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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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Since 2009, I’ve been a regular day visitor to the UK Games Expo. The popularity of the show has increased year on year, and it has been a pleasure to watch it grow, but without trying to run before it can walk. It always felt like the team running it paid as much attention to what went wrong as to what went right. This year, after seeing a posting on FB asking for any Volunteers to put their names forward, despite a little hesitation I decided to put my name down. I didn’t know anybody on the team, but life is too short to worry about this kind of detail.
Friday Day
To beat the traffic on the M25, you leave early, or you lose 2 hours of your life slowly shuffling along, so I left early. My first shift didn’t start until 11am, but I intended to stop en route for some breakfast as I was due to be working through to 8pm. Every previous year, we’d popped into Sainsburys and had something there, so the plan was to do the same. Traffic was fairly light, and I’d a few Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode Film Review podcasts to get through, so the journey was easy and smooth, and I arrived for breakfast around 9. Full fry up and a large coffee before the final 20 minute run to the Expo.
I was greeted at the door by one of the Organisers, and soon sent off to complete various errands, from clothing tables for Wargamers to building a pen out of barriers for Vikings (both groups looked quite similar). Most of the hard work had already been done by a more experienced and able team over the previous couple of days, so it was mainly light duties and marshalling. We then helped the traders in, and also moved some tables and chairs over to the hotel. With the Expo ready to go and all jobs seemingly done I managed a quick bit of retail therapy at Leisure Games who were still setting up, but had some good stickered offers, so I picked up Marrakech, and Hurry’Cup up for £10 and £5 respectively. I’ve played Marrakech a few times before, and always enjoyed it as a lighter interactive game with attractive pieces, and Hurry’Cup looks fun as a family activity. I grabbed a few moments to book my games into the bring and buy as well, and put out Blood Bowl, Candamir, Diamonds Club, Evergreen, If Wishes Were Fishes, Leaping Lemmings, Midevil, Ming Dynasty, Risk Balance Of Power, Starship Catan, Techno Withces, Zombies, and ZombieTown. I’d tried to be harsh with this a little, and had priced the games to sell rather than come back. If I sold it all, I’d be getting a little over £100.
Friday Evening
Three of us had agreed to get together for a few games that evening, so we grabbed a quick bite to eat, and then went into the Strath Hotel. As an opener, we had a quick game of Zombie Dice with a couple who were waiting for their food. This isn’t a game that really gets me excited, but it was just a light opener so I can accept it as that. Consensus then seemed to be Pirate Fluxx, again not my type of game, but it ended when one player pointed out to another player that if they had played their cards I a slightly different order they could have won. We were all happy for the turn to be replayed, and that was game over. The couple then left as they were booked into an rpg, and we moved on to the end of the library table to play Walnut Grove. This was on my wishlist, so I was keen to see how it played in advance of possibly picking it up over the weekend, and to figure out if it was as good as some had mentioned it to be.
* Walnut Grove *
I’m sat here scratching my head for what to say about this. Ultimately, this 4 player game was won by Peter who had played it the most, but the rest of us weren’t too far behind. Peter described it as Carcassonne meets Agricola, and to some extent I can see that, however I’m not sure that it takes the best bits from either of those games. The Carc bit involves placing about 12 tiles over the course of the game to maximise fenced off areas and areas of a similar type, and so feels considerably more like Cities than Carc. The Agricola part was interesting, but without being groundbreaking. Your ‘workers’ need quite a bit of feeding, and keeping warm, so a good percentage of the resources you create each round go back in to the pot. This creates maths for maths sake, and I found myself pushing cubes slightly off to the side on their tiles as I knew I couldn’t use them. I know you can mitigate your loses slightly, and they change according to how many resources each worker colour needs, but you know this before you go to harvest, so you simply adjust what you collect to reflect what you need. Therefore you are left over with minimal resources with which to take your victory. It is still worker placement, and I just feel that particular mechanism is being flogged to death at the moment, and I don’t feel it is developing particularly. I played to get workers, figuring that the more tiles I placed, the more resources I would get, the more resources I’d be able to use. In the process, I created a wooded area comprising six tiles, so I took the bonus matching this, but came in second to Peter who did a little of everything rather than a lot of something, although he had created a better tiled area with lots of fenced areas. I liked it, but less than similar games. I’d rather play Cuba.
During the game, I took a trade from Chris to hand over during the trade on Saturday lunchtime. He was also kind enough to buy me a beer for my troubles, which was well received.
* Sunrise City *
A new one to me. Peter had supported this on kickstarter and we sat down to play. It was 10ish by now, and I was a little phased, and struggled to take on board how the game played. It seemed like a real jumble of ideas – a tile placement round followed by a bidding round, followed by another tile placement round with a different scoring mechanism to the previous round with a bit of role selection thrown in to the mix. I couldn’t see anything clearly defined, nor could I create any form of strategy for playing it. To add to the confusion, you score 1 victory point for every ten points you score, but if you get to exactly 10, then you score 2 victory points. Therefore if you are on 9, it is better to score 1 point than it is to score 10 points. You cannot really plan ahead as the layout changes significantly between turns, so on your turn, you say ‘How do I score x number of points’ and then stare at the tiles until you can work out if you can do it or not. This particular aspect of the game turned into a social activity.
During each round you have to ‘auction’, and if two players by coincidence are only able to build on a few tiles, then they will lose all their voting discs bidding on said tiles, whereas the player with the better spread of buildings in hand can earn many more points. There are also score modifying tiles all over the map that add or deduct points according to what type of building is built adjacent to them. All this did was make the calculation more complicated without making it more interesting. Laying positive tiles can be done to add to your score, but as you have no idea what building tiles your opponent has, laying negative tiles is just done without any reason. As you play all the tiles in your hand each round when laying the groundworks out, you can’t choose not to play these either.
The role selection came down to the luck of the draw, and from the little we saw, it seemed that some cards were considerably more valuable than others. We all stumbled through it, with the game eventually tied between Sarah and myself, so Sarah won on the tiebreaker. The game is the equivalent of a tractor engine on a hedge trimmer – something unwieldy and complicated designed to do a relatively simple task. I can’t help but feel that kickstarter is all a bit of a con. Give us a lot of money for a game that we think is really good, and we’ll give you it well before anybody else. No thanks – it is too much like films that don’t get press screened before they get released.
All this said, this game will find a market and will appeal to some, but it contains too many elements that I really didn’t enjoy when mixed into a single game.
* Bohnanza *
Stefan wandered into the games library looking slightly disappointed that all the gamers from his previous game had gone to their respective beds. We therefore sat down to a game of Bohnanza. The most memorable part of the game was Stefan’s shock at some of Sarah’s trades – she acquired beans she didn’t need and he did by offering better trades, and he sat in disbelief. Peter won this without buying a third field, so fair play to him. I got my now obligatory second place. By now it was 1:30, so we all packed up and headed out to the Hagley. If you are interested to know about this hotel, just have a look on trip advisor, but 2 of the reviews are titled ‘Travellers Beware’ and ‘Disgraceful’. One of the rooms had no lock, and the light didn’t work, but fortunately it wasn’t mine.
Saturday
I always struggle to sleep on my first night in a new place, especially one like this, so I didn’t drop off until sometime around 2, and slept really lightly around until about 6. I eventually dropped off then, and was just getting some quality kip when the alarm went off. I struggled up, and had the shower dribble on me. No breakfast going at the hotel (probably a good thing), so I had a quick cereal bar and set off for my 8am shift, arriving just after 7:30. I went on to one of the side doors letting traders in, for the first hour and a half, in which time I did manage to spot the current preferred method of transport for Stormtroopers – a Renault Scenic. I then went up to help organise the Bring and Buy queue, which we moved into a separate room to try and keep the hallways as clear as possible. Despite the huge queues and old-fashioned booking in system, people were generally good natured, although the waiting time was about an hour and 20 minutes. I recognised a local gamer clutching a Road & Boats which he was selling for £80, and had to stop myself from blowing my budget there and then. I was amazed at how big the box was. I came off this area at 11am, and then went on a break, otherwise known as a shopping spree, and made my first purchases of the expo.
I picked up Silverton from Northumbria Games, with both guys on the stand being really friendly and help. I really enjoy train games, but often struggle to find anybody willing to give them any time so this should hopefully keep me quite happy with a solo option. I then ambled over the six feet between Northumbria and Gameslore, and purchased Santiago De Cuba and Mondo. I’ve played SdC online a number of times, and find it highly enjoyable, and often very close run, and have wanted to have the physical version for some time. At £20 this seemed like a good price for a fun game. I like the level of interactivity it offers along with the simplicity of the rules, but with enough depth to make it interesting. Mondo is for playing with my daughter, and I really hope this will appeal to her and help develop her interest in games. I then went up to have a browse through the Bring And Buy, which was in chaos, and ended up marshalling, and keeping people back whilst they tried to tidy games up and prepare for the next onslaught. It was a good chance to have a chat with various friends – both those I was expecting to see, and those whom I had no idea were going to be there. Whilst waiting, I noticed 2 copies of Dominant Species, a copy of Night Of The Magicians, and a copy of Formula Motor Racing. As soon as the stall reopened, I grabbed 1 of the DS games and held on to it after seeing a tag of £35, picked up NotM and promptly put it back after seeing it priced for £25, kept the FMR which was either £3 or £5, looked at the other DS, and put it back (£45), and also spotted and grabbed Manila for £15.
Then back to the car to drop off, and grab my bag of games to trade, and I went up to the Playtest area, arriving about 15 minutes early. Rob suggested I try Zombie At My Heels, a light card game with a similar idea to Family Business. I played with two others who were taking the game very seriously, and were playing quite slowly, so before we knew it, the trade was beginning, and I was lost between trying to play the game, and give it the respect it deserved, and trying to participate in the trade. In trying, I failed spectacularly to do both, and owe an apology to both the maths traders for my lack of handshaking and trading, and to the two gamers for my lack of concentration on the game, and I deserved to get eaten as much as I did, losing quite spectacularly, although I’d lay the blame a little on having both my characters at the front of the eating queue due to the initial draw not favouring me at all (draw 4 play 2?). Otherwise, the game was well explained and would work as fun game for a light-hearted group of gamers. It wouldn’t be fair for me to make any further comment on it. Through the trade, I traded away Chris’s Blood Bowl Team Manager, and my Dragon Delta, Montego Bay, Khronos, Castle Merchants, Barons and Supernova, and picked up a bag of Catan expansions for Chris, Blood Feud In New York, Gheos, and the WarCraft Boardgame. I took those back to the car, and then went on to the door for the rest of the afternoon, which was a terrible job considering the breeze coming through the doors that seemed to attract both Catwoman and one of Dr Who’s assistants to the same spot as me. Awful, just awful. At one point I was most shocked to see Harry Potter popping out for a quick ciggie. What would Dumbledore say to that, Harry?
At closing time, we headed up to the War Machine tables as they were starting their final game of the day, and just helped the traders upstairs close down, securing the area whilst the wargames were still going on. I admire how well organised these tables were, and it was fascinating to see such a mixture of armies and battles going on. The contestants were keen to chat once their games were over, and really seemed to be enjoying the competition – one player I spoke to had travelled with his friend all the way from Serbia to take part. I then collected some cash from the Bring and Buy to replenish my emptying wallet – I’d sold 9 of my 14 games, so was quite happy there. We then picked up another Subway, and sat out on the grass to eat before heading into the Strath. I then picked up Primordial Soup from the Wallace Suite in the Strath before sitting down for more games.
* Small World *
We set up again at the end of the library table so the library volunteers could join us, and started with Small World which all of us but 1 had played before. I picked up Pillaging Orcs in the first round, and for the first time kept them for the entire game. Nobody attacked me once, and I scored a steady 9-10 points per turn. Every time I thought about putting them into decline, another player would go into decline so I’d just lift them all off and come on afresh. At final scoring, I lost out by 1 point so ended up in second again. Small World was a great ice breaker for Lindsey who then ended up playing games with us for the rest of the evening. It is at it’s very best when treated that way, and I don’t think works as well as a quiet and serious game. There was a lot of fun banter, and we all really enjoyed it.
* Discworld *
Last year after the Expo I raved about this game. Commander Vimes won the game that time. Every time I’ve played it with gamers since then, Commander Vimes has always been one of the Player’s objectives, and Commander Vimes has always won, which I find worrying. Easy to solve, but slightly frustrating. However, I went into this with an open mind. I was the only player who had played this before, so taught the game, dealt out the goals, and we began. It is such a simple game to play and teach. Almost all the information you need to play is given to you and as long as you watch out for what others are up to, then you are fine. Again, with the interaction inbuilt into this, the level of banter was fairly relentless as we robbed and backstabbed one another on a regular basis. I was slowly losing my voice at this point, so was reduced to hand gestures and squeaks. The game ended and… Vimes won again. Everybody really enjoyed it though, so we went immediately into another games. My goal this time was Vimes, and I played as one of the Lords, making all the other Players lose their turns to try and keep me from that objective. This also helps burn through cards, and soon the deck was gone without anybody else even getting close, and Vimes won again. I’m tempted to just remove him from the game next time, but then my strategy would be to maximise VP as opposed to going for my objective.
It was again fairly late/early by now, but we were all up for just one more, so we played Poo, another random card game with a silly theme that in itself was fodder for the fire, but with us all flinging banter about worked quite well, and gave us some laughs. I was first out in both games, but didn’t get the banana in either. If that means nothing, don’t worry.
I didn’t go to sleep that night – I passed out.
Sunday Morning
I was up again at 7, and at the expo for 7:30. We changed tables over in preparation for the 40k tournament and Flames of War, and then I went on to the back entrance for the pre-booked crowd. We got them all through in 8 minutes flat, so I spent the rest of the morning on the front door.
