→ March 30, 2020
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ March 19, 2020
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 17, 2020
→ By

Best two-player games for 2020.

I’ve been getting so many requests for recommendations for two-player games this week that I decided to pull the list I’ve added to the bottom of my annual top 100 rankings and make a separate post, with some updates for things I’ve played more recently and a few games on which I’ve changed my opinions as well.

1. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is my favorite 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. The new app is also fantastic, with a campaign mode full of variants. Complexity: Low.

2. 7 Wonders Duel. Full review. Borrowing its theme from one of the greatest boardgames of all time, 7W Duel strips the rules down so that each player is presented with fewer options. Hand cards become cards on the table, revealed a few at a time in a set pattern that limits player choices to one to four cards (roughly) per turn. Familiarity with the original game is helpful but by no means required. There’s a brand-new app version out from Repos this fall. Complexity: Medium-low.

3. Carcassonne: Full review. Carcassonne 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. I 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. I also have Inns and Cathedrals, which I’ve only used a few times; 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.

4. Imhotep: The Duel. Full review. A truly great re-imagining of a larger game for two players, one that forces more interaction between the two of you so you don’t feel as much like you’re playing parallel solitaire. Players place their four meeples on the 3×3 grid that allows them to take goods off of the six boats, three on one side of the grid and three on the adjacent side, and place them in the four spaces on their personal boards, each of which scores in its own way. Several of those spaces create competition for specific tiles, and the boards have two sides so you can mix and match between the more or less interactive sides. There are also blue tiles that give you bonus actions and for which you may particularly want to battle your opponent when they appear. Complexity: Medium-low.

5. Patchwork: Full review. A really sharp two-player game that has an element of Tetris – players try to place oddly shaped bits of fabric on his/her main board, minimizing unused space and earning some small bonuses along the way. It’s from Uwe Rosenberg, better known for designing the ultra-complex games Agricola, Le Havre, and Caverna. Go figure. And go get it. Complexity: Low.

6. 7 Ronin: Full review. An asymmetrical two-player game with a Seven Samurai theme – and when I say “theme,” I mean that’s the whole story of the game. One player is the seven ronin of the title, hired to defend a village against the invading ninjas, controlled by the other player. If the ninjas don’t take the village or wipe out the ronin before eight rounds are up, the ronin player wins. But the ninja can gain a decisive advantage in the first four rounds with the right moves. It’s very clever, the art is fantastic, and the theme is completely integrated into the game itself. It also plays in about 30 minutes. Complexity: Medium-low.

7. Wingspan. Full review.The only game to which I’ve given a perfect score of 10 since I started reviewing games for Paste five years ago, Wingspan is one of the best examples I can find of immaculate game design. It is thoroughly and thoughtfully constructed so that it is well-balanced, enjoyable, and playable in a reasonable amount of time. The components are all of very high quality and the art is stupendous. And there’s some real science behind it: designer Elizabeth Hargrave took her love of bird-watching and built a game around the actual characteristics of over 100 species of North American birds, such as their habitats, diets, and breeding habits. The European expansion is now out as well. Wingspan won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019, which it more than deserved, making Hargrave the first woman to win that honor as a solo designer and just the second solo woman to win any Spiel des Jahres prize. It’s a marvel. Complexity: Medium.

8. Watergate. Full review. It’s a pure two-player game that pits one player as Nixon and the other as “the journalists,” each with a unique deck, where the latter player tries to place evidence tokens connecting at least two witnesses to the President, and Tricky Dick tries to block them. It’s fun, incredibly well-written, and a real thinker. Complexity: Medium.

9. That’s Pretty Clever. Full review. From the mind of the designer of The Mind, Wolfgang Warsch, That’s Pretty Clever (original title: Ganz Schön Clever) is a roll-and-write game where you roll six dice, each its own color, and can choose one die per roll to score on your sheet. The player sheets have five areas matching five of the dice colors, with the white die a wild, and each area scores in a unique way, with the potential for bonuses like the power to check off a box in a separate area for free. It’s also a great solitaire game, where 200+ is a solid score and 300+ is some Hall of Fame type stuff. Complexity: Medium-low.

10. Targi. Full review. Moderately complex two-player game with a clever mechanic for placing meeples on a grid – you don’t place meeples on the grid itself, but on the row/column headers, so you end up blocking out a whole row or column for your opponent. Players gather salt, pepper, dates, and the relatively scarce gold to enable them to buy “tribe cards” that are worth points by themselves and in combinations with other cards. Some tribe cards also confer benefits later in the game. Two-player games often tend to be too simple, or feel like weak variants of games designed for more players. Targi isn’t either of those things – it’s a smart game that feels like it was built for exactly two people. Complexity: Medium.

