Archive for Mike Hulsebus
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Mike Hulsebus
United States
Ann Arbor
Michigan
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If I had one complaint about the reviews I see on BGG and hear on podcasts, it’s that there aren’t enough negative reviews out there. Say you’re holding to the principles of Bus Theory and you are trying not to buy too many games and make sure your favorites see play. If you were to buy games based on BGG reviews, you would end up with a lot of games you didn’t want, need, or maybe even like.
Let me back up my claim with some data. A few weeks ago, I went through the first 30 reviews on BGG and tried to sum up their main point with a 1-2 sentence quote from the review. I’ll separate them by type for you here below
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Positive Reviews
Memoir 44: Everyone should try this game at least once!
Super Dungeon Explore: I can’t wait to play this game again.
BuyWord: Is BuyWord for you? As far as game designers go, they don't get much better than Sid Sackson.”
Nightfall Blood Country: If you liked Nightfall, then we don’t see why you wouldn’t want to add in Blood Country
Dungeoneer: Highly recommended classic dungeon crawl with nice 'gamer' edges.
Eminent Domain: I am looking forward to many more 2 player games of this - at the moment we're playing it almost daily, and I would be happy for that to continue for the foreseeable future!
Dungeon Twister: As a game for a couple I will give this 4 out of 5.
Aton: Aton is one of the best [abstracts], and more people should try it.
Frankendie: It has replaced our copy of Zombie Dice and is quickly becoming a family favorite. FrankenDie was designed to be entertaining and it most certainly delivers.
Crappy Birthday: On that note, Crappy Birthday scores a solid 7, when played with non-gamers in a birthday party setting. You’ll definitely get your money’s worth here.
Robin Hund: it's a solid & very enjoyable game for kids & families.
Innovation: This game is great for serious gamers, and a suitable "light" main event.
Napoleons War II: Overall, I think this game is a big success.
Escape of the Dead Minigame: It's simple, fun, and easy to play...but it takes some time to figure out a good winning strategy. I suggest this game to everyone who likes these quick games.
Talisman: Talisman is a classic board game, well-remembered by many, and for good reason.
Elder Sign: This is our go-to game for battling the forces of darkness together as a team.
Isla Tetra: [a positive review that is mostly a session report—no good quotes to pull]
Quarriors: Having said that, it's still a great little filler, even with just 2, and it's easy to play a couple of 2 player games in 10-15 mins between other games
Upon a Salty Ocean: A thematic challenge provider. An optimization Euro in its very core form with a nice well-implemented action mechanism. A good game as it is.
Forbidden Island: Following the BGG guidelines, I give this game a 7.
Infarkt: Infarkt is a fun and silly game that lets players try to creatively work out ways to off one another.
Poo The Card Game: Poo is a GREAT game! Almost every group I have played it with enjoy it
Identik: I think 120 cartoons are good value for money, espcially with all the hysterics we got out of the demo alone. Recommended!
Five Fingered Severance: The game is light-hearted and fun. The rulebook is funny, the art is good for a few laughs and the title alone is enough to warrant interest
Tobago: Overall, Tobago offers a great experience, putting a rich, approachable theme onto its essentially economic mechanisms
Memoir 44: The nice thing about Memoir is that it is an extremely simple game and just about anyone can enjoy it and in this day of $100 games it's still only $50 and you get a ton of stuff.
Records of Three Kingdoms 190-280: I really like this game, its well done, while there is a lot of FAQ, the FAQ answers the quesions well and the game is quite historical as it models the warfare and poltiics of the time(a lot of leaders switching sides).
Weiß Schwarz: Weiss Schwarz is a good trading-card game with reasonably simple yet well-weaved rules, well-balanced cards, and rich, subtle strategy in actual playing (as well as plenty of options in deck construction).
Neutral/Negative Reviews
Penny Arcade the game “Mediocre game. Not bad, but not that good either.”
