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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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(See this post for how I choose my ratings.)
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8 Age of Rail: South Africa
Now I finally got my hands on this, I was glad to get a play of it, and try out the Pampas map. Sadly the game didn't go too well, I got a strong set of shares early on, and ran away with the game. It's not that much fun when you have a run-away winner, even if that winner is me. In this case folks at the table wondered if there was anything they could have done to stop me. I think it was very possible. When we played Prairie Railroads last month (a very similar game), I also got off to a big lead early on. But the two other players combined into a strong company and I ended up in second place. This time the other three didn't manage to arrange partnerships in a suitable fashion, and I feel this game is all about getting yourself into the right partnerships./pic8142784.jpg)
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5 Sparks NEW!
5 Spectacular NEW!
A couple of new Essen releases. Both of these were agreeable take-and-make style games, as is common these days. Neither of them made a big impression on me./pic8377382.png)
N/A La Pâtisserie Rococo NEW!
Pre-play for an HC stream that will go with their kickstarter, so no comments on it until later./pic8145392.png)
5 Luthier NEW!
A worker placement game with a theme of constructing musical instruments to satisfy patrons and fill first seats in an orchestra. Taking on a patron will supply income, but they are effectively contracts which have to be satisfied within a couple of rounds or you lose serious points. Much of that satisfaction is about constructing instruments or doing repairs - which are both recipe fulfillment. Completed instruments can go into the orchestra to gain area majorities. On the whole this felt similar to Rococo and would appeal to those who like that style of game but want more complexity and find the theme appealing. But for me the complexity increase didn't add more fun and with four players the game really dragged in the last hour./pic7463309.jpg)
5 Trick and Trade NEW!
Trick taking game with a stock holding element. Winning a trick allows you to buy stocks (themed as cyptocurrencies) based on which suits have tricks won by the lowest scoring card. Interesting mechanism, but ended up being a JATWAT [^1]/pic8332056.png)
6 FIXER NEW!
A trick-taker where each round you play one card against one two-handed trick against one of your opponents. Once both players play to the trick, it gets resolved, scoring points for the winner, but potentially giving the loser a useful card. I play three tricks against each opponent and on my turn I have to choose which trick to play a card to, knowing I might get more useful cards later. It's an interesting game, but not quite enough to beat the JATWAT trap./pic8225652.png)
7 Seven Prophecies NEW!
This was the last of this trio of trick-takers we played on a Heavy Cardboard Stream. (although on the stream we played this first). In this one the game lays out a sequence of suits that will be led suit for each trick. Each player makes a prophecy (bid) indicating how many tricks they finish in each position (eg two first, three second, one third, and one last). The first person to complete the prophecy scores points, more points if they win it quickly. I have to look at my hand and imagine how I might play to each trick and what my likely position in the trick will be. This caught my imagination more than most trick-takers manage./pic5741971.png)
5 Stress Botics NEW!
I found this to be a quirky game, with some very appealing features. The theme is we are robots mining a planet. We move around to mine resources, which we need for our movement, to connect with the mother robot, and to deliver to passing spaceships - which is the main way to score VPs. The spaceships only come at particular points, and each one only accepts a single delivery of particular resources, so I have to ready to beat any other players who want to make that drop-off. Being first in turn order is extremely helpful, but to do that I need to take on stress, which is negative VPs and can also complicate my spaceship delivery. The way the resources work and the stress mechanism are both lovely, but there are a lot of rules in this game, and they don't all run smoothly. The game also runs rather long, so overall exceeds my stress limit.
^1: JATWAT stands for “Just Another Trick-Taker With A Twist”, an acronym I learned from jtakagi in the Knizia discord channel.
I've been playing board games since I was very young. Now I'm old, but when will I become wise?
4
Comments
Sun Nov 3, 2024 1:32 pm
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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Last week I (finally) got my kickstarted copy of Age of Rail: South Africa. I backed this game because, of the investor-centered cube rails games I've tried so far, it's my favorite. (By “investor-centered cube rails”, I mean cube rails games that have players act as investors in train companies: such as Wabash Cannonball / Chicago Express, Chicago & NorthWestern, or South African Railroads.) There are various reasons I feel that way, but that's not the theme of this post. Instead it's another element of its packaging: the name “Age of Rails”, and that it comes with two included expansion maps.
Expanding a game by offering additional maps is a common approach with games that depend on spatial maneuvering over a topographical map. We see it in games like Concordia and Power Grid. I first encountered it in the 80's with Railway Rivals. And it appears at its most notable level with Age of Steam.
At its simplest level, adding a new map to a game gives us a different topography as a playing surface for our game. Terrain or other connection costs alter the way we can make connections, creating subtle or significant changes in how we position our actions on the board. If nothing else, it adds a layer of fun in engagement, a familiar game set in Germany feels just that bit fresh by moving it to France.
But at it's best, map-based expansions go better than that, packaging that topography with rules tweaks that go beyond changing the setting, to significant mechanical changes, while still feeling like the same game. This kind of change is one of the things that makes Age of Steam so special, with over 200 maps.
This huge map count is what make Age of Steam the most successful example of map-expansion, and is what's striking about the name “Age of Rail”, and its initial trio of maps. The name is a signal to the possibilities, are Winsome and Capstone hoping for a similar flowering for this title?
Winsome's history casts a thought here. Winsome is the original creator of Age of Steam, and their behavior played no small part to the plethora of maps available now. Yet with their other train games, they haven't gone down the path of map-expansion. I've only skimmed the oeuvre, but enough to see lots of similarities between Wabash Cannonball, Texas and Pacific, South African Railroads, Chicago and Northwestern and the like. But each of these games was initially published as their own sibling game. I have no idea whether further map-expansion for Age of Rail is in the mind of John Bohrer (Winsome's owner and primary designer).
