→ December 1, 2015
→ By

Steam: Rails to Riches app.

Steam: Rails to Riches was itself a reimplementation of an earlier game, Age of Steam, both by designer Martin Wallace, the man behind the game Brass … which, like Steam, was also just adapted as a an app for tablets. The Steam: R2R iPad app (no Android version available) had an early bug issue to work out, so I played and reviewed Brass first and tried Steam last week. Like Brass, it’s a solid implementation if you already know the game, but the AI players could use some work and the tutorial isn’t very thorough. Unlike Brass, Steam still has a few glitches to work out, particularly if you change your mind while doing something on the screen.

Steam: Rails to Riches (just “Steam” from here on out) came out in 2009, shortly after the release of the third edition of Age of Steam, cleaning up some flaws in the first game’s mechanics and starting what appears to be a long debate over which version of the game is superior. Since Steam is the one we have in app form and I’ve never played or even seen Age of Steam, I’m going to pretend that debate doesn’t even exist and will focus on the app.

Steam is a train game, but rather than just connecting cities and building routes as in Ticket to Ride, Steam players have to raise funds, lay tracks, and then ship goods along the tracks they’ve laid (and sometimes tracks opponents have laid) to earn either recurring income or one-time victory point bonuses. The base game’s map covers the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, with various cities already placed on the map as stations with cubes representing the different types of goods in five colors.

For each round – the number of turns varies with the number of players – there’s an auction to determine the turn order, which also determines which special ability or benefit each player gets in that round, which can include the ability to turn a town (marked on the board) into a full-fledged station, to add goods to a city on the board, or to increase the player’s locomotive power, which determines how far that player can ship a goods cube. After the bidding ends, each player gets three actions: one to build tracks, and two to ship goods. Each player can use a shipping action to upgrade his/her locomotive power. Each stop on a track – a station or a non-upgraded town – counts as one segment, and a player can only ship a goods cube along a number of segments equal to or less than his locomotive power. The maximum locomotive power is six, so obviously getting to that mark and then shipping as many goods as you can along six-segment paths of your own tracks is the optimal strategy. You can ship a good along another player’s track segment, but that player gets the bonus point or boost to recurring income.


Once upon a time there was an engineer…

Of course, building those perfect routes is difficult with other players chasing the same goal and frequently blocking your path or stealin’ your goods. The AI players in the Steam app are good enough to teach you the game, as they all tend to build delivery loops – tracks that appear to be convoluted but provide 5- and 6-point plays for shipping cubes. (There’s no reward for efficiency here; if anything, inefficient delivery networks are key to racking up points.) But they’re often not aggressive enough in bidding for turn order, and they appear to struggle with creating enough options for big-point deliveries in the final round or two. I went from having never played the game to consistently beating the best AI options in 3- and 4-player matches – only by a few points each time, but never losing, even once in a game where I accidentally borrowed $0 in round 2 (which meant I could do almost nothing that entire round).

That’s the main issue with the app, but not the only one. The tutorial is too simple and probably wouldn’t suffice to teach anyone the game if s/he hasn’t played it before; I didn’t understand the rule around building through undeveloped towns (and how that could be beneficial – it adds a segment to a line between two cities). Turning a track tile to orient it properly is a little more finicky than it should be, and the app itself often “guesses” wrong with its initial orientation after you drag a tile on to the desired space. I also ran into frequent graphics glitches if I started to drag and drop a track hex from the array at the bottom of the screen to the map, but changed my mind and tried to return it – the image would remain in the middle of the screen unless I backed up to the main menu and resumed the game. The app also will let you take the City Growth action even if there are no more cubes to add to cities on the board, which makes it a wasted move. Tightening up the AI players should be the top priority, but I’d like to see these other hiccups addressed before fully recommending the app for solo play.

—

There’s a new, free, official Dominion app available today for iOS and Android tablets, but the early comments on Boardgamegeek’s post are overwhelmingly negative. It doesn’t seem to work well, and in-app purchases of expansion decks are $15 a pop. I love Dominion, but this sounds like a pass for now.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 30, 2015
→ By

Cyber Monday boardgame deals.

Here’s what I’ve found on amazon so far – feel free to list other deals you’ve found in the comments:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 27, 2015
→ By

Boardgame app sales and Thanksgiving post mortem.

