I recently published two articles to BGG: a discussion of strategy in Modern Art and a review of the live-action pseudo-boardgame Cash & Guns: Live.

To decide who goes first:

• Pick a spot on the board
• Grab a marker from every player and drop them all on the board
• Closest marker to the designated spot goes first

Mini-Reviews:

Vikings: Lots of fascinating, quirky, novel mechanics. The trouble is I think they have all been added together to come up with a very ordinary game. Verdict: 2+. I would play again.

Conquest of the Fallen Lands: Neat mechanics in a solid, elegant game. I see a big flaw in that it can be possible for a player to get “stuck” with little to do for many turns at a time. I would feel uneasy about demoing it to new players for this reason. Verdict: 2+++. Would definitely play again, but someone else has to take the blame for suggesting it.

Quo Vadis?  The name means “Where are you going?”, evidently a Biblical allusion. “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.” Negotiation is the heart of the game, and for such a game, it plays very quickly. There’s opportunity for treachery and betrayal, but it doesn’t seem to be integral–our winner won without it. I suspect it has great value as an icebreaker or to play with new folks, but less replay value than most games. Verdict: 2++.

Notre Dame: After two more plays, this is definitely at least as good as I thought it was. 3+++.  It’s easy to pick up and surprisingly subtle. Once you have the basic hang of it, the myriad ways timing is important become apparent. The comparisons to Puerto Rico are very apt. People speak glowingly about the prettiness of the pieces, which are indeed pleasant, but I’m more impressed by the scoring chits. Scoring might otherwise be fiddly, but the chits come in ultra-convenient denominations of 1, 3, 5, and 10, with plenty of each to go around. The presence of the 3-valued chits is particularly welcome and saves a lot of changemaking.

Yspahan: I had been pretty enthusiastic about trying this game out. But I downloaded the rules and the computer version and I’m not so sure. In particular, I can’t tell what you’re supposed to do well during the game in order to get a good score. I’ll reserve judgment until I play an over-the-board game at some point, but I don’t think I’m going to run out and buy a copy any more.

Caylus: Got it in the mail today; hope to play at some point this week. I have high hopes; it looks like it features the same timing challenges and balancing of resources that make Puerto Rico, Notre Dame, and Caylus Magna Carta so much fun. The original rules for Caylus are a notoriously tortuous pamphlet–one can be forgiven for thinking it’s a hard game to learn. But also included in the box is a single-sheet description of the rules–front and back, in a large font–with apparently no omissions, everything right there.

I have been going through BoardGameGeek’s list of games, ranking the games that I’ve played using my own rating scale and adding a short blurb for each. The list is permalinked in the sidebar, but I’ll call it to your attention here.

I’m going from the #1-rated game down, and as of this writing, I’ve gone through the first 200. I’ll add more later and call attention as I hit various milestones. Interestingly, my preferences definitely span the whole spectrum even in the top-rated games, from 4 down to 1, and that’s not even including the wargames I know I wouldn’t be interested in.

Sorry for the long absence. I demoed Notre Dame this week and Silk Road two weeks ago. I thought Silk Road was OK, if a bit underwhelming for the $50 price tag. Then I played Notre Dame, which is fantastic and $10 cheaper. Reader Fu Leng is right: Life is too short to play merely good games.

Notre Dame: People are saying this in the same breath as mighty Puerto Rico and that’s tough company–and it speaks very well of this game that it holds its own. The two mechanics at the core of the game, action-drafting and building up resources in a triangular fashion, work very well. We played it with 5 new players–two had read the rules, three totally new–and finished in 75 minutes including rules explanation. (To be fair, we’re all seasoned gamers.) It’s lighter than Puerto Rico or Caylus Magna Carta but fills a similar niche; I much prefer it to Pillars of the Earth. If it has a weakness, it’s that player interaction is minimal. Verdict: 3++, maybe 3+++.