This though makes me noodle further on what helps make map-expansion successful. At its heart, my feeling is that it relies on engaging designers outside the initial creators. Concordia and Power Grid have been around for a while, but don't have the range of maps, both in quantity or in variation, that come close to that of Age of Steam. This is likely because it's primarily only Mac Gerdts and Friedemann Friese that design new maps for their respective games. Age of Steam, however, has long had many other designers come up with new maps. In the early days we saw the Steam Brothers, Ted Alspach, Vital Lacerda, and Alban Viard create Age of Steam maps - and many of those names you should recognize as folks who have gone on to become major designers in our hobby. Today, two decades after Age of Steam was first published, we see new designers come up with striking designs. My thinking is that anyone who wants to follow Age of Steam's success here needs to follow that openness. This kind of platform creates a space for people who want to indulge in game design, who aren't wanting to design a whole system from scratch, and are more inspired by taking an existing, successful, system, and building upon it.
Another element that I suspect helped encourage the outbreak of Age of Steam maps was the example of the first Age of Steam expansion set. On the simplest level, these two maps extended the effective player count of Age of Steam's initial “Rust Belt” map: England to 6 and Ireland to 3. But the really interesting thing about this pair was how they demonstrated two different styles of expansion. Bohrer's England map is a simple expansion, with no rules changes. Yet by a slight stretching of the distance between towns, it creates a surprisingly significant change in game play. Martin Wallace's Ireland map, however, makes drastic changes to key rules elements, showing how much a change can be made while still retaining the kernel of Age of Steam.
Ironically, perhaps the closest I've come across to this fertile ground of a cohort of designers on a base game is another “Age of”: Age of Industry, where a few other designers created maps after Wallace's original publication. Sadly that family now appears moribund. (And pure map-expansion isn't the best thing for a Brass-like system, as I feel changing the industries is an important part of expanding that family.)
I don't know if the trio of Age of Rails maps are the harbinger of a future system or merely three and done. Certainly Pampas and Allegheny are closer to England than they are Ireland. But I enjoy the subtle interactions that these investor-centered cube rails games create between the players, with the need to build partnerships between competing investors. I'd love to see the kind of design imagination that led to maps like Ireland, Sweden Recycling, and Steampunk applied to this kind of game.
(A similar prospect appears before Wallace's Steam Power - how will its map catalog grow?)
Sun Oct 20, 2024 2:54 pm
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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(See this post for how I choose my ratings.)
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8 Speakeasy x3 NEW!
I've written a longer review of Speakeasy, but in short - I can imagine this becoming my favorite Lacerda./pic8320074.jpg)
3 Prairie Railroads NEW!
An early, as in 1999, cube rails game. While it was a weaker member of this clan, I found it interesting as it revealed some of Bohrer's early thinking about cube rails, revealing early mechanisms that led to games like Wabash Cannonball and Age of Rail: South Africa. It used dice to indicate which towns on the map were developed, not a mechanism that went down well at the table. The production was also typical of Rio's approach to these games, which is barely-better than Winsome. The map was crude, and had some annoying deficiencies in the information design./pic7745780.jpg)
8 Winner's Circle NEW!
I recently got hold of this nifty Knizia as the fancy Dicetree edition became available on Amazon in the USA. I fancied it as a fun, shorter game for five or six players. We ended up with four, due to a late cancellation, but it was great at even this player count. The game is suitably simple. You have three races, each of which has seven horses running. We start by laying three bets on different horses. Then we race the horses, where we take turns rolling a die, each horse has a different amount of spaces to move depending on which face of the die is showing, and once a horse is moved, it can't be moved again until all horses move. This applies just the right mix of control and randomness to the race, and players get to push their own horses and nobble opponents. The game sets up a similar portfolio of partnerships that you get in stock holding games, like Wabash Cannonball, but with a different theme and rhythm to the play.
The default rules have bets be public, which is how I prefer it, since I find secret bets add too much uncertainty to the game. The Dicetree production is excellent, and it's a welcome addition to my ever-growing shelves of Knizia/pic2233614.jpg)
7 Orongo NEW!
Another Knizia, one I haven't tried before. It's a mix of tile-laying and auction, where the highest bidder goes first, and also lays more tiles. The twist is that this is a closed economy, where I have to forego a bid to gain more shells (money), so conserving and timing my bids is vital to help me get the right territory of tiles to place./pic8225039.png)
5 The Icarus Club NEW!
A fun variant on a trick-taker. We lay out a line of cards, which indicate the given suits for the next tricks in order, but can be changed by the winning player. Furthermore the highest scoring player in each hand gets their score zeroed out, and highest scoring player is eliminated, making this game all about scoring second./pic715611.jpg)
8 Age of Industry x2
Two contrasting plays of this now-favorite. The first introduced two new players to the game, testing my question of whether non-heavy gamers would enjoy it. It was my first teach to players unfamiliar with Brass, and they quickly got into the swing of things, despite one of them starting in isolated Pennsylvania. It reinforced my view that this is a worthwhile game in its own right, and shouldn't be seen as a lesser-Brass.
The second game was my first try of the Portugal map, with a couple of experienced industrialists. Coal was eye-wateringly expensive, and Shrey did well to monopolize the coal mines in the first half of the game. I pushed him to a close finish, losing by just a point. All-in-all a great three player map.
Thu Oct 3, 2024 6:24 am
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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My boardgame friends include plenty of people who are comfortable with heavy games, yet I find myself wondering whether such heavy games are really for me any more. In particular whether I need to have them on my board game shelf. Weight is a loose term, as "heavyness" means different things to different gamers. Rules complexity, depth, low-luck, length, and opacity all play a role. For this essay, I'm going to focus on rules complexity (but I felt a title like "Will I buy another game with high rules complexity" was too low on pith.)
I'm not afraid of complex rulesets. My early days of hobby gaming involved playing hex-and-counter wargames of the 70s and 80s - and these involved large, dense rulebooks, which totally needed phrases like "Stacking of naval and air units is unlimited while at sea/in the air. (EXCEPTION: Rule 34.3) See Rule 28.1, Rule 29.11 for stacking capacities of naval and air bases." [^1]. But the problem with complex rules is that they are time-consuming to absorb and to teach. This effort pays off if iff you play the game a few times within a reasonably short time period. But without that payoff, I fear a sense of dread if someone would pull such a game off my shelf and I know I have to teach it, based on my memories of games played a year or two ago. More likely, however, even a group like ours won't pull such a game off the shelf. If they fancy a game with that kind of weight, they will bring it themselves. Games that come off my shelf these days tend to be shorter games, good for filling in those gaps between the longer games, yet still possessing the depth that appeals to heavy gamers. There are plenty of such games, and despite what a quick look at my shelf would suggest, they are not all designed by Knizia.