Risk Legacy: “If you're intrigued but unsure (like I was), I feel that the price tag is unjustified. Save your money for something that will see table time beyond 15-16 sessions”
Kingdom Builder “I rate it a 4.”
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I find it interesting that not only are 27/30 of the reviews positive, but many of them are glowing. Now, don’t get me wrong, some of the reviews quoted above did also address who the game wasn’t for, but so often I find that reviews just give the illusion of being impartial. Imagine a fictional game called CubePusher. People will write like this.
“CubePusher is a heavy Euro game that plays 5-7 players. If you don’t like heavy Euro games that take 2+ hours, can’t get 5+ people to the table, or are a from age 1-3 and might choke on the pieces, you shouldn’t buy this game. Otherwise, this game is amazing and everyone should own it!”
or
“I have heard complaints that the rule book is hard to understand, that one strategy is always dominant, and that the first player wins 90% of games. That doesn’t bother me though! I have fun and everyone should own it!”
Do I think that the Poo: The Card Game reviewer quoted above was lying when he said that he thought the game was “GREAT”? No, not at all. Let me be clear: I’m not trying to take individual reviews to task, I’m talking about overall trends in reviews. If people still want to say “Dungeon Lords is the best game of all time!” I welcome it even though I don’t agree. But I also would love to see more reviews that say, “This is a mediocre game. Let’s talk about it and go over what works and what doesn’t.”
I think we can only get an accurate picture of a game if we know why the people that love it love in and why the people that don’t like it don’t like it. If you’ve been on the Panic Station forums, you have a great picture of the many differing opinions on the game and have all the tools you need to figure out if you’ll like the game.
Along those lines, we can only truly get where a reviewer is coming from if we know what games he or she doesn’t like. I, for example, enjoy listening to the State of Games podcast and reading its companion blog, Dice Hate Me (I especially appreciate the good photos). However, there aren’t many reviews that pop up that are negative, especially on the blog. So when Chris says that Road to Canterbury is “a sinfully-delightful masterpiece,” it’s hard for me to evaluate those claims when every review is a positive review (recent scores: 17/18, 16/18, 13/18, 15/18, 14/18).
But, over time, I’ve learned that Chris can’t stand Mansions of Madness and I know that Chris and Cherilyn don’t like deck builders. So if Chris said “I thought I was going to hate this game because it seemed so similar to Mansions, but it turned out I really loved it” that would really make that review stand out to me. In the most recent podcast, they talked about Pond Farr, an in-development deckbuilding race game that they liked. Pond Farr is now on my radar as something I might like. All the other ones they talked about loving? I’ll wait and see.
One of the things I really like about the Dice Tower video podcast is that Tom reviews everything he gets. So when I watch a bunch reviews in a row where Tom says
“My kids like this but I’m not that crazy about it” or
“This is basically just an Uno variant if that’s what you’re looking for” or
“This is a good game and parts of it are cool, but overall it’s nothing special”
but then, in his next review he says “this is a great game,” that this game is really a cream of the crop game. And, similarly, all of his previous reviews have given me enough background that, if Tom says “Star Trek Fleet Captains just might be my game of the year” I can say, well, I know from previous reviews that Tom never gets tried of space themes, so maybe I’ll look into this more before I run out and buy it.
My challenge to you:
Find a game that you’ve played recently that you would rank a 6 or less (for reference, this corresponds with “Ok game, some fun or challenge at least, will play sporadically if in the right mood”) and write up a review discussing its pros and cons and post it to BGG. Post a link in the comments and even if you write that you hate Mansions (a game that was my #2 played game by time in 2011), I’ll thumb it based on principle.
I don’t have many reviews here on BGG, but as much as possible in my reviews over at http://dicearenice.com I tried to review games that I did and didn't like, but if you want to argue that I did a bad job with those or with this blog post, I welcome the negative review.
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Mike Hulsebus
United States
Ann Arbor
Michigan
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The best review you can give a game is spending time playing it!