Eric Longenhagen and I have a too-early top 30 ranking for the 2016 MLB draft up for Insiders. Paste posted my review of the boardgame Cacao on Wednesday; it’s a big hit around here as the rules are pretty easy to pick up but there’s still some strategy involved. I posted my annual list of recommended cookbooks here on Monday.

Many of the best boardgame apps are on sale this weekend; I haven’t updated my rankings since last January but will do so around the holidays. In the meantime, here’s the ones that are on sale, starting with my favorite and working down in rough order:

1. Carcassonne: $6.99 for iOS, $2.49 for Android.

2. Agricola: $2.99 for iOS.

3. Caylus: $2.99 for iOS.

4. Galaxy Trucker: $2.99 for iOS or
Android.

5. Pandemic: $4.99 for iOS.

6. Elder Sign: $0.99 for iOS or Android.

7. Lost Cities: $2.99 for iOS.

8. Hey, That’s My Fish: $0.99 for iOS or Android

9. Steam: Rails to Riches: Brand new app, $2.99 for iOS. I’ve played it three times, and so far I’m enjoying it.

10. Lords of Waterdeep: $2.99 for iOS.

11. Kingdom Builder: $1.99 for iOS or Android. I haven’t played this one yet.

–

A little post mortem on yesterday’s Thanksgiving feast, which went pretty well overall.

Today's menu. Have a safe and highly caloric Thanksgiving, everyone.

A photo posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

With three guests who are gluten-free, I had to tweak the menu in a few ways, thickening the gravy with tapioca starch, for example, and making the cornbread with gluten-free flour. The chocolate tart was also gluten-free (recipe from Bon Appetit, includes a small amount of wheat flour which I swapped out), and was one of the two biggest hits of the day, along with the carrot soup, which came from Hugh Acheson’s must-have cookbook The Broad Fork. The beet dish gave me some trouble as roasting them for an hour still didn’t make them soft enough to smash as I’d intended.

Spatchcocking and salting (“dry brining”) the turkey was a huge success, and I’ll cook the bird that way for the foreseeable future. It definitely created crispier skin and juicier meat, and the whole 16.66-pound bird cooked in about 90 minutes. I pulled the bird when the breasts registered 152; the tenderloins were a touch less cooked than I’d have liked, but everything else was cooked perfectly. I now also have a backbone and neck to use to make stock, as well as the remains of the carcass, and a lot of leftovers.

As for the dish that must not be named, I used Alton Brown’s master recipe to make it 1) less gross and gloppy and 2) gluten-free, as condensed mushroom soup often has wheat flour as a thickener. I also fried the onions with rice flour, although I think I needed to crank up the oil’s temp to something higher than 350 to get them to brown faster and thus absorb less grease. (Sitting them overnight on paper towels took a lot of oil off them.) It was fine for a first attempt but that dish clearly needs work, since it’s demanded by several family members even though I think it’s a cruel thing to do to vegetables.

I hope all of you had a safe and happy Thanksgiving. I’ll be back Saturday with a links post and on regular duty again starting Monday, by which point I hope we’ll get some signings and/or larger trades to discuss.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ November 24, 2015
→ By

Le Havre the Inland Port app.

The new app version of Le Havre: The Inland Port (for iOS) – itself a two-player adaptation of the highly complex strategy game Le Havre – is a beautiful port of a boring game. That’s probably enough to keep most of you from reading a long review, so here’s a short one instead. (And if you’re looking for a good new two-player game, try 7 Wonders Duel instead.)

The boardgame version of Le Havre The Inland Port takes the theme of the original game and creates a much simpler two-player experience, where a stream of buildings, advancing in cost and productivity/value, comes up for sale in the central market, and players must balance gaining resources from buildings that they’ve already built (you can use yours or an opponent’s, paying one coin for the latter) against buying new buildings to add victory points and go for two game-end bonuses. The buildings are the same in every game and even the order in which they appear for sale doesn’t vary much at all.

Resource production/acquisition is the strangest part of the game, a peculiar mechanic that seems to be peculiar for its own sake. You don’t just get, say, 2 wood or 1 bread, but you move your four resource tokens (wood, coal, bread, fish) on a numbered array, going up a row (plus 3), right one space (plus one), up and to the left diagonally (plus 2), and rarely up and to the right diagonally (plus 4). When you spend resources, you can spend in combinations of 1, 3, and 4, which means sometimes you have to pay an extra unit or two, for no reason other than that’s how the game was designed.