Again, I wasn’t on shift from 11 to 2, so I went looking for 1812 Invasion Of Canada which I couldn’t find anywhere. Northumbria Games went on to their distributor, and said it was in stock there, but I couldn’t find it on any of the stalls. Trouble was as soon as I asked for 1812, people would think trains, so no go there. Whilst looking on the Leisure Games stand though I did find Upon A Salty Ocean for £17, so grabbed that, and then found Zertz for £3 on the Bring And Buy. I then went in search of some playtests, specifically Mythotopia, only to find the 1 person who knew the rules wasn’t there. I spoke to some of the stallholders before moving on through the Family Zone, were I was delighted to see so many families with young children sat together enjoying games. The smiles were very genuine, and the delight was a good reminder of why this is such a great hobby to be involved in. The Imagination Gaming team were a fantastic bunch, and were always busy giving time to new and old gamers alike.
* Anchorage *
I’d seen this on Saturday, and liked the look of it. I enjoy pick up and deliver anyway, so this looked like it should work for me, although I’m not so sure about the plastic lunch box it came in. I jumped into a demo just starting so we were a 3, and after a very brief and slightly scattergun rules explanation we began playing. The game was quite light, and easy to learn, but didn’t seem to have much in the way of depth. Your goal is to use factories to make goods to build better factories to make better goods to sell for points. The best approach seemed to be to build a buoy route between two ports, upgrade to the better factories, produce the high value goods, and sell them at the ports. There is limited demand at the ports, but if your scoring marker lands on the VP track (which goes around the outside of the board) adjacent to a port, then the demand card is replaced. Also, when these VP markers pass various points on the board, the tide changes. This is a neat idea, but it applies to all players on all parts of the board, so makes no difference.
I like the look of the game, and I enjoy the mechanic, but this is an optimisation game, and there seems to be a single route to victory with only minor divergences. The game feels like it is the basic shell that needs something more to create a more varied gameplay. Having the tide alternate across the board would help here so when one half of the board is on low tide, the other half is on high. The game does allow for interaction, and it is possible to block routes by using up the buoy spaces. I see this as positive interaction – it is deliberate, and forces players to think carefully about the routes they choose. However, the best tactic here is just to keep out of the way of others. The negative interaction is that you can’t use a port if another player is already in it. This isn’t deliberate, just frustrating, but again can be planned for. The demoer failed to score in the time it took me to complete the single lap of the board we had agreed to play (you would normally complete 3) mainly because every time he tried to enter a port, it would already have a ship in it. Actually, what I feel the game really needs is an economy. I’d really like to like it though as it was attractive, and fun, but it isn’t really any more than games like Bombay.
* Mythotopia *
Ah, my most wished for game. Never have I been more excited about a plain white box with a sticker on it. I spotted someone I won’t publicly name, and knew he would be able to provide me with more information about this game which, to the very best of his ability he did. We opened the box, and had a look through the cards and components. The game will use the A Few Acres Of Snow mechanic, but in a game that goes from 2 up to 4 players. Each player is handed their starting decks, from which they then select a number of cards. Players also have their own Empire deck to purchase cards from, as well as a common deck which, if I understand correctly, will be a selection from a larger deck of cards. There are also a set of location cards.
Players earn points from owning cities and magical symbols, and from placing roads, and the victory condition was described as being ‘Settlers like’, which I can see will have to lead to alliances and bash the leader. Areas also produce resources, so there are mountains to be mined, and gold to be had. The board layout currently provides a central land with an island in the south west corner, and varied terrain to be dealt with. The board is far more open than A Few Acres, (think more Game Of Thrones) and I assume therefore that combat will have to be dealt with differently. There is a VP track around the outside, with marker points dependant on players (not sure why – I’d have to assume this was to do with victory conditions). Oh, and apparently it is going to look truly spectacular. My response to this was ‘Are you going to get somebody else to do the artwork then?’.
I’m definitely not one of those who believes A Few Acres is a broken game. I’m equally as competent at losing as either side, and find it a really enjoyable game to play. So much focus has gone into the debate about the game working or not working that everybody has missed the step forward this game has taken. Martin Wallace has taken one of the most interesting developments in games and has taken it to the next step. Lords Of Waterdeep sold out at the show. You couldn’t buy a copy past about mid morning on Saturday. I played it a few weeks ago, and it was interesting enough, but about as new as that comfy sweater you just can’t part with. Hopefully gamers will finally recognise the step forward that has been made by taking Dominion, putting it on a board, and making it fit together so seamlessly. So, in summary, Mythotopia is, at its heart, A Few Acres, but on a more open board with up to 4 players, and lots of bells and whistles. Lets hope for an Essen release.
Sunday Afternoon
Back on shift after this fleeting glance, and I was working on the main entrance by Kenny Baker’s signing table. The Galactic Knights were all on hand, and were reluctant to move away from one of their heroes, and I don’t blame them either. They were keen to try and draw the crowds over so he could sign some autographs, but the price seemed to be putting people off. How the Galactic Knights kept going throughout the show, having fun with the crowds, and keeping their enthusiasm up I don’t know, but well done to them. With the day slowly coming to a close, the awards were announced (don’t ask me – I missed them as I was on the door) and we began the final cleardown.
Most volunteers had worked from 6 to 9 hours each day from Friday through to Sunday, but the level of energy put into the clearup was incredible. All the tables were moved away, all the boards and chairs were stacked, the cloths cleared, and in super quick time. Everybody kept good humour throughout, and it was an exhausted but happy bunch of volunteers that gathered for pizza at the end of the day.
I’ve never met a more hard working and dedicated crew of people who were tireless and who never, not even for a second, lost their cool. It strikes me the further north you head in this country, the easier people get to talk to and be around, and this is from someone born and bred in the south. It was a real pleasure to be part of, and I enjoyed every last moment. Next year bigger and better, and with the team behind it, I’ve no doubts that this show is just going to grow and grow, but never lose its way.
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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I saw a comment somewhere on the geek which suggested that 2011 had been a poor year for games, with no new ideas and lots of regurgitated mechanics. Well, I can agree with this sentiment in many cases – I purchased a couple of deck building games that really didn’t do anything that new. Rune Age took the deck building idea and turned it into what seemed more like deck stripping. Blood Bowl: Team Manager just seemed to support a leader too much, and didn’t feel either new or exciting, although it was good to see an old name return.
I own 16 games from 2011 – I’ve played a few more than that, but if it was really good, then I would have enjoyed it enough to buy it. Of the 16, one was a playtester copy which I’ve promised not to blog about (it needs a lot of work). One was a review copy I said I would blog about but I really don’t have anything to say that is positive at the moment. As a game it would work as an app, but as a physical card game it suffers and I’d rather be playing KardCombat.
Barons was a purchase based on a review, and after a few plays, I’m really not seeing what this game has to offer. The card combinations are fairly uninspiring, and the card art is poor. The game is chaotic, and becomes a ‘bash the leader’ chase to the finish line. This particular gaming issue is a real problem for me. I don’t usually enjoy these games, and often find that they aren’t won by a good player, but come down to the most manipulative or whiny person to take the win. I enjoy player interaction, but like fair play.
There are also games that I really want to like, but have issues that make them hard work to enjoy. Unfortunately for me, despite writing about it previously and heaping praise on it, Discworld: Ankh-Morpork seems to end the same way almost every time I play it – the deck runs out, and the player with that objective takes the game. This is a real shame because otherwise this is an excellent game with great artwork, and a fun theme.
Friday deserves a mention – I’m not going to put this in my top games for the year, but it is a great little solo experience that works really well. The only failing it had for me was that it was a little too easy, even on the hardest level, and once I’d worked out the best process, I could beat it 3 out of 4 times. The idea is excellent though of taking the experiences you have to survive and using them to make you stronger, and also the idea of aging each time you get through your deck. This was a surprisingly fun little card game.
Another noteworthy game to not make the top list was Fortune & Glory. I played a fellow gamer’s copy of this in one of my local groups, and really enjoyed it, but had no intention of purchasing it. Then it popped up on ebay and nobody was bidding on it, so I grabbed it as a bargain. It is an experience game that I may have played more of if it wasn’t for two of the games in my top 5 which do a similar thing, but a whole lot better.
A few other honourable mentions – Revolver: The Wild West Gunfighting Game is an interesting 2 player thematic card game that is simple, but tense, and great for a bit of table talk between players. However, it is dependant on getting the right cards when you need them, so is a little too luck based.
Last mention goes to the very divisive Panic Station. I played this just before Christmas with my Sevenoaks group, and it didn’t work because they are just all too polite – the same group struggled to get to grips with BSG because they aren’t very good at lying. When the infected Player tried to trade an infection and failed, the player he tried to infect immediately accused him, and he admitted what he had done at a point when he should have denied it, and accused that player of lying, or trying to set him up. This game really needs the right players for it – it needs people who can role-play. With the right group this would work far better than it did on my one experience, but as a game will only ever be as good as the players involved in it.
Right, with all of that out of the way, I can move on to my top 5 of 2011.
5. Sekigahara: Unification Of Japan
Whilst trying to drum up interest in my Sevenoaks gaming group, I got an email from a local gamer who couldn’t make the group, but was interested in meeting up anyway, so I went round to his, and we played this. I had little idea of the rules, and we jumped straight in, but it struck me pretty quickly that this was an excellent game. The rules are so much easier to follow than the genre usually forces upon you, and the combat was fully reliant upon good hand management. I picked this up pretty quickly after my first play, and have really enjoyed each outing with it. My most enjoyable moments have been the points of brinkmanship where I know I don’t have the cards I need to defend a vital point on the board, and if my opponent attacks me I’m finished, but I look confident and ready for the fight. Or when I’m confident I can win a battle only to get trounced because my opponent has been building a hand ready for the same fight.
The game is well produced, the blocks represent forces well, and look impressive when in a large stack. The downsides are insignificant – sometimes the blocks obscure important parts of the map, the block towers can fall over, there are no tracks on the board which would have made the game a lot easier to play, and two of the black army symbols look quite similar, and have caused some game changing confusion at times. In another year, this would easily have made the top 3, but there are some excellent games out there to compete against it.
4. Gears Of War: The Board Game.
Well, I’ve already rambled on about this one in another blog. It’s an excellent game, well produced, great miniatures, thematic, tense, works well solo, this is one of two reasons why Fortune & Glory (which was released at the same time) fails to make an impact. When I game, I tend to lose myself in it – I played Ora Et Labora at the weekend, and you could have let a firework off in the room and I wouldn’t have noticed. Gears Of War takes this a step further though – I’m fully immersed in the game, but thematically I’m dragged in too, more so than the video game ever did. Maybe because the boardgame experience is about thinking, whereas the videogame is about reacting. What do I do? I’m hurt so do I retreat for cover and heal up, or do I push on and try and take that last monster out? It took me something like 7 attempts to beat the first scenario, and I enjoyed every minute of play, even if sometimes I got no further than the second room. I actually think this game is much better than the license suggests.
3. A Few Acres Of Snow.
The imbalances and reported imperfections this game has don’t bother me too much, even though maybe they should. I play with the amended rules now, but I’m not a good enough gamer, and I simply haven’t played this enough to have worked out the best way for either side to win. Playing this on Yucata on occasion has seen me get trounced easily as both sides, so go figure. What appeals is the mechanic, the idea of taking the Dominion deck builder and actually making a game out of it using a board to give it that physical presence, and a better understanding of what the situation is. I’ve had some really tense, close run experiences with this, and am really looking forward to seeing how this is developed with Mythotopia. For me, this game was the most exciting development in gaming during 2011 – the idea of taking a deck building game and making it a boardgame.
2. Mage Knight: Board Game.
I actually enjoy this more solo than playing with a group. It’s a deep, complicated game that provides the player with the freedom to play, and a highly varied gaming experience each session. Getting all of the rules right all of the time is quite a challenge in itself, and solo this is less of a frustrating experience as downtime looking up a particular rule only slows the game down for that player. This is a terrible reason not to play this with more, but actually it works really well just as a solo. There is so much else to interact with in the game – do you take over the Keeps to get your draw up? Do you go for spells? Any game where I find myself thinking ‘I need to get out of these woods – night is coming’ is a hit for me. It isn’t quite a deck building game – you only get through your deck a handful of times, but you really need to make every card count. The number of variables is huge, from the tile draw order to the monsters in the locations, to the advanced action and spell cards that come out, the units you can hire, the combinations mean you’ll never see the same game twice.
It has issues – something this big always will. The rules being split over two books is almost laughable. There is no index for looking something up, and often I found myself hunting for a rule I know I’d seen in one of the books somewhere. Every time I read the rules, I spot something else small I’ve missed, but I suppose so what? I’ve got it 90% down, and it still fells like a great game. The pieces are excellent, the artwork is thematic and clear, but it does take up an awful lot of space on the table – even in solo it fills a large dining table. The card stock is really truly awful – I hate sleeving games but felt with this (at that price tag) it is essential. Mage Knight is a beautiful monster.
1. Eclipse
Maybe an obvious choice, but I don’t care. Earlier I moaned about bash the leader games, and this is probably one of those, but it is terrific, such a punchy game. It doesn’t do anything new, but it does refresh lots of old ideas, and takes a mix of mechanics to make an outstanding game. The game appeals to the child in me, and really creates a story each time you play it. It rewards aggression which really makes a change for this type of game – the player that keeps out of the way is much less likely to win in this than in, say, Shogun. You need to get your hands dirty, you need to make alliances. There is so much to do – conquest, research, exploration – all there for the taking. The alien races add some freshness to it as well. Each game is different, new and exciting – the strategy that won the last game may not even be an option in this one and players need to react to the game as it evolves.
