→ March 3, 2019
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The River.

The River, the most recent release from the imprint Days of Wonder, tries to be Stone Age Lite, but only succeeds about halfway, as it strips down game time and makes building things a bit easier, while also recomplicating things with a strange and not very successful new scoring mechanism that adds little to nothing to game play.

Stone Age is both one of my favorite games ever, and one of the best examples of a straight worker-placement game: You get a finite number of meeples and you put one or more of them on the board in each turn to either gather resources (wood, brick, stone, gold, or food) or spend them to get stuff (build buildings for big points or buying cards for points and/or more goodies). Stone Age starts each player with five meeples, and you can run that up to ten by sending two meeples to what is colloquially known as “the love shack” on a specific turn to, um, make another meeple. Games can run 90 minutes or more, but you’re constantly in motion, and there are a lot of constraints that force players to compete for the same spaces and rewards on the board.

The River’s intent is clear: Streamline (pun intended) the Stone Age concept for a half-hour game. There are three main resources, wood, brick, and stone, plus a wild-card resource of food (little turkey meeples, a nice touch). You gather resources to build building cards worth two to nine points, and early buildings gain bonus tokens starting at six points and gradually decreasing to zero. The number of resources you get when you visit a resource space is equal to number of symbols showing that resource on the twelve spaces on your personal river board, and you also have a number of warehouse symbols that limits what you can store.

Within each round, you can also take up to two new tiles to place on your river, in order. Tiles show resource and/or warehouse symbols, or they confer one-time or game-end bonuses. So you can expand your storage and set yourself up for bigger resource hauls with the right tiles, making your meeple usage more efficient. You start with four meeples, and placing your fourth tile (out of twelve) unlocks your fifth meeple. After that, however, you can lose meeples, staring with your fifth tile, as your workers choose to settle down on the new terrain you’ve developed, so rounds can get shorter as players keep placing tiles.

The game ends when a player has placed twelve tiles, filling their river board, or built five buildings, filling all five bonus token spaces (even if one or more tokens are worth zero points). The game-end scoring adds an additional wrinkle: Tiles come in five different terrain types, and if you’ve managed to get the same terrain in two or all three of the tile spaces in one column, you get additional points – six if you got all three to match, two if you got two of the three. There are a few ways to switch tiles around once you’ve already placed them … but my God, this feels like a totally extraneous, tacked-on scoring method. It has no tie to game play, and it has no tie to the theme. With winning scores in the 30s for us, a player could mostly skip the building cards, get a little luck with river tiles, and rack up enough points to win just by color-matching.

The two-player game uses a smaller main board that restricts meeple placement further, and the game ends if either player builds four buildings (reduced from five). That latter threshold might be too low; my daughter, who didn’t care for this game, decided she was going to try to end it as quickly as she could, and raced through to build four building cards, two of which were worth two points each, the lowest value. It turned out to be a smart plan, because she ended the game before I could build my third building, since I was trying to get some higher point cards. It’s also possible that my daughter is just smarter than I am.

I don’t think The River makes the cut in my house to stay in our rotation; it’s too familiar – really, yet another game where we’re gathering wood, brick, and stone? really? – and offers nothing new in the mechanics or theme. It is, however, a simplified version of Stone Age and similar games, and probably far more friendly to play with younger kids – especially if you just dispense with the game-end tile-matching bonus. That eliminates one spot on the board, and you’d take out some tiles that give you a free tile swap power, but then the game would be like a starter version of Stone Age … except that such a game already exists, My First Stone Age, with a listed playing time of 15 minutes. I haven’t played the latter, but I keep coming back to how The River just feels like a blurry copy of Stone Age, and that feels very unsatisfying to me as a critic or just a player.

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→ March 2, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

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→ February 19, 2019
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Kero.

Kero is a pure two-player game that is absolutely perfect if you like games with lots of dice-rolling – not the Monopoly sort, where you roll once and are stuck with it, but more like King of Tokyo and other games where you get to re-roll repeatedly until you get a result you like or you bust. There’s a lot of luck involved, and I’m not sure all of the elements here are strictly necessary, but there’s something very appealing in how Kero works the dice.

