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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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I think the back of my mind has a secret crush on Michael Schacht. He’s not a designer that I think of when I think of great board game designers. And yet, I quietly enjoy a whole lot of his designs. Other than maybe China/Web of Power, none of his games floor me with amazement. But, I always enjoy playing his games and I pull them out on a regular basis.
In my experience, it seems like a Schacht game is one that’s rule set creates a fairly simple process but one that offers multiple paths to victory and different meaningful choices. Schacht feels, at least for me, like a less math-intensive Knizia and that’s a compliment in my book.
The other night, I visited a friend and taught him some games, including Roll Through the Ages, which I have already commented on in an earlier blog, and Rat Hot. While Roll Through the Ages was the real hit of the evening, ending with him buying the game for his iPhone, Rat Hot was the game that I really got a kick out of. (I was so busy teaching Roll that I wasn’t able to enjoy it fully. Rat Hot, on the other hand, is easy enough to grasp that I could stop teaching and just start playing.)
Rat Hot is one of those games that is not so much innovative as it does a good job taking bog standard elements and putting them together well. (What does bog standard mean anyway? Am I referring to a marshland or a toilet when I use it?)
The theme is that you are competing spice merchants who are trying to store your spices as efficiently as possible while avoiding the rats that happen to like your particular spices. The theme itself is pretty darn arbitrary, although it does seem like there is some kind of amusing back story going on. Why are two guys who hate each other’s guts sharing a warehouse? Is the economy that bad or is it just the only warehouse on the dock? Why do certain breeds of rats only eat specific colors of spices? Is there a mad scientist who is breeding quirky rats next door?
At any rate, it is a tile laying game. Each tile is three squares long and you have to place them so that squares touch the sides of other squares, which still leaves quite a bit of creative wiggle room. But wait, it gets better. You can stack tiles on top of other tiles, adding in the third dimension. You can’t have any holes underneath, though, and the tile must go over more than one tile. So, no just stacking up tiles in one big column.
The individual squares are either blank or have a spice in one of the two players’ color. (As a side note, they also have sufficiently different shapes that even my colorblind eyes can tell them apart with ease) They might also have a rat, also in a player’s color. Rats are bad, by the way. They are harder for me to tell apart but I’m not too proud to ask my opponent what color a rat is.
On your turn, you draw two tiles and place them one at a time, scoring as you go. When you create or add to a group of identical symbols, the player who matches that color score one to two points. It’s generally recommended that you don’t score points for your opponents. At the end of the game, the whole board is scored one more time and the winner is the one with the most points.
Ah, but what about the rats? Well, if three rats in your color are showing at the end of your turn, you automatically lose. Since you do place two tiles at a time, it’s usually not that hard to be able to prevent that. Generally speaking, you have to be playing very poorly or your opponent has to be playing devilishly well or you just have to have really, really bad luck. That said, rats do add some risk management to the game and add an extra layer of play and decisions.
Despite the rats, there’s no denying that the game is a pretty light one. Alternate rules exist, with scoring only at the end of the game, which I haven’t tried yet. However, right now, I am happy enough playing with the more tactical and lighter rules that come in the box.
As I already mentioned, there isn’t that much that is really that extraordinary about Rat Hot. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of tile laying games out there. Even if you exclude games that involve player markers like Carcassonne, you have games like the Very Clever Pipe Game or Wooly Bully (which I will hold out are both pretty good games) Still, there is something about Rat Hot that makes me keep on pulling it out.
Part of it is that the game is fast and easy to play. Choose colors, set out the starting tile, and go. However, I honestly think that the little tweaks in the conventional tile laying paradigm add up to a different way of looking at the game. The ability to stack, the fact that you draw and place two tile at a time and the fact that you have to watch out for the rats, they add some depth to the game and give it its own feel.
None of those elements are unique to Rat Hot but they come together fit the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in it. None of the mechanics might seem to be that special but all the pieces work well together and you need all of them for the game.
For me, that is part of the quiet genius of Michael Schacht. He doesn’t go around inventing new wheels. He uses wheels that seem old and boring in interesting ways.
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