So, a really good, exciting bunch of games in the top 5 for me. Personally, 2011 was an excellent gaming year with some really top quality games. For 2012, I’d really like to see designers continue to push at the boundaries, and not just redevelop old games, or churn out expansions. All of my top 5 were excellent games out of the box, and none of them felt like they needed an expansion to work properly. Having said that, I’m sure at least two of them will have expansions in the next year, but for now they work just fine as is. Fingers crossed for so many good new games that this list needs a top 10 for 2012.
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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So this is the big game right now that everybody seems excited about? This no doubt will settle down, and the race up the ratings will also settle as Eclipse starts getting rated by those that don’t own it, so haven’t invested hard earned cash into it, and aren’t as determined for it to be the next great game.
The entire point is this though - is it really any good?
To clarify how qualified I am to speak about it, I’ve spent money on it. I’ve played it three times.
The sheer volume of ‘bits’ in this game is staggering – 24 various ships and tiles per player, add to that 52 discs and cubes each, we start with 76 pieces over a potential six players, so 456 bits to put somewhere. We then have 44 sector hexes to sort through and shuffle, 7 boards to check and distribute, 96 Tech Tiles to shove in a bag, 154 Ship Parts to sort onto the Supply Board, 70 other counters to sort out and put on the Supply Board, 32 Reputation Tiles to put in a bag, 11 Cards, 18 dice, 13 bits of wood for the Supply Board, and a Start Player marker. So, in setup, that means handling over 900 bits. Blimey Charlie. Even in a 2-Player you’re looking at around 600.
To deal with this, I’m using a tackle box, but then that puts the price up. For the retail price on this I’d expect a storage solution in the box already. With the Tech Tiles, it really doesn’t matter in the slightest – they all get chucked in a draw bag. However, with the Ship Tiles, they need sorting into 17 piles. Yes, you can simply throw them in a pot, and hunt for the one you need when you need it, but that still means sorting. I’m daft enough to have timed the setup, and it takes 15 minutes. What would have been easier would have been a storage tray with the tech tiles in compartments.
The bits are ok, and no more than that, certainly not up to the standard of what you would expect for the money. 1 of my hexes is oddly printed on the reverse which makes it instantly distinguishable from the back. I was missing a cube. The ships come from a game that was published 4 years ago. The little tiles are fiddly, and chunky, clumsy or nervous hands are going to send the neat little piles toppling over. It has that cheap, slightly dusty, musty printing look about it. The economy markers are supposed to be orange, and they aren’t – they are a light brown, which would be fine if materials weren’t brown as well. Economy could have so easily been green. Moans aside, what does work best here is the artwork on the hex faces – there is a comment in the rulebook about hex images being sourced from the European Space Agency, and this has been handled well.
It strikes me that rulebooks are a matter for personal preference – I squirm every time I pick up a Fantasy Flight rulebook these days – I can’t stand rulesets that triple reference themselves, and this is apparent in games like Gears Of War and Rune Age. A common irritant is ‘On your turn, you can do action a. To see what you can do in action a, turn to page 10’. Page 10 then reads ‘Action a lets you do this, this and this. For more detail on this, this and this, turn to page 14’. Just tell me what I can do, and how I do it. What I tend to do is summarise a rulebook, and for 2 reasons. Firstly, it is the best way for me to understand the rules. If I’m putting them into my format, then I need to understand them, and what they intend. The second reason is to put them into an order that makes sense to me. This order is Game Setup, Game Principals, Playing The Game, and Game End. For me, this is the most logical order for rules to be in, even if the best way to explain a game can often be the exact reverse of this. Eclipse rules follow my preferred order almost to a tee. The only change I would have liked to see is to move the examples to the back of the book, and not have them after each section – a full summary at the end of a round in the middle of a game would have been better for me, and having the summaries after each section makes finding rules in the book a slower process than it needs to be, but I nit pick.
When on the table, this game takes up a lot of room. The hexes can spread out considerably, and all players need to be able to see the supply board, which is quite a challenge – even in our three player, it was on the opposite side of the table to me, so meant that each round I was moving around the table to see what techs were in play. To properly see what is on offer, you can be no more than a few feet away, and players with poor eyesight, or in poor light are really going to struggle with this. The supply board can’t be moved either – even if you place the ship parts elsewhere, the tech tiles mean the board stays in one place.
Understanding and explaining the game is fairly easy. The game is played over 9 rounds. Each round has a series of phases, starting with the action phase, followed by the combat phase, and ending with an upkeep phase. You do, you fight, you tidy. When you do, what you are doing makes sense, although the player aid cards could have provided some more information on the limitations of what you can do. This is included on the player sheet though in an abstract way, so is there if you need a gentle reminder (typically you get to explore 1 tile, move 2 influence, research 1 tech, upgrade 2 parts, build 2 ships/techs, or move 3 times). But the options are intuitive, and the cost is the same regardless. What resources you have is easy to track, and what rate you earn at is cleverly recorded – as you move cubes onto discovered hexes, you take them off a value track, which then shows an increased value for your resources. When explaining this, it is very simple for players to grasp quickly, and see the ease of use this provides during the game – there is no long drawn out counting of hexes, or figuring out of resources – all the numbers are on your sheet.
There is some room to play the system though – if you place an influence disc in a deserted hex simply to take a discovery tile for the benefit it provides, you can deliberately bankrupt yourself by taking actions to allow you to return this disc to your sheet without having to pay the price for it. Although you can convert resources on a 2:1 basis, you aren’t forced to, so there is some element of playing the system here. Also, the first player to pass goes first in the next round, and this is a good position to be in if you are looking out for a specific tech. Again, it is possible to exploit the rules slightly by passing earlier than you might need, and still being able to take actions through the reaction option. When you pass, you still have the option of taking 3 of the actions in a limited form. However, if you were planning to use all of your materials to just build a monolith, then you might as well pass now, and then use the reaction ability to build it anyway. Unless, of course, every one else passes.
The order you take your actions in is important – do what there is competition for first, and then fill in the gaps. Attack your opponent before they attack you, take that tech before someone else does, discover that final hex before it’s gone, and leave the ship upgrades till later.
When you fight, you work out which ships have the highest initiative, and you hit on a 6. A die roll, plus computers, less shields. You get blown up, you don’t get to attack. Repeat until either someone runs away, or to the last player standing. Early on, though, this can lead to some rather long, drawn out combats with 2 players rolling to get a couple of 6’s. This changes, however, as the ships are upgraded and you hit on a something more like a 4+ rather than just a 6. Missiles, combined with computers, can be deadly, and may turn out to be too powerful – in my last game, a powerful attacking fleet was destroyed by missiles before it even got to take a shot. Grabbing that tech, and being the only player with it gives a distinct edge.
Three games in for me, and this is a game full of questions. What do you do? You need economy, to pay for your actions. You need science to give you the tech you need to build stronger ships, build other structures, to give you more action discs, and other advantages. You need materials to build those ships. Concentrate too much on one area, and the others will cost you. Yet you are limited by what the game offers you. You don’t have to place a hex, but if you don’t you’ve lost an action which early on your competitors are going to get. With experienced players of equal skill it may come down to who draws the best hexes, or buys the best tech first, but at the moment I have no idea what the best approach is. Logically, you build an engine, and then you use it, but in the mean time you need to react to what is happening as the game progresses. Being offensive is a strong strategy as this allows you to draw the rep tiles which could quite easily make the difference between first and last. Hexes don’t seem to create much difference in scoring, nor does tech research. Monoliths in your outer reaches may help, but the best bet seems to be to create an aggressive fleet and go blow things up. That makes it a hostile, confrontational game of pick on the weak, which might put some people off.
What is pleasing is that you get the whole game. It doesn’t feel like 70% of an overall design, with parts skimmed out for an expansion – it’s all in the box you buy. 7 races (6 aliens and the humanoids), 4 ship types, 24 types of tech, 17 ship upgrades. There are possible additions, but your play experience is a full and complete one.
The play time is a bare faced lie. 30 minutes per player isn’t going to happen. On average you’ll be taking 4 actions per round, and will likely see 1 combat per round. That means 36 actions, 9 combats, and 9 upkeep phases at 30 minutes per player? Don’t forget the 15 minutes to set up, and the 10 minutes to pack away. My reckoning is 45 minutes per player, maybe 40 with more players as the upkeep phase routine of adding tech takes less time per player, as does set up and pack up. 4 hours for 6 players is realistic, 3 hours isn’t. With each player taking 1 action before play moves on though, players are almost constantly involved. If you aren’t involved in combat, then you may have some down time, but it is enjoyable to watch other player’s plans fall apart, or get nervy when they move ever closer to you.
I play games to escape, to challenge myself, and to enjoy a collective experience. Eclipse delivers this for me. I find the space theme more interesting and involving than ancient civs, or modern economy. I like rules that make sense. I enjoy creating something visual, and with this I can. At some point in the not too distant future, somebody will find a way of breaking the system, be it with missiles, or by playing the economy, but for now it all works. There are no cards to confuse things, no shoe-horned rules exceptions to make it play. It could be glossier, look more expensive, but I’m not sure it matters that it isn’t when you are in the middle of a game.
Eclipse seems to work with all player numbers. I can play it with my game groups, and at home with my son. I’d really like to try with more players, but for me the play time will restrict the ability to do this. To try and wrap up, I’m glad to own it, and the designer has done an exceptional job. There are faults, mostly cosmetic, so it isn’t perfect, but it deserves to be well thought of. It does nothing new – it is no more ground breaking than the vaguely similar Age Of Empires III (or whatever it is called now) or the recent Civ game, but it works well as a whole. As of today, I rate it a nine, and it could still go either way. Many of us gamers, and I do include myself, have a short attention span for games like this, so it could burn bright, and burn out, but for now I’ll enjoy it burning bright.
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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I find games that use dice for combat infuriating. I can position my troops perfectly, have the odds firmly stacked in my favour, and be on the brink of a decisive game winning move. Then I roll my 10 attack dice, needing a 4, 5, or 6 to hit. I roll 4 1’s, 3 2’s and 3 3’s. Crap. My opponent, with his three defending units, rolls 3 6’s. OK, so this is a made up situation for a made up game, but when I play, I can feel this frustration building inside me – the certain knowledge that this is going to occur in a manner that is relevant to that game. It happened to me first in Risk, and ever since has followed me around with glee. Memoir ’44, Last Night On Earth, Claustrophobia, I’m looking at you, and you are looking back at me and taunting me with your constantly game crippling spite.
The Boardgameguru newsletter dropped into my inbox a few weeks back, and two games grabbed my attention – Fortune And Glory, and Gears Of War. FaG looked really impressive. The demo video wetted my appetite, and with trembling hands I made the decision to place an order. Then I saw the price, and closed the session down. I couldn’t justify that kind of purchase without being sure this was the game for me. What would be the point of buying it to only play it once? OK – it plays solo, it looks great, and more importantly it has a Zeppelin that spits out Nazis. But some of the comments were so-so, and there were some concerns over replayability, so I stalled. One for the Christmas list maybe, but not for now – I wanted to see some objective reviews once the initial hype had subsided.
Gears Of War held only passing interest for me. I’d played and beaten the first game, enjoying the particular pov style the game used, and had got maybe a third of the way through the second game and lost interest, finding it all to similar to the first. The third – couldn’t care less really. A friend had picked this up on release (the boardgame, not the video game) and had been tweeting about how good it was. The early comments looked good as well, although slightly fanboy based. I could resist this one – it seemed similar to a couple of games in my collection I wasn’t really playing anyway.
Then GoW came along one night to the gaming club, and was played whilst I was in a game of Discworld. Maybe 15 minutes in, a player uttered the words ‘Right, I’ll go get him with my chainsaw’ and my curiosity peaked. The next week, I had a quick peak online, but to no avail – again it seemed too expensive for something I just didn’t feel like I knew enough about. However, the twitch had started.
By now, the twitch was developing to a shiver – I felt like I needed to find something to fulfil that obsession, that desire to buy, so I dropped onto a few retailer sites, and browsed through their deals – maybe something in there I was after for a good price. I am well aware how this sounds, but I know I’m not the only one. Whilst just browsing, with no intention of really making a big purchase (I had my mind set to getting the Railways Card Game expansion) I spotted that IGUK had a Gears Of War listed as damaged for £34. I clicked ‘add to basket’ and checked out before I could persuade myself otherwise. A week later the box arrived on my office desk, and with a dink in the underside maybe 2cm long. All the contents were perfect and undamaged, and after a couple of minutes work at home with some gaffer tape and elbow grease, the box looked, well, slightly less damaged than it had before. I folded out the insert to lay flat around the bottom and the sides of the box, and felt ready.
After making the purchase, I had checked out a couple of reviews, and had doubts, but also a couple of session reports, and felt more positive. I’d read through the rules which seemed fairly straight-forward. The mechanic seemed ordinary, but workable – play a card, and do one of three things, being either the card action, combat, or movement. Spend other cards to take other actions, like recovering a teammate, or using equipment. Cards are your health, well that is easy enough, and have a secondary ability (get in a response attack, add to your defence, or allow you to move). As an additional note, it is a good thing that the game is quite simple to play, because the rulebook is a mess. As an example, I want to know about how I pick up a weapon. I flick through the rulebook from the front and on page 9, find a turn summary that tells me to find out more about how I do this, I should turn to page 10. I turn the page, only to get told no – if I want to know about that I shouldn’t be on page 10, I should be on page 20. You lied to me, rulebook. This never fails to make me groan, although GoW isn’t the worst example of this, for a game with such high production values, this is a letdown.
