At Origins I picked up Coloretto. I wholeheartedly recommend it. There are lots of decisions to make (but none of them brainburners), no waiting, plenty of opportunities for calculated risk-taking. Interaction? Hell, yes: whenever you add to a stack of cards, you’re the last person who is allowed to take it; so keeping track of what every other player wants is all-important. The estimated playtime of 30 minutes is a dirty lie–15 is more like it–and to top it off, it’s dirt cheap. Go order yourself a copy.

(I also demoed the 2007 Spiel des Jahres winner, Zooloretto. The basic mechanic of the game is the same but it’s been “bulked up” into a full-length, 45-minute Euro. It’s a fine game but I feel it lacks both the elegance and intensity of its older, leaner sibling. Plus it costs four times as much.)

It’s not dissimilar to my Favorite Game Ever, Ra–more on this next time.

That’s not spam–that’s the name of the game. A cheap one I picked up at Origins.

Unfortunately, I am here to report that the game is… not bad. But too dry, like a wine that everyone agrees would be really great for someone else to drink. Nobody actually likes it enough to want to play it. Which is a shame, because it’s not bad. But I think it’s gonna stay on my shelf.

The game itself is like a mini-biathalon–a dry, inoffensive bidding game followed by a slightly less dry bluffing game. The bidding game seems gratuitous and uninteresting, and doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on the game. (I think the bidding falls particularly flat because all the cards have essentially the same value to all players.) The bluffing game is marginally more interesting, but every step feels anticlimactic. “Oh YEAH! I got… what appears to be… a slightly better value …on my goods… than you did there. Chew on THAT.”

Not bad. Just not good enough for anyone to want to pull it out. Sorry.

I had a great time at Origins and have several new games and articles to write.

First, I demoed a game called If Wishes Were Fishes and wrote a short review at BoardGameGeek because they didn’t have one yet. It’s available here. Short summary: gameplay is solid but uninspired; theme makes it look much lighter than it actually is.

I liked Bang! when I got it. I thought it was an excellent party game. But unlike most games, which have grown on me as I have played them repeatedly, I’ve been enjoying Bang! less and less.

The weaknesses which have become increasingly apparent over time:

• Player elimination. In general I am opposed to this.
• Player elimination… before that player ever gets to take a turn. I have seen this more than once. This is not forgivable. What’s more, the bonus for eliminating outlaws makes it more likely to happen.
• Wildly varying play time. From five minutes to over an hour. You can’t start a “filler” game and be confident of finishing in a reasonable length of time. Very frequently one player is eliminated quickly and the rest of the game drags on for over half an hour. Great if you really wanted to get some pizza instead of playing a game. Bad if you sat down to play a game with the intention of playing.
• Unhelpful card text. “But, ” you say, “the cards have those helpful little icons on them.” Except that still nobody remembers how Panic works, and oh yeah, the six or seven difficult cards don’t even try, they just have a little icon meaning “see rulebook text.” Which defeats the damn purpose. Especially when the rulebook is a flimsy, tiny-print foldout piece of paper.
• Did someone else say the rules were easy? Except that every character gets a special power, which isn’t obvious from looking quickly or from the name or from anything except reading the card carefully. And they can’t be ignored or glossed over, because many affect the way people shoot you. (e.g. the character that has a built-in Mustang, the character that allows you to steal cards when shot, etc.) So everyone is tired of listening to blah blah character descriptions before the game begins, and then once play starts people lose track and need to be reminded.
• Whoever gets blown up by the dynamite, loses.

Pillars of the Earth is an economy/resource game with a novel auction mechanic.

The economy/resource portion is solid if unremarkable. You deploy laborers (you get 12 every turn) to acquire raw materials (wood, stone, sand) and feed these resources to craftsmen to earn VPs. Craftsmen are like technologies; they stick around.

The auction mechanic is the neat part, and the one that really makes you think. There are about 15 privileges available, and each player will eventually get three of them. Some are decidedly better than others. For each player, three markers are placed into a bag, and one is drawn out. That player has the opportunity to either pay 7 gold (which is a lot) for the opportunity to choose any one privilege, or pass, which effectively boots that privilege-choice to the very end of the line. The next marker drawn costs 6 gold, the one after that 5, etc. The last few all cost nothing, and after that, passed markers are placed.

The game looks way more complicated than it is–it “fell into place” for me around halfway through the first game. It took 4 first-timers 2 hours to play; with veterans it would probably be 90 minutes, with setup, or 75 if you hurried. Production quality is good  but not great–I didn’t much care for the decorative little wooden cathedral. On the other hand, the cards look nice and are helpfully backed.

I apologize for the long hiatus. I haven’t been idle in gaming, and in fact, I have quite a queue of pseudo-reviews to write, including Niagra, Medici, Ingenious, and Carcassone: Hunters & Gatherers.

