→ September 19, 2018
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Founders of Gloomhaven.

If you go over to Boardgamegeek.com and browse their enormous database of games (over 100,000 and always growing), you’ll see the #1 game is something called Gloomhaven, a mammoth, $140 game that, in my personal opinion, isn’t actually a board game: It’s a role-playing/miniatures game that comes in a board game sort of box, but isn’t something the average person would consider a regular tabletop board game. It’s expensive, huge (the box weighs 20 pounds), and requires playing over many sessions, while borrowing heavily from the mechanics of RPGs. It may be great, but that’s not a board game to me, or, I think, to most of my readers.

The designer of Gloomhaven, Isaac Childres, has extended the brand by developing a true tabletop game in the same universe as his hit title, one that is also still complex but plays very much like a regular, heavy strategy game, and manages to introduce some clever tweaks that produce a novel playing experience. This new title, Founders of Gloomhaven, somewhat de-emphasizes the Gloomhaven part – the title on the box has Founders in huge letters and puts the “of Gloomhaven” part in a tiny font that’s easy to overlook – but still comes with a million pieces and an elaborate set of rules and mechanics to satisfy the hardcore gamers in your group. The rules are not well written or organized, unfortunately, and my first playthrough was marred by a lack of understanding of the real point of the game, along with questions we had to head online to answer, but at least when I tried the game a second time I knew what my goal was and what basic actions were required to get me there.

Founders of Gloomhaven is a game of hand management and pickup-and-delivery mechanics that also works in tile placement, route-building, worker placement, a technology tree, and some basic economic elements, so … yeah, there’s a lot going on here. Each player controls two or three of the eight basic resources at the start of the game, and players will build resource production tiles of their own while also paying to get ‘access’ to the resources owned by other players so that they can build better buildings that require delivery of those resources. Eventually, larger “prestige buildings” will appear on the board, and players will earn larger point totals by delivering resources to those while also creating new actions for players to use with their workers.

The real core of the game is in how you connect these resource buildings to the upgraded buildings, which produce level 2 and level 3 resources, and to the prestige buildings, using roads, bridges, and gates. There are ornate rules about where you can place buildings – primarily that you can’t just place new tiles next to your own tiles already on the board – and you must use those connector tiles to create uninterrupted paths from the resources’ origins to their destinations. That means you will often want to forego certain actions or income to place more roads and thus create multiple paths to ship your goods around the board, especially if your competitors might have their own resource production buildings they’re trying to connect to the same destinations.

On a turn, you play one of the five action cards from your hand (six in a two-player game, with a card to collect Income added to the hand) to the table, take its main action, and then let other players take a similar but lesser ‘follow’ action. These include Construct, where you build a personal building like a house (freeing up a worker meeple), a bridge or a gate; Recruit, where you pay one or two coins to add an adviser card to your hand, giving you an upgraded version of one of the five basic actions; Upgrade, which lets you build an advanced resource building for either 4 or 6 coins, as long as you can deliver the required goods to it; Trade, which lets you place resource stalls on the board or pay to get access to someone else’s; and Call to Vote, which triggers a vote on the next prestige building to enter play, gives you some income or road tiles or influence tokens while paying more income to all other players. Your income increases as you bring more resources on to the board, so the game has an incentive built into the rules to keep the board growing and the pace moving along, although money is scarce within the game and you’ll make tough choices every round on what to do. (I rarely build houses, even though I’d get more worker meeples from them, because they’re pricey and I don’t think they pay off as well as upgrades do.) You can also use a card from your hand to take a basic action, like taking one coin, placing one road, or moving a worker to an open space.

Each player also plays as a unique race that owns one specific resource and that has a worker placement space on the main board for the player to use once s/he has built at least one house. The choice of race affects what other basic resources you can own at the start of the game, but beyond that doesn’t seem to have much effect on game play.

