→ November 16, 2012
→ By

The Recognitions.

“Thank God there was the gold to forge!”

I finished William Gaddis’ 953-page novel The Recognitions for three main reasons:

  1. It’s on the TIME 100, which I am trying to finish. (Just three left!)
  2. Two people whose opinions I respect, Will Leitch and Michael Schur, both recommended it highly.
  3. I am stubborn.

So I pushed through it over the course of about three weeks, using the online annotations and chapter synopses to get me through. I could be facile about it and say that the book went largely over my head, but that would avoid responsibility – the truth is that I didn’t read slowly or carefully enough to grasp every nuance and every reference, because that’s just not how I enjoy reading. This is a book to be studied and pondered; even when I read literature, or other difficult works, though, I still read for pleasure, and appreciating the brilliance of The Recognitions – for it is brilliant – requires more work than I was willing to put into it.

Several people asked me over the last few weeks what The Recognitions is about, but the question has no single answer. There is a main character, but his narrative is jumbled with many subplots and he often is the vehicle for other stories or themes beyond his own quest for identity. That character, known as Wyatt when the novel begins, is the son of a Protestant minister and intends to take orders but ends up pursuing a career in drafting and copying architectural drawings that devolves into a vocation as an expert forger of paintings, notably works by Dutch masters. Wyatt’s quest leads to Gaddis dropping his name entirely before the novel is halfway through; he doesn’t obtain a new name of any sort until the final hundred pages or so, when he’s dubbed Stephan because that’s the name on his new, fake Swiss passport. Wyatt’s father, meanwhile, descends into madness while increasingly confusing his Christian faith with its onetime competitor, Mithraism, eventually dying one of the first of the book’s many bizarre, seriocomic demises.

As for the rest of the characters and subplots … Wyatt marries a woman named Esther, then abandons her as he loses his sense of identity, only for her to hook up with a confused writer named Otto who spends much of the novel walking around with a sling for an injury he never sustained. She also ends up having an affair with Ellery, who works in advertising with Benny, who previously worked with Wyatt in the drafting business. Wyatt’s forgery business involves him with the art critic-alchemist-spy Basil Valentine, and the odious collector and smuggler and scatologically-named Recktall Brown, who eventually dies while showing off a centuries-old suit of armor he owns by wearing it, only to have it noticed after his death that a portion of the armor is fake. Otto’s group of acquaintances also includes his college classmate Ed Feasley (who always says “Chr-ahst”), the poet Max, the failed poet Feddle, the frail Esme, the anguished Catholic Stanley, the irascible poet Anselm, the magazine editor Don Bildow (always in the midst of a sexual misadventure), an unnamed art critic in a green shirt, the closeted gay man Arny Munk and his baby-stealing wife Maude, and even “Willie,” the author himself in print – a laundry list of caricatures and pathetic figures swapping drinks and beds while living circular lives without apparent direction or meaning, often losing their identities by pretending to be something they’er not or by selling their souls for material gain.

The twin themes of self-doubt (identity) and forgery (fraud) are about the only things tying the entire novel together, other than the glue in the binding. Wyatt spends the entire novel on a quest for an identity, first losing one and then searching for another. He has one in childhood, imprinted on him by a domineering, puritanical aunt and a befuddled, widowed father, but sheds it when he realizes it’s merely a covering placed on him by external forces. His drift into a forger’s lifestyle leads him into his own madness, mirroring his father’s, because he’s replaced a lost identity with one tied entirely to fakes, leading him to doubt the possibility of any kind of authentic life or meaning in the world. He sees originality as an irreducible equation – everything is a copy of something else, and often the ‘experts’ in a field can’t distinguish the real thing from a perfect forgery. He ends by scraping down a fresco to get to the stone underneath, the one original part that can’t be copied, at least not by man.

The secondary characters, as a group, nearly all collapse in search of false identities or meanings. Most attempt to find them through money, with one character proclaiming it the “Age of Advertising” (which, in the ontology of The Recognitions, is a falsehood wearing another falsehood), while others giving up their bodies, their gods, or their countries for want of a little more cash. Several characters struggle with religious conflicts and doubts, ranging from the obsessive Catholic Stanley (whose death might be the most comic, even with the heavy-handed metaphor involved) to the seemingly anti-Catholic Anselm (who purifies himself in grotesque manner, then becomes a publicity man for a monastery). Otto is supposed to meet his father for the first time, but ends up in a meeting with a counterfeiter where both men mistake the other’s identity, after which Otto leaves with $5,000 in fake bills, which leads to him fleeing the country and assuming a new identity (and acquiring a real reason to wear a sling) to avoid prosecution. The one point all of these side characters have in common is that their quests, conscious or otherwise, for identity and meaning come to naught, with the possible exception of the writer Ludy, who may (it’s deliberately left unclear) actually find meaning in religion because he wasn’t explicitly looking for it.

I think the greatest value I found in The Recognitions was validation of my decision to similarly force myself through Ulysses several years ago, because I have no doubt that this is Gaddis’ response to Joyce’s work. Wyatt’s new name of Stephan, alludes to Joyce’s alter ego Stephen, while the lengthy epilogue harkens in form and style to Molly Bloom’s rambling soliloquy. The book has nearly as many references as Joyce’s did, and similarly pushes the boundaries of language, utilizing sentences or passages in at least six beyond English. Both novels rely on humor of various stripes, including black humor, bathroom/bedroom humor, and the occasional bit of slapstick to advance the story and keep things from becoming too dense or philosophical – not that I’d say I actively enjoyed the experience, but there were certainly parts of The Recognitions, and Ulysses, that had me laughing out loud.

But Gaddis’ work is, undeniably, an arduous experience for the reader. He dispenses with quotation marks, setting off dialogue with a – instead. Speakers are often left unidentified, and Wyatt goes nameless for about 700 pages. The allusions are fast and thick and often quite obscure, beyond the usual Bible-and-Shakespeare stuff present in most literature of this ilk. The anfractuous plot left me reliant on the chapter synopses online to figure out who was doing what and where. Gaddis even introduces half of a joke on page 66, about Carruthers and his horse, referring to it again a few times throughout the novel, delivering the punch line on page 941. I can respect the cleverness of the gambit while also being highly irritated by the assumption that I was sufficiently focused and reading the book quickly enough to remember the joke when the payoff – not even that funny – finally came. And that’s The Recognitions in a nutshell for me: Brilliant, clever, insightful, but too damn much work.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 16, 2012
→ By

Top 40 boardgames.

This is the fifth iteration of my own personal boardgame rankings, a list that’s now up to 40 titles, up ten 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 own every game on this list except Diplomacy, Caylus, and Tigris & Euphrates, playing the latter two in their iOS app forms. As always, clicking on the game title takes you to amazon.com; if I have a full review posted on the 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 and am gradually adding the rest.

Finally, I’ve added 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.

40. Tikal: Full review. Strongly balanced game of board exploration, but the length of time between any single player’s turns, especially with three or four players, is a real drawback. Players compete to control temples and acquire treasures while building out a board representing a Central American jungle; control of those temples can change from turn to turn, and each player’s ten “actions” presents an enormous list of potential decisions to position his/her pieces for maximum points in each of the scoring rounds. That makes it interesting to play, but also leads to the long gaps between turns. Plays two to seven, but doesn’t play well with two. Complexity: Medium.

39. Maori: I haven’t reviewed this one yet, as I just got it earlier this month and have only played it (and lost, as it turns out) three times. It’s a light two- to four-player game, relatively high in the luck department for this list, with more opportunities to screw your opponent in a two player game, whereas with four players you’re focusing more on your own strategy and less on others’. In the game, players compete to fill out their own boards of 16 spaces by drawing island tiles from a central 4×4 grid, where the available selections depend on the movement of a boat token that travels around that grid’s perimeter. Players must form completed islands to receive points, and lose points for open spaces. Currently out of print, but amazon has plenty of new copies through marketplace sellers. Complexity: Low.

38. Alhambra: Full review. After playing it a few more times, I do like it more than I did the first time around, but the method used to acquire money is an awful mechanic that really screws the game up (for me) with more than two players. One of the cooler-looking games in our collection. Complexity: Medium.

37. Oregon. I need to play this some more, but it does have promise as a 2-4 player game that actually works with two players. Each player competes to place meeples and buildings on a rectangular grid by playing cards that match the row and/or column in which he’s placing the pieces. Points increase when players form larger groups of farmers on adjacent squares, place buildings next to farmers already on the board, or accumulate coal and gold tokens by building mines. It’s pretty simple and quick to play, but not that deep strategically. Complexity: Low.