So at home, with a quiet house (a rarity) I set the game up for solo play, picked Marcus as the hero, and played the first scenario. The pieces and boards looked great on the table, with easily distinguishable enemies, and fantastic artwork. Initially my turns were quite slow as I gained familiarity with the hero cards, checked the rules a few times for clarification, and just gained the confidence that the game was going well, so I seemed to be doing the right thing. Once or twice the AI cards made me sit tight and heal up before pushing on, and it felt to me like a good representation of the video game. At no point did the AI cards make the enemies do anything really stupid, and I was starting to realise the importance of good hand management, having been cornered with no defensive bonus cards.
The final objective was to blow an emergence hole with a grenade. The final board had a few figures on it, but I reckoned if I could dash in, throw the grenade, and then hold for 1 turn I’d be fine – I could run back for cover next turn, and then pick off the remaining enemies. This, with GoW, is a mistake. You can never do the crazy hero thing and survive to tell the tale. The AI card made two adjacent enemies attack. I only had follow orders as responses through poor hand management. I rolled, had no shields, and instead got a bunch of hits on me. Twice. All cards gone, plus a few I didn’t have, and that was game over.
What was different though, very different from the games mentioned earlier, was that it really felt like I’d let myself down – I’d put myself in a position where the dice could beat me when I didn’t have to. I could have, should have, picked each enemy off, and then thrown the grenade. I panicked when I didn’t have to. I had lost because I was tactically inept. I packed the game away with a smile on my face. It had beaten me fair and square.
Second session I played with my son. The box had been on our dining table since the previous evening, and he had been eyeing it with some relish, so we set up. My frustration here was that we decided to play Marcus and Dom, but realised the figures looked VERY similar indeed, so we swapped Dom out for Cole. I can see myself painting the edge of the bases different colours to help distinguish between them. I explained my previous evening’s error. We wouldn’t make the same mistake, would we? Well, we did. With him low on health, 1 had a chance to drop in the grenade on the final room, and did so. The door blew, and in piled the meanest looking bunch of beasts I’d seen since my last family get-together. I got picked off really quickly, and he barely got to his feet before he was destroyed to. Again, bad decision. Patience is a virtue.
Four more solo sessions came and went over the next week and a half, some going to the wire, and some where I hardly made it out of the first room. I had developed my play considerably – I was holding cards for combos, keeping response cards and using them wisely, and making the most of cover and equipment. I knew what was in the AI deck, and what had been played. In my seventh game, I registered my first success. It was a fairly simple game, with only 1 Boomer appearing. I made good use of the secondary card abilities, having more of a feel for the odds, and played a fairly astute game.
For me the biggest compliment I can pay is in the immersion you feel. Video games are immersive experiences, escapist fun, and this recreates that very well. The narrative takes over, and the drama plays out on the boards with the figures. Playing an ambush or picking off a Locust from distance feels like an achievement, like a kill rather then a card, some dice, and removing a piece from the board. Clever play is rewarded, not irrelevant. Losing is mostly as the result of over eager play and being exposed for failing to make use of the cover, or not holding and playing the right cards. And victory is sweet, feels earned and deserved. When I finish playing, I suddenly realise that I’m sat at home and notice the room around me – for the last however long (and I couldn’t tell you – 30 minutes? An hour? I’m too immersed to notice or care) I’ve been transported on to those boards, and in to the game.
It isn’t without fault – the AI deck is reshuffled and you start on it again, so feasibly you could draw a really nasty card, like a spawn, and then next turn draw the same card all over again. You can roll badly. You can draw a couple of really awful guns from the weapons deck. Some of the boards are a little ambiguous on line of sight and cover, and as the enemies have no range limitations, sometimes the layout can put you at the end of a really long corridor where you can’t hit them, but they can hit you. The rulebook is, as I’ve said, poor. Really well illustrated, but poorly laid out. There is already a substantial list of rules questions building up, but with these types of games that is always the case. Just go look at the faq for Last Night On Earth.
It isn’t for everybody, either, being a pure co-op. The game time on some of the scenarios can be quite substantial with a larger group, and I’m not sure how I would feel about playing this on some of the longer levels with the full compliment of Players. But it is evident that this has been created by an experienced designer. The scaling for players is neatly dealt with, the AI often has 2 or 3 options, the game is smooth to play, the pace is right, and the theme shines through without complexity to trip it up.
I’ve now played Fortune And Glory twice, and my feeling is, well, it’s ok. Just ok. I know if I’d got these the other way around – purchased FaG, and let GoW go, I’d be pretty peeved about it. I know – I purchased Marvel Heroes and not Battlelore when last I had an option like this.
Death Angel was a complete disaster for me. I played it once, beat it, and traded it, and I don’t miss it at all. I never felt for a second that I was commanding a group of Marines under pressure. This is so much stronger, more intense, yet so easy to play. A triumph of design simplicity and theme whilst retaining the need for tactical consideration, or put slightly more simply, FUN.
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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Playing A Few Acres Of Snow for the first time, I must admit that I felt slightly let down. My expectations for this were exceptionally high after reading the rules through, and seeing the game at the UK games expo. In the first game we played, both players seemed to cancel one another out, and sieges didn't have any important impact on the game which turned into a bunch of petty raids, and tit-for-tat. We were both left slightly non-plussed by half way through the game, and rushed the end through. As I packed it away I was thinking hmmmmm….
The second game went better then the first, but still seemed to ‘to and fro’ over raids. We played with far more purpose though, and a much better idea of how the game would play. The French won simply because they developed much more than the British by the time a final raid on New York ended the game. But this time, as I was packing the game away, we were talking about how much better both sides could have played.
I played my third game last night though, and was the British for the first time. I built up a substantial military force, put forts into all of the key junction positions to prevent the French from raiding, and went on the assault. I got to Montreal by heading up the left side of the board only to realise that there is no Montreal card for the Brits, so I couldn't use that route to get to Quebec! The game ended in the same way as the first two we played with villages captured, but this time by sieges over raids.
There is a lot in the box in terms of playability. One 'sort of' downside is that players would need to be at a similar level - if I was to play my 4th game tonight against the me that played my first game on Sunday, 4th play me would win hands down, leaving 1st play me slightly dazed and confused. But this is a sign of a good game - it is so frustrating when you've seen everything a game has to offer in the first couple of plays. This really isn't the case at all here.
There is a certain amount of learning the board required - knowing what routes connect is essential in planning advances, and also knowing what needs defending. With no advancing beyond Kennebec for either side, that is a dead end card that just fills up your hand, but could potentially be a good point for either side to launch longer distance raids.
The reserve box adds a really interesting element to the game – it is almost like a planning box, but where your opponent can potentially see what you are up to. The first instinct is to use it to just reserve military forces, but through some experimentation there are some interesting alternatives. If I have governor in my deck, I can use it to store up cards that need clearing out. I can keep a settlers cards in there for developing more efficiently. If I already have a card in my hand to block raids or ambushes, I can place another card in the reserve to replace it when I need to.
Sometimes you really need to burn cards out of your hand. As the British player, I often used the merchant action to do this – playing a ship card, and even just 1 coin card clears out two cards from your hand. On hand strategy, sometimes you want to delay a siege victory until you can get a settlers card into your hand.
So what constructive criticisms are there? Well, I’m really happy to own the limited edition, but feel that the pieces could have been bigger. They really are very small indeed, and are the most horrendous pieces for dropping on the floor – they are small and hard to see, but are designed to inflict the most amount of pain when trodden on. The board itself could have been larger, allowing more room for the map. I’m not too worried about geographical accuracy here, and would be happier if the location boxes were slightly larger even if they needed moving about a little (still maintaining the layout) to allow for larger pieces, which would look fantastic on the board. Another small point as well – from memory there is no snow on the map – it is all varying shades of green. This aside, the map looks really good, and the routes don’t get in the way at all, being clear and well built in to the design. I’m not sure how hard wearing the cards are going to be either, and these will probably need sleeving to keep them fresh. I’m just not a big fan of shuffling sleeved cards. These minor complaints are really not important issues though, being more than made up for with the gameplay so excellently implemented.
So for me this is a real hit. It turns the abstract Dominion idea, and makes it a game that fits the theme. It shouldn’t be labelled as Dominion with a board. Dominion is an enjoyable game that works very well for what it is, and was an interesting development for games. A Few Acres Of Snow takes the deck building idea from Dominion, and completely re-designs it from the ground up, placing it in what feels like a very natural way into a wargame. As Martin Wallace has already pointed out, the turns that occur between buying something from your empire, and actually being able to use it mirror the realities of the period. Putting together a solid attack takes some careful planning and hand management, and being able to keep cards in your hand between turns is such a simple but well thought out idea. Finding imaginative ways to play them through rather than paying to discard them is part of the fun of the game. What also feels quite thematic is having to change your plans and re-direct infantry that you were planning to attack with into defending instead. The sieges running over many turns is a tense experience, and can mean a lot of cards committed, especially where ships can be used as well.
The game is never really over either – if you are doing well it is because you are gaining land and expanding. This has the inevitable consequence of filling your hand with location cards, which often serve no purpose other than to fill your hand. Deck management with governor is a slow process, and that card in itself is another card you don’t really want in your deck. So you were ahead and doing well, now you have too many cards and need to clear some out. Well, whilst you are doing this your opponent is adding raid cards or military, and is preparing to counter attack, so you’d better watch your back.
The sides are nicely weighted, and provide different opportunities for strategic approaches. The temptation for me at the moment is to concentrate on military for the British, or raiding and developing for the French. However, a swift military approach might just work for the French, and a rapid land grab could be a workable strategy for the British. There is an element of reacting to your opponent to try and negate their strategy as much as possible, but this can compromise what you are doing. If the French are raiding, the British need cards like fortification or rangers in hand to be guaranteed the block – losing too many locations to raids is very frustrating as you’ll suddenly realise how often you draw these location cards that you can no longer use.
There is so much I haven’t yet seen as well that I know is in there – cutting off supply lines could be devastating as everything needs to be traced back to one of the starting towns. In our three games we haven't even touched upon ambushes yet - it always seems far better to use raids. However, if the British do just build forts everywhere, this could be an excellent delaying tactic for the French to allow them to develop - if memory serves, there are easier points pickings on the French side.
Every game has been unique, and I can see this continuing to be the case – if a player develops a ‘winning strategy’ an opponent should always be able to find a way to react to it. Time will tell here though – creating sides with a different feel always runs the risk of being imbalanced, and is a real challenge to get right.
The options aren’t too confusing – much is explained on specific cards anyway. After a 90 minute game of this you don’t emerge, blinking in the light, feeling like your brain has been put through a mangle. The choices are varied enough to provide both players with the opportunity to be inventive though, and there is a surprising amount of ability for a card drawing game to build a hand to allow you to perform a particular action.
So initial concerns out of the way, this is an excellent idea well implemented, and could prove to be right up there with the likes of Steam and Brass. In my opinion, this feels like it is going to become the best Martin Wallace 2 player game that I own, something that to date has been lacking. Now, I’m just going to look on the floor for one of those forts before somebody steps on it…
Wed Jul 20, 2011 11:57 am
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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Having seen a couple of award lists doing the rounds I thought, well, why not? My own list is very different from those that are already doing the rounds, so has its own value. My criteria is simple – games published according to BGG in 2010 that I own. That easy.
Looking through my collection, this gave me 28 games to choose from. Of these 28, there are 3 I haven’t played yet, and 4 that are expansions, so that leaves me with a list of 21 possible winners. This isn’t a lot – I realise that. However, I do think that the top 10 listed below are all very good games indeed.
A couple of honourable mentions need to be handed out first – there are 2 games that didn’t make the top 10 that still deserve credit, being Nuns On The Run, and Fabula. Both, although very different, are excellent as family games.
Fabula provided us with a gaming session on Boxing Day that will stay with me for a long time, and for that deserves praise. We played this as a family (my wife, my four children ranging in ages at the time from 17 to 10, and myself) and I really wasn’t sure what the result would be. My wife was the storyteller, and in the first round set the scene. We all fairly quickly grabbed an item, and told our version of the tale. My second eldest son, 15, was sat quietly, and seemed to me to be totally switched off to the whole idea, and was last to go. He then invented a story using one of the items that knocked the rest of our tales out of the park, and went on to win hands down with some incredibly inventive storytelling. This isn’t a highly rated game on the geek, but I feel deserves more attention. The artwork is outstanding, and the stories are interesting.
Nuns On The Run is a fairly simple enjoyable game that can get quite tense. With multiple players, the uncertainty of how well others are doing makes players push their luck, and adds the element of not only being concerned about being caught, but also about being left behind.
Anyway, getting back on track, my top 10 in reverse order is as follows:
10 – Fresco
Actually what impresses me most about this game is that the box contains plenty of alternative options for playing this game. You can play it like it is, or add whatever element takes your fancy. This gives plenty to explore, and adds life to the title. The production standards are excellent, and the gameplay is simple to understand, yet difficult to properly master, which is how games should be.
9 – Mystery Express
I always liked Mystery Of The Abbey, a game that would always get played Christmas and Easter in the evening, and one our eldest 2 sons have fond memoires of as they remember being allowed to stay up late to play. Mystery Express takes the same Cluedo idea and improves upon it, enough to probably place Mystery Of The Abbey in the superseded category. It’s a game that makes me smile – did I give you that card, and have you just given it back to me, or did I pass that card the other way? Having a guess at the answers before the end is interesting as well, and adds an element of dilemma about whether you take a hunch or not. Again, the production is just excellent, but this is expected from Days Of Wonder anyway.