The points awarded for delivering resources don’t strictly go to the player who delivered each specific resource, which is one of the most important and most confusing aspects of the rules of Founders. If you deliver leather to a prestige building that rewards 4 points for that delivery, for example, but your leather production building took hides from someone else’s trade stall, you would have to give one point to the other player and keep just 3 for yourself. This means there’s a lot of accounting to do each time there’s a resource delivery, and it’s probably the biggest factor in increasing game time, because as the board fills up, placing any upgraded building or prestige building will likely result in a pause to figure out who gets how many points.

The game ends once six prestige buildings are on the board and completed, meaning someone has delivered each resource required by that building. Our first play-through, with two players, took about 2.5 hours, a little above the 120 minute time shown on the box. I also played a solo game that took an hour or so, although I am fairly certain I played a bit loose with some of the rules (mostly because I’d already had two drinks, which is not great for modeling paths in your head, it turns out). The solo mode has you playing against the clock, trying to complete seven prestige buildings in seven rounds, with certain costs increasing on you as the game progresses; either I missed a rule somewhere or there needs to be a better way to obtain income, both currency and influence tokens, to give you a fighting chance here. (I did “win,” technically, but again I think I skimmed some rules here.)

I see two fundamental problems with Founders of Gloomhaven, starting with the rules themselves. They’re not well written or organized, and terms are used to mean slightly different things – “own” in particular has multiple distinct definitions in the game, as does “import” when referring to resources. The BGG forums for the game are filled with rules questions like those, or asking about the multifarious rules on tile placement. The other is that it seems to be too hard to get roads to place on the board – if ever a game needed a card like Catan’s Road Building development card, this is it. You can forego money in the income phase to take and place roads, but that puts you at some disadvantage in the next round, and that is one of just two ways when you can place multiple road tiles at once, the other coming with certain adviser cards you must purchase. The game can’t work without a big network of roads connecting resource stalls and buildings around the board – you actually don’t have enough claim tokens to set up unique resource buildings in each section of the board – so all this shortage does is add some needless length to the game.

One last positive aspect worth mentioning is that there is some collaborative effort to the placement of buildings, especially prestige buildings, because multiple players can benefit from any such placement. That speeds the game up a little it, and also encourages players to work together on building the network around the board (which comes with two sides, one of which is apparently harder than the other). For a game of this depth and potential time requirement, a collaborative aspect is both welcome and necessary.

The game has a list price of $80 but I’ve seen it regularly under $50; amazon has it right now for $45. I imagine it’ll appeal to Gloomhaven players for its theme, but this is much more of a game in the vein of heavy strategy titles like Great Western Trail or Whistle Stop from last year, games that focused on tile placement but also required you to manage multiple other tracks (no pun intended) at the same time that you’re building out the board. It’s solid, and offers some novelty in the semi-collaborative aspect, but I don’t think I’ll pull Founders off the shelves before some other heavy strategy games that play more smoothly or are just more fun.

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→ September 15, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 9/15/18.

My one ESPN+/Insider piece this week named my Prospect of the Year for 2018, with a number of other players who were worthy of the title but couldn’t unseat the incumbent. I answered questions on that and other topics in a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Disney’s Villainous, a card game that resembles deckbuilders (like Dominion) in mechanics, but gives you your entire deck at the start of the game. Each player plays as a specific villain, with a unique deck and victory conditions, so you learn each deck’s intricacies as you play.

And now, the links…

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→ September 14, 2018
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Lost Cities Rivals.

Lost Cities is one of the original, classic “couples” games, a strictly two-player game that’s quick to learn, has enough luck involved to allow someone who hasn’t played many games to compete fairly with an experienced gamer, and that has plenty of interaction to keep the two players engaged. It’s from Reiner Knizia, whose games are all built on a math foundation but keep that stuff under the hood. It has since fallen behind several other two-player games (notably Jaipur) in my own rankings & my house, but I’ll always have a soft spot for it because it was one of the first two-player games I ever tried and liked.