36. Race For The Galaxy: Full review. I’ve played this game a few more times using a freeware version I found online with very strong AI players, but that’s only served to underscore for me how much this game resembles work. It’s a deck-based game where players must know the cards in the deck well to be able to execute a strategy, and are more or less told by their initial card what strategy they must pursue. I don’t game to add to my stress levels, but this game requires such intensity of purpose that, despite a good theme and precisely designed mechanics, it feels like a responsibility rather than like fun. Complexity: High.

35. Zooloretto: Full review. A fun game, but a bit of a trifle compared to the others further up this list. You’re a zookeeper trying to fill his zoo’s three enclosures (expandable to four) with animals that arrive each turn on trucks available to all players, but each enclosure can only hold one type of animal at a time. There’s a cost to switching animals around, and there’s a penalty for picking up animals you can’t house, with points coming for filling an enclosure or filling all spots but one. I’m a little surprised this won the Spiel des Jahres, as it lacks the elegance of most winners of that award, and the two-player variant rules included in the game don’t work at all. I have played a simplified version of the game with my daughter, who loves the animal tokens and the well-drawn zoo boards. It’s a good starter game in the German-style genre, but not the best. Complexity: Low.

34. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups, and one of the oldest games on the list. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme. Complexity: Low.

33. Asara. Full review. Light strategy game that feels to us like a simpler, cleaner implementation of Alhambra’s theme and even some of its mechanics, without the elegance of the best family-strategy games like Stone Age or Small World. Players compete to build towers in five different colors, earning points for building the tallest ones or building the most, while dealing with a moderate element of randomness in acquiring tower parts. It’s also among the best-looking games we own, if that’s your thing. Complexity: Low.

32. Jambo. Full review. A two-player card game where the deck is virtually everything, meaning that there’s a high element of chance based on what cards you draw; if you don’t draw enough of the cards that allow you to sell and purchase wares, it’ll be hard for you to win. Each player is an African merchant dealing in six goods and must try to buy and sell them enough times to go from 20 gold at the game’s start to 60 or more at the end. We played this wrong a few times, then played it the right way and found it a little slow, as the deck includes a lot of cards of dubious value. I’m due to replay and reevaluate this one, though. It’s also among my favorite themes, maybe because it makes me think of the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disneyworld. Complexity: Low.

31. San Juan: Full review. The card game version of Puerto Rico, but far, far simpler, and very portable. I like this as a light game that lets you play a half-dozen times in an evening, but all it really shares with Puerto Rico is a theme and the concept of players taking different roles in each turn. It plays well with two players but also works with three or four. I get that saying this is a better game than Race for the Galaxy (they were developed in tandem before RftG split off) is anathema to most serious boardgamers, but the fact that you can pick this game up so much more easily is a major advantage in my mind, more than enough to balance out the significant loss of complexity; after two or three plays, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how to at least compete. The app version is very strong, with competent AI players and superb graphics. Complexity: Low.

30. Yspahan. Full review. I should love this moderate-strategy game that combines worker-placement, building, and trading/shipping into one fairly quick-moving game, but the need to choose and play a tight strategy from the start detracts a little from the fun value. Players compete to place goods in clusters of buildings called souks on the brightly colored game board, with completed souks worth points at the end of each of the game’s three “weeks.” Players also earn points and privileges by building up to six special buildings, and can accumulate points quickly by sending goods to the caravan – or can ship other players’ goods from souks to the caravan to screw them up. Requires at least three players. Complexity: Medium.

29. Tobago. Full review. Solid family-strategy game with a kid-friendly theme of island exploration, hidden treasures, and puzzle-solving, without a lot of depth but high replay value through a variable board. Players place clue cards in columns that seek to narrow the possible locations of four treasures on the island, with each player placing a card earning a shot at the coins in that treasure – but a small chance the treasure, like the frogurt, will be cursed. The deductive element might be the game’s best attribute. Complexity: Low.

28. Diplomacy. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the history of Diplomacy (and seven other games) for mental_floss in 2010, concluding with: “One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the GAMES Magazine and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.” I think that sums it up perfectly. I haven’t played this in a few years, unfortunately, although that’s no one’s fault but my own. Complexity: Medium.

27. Agricola: The most complex game we’ve tried, with the steepest learning curve. Very well made aside from the square animal pegs, which we replaced (at the suggestion of one of you) with actual animal-shaped pieces I bought via amazon. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved, and require some knowledge of the game to play it effectively. My wife felt this game felt way too much like work; I enjoyed it more than that but it is undeniably complex and you can easily spend the whole game freaking out about finding enough food, which about a billion or so people on the planet refer to as “life.” Complexity: High.

26. Le Havre. Full review, including app. It’s a great game, one of the most complex I’ve tried, based on Agricola and on another game further up this list (Caylus), but my God, the setup is a bear if you’re playing the physical game, and a full game can take a few hours. I do like the game a lot on an intellectual level, and I think it’s a little more enjoyable than Agricola, but I can fully understand anyone who looks at the size and scope and says “no way.” The app version, on the other hand, removes the biggest obstacle to the game and the AI players are solid, even able to execute some niche strategies that require knowledge of the special buildings in the deck. Complexity: High.

25. Scotland Yard. App review. One of the few old-school games on the board, and one I’ve only played in app form. One player plays the criminal mastermind (I don’t know if he’s really a mastermind, but doesn’t he have to be for the narrative to work?) trying to escape the other players, playing detectives, by using London’s transportation network of cabs, buses, the Tube, and occasionally a boat along the Thames. It’s recommended for ages 10 and up but there’s nothing on here a clever six- or seven-year-old couldn’t handle if playing alongside an adult, and like Tobago has a strong deductive-reasoning component that makes it a little bit educational as well as fun. Complexity: Low.

24. Power Grid: Full review. This might be the Acquire for the German-style set, as the best business- or economics-oriented game I’ve found. Each player tries to build a power grid on the board, bidding on plants at auction, placing stations in cities, and buying resources to fire them. Those resources become scarce and the game’s structure puts limits on expansion in the first two “phases.” It’s not a simple game to learn and a few rules are less than intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a game that does a better job of turning resource constraints into something fun. I’d love to see this turned into an app, although the real-time auction process would make async multi-player a tough sell. Disclaimer: My wife doesn’t like this game because she says the board and cards look “depressing.” Complexity: High (or medium-high).

23. Glen More: Full review. Build your Scottish settlement, grow wheat, make whiskey. Sure, you can do other stuff, like acquire special tiles (including Loch Ness!) or acquire the most chieftains or earn victory points by trading other resources, but really, whiskey, people. The tile selection mechanic is the biggest selling point, as players move on a track around the edge of the central board and may choose to skip one or more future turns by jumping further back to acquire a better tile. Back in print at the moment, and maybe the game on this list that gets the least press relative to its quality and fun factor. Complexity: Medium.

22. Navegador. Full review. I love this game’s theme and better implementation of the explore-build-trade combination than Yspahan has, but it doesn’t work well at all with two players and really needs at least four to create enough competition on the board to make it more than just a few players playing solitaire at the same table. Players begin in Portugal with two ships apiece and have to sail to South America, around Africa, and eventually to Japan, opening up new areas, establishing colonies, building factories and shipyards, and buying and selling goods from their colonies according to fluctuating market prices. With enough players, it’s tightly competitive without feeling work-like, and the replayability comes from the interactions among players, since the game has only a miniscule amount of randomness. If you tend to game with four or five players, this would probably rank higher for you than it does for me. Complexity: Medium.

21. Vikings: Full review. Currently out of print, and unavailable through that link (which I’m including anyway because used copies may appear there in the future). A very clever tile placement game in which players place island and ship tiles in their areas and then place vikings of six different colors on those tiles to maximize their points. Some vikings score points directly, but can’t score unless a black “warrior” viking is placed above them. Grey “boatsman” vikings are necessary to move vikings you’ve stored on to unused tiles. And if you don’t have enough blue “fisherman” vikings, you lose points at the end of the game for failing to feed everyone. Tile selection comes from a rondel that moves as tiles come off the board, with each space on the rondel assigning a monetary value to the tiles; tiles become cheaper as the number remaining decreases. You’re going to end up short somewhere, so deciding early where you’ll punt is key. I’m sad to see it out of print. Complexity: Medium.

20. Lost Cities: Full review. This was the best two-person game we’d found, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, and the most portable game as well, since it can be played with nothing but the game cards. We’ve since moved on to some more complex two-player games, but for simplicity (without becoming dumb) this one is hard to top. The deck comprises 12 cards in each of five colors, including cards numbered 2 through 10 and three “investment” cards to double, triple, or quadruple the profit or loss the player earns in that color. Players take turns drawing from the deck but may only place cards in increasing order, so if you draw a green 5 after you played the 6, tough luck. You can knock out a game in 15 minutes or less, so it’s one to play multiple times in a sitting. The iOS app is very slick and plays really quickly – a great one for killing a minute while you’re waiting in line. Complexity: Low.