It’s time once again for my yearly audit of all my logged plays this year. I’m interested to compare this to last year and also to check in with the games that I wanted to play more.
Here are this year’s most-played games.
1) Dominion (115 plays | 28.8 hours)
Interestingly enough, I logged more plays of Dominion than last year (115 vs 108) but logged far less time playing (28.8hrs vs 56 hrs). This can be attributed to the bulk of my plays happening online with my brother where we could play a full game in about 10 to 15 minutes. I'm glad to be able to play online: I only bought Cornucopia after playing and enjoying it. Hopefully the forthcoming digital release will be playable on the PC.
2) Mansions of Madness (9 plays | 27 hours)
This was a game that I originally wasn’t going to buy, but once I got a chance to play it, it was clear that this was a game for me and, most importantly, that it was different enough from Arkham Horror to warrant owning both. I still think there is a lot of replay value here so I’m holding off on buying the expansion.
3) Battlestar Galactica (7 plays | 19.3 hours)
I will never turn down a game of Battlestar Galactica if we have the time. I will also never choose to be Boomer.
4) Power Grid (12 plays | 18 hours)
On last year's list, I identified this as a game that I wanted to play more to see what I thought of it since, at the time, I had only played it once and didn’t even play a full game. I wrote, “I suspect that repeated plays may just show me that this isn’t the game for me” and “Currently, I’m rereading the rules and basically seeing if I can convince myself that it would be easy to teach,.and that my wife would like it.”
As it turns out, this is a game that my wife, Karen, really likes (It’s her #4 game) and one that I like too, so we play it when we can manage to find the time once our one-year-old daughter Violet has gone to bed. We like this game for its replayability and how each game is different every time. And yes, we do enjoy this game as a 2 player game.
5) Arkham Horror (5 plays | 17.5hrs)
Arkham Horror has gone down in the rankings this year (last year it was my #2 most played game by time), but not because I have played Arkham Horror less: we logged 5 plays this year and 5 plays last year. I think that this is indicative of the fact that I am playing my favorite games more often when something I spent almost 17.5 hours playing is my #5 most played)
6) 7 Wonders (23 plays | 11.5 hours)
I’m surprised this made it all the way up to the #6, but those "we have 30 minutes, what should we play" sessions start to add up over time. I’m really happy to see that, even after all these plays, that there isn’t an “always-do-this” kind of strategy.
7) The Resistance (19 plays | 9.5 hours)
The Resistance is my new-to-me game of the year for 2011. I have played this with over 20 different people (not all at once—across multiple plays) and this has always gone over well. For its versatility, fun, and let’s-play-it-again-ness, this was a great purchase.
8) Flash Point: Fire Rescue (12 plays | 9 hours)
Yes, this is more random than Pandemic, but I like this game better than Pandemic. This was definitely in the running for my new game of the year, but I felt like it was too new to get the title. I really like all of the boards available to me, and I like how there is still a lot of strategy to the game since you can play the game of probabilities. We’re still figuring out the best strategy to win. Amazing that it made it all the way up to number 8 even though it came out in late November.
9) Forbidden Island (17 plays | 8.5 hours)
Still going strong. Whenever I’m recommending games to people, this is usually one I recommend (unless they already own Pandemic).
10) Time's Up (8 plays | 8 hours)
There is no better silly party game than I’ve found than Time’s Up.
11) What's My Word (7 plays | 7 hours)
I still have yet to beat my wife at this. This game is a great game for my wife because she likes word puzzles and logic/deduction puzzles and this has elements of both. I’m going to win this someday if I can quit ruining my best games by making mistakes.
12) Pandemic (9 plays | 6.8 hours)
Most of these plays came from a string of “we have to play this until we beat this” plays. It took 9 plays to finally win and when we did win, it was a landslide.
13) The Drawing Game (aka Eat Poop You Cat) (6 plays | 6 hours)
This is still more of an activity than a game, but it never fails to entertain.