Kosmos has now released a new version of the game, Lost Cities: Rivals, that allows up to four to play at once, simplifies the scoring, and mitigates the luck factor at least a little bit so that players can strategize a little more over the deck. It still works with two players, but the design here, giving players money to bid on cards, is clearly aimed at getting the whole family to the table at once. It’s a nice filler game, nothing too novel, but again very easy for anyone to pick up and certainly appropriate for younger players (the box says ages 10+, but I’d say this is fine for kids as young as 8), and priced appropriately at $14.95 list.

The basic premise of Lost Cities: Rivals is the same as the original – players try to build ‘expeditions’ of cards in five colors by acquiring cards numbered 2 through 10 and playing them in ascending order. That is, once you’ve played a red 4 card, you can’t play the red 2 or 3 any more. The Rivals deck has two copies of each card numbered 2 through 5, and just one copy of each card numbered 6 through 10. On a turn, a player may uncover the next card in the deck and place it on the table for all players to see, or may bid on all face-up cards on the table, starting an auction that proceeds around the table until all players pass.

The scoring in Rivals is much simpler than in the base game. The original had you start with -20 points in any expedition you started, so you’d have to make up the deficit by playing enough cards to that expedition, with each card worth the points of its numerical value. That’s all gone in Lost Cities: Rivals, as you start with zero points in each expedition, score one point for each card you play to any expedition, and get a straight eight-point bonus for any expedition where you play at least four numbered cards.

Rivals also carries forward the ‘wager’ cards for each expedition; you can play one, two, or three such cards to any expedition before you play any numbered cards to it, and those increase your bonuses for each card to 2, 3, or 4 points. (The eight-point bonus for playing four cards is unaffected.) Each player begins the game with two random wager cards, while the remaining ten are shuffled into the main deck.

Players begin the game with equal stashes of gold coins – there are 36 in total, and you distribute them evenly among all players – to use to bid on cards on display. The deck is split into four piles, and when each of the first three piles is exhausted, the ‘bank’ of coins paid to buy cards is split evenly again among all players, with any remainder left in the bank. The player who wins the auction takes all cards but may discard one from the game entirely, and may not take any other cards s/he can’t legally play to his/her own tableau. Thus you may still want to bid on cards even if you can’t play some of them – there is value in discarding a card that’s valuable to an opponent, and there’s no penalty involved in winning cards you can’t play because you just leave them on the table.

The game moves very quickly since turns are short and decisions aren’t really that complex – it gets tricker towards the end when you’re hoping for certain cards and might preserve your coins to try to nab something important – with a full game taking under 45 minutes in our plays. It’s also very compact, like the original, something you could easily take with you on the road in its box or just by bringing the deck and throwing the coins in a small bag. I don’t think this will be in regular rotation here, though; it’s certainly light and simple, but I think we want a little more fun or strategy from games we’ll play often. This felt a bit too familiar, and other than the few times we were all seriously bidding on a set of cards, there wasn’t enough to get us laughing or taunting each other to make me want to pull the game out again.

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→ September 9, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 9/8/18.

My one piece for ESPN+/Insider this week looked at the top prospects at last weekend’s Future Stars Series, including Daniel Espino, the top RHP for the 2019 draft, and Glenallen Hill, Jr. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My annual minor league player of the year column is supposed to run this upcoming week, which means I need to write it (it’s not like the winner is a tough choice, but I like to highlight a few other dudes who had great years too), and I am hoping to get a new edition of my email newsletter out as well.