19. Puerto Rico: Full review. It’s grown on me, especially since I got to try it out a few times online via Tropic Euro, although I’ve had friends and readers tell me it can become monotonous after a lot of games. You’re attempting to populate and build your own island, bringing in colonists, raising plantations, developing your town, and shipping goods back to the mother country. Very low luck factor, and just the right amount of screw-your-neighbor (while helping yourself, the ultimate defense). Unfortunately, the corn-and-ship strategy is really tough to beat, reducing the game’s replay value for me. Complexity: High.

18. Samurai: Review of the iOS app, which is identical to the board game. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app, and aside from a slightly dated design and look to the pieces and the board, it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun. Very high replayability too. Complexity: Medium/low.

17. Through the Desert. Full app review. Another Knizia game, this one on a large board of hexes where players place camels in chains, attempting to cordon off entire areas they can claim or to connect to specific hexes worth extra points, all while potentially blocking their opponents from building longer or more valuable chains in the same colors. Very simple to learn and to set up, and like most Knizia games, it’s balanced and the mechanics work beautifully. Out of print at the moment, although I picked up a new copy around this time last year for $10 on amazon. Complexity: Low.

16. Orient Express: An outstanding game that’s long out of print; I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues. The publishers still sell the expansions, adding up to 30 more cases for you to solve. Complexity: Low.

15. Thurn and Taxis: Full review. I admit to a particularly soft spot for this game, as I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. (I don’t care for chess, which I know is considered the intellectual’s game, because I look three or four moves ahead and see nothing but chaos.) Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. Just don’t do what I did and play it against an operations consultant, lest you get your clock cleaned. Back in print this year and quite reasonable at about $25. Complexity: Low.

14. Battle Line: Full review. Among the best two-player games we’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind Lost Cities. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The iOS app is among the best as well. Complexity: Low.

13. Caylus. App review. Another game I’ve only played in its app version, Caylus is the best of the breed of highly-complex games that also includes Agricola and Le Havre, with slightly simpler rules and fewer pieces, yet the same lack of randomness and relatively deep strategy. I’ve also found the game is more resilient to early miscues than other complex strategy games, as long as you don’t screw up too badly. In Caylus, players compete for resources used to construct new buildings along one public road and used to construct parts of the main castle where players can earn points and special privileges like extra points or resources. If another player uses a building you constructed, you get a point or a resource, and in most cases only one player can build a specific building type, while each castle level has a finite number of blocks to be built. There are also high point value statues and monuments that I think are essential to winning the game, but you have to balance the need to build those against adding to the castle and earning valuable privileges. Even playing the app a dozen or more times I’ve never felt it becoming monotonous, and the app’s graphics are probably the best I’ve seen. Complexity: High.

12. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline. Complexity: Medium.

11. Tigris and Euphrates: Review of the iOS app. The magnum opus from Herr Knizia, a two- to four-player board game where players fight for territory on a grid that includes the two rivers of the game’s title, but where the winning player is the one whose worst score (of four) is the best. Players gain points for placing tiles in each of four colors, for having their “leaders” adjacent to monuments in those colors, and for winning conflicts with other players. Each player gets points in those four colors, but the idea is to play a balanced strategy because of that highest low score rule. The rules are a little long, but the game play is very straightforward, and the number of decisions is large but manageable. I’ve never played the physical game; the current version (sold through that amazon link) includes some minor expansions I haven’t tried. Complexity: Medium.

10. The Settlers of Catan: I do feel somewhat odd about dropping this in the rankings for the second year in a row, but the truth is we don’t pull this game out as much as we did a few years ago, and I’ve still got it in the top ten largely because of its value as an introduction to Eurogames, one of the best “gateway games” on the market. Three or four players compete on a variable board of hexes to acquire different resource types, build roads and cities, and reach twelve victory points before any other player. Resources are parceled out in part according to rolls of the dice, and you can lose resources if the Robber shows up on a roll of seven and you’re not prepared for it. The Seafarers expansion balances out the core game’s low value on the wool resource, but also makes the game take about 50% longer to play. It was, and is, a great starting point if you’ve never played anything on this list, and is also one of the few games here that has some traction outside of the boardgamer culture. You can even find this along with Ticket to Ride (higher up the list) at Target, which is about as mainstream as you can get. We’ve just got lots of other games we prefer after playing this one so often over the years. Complexity: Low.

9. The Castles Of Burgundy Full review. The highest-ranked new game on the list this year, Castles of Burgundy even scales well from two to four players by altering the resources available on the board to suit the number of people pursuing them. Players compete to fill out their own boards of hexes with different terrain/building types (it’s like zoning) by competiting for tiles on a central board, some of which are hexes while others are goods to be stored and later shipped for bonuses. Dice determine which resources you can acquire, but you can also alter dice rolls by paying coins or using special buildings to change or ignore them. Setup is a little long, mostly because sorting cardboard tiles is annoying, but gameplay is only moderately complex – a little more than Stone Age, not close to Caylus or Agricola – and players get so many turns that it stays loose even though there’s a lot to do over the course of one game. This is the best new game we tried this year. Complexity: Medium (medium-high).

8. Pandemic: Full review. We haven’t tried many cooperative games, but this one sets a very high bar. Two to four players work together to stop global outbreaks of four diseases that spread in ways that are only partly predictable, and the balance between searching for the cures to those diseases and the need to stop individual outbreaks before they spill over and end the game creates tremendous tension that usually lasts until the very end of the event deck at the heart of the game. I haven’t tried the On The Brink expansion, but several people (including my sister and her husband) rave about what it brings to the base game. If you’re looking for a cooperative game you can play with kids, try Forbidden Island, from the same developer but much easier to learn and to win. Complexity: Medium.

7. Dominion: Full review. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are four major expansions out there, including the potential standalone Dominion: Intrigue game – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think we have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. We own Dominion Seaside (which is outstanding) and Dominion: Alchemy (which I find a little weird), plus a standalone expansion further up this list. I can also vouch for this as appropriate for a young player – my daughter (age 6) understands the base game well enough to play it without me deliberately throwing the game to keep it competitive. Complexity: Low.

6. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is now our go-to two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour. It’s also incredibly portable. Complexity: Low.

5. Dominion: Intrigue. Intrigue can be combined with the base game of Dominion, but unlike other Dominion expansions (of which there are now approximately 82, with a new one released every other week, or so it seems) Intrigue is a complete game right out of the box because it includes the money and point cards. And it’s better than the original game when both are viewed without any expansions because it’s more interactive – Intrigue lives up to its name in the sense that you should spend much of your time either plotting against your neighbors or trying to defend yourself, which makes the “Big Money” strategy in the base game much less effective. The changes make the game longer, but more even, and more fun. Complexity: Medium.

4. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. I haven’t tried the expansion, Style is The Goal, yet. Complexity: Medium.

3. Ticket to Ride. Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 expansion to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. We also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. Complexity: Low.

2. 7 Wonders: Full review. 7 Wonders has swept the major boardgame awards (yes, there are such things) this year for good reason – it’s the best new game to come on the scene in a few years, combining complex decisions, fast gameplay, and an unusual mechanic around card selections where each player chooses a card from his hand and then passes the remainder to the next player. Players compete to build out their cities, each of which houses a unique wonder of the ancient world, and must balance their moves among resource production, buildings that add points, military forces, and trading. We saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that we couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up our first game. The only negative here is the poorly written rules, but after one play it becomes far more intuitive. Plays best with three or more players, but the two-player variant works well. Complexity: Medium.

1. Carcassonne. Full review. The best-of-breed iOS app has only increased my appreciation for Carcassonne, a game I still play regularly by myself, with my wife and daughter, and with friends here or online. It brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. We own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. We also have Inns and Cathedrals, which we’ve only used once; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.

Last year, I promised but never provided a ranking of games just for two players, so rather than make another pledge I won’t keep, I’ll rank them here, in reverse order. I’m only considering two-player value, so I’ve only included games I’ve tried in two-player format.

1. Jaipur
2. Carcassonne
3. Stone Age
4. Ticket to Ride
5. Dominion/Intrigue
6. Small World
7. Battle Line
8. Samurai
9. Castles of Burgundy
10. Lost Cities
11. Pandemic
12. 7 Wonders
13. Through the Desert
14. San Juan
15. Jambo
16. Thurn und Taxis
17. Orient Express
18. Tigris and Euphrates
19. Tobago
20. Asara

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ November 15, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S10E2.