11. Baseball Highlights: 2045: Full review. I was floored at how much I enjoyed this game; it is baseball-themed, but it’s really a fast-moving deckbuilder where your deck only has 15 cards in it and you get to upgrade it constantly between “games.” The names on the player cards are all combinations of names of famous players from history – the first name from one, the last from another, like “Cy Clemens” – except for the robots. It’s not a baseball simulation game, but that might be why I liked it, because it was easier to just let the theme go and play the game for what it is. It’s down from previous years as I’ve found the replay value is limited, even with the expansions. Complexity: Medium-low.

12. Silver & Gold. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding is some sort of genius, with Imhotep, the Sushi Go! series, Bärenpark, Gizmos, and this all hits under his name, with the Adventure series he co-created with Matthew Dunstan still on my to-play shelf. Silver & Gold is a polyomino flip-and-write game where there are just eight shapes to choose from in each round, with seven of them displayed in random order (the eighth isn’t used), and players fill in those small shapes on the larger ones on their two objective cards, using dry-erase markers. You score for finishing shapes, with three small bonuses available each game that do usually end up mattering in the final score. It’s portable, easy, lightly strategic, and undeniably fun. Complexity: Low.

13. The Mind. Full review. The Mind may drive you crazy; I haven’t beaten it yet, playing with several different people already, but I still find it really enjoyable and something that nearly always ends up with everyone laughing. This Spiel des Jahres-nominated game has just a deck of cards numbered 1 to 100, and in each round, every player gets a set number of cards dealt from the shuffled deck. All players must play their cards to the table in one pile, ascending by card number … but you can’t talk to anyone else, or even gesture. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Complexity: Low.

14. 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 introduced my daughter to the game when she was 10 and she took to it right away, beating us on her second play. Complexity: Medium.

15. 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. I 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. The iPad app, developed in-house, is among the best available. The newest expansion, France and The Old West, came out in the winter of 2018, with two new rules tweaks, one for each board. I’ve ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride boards for Ars Technica. There’s also a kids’ version, available exclusively at Target, with a separate app for that as well. Complexity: Low.

16. Splendor: Full review. A Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2014, Splendor has fast become a favorite in our house for its simple rules and balanced gameplay. My daughter, now eight, loves the game and is able to play at a level pretty close to the adults. It’s a simple game where players collect tokens to purchase cards from a 4×3 grid, and where purchased cards decrease the price of other cards. Players have to think long-term without ignoring short-term opportunities, and must compare the value of going for certain in-game bonuses against just plowing ahead with purchases to get the most valuable cards. The Splendor app, made by the team at Days of Wonder, is amazing, and is available for iOS, Android, and Steam. I also like the four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor. Complexity: Low.

17. Agamemnon. Full review. An absolute gem of an abstract two-player game, with very little luck and a lot of balancing between the good move now and holding a tile for a great move later. Players compete to control “threads of fate” – connected lines on a small hub-and-spoke board – by placing their tokens at the hubs, but there are three different types of lines and control of each is determined in its own way. The board has alternate layouts on the other side for infinite replayability, but the main board is elegant enough for many replays, because so much of the game involves outthinking your opponent. Complexity: Low.

18. Dominion: Full review. I’ve condensed two Dominion entries into one, since they all have the same basic mechanics, just new cards. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are ten expansions now available, so you could spend a few hundred dollars on this – 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 I 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. I’ll vouch for the Dominion: Intrigue expansion, which includes the base cards so it’s a standalone product, and the Seaside expansion, which is excellent and really changes the way the game plays, plus a standalone expansion further up this list. The base game is appropriate for players as young as six. Complexity: Low.

19. 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. The iPad app is outstanding too. Complexity: Medium.

20. Battle Line: Full review. Reissued a few years ago as Schotten Totten – same game, different theme, better art, half the price right now. Among the best two-player games I’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind a bunch of other games on this list. 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.

21. Samurai: Full review. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app (which, as of November 2019, is still not updated for the newest iOS version), and 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. Fantasy Flight updated the graphics, shrank the box, and reissued it in 2015. Complexity: Medium/low.

22. The Castles Of Burgundy: Full review. Castles of Burgundy is the rare game that works well across its range of player numbers, as it 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. I’ve played this online about 50 times, using all the different boards, even random setups that dramatically increase the challenge, and I’m not tired of it yet. Complexity: Medium.

23. Morels. Full review for Paste. A 2012 release, Morels is an easy-to-learn two-player card game with plenty of decision-making and a small amount of interaction with your opponent as you try to complete and “cook” sets of various mushroom types to earn points. The artwork is impressive and the game is very balanced, reminiscent of Lost Cities but with an extra tick of difficulty because of the use of an open, rolling display of cards from which players can choose. The app version is also very good. Complexity: Low.

24. Ingenious. Full app review. Ingenious is another Reiner Knizia title, a two- to four-person abstract strategy game that involves tile placement but where the final scoring compares each player’s lowest score across the six tile colors, rather than his/her highest. That alters gameplay substantially, often making the ideal play seem counterintuitive, and also requires each player to keep a more careful eye on what the other guy is doing. The app, which I owned and reviewed, is now gone from all app stores, because of a trademark dispute (and maybe more). Complexity: Low.