Most buildings bring you new resources, showing an arrow in one resource’s color, with the arrow telling you in which direction to move. When you buy a building, it goes in the zero column of the main board, and each “day” of the game that you don’t use it, it moves one column to the right, with the columns numbered 2, 3, 4, and 4+. The number tells you how many times you can invoke the building’s capability – for example, if the building with the brown arrow pointing to the right is on the 3 column, you can use it, moving your wood (brown) token three spaces to the right, then returning the building to column 0. The + symbol in the last column gives you one coin in addition to the building’s regular function, and if you don’t use that building before the end of the current day, it’s sold back to the bank for half the face value (which you get).

There are five special buildings that can award bonuses at game-end. There’s one “anchor” building for each resource that gives you one point per unit of that resource that you have on hand when the game is over. A fifth building, the dock, costs 7 coins to build (but no resources), and gives you ten points for each of those other four anchor buildings.

Because turn order is determined from the start, the player who goes second will get the first shot to buy the Dock when it appears on Day 12, the last Day of the game. So if s/he plans properly, s/he gets an automatic ten-point bonus – the dock plus one of the two anchor buildings that show up in day 12. (The other two appear in day 11.) That gives the game a deterministic feel, and I found after two or three plays I felt like this guy:

As for the app itself, it looks great, with bright colors, clear graphics, and a thorough tutorial. The AI has five levels of difficulty, but I beat the medium player the first time through, and took down the hard AI player (named Pascal … of course) after two or three tries. I hope the developers choose a better game to port next time out, because their work is good, but this title just wasn’t worth their efforts.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 20, 2015
→ By

Brass app.

Many of you already have the Ticket to Ride app (for iOS devices or for Android), but if not, it’s been overhauled now, with better graphics, some more board-specific AI players, and an all-in-one in-app purchase that gets you all of the various maps beyond the core U.S. map – Europe, Asia, India, Switzerland – in one purchase. It was already a must-have but it’s even better now.

–

Brass is one of the highest-ranked games on Boardgamegeek (#17 overall right now) that I’ve never tried; it was out of print for a while (it’s in print now, $44 new on amazon) and lists a playing time of 2-3 hours, which, since I’m a parent of a fourth grader, isn’t terribly practical right now. (The need to review such games for Paste is why I’ve put out the call for folks in my general area willing to test out some of these longer games with me.) The game, perhaps the best-regarded of all “economic engine” games – where you’re building for immediate points and creating a network that will help you generate more points as the game unfolds – was ripe for an adaptation that speeds setup and does all of the calculations of costs and points for you. Over a year in development, the app finally hit the various online stores last week, and it’s extremely well done if you’re looking for an online experience, but the tutorial is too light and the AI players proved very easy for me, a total novice, to beat. This review covers the iOS version, but it’s also available for Android devices. (There’s an entry for the Android app on amazon, but it’s a fake.)

Players in Brass play 16 turns in two phases set in the Industrial Revolution in England, with the second phase coming after the advent of railroads. Players build four buildings that can produce income as well as points – ports, cotton mills, coal mines, iron works – and must “activate” them by connecting them to networks of canals or rail lines to begin generating revenues. A fifth building, the shipyard, only generates victory points. The exact income and points depend on the “level” you build; you must develop each building type individually over the course of the game to keep up with the times and your opponents. Money is scarce early in the game, but Brass allows players to take loans – as far as I can tell, you can’t get anywhere without it – of up to £30 if you pay 10% interest every turn for the remainder of the game.


In 19th century England, tiny hills were totally impassable.