Silk Road: You know that feeling in Settlers when you roll a 7 and have to hit someone with the Robber, but don’t have a clear choice? OK, imagine that every turn of the game. Silk Road is packed with decisions but not only are they difficult, they’re made with limited information and don’t matter much. Production quality is fine but wasteful; inexplicably, they’ve opted for, say, wooden money chits (where every other game in the Universe uses cardboard), pushing the cost of what’s actually a small game up to $50. Look, people, for $50 I can get Memoir ‘44. It’s a playable game that I wouldn’t say no to playing in the unlikely event someone asked me to. Verdict: 2

I picked up about 6 games at Origins, and readers qualistarian and Fu Leng picked up even more on their own. (And we got a few more that we couldn’t resist after, not to mention demoing them at the FLGS…) I’ve finally had the chance to play all or most of them–many weeks later–and I don’t want to bore everyone (including myself) with a full review of each. So, get ready to drink from the firehose:

Lost Cities: It’s required to say “I hate this game!” at least once per game, or you lose 10 points. Despite this, I love it. Verdict: 3+++

Hive: Incredible depth for such simple rules. There’s a lot going on and a lot to learn. The lack of luck makes it feel “heavier”; since nothing totally unexpected is going to happen, everything can be planned, and a failure to win is a failure of planning, right? Verdict: 2++

Coloretto: Fast. Lots of decisions. Easy rules. Deeper than it looks. Engaging. Highly recommended. Verdict: 4 (my only 4 other than Ra)

Twilight Struggle: Awesome and with surprisingly easy rules. Dripping in an exciting theme. Who would have thought that I could find the domino effect so engaging. Fly in the ointment? The three-hour playtime and the fact that it’s two-player only. Jury is still out.

Santiago: Solid game with a fascinating bribery/persuasion mechanic. There’s no other game except Settlers I can think of where you’re engaged in such tense, albeit nonviolent, negotiations with the other players. Verdict: 3+

Princes of Florence: We put off playing this game for a long time; it looks painfully dry and slow-moving. Looks are deceiving. The theme works well and the game is fast-paced and exciting for everyone. There are definitely multiple paths to victory and no other game so well emphasizes the idea that “there just isn’t enough time to do everything you want.” Verdict: 3++

Colosseum: I played this before I played Princes of Florence and thought it was OK–probably a 2+. Halfway through my first Princes game I said “I am never playing Colosseum again.” I have no idea how this got printed in a world that includes Princes of Florence, because Colosseum feels like a pale imitation. Verdict: 1++

Ingenious: Light, but with lots of opportunity for strategy, and fast-playing. Also very pleasing to look at and play with the pieces. The box is certainly much heavier than the game. Verdict: 3++

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation: It only looks like Stratego. There are a lot of fascinating little nuances and although I’m usually really horrible at bluffing games, I seem to do OK. The theme, complete with unbalanced forces, works very well. Verdict: 3+++

Thebes: The internationalization and minor rewrite of Jenseits von Theben. I have never before seen the theme (archaeology) of a Euro work so well with the game. First, you run around Europe learning about ancient civilizations, then you try to make it to said civilizations before your rivals do and get all the best artifacts for themselves. There’s a tense, exciting balance between learning enough to make good use of your digging time, and getting there before all the good stuff is gone. There’s a lot of luck, probably comparable to the amount in Settlers, which is OK with me but I can see people being frustrated. Verdict: 3+

Caylus Magna Carta: Variously nicknamed “Caylus Lite”, “Caylus Jr.”, “Baby Caylus”, or “My First Caylus” even though 1) it’s certainly not a “light” or children’s game and 2) we’ve never played the original. Despite this, it’s definitely a lot of fun, with lots of decisions to make. Verdict: 3

Shogun: It’s a wargame! No, wait! It’s a Euro! The mechanics look cool but the playtime looks daunting. I’ve only played half a game so far. Verdict: Jury is still out. My guess is that it will end up with a high 2 but I might be surprised.

No Thanks!: Fun. Light. Hard to say no. My particular favorite part is how far you push your luck passing around a huge card that’s a big hit for everyone else but safe for you. I prefer Coloretto but might suggest this to keep people from getting sick of it! Verdict: 3

Zooloretto: Definitely looks and plays like a bulked-up Coloretto. Unfortunately, one of the neatest parts of the game–the tension of making stacks that are good for only you–is much diluted, since additional extra animals of a kind don’t hurt, and having too many animals of the kind you are collecting can hurt you. Not a bad game, but nowhere near the front of my list. Verdict: 2+

I posted a short, negative review of Himalaya over at BoardGameGeek. It’s here. I really dislike this game. The programmed movement is frustrating, the way scoring opportunities arrive is unpredictable, and the scoring/winner determination is too boring and baroque to be worth messing with.

I may be posting future negative reviews over at BGG–they don’t get enough of them there–and continuing to post positive or more broadly thought-provoking reviews here.

So, apologies to reader qualistarian, who I know had high hopes for the game; my rating is 1+.