My MVP preview piece is up – won’t you be glad when this is over in a few hours? – and I had my weekly chat today.

On to the food … The qualifying stuff is gone, and the fifteen surviving chefs head off to Seattle for the real fun.

* Quickfire: The chefs break down into five teams of three. The judges include three past contestants who didn’t win their respective seasons – Josie, Stefan, and CJ. They must make a dish using local seafood in twenty minutes. John profiles Kuniko as a knife-skills expert because she’s Japanese … but he’s not wrong, in this case. Meanwhile, he’s game-planning while Padma’s talking about the challenge and she goes all Catholic-school on him and smacks his hand with a ruler. Don’t mess with Padma.

* Several chefs focus on digging in one muddy bin for geoduck (pronounced “gooey duck”). Kristen says it “looks like a penis … a really big one.” Maybe a dinosaur’s penis? Even John Holmes feels inadequate next to one of those.

* Carla, who looks like Señor Wences’ puppet Johnny, says she wants to win a James Beard award and have a nice ass. Later, she yells at her teammates that she “can’t keep running around like a stupid.” She’d be hilarious if her voice didn’t sound like a jackhammer scraping down a chalkboard.

* John referring to himself as most hated chef in Dallas has already gotten old halfway through episode two. I also don’t think he’s quite as much of an asshole as he’s making himself out to be – he’s blunt, but there’s zero evidence so far that he’s the least bit malicious.

* For all the talk about the time limit, every camera shot of prep work has the chefs working deliberately. Only plating ended up rushed.

* Judging. John, Kuniko, and Sheldon won for their thinly-sliced gooey duck sashimi, which was sliced more thinly than that of the other team that used the dinosaur penis. Bottom dish was Josh, Danyele, and Eliza, whose razor clam and corn chowder was underseasoned; they wanted to use gooey duck but there was none left for them to utilize. John wins immunity on a random draw.

* And the twist … the three former contestants are reentering the show! Why are the new competitors all complaining? You still have to beat a ton of other chefs. And it’s not like these are past winners.

* Elimination: now we have six teams of three, with the former contestants forming the sixth team together. The challenge is to make a dish using regional ingredients for local chef Tom Douglas. They get 47 minutes to prep and cook in the Space Needle, the time required for it to make one full revolution. I lived there for a summer and never went up. When we wanted a great view, we went to Kerry Park on a clear day, where you get the skyline and Mount Rainier in one shot.

* Now John calls Kuniko a risk taker and praises her for it. He might not play well with all of the others, but if they’re trying to make him this season’s villain, he’s not complying.

* Danyele, Josh, and Eliza are using a fish they can’t identify. That won’t go well. If that fish showed up in Arizona they’d deport it.

* Josie says people call her the “Global Soul Chef.” It’s probably a bad idea to ever use your own nickname on a reality show, unless you want your new nickname to be the Insufferable Douchenozzle Chef.

* Two teams cook at a time in a fairly small kitchen, although that ends up a non-issue.

* Kuniko wants to poach cod fish in chili oil and there’s instant agreement that that’s the team’s dish. Sheldon makes dashi while John does the veg. I don’t know if this is just good chemistry, or if we’ve got three chefs who are all mature and/or laid-back enough to jump immediately to the same page.

* Team Carla is doing poached salmon on seasonal veg. She insists on using a chinois for beurre blanc, saying that’s the only way to make one … I may have missed something in her plan but I have no idea why that would be the case. She’s even annoying chefs who aren’t on her team.

* Chef Douglas is at the table, wearing Meatloaf’s hair. This is not a good look for anyone.

* Kuniko’s chili oil reaches the smoke point and she has to start over. I’m completely confused about how she could “lose focus” (something she says she does a lot because she’s always thinking … that sounds familiar) in a kitchen that small. Was she working on something else? She couldn’t have gone far.

* Judges’ table. Team Kuniko’s cod is poached perfectly, with just the right amount of heat, and a spot prawn shabu shabu that also gets high marks.

* Team Carla’s poached salmon looks like spam. I have never understood the appeal of poached salmon; I don’t know of any other fish that develops so much flavor when seared or otherwise browned, yet poaching just produces a flavorless, gummy pink slab. It’s over fava beans, baby carrots, and baby fennel, as well as that beurre blanc. Sure enough, the judges say the salmon has very little taste, but it’s saved by the sauce. Meanwhile, Carla only enhances her image as Chef Train Wreck by reaching into her knife bag and slicing her hand open.

* Next two groups include Jeff, Brooke, and Bart, where there’s already discord when Brooke thinks Jeff has overcooked the halibut by searing both sides (skin off) but doesn’t seem to speak up in the kitchen. Team Retreads changes its dish at the last minute to try to do something different from the other five teams, which are all making fish; their new dish is quail with a cherry emulsion-broth that no one likes. Meanwhile, Stefan keeps making breast jokes, because those aren’t tired and unfunny at all.

* Josh, no one thinks you’re just this little guy from Oklahoma. They think you need to shave and maybe stop being so paranoid.

* Back to the table: Team Retread’s quail breast with confit spot prawn, porcini, mashed potatoes, and cherries goes over poorly. The quail and spot prawns are all overcooked, the broth is slightly bitter at the finish, and the cherry mixture isn’t sweet. I guess experience is as overrated on Top Chef as it is in October baseball.

* Jeff, Brooke, and Bart serve pan roasted halibut with mushrooms, English peas, and wheat beer with herb sabayon. Padma’s fish is hockey-puck overcooked.

* Final two groups start with Daniele, Josh, Eliza, and the mystery fish, which turns out to be cod. They pan-roast it and serve it with sautéed mushrooms, fava beans, and pickled apples. The apples get raves but there’s too much raw garlic in the sauce.

* Micah, Kristen, and Tyler serve seared pacific salmon with seasonal veg and another spot prawn butter sauce. It doesn’t seem very creative, but they “crrispy-seared” it, which is how you treat salmon, dammit. Kristen can really sell a dish – her descriptions are always detailed and highlight what makes each dish distinctive. She knows what to say that will get judges’ attention. It’s like subliminal advertising. Anyway, their salmon is far better than the other salmon dish.

* John, Kuniko, and Sheldon win again. John is very quick to credit Kuniko in front of the judges, again defying the villain tag. She’s cooked ling cod (native to the U.S. and Canadian Pacific coast), but has never poached in chili oil before. The dashi was flavorful, John’s spot prawns were perfect, yata yata. Kuniko wins, making me wish the racist from the first episode was around to see that. John has a kiss for her on the head as they walk out.

* Bottom two: Team Retreads and Team Brooke/Jeff/Bart. Josie can’t even identify why they’re there, which has Tom wearing his Smuggie. Stefan doesn’t realize the quail was overcooked, then makes excuses when confronted about it.

* Brooke is fairly polite in disagreeing before the judges. Jeff overcooked the fish with hard sear on both sides. Bart’s sabayon was flavorless. The judges were far harsher here than at the table; from this discussion you’d think this wasn’t fit for your dog.

* The killer here seems to be Jeffrey starting the fish too soon (14½ minutes to go) and hard-searing both sides, so by the moment of service it was already dry in the center. He goes home, with a pretty clear explanation of why. Padma’s already crying; episode 2 waterworks has to be a new record for her.

* Still way too early top three: John, Kristen, Micah, with Kuniko just on the outside because she might be her own worst enemy if she can’t maintain focus. None of the three retreads was remotely impressive this time around.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 14, 2012
→ By

Yspahan.

My take on last night’s Toronto-Miami megadeal is up for Insiders, as is my Cy Young Awards preview, which includes my hypothetical ballots.

Yspahan was a finalist for the Spiel des Jahres in 2007 (losing to Zooloretto) and caught my eye because of its unusual name, referring to a city in Iran more commonly known as Isfahan, and the promise of a game that combined a worker-placement dynamic with one involving selling goods in a market. It didn’t quite live up to that description, and is more like a lite version of Puerto Rico, where players choose between building, placing your cubes in neighborhoods, and shipping goods on the caravans, but unlike the more complex Puerto Rico, in Yspahan it’s hard to win without balancing your strategy across all three main methods of scoring points.

Yspahan’s board consists of four neighborhoods, each of which is broken down into groups of buildings called souks, with the four neighborhoods separated by two roads that cross near the center of the map. Each player has a supply of goods that s/he can place on buildings on the board with an eye toward filling complete souks, each of which has a different point value tied to its size and its neighborhood. These goods can also be sent to the caravan, which, when filled (nine spaces in a three-player game, twelve in a four-player), returns additional points to the players with goods on it, tied to how many goods they have and where they sit on the caravan. Each player also has a small board of six special buildings that can be built by spending gold and/or camels; each building gives the player some special power or bonus for the rest of the game, and building at least three buildings yields immediate bonuses of five to ten points, with a maximum of 25 if a player constructs all six.