25. Azul. Full review. The best new family-strategy game of 2017 and winner of the Spiel des Jahres, Azul comes from the designer of Vikings and Asara, and folds some press-your-luck mechanics into a pattern-matching game where you collect mosaic tiles and try to transfer them from a storage area to your main 5×5 board. You can only put each tile type in each row once, and in each column once, and you lose points for tiles you can’t place at the end of each round. It’s quite addictive and moves fairly quickly, even when everyone starts playing chicken with the pile left in the middle of the table for whoever chooses last in the round. Complexity: Medium.

26. Cacao. Full review. A simpler Carcassonne? I guess every tile-laying game gets compared to the granddaddy of them all, but Cacao certainly looks similar, and you don’t get to see very far ahead in the tile supply in Cacao, although at least here you get a hand of three tiles from which to choose. But the Cacao board ends up very different, a checkerboard pattern of alternating tiles between players’ worker tiles and the game’s neutral tiles, which can give you cacao beans, let you sell beans for 2-4 gold pieces, give you access to water, give you partial control of a temple, or just hand you points. One key mechanic: if you collect any sun tiles, you can play a new tile on top of a tile you played earlier in the game, which is a great way to make a big ten-point play to steal the win. Complexity: Low.

27. New Bedford. Full review. I adore this game, which is about whaling, but somehow manages to sneak worker-placement and town-building into the game too, and figures out how to reward people who do certain things early without making the game a rout. Each player gets to add buildings to the central town of New Bedford (much nicer than the actual town is today), or can use one of the central buildings; you pay to use someone else’s building, and they can be worth victory points to their owners at game-end. The real meat of the game is the whaling though – you get two ships, and the more food you stock them with, the more turns they spend out at sea, which means more turns where you might grab the mighty sperm whale token from the bag. But you have to pay the dockworkers to keep each whale and score points for it. For a game that has this much depth, it plays remarkably fast – never more than 40 minutes for us with three players. Complexity: Medium.

28. Welcome To… Full review. I don’t know if it was the first flip-and-write title, but Welcome To… was the first one I encountered, and I think it’s spawned a few imitators because it’s so good. In each round, there are three cards from which players can choose, each showing a house number and one of six colors; each player chooses one of those three houses to fill in and takes the benefit of that particular color. The goal is to fill out as much of your own ‘neighborhood’ as you can, scoring points for clusters of adjacent houses, for providing green space, for adding pools to certain houses, and more. It’s simple to learn and has huge replay value. Complexity: Low.

29. Everdell. Full review. This was my #1 game of 2018, just edging out the legacy game Charterstone. Everdell takes the worker placement and resource collection mechanic of Stone Age and adds what amounts to a second game on top of that, where the buildings you build with those resources actually do stuff, rather than just giving you points. Players build out their tableaux of cards and gain power as the game progresses. Some cards grant you the right to build subsequent cards for free; some give resources, some give points bonuses, and some do other cool things. The artwork is stunning and the theme, forest creatures, is very kid-friendly. The game also crescendos through its “seasons,” with players going from two meeples in the spring to six by game-end, so that no one can get too big of a lead in the early going and new players get time to learn the rhythm. It’s quite a brilliant design, and consistently plays in under an hour. Complexity: Medium-low.

30. Gizmos. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding’s engine-builder plays very quickly for a game of this depth, and doesn’t skimp on the visual appeal – the ‘energy tokens’ you’ll collect to buy more cards are colored marbles, and they’re dispensed by what looks like a cardboard gumball machine. The engine-building aspect is a real winner, though, as it’s very easy to grasp how you’ll gain things from certain cards and how to daisy-chain them into very powerful engines before the game ends. Complexity: Medium-low.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ January 30, 2020
→ By

That’s Pretty Clever!

In 2018, a fairly unknown designer named Wolfgang Warsch ended up with three of the six nominations for the annual board game awards known as the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) and the Kennerspiel des Jahres (often translated as the ‘expert’ game of the year, or the connoisseur’s game of the year), winning the Kennerspiel for his fun press-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg. One of those other nominations was for the game known as That’s Pretty Clever! (Ganz Schön Clever), a roll-and-write game with a crazy scoresheet that lends itself to all kinds of real-time decision-making.

That’s Pretty Clever! gives you six dice, each a different color, that you’ll roll three times on every turn. You also have a scoresheet with five scoring areas, one for each die color except the white die, which is always wild. You roll all six dice and choose one to score, but then must set aside all dice with values lower than the one you chose, placing them (if you’d like) on the ‘silver platter’ in the game box. You roll all remaining dice, choose another one to score, set aside those with lower values, and then roll any dice still remaining and score one more. You’ll do this sequence four to six times, depending on the player count. When an opponent rolls, you’ll still get to choose one die to score. After that opponent has finished all three of their rolls, you can choose any die from the silver platter and score it. Multiple players can choose to score the same die in this stage. You can still score more dice than this, however, if you choose wisely when scoring dice you automatically get to score.