I thus felt a sense of disappointment last year when Hegemony arrived at the house. I was delighted by it when we played the prototype, so I backed the kickstarter. But was it to become a sad box on the shelf? As it turned out I was able avoid the biggest issue, getting it played a few times in the first couple months by making a special effort to host focused game nights with a subset of our group. That removed the fear that I'd only feel sadness when I looked at it on the shelf. But despite that, I haven't played it at all this year, and feel that dread of re-learning and teaching it.
This has led me to increasingly feel that rules complexity was altogether a Bad Thing. I saw that it was necessary to generate good things - such as strategic depth, immersiveness, or thematic depth - but I should look to games that give me those attributes with minimal rules. As we moved into spring, I tentatively decided that I wouldn't be buying any more heavy games. But in a conversation with another gamer [^2] they said that they love the feeling of navigating a large toolkit of options, a feeling that is distinct from what comes from a low-rules-high-depth game. That reminded me that I get that fun too: identifying a path to a goal, but then pondering more and realizing I have a superior alternative. Of having my plans foiled by another player grabbing the spot I needed, and figuring out how to still get close to my aim. (That dynamism where other players force replanning is a large part of why I enjoy lots of interaction in my games.)
Given this, I'm not sure where this takes me for further heavy purchases. There are cases where I know I'm interested in getting a heavy game, despite the risk of it becoming shelfware. There are good indications that there will be a new sibling to Brass hitting kickstarter shortly. And I've already broken my nascent "no heavy games" rule a few weeks ago by buying Great Western Trail Argentina. Getting another Brass is no surprise to those who know my love of that system, but there's another common feature it shares with Great Western Trail. Enough people who are into heavier games are already broadly familiar with these systems, so much of the cognitive load of the rules doesn't weigh on us. A rules teach can flow much faster when most of the mechanisms are familiar to those at the table. (This effect is a large part of the appeal of 18xx.)
I'll be facing this question directly in the next few weeks, as I've had the opportunity of playing a pre-production copy of Speakeasy, ready for a Heavy Cardboard stream on September 26. I very much enjoyed my first play this week, immersing myself in another of Lacerda's fascinating clockwork puzzles, enjoying how the theme was represented in those mechanisms, ogling Mr O'Toole's wonderful artwork, and appreciating his thoughtful information design. The question, of course, will be whether I will back the kickstarter, only to see another heavy, beautiful, but little-played game on my shelf.
[^1]: quote from Third Reich, 4th Edition §6.2. I played with an earlier edition in the 70s, but the rulebook was very similar.
[^2]: "queues" on the Game Brain Discord
Wed Sep 11, 2024 7:52 pm
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
-
(See this post for how I choose my ratings.)
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6 Stephenson's Rocket
This feels like a cube rails game with Acquire transplanted into it. We build track, try to visit stations and towns, but if our track hits another track, we merge. There's stockholding with a mechanism that allows other investors to re-route a proposed track extension. It all feels like a rather twisted take on cube rails, and I'm not sure how I feel about the twists. Is this a great and subtle game, or just too opaque to be worthwhile? Those with me at the table, all more experienced than me with the game, confessed they didn't really know what was going on. I suspect that with a group that decided to play this every week for a few months, it could really shine. But probably not a great choice for occasional plays./pic7353926.png)
6 HUANG NEW!
Essentially a new printing of Yellow and Yangtze, which is a hexagonal recreation of the immortal T&E. Sadly I've only played T&E once, many years ago, so can't really compare Huang to its quadrilateral predecessor. I enjoyed trying to balance scoring victory points, thinking how to set myself up for scoring them, and how to cope when others knocked my leaders out. Maybe someday I'll graduate to plotting how to overthrow my opponents' leaders. It's a good game, my main reason not to dive into it more is that I feel I ought to get to know T&E first. The art is lovely, but the production was let down by leaders that were unclear who they belonged to, which made the game needlessly difficult to parse./pic7780116.png)
5 Dutch InterCity NEW!
A rare winsome cube rails game that was designed neither by John Bohrer nor a by pseudonym of John Bohrer. It comes with some neat mechanisms. Auction rounds continue until someone runs out of money, which triggers an interesting decisions - should I overpay by a few bucks to prevent anyone else buying stock, or forcing them to overpay even more for this one? There's limited lines and everyone simultaneously which line they are going to build this round, with an auction should two companies bid the same line. Unfortunately the bids in the last round led to tedious calculation. Rio Grande is sadly continuing to lean into the Winsome aesthetic for the boards, a crude bunch of lines and boxes, which was unappealing and had annoying visualization flaws./pic1731731.jpg)
5 El Caballero NEW!
I'd not come across this one, what Kramer and Ulrich did a couple of years after El Grande. We lay tiles on the shared board, placing Caballero tiles to strive for area majorities, at least until they are removed by opponents' tile plays. The result is a very interactive game with a fair bit of destructive interaction. My fellow players rate this one highly, preferring it even to the great El Grande himself. I'm not a huge El Grande fan, but while I felt this was a solid OG game, didn't feel it pushed above the average./pic2663291.jpg)
5 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization NEW!
I've long wanted to play this game, a classic that's achieved a high rank on BGG. While playing it, I can certainly see the appeal. I have to choose cards to build an engine that will supply me with the right mix of resources, while not neglecting the culture that is victory points at the end of the game. It's the classic Euro mix of difficult choices, there are 6 things I really need to do this round but can only do 3. The theme of civilization building comes through really well from these choices, and the mechanisms are smooth and quickly get out of the way. Given this I enjoyed myself while playing this, but I also recognize that it has one huge fault for me - it's length. We played the "short" version, which felt truncated, but still took till late to play. So my conclusion is that while it's clearly a great game, it runs too long for me./pic750583.jpg)
7 Troyes
Edward wanted to try this game to see if he still hated it. I've long enjoyed this take on dice drafting, where the ability easily buy opponent's dice means that high values are less desirable. It's a game with lots of interaction, grabbing dice, competing to put workers into slots. Randomized setup provides a varied puzzle of routes to scoring, and the rules don't make the common mistake of getting too complex for its own good. All in all this is solid mid-weight Euro. Edward concluded that he enjoyed the game, but still hates (but can live with) the art./pic7360579.jpg)
5 1930: The Golden Age of Airlines x3 NEW!