This one is a short review of Tsuro, and it’s an easy review to write. Tsuro is a tile-laying game. You start your marker on one edge of the board and lay tiles to extend the path that it lies on, attempting not to join it to another end of the board, while trying if possible to connect your opponents to the end of the board.

The board only takes 35 tiles, so there’s no risk of the game running for a very long time.

The Good: Visually, the game is very beautiful. It’s good filler for any number of people. When they say 2-8 players, they’re not kidding; it works fine with any number. You can play a game involving new players in 15 minutes, and experienced players can probably manage a 5-minute game.

The Bad: There’s really not much strategy. Over the course of the game, only two or three moves will probably be of any consequence. In a large game, the amount of control you have over your own destiny is very small.

The Ugly: None. As I stated before, the game is very pretty.

The Strange: I’m surprised Tsuro was themed so abstractly and marketed as an ordinary adult board game. With its easy rules and quick play, it could have easily been themed as a children’s game–replace the abstract paths and markers with roadways and race cars, or slides.

The Verdict: In my opinion, Tsuro is fun and a cute filler game to have around, but too expensive and too light to pay full price for. Consider it if you find yourself in need of a filler game to play with a varying number of people and see it on sale.

I would like to propose a rule that if the rules for your game include a morale check of any kind, you may not bill it as “light.”
I got to play two games Monday night: Seismic and Battleground.

Every review of Seismic I’ve seen has referenced Carcassone, and with good reason: it’s very similar. The mechanic where earthquakes can remove certain tiles is cute and it’s not without strategy, but it feels too much the same to invest much energy or thought in. If you like Carcassone and are planning to buy a tile-laying game, give Seismic a try if you can to make sure you don’t like it better. Or consider it if you kinda want to buy Carcassone but your friend already owns a copy.
I also tried out Battleground: Fantasy Warfare. This is a wargame, no two ways about it, that uses collectible cards instead of minis to represent the units. It’s billed as “light” and I guess it is… relative to a regular wargame. To my Euro-attuned gamer sensibilities though, it seemed heavy and tedious. I refer you to the tagline of this article: when a unit takes enough damage, a morale check is involved. Ouch. The rulebook is not particularly well organized and is printed on a tiny little rulebook the size of a playing card–I thought CCG manufacturers learned not to do that ten years ago. Fans of wargames might feel entirely differently, thought, and want to take a look. Although the portability of the game is a big plus, I’m still not sure that there’s room in wargamers’ hearts for both this game and Clix-type games.

I haven’t been entirely idle in this unfortunate hiatus. Most notably, I got to try out Reiner Knizia’s Ra at demo night at the local gaming store. Read on for the mini-review-esque thing; the quick summary is that I bought it really quickly.

The game in a nutshell: There is a stockpile of tiles. Various tiles are worth various numbers of points in various combinations, too complicated to list here. Most are worth at least 1 point when all is said and done; under the right circumstances, they can be worth about 3 or occasionally 5. Each player has a fixed number of “suns,” which are opportunities to bid. On your turn you may either draw a tile from the bag and put it in the pool of exposed tiles, thus increasing the stakes, or you may initiate an auction for the entire pool.

When an auction occurs, the suns are ranked by precedence, and the highest played wins the auction; your sun is then expended, and will go to the winner of the next auction; you win the sun used to win the previous auction, although you can’t actually use it until the next round of the game. Thus, no matter how powerful your suns are, the number of auctions you can win per round is fixed at 3.

In an auction, there is only one round of bidding, and the auctioneer has the last privilege to bid. That’s the good news; the bad news is that if nobody else bids, the auctioneer must. So a player with weak suns will want to initiate auctions frequently, to keep the auctions from being worth too much, but not so frequently that he is forced to squander his strength on worthless prizes.

The last wrinkle of note is that some of the tiles contain the titular icon of Ra. These initiate an auction, but the drawer is not obligated to bid; furthermore, after a certain number of Ra tiles are drawn, the round ends, and when the last Ra tile is drawn the round ends immediately without an auction. Thus, even if only one player has suns left, he must still decide: Bid now? Or keep drawing and hope the round doesn’t end and make the remaining suns worthless?

The thing that sold me on Ra is the number of times that I remarked “Wow! That’s a tough decision!” In particular:

• Should I initiate an auction? Will someone bid on this, and if not, am I OK being stuck with it?
• Should I bid on this? Is this sun I’m getting in exchange OK? Can I get more points by waiting, or should I take the gains in front of me?

And they come fast and have important consequences. It’s tense from beginning to end unless one player gets a runaway victory through good luck.

Next time: Why Ra has caught on so well in my gaming group.

This is the account of a demo night I attended a few weeks ago. I got to try two games: Dreamscape and Mission: Red Planet.

Dreamscape is collectible. This is a shame, because this makes it very unlikely that I’ll play it, despite the fact that it looks very good. It’s published by Wizards of the Coast, and they were promoting the heck out of it at Origins.

