→ August 25, 2020
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Fairy Trails.

Uwe Rosenberg’s Patchwork is one of the best pure two-player games on the market, combining polyomino tiles, a rondel mechanism for tile selection, and a little bit of take-that into a fun but reasonably intense two-player experience. His newest two-player title, Fairy Trails, is something quite different for him, a lighter game in both theme and mechanics, but unfortunately it falls a bit short of his prior standard, including cute art I thought made the game harder to play.

Fairy Trails comprises a deck of cards, each of which shows two colors of trails on it extending out to all four sides, and nineteen tokens per player. On each turn, you will play one of the three cards in your hand to the table, and will try to complete trails in your color. Some of those cards show trails ending in cul-de-sacs, but most extend the trails to one or two other edges of the cards, so finishing them involves a little advance planning. Trails also have spaces on them for houses, and once you’ve completed a trail in your color – meaning that the trail is closed at all ends, with nothing terminating at a card edge – you can place your tokens on all of those house spaces. The first player to place their 19th house token wins.

The game’s simplicity is its best feature; there’s almost no learning curve here. Once you see how the trails work, and that you aren’t just looking for cul-de-sacs but need to try to loop your trails back to themselves, and can also stymie your opponents by making that harder, you have the game’s mechanics. Turns aren’t necessarily that quick, however, because of the number of permutations you have to work through to choose which card to place, where to place it, and then which orientation, most of which won’t end up closing a trail completely, leaving you to consider whether to extend an existing trail, hoping to get more house tokens on it when it’s completed, or move it closer to completion.

That leads to the game’s biggest issue, the art, which is pretty enough but makes parsing the trails’ routes much harder. The two colors are distinct enough, but the trails overlap each other in confusing ways, making it hard to see the trail that’s ‘underneath’ the other one, and since the background of the yellow trails is a grayish-purple, it looks too much like the color of the fuchsia trails. The trails are also drawn in a wispy style, like a font with too many serifs, which may improve the aesthetic value but also contributes to the confusion about where the trails go. The dark green backgrounds also don’t quite help – they don’t provide enough contrast with the two trail colors, yellow and fuchsia.

Two example cards from Fairy Trails.

My other main complaint with Fairy Trails is that the mechanics themselves aren’t that interesting; it’s like a poor man’s Carcassonne, where your moves are somewhat limited by your cards, but here you can’t try to jump into your opponent’s trail to steal points, and with just a single feature to complete and score, the game is kind of repetitive. You can add a card to make it harder for your opponent to close one of their roads, which means they can’t place any house tokens on it, but you might do so at the expense of a move that would help close one or your trails, or extend it in a way that’s more profitable when you do close it, so the take-that element exists but is of limited strategic value.

I had a hard time teasing apart the two problems I had with Fairy Trails. Would I like the game more if the art weren’t visually confusing, so that evaluating moves or scoring trails was faster? Rosenberg’s heavier worker-placement games often suffer from a surfeit of mechanics and scoring options; would the art here have bothered me less if, say, there were one more way to score, or one other option beyond just building trails? I did play this with a younger player who likes games, but she ended up losing interest halfway through, I think because it was such a long process to close her trails and place tokens on them. Fairy Trails seems like the core concept for a good, light two-player game is somewhere in here, but it’s not finished the way that Rosenberg’s games usually are.

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→ August 20, 2020
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Port Royal.

Port Royal came out in 2014 and was brought to the US in 2017 by Steve Jackson Games, one of the oldest extant board game publishers, who first rose to prominence with the 1980 game Car Wars and have since had success with the extensive line of Munchkin games. Designed by Alexander Pfister (Isle of Skye, Great Western Trail), it’s a very simple press-your-luck card game with a pirate theme to make Sid Meier proud, where players draw cards from a common deck and take one per round, but you can bust if you push too far when trying to draw something better, with the ultimate goal of becoming the first player to accumulate 12 victory points from cards and expeditions.

That deck has three main card types: ships, persons, and expeditions. The ships all have gold coin amounts ranging from 1 to 4 coins, and if you choose to take that ship, you get that many coins, represented by cards drawn face-down from the deck. (Their face-up side has no meaning when they’re used as coins.) They can also show a number of crossed swords on the bottom of the card, ranging from 1 to 6, or just a skull and crossbones. If you draw two ships of the same nationality on your turn, however, your turn ends immediately and you get nothing.