8 – Catacombs
A simple, light hearted Dungeon romp with disc flicking. To start on a negative, the artwork on the boards, cards, and on the stickers for the discs is pretty poor. The game has that cheap printing feel about it, and all my discs needed a good clean when I opened the box. However, having had to clean all the discs, and apply all the stickers, I had a little bit of a feeling that I myself was involved in the final production! Playing the game is great fun though, and has enough decision making to make it interesting. I’ve considered building a shallow wooden frame to go around the boards to stop the discs from flying around the room, but haven’t come up with a final design yet. The felt mat idea looks pretty sound as well. Because of flying discs, I haven’t played this anywhere but at home. The system is simple – simple enough that a 10 year old can cope with it. The balance seemed fine to us – our last game went very much to the line, and was won by the heroes. It could have easily gone either way. Again here, the emphasis is on family fun.
7 – Runewars
An absolute beast of a box that is only about a quarter full, so slightly frustrating there as space for me is getting pretty tight. When my son leaves for Uni next year, we are moving the other two out of their bedroom, and shuffling them into smaller rooms just to give us a larger study for storing my games, and my wife’s work, and games like this are the reason why. My plan is to get a gaming table in there so I can have games like this set up, and can play them over a few evenings without upsetting anybody. Runewars takes so many different gaming elements and places them in a single game. My only issue is that some quests are very easy to complete, and others are much harder. I need to play the suggested variant to make this a little more balanced. As far as production is concerned, this is fantastic. The pieces look excellent, the mountains add visual flair, and the board looks wonderful when set up. The combat system works well, and there really is an epic feel to it. My only downside is that it isn’t as good as War Of The Ring, and the game doesn’t feel as tense. War Of The Ring does something very similar, and does it slightly better, and in a more recognisable world. With 2 players, I’d be more likely to play War Of The Ring over Runewars simply because they take the same amount of time, but War Of The Ring just does it all a little better.
6 – K2
Yet another card based race game, much like Snow Tails and Fast Flowing Forest Fellers. What this has that they lack though is far more tension. Do I go higher, or am I going to freeze to death on the slopes? What route do I take to avoid other climbers? Do I place a tent here, or do I try and go higher first? Most of my plays of this have been solo, and this works really well – actually this is probably the best solo game I own for a quick gaming fix. If I had the time, I’d play Ghost Stories, but this is simple, quick, deep, and thrilling. I feel quite involved in the experience as well, and I get totally immersed in getting those 2 little wooden climbers to the top and back out safely.
5 – Troyes
Top 5 now, so getting into the serious stuff. There have been numerous games that have used the idea of making dice do something different, and I have different feelings about them all. Kingsburg seemed to start the craze, and is a good game. Stone Age really failed to excite me because the game never seemed to quite gel together, with the two separate elements of rolling for resources, and collecting cards always made the game feel slightly misjointed. Alea Iacta Est (apologies for incorrect spelling) really wasn’t enjoyable at all. Alien Frontiers was the best of the bunch for me, but in our group games the player who could get the most dice in the quickest time always won. Troyes is far more subtle and sophisticated. The numerous card possibilities mean you have to develop your strategy as the game unfolds, making sure you have a presence in the right buildings at the right time. Failure to do so will end your game. There isn’t (as there is in Alien Frontiers) any bash the leader problem, and arguably it is better to have a bad roll. The idea of all end goals applying to all players is clever as well, and makes you keep half an eye on what your opponents seem to be trying to achieve. However, obsessing about this during the game can lead to your downfall. This should see the end to this type of game – it will be difficult to raise the level beyond Troyes. On the production side, the artwork doesn’t seem to suit all tastes, but I enjoy the deliberate period artwork, and feel it helps set the scene.
4 – Inca Empire
Fine, so this game was released some time ago under another name, but in its current format it is new. Also, this is a train game, it just doesn’t have any trains in it. What stands this game apart is you can’t win on your own. You need to work with others, using their network, but without giving them too much of an advantage with yours. The use of cards affecting multiple players is interesting – do I harm others, or help myself? I do feel completely removed from the theme, and yes, the symbology on the cards is confusing to say the least, but the gameplay is sound, and the mechanics work very well. The production quality is high, and the board looks great, especially towards the end of the game.
3 – London
No top 10 for me would be complete without Martin Wallace. Steam and Brass are two of my favourite games, and I do enjoy card games, so the idea of a Wallace card game really got me interested, and this is a game I would have purchased without seeing a single photo or reading a word on it. London is a subject I find absolutely fascinating, and the game follows the development post the fire. Play is interesting, and I particularly enjoy the relevance of the poverty points. Having to balance these, and calculate the best time to run your city is excellent. The dilemma of whether to build over an existing card or start a new stack, coupled with trying to watch money and poverty works well. The Pauper cards are well handled within the game, and the end scoring can be quite tense. The artwork is what you would expect from Treefrog – not great, but not awful either. The map board is well done though, and again the addition of owning districts and using them in collaboration with the cards works well.
2 – Navegador
I’m not too keen on rondel games I’ve played in the past. I find them frustrating, and feel they get in the way of playing the game. With Navegador, I never feel hindered by the rondel as the actions available can always be used in one way or another. In fact, I don’t even find myself thinking too much about the rondel itself. This is possibly due to the lower player interaction in this game. There is competition for privileges, and buildings, or to make the most of the market, but never in a way that completely stops you from doing what you want. You interact with the game rather than any particular player, and this is a real benefit here. The mechanics are simple to explain, but difficult to master. You need to focus on a particular strategy, but tweak it as you go to make the most of the opportunities as they present themselves. It is hard to tell who has taken the win until the final scoring, and a clever move really can make the difference. The game works perfectly well as a 2 player, and can be played in what is fairly quick time for a game of this type – it manages to pack into under 2 hours what many games will struggle to give you in 3. The pieces are excellent (although one of my factories has a little chunk out of it) and the board art is both excellent and perfectly functional. A deserving second place.
1 – Vinhos
Well, if you’ve read any of my blogs before then this won’t be a shock. This game is just excellent. I’ve already written an entire blog on this, so I won’t be saying anything new on this here. The subject matter is well handled, and is interesting to be a part of. The right parts of life as a wine maker are in the game – you make the wines which have quality dependant on the weather during the year, your own facilities and aging process. You sell them according to this quality and their general renown, you need to visit the bank to get cash freed to you and mess around with your investments, you have to visit the fairs where the best wine isn’t necessarily going to win – it all depends on who you know. Managers and experts will help you in different ways, and you can sell abroad for no immediate gain, but ultimately that might get you a victory.
The best way to play isn’t obvious – you need an overall strategy that you learn to develop in order to best match what is going on in the game, and you have to make the most of the opportunities that are available to you. Interaction is enough for you to have to adapt to what other players are doing (and keep an eye on where they might be looking to make their points at the end of the game) but not too much that it can ruin your entire game (unless you are obviously going for the money in which case other players should definitely block that particular bonus). The board is colourful and covers everything you need (yes, I know it looks like a fruit machine), and the components are, on the whole, decent. I’d love little wine bottles rather then the square cardboard counters, but realise what the cost involved would do to the retail.
The biggest fault here is the failure of supply to the US market. This hasn’t been to hard to get hold of in Europe. My version is the German language edition, but it was easy enough to print out the English rulebook, and the game has no text issues – the thematic artwork text on the board is in Portuguese regardless.
So there it is – my top 10 games with a worthy, but unsurprising winner. So what do I own that didn’t make the list? Well, after Fabula and Nuns On The Run was Civ, which although enjoyable is over long, and fiddly. The game asks for more than it delivers, and I’m just not a huge fan of games that require players to beat up on one another all the time. Next was the Railways Of The World Card Game, which I think plays very well, and is a good recreation of the board game. However, when it comes down to it, I’d just rather play Steam.
Rattus was next on the list, coming in at 15th. This wasn’t as good as I hoped, and it does seem that the Witch is a waste of time, and that the best strategy is to take no cards at all! Further plays may change my mind on this.
Next is Mr Jack Pocket, which we played a lot around Christmas time, but not much since. The game is good, it is quick and portable, but doesn’t offer any long term excitement as it offers everything it has very quickly – after about 10 plays, you’ve seen it all.
Next is Defenders Of The Realm – Pandemic with monsters and dice. Monster of a game, interesting to play, some fun new ideas but it is just Pandemic with monsters and dice.
At 18th is Sun, Sea & Sand. Not deep enough to be a game that rewards multiple plays. You really do see everything this has to offer after a couple of goes, and can very quickly develop a strategy with a high success rate.
19th is Forbidden Island, which is Pandemic for kids. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is a kids game. 20th is Braggart, which seems harsh, but again this is as far down as this because it is a children’s game with little skill involved. It is a novelty game that can only be played occasionally before the joke will start to wear thin.
At the bottom of the stack is Road Kill Rally. The theme doesn’t bother me, neither does the artwork. What lets the game down for me is the lack of excitement and racing thrill in a racing game. It is as if the theme was enough, and the game never really evolved from there – I can see the design idea as being ‘We have a name for a game, and somehow we’ll make a game out of it’.
Just to qualify, I don’t think any of these games are really terrible, I just think that there are those that are far better than others. And a quick disclaimer – these are my opinions of the games I own which were released in 2010. If I think about my top 10 games in my collection, only Vinhos is on that list (my current number 5). Navegador and London would most definitely make my top 20, Inca Empire possibly in there as well, but the others would be outside of that. Catacombs is the only new, fresh idea in the list, with all the others taking existing design ideas, and trying to make improvements on them.
I’m interested to see how I feel about these games in a years time, and if I’m still wittering on by then, I’ll review the order at that point. Who knows – Vinhos might be available in the US by then…
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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Well, it has been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about games, mostly because when I set out to create this, it wasn’t with the intention of writing for the sake of it – I wanted something relevant to say. So, another month ends, and June, as it has been for the last few years, was quite an important gaming month for me, containing the UK games expo.
So what came out of June for me? Well, to start with I’ve looked at my games played, and I’ve managed to notch up 37 plays, spanning 19 different games, with 9 of these being new games. Of the 19 games I played, 14 of them are owned by me. Right, enough numbers.
Game Of The Month, & Session Report
So the best game played this month? Well, that was a real favourite of mine, Game Of Thrones. This came out at the Ashford group a couple of weeks back, at the request of two of the gamers in the group. We’d tried this about a year ago, and because I hadn’t played it before, and got a few of the rules wrong, it had been a complete disaster. That previous game ended when, whilst checking end conditions, we suddenly realised that House Baratheon (Simon) had enough of the Cities/Strongholds to claim the victory, so we finished after maybe an hour of confused play. Part of the problem had been that the Westeros Deck didn’t provide the chance to take power tokens, but the bidding using these (the Clash Of Kings Card) kept coming up. Also, although I’d read the rules through a few times, I hadn’t understood how they were going to work in practice, and had completely failed to comprehend the relevance of Support. When we finished that game, the next day I opened the rulebook again, and took another good look at it. Everything then made sense, and the light came on. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, it was too late by then to get the game back on the table with that particular group.
With the superb tv series refreshing everyone’s interest, and with the game gaining cult status as well, it was a lot easier to get this one played. This time out I was ready, having refreshed the rules, read through a couple of sessions, and just generally got some ideas to pass on to the group regarding strategy. We set the board out on a good sized playing area, dished out the Houses, and set to work. Despite warning the others that allegiances were a good idea, only myself as Stark and Sam as Greyjoy actually agreed on an allegiance. Lannister and Tyrell had some early scuffles, and Greyjoy then made the most of these, taking both home cities by about the fourth turn. The battles were especially vicious, with casualties galore, so we were all running with fairly stripped down armies. Everybody had plenty of power tokens, and we had some bids so roles were changing hands fairly frequently. What we didn’t have until about round 5 though was mustering, so everyone was down to their last few units, and getting nervous about fighting.
Once the initial land grab was done, Baratheon and Stark were looking best placed simply because both houses had stayed out of the fighting. The Mustering came out, and the game changed – with a lot more units to use on the board, everyone became a lot more aware of how many Cities and Strongholds were being held. Almost all players were on 5, and I could see that within a few moves, and by turning against Greyjoy, I’d be able to take the win. With a real sense of guilt, I turned on Sam, and, combined with a retreat into an unprotected City, I took the win in round 6. We had all experienced some heart racing moments, and the tension was sky high for the last three turns. Whilst not a difficult game to understand, it is a very tense game to play. I can see it being requested again, although probably not for a month or so, but this session has renewed my belief in this game as being one of the best in my collection. Just as a side note, one of these sold for £90 on ebay this week. I’m surprised that Fantasy Flight haven’t re-printed this, but I’m sure that will be something to do with licensing. It doesn’t seem that long ago that there were a fair amount of these on the shelves.
A very direct and appropriate criticism of this game relates to the Westeros Cards, and it can be frustrating, and potentially ruin the game. Without too much difficulty, each deck could be shuffled into an order that would kill the game off, and with the Winter Is Coming Card this could provide an endless cycle of misery. The answer is fairly obvious though, and that is to balance the Cards into groups, and shuffle them within those groups. There is already a good suggestion for this on BGG anyway, and I feel this makes the game both more reliable and far more tactical.
Other Old Games Played
Of the other games that weren’t new to me, I played the following:
4 games of Once Upon A Time with my daughter – we use this as a replacement to me reading to her at bedtime. She is 11 now, and so likes to read by herself, but enjoys the company at the end of the day. Once Upon A Time is the perfect answer to this for us. We can make up a story together, but within the game format. It encourages us both to use our imaginations, and is a wonderful way for her to end the day, and to focus on something outside of the daily worries of an 11 year old girl. I’ve been making the game slightly more complicated the more we play it, and have implemented some of the rules that we were fairly lax on originally – each card must be played as part of a separate sentence (she would often play four cards in one sentence) and you pick up a card when you are interrupted. We also play with the same amount of cards in hand, although I let her choose from numerous ending cards, and I only take 1. We don’t interrupt for pauses, or for mistakes.
