Have you ever been playing Caracssonne, and someone puts out that one tile that just totally screws you over? You know, you're building the big ole city, the one with the extra-special super bonus tile in the middle of it, and there's just one more tile to go before you close it off and score so many points that you'll lap around the scoring track four or five times? And then some hater comes along and plays a tile that makes it impossible to finish that city? Do you ever wish that you could just take a little Meeple, arm him with a laser cannon, and go blast that tile into smithereens?

Then you're going to love Seismic!

COMPONENTS

Seismic is a tile laying game, so of course it has tiles. And these are good tiles, too - nice, thick tiles with a hefty weight to them. The tiles are glossy and slick, and look nice all layed out on the table. They're hexagonal, and most of them have roads printed on them. Each road segment enters one hexside and leaves a different hexside, so there are up to three road segments on a tile, and anywhere from two to six used hexsides. The roads don't connect on a given tile, but they do crisscross. A few of the tiles have one or more road segments that terminate in the middle of the hex - these are called interesections, and each has a value from +1 to +6. And six of the tiles have earthquakes on them. There are six earthquakes, each uniquely numbered from one to six.

There's also a bag of cubes which isn't nearly so much fun to painstakingly describe. They're, well, cubes. They're made of wood. They're painted different colors. You've seen them before. Move along.

The rules are printed in tiny print that reminds me of a Steve Jackson game. Honestly, the rules are the one component that could have used a little work. They're clear enough, but they're a little intimidating, which is too bad since this is such a simple little game. I can imagine a casual gamer picking up this game, glancing at the rules sheet, and immediately giving up because it looks too hard. But hey, that's a pretty minor complaint for hard-core gamers like you, Dear Reader. (If you're not a hard-core gamer, and you're online reading a review of Seismic on a website called Board Game Geek, perhaps you should reassess your own personal view of yourself, because dude, you're a hard-core gamer.)

GAMEPLAY

First, you have to set up the deck of tiles. You take all the earthquakes, all six of them, and mix them with other tiles. You shuffle them up, and then discard six of them without looking. You might, therefore, discard all six earthquakes, but probably not. Then you take the tiles that are left and mix them with all the rest of the tiles. Turn the top two over, and the first player takes the first turn. (In one of the more creative ways to start a game that I've seen, the designers suggest the person sitting closest to a sturdy doorframe begin - clever!)

On a turn, the player starts by turning over one tile, which will give them a choice of three to play. They choose one and play it so that it touches an existing tile and legally connects all the roads that it touches - in other words, no creating dead-end roads.

If one of the roads you've created does has not yet been claimed, you may claim it by putting a cube on that road on the tile you just placed. This allows you to take ownership of the road and get points for it later. If your tile makes it so that two people now own a single road, the person with the most cubes on that road gets the points for it. If the owners have the same number of cubes, they all get all the points for it.

The trick is that the road is worth nothing unless it has two ends to it. End hexes - the intersections I mentioned before - have a number from one to six on them, and one or more road fragments that terminate in the center of the tile. If both ends of a road have a terminus, then you count one point for each non-end tile that the road crosses, plus the total number of points from both ends of the road. So you can make a road as long as you want, but until you end it, it's worthless.

The fun comes in when somebody flips over an earthquake tile. When this happens, some roads are gonna go the way of the Bay Bridge! You start off by finding out which of the six rays that extend straight out from the center tile is the longest. Once you figure that out (which hopefully won't take you too long - we're talking counting to six or so, and we've already established that you are a Hard Core Gamer) you remove a number of tiles from that row, starting with the one closest to the center. If there's a tie, the person flipping the earthquake gets to decide which row to affect among those tied. The number of the earthquake is the number of tiles you have to remove. If there's a cube on one of those tiles, tough! It gets blasted along with the tile. I find it is fun to make little screaming sounds as you dump the cube off the tile back into the owner's pile. After the earthquake is resolved, the player's turn continues and they still get to play a tile.

After an earthquake, roads that were formerly complete, valuable, and claimed, are none of the above. Holes litter the playing field, and new tiles can be played in the now-vacant spaces.

Eventually you'll run out of tiles to play, and then the game is over. Scoring is simple. First you take off any cube that's on a road that doesn't have two end points. Then you count points for all the roads that are left. High score wins!

(I'll briefly note that the designers provides a few variant rules that I think will keep the game fresh after it wears out a bit, including a cool-sounding variant that actually requires two boards. I haven't tried these variants, but they sound neat.)

IMPRESSIONS

This is one of those great games that has a neat, easy to understand concept, but plenty of good strategy. At its simplest, it's a luckfest, with you just putting down tiles that make your roads longer, hoping to get a terminus that will give you some points, and hoping that the earthquakes don't hurt you too much. But playing like that is no fun at all.

Because the earthquake only affects the longest row of tiles, it makes a lot of sense to concentrate your own cubes on one side of the board, and try and extend your opponent's side of the board so that it's longer than yours, thus making it more vulnerable to quakes. Naturally your opponent(s) are trying to do this to you, too. But it's harder than it sounds. As the rows get longer, there's more space in between the cardinal rays to play tiles, and those in-between hexes are always safe. If you play carefully, you can keep your cubes on the safe hexes, and when the main rows are destroyed, you can quickly snag those spaces with tiles that give your cubes the most points. This means that lengthening the row where your opponent is concentrated might hurt them a little bit, but if they play cleverly, they can really turn it to their advantage.

Additionally, there are always lots of choices when your turn comes as to which tile you will place. The tile you need is sitting there, waiting for you to grab it next, when your turn comes around. But you draw a juicy four-point intersection. Do you drop in the tile that fits your road network just right, hoping to score more for your roads later, but leave the intersection for the next player to grab? Or do you take the sure thing and end one of your shorter roads (if you have one)? If the only place to play that perfect tile is in a long row straight out from the center, is it better to leave it for someone else to take and possibly claim roads on, hoping that tile gets destroyed in an earthquake soon?

CONCLUSION

Seismic is a very solid tile-laying game with a lot that's familiar, but enough new to make it feel fresh. Fans of Carcassonne and the like will love it, especially if Carc is a bit played out. Those who enjoy spatial-relation games (like Blokus or Ta Yu) will really appreciate this game as well - my engineer wife thinks it's just great. Thirty bucks is perhaps a tad high for what is basically six sheets of tiles, but the production value is so high that I didn't really feel cheated at all. Strongly recommended.

The price tag on this one had scared me away ... but Seismic seems to be getting solid press ... it is now on my "to buy" list.

I picked this one up the day before I made it into Gencon, and my gaming buddies really liked it. They are big time Carcassonne fans, and they said this played like Carcassonne with earthquakes. I'm happy because I was feeling a little burned out on Carcassonne myself, so this will still scratch their itch, while being different enough to keep me happy.