As promised, the review/impression of Modern Art.

First, the components that I mentioned yesterday. The scoring/currency chips aren’t as bad as I had thought. You need to hold them in a closed hand, so small is important, as is plastic (so they don’t get destroyed by sweat, pizza grease, etc.). So that’s OK. Less OK is the absence of a 10 denomination (only 1, 5, 20, 50, 100) but it’s no big deal.

The screens, however, are even worse than I had thought. They’re so light and flimsy that a tiny breeze knocks them right over. Evidently I have a habit of exhaling sharply through my nose when thinking, which I never notice unless it blows over the tiny paper screen on the table right below me. A curse upon them.

On to the actual game. It’s classic Knizia. There’s nothing but the auctions. So is it fair? Darn near (but see below). The idea of the game is that the more paintings by a painter are sold, the more each one will be worth. Each player can offer up paintings for auction, and has the choice to offer a painting by a popular painter (likely to sell for more money), but if the player doesn’t want this painter to be even more popular (perhaps he doesn’t have any paintings by that painter), he could offer something else.

One of the neat quirks is the several different flavors of auction, which is a property of the painting that’s being auctioned. There’s an ordinary auction; an auction where each player makes one bid in secret; a once-around-the-table bid where you can only make one bid; and a fixed-price auction where the auctioneer names a price and the bidders can only take it or leave it. There’s also a “double auction” that gives the player a chance to offer another painting by the same artist as part of the same auction. This is the biggest imbalance in the game: double auctions give the player that happens to draw them a lot of control over the value of paintings. A suggested houserule, which I am likely to adopt, is that the double auction cards are separated from the rest of the deck and dealt separately (and evenly), away from the rest of the cards.

Modern Art is not for everyone; if you don’t enjoy the at-times fiddly considerations of how much a painting is likely to be worth, you’re probably not going to like the game. I have an intuitive feeling that very few people are going to start out skeptical but end up won over. Maybe later I’ll think about what patterns I’ve seen that have led to this intuition.

Recommendation: If you and at least two other people you game with are Knizia fans, get the game. You’ll enjoy it. If you’re not already Knizia fans, I don’t think Modern Art is worth the low production value and the risk of not being into him; I’d try something else to start, like Taj Mahal.

The other game I recently acquired is called Memoir ‘44. It’s a tactical wargame that lets you recreate historical battles from World War II (specifically, in France on and after D-day–hence the name).

This is the wargame I have always wanted to play.

To explain that statement: I love rules, I really do. I write pages and pages about them. And I like games, and I like planning strategy, and I like planning tactics. But other wargames are just way too much. In particular, the overhead to even begin a game is far to high. You need to read the rules to understand what the heck is going on, which is difficult considering the countless minutiae; you need to create and plan an army; you need to actually acquire the pieces; you then need to find an opponent who has done all of this work as well; you need to understand one another’s armies; you need to set up a place to play, and then you need to actually play the game, a task that can take hours.

Memoir ‘44 is different. It’s more like an ordinary boardgame than a wargame, really. You choose a scenario from the 16 in the rulebook (more available online) and set up the terrain (precut hexes) and opposing forces (small figurines provided) as described in the scenario. This takes about 15 minutes (from scratch) or 5 (just the armies, if you’re replaying a scenario, which you will.) Eliminating an enemy unit entirely is worth one “victory medal,” and in some scenarios tactical objectives (bridges, towns, etc.) are also worth victory medals. Game is to a certain number of victory medals.

The rules are simple, and wargame enthusiasts would probably feel that they are too simplified, but they work well. There are only three types of units: infantry, armor, and artillery. Units fight at full strength until dead. When you attack, you roll 1-3 outcome dice based on your range. Forests and towns are hard to move into, but provide cover. You can’t cross a river, but you can shoot over it. The few exceptions and additions fit onto a set of seven or eight quick reference cards, and you don’t need all or even most for any given battle.

Actually ordering the units comes from cards you draw from a deck and play every turn. Some give you the right to move and attack with a certain number of units in a certain region (left, right, center) of the battlefield. Others have broader powers, like “Infantry Assault” that lets you move and attack with infantry units wherever they are, or “Medics and Mechanics” that lets you repair a damaged unit. Differences in command ability in the historical battle are represented by different hand sizes; a superior commander grants that side a broader range of tactical choices. Some might complain that the cards are too restrictive; but they make the flow of the game from turn to turn very smooth. Choose a card, move the couple of pieces it tells you to, draw and let your opponent go. Card quality tends to even out over time but yes, poor luck can sink your plans through the card draw just as it can through awful dice rolls.