The twist in Yspahan’s mechanics determines how players get the right to place cubes in certain neighborhoods and how they acquire camels and gold. There are nine white dice in the game, rolled once per “day” in the game (which is divided into three weeks, for 21 total turns). The dice are placed on another board that comprises six spaces: camels at the bottom, gold at the top, and the four neighborhoods in between. The players sort the dice by number, placing all dice with the lowest rolled number on the camels space, the highest on the gold, using the remaining dice to fill up the neighborhood spaces from the bottom up. Therefore, the top neighborhood, labelled with a green vase, is the hardest to get because that space on the tower is often empty. Each player takes dice from one row on the tower and gets to either draw as many camels/coins as there are dice on those spots or to place as many cubes on a neighborhood as there were dice in that neighborhood’s row. The player can also choose to draw a card from the main deck, each of which grants some special privilege such as additional camels/coins or free placement of a cube, or to move the supervisor up to three spaces to a road space that sends any adjacent cube(s) from the board to the caravan.

Souks are scored and cleared at the end of every week, with each completed souk worth from 3 to 12 points, plus a possible 2 point bonus per completed souk for players who’ve built the Bazaar. Incomplete souks are worth nothing. The first row of caravan spaces is worth two points per cube, and the second is worth one, but the big scoring comes at the end of each week and again when the caravan is filled – each player gets one point per cube there, multiplied by the highest row on which s/he has a cube. So if a player has one cube in each row, s/he would receive nine points – 3 cubes times row 3. In playing live and on the authorized free PC version found here, I’ve found it impossible to win without racking up at least some points in all three major areas – souks, buildings, and the caravan – and I’ve always needed a little bit of luck, or at least an absence of bad luck in die rolls, to pull it off.

The flip side of that in-game balance is that Yspahan starts to get to close to the edge of strategy games where playing starts to slightly resemble work: If you play to win, or at least to compete, you have to do certain things by the end of the first week or else the game is nearly hopeless. It’s very hard to come back from an early hole like that, so the early part of the game becomes a to-do list, with a good chunk of your fate in the hands of the dice. The game reminds me of Alhambra in that regard, another game where the random element in the mechanics can put one player in a giant hole from which s/he can’t crawl out. Yspahan’s simpler than Alhambra and moves faster, and far more balanced than many games on the market, but despite that simplicity it has some of the intensity required by more complex games like Le Havre or Agricola, which isn’t entirely my cup of tea.

I’ll be updating my board game rankings by the end of this week, for those of you waiting for that post; here’s last year’s rankings to tide you over until then, with ten new titles for me to add to that list.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 10, 2012
→ By

Saturday five, 11/10/12.

Five plus one this week, although the last one probably only matters if you have ties to Long Island.

* From The Atlantic, a look at from where post-election racist tweets emanated. There’s been a fair amount of debate over the practice of outing people, often kids, who say awful things on Twitter, but on this topic I subscribe to the thinking of Shakti Gawain, who said, “Evil is like a shadow – it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light… In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.” And maybe we could make the morons who compound their ignorance by crying “freedom of speech!” after they’re exposed take a civics class to learn what the First Amendment actually means.

* Also from The Atlantic, a piece on the problem with “rape exceptions” in anti-abortion laws. The author makes a pretty compelling case that they’re worthless.

* Brandon Heipp’s piece at BP on the history of “replacement level” in baseball analysis was a great and timely read, given confusion over the term in the religious wars around the AL MVP contest.

* mental_floss delves into the secret lives of six spices. It quotes Giles Milton, whose book Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is one of my favorite non-fiction books on any subject.

* Bookmarked but unread, a short story recommended by Michael Ruhlman called “The End of Baseball.” It’s only accessible if you have Flash, as far as I can tell.

* I concede this is of interest to maybe a handful of people besides me, but this New York Times review of Kushi, a new sushi restaurant in Nesconset, caught my eye because it’s about a mile and a half from the house where I grew up, and which my parents just sold earlier this year. If anyone’s tried it, I’d love to hear how it is.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 9, 2012
→ By

Phoenix eats, fall 2012.

Today’s installment of the offseason buyer’s guides, covering the catching market, is the end of the series. I’ll do award posts starting on Monday with Rookies of the Year.

Barrio Queen, in Old Town Scottsdale, is a spinoff of Phoenix’s Barrio Cafe, sharing some menu items but focusing more on street tacos, roughly four-inch tortillas generously filled with about 20 different options diners can choose from a sushi-style paper menu that covers beef, chicken, pork, seafood, and vegetarian fillings, all ranging from $2.50 to $5 or so. The restaurant’s signature cochinita pibil (slow-roasted pork shoulder) appears in taco form, as do carnitas, grilled flank steak, mushrooms and huitlacoche (corn fungus), and smoked salmon. The carnitas taco was the best of the four I tried, with the meat shredded and slightly crispy on the edges, although the smoked salmon with roasted cactus paddle (nopal) was a close second. The mixed grilled peppers taco blew my mouth off, although that doesn’t make it a bad thing. We also tried the chili verde fries, which are just what they sound like, with pork and cheese, a little too over the top for me although the chili verde itself was delicious. The food itself destroys any other tacos I’ve had in the Valley save downtown’s Gallo Blanco, and the prices are comparable to and even below some well-reviewed places like the overrated La Condesa.

Distrito, in the Saguaro hotel just up Drinkwater from Scottsdale Stadium (where the Giants train), also goes for a Mexican street food vibe, but the dishes are more complex and upscale, with price points to match. The mahi-mahi tacos ($14) come three to an order, with large pieces of fried fish on top of chipotle remoulade and a red cabbage slaw on top. Their cochinita pibil ($12) comes already sliced, which is a little odd, but the meat was tender and was served with a slow-cooked pineapple achiote sauce that was actually even better the next day. Their huarache de hongos ($10) flatbread includes mixed wild mushrooms as well as huitlacoche and a topping of melted mild white cheeses. The guacamole ($10) with cotija cheese was silently spicy but also had some of the creamiest avocadoes I have ever tried, giving them a faintly sweet taste as well. We tried one of the vegetable sides, the esquites ($6), sweet corn served off the cob, tossed with lime and queso fresco, served on a bed of chiptole aioli (probably the same that’s under the mahi mahi), a fork-friendly equivalent to the charred corn with cotija and paprika dish that’s become very trendy across the U.S. over the last few years. The one dish that fell a little short for me was the queso fundido ($12), duck barbacoa with roasted chilies served under a sheet of melted cheeses; the flavor of the duck itself completely disappeared under the cumin, red peppers, and poblanos.

While I’m still covering Scottsdale, I’ll throw in yet another endorsement of Baratin Cafe, which might be the single best value in the Valley because you’re getting very high-end ingredients and preparations for roughly $10 per salad or sandwich. The catch is that the menu changes daily and it is small – one salad, one sandwich, one “potted” (forcemeat or pate) or pickled dish, a snack, a starter, a vegetarian plate, and a dessert. I’ve been four times, always showing up with no idea what would be on the menu, ordered the sandwich each time, and have been thrilled with everything, even the day the sandwich was vegetarian and built around eggplant, probably my least favorite vegetable (technically a berry) of all. Baratin piggybacks on the purchasing power and prowess of FnB, which is just around the corner on Craftsman, but you can get in and out of Baratin at about half the cost of its more sophisticated sibling. If you’re staying in Old Town and are an open-minded eater, this is the one place I’d encourage you to hit above all others.

Moving over to Phoenix, Chris Bianco’s newest place, bearing the Google-unfriendly moniker Italian Restaurant, opened earlier this year in the Town and Country shopping center just off route 51 between Highland and Camelback. The focus here is on house-made fresh pastas produced from Arizona-grown wheat and served with simple, mostly traditional sauces that rely on fresh ingredients, with the menu changing frequently to reflect seasonal items. We started with the farinata, a traditional Italian crepe made from chickpea flour and cooked in a very hot cast-iron skillet until crispy. Italian Restaurant’s version includes red onions, black olives, and sage leaves, balancing the sweetness and tang of the onions with the brininess of the olives and the earthiness of the chickpea flour and sage, bringing a very satisfying crunch from the high heat to which it’s exposed during cooking. (You can try this very similar recipe if you want to make it at home as I’ve done.)