And now, the links…

  • Slate looks at the sustainability of The Athletic’s business model while raising critical questions about whether their content is actually as unique as they claim it is. (I’m an Athletic subscriber and happy to pay for good content, but I would say I read a very small number of writers on that site.)
  • Two longreads from the great investigative journalism site ProPublica this week. First, how Oregon keeps releasing violent criminals who were judged criminally insane, with several such convicts eventually reoffending for violent crimes.
  • Also, José Bacelga, a cancer researcher and the Chief Medical Officer at Sloan Kettering, failed on several occasions to disclose financial conflicts of interest when publishing cancer research in major journals. He was even editor-in-chief of one such journal that published his research yet broke its rules on disclosure.
  • I loved Will Leitch’s take on Nike choosing to ally itself with Colin Kaepernick despite the entirely expected outcry from the right. I also think they got more publicity value out of the announcement than they could possibly have bought. (Will is a friend of mine.)
  • Ars Technica, for whom I have written one freelance piece, has a short column asking BBQ pit masters for basic tips on pork butts and briskets. I’ve used the foil trick to get around the stall problem with pork shoulders, but prefer not to use it because it softens the bark that forms on the meat’s exterior.
  • The President’s increasingly overt racism shouldn’t be a surprise – he’s been attacking Elizabeth Warren for years by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a sort of racial slur to question her integrity. The Washington Post debunks Trump’s claims that she used her heritage to obtain promotions or admission to schools.
  • A trans woman of color was murdered in Philadelphia this week, and 2018 is shaping up to be an especially deadly year for trans people in the US, although it seems like hard data on the subject is hard to come by. I think it’s fair to say the trend isn’t good – such killings should be going down and they’re probably not.
  • Passengers on four Southwest Airlines flights may have been exposed to measles thanks to a sick passenger who traveled on those planes. The measles virus is extremely contagious and can be fatal at the time of infection or later in life. I would entirely favor a law criminalizing the woman’s actions: flying with a contagious, vaccine-preventable disease, thus putting hundreds of people at risk.
  • Ride-sharing services like Uber may be exacerbating traffic problems because riders choose them over public transportation, not over driving themselves. I do use these services from time to time, but not when public transit is available (and safe).
  • Twitter banned Alex Jones and InfoWars this week after months of pressure to rid the site of the hoax-peddling arch-right conspiracy theory factory and its corpulent founder. Jane Coaston covered these bans last month for Vox, looking at why YouTube, Apple, and Facebook took the same action.
  • Board games! Z-Man Games, an imprint of Asmodee, announced the latest extension to the Pandemic brand with Pandemic: Fall of Rome, which sounds a lot like last winter’s Pandemic: Rising Tide, another game that took the framework of the original Pandemic, added some clever twists to the rules, and shifted the theme away from fighting global epidemics.
  • Floodgate Games announced the Kickstarter for Bad Maps, a light family-level strategy game they demoed at Gen Con. It’s about 2/3 to its goal with 18 days to go. Floodgate also released the 5-6 player Sagrada expansion, which includes a private dice board to tweak the original’s dice-drafting mechanic, to retail this past week. It’s $25 on amazon via that link.
  • Starling Games announced a Kickstarter, opening to backers on September 10th, for Pearlbrook, the first expansion for Everdell, itself in the running for my #1 new game of 2018.
  • It seems like each week brings one great new(ish) comic on vaccine denialism, so here’s the latest.
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→ August 27, 2018
→ By

Kerala.

The family board game Kerala: The Way of the Elephant first came out in 2016, and I tried it for the first time at Gen Con 2017, jumping into a game of a few friends who needed a fourth player, but I hadn’t scored a copy until just last week. It’s a very light, fast-playing game with a decent amount of luck involved, but the way the turns go, every player is going to have to cope with the randomness in the same way, and ultimately the game plays out as a sort of competitive puzzling match where each player has to build out his/her set of tiles to maximize points and minimize penalties in the same way.

Each Kerala player gets two elephant tokens and a start tile, all in the same color, with five colors total in the game (the game plays two to five, but it’s best with at least three). On each turn, the start player draws one tile from the bag – 100 tiles if there are 5 players, slightly fewer for lower player counts – for each player, and then players select tiles from those drawn to add to their tableaus. You can only add a tile next to one of your two elephant tokens, and then move the token on to the new tile. Then the start player moves around the table, so over the course of the game you should pick first through last a roughly even number of times.