The persons can cost anywhere from 3 to 9 coins to hire, and they come in seven basic roles. The most common are the Sailors and Pirates, who are worth one or two swords each, respectively. You can use all of your pirates together to ‘repel’ any ship with a sword number equal to or less than your pirates’ total number of swords, discarding that ship card but keeping your pirates. This is one way to reduce your odds of busting on a turn, although you can’t do anything to repel ships with the skull & crossbones on them.

Other people you can hire give you lasting benefits for future turns. The Settler, the Priest, and the Captain all can help you complete Expedition cards, which require two or three of those in a specific combination and grant you 4 or 6 victory points. The Jack-of-all-Trades costs a bit more but is a wild card that can represent any of those three people for the purposes of fulfilling an expedition. The Governor lets you take a second card on your turn. The Admiral gives you 2 extra coins if it is your turn to take a card and there are at least 5 cards in the display. The Mademoiselle lets you pay one fewer coin to hire a person. The Jester gives you 1 coin if there are no cards in the display when it’s your turn to take a card – even if that’s because you busted. Traders give you an extra coin if you ‘trade with,’ meaning take the gold coins from, a ship of their matching nationality.

Once you’ve completed your turn by taking a card, if there are any cards remaining, all other players get the opportunity to take a card from the table by paying you 1 coin and then paying the regular cost to hire a person or simply taking a ship and receiving its gold value. This means what you leave on the table might be a consideration for what you take, or how far you keep pushing your luck – it may be better to keep going rather than take a mediocre return and leave a valuable card on the table for another player who has the coins to buy it.

Pushing your luck can yield another benefit as well. If you can get four ships of different nationalities on to the table without busting, you get to take a second card on that turn; if you get ships of all five nationalities, you can take three cards. There are also a couple of taxation cards in the deck, where all players with 12 or more coins must give back half of their stash, and either the player with the most swords or the fewest victory points gets a one coin bonus.

Person cards can be worth 0 to 3 victory points; expedition cards are worth either 4 or 6 points each, although they require you to turn in Settler, Priest, or Captain cards that are worth 1 point each, so taking an expedition adds 2 or 3 net points to your total. The official victory condition is 12 points, after which you complete a full round so every player has had a chance to be the start player an equal number of times. You can also just agree to play to any point total you like, or to say you can’t win without completing an Expedition, two popular variants.

I’ve played more than 100 games of Port Royal online, and I own the physical game as well (which is just a deck of cards, so it’s really portable). I definitely have my preferred strategy, and I think the Just One More Contract… expansion helps address some of the base game’s issues with certain cards being too valuable. But even the base game is still kind of a blast, because it’s a gambling game at heart. Every turn is a bet, one you can make a little smarter by collecting swords and maybe keeping an eye on what ships have gone by, but ultimately it’s no better than smart luck, and I find it very enjoyable even when I bust a few times and know I can’t come back to win. (Although I did do that once, busting three times early in a game, taking more risks after that to try to get extra cards, and storming back to overcome an 8-point deficit. Good times!) If you’re into push-your-luck games, like the Quacks of Quedlinburg, Clank!, or Can’t Stop, I definitely recommend Port Royal.

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→ July 12, 2020
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Walking in Burano.

Walking in Burano is a 2018 game from Taiwanese designer Wei-Min Ling, who also designed the semi-abstract, chess-like game Shadows in Kyoto; and Mystery of the Temples. Ling owns one of the most important board game publishers in Asia, EmperorS4, which produced Hanamikoji and Realm of Sand, and uses Taiwanese artist Maisherly Chan for the majority of their games. With great art and a fairly simple set of mechanics, Walking in Burano is one of the best EmperorS4 games yet, not quite at Hanamikoji’s level but on par with their other top titles, especially given how quickly you can learn to play.