This game has an odd feel to it. It has an obvious influence from 18xx, with technology colors that go yellow, green, brown, and grey. There were some interesting ideas here. Airlines need to increase their technology to fly to lucrative foreign cities, and also to upgrade domestic cities. Players could do one action per stock certificate they had, for that company. On the whole I got the impression of designers looking to create a streamlined 18xx game, but not going in the same direction as cube rails games tend to. Players buy shares in companies, but the money goes into the bank, there was no notion of company money. It has a map of the US with airports, but no links, and you fly anywhere from anywhere, so the map doesn't lead to any spatial puzzle. The biggest frustration was that share buying occurs at face value, in turn order, with no mechanism to manipulate that turn order. That means that whoever happens to go first has first dibs on the attractive shares, while those late get dregs. There were definitely times I felt that an auction, commonly the approach used with cube rails share buying, would remove an annoying randomness. I'll also add that the production followed the style of Rio Grande's Winsome games - a dull board and some annoying information design flaws.
The game did yield some good partnership discussions, like the best cube rails games, there that nice conversation around collaborating with different partners to help common airlines. But the game also ran too long. After our two pre-plays we decided to play the stream game with four turns instead of six, and even then it felt it had run a bit long.
All in all this is a game that mixes some appealing features with significant flaws.
(Heavy Cardboard Stream)/pic6884563.jpg)
8 The Castles of Burgundy
This was my second play using the vineyards expansion, that comes with the new edition. I like that it grafts cleanly onto the base game, with no sense of a difference between it and the original mechanisms. But on the other hand, I don't think adds anything either. So I suspect it will stay in the bottom tray of that huge box, only popping out when someone is curious to try it./pic7962729.jpg)
6 Nunatak: Temple of Ice NEW!
This follows the common "take and make" approach, where we are drafting cards in order to build a tableau. But in this case the tableau these actions also build up the shared "temple of ice". As well as the usual scoring tags on the cards, we also score on how our temple pieces combine with prior and later temple pieces. The result adds a greater degree of interaction than I normally find with this genre, which certainly appeals to me./pic715611.jpg)
8 Age of Industry
I got the chance to try one of two-player maps: Great Lakes. An enjoyable and tight map, continuing my exploration of the under-rated little sister to the famous Brass./pic6886727.jpg)
4 Age of Comics: The Golden Years NEW!
I like the comic theme, and I enjoyed the comic art, but sadly the rest of game was Yet Another Forgettable Worker Placement game. It's a production based game, where you take a series of actions to publish a comic. I've enjoyed this style in Viticulture or The Gallerist, but here it fell flat. The game felt rote, with much of the play feeling rather obvious./pic178418.jpg)
8 Caylus
It feels deeply wrong that this was the first play of Caylus I've had since the pandemic. I made a couple of overly risky reaches, and Félix rightly chopped off my hand each time, leading me to a dismal last half of the game to an inevitable last place. But despite that, I much preferred playing this to the prior example of mediocre worker-placement games./pic8074402.jpg)
5 Seers Catalog NEW!
An enjoyable climbing game, with a couple of decent twists. One is that to score well you want to have just a couple of high-value cards in your hand when someone goes out. The other is a wide mix of fancy special-power cards in the mix. The trouble is, whenever I play one of these games, I just wish I had the chance to really get into one of the older climbing games (such as Zheng Shangyou) that you can play with a regular deck./pic7945692.jpg)
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9 The Quest for El Dorado
8 Cascadero x3
8 Babylonia
9 Race for the Galaxy
7 Great Western Trail: Argentina
7 Pax Porfiriana
9 Brass: Lancashire
(Grid generated by GCL Games Played Formatter. See this post for how I choose my ratings.)
- El Caballero
- Stephenson's Rocket
- Dutch InterCity
- Caylus
- Age of Industry
- Troyes
- The Castles of Burgundy
- Age of Industry Expansion: Great Lakes & South Africa
- Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
- Age of Comics: The Golden Years
- The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition
- HUANG
- 1930: The Golden Age of Airlines
- Nunatak: Temple of Ice
- Seers Catalog
Tue Sep 3, 2024 12:24 am
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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As the title of this blog indicates, I'm now in my seventh decade of life. This means I've had the opportunity to have a long experience of the boardgaming hobby. I enjoyed games from a young age, I remember playing a range of relatively mainstream games in my pre-teen years, including not just Monopoly and Cluedo (the English title for Clue) but also less well-known games Buccaneer and Escape from Colditz.
But my true encounter with hobby games really only began once I got to secondary school and met Richard, who is still a close friend. In the 70s there was no internet or BGG, Richard was well informed becuase he subscribed to Games and Puzzles a monthly magazine. With its help we discovered the top board games of that era: Diplomacy and Kingmaker.
I also started to get a gaming magazine, my choice was the American wargame magazine Strategy and Tactics. It came with a game in each issue: I particularly remember Armada and Ney vs Wellington. Much of my wargaming was two-handed solo. I enjoyed using games to learn about historic conflicts. While I've never had a problem with war as a theme for games, I did pine for some other subject. (I wonder if I still have any of these hidden away somewhere.)
Most of our gaming was cards, played before school and in the breaks. We preferred the warmth of S1 to running around in the rain. We played a lot of different games, although the range we could find about wasn't anything like what Pagat offers to us today. I remember playing a fair bit of Bezique, Canasta, and Piquet. When we fancied something silly we enjoyed Chase the Ace, often with a bewildering range of house rules. Probably the most played game was Black Maria, a variant of Hearts, sometimes in wild combinations. (I think we played with four partnerships at one point.)
Our most serious card game was Bridge. I proved to be an erratic player, prone to occasional brilliance and rather more frequent idiocy. That, together with the fact that I didn't really take it very seriously, meant I didn't land a spot on the school bridge team. I did once get to a Bridge club, and was horrified at how seriously people took it. When playing, we weren't allowed to talk, our bids had to be made by pointing on a chart. I've never had any desire to attend a bridge club since.