A solo game after four rounds.

The scoresheet has five sections and each scores completely differently. The yellow area has a 4×4 grid with four spaces already X’d out, and then two spaces each showing a number from 1 to 6. If you score the yellow die, you cross out a space with the number showing on the die. (You can always use the white die for the same purpose, since it’s wild, but I won’t repeat that in each section.) When you complete a row or the top left to lower right diagonal, you get a bonus: you can fill in another square in a different (specified) section, or you get a +1 bonus that allows you to choose to score an extra die at the end of someone’s turn – even your own, or you get a fox bonus, which I’ll explain in a moment. When you complete a column, you score 10 to 20 points at game-end.

The blue section also has a grid, but this one goes from 2 to 12, and you score it by combining the blue die’s value with the white die’s. Thus not every space is equally easy to cross out, and when you get a blue bonus in another section, you might want to mark the 2 or the 12 since they’re generally hard to get. You score points at game-end based on the number of spaces marked in the blue section, with the values increasing faster as the number of spaces increases.

The green, orange, and purple sections are all rows that you’ll fill out left to right. The green row requires dice values greater than or equal to what’s shown in the space, starting at 1, going up to 5, then restarting at 1. The orange row is the easiest to fill in – you just write the die’s value in a space, with no restrictions. Some spaces let you double the die’s value; the last space lets you triple it. The purple row is the trickiest, as you can only fill in a space with a number greater than the one in the space before it, unless the prior number is a 6, in which case you can start over. All three of these rows award bonuses for certain spaces, but the purple row gives you a bonus of some sort on every space starting with the third one, so I think it’s the most valuable section on the sheet. At game-end, you score the orange and purple by adding all the numbers you’ve written in the squares, and you score the green by looking at the number above the last square you’ve filled, with values increasing kind of like they do in the blue section.

There are also a few bonuses you get at the start of each round – a free re-roll of all dice, a +1 bonus, and at the start of the fourth round the choice to fill in one square anywhere on your sheet, either with an X (for yellow, blue, and green) or a value of 6 (for orange and purple). At game end, you add up all five of your section scores, and then you count how many fox bonuses you got, with a maximum of five. Find your lowest section score, and then multiply that by your number of foxes, and add that to the five section scores for your total. Over 200 is pretty good; I’ve cracked 300 once in pen-and-paper, while my high score in the app – which works well but assumes you know the game already – is around 285.

I’ve played this dozens of times between pen-and-paper and the app, and I find it incredibly addictive. Despite the simple mechanics, it doesn’t become repetitive because you are always making multifaceted decisions – choosing a die to score usually means relinquishing other dice for the remainder of that turn; choosing when to use those powerful +1 bonuses involves weighing the value of saving them for later, when maybe you can start a daisy-chain of bonuses that will let you fill in four or five boxes with one die. There’s a sequel game I haven’t tried called Twice as Clever! that’s apparently good but not quite as elegant as this original, which has already entered the rotation of games we bring on trips because it’s so simple, portable, and easy to teach.

You can also see my reviews of Warsch’s other games, The Mind, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and The Taverns of Tiefenthal, over at Paste.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 16, 2019
→ By

Yellow & Yangtze app.

Yellow & Yangtze is Reiner Knizia’s update to his all-time classic Tigris & Euphrates, which still sits in the top 100 on Boardgamegeek and pioneered the “highest/lowest score” mechanic, where you score in multiple categories, and your lowest score is the one that’s compared to your opponents’. Both are abstract games of area control that are well-balanced so that it rewards strategy but also has mechanisms for preventing runaway winners or leaving someone totally in the dust. Dire Wolf Digital just released an app version of Y&Y that I think is incredibly strong, including quality AI players (on the hard setting), great graphics, and intuitive game-play, and it’s kind of selling me on picking up the original game at some point too.

Yellow & Yangtze makes several major tweaks to the rules of T&E, using hex tiles instead of squares, introducing a fifth color of tiles that you can use like a wild color, needing three tiles rather than four to build a pagoda, and giving each of the other four colors of tiles a unique power. You get six tiles at a time in your hand, plus a ‘leader’ in each color. On a turn, you get two actions, most of which will involve placing two leaders or tiles on the board. You must place a leader next to a black tile. When you then place a tile of the same color as a leader in the same cluster of tiles, you get one point in that color. If you make a triangle of three hex tiles of the same color, it becomes a pagoda, and then gives one point per round to the player whose leader of that color is in the same cluster. Each cluster can only have one leader in each color, but it can have leaders from different players.