Kero’s theme is postapocalyptic, and each player has a truck full of kerosene that must be refilled from time to time. Players roll the dice to collect various resources and use them to collect cards worth points at game-end and that also give one-time or permanent benefits, and can place ‘recruits’ on the four territories on display to claim those for more game-end points. Your truck contains an hourglass with sand in it, and on your turn you flip it and may continue rolling your dice as long as you have sand (kerosene) left in your tank, or until your dice all show fire icons, after which those dice have ‘burned up’ and can’t be re-rolled. The other sides of the five basic white dice show various resources – metal, food, recruits, fuel, or bricks – and you may pay fuel to add any of the three bonus dice, which have bigger rewards on them.

When your fuel runs low, you can spend one jerrycan token to refuel – and your opponent gets to roll the dice. You flip your truck the other way, so the sand fills the visible portion of the truck’s tank, and your opponent rolls all eight dice, and rerolls every die until all eight show fire tokens, at which point the refueling stops and you set your truck on its wheels again. (If you get seven fire tokens, then you roll the eighth die a maximum of five times before you just give up.) So there’s randomness all over the game, but the designers – Prospero Hall, the same group behind the Villainous games – have mitigated that with the ability to re-roll, and additional tokens you can use to allow even further rerolls or that let you ignore fire symbols for a particular turn.

Once you’ve decided to stop rolling dice on your turn (assuming you didn’t run out of fuel, which would end your turn immediately), you can use the resources shown on your non-burned dice to buy things from the board. The most common choice will be to buy cards from the market, with cards granting you points at the end of the game and most cards giving you either a one-time bonus or a permanent (unique) bonus for the rest of the game. The permanent bonuses mostly appear in the first round of the game – there are three rounds, separated by ‘claim cards’ shuffled randomly into the main deck – and grant you powerful benefits like a specific resource in every turn for the rest of the game, or the ability to convert something into fuel. Each player also starts the game with two Tuarek tokens, which grant one-time abilities like the power to ignore fire icons on dice for a turn or to move explorers to different territories.

Those territories, of which there are twelve, appearing four at a time across the three rounds, are the other source of points for game-end, either flat bonuses or bonuses tied to the cards you’ve collected. Each player has seven explorer tokens they may place in each round, usually by combining a recruit icon and a metal icon from dice. When a claim card appears to end a round, players compare who has the most explorers on each territory; whoever has the most gets that card for the rest of the game, taking any immediate bonuses on it. (There’s a power you can gain that helps you win ties, which happen frequently.) This is one of the few clumsy mechanics in the game, because the rounds are short enough that territories often go to a player who placed a single explorer on them, and it’s nearly always more efficient to go claim an empty territory than to compete with your opponent for one where they’ve already placed a token.

Kero games run about a half-hour, as the game’s length is determined by how quickly you move through the card deck; any time a player finishes their turn with at least two fire icons showing on the dice, you also ‘burn’ the rightmost card in the market to keep things rolling (pun intended), so there’s no way to stall progress through the game. The mixture of controlled randomness through the dice and the light engine-building aspect of the cards with permanent benefits makes Kero better than a pure dice-rolling game, so there is some strategy involved, but it’s definitely a game of luck – perhaps one of making your own luck, but still one where the randomness of dice rolls has a lot to say about who wins. That makes it a good game to play with your kids, since the dice will help smooth out any gaps in your skill levels, and one I think we’ll keep on the shelves here, but not something I’d pick over my favorite two-player titles like Jaipur or 7 Wonders Duel.

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→ February 18, 2019
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Petrichor.

I got my first look at Petrichor back at GenCon 2017, where the APE booth had a prototype of the game and both the stunning artwork and the clever theme (players are clouds? Sign me up!) caught my eye, although there wasn’t much available yet about the actual mechanics. The game finally hit U.S. shelves this summer, and it didn’t disappoint, with a smart combination of individual strategy and direct interaction between players, plus the replay value of a modular board that can alter the tenor of each play depending on what tiles are available and how they’re aligned.