Whilst at the games expo, in the evening we played 2 games of 7 Wonders. I’d only played this twice before as a 7, and was keen to try it with a smaller number of players. I enjoy Fairy Tale, and feel it works well with 3 and 4, so was hopeful of getting a much better impression of 7 Wonders from playing with more. These 2 games didn’t help me learn to love 7 Wonders at all. I won the first one, took a very similar approach to the second, and lost, probably because Andre and Simon knew exactly what I was going to do. The problem I have with 7 Wonders is that it feels like a card version of a much bigger game, as if a 2 hour board game had been condensed into a 15 minute Card game, and everything that had made it deep and involving has been sucked out of it. Roll Through The Ages leaves me with a similar feeling. So I don’t understand the fuss behind 7 Wonders really – I can see why people play it, but I don’t see why it gets rated so highly. I only rate games I own, or have owned, but this would get a 6 for me. I’m actually more likely to play this if it gets released as an app – no shuffling and creating decks, just play.
I played Transamerica twice on BSW late at night, a game of Carolus Magnus and Fearsome Floors on Yucata, a 2 Player game of Game Of Thrones LCG with my 14 year old son Callum (we are yet to have a close game of this – either one of us runs away with it), a game of Talisman with Callum in 90 minutes which was his first, and probably my 50th, give or take. He really enjoyed it, and we finished the game by fighting it out on the Crown. I won because he went to the middle level too early (I did warn him) so lost a few turns getting beaten on whilst I picked up the goodies in the outer ring. The game was pretty quick, because the three cards giving 4 additional craft/strength/life came out within the first 10 minutes of the game. I know he’ll want to play this gain, but he might ask for Prophecy instead.
Finally, of games I’ve played before, we played Incan Gold and Snow Tails at Ashford last Sunday. I took the same approach to both games, losing one, and winning the other. I’ve only ever seen Incan Gold won by taking a gung-ho approach. This, in the last few rounds, won me the game because I managed to take two of the treasures, and a whole pile of gems just before the second matching problem card came out. With Snow Tails, I went for broke with the intention of getting and holding a lead. Simon tried to keep up, and Paul did his own thing, trailing some distance behind us. However, we had designed the track with catching up in mind, putting trees in the middle of a couple of bends, and a long straight at the end. Paul let us carve a path through the trees, and break the speed limit a few times, so we ended up with a hand full of dents (I finished with 4) and he passed us both in the final turn. This actually disproved a theory that has held me back from playing this too much – it is too hard to catch up. Play your own game is the answer there.
Best New Game
So what new games did I play? Well, I picked up Troyes at the expo, and have played this 4 times now; 2 2-players, a 3-player, and a 4-player. Each game has been very different. In the 4-player, we had an awful lot of the combat cards to deal with which really beat up on me. I got far too fixated on my goal of placing workers on cards, and was doing this regardless of the benefit or dice I was rolling. In the last game I played, a 3-player, I put a lot more concentration into making sure that the workers and dice worked together, and did far better as a result.
I like how player interaction is handled in Troyes. I can mess with another Player’s plans, but I can’t completely stop him. I feel Troyes is a better game than Alien Frontiers for this reason – I don’t feel the pressure in Troyes to take aggressive measures towards an opponent. As the game ends after a number of turns rather than when a Player reaches a certain score, there is more emphasis on concentrating on my own success rather than trying to hinder the success of others. They are both good games, but Troyes is the one I’d rather play. I also traded away Stone Age this month – Troyes is the game I was hoping for in Stone Age, and didn’t get, and is the best new game I’ve played this month.
Another game I’ve really enjoyed, although there is a little bit of burn out on it after 6 plays is The Resistance. This is a game for people who know each other well, and is about lying to, and deceiving your friends. I enjoy the logic challenge to it, and the tension it creates. It calls upon a very different set of gaming skills, and takes the best element of the Battlestar Galactica game and distils it into a 10 minute blast. I enjoy the longer game, of BSG, but it is a slower, more subtle development. This is immediate, right from the get go.
Other New Games
Of the other new games, I’ve played three games of Braggart. This is fun, but ultimately is a kids game. Callum and I played 2 games of Rat Hot, which is an interesting, quick 2-player. There is a good balance of decision making on your turn – do I cover for rats coming out, do I go for points, or do I cause problems for my opponent? The more we play this, the better we’ll get at it. I played a shortened game of Nightfall, and it fell below what I was hoping for, mainly because the point of the game is to score against other players. The tough decision is that early attacks are often indiscriminate, and by attacking another player you give them reason to attack you. The mechanic forces this early combat as far as I could work out from our limited play, and this felt a little frustrating. Although, in the game we played as a demo on the AEG booth, one player held the demo up because he had wandered off, so choosing a player to attack wasn’t that difficult. I had this on my wish list, but now I’ll pass.
The success of the expo was our 1 game of Ankh Morpork, a light, fun Martin Wallace game, and it isn’t often you see those four words together in a sentence. The artwork on the version we saw was excellent, the rules were fairly easy to follow, and on the most part it all worked well together. My other play was Star Trek: Expeditions, and I’ve already said enough about that. My final 2 new games were Portobello Market, which was better than I was expecting, being an easy to learn, quick, but tense game with a good level of interaction, and Claustrophobia.
Claustrophobia hit the table 3 times in about two weeks, and proved to be, ultimately, a frustrating game. I know my experience is still limited with this, but it took until the third game to have any success in the first mission. It felt harsh, as the human player. In one game, our second, and on the second turn, I had left the brute one room behind to stop spawning, and had moved the rest of the humans forward together. Callum then rolled the dice to allow him to ignore Humans when spawning, and, as it was the hex room, he spawned four trogs and a demon in there. He rolled for the trogs first, and got four hits, allowing him to roll five dice with the demon. He then rolled another two hits. Brute dead. Game, effectively, over on turn 2, without the brute having made a single attack. The game ended with only 5 new tiles drawn, so only half of the required progress made. Finally, on the third game the humans won, but it was touch and go to say the least, with the two humans that escaped only having 2 dice lines left each. My concern is that the game feels like an ordeal more than a strategic battle game. Maybe some of the later scenarios are better, or maybe we are playing a rule wrong.
Through the June UK maths trade, and the expo, and a couple of ebay purchases, I’ve added something like 15 games to my collection this month. I’ve got a lot to play through, and an ever increasing, and frankly quite embarrassing list of games owned and unplayed. This month saw me trade my first unplayed game, Ants!, which I purchased on ebay. I set the game up, played a few rounds as a solo test run, felt completely uninspired by it, and put it up for trade. It seemed to me to be a poor take on games along the lines of Nexus Ops, and I just felt that there were always going to be other games I’d rather play. I have one game in my collection I gained in June that is now played – I register my online plays against human opponents when the game is completed, and have just finished a game of Campaign Manager 2008. I picked this up from ebay for less than a tenner, and decided the best way to learn it was via Yucata. I’ve just finished a game, and have another on the go, and I’m very impressed with it. I can see that it will have a life span to it, but I’m excited about trying this with Callum, and playing a game in a single session. I don’t have much of an interest in American politics, but love the rhythm of this game, the ebb and flow, the constant push and pull. Drawing a card is a risk – do you do it when you know it is safe, or do you risk playing a card to force your opponent to counter?
I think, ironically following my earlier comments regarding 7 Wonders, but this takes the dilemma I felt in Twilight Struggle, and puts it into a 30 minute frame. Where it improves over 7 Wonders is that it keeps the scale of what it is trying to achieve at a small level and allows a very simple idea to develop. I know what 15 cards are in my deck, and I know what I’ve got to work with. In 7 Wonders, I might know what cards I’ve passed, but I don’t know what will come back to me. I suppose I’m trying to justify my general disinterest towards a game so many others seem to rate so highly, and enjoy.
Highs And Lows
Rounding this off, my top 5 gaming highlights of the month
1. My 5-player Game Of Thrones with a really good group of players. Really enjoyable and tense, with equal amounts of joy and frustration.
2. Ankh-Morpork at the UK Games Expo. Great looking game, simple and enjoyable to play, but with enough depth to ensure it hits the table.
3. Although Troyes was a better game, playing The Resistance has given the Ashford group more laughs than anything we’ve played before. My highlight was Paul and Andre laughing at each other when they opened their eyes in the second game in a row to see they were again both spies.
4. Playing Braggart with my 2 youngest, and smiling throughout as they yell ‘Liar!’ and change those amazing brags into something significantly less brag-worthy, but infinitely more amusing.
5. Discovering Campaign Manager 2008 on yucata, and picking it up on ebay for such a good price (just under half the retail). It has left me wondering if I shouldn’t be looking to pick up 1960.
5 Low points of the month
1. Star Trek: Expeditions. The scoring was nothing more than a joke, but I’ve already said enough about this.
2. A Few Acres Of Snow not being available to buy at the expo, although this is offset by an email from Julia whilst they were in Rhodes confirming I’d pre-ordered a limited edition.
3. An aborted game of Nightfall thanks to two players who muscled in to our demo game, made us wait whilst they wandered off, and then walked out 15 minutes in to the game. Pitiful behaviour, and I really felt for the guy explaining the game who did a pretty good job.
4. Having to wait two weeks to have one of the games I traded for on the June UK Maths trade to arrive. Maybe it is just me, but I ship mine the day after the trade is resolved.
5. Trading Mousquetaires Du Roy. I played it once as a solo, thought it was a total mess, and listed it for trade, but there will always be a part of me that will wonder what could have been. The demo video from Essen made it look so very good, but it just stank like a month old Camembert. Just in a solo game there were times when I had no idea how the cards and game were supposed to combine, and found myself left having to make a ruling on how I would have to apply the card. This first and only game took me a couple of hours to work through, with the musketeers eventually being defeated. I was glad it was over, and put it straight back into the box, fairly sure that I wasn’t going to play it again. Next time I’ll be slightly more cautious about picking games up. I suppose my logic was that all of the Ystari games I’ve owned have been excellent, although the rules translations have been slightly loose at times. The board art and pieces are exceptionally well done, but the game really felt rushed and untested, as if they really needed to have something to release, and this was the closest to being finished.
So this was June for me. Bring on July! And good luck, Andy...
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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These are my thoughts after a single play, and should be taken exactly as that. We were playing under the instructions of a member of the Esdevium team at the UK Games Expo. To set the scene, we were in a busy room next to some noisy Daleks, and a Doctor Who look alike with a water pistol.
To start with, the game is based upon the most recent movie. I grew up with the original series, and loved it as a child. I watched and enjoyed most of Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager, but didn’t watch Enterprise. I enjoyed the new film, but find the entire Star Trek world no more than interesting.
How Does It Look?
Well, the miniatures are fantastic. The Klingon ship was my personal favourite, but they are all exceptionally well made. The board however looked dull – a part of a planet’s surface as seen from space, and it lacked any real definition. The board is divided into section by the addition of some white lines, rather than try and make something of the artwork. I would have liked to have seen an aerial view of a futuristic city divided up into districts just to try and help set the scene, but if then this may hamper future scenarios. The spaceship tracks were functional, and took away from the impact of the two ships moving back and forth (mostly back for the Enterprise in our game). The card art was passable, simple, and generally uninteresting, but perfectly functional.
What Is The Setup?
Well, this was already done when we sat down, but the planet’s surface is divided into 15 different territories, and each territory gains a card face-down, and an item that can be used to aid either the Enterprise or the team. All the players start on the enterprise, and Kirk has the first turn.
Additionally, there is a seperate board with three tracks, which shows the final outcome of the game. Each track has a marker to track your successes and failures. Each track has different sections from a good outcome down to a bad outcome – you start there, so have to improve to get a respectable result by game end.
What Do You Do?
Each round a bad thing happens, depending on what level you play at. Then you take actions, such as moving, beaming up or down, taking cards, picking up items, swapping crew, or using a skill. Apologies if I’ve missed anything here – but as per Pandemic, each player had a card showing all their possible actions, with an icon depicting where you needed to be in order to take the action (the surface of the planet or on Enterprise).
When you move to the planet, you reveal the card on your location. This then has a challenge for you to complete, either as part of the main mission, or as a side event. These cards are of a good size, and do have some flavour text. To complete a mission, you look at the type of mission it is, and find your stat from the base of your figure, clearly done by colour. You then add points for any additional ‘skills’ you possess, and also you gain +2 for every other player figure present at your location. To this you add the roll of 2 dice, and you pass or fail. These are regular 6-sided dice, with the exception that 6 has been replaced with 7 (-1). This means you get a 7, but you take 1 wound.
Each time you complete a main mission, how well you do decides which mission is next from the 2 possibilities. The goal is to complete all of the main story missions before either Enterprise is destroyed or the day track reaches the end.
How Does It Play?
The game mechanic is maths and optimisation. Which player has the right stats to complete the missions with the highest score? Who has the right crew members? Who has the right cards? We were told you can talk about cards, but not show them. Crew members are played to the table anyway, so this is open. We were openly stating which cards we had, and each turn was spent calculating who goes in what order. The choices were always obvious, with no subtlety at all, and the theme slipped into the background. We have a yellow 22 mission to complete, but really we want to roll 24 to get the best outcome. Who has the highest overall yellow score? Do they need another player to be there for the +2?