The conflicts between players are similar to the original. If two kingdoms (the game’s name for clusters) are connected, there’s a war, and it’s settled by players with leaders in each kingdom contributing red tiles from their hands. If you place your leader into a kingdom that already has a leader of that color, it’s settled by both players contributing black tiles. When you place a green tile, you get to choose your replacement from the display of six tiles; otherwise, you get new tiles after your entire turn, and they’re random. When you place a blue tile, which may only go on a river or shoreline space, you can continue to place more blue tiles for free as long as they’re all adjacent. If you have blue tiles, you can also destroy any tile on the board in a “peasants’ riot;” you blow up a black tile with this and then any leaders adjacent to it are also removed if they aren’t still adjacent to another black tile. Yellow tiles are wild; you get points in the yellow category, but at game-end, those points are distributed to your other four scores to always raise your lowest score.

The app is just great. It looks fantastic, with very bright, clear colors, so that there is no confusion between tiles or about what’s been placed where. The screen shows you your tiles and as much or as little of the board as you want, with smaller indicators for which opponents still have their leaders in hand (five dots under each opponent’s name, with unplaced ones lit up) and what six tiles are on display for players who place green tiles (a ring on the lower right). Your scores are in the lower left – you can’t see opponents’ scores – and if you have an active pagoda that score has a flickering flame behind it, which makes it much easier to track. The easy AI is just tutorial level, the medium is just modestly challenging, but I have a hard time beating the hard AI when I play against two of them. The hard AI loves to use that peasants’ riot feature, which is probably good strategy but feels extremely personal.

The app is $9.99 right now, on the high end for board game adaptations, although with the cardboard game over $40 it’s good value for the game play provided. Dire Wolf Digital does great work, with this their second outstanding app release of 2019 (along with Raiders of the North Sea) and their Lanterns another favorite of mine for its animations; you can add Y&Y to the list, as I think it checks every box for an app, with challenging game play, great graphics, and high ease of use.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 11, 2019
→ By

Three new games for kids.

I occasionally get games from publishers that are beyond what I typically play and review – my focus for Paste is strategy games, and if you include social deduction games in that, you’ve got just about everything I play, too. I don’t do RPGs, for example (cough-Gloomhaven-cough), and I don’t play the straight party games that often show up in my mailbox. I do, however, find myself playing a few more games that are aimed just at younger kids lately, and have three I can recommend if you’re looking for gifts for the little ones. These are games you’d never play except with young kids.

Friends of a Feather, from Ravensburger, is aimed at the youngest players – ages 3 and up – and has incredibly simple rules and goals. Each player gets a bird (which looks a bit like a table tennis paddle) and will try to gather feathers in their own matching color, taking them one at a time from the nest in the center or trading in two at a time for a matching pair. There are four colors plus “rainbow” feathers that are wild, although I have found kids like those so much they may try to gather those above all else. I played this with a smart three-year-old and she had no problem understanding the rules or the goal, and kept showing off her panoply of feathers.

Friends of a Feather.

The Furglars, from Bananagrams, is a dice-rolling game with a very light dice-drafting mechanic. The dice have four different symbols on their six sides: the furglar monster symbols, locks, hands (for picking locks and stealing dice), or blanks. On your turn, you roll all of the dice that aren’t stored as furglars on someone’s card, and then choose which dice to keep. You can buy point cards with furglars, spending 1/2/3/4 dice for 1/2/4/7 points, or you can keep up to 3 furglars, and may protect any of them with locks, one die with a lock showing per furglar die. You can also use one hand die to steal an unprotected furglar from an opponent, or to pick and remove a lock protecting someone else’s furglar. The point goal to win the game varies with player count but it’s 15 for four players, which really doesn’t take very long. The only rule that is a bit tricky for younger players involves how the locks work: You need one per furglar you’re protecting, but on their next turn, they keep the furglar dice but must re-roll the locks.

Catlantis, also from Ravensburger and designed by the Prospero Hall collective (Villainous, Kero), is a silly card-matching game listed for players 8 and up but really playable with younger kids, at least down to age 6. The deck mostly comprises cards that show these Dr. Moreau-level cat/mermaid hybrids, with five cats and five mermaid tails mixed up in all 25 potential combinations. At the start of the game, each player is randomly assigned a cat and a tail and must try to collect as many cards as possible that match those. The gimmick here is how you get cards: There is a rolling market of four cards at all times, and on your turn, you pick any two of those cards and offer them to an opponent, who must pick one, leaving you with the other one. A full round involves each player making such offers to all opponents, after which the round resets. The deck also has three types of treasure cards, which become more valuable the more you collect a specific treasure; and a few cards worth straight points. That card-drafting mechanic is a little weird and certainly not intuitive, especially in the sense of knowing what cards to pick so that your opponent takes the one you don’t want and leaves you with the one you do, but the kids with whom I’ve played this like the silly art and theme. Younger players may need reminders to check their cat and tail cards to ensure they keep matching the correct ones. My one issue with the game is its length – we have always had to cut the game short rather than complete the entire deck because someone, and not always one of the kids playing, started to lose interest.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ December 9, 2019
→ By

Imhotep The Duel.

