakthrough scenarios (much like the Overlord specific deck found in that expansion)
• The 20-card Winter Combat deck (which is similar to the urban combat deck that game with the Sword of Stalingrad battle map)
• Various terrain, troop, action & special weapons assets rule cards

Are the scenarios balanced?

We played three of the regular scenarios and three of the Breakthrough scenarios and had only one complete blowout – which can be blamed mostly on the dice hating my opponent. The rest of the scenarios were nail-biters, usually won by 1 or 2 medals.

Another card deck? Really?

Actually, there are two more card decks.. Let me explain why I think both are wonderful additions to the game.

• The Breakthrough deck changes both the card mix and adds a new type of Section order card: "On the Move." Those cards (Recon, Prove & Attack) allow you to do your normal move/attack for the stated number of units while also allowing you to move 1-3 other units anywhere on the board but without attacking. With the longer boards, this fluidity of movement allows you to bring units into action (or retreat them to safety) while still maintaining your offensive... a welcome addition to the Breakthrough method of playing Memoir '44 that I and the other players liked a great deal.
• The Winter Combat cards are additional cards that are played alongside your Command card (or in response to events on the board) that add some interesting twists to the game. You receive two to start the game and receive a new one every time you play a Recon card. (This mechanism for bringing these special effect cards into the game means that players with lots of "slower" cards get Winter Command cards as a way to level the playing field while making the cards more rare for players with "better" hands.)

A Few Stray Thoughts

• The "Reduced Visibility" rules are brutal... and yet do a great job of reflecting the reality on the ground in December of 1944. When these are in effect (in most of the scenarios here), unit symbols rolled do NOT count unless you are in Close Assault, requiring you to engage at close quarters in order achieve maximum fire power.
• The Breakthrough deck cards have the same back as the original Command deck, allowing you to seed them into regular scenarios. (I think this is unwise, as it would allow too much freedom of movement on the smaller boards, but your mileage may vary.)
• The rulebook does an excellent job of clearly defining the various objective-based victory conditions – and adding some we haven't seen before. (Sudden Death victory, anyone?!)
• I haven't had the opportunity to try the Breakthrough deck with the scenarios from the original Breakthrough expansion – I'm looking forward to it, though!

My recommendation

While the Breakthrough expansion is aimed at the hardcore Memoir '44 player and a lion's share of the cards included in Winter Wars are specifically for Breakthrough scenarios, I think Winter Wars has an appeal beyond the hardcore fanbase. Since more than half of the included scenarios can be played with the base game and this expansion, players less invested in the system can still get a lot of bang for their buck with the scads of new terrain and Winter Combat cards.

At the same time, as a long-time Memoir '44 fan, I've been most excited about the Breakthrough deck and think it ratchets up my high opinion of the Breakthrough maps expansion even more.

Once again, Richard Borg (and Days of Wonder) have managed to create an expansion that adds tactical and strategic depth without adding undue complexity. I should not be surprised – this is a game system that has been lovingly and carefully expanded. Thanks, guys!

Categories: Game News

Hans im Glück Delves into Party Games with Ranking

Tue, 11/23/2010 - 10:57am

Game name:  Ranking Designer:  Stefan Dorra Designer:  Ralf zur Linde Publisher: Hans im Glück — October 2010
Featured at: Spiel 2010

Hans im Glück may be the publisher linked to the term "German Game" more than any other, having won the Spiel des Jahres award more often than any other publisher – but Stefan Dorra and Ralf zur Linde's Ranking is different from what we are used to, being a communicative bluffing game.

Each round there is a question like "What is more valuable?" or "What can you find in a politician's bedroom?" Each player secretly chooses one of his tiles, and additional tiles from the general supply are added until seven face-down tiles are in play. After revealing all tiles in the middle level of the ranking chart, the current player has to compare two tiles that are on the same level. The tile that he thinks fits the question better moves one level up, the other tile moves one level down, and of course he explains why he thinks so. Additionally, his fellow players now may guess which tile he owns.

This process continues clockwise until at least one tile is in the top level and one tile in the bottom. Each player scores points equal to the level where his played tile now stands – but then loses one point for every correct opponent's guess marker on his tile. A new round starts, and the game continues until one player has reached a certain number of victory points.

So if you like telling your gaming group why a piano is more important to a yeti than a suitcase, Ranking might be the right game for you.