On each turn, the player gets two actions, choosing from building, developing, taking a loan, shipping cotton (from your own mill to any player’s port), or building a canal/rail link. Players have hands of up to eight cards, with cards showing either one of the towns on the map where players can build or a specific building type; to build, you must discard a card that shows either the town where you want to place the building or that building type, then pay the cost – but in many cases you must also meet another requirement, like having a link to your network or being able to get coal to the building site. You then activate a building by using it – shipping cotton from the mill, shipping it out of a port, providing coal to the network all at once or one bit at a time as you build within the network, or sending a bunch of iron to the market. (Shipyards are activated automatically when built.) Each town allows specific building types; in phase one, you can only have one building in each location, but that’s lifted for phase two. At the end of phase one, all level-one (undeveloped) buildings and all canals disappear; in phase two, you can only build level-two or higher buildings, and can only build rail lines. The AI player always uses its first move of the game to develop ports to level two, so I have adopted the same plan, as it ensures that those ports provide a greater return and stay in place for the remainder of the game. Turn order changes each turn, going in reverse order of spending from the previous turn – if you spent nothing last turn, such as by taking loans with each action, you’ll go first next time around.

Games on the app take about 10-15 minutes, on par with other complex strategy games like Agricola and Caylus. The graphics are clear and bright, the map itself is attractive, and the animations (if you use them) are helpful while you’re learning the game. There are pop-up menus from the sides that can give you all the information you need once you understand what you’re looking for, and I only encountered very minor glitches, such as the app telling me I could ship cotton on some turns when I didn’t have an unactivated cotton mill from which to ship.

The tutorial was a little superficial and didn’t get into some of the details of interactions between buildings or point scoring, so I didn’t understand anything but the basic mechanics and had to learn a lot of the game’s restrictions on building via trial and error. I’ve also found that, once I understood the game, I could beat the AI players every time, even playing against three at once, primarily because they never build shipyards. A level two shipyard is worth 18 points, and there are only three spots on the board where you can build one; with winning scores typically around 100-110, if you build two shipyards, you’re going to win. I haven’t lost any game where I built even one shipyard, in fact. (It also seems to me that there should be at least one shipyard space per player.) I’ve swapped emails with the developers and there will be improved AI players in a later update.

The game itself is very elegant, with a small number of rules and options leading to complex strategic decisions, but has virtually no interaction between players. I found after a few plays that I could simply skip the animations of AI players’ moves and play my own game as if I were going solo. There are rare conflicts over building spaces on the board, and there’s a brief race each phase to ship cotton before the export market’s bottom falls out (which it does, quickly), but otherwise that’s it. The fact that AI players don’t build shipyards means I can wait till the last phase to do so, and even ignoring that, the AI players’ moves didn’t otherwise affect me. You can use anyone’s canals or rail lines, and even ship cotton from someone else’s ports. If you need coal to finish a building, you can take from someone else’s unactivated coal mine; the worst thing that happens is that you take its last piece and activate the mine for your opponent, but that was probably going to happen at some point anyway.

If the designers of Brass – who have had some great blog posts on the process, like explaining their improved method of displaying victory points – improve the AI players, this could be a must-buy for serious boardgamers along the lines of Caylus and Agricola, both of which have AI players that are at least tougher for the novice player. I’d also like to see a tutorial that explains more of the details of building and scoring, so that newbies wouldn’t have to fly so blind for their first few games. But it looks great and plays cleanly, two of the biggest hurdles for new apps that try to implement games of this size and complexity.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 12, 2015
→ By

Top 80 boardgames.

This is now the eighth iteration of my own personal boardgame rankings, a list that’s now up to 80 titles, up twenty this time from last year’s list. It’s not intended to be a critic’s list or an analytical take on the games; it’s about 80% based on how much we enjoy the games, with everything else – packaging and design, simplicity of rules, and in one case, the game’s importance within its niche – making up the rest.

I don’t mind a complex game, but I prefer games that offer more with less – there is an elegance in simple rules or mechanics that lead to a fun, competitive game. Don’t expect this to line up with the rankings at BoardGameGeek, where there’s something of a bias toward more complex games, which is fine but doesn’t line up perfectly with my own tastes.

I’ve expanded the list to include several games I have only played via iOS app implementations, rather than physical copies. As always, clicking on the game title takes you to amazon.com; if I have a full review posted here or on Paste magazine’s site, the link to that will follow immediately. I’ve linked to app reviews where appropriate too. I’ve got most of these games in my aStore on amazon as well, unless they’re totally out of print.

I’ve added a list of titles at the end that I have played at least once but not enough to offer a review of them or rank them. Many of those will appear on a future list once I get to play them more – I might update this list in a few weeks as we keep playing, as I’ve got a pretty long list of games to try out.