For the entree, I went with the papardelle bolognese, which is among my favorite sauces but one I rarely eat because it’s so often done poorly – overcooked, made with too much cream, made only with beef, made with cheap tomatoes, whatever. Bianco’s place does it right, starting with giant sheets of pasta closer in dimensions to lasagna, cooked just barely to al dente, served with a vibrant red sauce without the heaviness of most bolognese attempts (including a few of my own at home). My parents were visiting that week, and my mother chose the cavatelli with Schreiner’s sausage, roasted cauliflower, and spring onions; the sausage and pasta combination was a perfect marriage, with the al dente cavatelli bringing a bready texture to the meat, although the cauliflower was overrun by other flavors in the dish. Portions are generous but not unfinishable and prices are reasonable for the quality you’re getting, with each pasta dish running $15.

I also tried Chris Bianco’s legendary sandwich shop, Pane Bianco, and was a little disappointed, at least compared to the high expectations I’d gotten from friends who’ve tried it. The bread was what let me down, which is shocking since Bianco is known for his pizza doughs and uses a similar formula for the focaccia at Pane Bianco. Mine was dry and lacked the soft sponginess of good focaccia, so while it absorbed some of the olive oil from the mayo-less tuna salad, it was too chewy and made the whole sandwich feel heavy. All five of these places appeared in Phoenix magazine’s list of the 20-odd best new restaurants of 2012.

To the east valley … if you’re going to a Cubs or Mesa Solar Sox day game, my new recommendation for a pregame meal is Urban Picnic on Main Street, less than ten minutes’ drive from the ballpark, offering a modest menu of hot (pressed, but not smashed) and cold sandwiches, made on these amazing baguettes, soft on the inside with a crust that shatters upon impact. I’ve tried two sandwiches, the mozzarella caprese and the roast beef with horseradish, both of which are outstanding, although I wish the mozzarella was fresher – it’s not quite the hard moisture-reduced stuff you get at your generic megamart, but it’s not as soft as even a good-quality cow’s-milk mozzarella is. The fruit cup you can get on the side is tiny but the fruit within has always been sweet and was obviously cut that morning. The only item I didn’t like was the fresh lavender lemonade, which was like sucking on a flower.

Pitta Souvli, located at Germann and Alma School just south of the 202’s Santan portion in Chandler, wins the prize for best Greek/Mediterranean place we’ve found so far, with everything solid but the small plates really shining. Their baba ghanoush is a powerful mixture of smoky, tart, and garlicky flavors that will have you radiating allyl methyl sulfide from your pores for days. The avgolemono – a soup made from chicken stock, lemon juice, rice, and eggs that are beaten into the hot stock to make a thick, cloudy end product – has bright lemon flavors and the thick, slightly uneven texture that the soup should have if the rice is fully cooked and the eggs are added slowly enough. Their souvlaki is a slightly mixed bag, with the meats a little overcooked for my tastes, more of a problem with the chicken (white meat, so it dries out) than with the pork. They also get points for using thick, better-quality pitas that can stand up to heat and to thick dips like the baba ghanoush and the hummus, which is topped with a bright peppery olive oil.

And finally, to Surprise, where there’s finally a good, fairly quick, non-chain option near the ballpark: Saigon Kitchen, the best Vietnamese restaurant I’ve found out here and another restaurant in Phoenix magazine’s list. I’m a little boring when it comes to Vietnamese food because I nearly always order the bun, steamed vermicelli topped with some sort of grilled, highly marinated meat, served with a sweet/savory sauce based on nam pla (a salty Asian fish sauce that’s very high in umami) along with bean sprouts, shredded vegetables, mint leaves, and sometimes peanuts. What Saigon Kitchen does differently from most places is create blocks of a highly spiced (but not spicy) pork meatloaf, as opposed to fatty slices of pork, baking the meat at a low temperature before finishing it on the flat-top to give it some color. It’s tricky to eat with chopsticks because the blocks are so large, but the added flavor and improved texture make it completely worth it. It’s busy at lunch but I haven’t seen it packed, probably because of all the competition from crappy chains next door to it on Bell Road, and the food comes pretty quickly.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
→ November 8, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S10E1.

My buyer’s guide to the relief market is up for Insiders, and I’ll be chatting today at 1 pm EST.

This year’s opening-episode twist had the chefs broken into four groups, each visiting one of the four chef-judges at one of his restaurants, and competing in a challenge of that judge’s design. The producers also broke the show up by using Tom’s group as the main story arc of the episode, returning to them three times while presenting each of the other three groups in single chunks from start to finish. I thought it was a clever twist and didn’t involve sending home as many chefs as last year’s opener did.

* Group Tom features John Tesar, the “most hated chef in Dallas,” who gets off to a roaring start of arrogance; South African Lizzie Binder, who has a mad crush on Tom; and Jorel Pierce, wearing Rollie Fingers’ mustache.

* Tom’s challenge puts the contestants in his Craft LA kitchen for part of a shift, with each chef getting one specific task to tackle, like stuffing and shaping fresh tortellini (Lizzie, who seems to nail it), breaking down whole birds (Anthony and Jorel), or fileting fish (John and Micah).

* Micah makes a statement against self-interest by telling Tom he went from line cook to executive chef but never worked as a sous. Tom contemplates eliminating Micah on the spot by using a boning knife but thinks better of it.

* Rollie Fingers’ restaurant is “butchery focused,” then he screws up butchering the chickens. We can see where that’s going. By the way, friend of the dish Dave Cameron (also of Fangraphs) says that Rollie’s Denver restaurant, Euclid Hall, is excellent.

* Moving along to group two, we have another insane mustache, which must be some more Movember nonsense. (Seriously, you’re going to ask people to sponsor you for doing nothing? Growing a mustache is not effort. If you’re not dead, your facial hair will grow. This isn’t like asking people to sponsor you for running a 5K. It’s like asking people to sponsor you for going to the bathroom.)

* Anyway, group two’s judge is Emeril, who asks the contestants to make soup in one hour. What isn’t clear is whether they get any stock as an input, although from the results I assume they didn’t. I find it really hard to imagine a soup with the proper body if there’s no stock involved.

* Two of the chefs, Stephanie and Kristen, work together, live in the same building, and got the same tattoo. Then Stephanie clarifies that they’re not actually a couple, which the editing leading up to that point implied pretty strongly, right? Kristen has the look of a breakout candidate/fan favorite – she was born in Korea, modeled as recently as five years ago, is chef de cuisine at a Barbara Lynch restaurant (Stir) in Boston, and, judging by her performance in this challenge, is ready to kick ass. (Aren’t models usually pretty tall? I always assumed that would be a handicap in the kitchen because you’re constantly leaning over a low table.)

* Word of advice to all the male chefs in the audience: Do not go on Top Chef and risk missing the birth of your daughter. Not only does that disqualify you from all future Father of the Year awards, your wife will bust that out in every argument you ever have with her, forever. And no, I didn’t miss my daughter’s birth, before anyone asks. I just know these things.

* Jeffrey trying to quick-chill a gazpacho was one of the few moments of cooking drama in the show, but they sort of dropped the subject until service – the same with Josh plating his soup a good five minutes too early.

* Judging: Jeffrey’s gazpacho is cold and he gets the Top Chef jacket immediately. Kristen makes an English pea broth with scallops, crème fraiche, and lemon peel she poached three times to remove the bitterness, something that makes a pretty clear impression on Emeril (and was, perhaps, done to make just such an impression, a pretty slick move). She advances, as does Josh, whose soup was still warm enough and who gets points for sutble use of chili pepper to balance the sweetness of his coconut broth. Kristen’s colleague/tattoo-mate Stephanie goes home, as does one other contestant.

* Group Tom resumes, with John saying that because he’s in Tom’s kitchen, he needs to do stuff Tom’s way. That’s maturity speaking, and doesn’t quite fit with the arrogant front he showed in the comments at the top of the episode. He nails the halibut he’s preparing and advances on the spot, although the other four chefs in the group don’t know if he passed or was sent home. Incidentally, John reveals that he came up through the ranks with several chefs who’ve gone on to greater heights but saw his career derailed by “casual drug use that became self-medication.” So he’s an ass, but one we might root for anyway. I think.

* Group Wolfgang is the motley crew, featuring the foul-mouthed (even by Top Chef standards) ex-wife of the owner of Rao’s in New York, a Japanese woman whose parents don’t respect her career choice, and a guy bragging about being ranked #1 on Yelp. That’s like a baseball prospect bragging about being on the most fantasy rosters.

* The challenge: Make an omelette in 45 minutes with presentation counting very heavily. Puck says, “I’m such an easy guy as long as they do it exactly the way I want it.” Having seen him on several other shows, I’m actually concerned he’s too soft for judging on this show, and he ends up being (I think) the easiest judge to please in this episode, passing several chefs who screwed up royally.

