First, an entire page dedicated to the pronunciation of Reiner Knizia’s name.

Second (speaking of loose themes), vignettes from Clue, inspired by a thread at BoardGameGeek.

Mrs. White: “Oh no! Mr. Boddy’s been shot! Look at the blood coming out of these bullet holes!”
Mr. Green: “Not so fast. I’m not sure we should discount the possibility that he was shot using that candlestick over there just yet.”

Miss Scarlet: “Oh no! A murderer is on the loose! Someone call the police!”
Col. Mustard: “Don’t be hysterical. Clearly the thing to do is split up and run frantically around this mansion looking for clues.”

Miss Peacock: “Ugh, I feel like checking for clues in the billiard room, but it’s such a long walk! I wish someone would accuse me of killing Mr. Boddy there so they’d send a team with a dolly to wheel me over.”
Prof. Plum. “…Which means… I must have done it! Funny, that. I wonder what I used to shoot him with–was it the wrench?–, and, come to think of it, where was I at the time? I hope nobody else figures it out first; that would be embarrassing. I’d much rather call everyone together and brag about how I committed the perfect crime.”

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.

The long-awaited article about the popularity of Ra. Perhaps I hoped that promising this article would make its substance magically apparent to me; regrettably, this is not the case, but I’ll do my best here.

In my gaming group, Ra has caught on quickly. It’s currently the flavor of the month, and although it’s not going to replace Catan or Puerto Rico, I think it’ll continue to see frequent play. It’s often compared to Modern Art, being another auction-based game by the same designer. But I’d have to resort to begging or blackmail to get pretty much anyone to play Modern Art, especially when they will be asking “why don’t we play Ra instead?”

First, Modern Art is stressful. It feels high-pressure; one of the reasons for this is that you’re bidding, at a very raw level, with victory points, for victory points. Are you throwing too many away? Are you not getting enough? The only way to end a round is throwing a painting away. Are you going to be forced to bite that bullet yourself, or will one of your opponents be even more desperate than you? Naming the price for fixed-price auctions is tricky, too. Ra is gentler. If you don’t bid high enough now, you might miss some good tiles, but you’ll be able to bid later and you’ll even have an advantage. If you’re biting your nails over the end of the round, it’s only because you’ve been saving your strength; as nervous as you may be, your opponents are even more worried, worried that you’ll make off with a king’s ransom for a song.

Modern Art also has the problem that decision-making is hard. When faced with every auction, you have to think “what, exactly, can this be worth?” When choosing a card to auction off, you have to consider a web of factors–how much you can sell the card for, what it will do to the prices of existing paintings, whether it will bring the round to an end, whether it leaves you in a good position for future rounds, what other players are likely to auction as a result, and so on. There’s a lot to think about, and it’s really pretty taxing. And if you end up losing, it’s hard to feel other than just outplayed.

By contrast, the decisions in Ra are straightforward:

• Should I pull a tile or start an auction? This is an easy decision 95% of the time, and you get to feel clever when you call an auction at an especially appropriate time.
• Which one of my three suns, if any, should I bid for this lot? These are the hard decisions and certainly the game is won and lost by them. But in any case, you get some gain after every choice, whether it’s a set of tiles or a weakening of your opponents’ bidding strength, so you’re not immediately going to be swamped by regret in either case.

Because the decisions are discrete and memorable, when I look back at a lost game of Ra, I can think “these were my mistakes” rather than “Somehow, I didn’t manage to accumulate enough money.”

Another advantage to Ra for many people, myself included, is that although it’s very competitive, it doesn’t feel cutthroat. The reason for this is that not all the tiles have the same value to every player. For instance, a flood tile might be worth 8 points to a player with a bunch of rivers and no flood; but just 1 point to a player who already has a flood. A couple of unmatched monuments can be worth zero points to a player who already has one of each, but 10 points to an opponent who already has two of each. So although you’re bidding, not every auction is a heated competition. (Also, keeping track of these imbalances is a neat part of the game. For instance, you can call Ra on a small set containing an important tile for your opponent, knowing he or she can’t afford to not bid on it.)

Finally, despite my complaints about the tiles, Ra just feels like a much nicer game. The suns and Ra piece are wooden and have a pleasant heft; the cardboard pieces, tiles and scoring tokens, are sturdy. Contrast this to Modern Art where the pieces are cheap–flimsy paper score screens, plastic bingo chips for currency/scoring, and a deck of cards decorated with deliberately insipid modern art.

Last time, I promised to talk about why Ra is so popular. But that article is proving difficult to write, and I have this moan here, all ready to go.

Ra is billed as a tile-based board game, but the tiles are, in fact, a major pain. There are 180 of them, which is very unwieldy–and you have to randomize them, and do it well, because like tiles tend to clump together during play and drawing several identical tiles in quick succession would turn the game very weird, very fast.  Because every player in turn has to draw a tile, you need to pass the bag or box around the table, and this is more of a drag than it sounds.

In a sane world, Ra would have been a card game. 180 cards is a lot, but there is precedent for it–Bohnanza has a lot, as does Bang. Cards are easier to draw from (a stack in the middle is much nicer than passing a bag of tiles around) and easier and faster to randomize. None of the tiles require any special placement, stacking, or manipulation, and it could all be handled by placing cards on top of each other.

Unfortunately, for some reason, there’s more prestige in a tile-laying board game than in a card game, so we’re stuck with a clunkier–but prettier, and more expensive–mechanic. At least the game is good.

Poker cards are 3.5 by 2.5 inches. This is the most common size, the one you’ll find in Target, Walgreens, or whatever when you swing by to pick up cards. Bridge cards are a bit narrower, to make it easier to hold 13 in your hand. You can occasionally find them at stores, but more often you’ll see them in special bridge boxed sets of two decks. They are otherwise identical.

When I graduated from college, one of my Bridge friends showed me a neat alternative to a yearbook: use a deck of cards and fine-point Sharpies. Have your friends sign and decorate the cards. Part of the fun is seeing what cards people pick. We found a tendency for guys to pick black suits and girls red; close friends want aces and face cards, and people with a lot to say want low spot cards for their large empty spaces. High spot cards were in the least demand.

This would also work for an ordinary yearbook, leaving summer camp or an internship, or whatever.

Thank you for nerfing Mages once again to reduce my temptation to go back and play your game.

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.