Finally, as with last year’s list, you’ll find a complexity grade to the end of each review, low/medium/high, to make it easier for you to jump around and see what games might appeal to you. I don’t think there’s better or worse complexity, just different levels for different kinds of players. My wife prefers medium; I’m somewhere between medium and high. This isn’t like ordering a filet and asking for it well done.

80. XCOM: The Board Game. Full review. A moderately successful adaptation of a wildly successful cooperative videogame, where players work to protect the planet against a massive alien invasion, facing multiple types of mounting threats as the game advances. Comes with a free app that helps run the game session. I just found the game a bit too complicated no matter how many players we had. Complexity: Medium-high.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 10, 2015
→ By

King of Tokyo.

I’ve owned the great, silly family boardgame King of Tokyo for over a year, but we always seemed to overlook it for other games I needed to review for Paste* or in favor of a longtime favorite of my daughter’s (like Splendor). We broke it out this weekend, however, and after a few more plays I can give it a fair review: It’s awesome, one of the best games we own that’s not just suitable for her to play (she’s nine), but which she can fully understand without making us feel like we’re playing something dumbed down for the kids.

* My latest review for them covers the app version of Camel Up; I have a review of the new edition of Mission: Red Planet coming up next week.

Designed by Magic: the Gathering creator Richard Garfield, King of Tokyo does have one major difference from most of the games I review here and for Paste: Players can be eliminated, and in fact one of the two victory conditions is to be the last player standing. That doesn’t always go over well with the young ‘un, especially since an eliminated player might have to sit around (or go watch Littlest Pet Shop) and wait for the game to finish. There’s also a way to win without elimination, just by becoming the first player to reach 20 victory points, which in our experience was the more common outcome.

Players in King of Tokyo – not to be confused with our variant, King of Totoro, or the perpetually-hungry King of Town – represent monsters fighting for control of Tokyo. Each player begins the game with 10 health points and zero victory points. Only one monster can control Tokyo at any given time, and once there, s/he becomes the target of attacks by all other players – and can, in turn, attack everyone else at once. Each player rolls six dice on his/her turn, which can result in combinations of points, healing, attacks, or energy cubes which become currency with which to purchase cards that grant additional powers or points. The dice have six sides: 1, 2, 3, attack (a paw mark), energy, or healing (a heart). On a turn, the player rolls all six, then may reroll one or more of the dice, and reroll one more time before settling on the six results. If the player gets at least three dice showing the same number on its face, s/he earns one victory point per die – so anywhere from three to six points on the turn. An attack die takes a health point away from an opponent: if you’re in Tokyo, all your opponents lose a health point, whereas if you’re not in Tokyo, the player who is loses a health point. Each heart you roll gets you back one health point, but only if you’re not in Tokyo.

If you’re in Tokyo and are sick and tired of those monsters attacking you, you can choose to cede Tokyo to any attacking monster right after you’ve been hit. But if you stick it out, you get two victory points for every one of your turns you begin in the city of Tokyo. Any player who moves into Tokyo gains one victory point for doing so, including the first player to occupy the city by rolling the first attack (paw) of the game. In games with five or six players, the second Tokyo space, for Tokyo Bay, also enters play, so two players can occupy the city at once, and their attacks on other players don’t affect each other.

The key to the game is the cards, unless someone has exceptionally good luck early with dice rolls. Cards can cost two to eight energy cubes, with three on the market at any given time, and offer all kinds of benefits – altering game rules, dealing quick damage to opponents, and so on. The right card or two can sway the balance of the game toward you … until someone else plays another card and sways it back. Some cards introduce additional elements to the game, such as “poison” tokens (the victim loses a health point per turn until s/he uses a heart die to remove it) or the Mimic card (which can copy any card any other player has in play, with a cost of one energy cube to change the target card at any time). It adds some complexity and strategy to the game so that it’s not quite so dice-dependent, but still has a random element from the huge deck of cards from which you’ll likely only see a handful during the game.

The game plays two to six, although we’ve found playing with two doesn’t work very well, with a recommended age range from eight years old up, which is in our experience quite fair, and would even be fine for gameplayers under eight if they can handle something like Ticket to Ride. A full game with the three of us lasts 20-25 minutes; I would guess a game of six players would take longer than the 30 minute time suggested on the box, but maybe with that many players you’re just beating the tar out of each other early and reducing the player count. It’s a must for any collection where the typical game group includes a mix of kids and grown-ups, and maybe even without the kids if the grown-ups like to drink and play.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ June 26, 2015
→ By

Bruges.