Imhotep came in at #24 on my top 100 boardgames list last month, one of the best games from one of my favorite designers, Phil Walker-Harding, the same mind behind Gizmos (#37), Sushi Go Party! (#87), Bärenpark (#88), Silver & Gold (#48), and Cacao (#43), although if there’s a hiccup with Imhotep it’s that the game, designed for 2 to 4 players, becomes a bit like two-player solitaire if that’s your player count. Enter this year’s Imhotep The Duel, which reimagines the base game for two players in a way that forces more interaction and requires you to think about what your opponent might be doing far more often than you would in the original game. It takes the feel and many of the main elements of Imhotep but changes some of the fundamental mechanics to make it a new game, and also condenses the playing experience to about 20 minutes. Like 7 Wonders Duel, this is how a two-player version of a larger game should relate to its original.

In Imhotep The Duel you’re still trying to unload goods from boats on to four different spaces – the obelisk, the temple, the pyramids, and the tombs – but this time, each player has their own track of four player spaces, each of which has a basic and advanced side, and all of the goods are different, whereas in the original you were just placing your stones. Each player has four meeples and will place them on a 3×3 board that has six boats along two of its adjacent sides. Each space on the grid corresponds to one space on each of two boats, one touching its column and one its row. When a boat’s row/column has at least two meeples on it, either player may choose to unload the boat, assigning the goods in those spaces to players whose meeples were in the corresponding spaces.

Imhotep The Duel setup

On a turn, you may place a meeple, unload a boat, or use a blue action tile that lets you do something more powerful. If you’ve placed your four meeples, you have to unload a boat or use an action tile that doesn’t require placing a meeple, so there will be frequent unloading throughout the game. The tiles on the boats correspond to the four spaces on each player track as well as the blue action tiles, which let you place 2 or 3 meeples in one turn, steal any single good from a boat (skipping the meeple/unloading mechanism), swap two tiles on one boat and then unload it, or place a meeple and then unload up to two boats in one turn.

The basic scoring sides for the four spaces on your track are straightforward, and three of the four have a competitive aspect to them. The obelisk tiles are all identical and score one point per tile, but the player who has the most at the end gets a six-point bonus. The pyramids come in two colors with six tiles in each color available, and each tile you place on one pyramid is worth N points, where N is the number of tiles you’ve placed there so far – so 1-2-3-4-5-6 tiles are worth 1-3-6-10-15-21 points. Since those are scarce, going for the same pyramid as your opponent limits both of your upsides. The tomb tiles are numbered 1-12, each unique, and you score for contiguous groups of tiles, with those values also scaling up with a maximum of 5 adjacent tiles for 25 points. Groups of 6+ also score at 25, so your opponent might try to give you a tile that joins two of your groups and takes potential points away. Only the temple tiles are noncompetitive – each has 1 to 4 dots on it representing its point value.

The ‘B’ sides introduce a bit more competition and strategy but are still pretty simple to grasp. The obelisk gives a bonus of 12 points to the first player to get to 5 tiles and 6 points to the second, but if one player gets 10 tiles they get all 18 points. The temple switches from one point per dot to points for collecting sets of tiles with 1, 2, 3, and 4 dots. The pyramids now only score for your pyramid with fewer tiles on it, and you lose 6 points if you have 0 tiles on either pyramid. The tombs now score 4 points per group of tiles, with one tile still constituting a group, so you want to separate your tiles as much as possible (e.g., only getting odd-numbered tiles).

When there are no longer enough tiles in the supply to refill a boat a player has unloaded, that boat is removed from the game. The game ends when the fifth boat has been unloaded, so there will always be one boat (with three tiles on it) that isn’t unloaded. Players add up their points from the four scoring areas, then gain one point per unused blue action tile and one per meeple still on the 3×3 board. I timed my last game, against a player who’d never played this version before, and we finished in just under 20 minutes. It’s fun, portable, and fast to set up & play, and I’ll put it among my top ten two-player games when I next update that list. I got it for $13 on sale but it’s still just $19 on amazon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ December 6, 2019
→ By

Pandemic Rapid Response.

Pandemic Rapid Response is the latest brand extension to the Pandemic cooperative game franchise, which now includes the two Legacy seasons and multiple spinoffs in specific geographies, but all of which adhere more or less to the original game’s mechanics. This one, however, is a completely new game with the Pandemic theme pasted on to it, adding a real-time element and a lot of dice rolling, removing all of the path-finding aspects of the original and creating a more tenuous connection between the game play and the theme itself. It’s available exclusively at Target.