I love this new rating system because it frees me from having to decide how good a game is, which is a subjective judgment anyway, and lets me focus on how much it makes me want to play it, which much more concrete and useful at the same time. For instance, I can rate Ra 4 and Go only 2+ without having to worry about slighting such a deep, subtle, elegant, and history-steeped game. If these ratings were “poor”/”awful” to “great” and I had to rate Ra an A+ and Go a C, I wouldn’t feel right doing that.

In related news, after my second play, Coliseum gets a 2+. Frustrations: It’s not very apparent how how well you do in the early rounds helps your final score; you can’t do very well unless you sit down near the beginning and think about your complete 5-turn plan; and relatedly, there’s a lot of potential for analysis paralysis, not only regarding your score but also other players’ scores and when it’s safe and unsafe to trade with them.

A little while ago I observed (didn’t actually play) a game of Graenaland (Greenland). The promise of Greenland is to be a trading/negotiation game like Settlers, but with extra complications and subtleties. The board is divided up into region in which players can build multiple settlements; settlements give voting rights to the resources in a region.

In practice, players didn’t seem so enthusiastic about the negotiation, which was a practice of last resort, preferring to dominate areas and eliminate the dependency on other players’ goodwill.  All of the complications made the game see very inelegant; this wasn’t helped by the rulebook, which was unclear in several places, poorly organized, and lacked helpful diagrams.

Theme-wise, you play Vikings, but you don’t fight. Is this historical? I don’t care! In my book, Vikings fight! Clearly this Greenland is populated by some weird non-confrontational Euro-vikings that would rather settle their differences with voting and diplomacy rather than fighting it out. Too weird.

I intended to post this as the first article when I got back from Origins, but somehow it fell through the cracks. I would ordinarily not be attracted to Exalted: War for the Throne because it looks so much like Risk, but I wanted to try it out for the redoubtable J. Vogel, a fan of the RPG.

Time: 1-3 hours. The people I demoed with confirmed that they had seen very short games as well as games where a balance of power was reached, forces built up, and the game ended up taking a very long time. I think this is a problem–I want to go into a game knowing about how long it’s going to take, and a two-hour swing is a big deal. In particular, in almost all cases “three hours” translates to “the rest of the night.”

Central mechanic: Massed armies in regions, like Risk. There are differences: you can attack from nonadjacent regions (using “ranged attacks” and “sorcery”). The attacker is not at risk for casualties but has only one attack per turn, so the attack isn’t taken lightly.

Theme and mechanics integrated nicely. I haven’t played a lot of Exalted but I recognized the “Charms” (magic techniques) and artifacts and it looks like they pulled this off pretty well. The foundation is a wargame where soldiers are moved from region to region; Charms grant special abilities that can be used every turn, while “Event Cards” are one-time special powers that can be used in or out of combat.

There are two resources: money, which is used to pay for units, and Essence, which can give temporary boosts to offense and defense or power Charms. They seem to be of about equal value.

(If you were looking for cinematic, over-the-top personal combat, that’s not really included.)

Luck: Uncomfortably heavy. The resolution mechanic is taken straight from the game: roll a certain number of d10; 7-9 is a success and 0 is two successes. In an attack, both attacker and defender roll; defender’s successes are subtracted from the attacker’s and the difference is the number of casualties. It turns out that this is not only a lot of dice to roll, but the variance is very high. Attacks can go unexpectedly fall completely flat, even if you have invested a lot in them, and likewise seemingly small threats can bite hard with a lucky attack and bad defense roll.

Elimination and near-elimination. Not unexpected, but: once you’re out, you’re out, and if you lose most of your territory, you’re crippled until someone decides to put you out of your misery. There’s not much of a chance to have a serious impact on the game if you lose most of your territory or forces, but you’ll be asked to keep playing to avoid tipping the balance of power…

Defense = numbers. This worries me the most. The more armies you have in a region, the more difficult they are to kill. This makes the game feel “unbalanced” to me.

Verdict: Let R be the your rating on an arbitrary scale for Risk and E be your score for the Exalted RPG. Then your rating for this game will be (2R+E) / 2.9. (The quotient is 2.9, not 3, to reflect the “neat” aspect of bringing the games together.) Then penalize yourself 10% for every person less than 5 who would be difficult to find to play. (This is not a game you can occasionally get nongamers to play–especially not after the first time.) It’s not an easy sell, but a group of Exalted fans who like Risk as well will probably dig it.