My latest game review for Paste covers the must-own reissue of Tigris and Euphrates, Reiner Knizia’s best game, now back in print in a beautiful new edition. You can get it buy it from amazon for about $45 (or about £39).

The 2013 boardgame Bruges is one of the more successful titles in the new subgenre that I think was at least launched by the success of Agricola – games where you can deploy cards from a very large deck in certain combinations to maximize your abilities to do more things and/or score more points. Each individual card gives you some special ability – one-time, once per round, or throughout the game – and most cards then give you an incentive to acquire certain other cards or types of cards. In Bruges, you don’t have to know the deck that well to play it effectively, and you don’t have the gating factor of Agricola or Le Havre where you must feed your family every round or lose points, so it’s lightweight relative to many games in the genre. It’s also long enough for you to build something and have a real strategy that plays out before the final round, unlike Elysium, which combines card-stacking with set collection in a game that is over before you can get anything going. So it’s good, but not groundbreaking – a solid implementation of a popular mechanic, yet nothing particularly novel.

In Bruges, players are local merchants or nobles who are trying to do a couple of not entirely connected things to score points. Each player has two five-segment canals to try to build over the course of the game, scoring three points for a canal that has three completed segments and earning a statue worth two to seven points for a canal that is fully completed. Players also can buy their way up the reputation track, which is worth one to twelve points at game-end depending on the player’s progress. And, most central to the game, players build houses in front of them, each of which can then hold a “recruited” artisan – a card whose powers are then available to the player. Each house is worth a point at game-end; each artisan is worth 1-4 points at game-end. There are also bonuses of four points available to any player who ends a round leading the other players in canal segments completed, number of artisans recruited, or reputation points. Once you earn one of those bonuses, it’s yours for the rest of the game even if some other player passes you. It’s a little weird.

Bruges has three types of payment for all of this stuff. Cards come in five colors, and to build a canal segment, you must discard a card in that space’s color and pay from one to five guilders (coins). To build a house, you lay a card face-down and discard one of the little worker meeples in that card’s color. (You start the game with five meeples, one per color, and can acquire more as the game goes on.) To recruit an artisan, you pay the cost in guilders on that card – multiples of three from zero to twelve. You can also discard a card on your turn to acquire two workers of that color, to gain one to six guilders (depending on the result of the rolls of the five colored dice for that round), or to discard a Threat token – more on that in a moment. Your hand will have five cards in it to start each round, during which you’ll play four of them. When the supply of cards, which is tailored to the number of players, runs out, that’s the final round.

The Threat tokens take the place of the “feeding your family” aspect of Agricola. Those five colored dice are rolled each round. Any die showing five or six delivers a Threat token in that color to every player; get three Threat tokens and you suffer some sort of penalty, such as losing a house or canal token, losing points, or losing a recruited artisan. These penalties are nuisances but in the grand scheme of things not a huge detriment, but discarding a card to remove a Threat token in that color also gets you one victory point, which is the only justification I’ve found for using a card to do this.

Bruges plays two to four and works well with any number, although I think you can get a little further with your strategies if you have more players. You can also vary the number of cards in the start decks to let the game play out longer, which I recommend because the deeper you go into the game the more fun it is to see your plans play out. But the game doesn’t offer that many chances for interaction, other than a few cards in the Underworld category that let you steal from an opponent or stick everyone else with a Threat token. You’re primarily building on your own, making Bruges closer to a solitaire game you play with friends. It’s a good-looking game and fairly simple to learn; I just see more complexity in the scoring than it needs, with no real connection between the different scoring paths.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ June 16, 2015
→ By

Thebes.

Thebes is a moderate-strategy game, first published in 2007, that uses an archaeology theme to bring a couple of clever mechanics to the genre without becoming too complex or slow. It also is the rare game that plays as well with two players as it does with more, even though the tenor of the play and your strategy will both vary greatly with the number of players. (It’s back in print as of January 2021.)