The catch in Kerala is in the scoring, of course. There are five colors of tiles, and you want to try to create one area for each color in your tableau – if you have two separate areas of green tiles, you will have to choose one to discard at game-end, losing two points for each tile you lose. (You can have two areas in your start color.) Most tiles have one to three elephant symbols on them, and you’ll score a point for each symbol on tiles you haven’t discarded in the end-game scoring. You also need to have at least one area of each of the five colors at game-end, or you lose five points for each color you don’t have.

There are three types of special tiles in the bag, and they can be extremely valuable or utterly useless, depending on when in the game they appear and what your board looks like. One allows you to relocate any tile you’ve already played to the table; otherwise a tile you’ve placed can’t be moved for the rest of the game. One allows you to jump either of your elephants to anywhere else on your tableau, which can be very useful if you’ve boxed one of your tokens into an inconvenient spot. And the third type has two colors on it, one covering most of the tile and one touching a single edge; you score five points at game-end if you match the edge color to the tile adjacent to it on that side.

Kerala allows you to stack tiles on top of each other rather than just adding to the edges of your tableau, which can help you connect areas or cover tiles that would lose you points, but can also cost you more points if you have to discard an entire stack – it’s two points per tile you discard, not just for the stack – and potentially traps your elephant somewhere that makes it hard to place more tiles. You can also pass twice per game, choosing not to take any available tiles; when you do so, you lay one of your two elephant tokens on its side. You do get one point at game-end for elephant tokens still standing, although it’s generally worth losing that bonus to pass on tiles that you can’t place without incurring the two-point penalty.

Rounds can easily take under a minute, and you can play a whole game of Kerala in about a half an hour, unless you have a player who hems and haws over every little choice (I know a few of these, but I’m not one). It’s listed for ages 8 and up and I see no reason an 8-year-old or even a child a bit younger couldn’t play this with a little advice from an adult – you’re matching colors and just lightly planning ahead, but there’s only so much strategy you can employ in a game that gives you no warning or way to predict what tiles might be available. Kerala is also a bit unusual in that the designer is a woman, Kirsten Hiese: Board game design is an extremely male-dominated field, and if you see a woman’s name in the credits, it’s usually either as co-designer or as the artist. My #1 game at Gen Con this year, Nyctophobia, was designed by a young woman, Catherine Stippell; Visitor at Blackwood Grove, another game I didn’t get to demo there, earned some positive chatter, and its lead designer is Mary Flanagan (also the lead on Monarch, a game with three listed designers, two of whom are women). But this is rare, and there’s no good reason for it, which to me is all the more reason to try to boost a game like Kerala, one that is fun and easy to bring out for the whole family to play, and that oh-by-the-way happens to be designed by a woman.

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→ August 18, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 8/18/18.

My biggest piece this week was my annual Gen Con wrap-up for Paste, covering the 20 best games I got to play, demo, or just watch at the convention, and discussing pretty much everything else I saw too.

For Insiders, I wrote up what Shane Baz’s inclusion means for the Chris Archer trade, with scouting notes on Adam Haseley, Nolan Jones, and some pitching prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. Feel free to sign up for more of my ramblings, plus links to all of my content.

And now, the links…

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→ August 10, 2018
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Century Spice Road.

When reviewing anything – books, movies, TV shows, and, yes, board games – it’s often too easy to describe something by comparing it to another more familiar title, or to say it’s a combination of this title and that title. Come to think of it, that comes up quite often in baseball too – readers and especially TV/radio hosts often ask me “who does this prospect remind you of?” I generally don’t like to answer those questions, because I find those comparisons too facile and often not very revealing – you lose a lot of nuance, and the comparison becomes an anchor point for whoever is listening or reading. If I tell you such-and-such a pitcher reminds me a lot of Roy Halladay, you’re not going to think of anything but Roy Halladay – and any further elucidation comes in the form of a negative statement, like “he’s Roy Halladay but not X.”