* Chef Yelp uses bacon fat and produces a messy, greasy omelette. Carla ex-Rao shreds her omelette when it sticks to the pan, Tyler’s omelette is overcooked and brown all over. Eliza burns her first omelette and has to salvage her other ingredients from that dish to make a fresh one. They probably all should have gone home.

* Kuniko infused chamomile in the milk in her omelette, the one bit of innovation I saw in all six dishes. It’s like everyone panicked and forgot that you don’t win Top Chef if you’re not pushing the envelope somewhere.

* All but Chef Yelp advance, after which Puck shows how to make a proper omelette, the French way … in a technique I learned from a $10 Julia Child cookbook. How is it possible that none of the six chefs in this group knew how to do that?

(EDIT: I forgot to mention how Chef Yelp referred to Kuniko as “Origami,” which was both incredibly racist and unwarranted since she actually made the dish correctly. He could have been a great punching bag for me for a few more weeks if he didn’t suck.)

* Let’s face it – we’re watching primarily for Group Hugh, and the editors show it to us last because they know we’re not changing the channel until we see the Unibrow. His challenge to the chefs: Make a beautiful salad in 45 minutes. I like that it’s possible to pass this challenge without actually cooking any ingredients, although if you take that route you had better be precise with your flavors.

* Chef Bart is a knight in Belgium, and really, Hugh is going to mock him endlessly for this, as am I.

* Gina says she’s a ferocious tiger. She is also annoying. But she founded a community food program, so she’s noble, but still annoying. She also says that Danyele is dumb for flaming her tomatoes and that is cooking school 101 and it’s pretty clear that this point that the editors are telling us Gina will not be with us for much longer.

* Sheldon has spent nearly his whole life in Hawaii and worked his way up from dishwasher to executive chef, making him another early leader for fan favorite. Hugh asks for Spam in his salad, of course.

* Put the lid on the fucking blender, Bart.

* Judging highlights. Brooke does a kale salad with Brussels sprouts leaves, lemon vinaigrette, and fried kale on top, trendy across the board, so she advances on the spot. Sheldon does fried Brussels sprouts and gets dinged slightly for using an out-of-season ingredient and for using too little acid in his dressing. Bart’s salad is overcomplicated. Danyele’s charred tomato vinaigrette is a little overpowering. Gina is blatantly trying to manipulate Hugh in judging, and she ends up the only chef in this group to get the axe.

* Group Tom, finale. Rollie Fingers’ beurre monté is too salty. Anthony did too much damage to the duck and was too timid in the kitchen. Both chefs go home, with Micah (who recovered from revealing too much of his resume) and Lizzie advancing.
* Way too early top three prediction: Micah, Kristen, and John. I also considered Brooke, Jeffrey, Josh (who can cook with more focus when his pregnant wife dumps him), and even Kuniko for that one burst of creativity. I don’t think we got a great look at Tyler or Eliza – if they were players I’d need to scout them again before even forming a preliminary opinion.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 6, 2012
→ By

Umamicatessen & Intelligentsia Coffee.

The offseason buyer’s guides continue with today’s post on the outfield market and yesterday’s on middle infielders. Wednesday’s will cover starting pitchers.

Umamicatessen is the latest creation of Adam Fleischman, the man behind Umami Burger (which I reviewed in February 2010), folding a burger joint into a restaurant with a larger menu that also includes salads, starters, Jewish deli sandwiches (mostly featuring pastrami), artisan hams (including prosciuttos and two types of jamon serrano), various cooked pig dishes created by Top Chef Master Chris Cosentino, and doughnuts made to order. It’s over the top by design, and while some of the more decadent items were too rich for more than a few bites, every item we tried – I went with D-backs beat writer Nick Piecoro – was outstanding.

I focused on the Pigg menu, by Cosentino, ordering pork cracklins ($5) with smoked paprika, sage, and cayenne, as well as the Texas Toast, topped with an obscene quantity of barbecued pig’s tail and a small amount of vinegary cole slaw. The cracklins, one of three lard-fried items on the menu along with crispy pig ears and French fries topped with ham and “brainaise,” were highly addictive, with the crunchy, airy texture of puffed rice but the unmistakable tangy-salty flavor of pork skin. If they had a flaw, it’s that it would be too easy to eat the entire cardboard cone full of them without realizing just how much you were eating (including the sheer quantity of fat).

The Texas Toast ($11) is an enormous plate of food, giant chunks of pig tail that looked a lot like an oversized short rib, fattier on the inside than that cut of cow, and with a slightly tough skin that needed knifework where a short rib can be eaten with a fork (teeth optional). The flavor of the sauce itself was the star item on the plate, elevating the smokiness of the tail with red pepper, cumin, brown sugar, and dark flavors that reminded me of coffee or aged whiskey. Every part of the dish worked together, but the pig’s tail itself was a fair amount of work to eat and I’m sure I left some bits of meat in the middle because I was trying to perform liposuction with a steak knife.

The roasted baby carrots ($4) were a huge bargain considering the quality of the carrots – actual baby carrots, not giant factory-farmed carrots cut and tumbled to look like baby carrots – and the care in their preparation, leaving them ready to eat right up to the half-inch of green extending from the carrot-tops, as well as the smoky red harissa sauce beneath them. The beet salad featured yellow beets (I presume roasted and peeled) with truffled ricotta, wild arugula, and smoked almonds rested primarily on the flavor of the cheese, which was thicker than most ricotta, more like a soft goat cheese, with enough tang to balance the earthy truffle flavor and the pepper notes of the arugula – but the beet was a little lost in the mix, even though overall the salad was excellent.

We ordered two donuts, the tres leches cake donut ($4) and the yeast-raised beignets (two small ones for $4), with the tres leches the clear winner for both of us. The donut itself probably stood on its own, but the combination of milks, caramel, and cinnamon-topped whipped cream turned it into the best coffee cake you’ve ever had in your life. The beignets were a little dry throughout, although the burnt sugar-coffee-chicory dipping sauce was a clever nod to New Orleans-style coffee (and, to be honest, had a lot more flavor).

The draft beer selection included about eight or nine options, running the gamut from IPAs to the Deschutes porter I chose. Nick went with the Bourbon Pig, bacon-washed bourbon with sugar and bitters, topped with a few thin slices of crispy pig’s ear. He described it as “smoky but not too strong. Basically it was wildly dangerous and amazing.”

Speaking of LA, I owe a shout-out to Intelligentsia Coffee, where I had an espresso back in September and got a little free coffee as a gift from a reader. I do love coffee but find most espressos are too harsh to drink without either milk or sugar – and sometimes both. Intelligentsia is one of the very few that uses beans fresh enough and high enough quality that I can drink the resulting espresso straight, with their Black Cat producing a beautiful, viscous shot with bright fruity notes (stop laughing) and a little oak, but none of the bitterness from older beans or much darker roasts. They started in Chicago, with four locations there and now three more in greater L.A., along with roasting operations in both places, and an emphasis on a personalized coffee experience in the store, where you get a barista with his/her own station who takes your order (and offers guidance) and makes your drink. It’s expensive relative to the big chain espresso spots, but you are paying for quality of inputs and the expertise of your barista. I’d rather pay more for that than spend 30% less on battery acid in a demi-tasse.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 3, 2012
→ By

Navegador.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is up – you can go right to the top ten, to 11 through 30, or to 31 through 50. The buyers’ guides are also back, starting today with corner infielders, where I discuss (among other things) A-Rod as a trade target.

—

Navegador is a beautifully-designed game with a great theme that’s strongly integrated into gameplay, combining exploration, production, and construction all into a single, easy-to-understand game that balances the three areas enough to allow players to win in several different ways. With three or more players, there’s enough competition for resources that players are forced to make tough choices and focus on single strategies before the game gets too far along. Unfortunately, the breadth of options for players makes it unsuited for two players because it’s far too easy for both players to get and do everything they want to.

In Navegador, players represent fleets of explorers – think Dutch East India Company – who start in Portugal and travel to Latin America, Africa, and south and eventually east Asia, exploring those areas, developing colonies, and acquiring trade goods to sell on the open market. Players begin with two ships apiece, but lose one ship if they’re the first to explore a new area of the ocean, although that player receives a token worth more points at the end of the game plus an immediate cash bonus.

Any player can purchase a colony once the adjacent sea area has been opened up, with sugar colonies from Latin America, gold from Africa, and spice from across Asia. (My wife insists the gold bars look like butter, which would at least make the food theme consistent even if it raises unpleasant questions about storage.) Colonies produce goods that can be sold on the market, but the price goes down the more a good is sold, after which the advantage shifts to players who build factories to process those goods – no colony required – which then drives the price for the raw materials back up. This creates the first of several “do what your opponents aren’t doing” dynamics that work much better when the game has more players.