The ‘bad things happen’ cards had no flavour text at all. They simply stated ‘no beaming’ or had the attack symbol, and displayed a number to tell players how many actions they could utilise that turn. Because of the ‘no beaming’ we had a key player stuck on Enterprise, so had to take the next best option, but again this was obvious. Failing a mission meant nothing – you take a wound and try again if you have enough actions, so you simply make sure you allow for this.
We played through the missions, using Spock’s special action to detect where they were amongst the face-down cards. This allowed us to avoid the pitfalls, and concentrate on the missions that needed to be completed. McCoy heals, Kirk moves around, Uhuru gets stuck on the Enterprise. Well, in fairness I’m not fully illustrating the possibilities here, but this is how it worked for us. Kirk has a special ability to pass crew around, which through the card draw we didn’t really feel was necessary (there was always something more important to do) and from memory, Uhuru can hand cards out to other players when she draws them.
How Did We Do?
This was the amusing part – we barely made it through the game because of the pounding the Enterprise took. The shield counters helped a little, but not enough so Enterprise finished on -4, meaning each outcome track moved down 4 points once the final mission was completed. Our result was that the planet was an ecological disaster, with many dead, in the midst of a civil war, and in the control of the Klingons. Pretty catastrophic, I’d say. However, as our final score was 20, we returned to earth with a commendation! Well, again, I didn’t see the rulebook over this, so can only take the demoer’s word for it but really? I know we just sneaked into this bracket by 1 point, but did we really beat the game on our first run through after all feeling we had performed pretty badly?
So?
In each round, each player has a turn in any order, so this allows for a single player to take two turns in a row. This is a good idea, but in practice we found it difficult to remember who had been and who hadn’t and there was probably at least one occasion when a player got skipped, or played before they were allowed to. As the same process happens before each player takes their turn, there was no obvious way of tracking this that we were told about, so this simply created some confusion. Have you been yet? I don’t know – who started the round? This would be very easy to answer – flip your player card once you’ve been for example, but it was a little frustrating.
With the dice rolls, using two dice felt far too random. The possible spread of results this allows for, from 2 to 14, is far too wide a band. Having a lower score to achieve, but only using a single die would help this a little.
The rule about cards is pointless – you can’t show cards to other players, but you can read them out. Each card has no more than a sentence on describing what the card does, so why not just show them to other players rather than reading them out all the time? There is no traitor present, nor is there a winning player at game end which might cause a player to want to keep a card to themselves – you all win, or nobody wins.
This is a backwards step for co-ops. It feels like it should have been designed around the time of Lord Of The Rings, which I would argue is probably an equal game to this, if not a little better – Lord Of The Rings feels more tense than this as the fellowship and the Sauron piece slowly converge. Pandemic has a visual spread of disease cubes, and the tension this causes. With Ghost Stories, Witch Of Salem, and Arkham Horror, you at least see the board filling up with monster cards which helps to generate an impending sense of doom. Battlestar Galactica has thematic board artwork, good miniatures, and evokes the theme throughout – the flavour text on the cards is present when required, and the traitor mechanic makes the game. With Castle Panic, you see your walls and towers tumbling, and the hordes gathering. Shadows Over Camelot has siege engines aiming at your castle walls, Defenders Of The Realm has the spread of evil forces, Forbidden Island has the tiles falling away from under you. So what does Star Trek: Expeditions have that creates this necessary tension? Well, the Klingon ship moves towards you, but if you want, you can move back a space, oh and the date track marker moves down the date track. Also, you can turn the dials on the bases of the figures, but you often have little idea how many turns have been made per figure.
Knizia has done well in the past to prove you don’t need buckets of theme to create a good game. Amun-Re is probably my top rated Knizia, and really it could be attached to most themes in some way or other, but the artwork is good, and the gameplay is excellent. I can understand why, but I feel critical of the fact that Knizia seems to have moved away from creating games for gamers, and is looking at games for the masses. With all the recent Knizia apps, and Lego tie-ins, he has lost what made him great. I understand that nobody is ever going to make their fortune from designing Amun-Re simply because the audience is too small. On the same day, I played Ankh-Morpork, the new Martin Wallace game. Ankh-Morpork is a fairly simple gateway game, and it is excellent, just to prove that this can be done, and done well.
In summary, the miniatures are excellent, the board and cards are functional, and ok, but the game is a real let down. If I owned this game, I’d probably play it at most 3 times as a solo. In contrast, I’ve registered 26 plays of Pandemic, and 9 of BSG and Castle Panic. We may have missed a couple of minor rules or nuances, but on the whole it felt like we were playing the game in the right way – nothing felt too out of place. I’m not saying that I could do better, nor am I intending to just say ‘this is rubbish’ but I feel there are plenty of co-operative games already available that are significantly better than this.
As an additional note to this, I’ve just quickly looked through the rules. The only rule we weren’t told was regarding taking wounds to increase the die rolls. With this rule, we would have finished the game a round earlier, and scored even higher than we did. I’ve also noted that we did get a commendation, and that a score of 0 counts as ‘Mission Complete! You are congratulated and sent on your next mission’. To get 0, the planet joins the Klingon empire, global civil war erupts, much of the eco system is destroyed, and large number of the population die. Congratulations.
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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Over the weekend on the annual pilgrimage to the UK Games Expo, four of us from my local gaming group had the opportunity to try Ankh Morpork, a Martin Wallace Treefrog production due out later this year. These are my thoughts after that single play.
What Is The General Idea?
In Ankh Morpork, each player has a hidden identity, with a hidden goal. These range from having control of a certain number of districts, having $50 in cash and buildings, having a certain number of trouble markers in play, or running through the draw deck. There may have been one or two others as well.
What Is The Setup?
The setup for four players was that we each had a single minion in three districts, with trouble markers, five cards, some money (can’t remember how much, but I’d guess it was between 5 and 10), and a reserve of minions and buildings. Then you have the main draw deck, a face-up building card for each of the 12 districts, and a deck of chaotic event cards.
How Does It Look?
Well, accepting that this was a mock-up, the board art was good, although a few times mistakes were made about exactly were the boarders were between the districts due to the slightly irregular shapes, and the colours being fairly close. With no pieces on the board, it is obvious, but when it started to get cluttered, it was much harder to tell. I’m fairly sure that this will be much clearer in the finished game.
Each player also had a summary sheet, about A5, printed on both sides. These guides explained the buildings and their usage (each building had a particular ability, such as earning money each go, allowing for trouble marker placement, etc), the symbols on the top of the cards (don’t think Race For The Galaxy here – this was much simpler), and the various player roles. This was invaluable for our first play, but as the game moved on we were all referring to them less. The symbology itself is well thought out, and nobody had any problems playing cards. The card art is excellent, the minion pieces were solid, representing head and shoulders, and were steady on the board. The buildings, again wooden, looked good on the board, and although they are tall, the bases are wide enough to keep them easily upright.
Overall, apart from the problem mentioned above with district borders, it was easy to interpret the board, which is essential as this is the entire point of the game – you have to know how close players may be to reaching their goal, and fairly often this meant having a quick check. You can very easily see who has control, how many trouble markers are in play, and where the dangers are.
What Can You Do?
On your turn you play a card, work through it’s effects, and then redraw up to 5. If you had achieved your goal, this can only be announced at the very start of your turn. The cards, depending on the symbols, allow you to place minions, place a building, play additional cards, remove minions, draw event cards, and generally mess with one another. Keep going until someone wins, or the draw deck is depleted, in which case either the player with the role to do this wins, or it comes down to vp based on cash, buildings and minions.
How Does It Play?
Well, there is little or no downtime – of your hand of cards, you’ll only have two or three that you’ll want to play. Remembering to use the abilities of the buildings can mean some board analysis is required, and it is hard to pre-plan this as it is constantly changing from player to player. Often, you’ll be playing a card this turn to allow you to play another card next turn, hoping that nothing interferes with your play. There is an element of collective policing as all players need to react if another player could win, but this can be quite fun as you can bluff here as well – if you know that another player doesn’t have a particular objective then you can fool other players into reacting to it, knowing you don’t need to yourself. You can also force other players to react by declaring that you would help, but you don’t have the required cards.
Table talk was a major part of this game. Yes, it could be played in silence, but then that would rely on all players watching out for objectives, and would actually take some of the bluffing skill away. Trying to work out which objective each player is going for is part of the fun here.
There is a small amount of card chaining possible as a few cards allow you to play additional cards, and during the game there were five or six examples of well-chained card plays.
Playing time will vary greatly – theoretically a player could claim a victory in the first few turns, but this would probably be as a result of poor play by others. Our game was probably closer to an hour and a half, but it never overstayed it’s welcome.
Problems?
Yes, but nothing deal breaking. On your turn chances are you add a minion – this symbol appears on a lot of cards. Adding a minion also adds a trouble marker if there are any other minions in the district. Where we got a little confused is we didn’t always remember to add the trouble markers, or didn’t remove them when minions were removed, or weren’t sure what to do when minions were shuffled about. We were surprised to discover later in the game that you add trouble when you add one of your own minions to an area with only your minions in. This would be second nature with more plays, but didn’t seem to be immediately obvious and simple.
The theme deck is totally chaotic. In our play, we went through the entire draw deck, but I didn’t use the theme deck once. Too often the result was just far too random. Any player drawing from this deck did so to a chorus of groans from the others. The first player to use it lost a building from doing it, and the second player had demons descend on his districts. The results of these cards tended to rely entirely on the roll of the d12, and with us all fairly evenly spread, they would be as likely to damage each player. This could have been easily mitigated by allowing the player drawing the card to make, say, three rolls and then choose a result. Either that, or the event deck should be part of the more powerful cards, so you gain a benefit, but it has an attached risk. This offset would make the risk worthwhile. The only practical use for this deck would be as a last-ditch effort to stop a player from winning.
Another issue is again related to cards – there are cards that allow you to swap hands around. Now to be fair I only remember one of these actually being played, but it deadens tactical play. There is little point trying to build a strategic hand for use later in the game – this causes you to play the good cards as soon as you can, and took a little bit of thought away. Slightly lazy card design, or there for a reason? To be fair to the game, if there is only one of these in the deck, as soon as it is played then it is most likely out of the game. I’d have liked to see more opportunity to chain card effects, but accept that this would come at the sacrifice of game balance with fewer players.
The Demons were used, but were a static presence in the game. They proved to be much more of a hindrance for players with objectives relating to area control, or trouble markers than those going for money or playing through the deck, but maybe this was seen as a necessary balancing mechanic. If so though, there is a fairly even chance they won’t appear at all during a game.
Time will tell if any particular role is any easier to complete. This obviously relies upon playtesting. We did manage to control one another quite successfully, and the player with the role requiring the deck to be exhausted did a very good job of keeping everyone busy whilst he burnt through cards at a rate of knots, but it will be interesting to see how this fairs when the general gaming public get hold of it.
So?
This is a light, fun, interactive, area control game. It isn’t a heavy gamers game, and isn’t what I have come to associate Martin Wallace with, although I think his more recent games have been moving in this direction. The difficulty for me when playing games like this is that I do want to retain an element of control – if a game descends into chaos, then ultimately no matter how much fun it might be it won’t get played as it isn’t rewarding if it doesn’t satisfy the gaming urge. There is randomness in here, but you do keep some control. Amongst a gaming group, and over numerous plays, I can see the victories being easily dotted around the players. We kept very close check on one another, but one player did manage to reach two different win conditions by the start of the turn – it just turned out that neither were his.
I know this is probably slightly sensationalist, but from my limited understanding of these things, this could be Martin Wallace going for an SdJ nomination – the game is family friendly, is based on a popular series of books, and both visually and when playing, is a treat. In the UK this game will be available in Waterstones, which is a real coup. We have a very poor gaming market with very little High Street presence, and your average member of public has no idea that there is the variety of games available beyond the likes of scrabble and monopoly. I am excited at the possibility of families playing this at Christmas rather than the old faithfuls. I’m not trying to say that Martin Wallace has deliberately tried to create a game for the masses, but you could tell from the smiles on his, and the rest of the team’s faces that they’ve got high hopes for this one, and rightly so.
I have every intention of buying this game. There is are two different luxury editions also due, but if the pieces in the regular edition are the same as those at the demo, I’m happy to take it as is. I’m not a huge fan of the Discworld books, so the tie-in isn’t a big sell for me. I’ve read all of the early books, but lost interest over time. For me, this game is actually the best thing about the franchise. There are a few in-jokes in the Cards, but nothing to prevent a player who doesn’t have a clue about the Discworld series from having a thoroughly enjoyable time. It may even lead people into the books.
It is in the same grouping as games like Rattus in terms of weight. It doesn’t do anything new or striking, and blends a few existing ideas. Once you’ve played it through three or four times, you’ll be as good as you are going to ever be at it, but the replayability lies in the player interaction element. However, there are a few gamers I know that I wouldn’t play this with – it is, by it’s very nature, confrontational. There were as many accusations during this as we normally have in a game of Battlestar Galactica, and as many laughs as we’ve had from any game.
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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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I was recently asked by a fellow geek what my feelings were about Vinhos. Below is my response, but edited into something that makes sense for a blog. This shouldn’t be used as a review of the game in terms of ‘this is how it plays’ but it can be read in terms of ‘this is what I think of it’.
What Appeals?