Categories: Game News

Bohnanza Coming to iDevices

Tue, 11/23/2010 - 10:39am

The wave of digital adaptations continues, with an announcement from German publisher Amigo Spiele that Uwe Rosenberg's Bohnanza is coming to Apple's iDevices, courtesy of the software firm Aspirement. The app will allow one or two human players to compete against up to two AI opponents. No word on the release date other than "soon."

From the Nov. 2010 Amigo newsletter – possibly not final

Categories: Game News

E.R. Burgess: Lost Cities Social: The Couples Game Hits Facebook

Mon, 11/22/2010 - 1:16am

Lost Cities Social: The Couples Game Hits Facebook

The first major Eurogame has debuted on Facebook and, as you would expect, it's a hybrid of Facebook-style gaming and Eurogaming goodness. The awkwardly named "Lost Cities Solo" is surely one of the reasons Dr. Knizia yanked the Xbox version of his famed Lost Cities card game (as he has done with permission on many online sites where gamers played his titles). Admittedly, Lost Cities on the 360 was a clunker. Any game on that platform which features a hand of cards is hard to play. ("Uh, can you look the other way, buddy?") But can the game dubbed "The Couples Game" for its alleged appeal to spouses (okay, "wives") survive the separation?

In fact, maybe some time apart might be a good idea. Publisher Zabu and Reiner have concocted a "Solo" version that plays well without the conversation and interaction. Instead, Lost Cities Solo stands on its appeal as a game of hand and risk management. As in the original and its "Keltic" brethren, players draw and play cards from five suits that include single cards from ranks 2 through 10. Each suit also has three "risk" cards that can create bonuses or massive negatives if your "expedition" (playing of a suit) succeeds or fails. Players hold a hand of eight cards and must play or discard one each turn, either adding to one of the five expeditions or discarding a card that cannot be retrieved. The main challenge is that you can play cards only in ranked ascending order. Thus, if the lowest green card you have is a 4 and you opt to play it to begin that suit, drawing the 2 or 3 rank cards later is useless and you'll need to discard them. The secondary challenge is that you score points for a suit only if you play more than 20 points of cards in it. If you play fewer points in ranked cards, the suit turns into negative points for you. As a result, players should usually not start all five suits and risk that cards for all of them come out in good order. Finally, the "risk" cards are like zero rank cards that can only be played prior to any number cards in the suit. They act as multipliers, positive or negative, and add up if you use more than one.

Lost Cities Solo retains these rules but loses the key piece of interaction with your now non-existent opponent. In the original game, discards were dropped into suit stacks from which your opponent (or you) could draw. In Solo, they all go neatly into a single stack so when a card is gone, it's not only no longer sorted but out of play. That robs the game of some of its charm from playing the denier and satisfyingly dropping a 7 card of a suit your opponent is playing just after she's grudgingly played the 8 – not a huge loss but one that longtime players may miss.

The only quirky bit about this fairly simple game is how the scoring frustrated new players (to the point that Knizia "fixed" the situation in Keltis by adding a score track). Although most of us can count to twenty, it still gives many pause on the first play or two. Lost Cities Solo solves this easily by displaying your current score for each stack right up top.

There are many new things that make this version appealing and more Facebookian. Naturally, there are achievements like scoring in all five suits that you can immediately post-brag about on your feed. But chief among the new stuff is that the game no longer plays in three rounds. As Facebook, even more than the actual Internet, is a bit like walking through a casino in Las Vegas where you are robbed of your concept of time, you can keep playing Lost Cities Solo as long as you reach a certain goal score for each round. At first, the scores are pretty low and easily beatable. But they get harder and keep in mind that your score can go down for suits that fail to hit 20 points. If you can keep beating the score, you can keep playing – technically. Each round of play costs you a certain amount of "energy," a currency that Zabu doles out to you freely each hour. However, if you are playing the game and run out, more energy is immediately available for some cash – and here's where they get to make some money. Like so many "free" Facebook games/activities (sorry, FarmVille is not a game), you can pay more money to keep playing even when you run out of energy. You don't absolutely have to pay; Zabu will let you wait it out – even providing a nice timer on-screen so you can see how long you are foolishly waiting to continue your game. Why not just throw in a little money to continue now?