In Rapid Response, two to four players play crew members on a plane that brings emergency supplies to the worst-affected cities in a global outbreak. There are five types of supplies, represented by four cubes each of five colors in separate rooms on the plane, and a track of cities around the outside of the board with a plane token to move around it. In the most basic version of the game, you start with two cities already asking for help, which means they need four or occasionally five supply cubes in a specific combination, and you must gather those supplies from around the ship in a convoluted fashion so you can deliver them from the cargo bay. You start with three ‘time tokens,’ and lose one each time the hourglass runs out, at which point you also unveil another city card that is requesting assistance – three more, in total, in the starter version. The hourglass runs long enough for multiple player turns, but you have to move quickly and make split-second decisions. When you deliver to a city, you remove that card and gain one more time token; if you run out of time tokens at any point, however, you lose the game.

"""

Each player has six dice that show various symbols on the six sides – the five supply types as well as an airplane symbol. You start your turn by rolling all of your dice, and then you may reroll any or all dice up to two more times at any time during your turn. You can spend any die, regardless of face value, to move to an adjacent room on the plane. You can spend a die with a plane symbol to move the plane one city in either direction. If you’re in a room and have dice with the matching supply symbol, you can place those dice on the room’s track; once you get at least four dice (it varies by room), you can ‘activate’ the room, take the displayed number of cubes, and then roll all of those dice to see how much ‘waste’ you generated, based on how many circled symbols you get on the roll. You then move up the waste track in the recycling room, which goes from 0 to 10; if it exceeds 10, you lose the game as well. You take your cubes and move them to the cargo bay, which holds up to ten cubes until you deliver some.

You can deliver goods by moving to the cargo bay and using one die with a plane symbol to activate it, after which you return those goods to their original supply rooms. You can also deal with the excess waste by going to the recycling room and placing up to five dice on that room’s track, losing them for the rest of the turn but moving the track marker back up to four spaces.

Each player has a unique role, as in the original Pandemic, that gives you some small but useful benefit, such as getting to move the plane 1 or 2 spaces per die, or letting you roll one fewer die for waste when you activate a room. One role lets you reroll up to two more times, for a total of five, which I think is the most useful of all, although I am not quite sure of that after just a few plays.

You can increase the game’s difficulty by using more city cards both at the start and in the mini-deck you’ll use during the game each time the hourglass is emptied; or by using the Crisis cards, which just throw more obstacles in your path, like the ones that sit atop already-played city cards and require you to deliver one specific cube to satisfy the crisis card first before you can make a second delivery to complete the city card. I don’t think they’re necessary, but they do add another wrinkle to the game.

The challenge is already pretty difficult, and I think you should be prepared to bark a lot of orders or “suggestions” at each other while you play because your time is so limited. You start the time, the first player rolls, does a few things, rolls the remaining dice, tries to do something else, maybe rolls a third time, stops, and the second player has to jump in immediately to start their turn. It’s a frenetic experience, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a big switch from Pandemic, which is also very tense but draws it from the game itself rather than a timer. Pandemic Rapid Response plays two to four players but is definitely better with more; you need the advantage of more pawns moving around the ship to be more efficient with your deliveries. It’s also the shortest Pandemic game by playing time; the box promises 20 minutes and I think that’s accurate once you get the rhythm down, although before that, the games might be shorter because you lose so quickly.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 26, 2019
→ By

7 Wonders Duel app.

7 Wonders Duel is my #2 pure two-player game, just behind Jaipur, and that makes it perfect for a port to the digital space – apps are great for pass-and-play or for playing against a single AI opponent. The 7 Wonders app, released about two years ago, turned out to be quite good, just a little tough to follow because of the size of the cards and the speed (which you could adjust) of the AI’s moves. The 7 Wonders Duel app has all of that, pro and con, although with just one opponent to track it’s much easier to follow, and some non-intuitive features that made it a bit harder for me to learn, but the AI seems fairly strong and outside of one crash the first time I used the app both on my phone and my iPad it’s been quite stable.

7 Wonders Duel is a real reimagining of the original game, which plays 3 to 7 and is best with at least 4, ditching the card-drafting mechanic for card tableaux where some cards are face-up and some face-down at the start of each round, with players alternating choosing cards. You may buy a card or, if available, take one for free because it has no cost or because you have a precursor card; you may take a card and discard it for 3 coins; or you may take a card, discard it, and build one of your four wonders. Once the seventh wonder has been built between the two players, the eighth one is destroyed. There are three rounds called eras, with cards becoming more expensive and more valuable as the game progresses, and there are purple guild cards worth variable bonuses in the third era just as in the original game. It’s a model for taking a multiplayer game and turning it into a two-player experience that forces direct interaction between the two players.

For straight play, the app is solid. There’s only one AI level, but it’s good enough for me; I’ve played the original game maybe a dozen times but wouldn’t say I’m particularly good at it. One of the most important strategies in 7 Wonders Duel is to choose cards that limit your opponent’s choices on their next turn, and it’s frequently possible to set up a move that forces your opponent to pick a specific card that makes two other cards available to you on the next turn. The AI player is programmed to do this, possibly above all else, and knowing that makes planning a counterstrategy a bit easier.