In Thebes, you’re a lead archaeologist who must gather resources called “knowledge points” before you head off to one of five dig sites (each with a unique color) to try to retrieve valuable artifacts. You gather these knowledge points in seven European cities, so the entire map has just twelve sites and getting around is straightforward, and by taking one of four cards shown on the board at any given time. To draw a specific card, you move to that city and pay the cost to acquire the card – more on that cost in a moment – after which you add it to your hand. Most cards contain one to three books in the specific color of one of the dig sites; those are “specialized” knowledge points, good only for that dig site. There are “general” knowledge points, blank books that count toward any dig site; assistant cards, which you collect in sets to add more specialized knowledge for any dig site; shovel cards, which you collect in sets to draw more artifacts when you dig; and rumor cards, which you count once as specialized knowledge during a single dig and then discard.

When you go to dig, you move to the city of the dig site and count all of your knowledge applicable to that dig – all your specialized knowledge points in that color, plus all of your general knowledge points up to the number of the specialized points, and then use a wheel to determine how many artifacts you can take from the dig site (a bag of tokens), which is also a function of how many weeks you wish to spend digging. There is no money in Thebes; the currency is time, as it takes one week to move between adjacent cities, one to six weeks for any card you take from the board, and up to ten weeks for any dig. The game takes place over three years for two players and two years for four players, so time is truly fleeting in Thebes and you need to budget carefully.

Those bags are the one truly new mechanic in Thebes, a game without much randomness until you start pulling tokens from a bag. There are 31 artifact tokens in each color, 13 worth one to six points each, two tokens worth knowledge points (one general, one specific to another color), and 16 blanks. At the start of the game, you take a one-point token in each color and place it on the map, so that the first player to dig there gets that artifact as a bonus. Then the digging begins: You use the wheel to determine how many artifacts you can pull (again, a function of your knowledge points and the number of weeks you wish to spend), and then take out that many tokens. You keep any that aren’t blank … and you put the blanks back in the bag. That’s right: The odds of pulling out a non-blank token just get worse as the game goes on. It pays to be the first one into the tomb.

Most of your points (about 75-80% in our experience) will come from artifacts you gain from digging. There are three other ways to gain points in Thebes. Two of them, Congress cards and Exhibitions, are available in the main card deck and will appear in the four card spaces on the board along with the cards described above. Congress cards are simple – there are nine, and you get points based on how many you have, with the point totals rising sort of logarithmically, up to a maximum bonus of 28 points for seven cards. Exhibitions come up in the second half of the game, roughly, and they reward you with four or five bonus points for artifacts you’ve already obtained; if you have the right combination of artifacts, you go to the city on that card, take it from the board, and gain those points at the end of the game. It’s a significant cost in weeks, however, so the payoff isn’t great. The final way to gain points is to have the most specialized knowledge points in any specific color, with the leader in each color getting five points, co-leaders in any color each getting three.

The one other unusual mechanic has appeared in other games, including an even more elegant implementation the wonderful 2010 title Glen More, where one player might get multiple consecutive turns because other players have moved too far ahead. Players count their weeks spent via a track around the outside of the board, and the player whose token is the furthest behind gets to take the next turn. Say you’re playing a two-player game and your opponent chooses a ten-week dig in Palestine; if you can play your cards right, literally, you might get four turns in a row to grab other cards while s/he is busy, because you’ll move around the track but still be behind your opponent.

Games take under an hour and setup is very simple, assuming you don’t do what I did once and confuse the colors of the bags. Thebes is also quite language-proof, with some of the clearest iconography of any game I know, at least among games at this level of complexity; I’d compare it to Ticket to Ride’s simplicity in that one aspect. There’s nothing in here an eight-year-old couldn’t handle, and most of the strategy involved is easy to understand; the hardest part of the game to grasp might be estimating the expected values of digs, especially once players have already been in a bag once or twice but might have yet to discover some of the most valuable tokens. (There are five cards showing the distribution of point-bearing tokens in each bag.) It’s a bright, attractive game with a well-integrated theme that fully ties into and even explains the game’s most notable mechanic, a very solid addition for anyone looking for a family game that kids will like but that has enough substance for the adults.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ May 5, 2015
→ By

Coup.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class is up for Insiders. I’ll chat about it on Wednesday.