One issue of Games and Puzzles ranked its top ten games - after Diplomacy and Kingmaker, the #3 was this strange game called Dungeons and Dragons. We dived deep into that, playing regularly throughout secondary school. I went on to UCL in London, and there I started a D&D campaign which I DMd for a few years, before handing it over to Martin C when other commitments meant I couldn't take part any more. That campaign carried on, despite the challenges of people getting busier and several moving away from London. As time progressed, they found it harder to get together, but the campaign just managed to reach its twentieth anniversary. By then one player had started to bring along his son, who hadn't been born when we started.
D&D was an absorbing game, but required getting the whole group together for a decent chunk of time, which got harder when we were no longer students who would stay up to 2am. One weekend we went to a mostly D&D weekend in Lincolnshire and someone introduced us to Railway Rivals. This was an early "crayon rails" train game, where we built track using wipe-off markers on a hex map. It proved a great game for a couple of hours when we couldn't get the full D&D party together. I really enjoyed the route building, but was pretty hopeless at the game, reinforcing that while it was important that I tried to win, it didn't reduce my enjoyment when I didn't. Railway Rivals is seriously flawed by post-German standards, but it was a decent game for the late 80s, winning the Spiel des Jahres in 1984 (as Dampfross).
My tabletop gaming life came to firm halt in 1994 when I moved to Massachusetts. I didn't have any gaming friends in Boston, and other than occasional trips back to the UK, I didn't play games for a decade. Looking back, I missed quite the opportunity. The late 90s and early 00s featured the German revolution in board games, and although I didn't know it, there was a vibrant community in Massachusetts - indeed this is where the word "meeple" was coined. But my life was a gaming desert until Martin C visited in the mid 00s carrying a present of Settlers of Catan.
Thu Aug 15, 2024 12:58 am
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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(Grid generated by GCL Games Played Formatter. See this post for how I choose my ratings.)
I didn't play many games in June, as we took a long trip and spent our time hiking and indulging in ostentatious eating.
6 Long Shot: The Dice Game NEW!
I don't tend to like roll and writes, put off partly by their usual multiplayer solitaire but also because I just don't like playing with wipe off pens. This appealed to me a bit more, while the theme is about betting on horse races, the key is to figure out who is incentivized to tweak which other horses, and bet on them too - much in the style of a stock-holding game. I enjoyed it a fair bit, although it mostly reminded me that I'd really like to try Winners Circle again.
8 Glass Road
This continues to be one of my favorite Rosenberg designs. I enjoy figuring out what actions I want to take and how likely they are for others to take them too, figuring out which scoring tiles to build towards, and juggling the resource wheel.
6 Metro
A nifty, short tile layer, that I've owned for a long time, and really ought to get out more often. It's good to see it on BGA now, filling a useful spot for six player games. It takes a bit to get the handle on how to read the routes, but once I do, I enjoy figuring out how to place tiles to take advantage of what others need to do.
6 Alhambra
An old favorite, one of the first games we played after my return to boardgaming - and one we played a lot during lockdown as a six player game that we knew online. As such I got rather tired of it. Now I compare this to more recent "take-and-make" games: where we draft from a common pool to build a passive tableau (eg Cascadia, Azul, Sagrada). In this comparison, Alhambra comes off rather well, the multiple currencies add complication to the drafting, and the fact that tableaus battle over color majorities forces me to pay plenty of attention to what the others are doing.
6 Scholars of the South Tigris x2 NEW!
This is the first Garphill game I've tried. I liked how the action selection combined dice and color mixing - where a green action required either a rare green die or both of the common yellow and blue dice. Interaction was fairly low, but there was a nice bit of symbiotic interaction with translators. To translate a scroll I could use a translator that another player had recruited, pushing them closer to retirement, yielding points to the employing player. I enjoyed looking at the balance between translators and scrolls, with opportunities for recruiting a translator for an in-demand language, or frustration when a translator for my crucial next scroll was used and shuffled into retirement. Translating a scroll opened up some scoring criteria, so I needed to pick scrolls that I could see a translation path that would also fit in what I was most able to do for scoring.
7 Pax Porfiriana NEW!
I've long wanted to try this, the original Pax game, whose mechanisms led to a string of later games. In some ways it resembles a common style of modern board game - the massive-deck tableau builder. A huge deck of cards, only half of which are even present in most games. They appear in a market for people to draft and add to their tableaux, giving them special abilities and points. Described like that, it sounds much like Terraforming Mars, Wingspan, or Ark Nova. A Pax game feels much different, however, because there is much more player interaction. I have to time my card purchases, depending on what others might need. Many of the cards affect other players' tableaux.
I really like the way you win, instead of accumulating victory points, certain "topple" cards appear after about 1/3 of the way through the game. If I've accumulated enough tags, and the game state lines up correctly, I can buy a topple card to win the game. But the topples first appear in a very expensive slot, giving other players the opportunity to move against me, before I can afford it. All this evokes the historic theme of the Mexican revolution, where I'm faced with a chaotic and unpredictable situation. I spend much of the game building up my position, ready for the card when it comes, then moving quickly to seize the opportunity. It's sets up for a tense, and often surprising finish.
All of this makes Pax Porfiriana an appealing game, particularly to someone who likes a rich, historic theme. The downside is some pretty fiddly rules, where I'm not quite sure about the consequences of my move, not due to the uncertainty in the game, but the uncertainty in parsing the rules. My one play of the related Pax Renaissance was ruined by constant battles with the rule book. Porfiriana isn't as bad, although it helps a lot having an experienced and talented teacher at the table.
(Heavy Cardboard Playthrough)
5 Ground Floor (Second Edition) NEW!
I was happy to see this was no point salad here. Indeed I was rather amused to see that, while the game was all about building a business, victory was entirely about how many floors I built for my office. There was some fun mechanics around some of the worker-placement spots, particularly around turn-order manipulation. The game was mostly open-information, but with a dash of randomness from cards indicating whether we were in a boom, a depression, or something in-between. I liked the amount of uncertainty here, enough to add a bit of excitement, but not enough that we couldn't plan around it.
It is still, however, a worker-placement game, and thus runs into the test all such games face. Although there were some fun mechanisms, there wasn't enough to please King Louis the Fair. The theme also didn't whet my appetite enough. A couple of months ago, we played Union Stockyards, and I found its historic theme appealing. Ground Floor's anonymous business just ended up not evocative enough compared to Chicago meat packing, let alone Viticulture's wine.