Players in Walking in Burano will acquire cards from the central market to create three-story buildings on their streets, ultimately filling out a 3×5 grid with five scoring cards, one beneath each house. These represent streets on the Venetian island of Burano, and the idea is to appeal to tourists and locals with various combinations of features on single buildings or streets as a whole. The catch is that building cards come in six colors, where each building (or house, they’re the same in this game) must comprise three cards of the same color, but adjacent buildings can’t share a color – unless you want to use one of your ‘rule-breaking’ tokens to break that rule and cede three points at game-end.

The market has three rows of cards, each of which corresponds to a specific floor of the houses you’ll be constructing. You may take one, two, or three cards from any column in the market, although you must start with the top or bottom row and can’t skip the middle card (e.g., you can take cards 1, 3, 1-2, 2-3, or 1-2-3). If you take an entire column, you don’t get any coins; if you take one card, you get two coins, and if you take two cards, you get one coin. You may then choose to build as many floors as you can afford, with the first floor you build on any turn costing you one coin, the second costing two coins more, and the third two coins beyond that. You get two scaffolding cards that you can move as needed, so you don’t have to build from the first floor up. You don’t have to build cards immediately when you take them; you can keep up to three from one turn to the next.

Once you complete any building of three cards, you can choose a scoring card from the available supply. There are four tourist cards that are worth four points each, and then give you additional points based on what’s showing on the three cards in the building you just finished – one point per flower pot, one point per plant, three points per cat, or two points per cat/awning/lamp/chimney. There are seven inhabitant cards in the base game, the supply of which is more limited, that offer very different bonuses that often apply to entire floors or to several adjacent cards. (I also have the one mini-expansion for the game, which adds three more inhabitants; you shuffle all ten types together and randomly choose seven to use in any single game.)

Once any player finishes their fifth building, it triggers game-end. You get points from your bonus cards, points from some first-floor cards that show shops, and 3 points for each rule-breaking token you still have. All players then count their “closed” windows on cards, those with X’s on them, and the player with the most loses one point per such window.

Even tough turns are quick, there’s quite a bit of strategy involved in Walking in Burano, as you try to collect certain symbols on cards to maximize your potential bonuses from cards you don’t yet have. You can end up losing out on a bonus card after collecting the house cards that would have granted you a huge bonus from it; you won’t end up with nothing, as you get another bonus card, but you’ll probably get fewer points than you’d planned. You are also betting on the availability of future cards, and future symbols, regularly during the game.

The rules also include a solo mode that works extremely well, almost exactly mirroring the two-player rules (where, after each round, you remove all cards in the rightmost column of the market, to keep it moving and create a bit more urgency), but also requiring you to remove one Character bonus card of your choice after each turn. This creates an upper bound on the number of turns you can take, as the game ends either when you complete your fifth building or when there are no bonus cards remaining, after which you score your street as you would in a multi-player game, deducting one point for every closed window you have, then comparing your score to the table in the rules.

Walking in Burano only came out in the United States in 2019, although the Chinese edition was released a year earlier, and I think the timing of the U.S. release during the flood of July/August releases last year led it to fall through the cracks. It’s pretty great across the board – easy to learn, quick game time, deeper strategically than you’d guess at first glance, with gorgeous art. Light-strategy games in small boxes that give you more to chew on than the typical short game are right in my wheelhouse, since it’s just easier to get people to sit for a game that’s short and that doesn’t require a long explanation of the rules; Walking in Burano is exactly that kind of game.

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→ June 18, 2020
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Mystic Market.

Mystic Market ($20) is a marvelous light family game that you can quite easily play with your kids, requiring nothing more than color-matching and a little arithmetic to play. There are just a few simple elements to it, with some direct and indirect player interaction, perhaps a little too much take-that for younger players, but also enough to satisfy gamers who insist on a bit of meat even in their lighter games. I’m surprised it hasn’t found more of an audience.

Players in Mystic Market are trying to gather ingredients, in the form of cards in six different colors, that can be combined in sets and sold for prices that vary depending on the color of the ingredients – and the timing of the sale. You can collect these ingredients by buying one or two of them them from the market for one, two, or three coins apiece, based on their current sale price on the ingredient track, or by swapping cards from your hand, one or two at a time, without regard to color or current value.