14) No Thanks! (15 plays | 5 hours)
A simple card game that has plenty of meaningful decisions. It’s the only filler game that I rate a 10 since it’s absolutely perfect at what it does.
15) Scrabble (6 plays | 4.5 hours)
I’m normally not really a fan of Scrabble (I blame 2 letter words) and the game can be frustrating when you and your opponent have accidentally locked down the board so that the only place to play off of is a J. Still, once we got Scrabble on our phones and could play games just by passing it back and forth, the game got more fun and neither of us takes it too seriously.
16) Space Alert (13 plays | 4.3 hours )
This game continues to be a winner. We still only win like maybe 1 in 4 games, but we still have a fun time trying. I would like to see the wizardry necessary to win the expansion’s difficulties.
17) Nuns on the Run (4 plays | 4 hours)
When we want to change up the pace, this game comes up. I still have a lot to learn about playing the adult nuns.
18) Magic the Gathering (10 plays | 3.3 hours)
It will be a sad year when I don’t get any Magic the Gathering plays in. These players were mostly from one free tournament event and from a few games against my brother. I miss the world of tournament Magic, but it is too expensive. I still enjoy following the spoiler feeds to see what new things they do with Magic every year
19) A five-way tie of games I played for 3 hours a piece
Panic Station – I want to play this again now that my main group has gotten past the learning game (2 hrs). Haters really like to hate on this game, but I like it overall and look forward to when we can get done with a game in 30-45 minutes. Still, I’m actually tempted to use the pieces from the game and make my own completely new ruleset.
Galaxy Trucker – This would see a lot more play if I could play with 5 players, but I don’t want to overcomplicate the explanation process with all those extra tiles
Cloud 9 – A game that is easy to pull out with gamers and non gamers. I still like push your luck games. I’m happy to see this up here.
Dice Town – Needs to see more play
Ticket to Ride – Another game that my wife usually beats me at. Almost all of my Ticket to Ride games are 2 player games
King of Tokyo – I’ve had fun with this even though I still haven’t had the opportunity to play it with the max number of players.
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Games that I hope to see played more in 2012
Agricola – This is pretty much guaranteed to be one my most-played games next year. I think I’ve already got 3-4 plays in of this in January alone and at 1-2 hours a play, this will quickly climb the charts.
Innovation – I really like this as two player game. I don’t know how balanced the cards may be, but I like how you feel like you still have a chance to come from behind, even if you’re far in the back of the pack.
Cosmic Encounter – I’ve gotten in one 6 player game of this and look forward to seeing how differently this plays when we all have different powers.
Also I hope to spend more time in 2012 further narrowing down my collection (see my article for why)
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Games that I said wanted to play more of last year
Alien Frontiers: Successful. I liked the game more after repeated plays but not enough to keep it, especially once I realized that I would always rather play Agricola over this and so I sold it.
Nuns on the Run: Success: made it up to #17 most played!
Power Grid: Made it all the way up to #4!
Small World: I got a play in which was fun, but I realized that there are always games I play over this, so I’m going to sell this as well. With all the two regular expansions and the out of print Necromancer Island, I suspect this should sell well.
Betrayal at House on the Hill: Unsuccessful (1 play), but I hope to play more this year
Diplomacy: Unsuccessful (0 plays). Someday I will play you again, Diplomacy
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Falling off of last year's top 10 list are
Carcassonne which I still like, but just haven't played as much recently and
Race for the Galaxy which, while I liked the game, took too long to explain and required too much investment up front if we just wanted to play a game. I sold my copy.
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Finally, if you want to see all of my data, you can check out the spreadsheet here: http://tinyurl.com/mikehulsebusgamesplayed2011
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Mike Hulsebus
United States
Ann Arbor
Michigan
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After a spending a good deal of time around here, I see a lot of people that can’t seem to stop buying games. While I am not prefect in this regard, I’ve come up a few points about buying games that I've learned along the way. My theory is as follows (since everyone gets named theories, let’s call this Bus Theory).
1) Just because you had fun doesn’t mean you need to keep paying for that fun.