(Heavy Cardboard Playthrough)
5 Next Station: Tokyo NEW!
9 Race for the Galaxy x2
5 Diced Tomatoes NEW!
3 Celestia NEW!
8 Cascadero
7 7 Wonders
7 Thurn and Taxis
4 Ankh'or NEW!
Mon Aug 5, 2024 11:08 pm
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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This was prompted from a (not particularly) recent conversation. Which games do I really like, that folks on BGG don't like so much? In my case, which games do I rate 8 or more that BGG's geek rating is less than 7. I have seven of them (at the moment).
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8 Big Boss (geek rating 5.969)
Big Boss is a game from early days of the German revolution in board games, designed by one of that revolution's early giants: Wolfgang Kramer (and explicitly inspired by the ur-Euro: Acquire). It's a rather abstract game where we build and invest in corporations represented as tiles placed on a large circle. I need to figure out which corporations other people will work to enhance, so that I can invest in them. In particular I want to invest in companies that will be bigger than their neighbors when they make contact, as they will merge, gobbling up the smaller corporation, yielding big profits to the stockholders of the large one.
Big Boss was out of print for a long time, and became pretty expensive on the second-hand market. The recent production from Funko is very well priced, and I find it a great choice as it revels in the OG style of simple game with rich interactions, playing well up to six.
8 Seize the Bean (geek rating 6.109)
This is probably the game that most frustrates me. I didn't buy it, I got it at a convention as a free kickstarter pledge. The kickstarter campaign was rocky, but when the game appeared I was entranced. Its a very thematic game about running a coffee shop in Berlin, lots of tricky strategic choices, great art, and above all a really fun vibe. I introduced it to whoever I could once I got it, but the game never got produced after the kickstarter, and is now only available at silly prices. Consequently I'm less inclined to introduce it to new players that I play with occasionally. I'd really like to have some folks to play it regularly, so we can explore its features.
8 TransAmerica (geek rating 6.422)
"Train games" run the gamut from the simplicity of Ticket to Ride to the lifestyle games of 18xx. In terms of rules, TransAmerica is down there with Ticket to Ride, but comes with a lot thought as players try to grow a shared network to connect their five cities first. It's quick to play, making it an ideal filler for anyone who enjoys a dash of route building.
8 Three Kingdoms Redux (geek rating 6.508)
This is the heaviest of this list, which will play for a crunchy few hours. It has a strong theme, if not one that will be familiar to most westerners. It's based on the "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", a piece of literature that fills a similar spot to that of Shakespeare in the Anglophone world. The game introduces some great twists on worker placement, where the player whose generals with the most points get to do the actions on the placement spot, and you have to choose when to place generals in the field to score VPs, losing the ability to use them as workers. It's a passion project from a tiny publisher, which has made it hard to get. The biggest barrier to frequent play is that it only plays with three, but is top of my list should I have that count ready to attempt to emulate Kongming.
8 Age of Industry (geek rating 6.586)
Brass is one of the most highly regarded modern board games, and when forced to rank, it's the one I put on top. Age of Industry was Martin Wallace's development of the original Brass Lancashire to streamline the system and open it up to expansions via new maps. Gamers I encountered in the mid 2010s told me that the streamlining had blighted the game, and the effort ran out of steam as Roxley published Brass Birmingham. I tried Age of Industry for myself in the last couple of years and found that, while it's not quite as good as the Brasses, it's still an excellent game. I've managed to get my hands on all the maps, and have enjoyed the twists they give to the system. It increased my desire to see much more effort into expanding the Brass family.
8 Babylonia (geek rating 6.749)
In recent years, Reiner Knizia's "reinerssance" has birthed several games that stand equal to his great run at the turn of the century. Babylonia is a tile-laying game that's fully fits Knizia's genius in creating games with few rules and lots of depth. When I first played it, its excellent gameplay was impeded by some production issues, but once they were fixed I was eager to pick up a copy. It's hard to compare a recent game like to his well-loved tile-laying classics from the 1990s, which have stood the test of time. But I suspect that as more players run into it, Babylonia will be seen as fit to share their company.
8 Medici (geek rating 6.822)
The second Knizia game on this list, this one from his first golden era. Although it isn't rated quite as high Ra or Modern Art, it deserves its place as one of his classic auction trio. I find it the most pure of his auction games, focused firmly on valuing the various lots that are offered. As with the first game on this list, it also shines with six players, and is thus a game that always jumps to my mind when we have an hour or so with that count.
(I gathered the BGG geek ratings for this post on Jul 30)
Wed Jul 31, 2024 3:23 am
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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7 On Mars
5 Civolution
Among my plays in May were two heavy Euros: Civolution and On Mars. I found the contrast between them interesting enough to be worth breaking out from my regular Plays in May post. (The title is partly inspired by while writing this, "Civolution" got auto-corrected to "Convolution".)
I should stress this post is only a first impression, as they are both Euros with a high rules-complexity, and I only played them once. Thus any comments I have are especially tentative, since high rules-complexity games usually leave me somewhat swamped on first play. Usually by the second game, providing it's played within a week or so, I can grasp how things fit together. But I didn't get the chance to do that with these games. (I had played On Mars before, but it was nearly two years ago, I almost entirely forgot it.)
Both of these games have a civ-building feel to them. You expand your presence over a map, in contention with the other players. You need resources to do this expansion, and expansion can be made easier by using technologies. I particularly like games with a spatial component, so the map maneuvering on games like this always appeals to me. Both games did this well, although I preferred the subtleties of way things get built and rewarded with On Mars.
Neither of these games had an interesting tech-tree, which is a common civ-mechanism. Civolution's were mainly simple rule-breakers. On Mars had the interesting aspect that you could use other people's technologies, providing a light sprinkle of symbiotic interaction. But neither had the kind of decisions that we usually find with tech-trees.
Civolution has a dice driven action selection mechanism, where two dice indicate which actions I can do based on a two-dimensional grid, but I can use resources to tweak die rolls if needed. On Mars has a simpler worker-placement approach, with actions made more expensive if others take them first. It also has a nifty wrinkle in that different actions are available if in orbit or on the surface, and I have to manage how I move between the two zones.