So now I’m going to violate everything I just said earlier – Century Spice Road is really a lot like Splendor, in a good way. It has one significant twist in the mechanics that make it a great game for people who like Splendor (and really, if you don’t like Splendor, I’m not sure if we can be friends) but want something a little different. Splendor is a shade more elegant, and gets points for bringing this general mechanical framework to the table, but Century Spice Road is perfect if you’ve decided you want something similar to Splendor but not exactly the same.

Century Spice Road is the first part of a game trilogy from Emerson Matsuuchi (Reef, Volt), the second part of which, Century Eastern Wonders, was out at Gen Con last week, with part three due out in 2019. The first two games can apparently be combined into a single game called Sand & Sea, which I will try out when I get my copy of Eastern Wonders.

Spice Road’s theme is a familiar one in the tabletop world – I’ve lost count of how many games involve merchants trading spices – while the rules are quite brief and simple. Players will collect spice cubes in four colors (turmeric, safran, cardamom, and cinnamon), and try to trade them in for bonus cards that can be worth 8 to 19 points depending on the cube costs. Players collect those cubes by playing cards that allow them to just take two or three cubes form the supply, and, more frequently, by playing upgrade cards that allow them to trade in some combination of cubes for another combination of cubes that is more valuable. (It’s not a zero-sum game; you’re trading with the market, which apparently is full of merchants who suck at math.) The cubes’ values are ordered, with turmeric the least valuable and cinnamon the most. Those values are reflected on all of the upgrade cards and on the bonus cards, so cards that require more cinnamon and cardamom cubes will be worth more points.

On a turn, a player can play a card from his/her hand, take a card from the supply, claim a bonus card with the appropriate cubes, or ‘rest’ to pick back up all cards s/he has played to the table. The queue of cards to take works with the same mechanic as many other games, notably Small World, where the leftmost (top) card in the stack is free, and you pay one cube of any color for each card you skip over to take another one, placing each cube on the card you’ve skipped. Sometimes that’s still a great play – your cube can only hold ten cubes at the end of your turn – and sometimes it’s smart to take a card from the queue because of the cubes other players have left on it.

The leftmost card in the stack of bonus cards rewards the player who claims it with a gold coin, and the next card to its right is worth a silver coin, although both piles of coins are limited to twice the number of players in that game. Game-end scoring is simple: add up the points on your bonus cards, take three points for each gold coin and one for each silver, and add one point for each non-turmeric (yellow) spice cube left on your caravan. When one player obtains his/her fifth bonus card (4-5 players) or sixth (2-3 players), players finish that round and score. Games take 30-40 minutes, turns are short, and the rules are very quick for new players to learn. It really is Splendor-ish, but with a little more engine-building to it, where instead of acquiring cards that give you permanent jewel/cube values, you play upgrade cards to boost the cubes you have. It’s a great lightweight game that capitalizes on the familiarity of an earlier game without feeling too repetitive.

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→ July 21, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 7/21/21.

For Insiders this week, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors and posted analyses of the Manny Machado trade and the Brad Hand/Francisco Mejia trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My next game review for Paste will go up next week; this week I reviewed the app version of Istanbul, a great strategic game of pathfinding and set collection, here on the dish.

I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm to talk Smart Baseball and sign copies.

And now, the links…

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→ June 13, 2018
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Compounded.

The board game Compounded takes its theme from the world of chemistry, asking players to gather five elements to assemble any of the sixteen compounds available at any given time on the table, while boosting players’ abilities to form and fill compounds as the game progresses. The core game play is pretty simple, although the rules are more detailed than they probably need to be, and there’s one rule I could probably have done completely without.