Players in Petrichor aren’t actually clouds, but they get to place clouds on the board, adding their own rain drops to clouds to try to gain the most points from watering the various crops shown on the board’s tiles. On a typical turn, a player will play a card from his/her hand showing one of the four main actions – create a new cloud with one of the player’s own raindrops in it and place it on the tile, add two raindrops to a cloud the player is already in, take one or two of the player’s raindrops from clouds and make them ‘rain’ on the tiles below, or use the wind to blow a cloud to an adjacent tile – and then cast a vote for the weather for the next round. There are four types of weather actions, and the player can vote for the kind shown on the card s/he played, or can vote for the next weather type after that (clockwise) on the board. The player can also skip the vote and choose to reduce the value of one of the three harvest dice to bring the game closer to the next harvest; that action brings the player one or two points immediately, and the Harvest itself is when all crops are scored and raindrops on the board are cleared.

Players continue taking these actions, potentially taking a second action by playing two cards of the same type, until someone passes, after which the remaining players may take one final action before the round ends. At the end of a round – there are six rounds in the full game, or four in a shorter game – the votes on all weather spaces are tallied, and the two with the most vote tokens on them are used; the player with the most votes on each space moves up one on the weather voting track, which can be worth quite a few points at the end of the game, enough that you ignore it at your peril. Those actions can upgrade light clouds (1-3 raindrops) to thunderclouds; cause thunderclouds (4-7 raindrops) to rain; allow each player to double his/her drops in one cloud; or allow each player to move one raindrop of any color to an adjacent tile. (A cloud with 8 or more raindrops ‘overflows’ immediately, raining those drops directly to the tile underneath.)

Most tiles begin to grow once the minimum number of raindrops shown on the tile, one to seven depending on the crop, is reached – counting only drops on the tile itself, not those still in a cloud – and the tile is then eligible to score at the next Harvest. Some crops just reward points based on each player’s raindrop count on the tile. Wheat tiles give three points to anyone with drops on the tile, no matter how many, except for the person with the most drops on it, who gets two points plus a special wheat token; at the end of the game, the player with the most wheat tokens gets 12 points. Potato tiles give 7 points to the player with the second-most drops on them, but only 3 to the player with the most. Coffee and rice plants must first be sprouted, and then award more points when they develop into full-grown plants. Thus a huge part of Petrichor strategy is figuring out where best to place or move your raindrops to maximize your point total and potentially reduce those of your opponents.

The wind action is a big part of that strategy as well. If you use a wind action yourself, you can move a cloud on to a tile with another cloud on it, which causes them to merge – a way you can snipe points from an opponent who might have thought s/he had that tile’s bonus locked up already. If one of the two weather spaces activated by vote at the end of a round includes the wind, you can also use this to change the scoring of tiles, often significantly, as a sort of sneak attack. That makes the two ways the wind appears in the game particularly useful for a player who’s fallen a bit behind – more so if the player can stack up enough votes on the wind space to gain the voting bonus for the round as well.

At the end of the final round, there is always a Harvest regardless of what the dice show, and all four weather actions are activated, although only the top two are scored in the voting. Players then add the value they’ve reached on the voting track to the points they’ve acquired throughout the game, as well as the bonus for wheat tokens if the wheat tiles were used in the game, to determine the winner. Games take 45-60 minutes, and while the strategy can be quite involved because you’re searching for moves that will benefit you without helping your opponents, and possibly taking points away from them, the mechanics themselves are quite simple to learn, enough that younger players should be able to play along with the adults.

There’s also a solo mode available called the Southern Winds variant, where the board comprises six tiles (with certain tiles unavailable in this mode). You play against a neutral player, whose moves are controlled by a special nine-card deck that allows that player to make moves unavailable to you and tends toward the aggressive, which requires you as the solo player to play quite differently. The solo game goes four rounds, and the neutral player still gets to vote on weather and to reduce Harvest dice values for points, with a Harvest guaranteed at game-end. The neutral player is strong, but it’s also ‘dumb’ enough that it can’t adjust for the presence of weird tiles like the potato (second-most raindrops gets more points) or wheat, so you might want to remove those tiles from the possible layout. Solo play becomes a bit more of a puzzle, or even a bit like programming – you can work through the likely set of moves for the neutral player, and then counterprogram with a set of potential moves for yourself to set yourself up to capture the majority of the scored tiles in each Harvest. I’ve found it’s easier to focus on the tiles than the voting in the Southern Winds, and have beaten the solo player outright before giving myself the bonus for wheat tokens.