Vinhos rewards your play. There is the random element of the weather which impacts all players, and also the order in which the vineyard grape colour, and wine specialist cards are revealed, but almost everything else is within your control. What lies at the heart of this game is managing all elements of the game to maximise your ability to make VP. Pursuing any single strategy will cause you to suffer in other areas – trying to win each wine fair, or winning majority in the foreign export market will get you points in that field, but will cause you to suffer in other areas. Every area is finely balanced, and you need to do a bit of everything in order to achieve anything. The limitation to the number of barrels, and the aging of the wine force you to often take actions that you would rather not contemplate. The moving of the Round Marker means it is always where you don’t want it to be when you can least afford to pay for it. Do I commit a wine to the wine fair now to gain advantage of the placement slot I want to use, or do I wait for a better wine from my cellar? Do I want to use an action now to place the wine, or do I wait until the fair is called? Do I commit barrels to the foreign market for game end VP, but lose their ability to generate income that I desperately need now? Do I divest and lose the points to give me the cash to make better wines? Do I commit barrels to spaces on the manager row that tie me in to a particular strategy, and limit my options?
The impact of what other players are doing is relatively minimal, but you need to keep an eye on them especially in the game end phase. If a player commits to a fixed point on the manager row, then you may be able to restrict the number of points they can make from it. Also, you can cut off their strategy if you see it early enough, but it will hurt you if you do. This game is made up of various constituent parts, and the endgame is an often overlooked part of this. This is the point where, with experience, the game is won or lost. I don’t think there is a fixed winning approach to the game – I believe you need to go with the flow a little, and maintain a developing strategy. However, on this, my experience with this game is limited for a number of reasons, so there could be a single path every game to win. I must admit, I lost interest in Dominion after a while simply because it became so formulaic, and I find Settlers too much about maximising probability, and not enough about clever play. I have other issues with Settlers, but I’m not going into those right now!
Dry mechanics don’t bother me too much as long as they are in some way relevant. What I find hard to accept in games are complicated mechanics that detract from either the theme or the gameplay, or in the worst possible situation, both of these. Another Essen release, Mousquetaires Du Roy, suffered badly from this, in that, for a very simple premise behind the game, the mechanics were clunky and complicated, actually having little relevance to the gameplay and making the game itself grind to a halt on frequent occasions. With Vinhos, actually the mechanics are very simple. Vinhos is, according to BGG, the most complicated game in my collection. Wrong! Try playing Stronghold with it’s 2 rulebooks and terrible translation. With Vinhos, there are (like Cuba) a lot of different constituent parts you have to remember, but they make sense thematically. The Expert tiles can be used whenever they apply, but get flipped if you do, and then can’t be used for the fair. If you haven’t flipped them, and use them for the fair, you lose them. The barrels can be moved in the manager rows, but you can only do this once per phase, and you need to throw a wine to do it. This makes perfect sense – you’ve gained their interest via the wine you’ve submitted to the fair, and now in exchange for some of your wine, they can help you out. You can put a bad wine into the fair, but still come out the winner because of the influence you have over the experts. The designer somewhere makes a really good point that these fairs are a little corrupt, and it isn’t always what you make, but who you know.
What the real miracle is here is that everything you can do has a simple thematic mechanic behind it to allow it to work within the game. The overall effect is that you really feel like a winemaker. The ‘weight’ of the game, much like Caylus, isn’t learning to play it, but learning to play it well. In my last game with my son, he concentrated on making money. He produced high quality wines and went for the local hangouts to make some cash, which he finally cleared out to take the game end cash bonus slot. My concentration was on having 3 completed vineyards (2 vineyards and 1 winery), and then picking up the bonuses for that. I suffered at the hands of some really bad weather early on which wasn’t so bad for him simply because he had the wineries and enologists needed. I ran 2 estates with Cellars, and used the third for making wines for the managers. Through some careful use of the experts, I managed to draw every wine fair apart from the second, when he should have won all of those, and it came down to me having more wines at the end to manipulate the managers. Two minor negative issues from our game were a) when moving onto another player you pay them 1,000. I still can’t really get my head around this, not because I don’t understand it, but because it is indiscriminately punishing. From this I mean that you can be on your knees financially, and have to reward a richer player. It is a good idea to break strategies, and I agree with the idea of paying more, but I think I’d rather see the money go to the bank, with the logic that, because someone has got there before you, it is now more expensive to take that action. Why give the money to the player already there? Are their henchmen blocking the door? I need to see what comment, if any, the designer has made about this. The only reason I can think of is that turn order is set from lowest to highest on the fair track post the fair, so I suppose in theory this punishes the player(s) doing better at the fairs, but it tends to have the most impact when choosing a second action. But don’t misunderstand me here – this really is a minor point, and if the money went to the bank, I might well be writing here that it should go to the player! I don’t think I’ll truly understand or appreciate this mechanic until I’ve played the game as a 4-player. The second issue is the difference between 1st and 2nd at the fair isn’t enough in a 2 player. Easy enough to house rule, but I really don’t like having to do that. But these are really minor complaints. One other comment is that an experienced player should win hands down, but I’ve always taken this as a sign of a good game, and it is something that applies for most of my top rated games. Brass and Caylus are really good examples of this, and that is pretty good company for any game to be in.
On that subject, I truly believe that Vinhos is as good as either of those. I was expecting to see this rise through the ranks but it doesn’t seem to have done, and this has surprised me. I can’t help thinking that if Vinhos had been designed by Uwe Rosenborg it would be top 5. However, I’m happy to have this hidden gem. Same thing with Inca Empire which doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
I would argue there are multiple games within a game in Vinhos. There is the wine fair sub game, the manager row sub game, and the manager row end game. I’m hoping to find an evening when my wife is out, all house chores are up to date, and the kids are out or otherwise occupied to set this up on the table, and play a solo 2-player game, to try a fine wine strategy against a mass production strategy. My gut feeling is that the mass production would win, but in the hands of a really good player, the fine wine approach will take it, especially with more players involved, and a larger gain to be had from the fairs. If I remember rightly, in a 4-player, the lowest scoring player at the fair gets a wine expert tile. This makes me smile because it is as if an expert comes over to you and takes pity on you.
Correct use of the manager row is essential though, so getting a wine into the fair early on that meets hopefully at least 2 requirements (usually A and C) is essential. Even if it is something as simple as moving up the investment track, this is well worth the lost wine. Equally though, this is a game about VP, so you really don’t want to throw all your wines away. I think an estate without a cellar just to churn out a wine for the managers is a decent approach. However, you get really bad weather, and suddenly you either panic buy a winery or an additional vineyard if you can, or your plan is finished. Yet another reason why the game is great.
There are very few games that keep me thinking long after the game has gone back into it’s box, and been placed safely on the shelf. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in some way related to accounts, so have developed an analytical mind, trying to break games down like a puzzle (which is why I’ve recently enjoyed playing Alien Frontiers). Those that keep my mind mulling over are Brass, Container, Cuba, Notre Dame, Agricola and Vinhos.
Having said this though, this isn’t a game you want to get through quickly. Some games have fallen flat with me, like Endeavour, and I just wanted it to finish. Vinhos vs Agricola is an interesting concept. Agricola fails for me – I like the game, and almost everybody in my gaming group has a copy. One guy even has all the expansions and mini wooden animeeples and vegimeeples, and currently claims to hold the world record for the highest single player score from chosen cards. The problem is we are all equally as good at it – as good as you could really be in this type of game. I’m not trying to boast here at all, but there is a process we all follow and the end scoring is dependant almost entirely on one thing – the cards we get at the start. If you played each hand face up, we could all look at the cards and say – hey, with that hand Fred is going to win this game. Three hours later, Fred wins. I enjoy Agricola without the cards as the family game. It is often much closer, more fun, and quicker. Another issue with Agricola is a personal preference. I want reed. I need reed. I can’t get reed. In Vinhos, I want a winery, I need a winery because the weather is -2, and I only have a single vineyard on the estate, I get a winery. OK, so it costs me more than it should have done, but I can get it.
Any Problems?
So, this is an excellent game. It reminds me of Cuba, but improves upon that idea. Vinhos does recreate the feeling of growing wines, and the design of the board helps this. I enjoy having my player board with my estates. I’d love them to be little red or white bottle wooden bottle pieces with numbers on them, but fully understand the impact this would have on the cost. The printing on my wine tokens is slightly hit and miss for line-up, and they are a little fiddly, but this is being pedantic. So what are the problems? For me there is a large gap between understanding the rules, and understanding the game. My approach to learning rules is to read them through, and then summarise them myself. I can then put them in an order that I can follow personally, and also this helps me learn them, and learn any of the quirks of the game. I’m sorry, but quirks probably isn’t the right word, but it is the best I can think of at the moment. What I am referring to is the rules that are created specifically to keep the game working – and Vinhos does have these in abundance. It is that complicated decision for a designer between making a thematic experience, and designing a workable game. Genoa and Goa are good examples of this. In Genoa, the ‘tower’ moves about the streets dropping discs on the way. In Goa, you can only choose to auction adjacent tiles, and they are ‘owned’ by you. Thematically, these make no sense, but in terms of the game, they work, but the designer makes no excuse for them. In Vinhos, there is a feeling that some mechanics have been wedged in to aid gameplay under the pretence of being thematic when they are there simply to improve the gaming experience. Reading the two geeklists written by the designer pointed out rules peculiarities that I don’t think were clear in the rules themselves, and further reading of the faq forum pointed out a few other small points that weren’t how I, and others, had interpreted them.
Teaching the game takes skill as there is a lot to cover. I was at a gaming day a few months back, and was playing Thunderstone on a table next to a group who were all new to the game except for one player. It took him an hour to teach, and then as a three it took probably three hours to play, and he had the rule book permanently open on his lap, and seemed to spend most of the time scratching his head. My suggestion would be to find a willing volunteer, and to play two or three two-player games of this before trying it with a larger group. You have to explain every rule. Knowing you can pick up two barrels from the same hangout for free before taking an action or a wine fair is important, but is a peculiarity. Also, knowing how the multipliers on the manager rows work is essential, and knowing that again this action doesn’t require a move (although is costs a wine) is very important. Having the right amount of wines at the end of the game in order to move barrels on the manager rows is essential, as is having the right wine expert abilities available to manipulate the final scoring. This is hard to teach, and even harder to understand. To get the most from this game you need a dedicated group. In that area it is much like games along the lines of Brass or Caylus. Your first game will be a disaster, but future plays will reveal the intricacies of the design. The game really does build to a crescendo – everything you do on the way places the building blocks for this final scoring.
The Theme?
Yes – the theme is very well done. We travelled to France last year, and stayed in the Dordogne, a wonderful region with some amazing wines. We found a local Sauvignon that I still have a bottle of at home, and I can’t bring myself to drink quite yet. Running a winery would be a dream job for me, along with being a game designer! To enjoy this game at it’s best, it really should be played with a glass of wine in hand. Playing it you can feel the effort that has been put into it, which just doesn’t come out with some games. It isn’t always neat and tidy, but it is rewarding. Good luck getting your group to play it!
A Winning Strategy?
My comment to anybody who plays the game the same way every time is that they aren’t maximising the options available to them. Sometimes there are options I would like to take, but at that particular moment, they aren’t cost efficient, so I need to adjust my strategy accordingly. If a player takes an aggressive approach to exports, I need to find a way of countering that. If my opponent is sending poor wine to the wine fair, then I don’t need to worry so much about increasing my quality, and can instead concentrate on, say, increasing my income. My limited plays have seen my strategy develop not only from game to game, but also during play. I know if there is a good chance we are due a bad year soon, so I can do what it takes to prepare, or risk a winery not producing at all. The difference between being first and second in the fair isn’t too bad, but between first and third or fourth can be too damaging.
On a simple level, there is not the time to take the actions you need to do everything you want. When you do have the actions, you don’t have the money. This appeals to me in a game, but works better in Vinhos I think than it does in Agricola. It is far simpler in Agricola, but I just find Vinhos more satisfying and rewarding.
Comparisons And Conclusions?
The designer, Vital Lacerda, hasn’t done anything else of note before this. He is obviously a very talented game designer though – I think what he has done is take the theme, and build the game around it, taking the mechanics he requires from other games, and fine tuning them to fit. I agree with what he has done because it fits what I want from the game. I want to be able to take an action if I really need to, so I can, but there is a cost, or if I’m really clever, I can find an imaginative way to solve it by using the experts or managers. You are never prevented from doing anything, but sometimes it can be a lot rougher on you than you hoped. Actually, the game can allow for imaginative solutions to problems which is as satisfying as any game I can think of. My most enjoyable moments in games come from clever play, be it over the course of a single turn, or over a number of turns. Games that spring to mind on this are Brass, Power Grid, Twilight Struggle and Steam.
I like to see the evolution of game ideas, and I think Vinhos is a good example of this. Scott Nicholson is good at picking up on these trends. I think Carson City is a really good game, but it is obviously an evolution of Caylus. The designer took Caylus, gave it a more fun theme, took out the bits that, in their opinion, didn’t work, added some theme related gloss, and then you have the finished game. I love Caylus, but prefer to play Carson City. Sometimes, I don’t think this evolution works – I don’t like Stone Age because I think it is 2 extremes of a game, and for me the marriage doesn’t work. One the one hand you have this simple worker placement and dice rolling thing, and on the other you have this complicated card selection/set collection/resource management thing that I don’t enjoy with some kind of strange end of phase feeding using resources mess. When I sit down to play it, I need 20 minutes to remind myself what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s a game about Stone Age men. Why is it such a mish mash?
At the moment Vinhos sits at 170 on the ranking, but with an average of 7.81, which is higher than Princes Of Florence, at 21. I really think it should go top 20, but I can see it going in the 50s or 60s, in the Wallenstein/Navegador area. I hope the weight comes down to ‘medium’ though because that might encourage people more. 53% of voters have it as medium heavy, and 30% as heavy. I’ve rated it as medium, but am in a small group of 13% of owners. Once you understand it, I don’t see it as heavy at all.
Right – enough for now!
Happy gaming,
Steve
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