The interactive card game Coup is part of the Resistance universe of games, but unlike the game that heads up that family, it doesn’t require five or more players, playing very well with as few as three. (The game plays two, but I’ve found it isn’t a great experience.) In Coup, each player gets two cards randomly drawn from a deck of just fifteen, containing three apiece of five different types, and can take any of the actions prescribed by those card types … but players aren’t required to show their cards when they make moves, so they can flat-out lie about what they have. That introduces the challenge system: If you think someone else is lying, you challenge him/her; if you’re right, s/he loses a card, and if not, you lose a card. The last player with at least one card remaining in his/her hand wins.

The play system in Coup is simple, as there are only seven actions available, five of which are defined by the cards. A player may take one coin as Income, which requires no card and cannot be challenged. Any other move requires a card and is subject to challenge from another player. The Duke allows the player to draw three coins as Tax. The Captain allows the player to steal two coins from another player, or to block another steal attempt. The Ambassador allows the player to exchange one or both cards with two cards from the deck, or to block a steal attempt. The Assassin charges three coins to take out one card from another player. The Contessa can block an assassination attempt. The sixth move is the Coup: For seven coins, a player can force another player to reveal a card, with no block or challenge possible. When a player begins a turn with at least ten coins, s/he must make a Coup against another player.

(The physical game includes an eighth action, drawing “foreign aid,” where the player draws two coins of income rather than one, but can be blocked by the Duke. This isn’t in the app version, which I’ll discuss below.)


The challenge system is what makes the game run, however. If you think another player is trying to make a move using a card s/he doesn’t have, you challenge it. There’s significant risk, since you only have two cards, and if you’re wrong, you lose one of them (and if you’re already down a card, a failed challenge knocks you out of the game). Of course, you can employ a little math, because you know what two cards you have, what other cards have been revealed, and perhaps what cards you’ve put back into the deck via the Ambassador, but the odds are rarely fully in your favor. If another player tries to use the Assassin’s power against you, and you challenge him unsuccessfully, you will be knocked out of the game: you lose one card for the unsuccessful challenge and another to the Assassin. On the flip side, you have nothing to lose by challenging an assassination attempt when you’re already down to your last card. If you make a move, are challenged, but weren’t bluffing, you still lose the card in question, gaining a randomly drawn replacement from the deck.

I’m reviewing Coup now because there’s a free iOS app version available, one with some in-app purchases, fresh graphics, no AI players (that’s coming, I’m told, but I don’t think it’s necessary), and the options to play friends or to participate in ‘ranked’ matches that cost you ‘reputation’ points, with the chance to win points and increase your reputation if you win the match. Aside from some small server glitches such as push notifications not arriving on time or having to submit a move twice, I’ve had a very smooth gameplay experience with the app so far. The server usually responds quickly enough to keep games moving, with moves in ranked matches limited to two minutes, with players getting the boot if they don’t respond quickly enough. (This can screw one of the remaining players, however, if you’ve built a strategy around having that booted player around for a little longer.)

The Coup app impressed most in how seamless it makes the gameplay despite the high interactive component and necessity of having constant communication back and forth to the server. In timed games, each player has two minutes to submit a move, and if it can be challenged, the next player gets a two-minute timer to Challenge or Allow it. (Any other player can challenge before that next player hits either button.) If a player sends the Captain or Assassin after another player, the target gets two minutes to decide to challenge, allow, or respond by claiming to have a counter card in hand. The two-minute limits mean games move quickly, sometimes too quickly for me – a few times when my iPad screen timed out, I couldn’t get back into the game fast enough to submit a move.


I did not win this game.

There’s a limited chat feature that allows players to say some stock phrases, with four expansion chat packs available, two free as well as two for $0.99 each (including a set of taunts, which I don’t think is a particularly sharp idea). You can pay $2.99 to remove any ads from the game (although I’ve barely noticed any), $4.99 for a “spies expansion” that gives you detailed information on your opponents’ tactical patterns, and $3.99 if you want to use alternate graphics, including the images from the physical game. It’s certainly worth the $2.99 price to remove ads and support the development effort, but I’d have a hard time justifying paying for more reputation points – it’s a little too close to the days when I’d lose a whole roll of quarters playing Gauntlet. I’ve played Coup against random opponents in over 50 games so far, which speaks to how addictive it can be and how quickly you can rip through a few games in one sitting.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,