Furthermore, Lost Cities Solo adds some "power-ups" that let break the rules in minor ways like undoing a last move, grabbing a discard, and such. After each round, players earn a secondary, complicated currency called "gems" and can use them to buy the power-ups, although they're pretty expensive and it takes quite a pot of gems to get something. But hang on – here's another way to spend some money. You can actually pay money for gems, too, so you can buy those power-ups. In fact, you can do it on the spot to get yourself out of a bind. Some might call this breaking a game, when paying money lets you do better than your individual decisions would allow. For collectible card gamers, it may bring back memories of "Mr. Suitcase," the gamer who spent so much money that he inevitably had better cards than you did. In the end, I just call it a revenue model that will likely make more direct money for Dr. Knizia and Zabu than letting the games be played on Brettspielwelt or SpielByWeb ever would.

The main reason I don't worry too much about the monetary aspect of the game getting in my way of the enjoyment of it is the other key social aspect of the game: limited-view player ranking. As is popular with Facebook apps, you can see your ranked score against your friends but not everyone on Facebook. LCS uses the same little ranking bar you see in other games, showing the profile pictures of the poor souls behind you, as well as the suddenly smug-looking smiles of those ahead of you. While I'm sure Zabu's ploy to get casual gamers to pay for power-ups and immediate play will work to some minor degree (they still have to fight against the "charm" of click-farming), I know my gamer friends won't do that. They will play the game as it is and probably will stop when they run out of energy. In the first week of play, I could see how they tapered off at a certain point when one naturally runs out of energy and just stopped playing to get their ranking out there.

The other reason is that despite the power-ups, achievements and opportunity to show off your Lost Cities Solo scores to your friends, in the end the game's charm wore off on me pretty quickly. Part of the appeal of the original game is that it takes twenty minutes to play, is light enough to chat over, and has large, gorgeous cards that sort of told the story of each expedition. As a solo experience on Facebook, the game gets tedious after a time and there are not enough truly interesting things to earn to make it exciting. Playing for two hours to unlock the ability to undo a card play? That isn't as exciting as finding a sword that will let you kill bigger monsters or even, dare I say it, growing really big watermelons. That didn't stop me from playing Farkel excitedly for about two weeks when my friends discovered it and kept sending me chips in what seemed like a semi-evil chain letter format. But I'm wiser now (I hope) and will probably drop off from playing much Lost Cities Solo.

That said, it's an attractive implementation and I've enjoyed time playing it. I certainly look forward to seeing the other games Zabu has promised, including dice-fest Pickomino (which I expect will be similar in style) and Peter Burley's awesome Take It Easy. If they do this last one right, with an option to play this socially with your friends currently on chat or over time each day when you log in, it could be a winner from a game-play perspective but perhaps less so from a profit angle. It's always unfortunate when those two aspects of the hobby are at odds.

Categories: Game News

Media Watch: "Settlers of Catan: Monopoly Killer?"

Mon, 11/22/2010 - 12:20am

Um, no. But as ESPN contributor Keith Law points out in an article in the mainstream U.S. publication Mental Floss, Klaus Teuber's The Settlers of Catan has created a rose-covered path to a new world of games for those who want to avoid playing Ye Games of Olde:

Settlers was my own introduction to German-style games, and it renewed my long-dormant interest in board games. I noticed it had earned induction into the GAMES Magazine Hall of Fame in 2005, the only game in that pantheon with which I wasn't familiar, so I sought it out – first, the two-player card game, then the original board game, then the Seafarers expansion. Our own collection now numbers over 25 German-style games plus a few expansions, but Settlers will always remain a favorite because of its blend of simplicity and strategy and the way that it ensures no two games are ever alike.

Categories: Game News

Charly

Mon, 11/22/2010 - 12:11am

Reviewed game:  Feed Your Animals in Charly or Lose Your Honey, Honey

Pigs are cute. No, not the hairy, ugly wild boars that roam forests throughout the world, but rather the pinkish, curly-tailed variety that is quite popular at petting zoos. While they may be cute and very intelligent, my understanding is that they are rather dirty and perpetually ravenous. I guess that's why they are generally depicted as gluttons.

This stereotype continues in Charly, a light, family card game from Inon Kohn and Abacusspiele. The players are throwing a party for a group of animals, and as good hosts, must make sure the animals have enough of their favorite foods. These animals include Charly, the perpetually hungry pig who will gleefully eat just about anything.