The game has a track with little ingredient bottles (filled with glitter), and at the start of the game they’re arranged in rainbow order, with purple at the bottom and the most valuable at 15 coins for a set, while red is at the top and returns only 5 coins for a set. The catch is that when you sell a set, its color drops in value to the top of the track (5 coins), with every other color falling down the track to the next highest price. Thus there’s a huge timing element to the game, both in terms of when to sell your own sets, and whether to try to take cards your opponents might need to sell high-value sets.

The number of cards you need for a set also varies by color, from four red cards or four orange cards for a set of those colors to just two of blue or purple, and their frequency in the deck declines as their starting value increases. Thus at some point during the game the purple set, which is hard to collect given its scarcity, will sell for just five coins because someone else just sold a set, and collecting it becomes less profitable.

It rarely makes sense to sell sets at 5 or 6 coins, and you’ll usually sell at 10-12-15 and turn a profit. The heart of the game is that process of buying and selling, working the timing of your sales, and keeping an eye on what your opponents are collecting, whether it’s to grab a card they might need or to time your sale in a way to get the high price for yourself and make whatever your opponents were collecting far less valuable. There are also three “supply shift” cards randomly shuffled into the deck each game; each one moves one bottle to the highest value on the track and moves everything that was higher than that bottle back to the lowest point, disrupting all of the values and thus your strategy if you were mid-set.

If that were all there was to Mystic Market, it would be good enough but probably wouldn’t have much replay value. The Potion deck contains cards with special, single-use powers, and you can buy those for specific combinations of two ingredient cards. Buying (“crafting”) a potion is a free action, as is using any potion. Several of them do something nasty to an opponent – stealing a card, forcing them to discard a card of your choosing, swapping a card with you – while others boost you, such as letting you sell a half set for full price, letting you substitute a potion card for one ingredient to complete a set, or letting you take a single ingredient card for free. There’s even a card that has no power at all, but can be redeemed for 15 coins, very useful if you’re left with a blue card and a purple card but can’t complete either set later in the game. You could choose to remove the take-that cards from this deck if you don’t want to play with them when you have younger kids in the game, but I do think they add quite a bit to the game both in strategy and in making it harder for one player to run away with things.

Mystic Market plays two to four players and is suitable for kids as young as 8, maybe a little younger if they’ve played a few games before; there’s a little text in the game, on the Potion cards, that requires sufficient reading and thinking skills that would stymie much younger players. You play until the ingredient deck is exhausted, which I’ve found takes about 45 minutes for a full game regardless of player count. If you’re looking for a good family game while we’re all still mostly staying home, I think this would fit the bill.

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→ May 30, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 5/30/20.

My second mock draft went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic; I think it was a lot better than my first one, which went up two weeks ago, based on the feedback I got from sources after it was posted. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday to take your questions about it. I’ll do another mock plus a draft ranking this upcoming week, then a final mock on June 10th, the morning of the draft.
 
Over at Paste, I reviewed Azul: Summer Pavilions, the third game in the Azul series (Azul and Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra). If you liked either of the first two Azul games, you’ll probably like this one as well, which offers the same tile-selection mechanic but new ways to place and score. Here on the dish, I reviewed La Isla, a midweight game from the designer of Castles of Burgundy and Carpe Diem.

My podcast this week featured Dr. Claude Steele, a psychology professor at Stanford and the author of Whistling Vivaldi, who spoke to me about stereotype threat and how players and evaluators might cope with it in sports. You can also listen on Apple, Stitcher, or Spotify. I also appeared on the Romantic About Baseball podcast to discuss my new book The Inside Game, the draft, and other issues in baseball.

The Inside Game has garnered several recommendations from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

And now, the links … many of which are from the Washington Post this week, which wasn’t deliberate.

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→ May 29, 2020
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La Isla.

I’ve got a mixed take on Stefan Feld’s “point salad” games. The Castles of Burgundy is one of my favorite games ever, probably my favorite heavy (or heavier, depending on your perspective) game. Bora Bora is a shade heavier, and pretty good, although I have to be in the right mood for it. His last two games have left me cold, however. Merlin was a total mess where it took a lot of work to get tiny gains in points. Carpe Diem was somewhat better but still not good, with at least one scoring method too many and a tile-selection mechanic that makes it way too easy to end up stuck.