Construction is the third leg of the game. There are five building types, including a factory for each good, plus shipyards, allowing players to build ships more cheaply, and churches, allowing players to recruit workers more cheaply. Each player begins with one shipyard and one church, so s/he can build one ship for 50 cruzados or recruit one worker for the same cost during that kind of turn. Each additional shipyard/church allows the player to build/recruit one more whatever for 50 cruzados; otherwise the cost for extras can run from 100 cruzados in phase one to 300 in phase three. Ships are required for exploration, while workers are required to build factories (three workers), shipyards (four), and churches (five). However, each building type becomes more expensive as the supply of available buildings declines, so building early can be a major advantage even thought it may box you into a specific strategy for the rest of the game.

You can’t do whatever you want on a turn, however; there’s a rondel on the board that lists different turn types – Sailing, Shipbuilding, Worker recruiting, Market, Building, Colonization, and Privileges. Players move around it counterclockwise, advancing one to three spaces at no cost (destroying one ship for each additional space, a very high price), so sequencing your moves properly becomes a fundamental part of gameplay.

The Privileges tie into the end-game bonuses that determine nearly all of the scoring in the game. Each player automatically gets points for exploration, colonization, and buildings at the end of the game: One point per colony, two per factory (all types), four per new region explored, three per shipyard, and three per church. Players can increase those bonuses by gaining Privileges, sacrificing one worker to take a token that increases the per-unit bonus in one of those five areas by one or two, while also earning an immediate cash bonus for doing so. For example, a player may sacrifice one worker to take a one-point Colony privilege, earning two points per colony at the end of the game rather than just one, while also taking 30 cruzados per existing colony at the time s/he grabs the privilege.

The game is fantastic with three or more players (I haven’t tried with five, so I’m extrapolating from other experiences), because you’re going to be tripping all over each other on the board and will have to straddle the line between executing the ideal strategy and staying flexible because someone will inevitably try the same thing. With just two players, each person can achieve in all three major areas without much competition, splitting the new exploration roughly in half, grabbing plenty of colonies, working the market (you sell, I process), and building enough of all building types to do pretty much whatever you want. The game remains fun because the theme and mechanics are so well integrated, but there’s not much of a competitive sense to it, nor is there the tension you’d get with more players, where you spend time between your turns hoping your opponent doesn’t do the thing you were going to do. That means that, for us, as great as the game looks and as easy as it plays, we’re not going to get as much mileage out of it as most of the other games in our collection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 2, 2012
→ By

Castles of Burgundy.

Just a reminder that my top 50 free agents ranking goes live on ESPN.com at midnight ET tonight. In the meantime, you can check out yesterday’s Klawchat and my appearance on Joe Posnanski’s Poscast.

The Castles Of Burgundy looks like Stone Age, plays a little like Glen More, but in terms of getting into it, it reminds me of 7 Wonders: The rules are complex and not that well-written, but gameplay is quick and strategy manages to be deep without becoming too much like work. It’s also one of the best uses of dice I’ve seen in a strategy game, utilizing them in a way that introduces a small element of randomness without throwing the game off balance or becoming a game of too much luck. The game plays two to four, with two-player games taking 30-45 minutes, and at just under $30 it’s one of the best values in German-style games.

So here’s a warning – I’m going to walk through all of the rules, which will make this game seem more complicated than it actually is. If you want the review stuff, skip down to the break.

In Castles of Burgundy, each player has a game board of hexagonal spaces that s/he will try to fill over the course of the game by acquiring various tiles from six different depots on the central board. On a turn, each player rolls two dice in his own color, with each one representing a potential action associated with the number rolled. (Therefore, you get two actions on each turn.) Possible actions include:

* Taking a hexagonal tile from the depot bearing the same number that the player rolled.
* Placing a previously-acquired hexagonal tile on a space on the player’s own game board that bears the number of the die and has the same color as the tile.
* Selling goods of the type indicated by the number on that die.
* Acquiring two worker tiles. Playing a worker tile allows the player to add or subtract one from any rolled die, including going from 6 to 1 or 1 to 6.

On each turn, a player may also spend two Silverings (coins) to buy one of the tiles in the black market, a central depot of four to eight tiles of all colors, not tied to any die rolls. This is critical to completing regions or maximizing point values, so getting Silverlings along the way is also critical; most of your silverlings will come from selling trade goods, adding mine hex tiles, and adding bank building tiles.

The purpose of the game is to earn the most victory points, and the variety of possible strategies in Castles of Burgundy comes from the myriad ways in which to earn points. There’s no single, ideal strategy, at least not that I’ve found, but the best approach is to build whatever you can early and then go for hex tiles later that add the most value to what you’ve already placed. In other words, what you play in the first round or two should determine what you do in rounds three through five. (The game comprises five rounds of five turns each.) The main ways to earn points, either during the game or at its end, are:

* Filling a contiguous region of one color on your board. This earns you a bonus tied to the number of hexes in that region, equal to (x2+x)/2 if you’re math-inclined, as well as a bonus tied to the round in which you fill the region, with the latter bonus declining as the game goes on. So filling a five-hex region in round two gets you 15 points for the region, plus 8 points for filling it in the second round.
* Filling every hex of a specific color on your board before your opponents. There’s a bonus of 5-7 points for doing it first, and 2-4 points for doing it second, depending on how many players there are.
* Placing pasture tiles with animals on them. These bonuses repeat themselves if you place more tiles with an animal type you’ve already placed. So if you place a tile with four cows on it, you get four points; if, in the same region, you later place a tile with three cows, you earn seven points.
* Selling goods. When you sell a stack of goods, you get two points per good sold, plus one silverling coin.
* Placing watchtower buildings, which are worth four points apiece. One beige region, used for buildings, may not contain two buildings of the same type, so there’s a cap on this bonus, unless you place the yellow tile that waives this restriction.
* Placing yellow “knowledge” tiles that provide additional bonuses at the end of the game, such as four points per bank placed, or four points per different animal type on your board.

—

If that feels a little dry, it looked that way when I first cracked the rule book, but the actual game play is far quicker and smoother than you’d think. Your set of possible decisions is broad, but not overwhelming, and once you’ve played the game a little bit, you will find it easier to zero in on the set of sensible moves. The fundamental pair of actions in the game is taking a tile and placing it on your board, and since you only have three spaces to store a tile you’ve acquired but not placed, you have to balance those two actions – often just by using your two allotted actions to take a tile and then place it. There are numerous ways to get bonus actions as well, such as placing castle tiles or placing certain building tiles, allowing you to extend your turn, but the main conceit is the same: You want to fill up most of that hex board, and do it in a way that’s internally consistent to max out your points. With two players, you won’t find yourself competing much with your partner for tiles or goods you want, but with three or four the competition for specific moves will be more severe.

I’m not thrilled with the physical design of the game or its box, which doesn’t allow for easy storage. (Small World remains the champion there). The theme is mostly irrelevant here and not that well integrated to gameplay; you’re supposed to be a medieval land baron filling out cities or regions on an estate, but there’s very little sense to what buildings or tiles go on certain regions, and no sense that you’re building a cohesive unit on your board. There are a lot of small hexagonal tiles, some of which need to be shuffled for each game, and shuffling small cardboard tiles is like herding cats. I also found the rules to be a bit unclear, especially with the various building and knowledge tiles that have special functions that required us to keep the rulebook handy throughout the game.

The best aspect of the game is the tension between what you know you want or need to do to increase your points and what the dice and the random supply of tiles will allow you to do. That tension will be increased with more players; the supply of tiles scales to the number of people playing, but also increases the chances that one of your competitors will take the tile you want, forcing you to spend more time considering the timing element of your moves, which isn’t as present when playing with two players. Replay value here is fairly high, thanks to the dice element and to the inclusion of several different player boards – everyone can play on the basic board, or you can use one of the four alternative boards included in the base game, meaning each player would have a different estate to fill. It’s more complex than Stone Age, less so than Le Havre, on par with Glen More, and like the latter game it’s much easier to play once you’ve stumbled through a game or two. I’d also compare it in complexity to Puerto Rico, but without the one semi-dominant strategy (shipping) of that particular title, and a little more fun to play because it moves faster once you’ve got everyone on board.

Just a heads-up – I’m hoping to review three more games before doing this year’s rankings: Navegador, Yspahan, and Oregon. If time doesn’t permit that, I’ll post the rankings the week before Thanksgiving no matter what.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,