The game is comprised of a deck of sixty-six animal cards, twenty food cards, nearly one-hundred honey drop tokens and a large plastic feeding dish. The animal cards depict five different types of animals – dogs, mice, rabbits, monkeys and pigs – each depicting one-to-three of the same animal. Food cards depict four different types of food – bananas, bones, carrots and cheese – with each type depicting four-to-eight items. Depending upon the number of players, 1–3 food cards are displayed face-up on the table. Players receive fifteen honey drops and are dealt seven animal and one food card. Let the party begin!

Each turn, a player has two options:

• Exchange an Animal Card. The player may take a card from the draw pile or take the top card of the discard pile. He must then discard a card from his hand. The idea here is to gather a collection of cards so that when the feast begins, you have an assembly of animals that you will be able to feed, thereby scoring a healthy number of points.
• Invitation to the Feast. When a player feels his hand is good enough, he can call a feast. Every player has one more turn, and the feast begins. To begin the feast, each player adds the food card they possess to the center of the table.
  One-by-one, players place an animal card from their hand to the corresponding food. For example, rabbits eat carrots, while dogs covet bones. Pigs, of course, will eat anything. The number of animals a food card can feed is equal to the value of the food card. For example, a card depicting six carrots can feed six rabbits, so if Mike plays a card depicting two rabbits, the card can still feed four more rabbits. In turn order, players continue adding animal cards as long as there is enough of the corresponding food. If a player cannot place any more animal cards, he must pass. A feast ends when no players can place cards.

What about those animals remaining in players' hands? They still must be fed. For each animal other than pigs pictured on the cards in a player's hand, he must pay one honey drop, which is tossed into the feeding dish. Pigs, which are doubly ravenous, require two honey drops. You can probably surmise that the idea is to conserve those honey drops. Subsequent rounds are conducted in the same fashion until one player runs out of honey drops. The player with the most honey drops remaining at game's end wins the game and is king of the animal farm.

The primary goal of the game is to assemble a hand of animals that match the food cards face-up on the table and the food card in your hand. This is the goal of choosing the exchange cards option; i.e. hopefully acquire animals that you feel you can feed. Of course, your opponents are also likely trying to collect predominately the same cards, as their only visible evidence of the food available are the three food cards face-up on the table. So all players tend to collect the same animal cards, meaning the available food for those animals will disappear quickly.

Of course, players each have a food card in their hands, so they can try to collect those animals, too. The same problem exists, though, as other players may also have a similar food card in their hand, so they, too, will be trying to collect that same animal. There are too few animal varieties to allow players to be collecting different animals. Thus, when the feast is called, it isn't long before the food cards on the table are consumed.

There are some minor decisions to be made when sending forth animals to be fed. Do you first play animals that you perceive are in abundance in the players' hands, which means their food sources will deplete quickly? Or, do you play animals that don't have a lot of food available? How about those pigs? You don't want to hold on to them too long, as if you are unable to feed them, each one costs you two honey drops as opposed to one. Sure, these are choices, but they are usually minor, and mostly based on guesswork.

Charly is a cute, light game clearly intended for families. Serious gamers will find little to interest them here. Even older children will likely not find much to maintain their interest. As such, it appears the game is best suited for families with young children. The cute animals will amuse them, and the game will provide a pleasant way to gather the family for some fun, quality time.

Categories: Game News

John Hornberger: Lumper or Splitter?

Sat, 11/20/2010 - 1:00am

Lumper or Splitter?

How do you categorize board games? Do you divide them into two or three groups based on some basic feature? If so, you're a "lumper" – you tend to see similarities among things and group them together. A lumper might separate the world of games primarily into board games versus card games, or two-player versus multi-player, or strategy versus luck. If you think that's too arbitrary and choose a game detail that's more germane to the game-playing experience and consists of more categories, you are focusing on differences between games, and you’re a "splitter." A splitter might have several major categories, such as party, strategy, family, trivia, themed, and kids games, for example.

