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.

I have removed the email contact link as it was being completely swamped with spam. In its place I have created a Contact/Suggestion Box page for your use and enjoyment.

On a whim I picked up Modern Art at the store yesterday. It comes highly recommended; it’s by Reiner Knizia and is considered one of his classics. I haven’t had the chance to play it yet, but I did open it…

I’m here to complain about the production quality, which is awful. Mayfair Games, I expected better from you. For my $25, I got:

• A deck of about 70 cards. The cards are glossy and have small illustrations on them (”paintings” by modern artists in five different “styles”, a.k.a. Photoshop filters). With bland design and border colors, the cards look OK if not great. They seem sturdy enough though, and this is the only part of the components I’d give even a B- to.
• A scoreboard for keeping track of art values. Constructed of medium cardboard, and warped. At least it’s color-printed.
• About 50-60 plastic bingo chips–like the very cheapest plastic poker chips, but smaller. They have denominations printed on them.
• Five cardboard screens to hide money totals (thank you, Mr. Knizia and your secret scoring fetish.) These are designed and printed very cheaply on flimsy cardboard and are unattractive.
• A manual: Two duplex black-and-white Xeroxed sheets, folded and stapled in the center to make a booklet. Looking like it was designed on a desktop publishing program back in 1987, this makes me feel like the owner of a bootleg game.

From the publisher of such games as Settlers of Catan, Tigris & Euphrates, and Iron Dragon, I expected much, much better. I don’t object to a simple-but-functional game, which I believe Modern Art will end up being, but for this level of production quality I want to buy it for $6 from Cheapass Games, not $25 from someone else.

Hopefully I’ll be able to play it tomorrow and write about my impressions of the actual game for Thursday. Despite my disappointment in the materials, my hopes for the game are high.

One of the things that struck me about the two games I just discussed is how different it is explaining the rules. The rulebooks are about the same length: Memoir ‘44 is 18 pages, while Goa’s is 12 (with slightly smaller text). Memoir ‘44 seems to come naturally to people. It goes something like this:

“Infantry move 1 and attack or move 2 but don’t attack. Their attack strength is 3, 2, 1 as the distance increases. Tanks move 3, can still attack, and can shoot up to 3 away at full strength. You get points by eliminating enemy units. Every turn, you play a card at the beginning, do what it says, and then draw a card at the end.”

Now, there are other wrinkles, and I usually take the time to explain them: the concept of “ordering” units can be a little confusing, it seems, and one opponent seemed averse to reading the cards. (He would play it and then ask me what it did!) There are other complications, too, but they’re all… intuitive and seemingly easy. Forests stop your movement but provide cover. Flags on battle dice make you retreat, unless you can’t, in which case you lose a figure. If you attack someone at close range and force them to retreat, you can move into the square they vacated, and even shoot again if you’re a tank.

On the other hand, trying to explain the rules of Goa to someone who’s never played it before is an immensely difficult task. Even experienced gamers have their eyes glaze over with confusion. There are just too many elements. Furthermore, there’s no way of fully explaining one element of the game without bumping into terms from one of the others. Let me try: Most of your points will come from advancing down these “technology tracks.” You advance technology with ships (how do you get them?) and certain combinations of spices. Spices come from plantations, which you can get in an auction (what auction?) or from a colony (what colony?) Well, colonies give you points too, and you get them by using an action (what’s an action again?) and flip two cards (What’s on these cards again?)and add your colonist technology bonus and making up the difference with loose colonists, but if it fails, you get another colonist for free, but that’s probably bad…. I’m getting confused just writing this. Don’t even get me started on the tiles, each of which has to be explained individually, or the exploration cards, which I just advise people to ignore on their first game. Most players seem to figure it out about halfway through the first game, which is frustrating for a game that’s as unforgiving as Goa. Choosing the wrong plantation or colony can give you a maddeningly hard time of advancing your technologies in a useful way for the middle half of the game.

And it’s strange, because Memoir is not really a shallower game than Goa, or not much. But I would give Memoir a shot with a friend who wasn’t much into board games, but would never in a hundred years play Goa with someone, no matter how brilliant, who wasn’t already used to Catan, Puerto Rico, etc.

I think a lot of the strength in Memoir ’44’s ease of learning comes from its theme. Not only is the subject matter familiar, but the game follows the theme very strongly–although it’s highly abstracted, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to call it a simulation of World War II battles. Goa, by contrast, is a theme added to beautify an abstract game. The ideas of exploration, competitiveness, and exploitation do come through in the play, but it’s not at all clear how the rules facilitate any of this.

This is not to say that Goa is a bad game. Far from it, and because it lets more people play, I’ve been able to bring it out more than Memoir. However, the ease of learning Memoir is really startling, certainly a reason to recommend the game and certainly a goal to aim for in design.

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.