La Isla isn’t his newest, but it’s probably his least-known title, and I don’t see any good reason for that. It’s not a point-salad game, really; there are only a few ways to score and they are all connected, logically and thematically. The game also features a lot of simultaneous play, so turns are very short, and you can play a whole game in under an hour. Yet it has the kind of strategic thinking I expect from Feld games, along with an extremely satisfying mechanic at the heart of the game that I find I really enjoy.

Players in La Isla are explorers trying to photograph five rare animals spread throughout the island represented by the game’s board. That board is variable, with ten interlocking pieces around a circular center piece, and both the board and the distribution of animals varies every time you play. The animals go in the green spaces around the board, and every such space is surrounded by places where players can place their explorer tokens. When a player places explorers on all spaces surrounding one animal – which can be two, three, or four spaces – they take that animal token and score for the number of explorers it took to claim it. Each player starts the game with a large, two-point token for one of the five animals.

That’s the heart of the game, but there’s more to the scoring, of course. There’s a deck of cards in La Isla that governs most of the play itself, with each card showing three things: a special ability, a resource color, and one of the five animals. Each player gets three cards on every turn and must choose one to use for its ability, one to gain the shown resource, and one to advance the shown animal on the scoring tracks. Each player has a cardholder with three spaces in it, and on each turn will place one card in one of those slots – covering existing cards from the fourth round onward – to gain that ability for as long as the card is still showing. The card selection process is simultaneous for all players, so the rounds move quickly.

To place an explorer on the board, you need to pay two resources of the matching color of the space where you want your explorer to go. (You only have five explorers, so once you’ve placed your fifth one, you start moving them, which is itself a strategic decision because you only have a few explorers to use to surround any animal token.) There are many special abilities that make this easier – you may gain a resource for where you place an explorer or the animal you take, or you may get to go on a certain type of space for one resource instead of two – making those abilities especially valuable in the early and middle parts of the game.

At the end of each round, players move up the five markers on the scoring board, one for each animal. When you move up a specific animal marker, you score one point for every animal token of that type you already have, so concentrating on one animal type has significant scoring benefits. The scoring board affects the end-game values of those same animal tokens, which start at zero but increase in value every few spaces; when the sum of the five values across all tracks reaches 7/9/11 points for 2/3/4 players, the game ends.

At end-game, the big points come. You score for each of your animal tokens based on their values on the tracks. For each set of all five animal tokens you have, you get another ten points – one of a few ways where Feld makes sure you can’t win just by going for a single animal type. And you get one point for every two resources left over.

La Isla requires you to have quite a bit of strategic planning, but you’re also always limited by the randomness of the cards. You have to have a long-term plan for what animals to go after, looking for areas of the board where you can be more efficient with your explorers and make the most use of the ability cards you have, but after a few rounds you’ll also be dependent on the resources that show up on the cards you draw. It’s easy to end up with a turn where you can’t place an explorer – it’s not ideal, and if you do that twice in a game you probably won’t win – because of that resource limitation, so planning ahead for that inevitability also becomes a strategic consideration. You’ll also want to push the animal you’re gathering up the track while trying not to push others up, although on some turns you won’t be able to move up your preferred animal at all and will have to determine which one to move that might just help their opponents the least.

There are two levels of ability cards in the game, with 120 level 1 cards and 60 more level 2 cards that introduce a bit more complexity to the game – some of which allow you to add up to two more explorers to your supply, others let you add a fourth slot for ability cards, and so on. They’re absolutely worth using but I agree with the rulebook’s suggestion that you play without them at least once to get the hang of the game itself.

Feld’s reputation for overly involved point-salad games is well-deserved, but La Isla isn’t one of them. There are only a few main ways to score – when you take an animal token, when you move up a marker on an animal’s scoring track, and at game-end for your animal tokens, so they’re all related, and require you to consider balance in your strategy. It’s also a brightly colored, visually appealing game, like Bora Bora (and definitely not like the original Castles of Burgundy), in a space where those features often get short shrift. If you’ve wanted to bump up to games a bit more complex than the family games I often recommend, but still want something good for kids 10+ and that plays in an hour or so, I would definitely suggest giving La Isla a shot.

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→ April 30, 2020
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Gingerbread House.