What kind of a game, for example, is Sequence? Is it a card game or a board game? If you were (or are) in charge of a game store, where would you stock it? Maybe under Family games? Parlor games? BoardGameGeek lists Sequence as both a family game and an abstract game. If you own it, where do you keep it? Is there any order to your collection, or do you put them wherever they will fit. (Box size and shape might be another way to categorize…)

So what are you, a splitter or a lumper? Many will say they're neither – and that I'm a "lumper" for imposing such a distinction in the first place. But I didn't make this up – I just see the same issues that I first became acquainted with as a student of Animal Behavior.

My educational background is in Biology, one subdivision of which is Taxonomics – or in modern parlance, "Cladistics." Taxonomists and Cladists take on the awesome task of describing the family tree of life; awesome because, among other things, no one knows (nor can they agree on) how many living species there are on the planet. (See this post on LiveScience.com for a nice discussion.)

Scientists can't agree on how many species there are because the definition of species is, itself, a difficult one that is still being debated. There are species which look different and live apart, but can still interbreed (African and Asian elephants, for example), and there are species which live in the same geographic area but because of behavioral differences do not interbreed (e.g., Baltimore Oriole vs Bullock’s Oriole). Some argue that the ability to interbreed makes them the same species, while others (perhaps the majority) say that they must typically interbreed in nature in order to be a species. The debate is fundamental in a semantic sense – depending on the precise definition of a species, the family tree will have a different branching pattern – but it does not undermine the underlying basis for understanding biology and evolution; it merely affects the final details. So the debate goes on.

Back to board games – as a former retailer and a current collector, and perhaps owing to my analytic yet playful mind, I think about this all the time. I now own over 1,050 games and have to decide how to organize them. Since I host game events, I need to be able to find what I'm looking for, when I need it. There are a variety of ways to do it, and available space has something to do with it, but I still want to have some organizational scheme that is related to what the games actually are.

Alphabetical categorization won't do. Abalone is in a hexagonal box, about 12" across, and it would not fit well on top of, or next to, Axis and Allies in its rectangular, long, thick box. And so on. Strictly spatial categorization won't do, either – I won't put Uncle Wiggily next to Clue.

Then again, several of my larger categories are spatial. I keep all of the small-boxed card games for ages 12+ in one place, where there is a small shelving area and they won't bury each other, and all the other small-boxed card games for kids on another stand-alone book shelf. I do put all of the Monopoly-sized games together because there are so many, and I can make subcategories within them. (In my case, I have them arranged by age range because they do tend to be primarily kids games.) I have a long row of 3M and Avalon Hill bookshelf games, arranged by category (war games, word games, abstract strategy games, etc.), so a portion of my collection is organized spatially, but the rest is organized by function.

Kids games are in the same area as the large Monopoly-style boxes. Games for older kids and young adults get their own space (much of the abstract strategy is included here), and the remaining categories get their own space, too: knowledge-based games (geography, words, general trivia, music, arts/entertainment, sports, bible), party games, war games, casino-type games. I have two more categories, as well – antique games get their own space (even though many belong in other categories), and I have one area set up as "featured" games. This is where I put my favorite games (History of the World, Titan: The Arena, Empire Builder, etc.), as well as games that are beautifully done (Wadjet, Palenque, Age of Renaissance, etc.). Most of the Eurogames go here.

But space is limited in just about any house. I was able to build a cabinet and customize it, but now my collection is too big. I want to know, if space weren’t limited, how would you categorize your games? BoardGameGeek lists 79 categories for games, but it also lists 44 different game mechanisms. Would you use them, or maybe combine some of them to make fewer major categories? Funagain.com lists nine major categories: Kids, Family, Strategy, Party, 2-Player, Card, Word, and War. This is perhaps most similar to what I have seen in stores, but they also list themes and genres as further types of categorization. Board Game Central list 15 different categories of board games, plus other lists.

Online retailers have the advantage of being able to cross-list games in several categories without confusing customers or intensively training employees. Brick-and-mortar stores, however, pay a premium for space, so they can’t get away with putting a game like Settlers of Catan in each of the sections where it might belong (Strategy, Family, Modular board, City-building, Eurogames, etc.).

So my big question really is: Is there a way to categorize board (and card) games so that categories are all-inclusive (every game has a home) and mutually exclusive (no game has more than one home)? I doubt it, but I'm still thinking about it and I would welcome any input, and I imagine the more realistic question is not whether that is possible, but given all the possible ways of splitting and lumping game features, which one makes the most sense, and why?