Like most Lacerda games, On Mars has a rich theme, so that every rule feels like it's inspired by the context of Martian settlement. Civolution's theme is weaker, the broad civ-aspects are there, but it's significantly more superficial. The setting is also a fantasy setting, even more so than a Martian one. Like most fantasy themes, it hasn't got any familiar references to build on, needing to do all its world-building from scratch. (The only way around this is to use an existing fantasy world, but these usually involve awkward intellectual property deals.) On the whole, I'm indifferent to fantasy and sci-fi themes, so Civolution left me cold. On Mars, despite being sci-fi, didn't seem like a huge stretch from reality, so appealed to me much more. It was more in the reasonable-extrapolation-of-technology end of sci-fi, rather than a fantastical space-opera.
Both games provide a plethora of ways to score points. Feld's games are particularly well-known for this form of point salad ("So, why are you hating me? Don't you love points?") I've observed that the more ways I have to score points, I feel less focus in the game. So I wasn't surprised by a feeling of resignation with Civolution, a sense of everything scores points, so what are we trying to do? With On Mars, the points scoring was layered on top of the progress of play, with variable setup tweaking the points for different actions. I spent this first game doing things that seemed useful, but I was very much aware that there was a whole other level of play where I would understand which useful things would score me the most points, and that I should maximize that. Sadly that victory point optimization didn't seem to fit in with Martian settlement, which undercut the strength of the theme. The result was a lack of focus that isn't present in my two familiar Lacerda games (Gallerist and Lisboa).
While the rules complexity of Lacerda's games, means I don't have a clear view of their mechanisms in my first game, I always have a sense of that I'm looking at an intricate and interesting clockwork mechansim, with parts interconnected in subtle ways. One of the appeals of Lacerda's games is the promise that I'll enjoy exploring this clockwork in later games. Feld's games usually also sport an interesting set of mechanisms, which is why I enjoy his games, but at a more medium complexity level that I can appreciate during the first play. Playing Civolutions however, I didn't get the feeling that he'd scaled up the mechanics of the game into the kind of intricate clockwork that a game of this complexity level needs, leaving me unenthused about exploring it further.
As I said earlier, to give a decent picture of these games, I need to play at least once more, preferably several times more. I reckon I need at least half-a-dozen plays within a couple of months - and I don't think I can get a group together to do that. That's the fundamental barrier for me with high rules-complexity games like these two.
But what I can do is indicate how eager I would be to play either of these games to that degree, and here there is a big difference. Like most Lacerda games, the theme and clockwork way the mechanisms fit together make me want to dig into On Mars more, the lack of these means I put Civolution much lower on a list for further exploration.
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin FowlerUnited States
Melrose
Massachusetts
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(Grid generated by GCL Games Played Formatter. See this post for how I choose my ratings.)
5 World Wonders
I tried this game back in December, and found it a fine game. Each round we are offered a range of polyomino pieces to buy and place on our personal boards. The most interesting of these are the wonders that score significant points depending on how they are placed with the others. It's a fine example of personal tile laying, but doesn't excite me more than Alhambra does. The expansion adds more wonders, which is useful as without them the wonders can run out in a higher player-count game, making the market rather less interesting.
7 Union Stockyards x2
This is the kind of medium-weight worker-placement game that gives me the same frown as King Philip the Fair. Union Stockyards, however, mostly avoids this fate due its tight theme and a couple of interesting mechanisms. The theme is that of Chicago stockyards in the late 1800s, and that really comes through in the game. Every action makes thematic sense, so I get a real feeling of deciding whether I should invest my time in an advertising campaign or opening a soap factory. I have to decide which animals I can best make use of, gauging how my, and the other players', actions will affect their prices. The theme makes it easy to understand what my possible actions are and how they will impact the game. This thematic-medium-weight style gives it a similar appeal as Viticulture or Obsession, but with an important difference: Union Stockyard has much less randomness.
If that's the overall feel, I should touch on the two mechanisms I liked. Firstly the market, which looks initially like three boring "temple tracks" (for cattle, pigs, and sheep). What makes them interesting is that as the players push up the track, the floor of the track moves up and down depending on how often the players cash in on the track. If everyone sells pig products this round, then the price of pigs for slaughter goes up, reducing our profits for pigs next round. It's great to juggle these three tracks.
The second mechanism comes in the common grid of squares where we build polyomino buildings. In most games we pay for a building and fit it on the grid, but here we also get the option of buying a six-square parcel of land for $2. If you build on unowned land you pay the bank $1 per square, you don't pay anything for building on your own land, and others pay you if they build on your land. So there's a great opportunity to indulge in land speculation to save or make money on the grid.
One concern I have is how well this plays at 3. That was the count for our first game and it felt rather loose. It seemed to play much better on the stream with 4: how much that was due to a tighter board and how much due to better understanding of the game, I don't know.
(Heavy Cardboard Stream)
10 Age of Steam x2
Two maps this month. England from Volume IV of the deluxe edition. Despite appearing in this form just a few months ago, this is an old map - it was (together with Ireland) in the first ever expansion for Age of Steam. I've also heard this map referred to as "England and Wales" and "Southern England". It doesn't have much in the way of special rules, and was designed to be a map to expand the player count for 5 or 6 players. The thing that most struck me about the map was that everything seemed far apart, making it difficult to do early deliveries. During the first two rounds I made two single point deliveries, which is two more than I made in my previous dozen games. The lack of special rules didn't reduce the enjoyment of the map, the position of the cities and the long distances meant there was plenty of action to play for. It's a solid choice for when you have a larger player count and is great choice for new players.(Heavy Cardboard Stream)
The title "Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico" is way too long for an Age of Steam Map (part of Volume II). We decided it really ought to called "Age of Cows", since its central feature is scattering cow cubes on the map to be delivered to border cities. I liked the twist of these cow cubes and the interesting special actions they added to the game. I started out intending to ignore them as I laid plans for regular deliveries, but once I was blocked in Dallas, I did a bovine pivot to eventual success. We played 5 player, which I would rate as comfortable (i.e. like Rust Belt at 4), so I think this would be a good 6 player map too. This was also designed as a beginner-friendly map, as it has lots of cubes to deliver.