Phil Walker-Harding is probably my favorite game designer right now, one of the only names that would get me to buy a game just because I saw it on the box. Silver & Gold was my #2 game of 2019, and Imhotep the Duel was #6. Gizmos made my top ten for 2018. Cacao remains a favorite, and I think his Sushi Go! Party is one of the best games for 5+ players. Imhotep itself was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres. I’ve never played a PWH game I didn’t like, and still have one unplayed game of his (the first Adventure game).

Gingerbread House came out in 2018-19, and I think it’s slipped a bit through the cracks because he’s released several better games in the last two years that overshadowed it. I suspect the goofy theme and art might lead people to think it’s a simpler game than it is, although Broom Service had very similar art and that’s definitely more complex than this game is.

Gingerbread House is like a kicked-up Kingdomino, or a better reimagining of Kingdomino than Queendomino is, asking you to place two-square tiles on your 3×3 house card to gain tokens based on what you cover up. You’ll then collect those tokens and use them to buy points cards, while also gaining up to three bonus cards for each level you complete. There are specific twists to the rules beyond that, but that’s the framework of the game – you place one tile on each turn, collect two things (or maybe three), and then buy a card if you can.

There are four colors of tokens in Gingerbread House, and the cards you buy, which represent humans and monsters you’re trying to ‘trap’ by enticing them to your house, can require as many as eight tokens and can require tokens of just one color or up to all four. You’ll cover two spaces on each turn and take tokens matching those spaces, although if you cover two spaces showing the same symbol, you get a third one as a bonus. There are other spaces that give you an extra stairway (see below), or let you swap one token for another one, or let you reserve a card to try to pay for it later.

If you’re mathematically inclined, you probably caught on to the fact that you can’t cover a 3×3 grid with two-square tiles. You start the game with one ‘stairway’ file, which is a square ring that allows you to see what’s beneath it. You can place that for free at any time, but you must cover it with a regular tile on the same turn. You also get a one-square wild tile whenever you pay for a card, and must place it immediately, taking whatever token or symbol you’ve covered; if you later cover the wild tile, you can take any color token or treat it as if it were any of the other three symbols.

When you complete a level of your house, you get to take a bonus card that’s worth points at the end of the game. In the basic game, you just take the highest-points card still on the table. In the advanced game, however, you choose one of the bonus cards, which are dealt out at random at the start of each game, and can thus tailor your strategy afterwards to maximize the points you get from the cards you obtain. Individual character cards are worth 4 to 10 points, but bonus cards can be worth as much as 12 points, so if you play your cards correctly (pun intended), you can gain the equivalent of another character card or more from each bonus card. There are some bonus cards that only give you two points, but instead reward you with tokens based on what’s visible on your board at the time you take them.

That interplay between bonus cards and character cards is what makes Gingerbread House more than just a basic family game. You could certainly ditch the bonus cards and play with younger kids, but the bonus cards are what make this fun for adults. What Gingerbread House lacks is any real interaction between players. Unless two of you are gunning for the same card, and maybe one of you uses the ‘cage’ symbol to reserve it, you’re mostly working on your own. That’s fine – Gizmos is like that, Silver & Gold is like that, Bärenpark is definitely like that – and the game is fun enough for a couple of plays, but I don’t know that this has the same huge replay value as his better games.

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→ April 9, 2020
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Nagaraja.

Nagaraja is the latest two-player game from Hurrican, the boutique publisher in the Asmodee family that produced the two-player dice-rolling game Kero. Co-designed by Bruno Cathala (Kingdomino, Five Tribes), Nagaraja combines tile-laying and dice-rolling in a game of medium complexity that seemed like it had one rule too many for a game that doesn’t allow for a ton of deep planning – but it might fit for players who want something slightly heavier in their two-player games.

Players in Nagaraja each start with a blank 3×3 board that has nine relic tiles randomly distributed face-down around three sides, with the fourth side, facing the player, providing three entrances for the player to start building paths to the relics. On each turn, the players will play cards to bid for a tile, revealed at the start of the turn, that they’ll be able to place on their boards. The tiles all show different configurations of paths, and once a player has completed a path from an entrance to any relic tile, they flip that tile over and gain anywhere from 3 to 6 points. The first player to rack up 25 points wins the game, but your 6-point relic tiles are cursed, and if you reveal three of them you automatically lose the game. 