Using the app is much easier if you know how to play and what the icons on the tops of the cards mean; they’re clear enough to see even on the phone, although I find spotting the symbols on the side that tell you what precursor card might get you that card for free isn’t easy even on the larger screen. I found the way you choose to build a wonder so non-intuitive – you have to click on your wonders to pull up a separate box, then drag a card from the tableau over the wonder you wish to build. Since you play a card to your space by dragging it there, and discard one for coins by dragging it to your money pouch, dragging it to your wonders should give you the choice to build.

The tutorial in the app is really not very good, and there’s no way (that I can find) to directly access the rules within the app. Some of the card descriptions look unfinished; if you click on a science card, for example, it just says it counts for the symbol shown, without explaining how science cards score. There are three victory conditions in the game – more points at game-end, advancing to your opponent’s end of the military track, and collecting six different science icons (there are 7, two of each in the deck, although you omit three cards from each game) – and the app at least labels the first two differently as Defeat and Supremacy, but I lost to the AI once without any indication of why. It wasn’t military supremacy and the game wasn’t over; if it was the science icons, nothing told me so and I don’t think that was true from what I saw on screen. There’s also no undo function, although in this game it might not make sense, since so many card choices will reveal at least one face-down card.

I’m picking the app apart a little bit, but the underlying game is really great, and the app does work – it’s more that it’s rough around the edges, and maybe the AI could be a little smarter about its choices of cards. I’m still playing it a lot, though, and would recommend it at the $4.99 list price.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 25, 2019
→ By

Palm Island.

Palm Island is a solitaire game with one of the most clever gimmicks – I use that term with endearment – I’ve seen in a while: You hold the entire game in your hand, hence the name “Palm Island.” It manages to sneak in some resource management and ‘building’ concepts while forcing choices by setting up the cards so you can’t do everything you want to do. You’ll cycle through a small deck of cards eight times, trying to gain as many points as possible by using the cards with resources on them to upgrade the cards worth victory points.

The base game comprises a deck of 17 cards, one of which is just the round marker, while the others are double-sided and have different abilities depending on which side is pointing up. After shuffling the other 16, all in their starting orientation, you look at the top two cards and choose your actions. You can rotate some cards 90 degrees clockwise to make a resource (fish, wood, stone) available, often for free but sometimes at the cost of other resources. When you use a resource card to pay for something else, you rotate it back 90 degrees counterclockwise. You may also spend resources to turn some cards 180 degrees, unlocking more powerful abilities/more resources/more points, or to flip them over, unlocking even more of the same. The base deck has two housing cards that you can upgrade three times (turn 180, flip over, turn 180 again) to get to 6 victory points, and two temples that you can upgrade three times to get to 10 victory points, but I don’t think it’s possible to hit all four of those maximum figures with the original deck, and the order in which those cards appear affects your ideal strategy.

There are a handful (pun intended) of other restrictions on how you use these cards. You can only have four resource cards rotated to the right at any time; to rotate a fifth one you must discard one of the others by rotating it counterclockwise back into place. When you rotate a card 90 degrees to make its resource(s) available, you place it at the back of the deck; if that card returns to the top before you’ve used it, you lose that resource, rotating the card back 90 degrees counterclockwise and also placing it at the back of the deck. You can keep the top card in place and keep using or discarding (to the back) the second card, but once you reach the round marker card, you have to use or discard that top card as well – you can’t roll it over into the next round.

Palm Island card play

Some of the resource cards can be worth points if fully upgraded as well, although it can be at the cost of some of its resource powers – the Logger cards, which give you one wood at the start and two wood if upgraded twice, are worth five points if upgraded all three times but don’t give you any wood in that state. You have to upgrade at least some of the resource cards to be able to max out the housing or temple cards, the latter of which requires eleven total resources to go from its 2x state to its 3x state. This combination of features means you have to make a series of choices that will be determined by the order of the cards in the deck. The rules say you can look through the entire deck once before you start, but once you’ve started you can only look at the top three cards.

The game comes with Feat cards you can gain by hitting certain milestones in your games, starting with scoring 30 points, which I did in my first game and do almost every game now, up to some more difficult goals – it took me several plays and a bit of luck with card order to finally hit 40 points – or more specific ones, like upgrading all your Logger cards three times. Those Feat cards are nearly always useful, some more than others, but getting them at the wrong time can mess with your card sequencing.

There are two base decks in the game, so you can play competitively or cooperatively with someone else, although it’s a bit of a kludge for a game that was clearly designed with the solo player in mind. I’ve timed myself and none of my games has taken more than 13 minutes to play. For a novel solo experience it’s worth the price, maybe not as clever or challenging as my favorite solo game, Coffee Roaster, but cheaper and much more portable.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,