Let’s say that you have friends over and you introduce them to Cosmic Encounter. They love it. You have a great time and everyone says that you have to play it again sometime soon.
I don’t know about you, but following that experience, my gut reaction would be to start looking at buying the expansions. Yes, your copy of the game came with 50 alien races. Yes, you could use these races for game after game after game and see how their different combinations come together. BUT THERE ARE NEW ALIENS YOU DON’T HAVE! And playing Comic Encounter was so fun!
Don’t be like me. Don’t own Small World and 3 expansions while only having played the game 3 times since you bought it in 2010. Just because you had a fun experience with a game does not mean that you need to spend more money on a game. It means you need to resolve to play that game more often.
If you love having your friends over to watch football, buying a bigger TV won’t make it more fun (or at least won’t make it so much more fun that it justifies the cost). You don’t need to build a shrine to the fun you’re having. You’ll have the same fun next time if you watch it on your same regular TV.
2) The opportunity cost of buying a new game to play is not playing your old games
I agree with Ryan Sturm: we should seek to play better games, more often.
How many times over the course of the year are you going to have opportunities to play games? 52 times? Wouldn’t you rather spend that time playing your absolute favorite games?
I hear a lot of podcasters and see a lot of BGG posters who talk about “I really need to get this game to the table” or they lament that they haven’t played a certain game in a long time. Why haven’t you played that game recently? You have spent too much of your time playing games that are not your favorites.
Think of your game collection and the plays you log like a Dominion deck. Would you rather draw from a 60 card deck full of 30 copper and 30 gold, or a 40 card deck with 10 copper and 30 gold?
3) Just because a game is a good game or a fun game does not mean that you need to own it.
Your criteria for buying a new game should not be “would I have fun playing this game?” It is a game. You like games. Chances are, you are going to have fun playing the game. If you’ve ever listened to the Myriad Games Presentation podcast, you know that they can have fun playing just about any game, even if they don’t much care for the game.
Somewhat better criteria is “Is this game going to absolutely blow me away?”
You can probably have fun with your friends playing a lot of different games: even bad games that you don’t really like. But remember, if you’re looking to buy a game, you want to fill your Dominion deck with gold, not copper.
And still, even if every game that came out in 2012 was a perfect 10 on the BGG scale, that would not mean that you needed to own them all. You would not have that kind of time. There is no sense buying 20 perfect games if you only have time to play 10 of them. And remember (rule 2), if you buy and play those 10 games, there are 10 games that you already own that you aren’t playing.
Eager for podcasts to listen to when most podcasts were on break for Christmas, I went back and listened to some old episodes of the Dice Tower including the best of 2007 podcast. It’s interesting to hear people’s thoughts on games of the day (big news: a game called Agricola is starting to generate buzz), but my biggest takeaway was how many of the discussed games I have never even heard of. People talk about the games from 2007 being a lot of fun of with a lot of replay value. And yet now, here in 2012, I have never heard of those games: they came onto the scene and then vanished.
I imagine that some of those here-then-gone games are still played, but I also wonder how many copies of Trading in the Mediterranean 2007 are collecting dust while their owner preorders the new hotness, Trading in the Baltic Sea 2012.
You could forever live in any year in recent gaming history and be happy. Game factories could all agree to only print reprints of already-in-print games from here on out and we would be perfectly fine and still have fun when we meet up to play board games. You would not run out of games to play and you would not run out of fun to be had.
You do not need to buy more games in order to have more fun.
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If you're interested in buying fewer games, you might consider checking out this Simple Dollar post where he suggests keeping an "already have" list of games to remind yourself you have plenty of games you have been waiting to play before you buy new ones
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Mike Hulsebus
United States
Ann Arbor
Michigan
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This article was originally written for my article on AnnArbor.com, where it will go live on Monday, March 7. All of my other reviews are viewable at http://dicearenice.com. For this BGG version I'll also include the full stats at the end.