The cards and the dice are really the essence of the game, though, as just acquiring enough tiles will eventually get you the relic points you want. The cards have two parts; the top part shows some combination of the game’s dice, while the bottom shows some kind of game function like letting you rotate a tile you’ve already placed, giving you additional cards, or adding ‘fate points’ to your dice roll that turn. You choose one or more cards for their dice symbols on each turn, which means you won’t use the benefits on the bottom of those cards, and then roll the dice, which are called ‘fate sticks,’ four-sided rectangular prisms in three different colors. All dice have different numbers of fate points on some sides; the brown dice have the most, but don’t have any of the other symbols, ‘nagas,’ that give you the right to play cards, while the white and green dice do. After your roll, if you have any nagas showing, you may play one card per naga. Once both players have passed, they compare all of their fate points showing on dice and cards they’ve played; the tile goes to the player with the most fate points, and to the start player if there’s a tie.

There are two card functions that seem especially valuable, to the point that you’d probably never want to play them for their dice unless you have no choice. One type lets you peek at one or two relics – yours or your opponent’s – which is almost solely about figuring out where the cursed ones are. You can use other cards to switch relics, including your opponent’s, so in theory you could switch your opponent’s to make them lose the gamer. (You can’t swap one of your relics for one of your opponent’s, however.) The other type that seems especially valuable lets you gain two cards, it’s valuable because you don’t automatically replenish your hand each turn. The player who doesn’t win the tile in a round draws three cards, keeping two and handing the other player the third. Thus it doesn’t take very long to run short of cards, and a big part of your strategy has to involve gaining cards.

Nagaraja also has some take-that cards in the game, including one unique card that lets you place a separate tile with no paths on your opponent’s board, and cards that let you move or rotate your opponents’ tiles. It seems like those cards are useful if you really fall behind, but if you’re close it’ll probably be more productive to try to build out your own board, especially once you know where your 6-point relics are.

Some tiles have spaces for amulet tokens, which can be worth 1 or 2 points, let you draw extra cards (the most valuable), or let you cancel the effect of a card your opponent has just played. This felt like the one game feature that was a rule too many, just one feature that the game didn’t need and that added more pieces to manage on the table without a huge benefit. Those functions could have been on cards, for example, although the amulets are kept secret from your opponent. You’re managing cards, rolling dice, placing tiles, creating paths on your board (and maybe rerouting them to get to different relics), and also have a couple of amulets. Somehow it all added up to one game element too many – but there’s also a strong balance here of strategy and randomness, and the game is fairly well balanced for two players, with the potential for high interaction between them. It’s a solid game that didn’t speak to me, one I can see is objectively good but probably won’t play that much myself given the other two-player options I have in the house.

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→ March 30, 2020
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Queendomino.

Bruno Cathala won the 2017 Spiel des Jahres for Kingdomino, a very simple, quick-playing game of tile-laying that’s cleverly balanced and playable for just about any age. On each turn, four domino-like tiles with two terrain squares and sometimes with one or more crowns on them will be laid out for the players to choose. The catch is that the tiles are placed in numerical order, where the more valuable tiles have higher ranks, and choosing a more powerful tile drops you in the selection order for the next round. Play continues until all the tiles are gone, by which point each player has at least had the chance to create a 5×5 grid around their starting square (twelve tiles per player). It’s super easy to learn and play, but there is plenty of potential for some strategic play if you’re all reasonably experienced gamers. It’s also one of the least expensive games on my top 100, usually selling for about $15.

The game’s runaway success led to a significant expansion called Age of Giants, that added new components and tiles as well as pieces for a fifth player to join; a roll-and-write two-player version called Kingdomino Duel that I thought was only tangentially connected to the original; and Queendomino, a standalone sequel game that you can play together with Kingdomino. Queendomino has also proven popular, but I think it does everything wrong: It adds complexity to the original game without making it more enjoyable, and probably doubles the game length.