4 Skyrise
I originally played Skyrise on stream, just over a year ago. This time we played the retail version, which to my mind is much nicer than the deluxe. This is one of those games with some features I really like, undermined by other features that I really dislike. What I like is the interplay of bidding and spatial tactics. Each player has buildings that are ranked into unique numbers. I place a building on a region, but may be outbid by another player placing a higher ranked building into an adjacent region, which may be outbid by a building in a region adjacent to that one. Once everyone passes, the winner builds in that region and everyone else gets their losing bids back. Scoring is for area majorities, regions of a particular color, and various other bibs and bobs. I'm fascinated by the way bids move across the board, changing the value of the auction as the adjacent regions change.
What I dislike is the ergonomics that make it hard to see what's going on. We use the same tokens for the building and the bids, which often means I think a region is already built, and thus blocks a neighbor, when it's only a transient bid. The connections between the regions are often hard to make out, which obscures a vital piece of information.
I think I'd really like this game if it was physically redesigned to improve its ergonomics.
4 Arcs
I wrote in detail about my thoughts in this post. In short, I was really taken with several mechanisms in the game, but overall I don't like space-battle games.
10 Dominion
Guilds and Cornucopia expansion. Dominion is one of my favorite games, although rather less popular among the game group. It's a somewhat oddity for my likes, as it's not exactly a high-interaction game. But it usually plays quickly, and I like the puzzle of trying to sort out a decent engine from the bunch of parts in the kingdom cards. As with all the Dominion expansions that I've tried, this adds plenty of interesting twists to the base system, and I would certainly get hold of this if I ever found a regular Dominion group to play with.
(Heavy Cardboard Stream)
9 Keyflower
Had we been keeping score, I suspect the Glory to Rome counter would have overflowed as it showed its usual capacity for plans to be damaged with every bid and worker placement activated. It was capped off with a snipe on the last play sending one player's score crashing from 59 to 19.
5 Hansa Teutonica
Finally got to play this with a decent teach. I always like a game that's played on a map, and I enjoyed that there's lots of interaction here. There's lots of opportunity to place cubes in such a way that opponents are forced to help you, and I can glimpse lots of the mechanisms that would be enjoyable to get decent at manipulating. However there's lots of different ways to score, leading to the kind of diffuse game structure that doesn't excite me. The theme is also minimal, at best, if not downright misaligned to the game play.
8 Cascadero x2
I played this twice during HeavyCon, and I'm left with one persistent question: is this a very good Knizia or is this a Great Knizia? Like all great Knizias the rules are simple, but there's lots to think about in the game play. The game plays on two boards, one is tile laying on an abstract map. Placing next to a city allows you to advance up the scoring track of that city's color (there are five colors). At this point my temple-track alarm bells were ringing, but Knizia has pulled off the improbable - scoring tracks that are interesting! The tracks interact directly with the tile laying map, so that you have to plan your tile lays, to trigger the effects you want from the tracks, which may combo back into your tile lays. It's a fascinating back-and-forth.
7 Québec
A great Hidden Gem, with a feel that makes me think of Knizia at his best. It's a tricky game to describe in a few words, a innovative twist on area control, where not just is there an intriguing sequence of actions to fill the areas, but also winning one area helps you with the next one in scoring sequence. No longer in print, but slated for a reprint this year. The old board is hard to follow, so I'm hoping for a good redesign.
7 Great Western Trail: Argentina
With this variation on GWT, I liked how the railway shifted from a way to deliver cattle, to a way of shortening the loop. I'm not sure how I felt about the grain farmers, it meant adding another resource and employee type, but I did like how the new shipping mechanism worked. All in all the variation from base GWT seemed much less than the variation that came from New Zealand, and I can see why many would say it isn't different enough, given that it's a full game rather than a variant map. Chatter on the forums suggests that it makes it more reasonable to use mixes of employees, rather than the single-employee strategies that dominate the base game. I'm not experienced enough in GWT to know if that's true, but it's an appealing notion.
Right now I'm increasingly thinking I'd like to get one of the GWTs. The game is pretty well-known and liked by the local group, so it has decent chance of tabling when I'm acting as backup HCHQ. I enjoy it, and would like to play it more. The question is which one? Right now I'm leaning to Argentina as it's not as big a change as NZ but is different enough to appeal yet disconcert those who are more familiar with base GWT. But it's a couple of months before I'll need to decide.
4 Boonlake
I wanted to try this since I got it as a give-away last year, but haven't cracked the shrink on it yet. Sadly we didn't get a chance to finish it, as it fell foul of the end of day and slow service in the bar due to some sportsball tournament. Based on the half-game we played, I did like the action selection mechanism. It was a good blend of the shared action rondel of Shipyard and the Puerto Rico approach where I select and action that everyone does, but I do with a bonus. I also liked the resource provision mechanism where you have two boats that you maneuver onto landings to get the resources you need: easily when going downstream, but you have to pay to go upstream. But like so many games, the clever action selection mechanism drove a game that didn't have a meaningful focus. There was no equivalent to the cattle-drive setting that made GWT such a hit.
6 MLEM: Space Agency
Fun push-your-luck game from Knizia. Everybody puts a cat onto a space ship that then moves up a map propelled by dice rolls. At each stop you can choose to get off, or push your luck for a more valuable planet or moon. The cats-in-space theme perfectly suits the silly-but-fun nature of the game, which does involve just enough decisions to mean that it isn't entirely a luck-fest. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of thing but this does it well, and I could imagine this being very appealing in the right context.
7 On Mars
5 Civolution
I have more first thoughts contrasting these games in another post.
8 The Great Zimbabwe
4 Ohanami
5 Ark Nova
8 Age of Industry
- Age of Steam
- Alhambra
- Age of Steam Expansion #1: England & Ireland
- Dominion
- Hansa Teutonica
- Québec
- The Great Zimbabwe
- Keyflower
- Viticulture Essential Edition
- Great Western Trail
- Obsession
- Skyrise
- Boonlake
- Union Stockyards
- Arcs
- Great Western Trail: Argentina
- World Wonders
- MLEM: Space Agency
- Cascadero
Mon Jun 3, 2024 5:47 pm
- [+] Dice rolls