To make matters even worse, it’s a miniatures game, which is a double shame: Your army is a maximum of 16 figures (could have been cards), and while the minis do look very attractive, there’s no reason why they couldn’t have been cards. (You move them around a tactical grid, which is very open, plenty of room for either minis or cards.) At such a small deck size, a CCG might have been conceivable.

The game looks neat, very fast-moving; on your turn, you can move all your units or attack with all your units. Between rounds you summon in more units to replace the fallen. You gain points for killing enemies and controlling squares near your opponent’s side of the board.

There are four “factions”: the evocatively-named Fear, Valor, Madness, and Passion. You don’t have to pick one faction; instead, the cost of units can be reduced (to a point) by units of that faction you already have in play. Mixing two factions looks very doable.

Units have special powers, of course, and it looks like they put a lot of thought and work into it. Which is a shame, because as I mentioned, I can’t envision myself buying any.

Mission: Red Planet, on the other hand, is an ordinary board game. The theme is steampunk colonization of Mars; it’s a very loose theme such as you would expect from your average Euro-game.

The gameplay will make you think of a cross between El Grande (vie for control of regions that are worth varying amounts of points; highest population controls the region) and Citadels (you have a hand full of roles; each turn you choose a role, which grants you certain choices in how you deploy your forces. Like Citadels, there is a strong element of preemption where the roles have a fixed order, and depending on the other players’ plans, going first or last can be a big advantage.)

The game is fun but not flawless; the selection of roles is very tight with lots of calculation, but there are “event cards” that can introduce dramatic and unpredictable scoring swings, which can be frustrating. It has the somewhat dubious distinction of being the first new board game I’ve played in a while where I thought “I’ve seen this before.” El Grande is a classic; if you like it and are looking for a slightly lighter, differently themed variant of it, give Mission: Red Planet a try. Otherwise, stick with the classic.

I’m not dead! I’ve been consumed with the much-anticipated Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft. To the unfortunate detriment of some of my other activities, most notably writing R0, Blizzard has created yet another home run sequel, a worthy addition to an already excellent game. It might even inspire a future article on what makes a great sequel.

Anyway, reader Ephraim Glass encouraged me to stick with the blog, the hobby, and the Invasion game, still in my mind. Step one was blowing off WoW tonight to visit demo game night at a local gaming store. I saw two games demoed. First was 10 Days in Europe. If you’ve ever played an old family game called Rack-O, it’s like that, but with a map instead of card ranks. I would recommend it to someone with kids–it’s light and you’d learn the geography pretty fast–but not of particular interest to adult gamers.

The main attraction, though, was a game called Beowulf by the prolific Dr. Knizia. The box looked immediately familiar–it’s the same size and illustrated by the same artist as the Lord of the Rings game. Although this game borrows elements from Lord of the Rings, it rings even more strongly of Taj Mahal.

Like Lord of the Rings, the primary resource is cards, which come in five categories (fighting, might, alliances, seafaring, and wit, plus wilds). Additionally, the game is laid out in a specific sequence of events where certain cards will be required and others will be available. This lets players plan out a long-term strategy.

The heart of the gameplay is in the auctions. There are about 9 or 10, and each one requires each player to bid two of the five types of cards. There are two types of auctions; in one, players go around the table bidding or dropping out, like in Taj Majal; the other is a one-secret-bid auction. In both cases there are a list of result choices ranging from great rewards (victory points, extra cards) to penalties (a VP deduction, a “wound” which must be healed by game’s end or be a large point penalty). For example, all of the outcomes of the Beowulf is Crowned King event are good–but some are better than others–while only the highest bidder in the Battle with the Dragon event wins out (gaining a large amount of VP) while the others sustain wounds. The order of preference is not always clear-cut, so the winner gets first choice, second place gets second choice, and so on.

There is a rather large element of luck–in fact, the relevant places on the board are clearly labeled “RISK.” In an auction event, this gives the player the opportunity to reveal two cards from the deck. If either one matches the ongoing event, the player gets to play them–for free. If not, the player has to drop out of the event and suffers a scratch as well (scratches are relatively easy to remove, but three add up to a wound).

Like Taj Mahal, there is a strong element of picking the right battles to fight–victory is achieved by not throwing resources into losing battles. Unlike Taj Mahal, the score comes linearly, not quadratically, and the makeup of your hand will make some fights much easier than others for you. This makes Beowulf much less cutthroat than Taj Majal. I like this about it, because I find winning cutthroat games not all that satisfying, and losing them can be very frustrating.

The balance hardly needs to be mentioned–it’s quality Knizia work and the luck factor is there on the table. The production values are nice; there aren’t all that many components but they all seem pretty sturdy. I’ll see if I can get myself a copy; it has lots of the calculating appeal of Taj Mahal without having to bury your competitors or hapless first-time inductees.