The elements that players will use to form their compounds are drawn at random from a bag, and no two elements appear with the same frequency – hydrogen is the most common, sulfur is the rarest. Compounds can be as simple as three elements, and can require up to eight. You can ‘claim’ one compound at a time, before you finish it, and can then place two elements anywhere on the tableau on a turn. Once you do finish a compound, you take the card, return the elements to the bag, earn three to seven points, and get to move up one of your four tracking tokens that affect how many elements you draw at the start of each turn (default is two), how many compounds you can claim at any given time, how many elements you can place on a turn, and how many elements you can store on your board (default is four). Some compounds also give you a bonus token or ongoing ability; for example, if you have three elements of any color, you can return them to the bag to take one element of your choice, but with the Pipette that ratio becomes 2:1 instead.

The game progresses until one player has scored at least 50 points – the scoring track is a separate board showing the periodic table, so you have to at least get to tin – or one player has reached the top of three of his four tracks, or the deck of compounds is exhausted. That can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half in our experience, playing with three to five players. (It plays two with some rules variations.)

The one rule that I would gladly ditch is the lab fire, which doesn’t do much but add some randomness and a little ability to screw your opponents to the game. Some compounds have one or two tiny fire icons at the bottom of their cards, indicating that the compounds are flammable. The deck of compound cards has five Lab Fire cards in it, and when one appears, players must add one very tiny fire token to every compound on the table that has the icon on it. Once all flame icons on a compound have been filled, the compound explodes and is removed from the board, and all elements on it are scattered to adjacent compounds (at the discretion of the player who had claimed but not finished it). There are also a few volatile compounds in the deck that explode when they’re completed and have a similar effect on the tableau. Players can complete their fire extinguishers – two oxygen, one carbon and use them to remove one flame token from any compound, although I think it’s better to save it until the end of the game for 4 extra points. And you may earn a one-time use Bunsen burner token that you can use to light someone else’s compound on fire, which is just mean.

There’s more strategy required in Compounded that just figuring out which compounds you can easily finish; gaining the abilities to draw or place more elements each round is huge, and whichever player moves up the fastest on those tracks is going to have an advantage that will be hard for other players to catch. Getting those abilities does require some luck, however, as you have to draw the right elements to be able to complete the right compounds; we had one five-player game where one player never managed to finish a compound that would have allowed her to draw more than two elements at a time. There is a slight workaround – if you finish a compound with a graduated cylinder on it, you can then bump one track down a peg and another track up a peg, once per turn for the rest of the game – but it can lead to a serious imbalance if one player just gets the wrong draws from the bag.

I’m all for more science-themed games, and chemistry games seem to be especially scarce, so Compounded is a welcome entry to the field. I did find some of the rules a little fiddly, and the Lab Fire mechanic didn’t really work for me other than to add more maintenance and move through the compound deck a little faster. The core game play itself, trying to figure out how best to deploy the elements you’ve drawn, is the best part of Compounded, and you can certainly tweak the other rules to work with just that basic mechanic for a cleaner experience.

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→ June 9, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 6/9/18.

The 2018 MLB Rule 4 draft has come and gone and I have recaps up for all National League teams and all American League teams. I also wrote my reactions to day one on Monday night, and held a Klawchat on Tuesday after the fourth round, while teams continued drafting.

You can find more details on my top 100 prospects for the draft on my Big Board, and can see my final first-round mock from Monday afternoon, which had 9 picks on the dot and flipped Arizona’s first two picks.

Over at Paste, I recapped what I saw at Paradox Interactive’s PDXCON in Stockholm last month, where they announced tabletop versions of four of their popular video game titles: Crusader Kings, Cities Skylines, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron.

My free email newsletter is back and I hope it’ll be more or less weekly again now that the draft is over; I’m planning to send the next issue this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I will be at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on July 14th, joined by my friend Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook), and hope to announce a signing in the Boston area for the weekend of July 28th shortly.

And now, the links…

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