The biggest difference in Queendomino, played by itself, is the introduction of red terrain squares that show construction sites, on which you can add single-square tiles with completed buildings that award you bonus points, mostly variable based on other things you’ve built on your grid. You buy those tiles based on a sliding scale, with the tile on the rightmost space in the market free and each one to its left costing a coin more. Some tiles let you place knights, which collect taxes based on the size of the area on which you just placed a knight, while others let you place towers, which can be worth points at game-end. The player with the most towers at any time gets the Queen token, which gives you a one-coin discount on any tiles you buy from the market.

The end-game scoring brings along the mechanics from the original game, where you multiply the number of squares in each contiguous area of any terrain (color) by the number of crowns on squares in that area, while adding bonuses from the construction tiles based on how may distinct areas you have, how many knights/towers you have, or just a fixed point value. The Queen token goes on the board of the player who has it as an additional crown, so it can easily be worth another 8-10 points. 

I could understand the criticism of Kingdomino that it’s too simple; I personally prefer games that are more complex, whether I’m playing with family and friends or whether I’m playing online. But if you have a limited amount of time, or are playing with any kids 8 or younger, it’s perfect – you can rip through a game in 15-20 minutes and it is incredibly easy to teach. But Queendomino ruins Kingdomino’s simplicity with needless complexity: it makes individual turns take longer and makes your current score harder to calculate at a glance. Some games just don’t need to be busied up with additional rules, especially not those that make the down time between your turns take that much longer.

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→ March 19, 2020
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Men at Work.

I generally don’t play many ‘dexterity’ games, meaning games that have some kind of physical component inherent in the play, like Jenga or the 1800s game Crokinole. There are tons of these games on the market but most just aren’t very good, often asking players to do things that are too easy or too difficult, and usually just rewarding the player who had the most fortunate timing rather than rewarding some specific skill or strategy. That made it a surprise that I enjoyed the 2019 game Men at Work, a dexterity game of stacking and especially of balancing, which builds in a way to keep you playing even if you make a mistake and gives players multiple things to do over the course of an entire game.

who can it be now?

Men at Work, designed by Rita Lodl (who appears in the game on one card as ‘Boss Rita’), has players building a construction site of girders and workers, where each player will get a specific instruction on their turn to place one of those two things with some specific additions or restrictions, such as matching a girder to a color already on the site. The initial setup has three girders and one or two workers on grey support blocks so that none of the girders is touching the playing surface. On your turn, you add the girder or worker, sometimes also placing bricks or tiny beams on the arms of the workers as well, while trying to keep the structure balanced so that nothing slips or falls to touch the table beneath. If any parts touch the table, you’ve caused an accident and must remove all such components, and then you lose one of your three safety certificates. If you lose all three, you’re out of the game.

Your moves are determined by a deck of two-sided cards. You flip a card to show two instructions, one for placing a girder and one for placing a worker. The card left on top of the deck will show a girder symbol or a hard-hat, telling you which instruction to follow, and two colors of girders, indicating you must place one of those colors or must place the new worker on a girder of either color. About a quarter of the way through the deck, the Boss Rita card will appear, after which the real scoring begins. If your move adds a new highest point to the construction site, you get an employee of the week token; the first player to get N tokens, where N varies by the number of players from 4 tokens to 6, is the winner. If your move doesn’t add a new highest point, which sometimes isn’t possible, you still must complete the move without causing an accident or risk losing a safety certificate. Play continues until someone reaches the target number of employee of the week tokens, or only one player still has safety certificates remaining.

The one key rule in Men at Work is that you’re supposed to place everything on the structure using just one hand, which is hard enough to remember, let alone to execute. I played this with a seven-year-old who had no problem at all understanding the rules – she only needed help with interpreting card instructions that weren’t all that clear, such as the different cards that say to put the worker on first and then add the bricks/beams, and those that have you put a brick/beam on the worker and then put them all on a girder at once – but I improvised and let her use two hands while I used just one. That was enough to keep the game balanced (pun intended) until eventually the structure got large enough that it was easy for one of us to knock almost the whole thing down with one errant move. It took us about 20 minutes of actual play time (not counting me reading the rules and looking up several cards for more explanation) from start to finish, and there was a lot of laughing in the process too. It’s still not my preferred genre of game but this is high on my list of titles you can play with kids of just about any age.

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