(Originally published May 19, 2010 on Hornberger's blog, The BoredGame Guy)

Categories: Game News

Kris Hall: I Want to Understand Why I Lose

Fri, 11/19/2010 - 1:00am

I Want to Understand Why I Lose

It isn't very often that I have a strong negative reaction to a game, but I did so last week when I played Revolution! for the first time. This blind-bidding game was designed by Philip duBarry and published in the USA by Steve Jackson Games. Now, you might simply label me a sore loser because I was not only beaten, but humiliated. I believe my final score was about 30 points and the final score of each of the other three players was over 130 points. But there are plenty of games that I have never won that I happily return to again and again. In fact, I have never won some of my favorite games – games like Brass, Age of Empires III, and Le Harve. So rather than simply rant about why I hated Revolution!, let me muse about why some games continue to fascinate even when we don't win them.

I think the thing that I hated the most about Revolution! was that no decision I made seemed to matter. If I had tried the same strategy over and over and lost, I would have no one to blame but myself – yet I deliberately varied my bidding strategy turn after turn, and nothing ever worked.

A word about the mechanisms of the game. In Revolution!, players secretly place bidding chips on spaces on a card. Each space gives different benefits to the player who wins them, but all the benefits come in one of three categories: more bidding chips for the next turn, outright victory points, or the placement or manipulation of player cubes on the areas of the game board. Having the most cubes in the different areas on the gameboard at the end of the game will result in big victory point payoffs. At least the other players managed to get payoffs – I barely got a cube on the board.

Let me be specific about the strategies I tried in Revolution! Some turns I would stack my bidding chips on only one or two spaces in the hope of outbidding other players. Some turns I would spread out my bidding chips in the hope of winning a space neglected by other players. Some turns I would look to see what spaces the other players could logically be targeting, and would try to avoid those spaces. None of these plans worked. And I soon felt like one of those mice who are subjected to random electric shocks in cruel psychological experiments. Mice seemingly can cope with predictable shocks or shocks associated with some cause-and-effect. But mice who are subjected to random shocks that they can neither predict or avoid sink into despair. Helplessness is a terrible feeling.

To flip this subject on its head and talk about something positive, I will say that games like Brass and Age of Empires III and Struggle of Empires keep me coming back for more in spite of my long record of defeats. In all of these games, I feel that my decisions affect the outcome of the game. In many cases, after losing the game, I can recognize where I went wrong in my strategy. I may have allowed myself to get trapped on the eastern map edge in Brass without access to ports. Or I may have concentrated too much on the buildings in Age of Empires III, and neglected sending enough settlers to the colonies of the New World.

My favorite games may have random elements in them, but these elements do not dominate the design, and may in fact have rules that mitigate the affect of luck. In Brass, a player with a lousy hand of cards can combine two of them, and use them as a wild card to place an industry tile where he really needs it to go. In Struggle of Empires, battles are resolved by die rolls, but there several ways to modify the die rolls. And players can avoid battles with specific players by using the game's unique auction-alliance system.

It has occurred to me that I may be too hard on Revolution! After all, for the other three players it was a fairly tight game with close final scores. And perhaps I was the victim of some perfect storm of bad luck. But I think I will stick with games that I lose because of my own mistakes, and avoid games where I can become the butt of a joke by some insane Lovecraftian blind-bidding gods.

Categories: Game News

Hacker and Admin Fight for Control of the Data Fortress

Thu, 11/18/2010 - 11:24am

Game name:  Data Fortress: First Strike Publisher: Living Worlds Games — Q3/Q4 2011

Data Fortress: First Strike will be the second title released by new U.S. publisher Living Worlds Games, following on the heels of 1955: The War of Espionage, and the game has overtones of Richard Garfield's Netrunner CCG released by Wizards of the Coast in the mid-1990s. Here's the description from the publisher:

When an enterprising young computer hacker locates a low-security Data Fortress belonging to All-Mar Corp's fast-food research division, she quickly hatches a plan to crack the fortress before Corporate Security agents can be alerted. Data Fortress is a tile-laying game of attack, defense and maneuvering where the two players take the roles of System Admin and computer hacker.

Data Fortress includes 54 tiles that represent a varity of programs and the computer network. The two players have different programs available to them, and their skill at setting up complete programs will determine their chance of success.

Categories: Game News