Fairness? Never heard of it. Some of the scenarios are grossly unfair. The introductory scenario (a simple one with no tanks or artillery) is an Allied sneak attack that the Axis has little hope to win. Another is a doomed Allied beach invasion. That’s fine. The scenarios are so short that the rulebook recommendation, which works quite well, is to play the scenario twice, switching sides, and compare scores. Assuming the same side wins both times, the player to reach a higher score as the losing side is the final victor.

The scenarios include a historical blurb about the battle, its context, and historical outcome. The game seems to do a pretty good job of modeling the way battles played out. The theme is very evocative and I have never seen a boardgame that has a theme tied so tightly and effectively to the gameplay.

If I have one complaint, it’s about the color choices of the pieces. The Allies are army green and the Axis cadet blue; under lighting that isn’t excellent, it can be a little tough to distinguish them at a glance. A lighter green or richer blue would have been a big improvement. I’ve never seen any actual confusion during a game, though.

The verdict: If you think the idea of fighting tactical miniatures battles is neat, or if you’re interested in World War II, you’ll probably like Memoir ‘44 a lot. If both are true, you’ve been living your life missing a Memoir-shaped chunk of it. Even if neither is true, it’s certainly worth a shot because it’s very easy to pick up and try out.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Rule 0. I’m sorry for the unannounced break; I wish I had the excuse of a bustling holiday season or personal issues to deal with, but really, it was just a combination of laziness and running out of things to write about. But I’m feeling refreshed from break and have a list of articles to write that will last at least half a month, so here we go.

My birthday fell over the hiatus, and one of the two games I got for it was Goa (subtitled Destination: Spice Islands), not to be confused with Go. Themed after the Dutch exploitation of the Spice Islands, It’s not the first and not the last in a line of games devoted to the European exploitation of some hapless colony. In the play, the most similar game is Puerto Rico; like that game, Goa features several resources that need to be weighed, considered, bought, and sold as each player more-or-less independently tries to build a powerful economy and amass victory points (VP).

The innovative mechanic of Goa, and certainly the thing that makes it most interesting, is the auction mechanic. The game lasts for eight turns, and before every turn, each player designates a tile (representing some resource or privilege) to be auctioned off. There is only one round of bidding for each auction, and the auctioneer has the privilege of bidding last. If the auctioneer buys the item, he or she pays the bank; if any other player wins the auction, that player pays the auctioneer. Money has (almost) no other value over the course of the game, except that the player with the most at the end wins a small VP prize.

This auction mechanic is nuanced, at times very cutthroat, and certainly where the game is won or lost. The rest of the game is quite complicated and rather hard to describe. Shipping spices back home aboard ships allows players to progress technology tracks; the technology tracks provide VP and also increase the rate at which players produce spices, ships, money (for use in the auctions), and so on. You are well-served by buying things in the auction that are still difficult to produce on your own, and so on.

In having this consideration for the careful planning and best use of limited resources, Goa feels very similar to Puerto Rico between the auctions. On one hand, being so closely compared to such an excellent game must be a good thing. On the other hand, Puerto Rico is excellent, and like Settlers, similar games have to be able to win the “why don’t we just play X instead?” argument. Goa is a longer game, probably by 30 minutes, which is to its disadvantage, because it doesn’t really pack any more payoff into that time. The rules sound like complete gibberish to new players (more on this in a later article) and it’s certainly not friendly to the novice board gamer. On the other hand, the strategy is certainly not wanting, and Goa brings a level of direct interaction that Puerto Rico lacks.

Also, we are pretty close to settling on a couple of houserules. One is that players’ cash reserves are public knowledge. There is no need for secrecy; all transactions are public, and keeping track of opponents’ levels is such a powerful and important strategy that a player not keeping track would have little hope of beating an opponent who is. Second is that instead of rotating actions, each player takes their first three actions all in a row. This affects the game only very rarely (and not in a surprising way, or one that gives a huge advantage to any particular player or strategy) and makes it faster and less confusing as players are encouraged to plan their turn all at once.

For a conclusion and recommendation: If you enjoy playing Puerto Rico or similar games against strong opponents, get Goa. You’ll have fun and be able to struggle with them more closely than other games. If Puerto Rico or Catan leave you tired or frustrated, or if your group hates games that take over an hour, leave Goa aside; you’ll play it once and leave it on the bottom of your shelf forever.