There’s a certain degree of nerdiness required to be someone who writes a board game review column, but today we’re going to ratchet up the nerd level a few clicks. Over the past year, I’ve logged every single board and card game that I played. So yes, if you’ve read this column regularly, you probably know what games I think are good or bad, but when it comes down to it, these are the games that I spent the most time playing this year. I’ll also talk about games I wish I played more.
This list spans games played from February 28, 2010 to February 27, 2011. I took my logged number of plays and multiplied it by the average number of minutes the game takes as reported over on BoardGameGeek, with a few modifications where I thought the numbers were off (no game of Boggle takes 10 minutes to play: it has a 3 minute timer). So, without further ado, here are my top 10 games that I spent the most time playing. My full reviews of each game are available on http://dicearenice.com
And finally, there are games I’ve played this year that I hope to get to play more in the year to follow. Here are some games that I would love to see rise in the rankings.
Small World (11th place: 6 hours | 4 plays)
Despite what I expected to happen after my first play of Small World, I like this game more each time I play it. I still don’t think of this as a family game like some people do, nor do I think it’s a game I would pull out with non-gamers again due to its length, but Small World is a game that I think gets better as you start to discover the strategies of the game—which I don’t think really happens until play two or three: there is so much more to the game that just recognizing which race and power combinations are best.
Betrayal at House on the Hill (18th place: 3 hours | 3 plays)
I’ve only played 3 scenarios of the 50 provided in the scenario book. My box is full of monsters and tokens and I’m really curious to see what each of them do once they get put in the haunted mansion. Having so many different scenarios makes it so that the game feels different every time (without having to take the time for everyone to learn a new game).</p>
Alien Frontiers (21st place: 2.5 hours | 2 plays)
I’m still not sure how what I feel about this game (which is why there hasn’t been a review yet). This is a combination worker placement/dice-rolling game where players are able to place their workers (dice) based what each die reads. Alien Frontiers is currently all the rage among the board game crowd, with its first printing selling out quickly and the second printing (due in April) in high demand. After my first play of the game, I thought it had too much downtime, but it went much quicker on my second play and I may be starting to warm up to it.
Nuns on the Run (33rd place: 2 hours | 2 plays)
This is a really fun game, and it’s a shame that I haven’t gotten to play it more. Like I mentioned in the original review, it’s somewhat hard to bring to the table since asking rules clarifications during the game might give away someone’s hiding space, but once people I know learn the rules, I’ll be more likely to pull this out. I enjoy playing this as a two player game, so that’s always an option too.
Power Grid (46th place: 90 minutes | 1 play)
This is another game that I’m on the fence about. Unlike Alien Frontiers, I suspect that repeated plays may just show me that this isn’t the game for me, but in the meantime, I really like the idea of this game and all the systems that it has in motion. In time I may understand enough of the strategy to remember that I usually don’t auction games. This is an auction/resource management game where players are trying to build power plants and supply power to cities across a map. Currently, I’m rereading the rules and basically seeing if I can convince myself that it would be easy to teach.and my wife would like it. I look forward to actually playing again sometime in the future to figure out my thoughts on it.
Diplomacy (tied for 102nd: 0 minutes | 0 plays)
I haven’t played a game of Diplomacy in probably 8 years, but it left such an impression on me that I traded for a copy a few months ago. Diplomacy is a negotiation game that requires exactly seven players to play properly and takes over four hours to play. This is a game that players get so into that people explaining the game often have to remind players that everyone is entering the game as friends and you should make sure that everyone leaves the game as friends. In my particular game 8 years ago, I made it to the final years of the game and was poised to share victory, only to be perfectly stabbed in the back so that my “ally” could win by herself. It was awesome.
Mike Hulsebus often finds himself wishing other things he did had such easily quantifiable data so he could spout off things like how many diapers he changes in a month at will. He can be reached at mikehulsebus@gmail.com
Full stats showing all 100+ games played over 270 total hours:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjI93nRoYaRSdEhYbkR...
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