Petrichor also comes with many variants in the rulebook to further enhance play, most notably a card-drafting option to replace the random card draws of the base game, which assumes players have some experience and will further lengthen game times. It’s solid with two players, better with three or four to get more clouds on the tiles and more chance of players interacting with each other (even though you make the board slightly larger). And the artwork is truly stunning, some of the most appealing I’ve seen this year, boosted by the choice of white backgrounds for all components to brighten the table and the clear glass beads that represent the players’ raindrops. It’s well worth seeking out if you’re looking for a midweight game that’s quick to learn but can provide you with the strategic depth of a slightly heavier title.

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→ February 16, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 2/16/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, but my entire prospect ranking package is now up for subscribers, including the top 100, farm system rankings, and in-depth rankings for all 30 teams, with at least 15 prospects ranked in each system. Before my vacation I wrote up the J.T. Realmuto trade. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday and another back on February 6th.

My most recent board game review for Paste covered the light, fun engine-builder Gizmos, by the designer of Bärenpark and Imhotep, a very family-friendly title with no text to worry about that takes the engine-builder concept and boils it down to a simpler game that plays in well under an hour.

I also resumed my email newsletter, so feel free to sign up for that if you just can’t get enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

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→ February 11, 2019
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Morels app.

Morels was the first game I reviewed for Paste, over four years ago, and crossed my radar because it was a brand-new, purely two-player game with some positive early press. It’s a great, quick-to-learn set-collection game that was only the second title I’d come across to use the now-popular rolling market mechanic, where you can take the first card or few cards in the display for free, while taking cards further from the start of the queue costs you something. There’s also a push-your-luck element to choosing which sets to collect and which to discard for twigs, the game’s currency, as well as trying to deduce what your opponent might be collecting and deciding whether it’s worth using a turn to grab something they need. It’s been on every iteration of my all-time board game rankings and my top two-player games rankings since I first reviewed it.

Late last year, an app version of Morels appeared for iOS and Android devices, using the original artwork and featuring strong AI opponents – at least, I think they’re pretty strong, since I can’t beat the hard level more than about half the time – for a very strong app experience. If you’ve been looking for a new two-player game and want to try Morels before buying the physical game, or just want a new game app that plays well as a solo vs AI experience, I strongly recommend this.

Morels is a game of mushroom collection, which means a few of my closest friends are already predisposed to hate this game. The deck includes cards of nine different mushroom types, each with a different point value and value in twigs. You can ‘cook’ any set of at least three mushrooms of one type to gain the points shown on those cards by turning in the mushroom cards with a skillet card; if you turn in four, you can boost the value by 3 with a butter card, and if you turn in five, you can boost the value by 5 with a cider card. Basket cards increase your hand limit. You can turn in two cards of any mushroom type to gain twigs, which you then use to grab cards from the market that are beyond the first two (free) spots. The market moves one space to the right on every turn, and if the rightmost card wasn’t taken, it falls into a pile just off the market that can hold up to four cards, which you can also take for free; if that pile reaches four and no one has taken the stack, they’re all discarded for the remainder of the game.

Morels app screenshot

There are two special card types in the deck. Destroying Angel cards are deadly, of course, and if you take one your hand limit is cut in half for several turns. Night cards show the same mushroom types as the regular (day) cards, with the exception of the most valuable cards, the morels, and Night cards are worth two cards of the displayed type – so you can turn in one Night card for twigs, or you can cook one Night card and one Day card of the same mushroom type for points. The catch is that Night cards show up face down, so you take one without knowing which mushroom type you’re getting (there’s one Night card for each non-morel mushroom). Game play continues until the deck is exhausted.

Decisions in the game are quick, but they’re not always simple; you’re working against the constraints of your hand limit, the finite supply of skillet cards, and the hard end to the game – you don’t get a last shot to cook once the deck is finished. I learned more strategy from playing against the AI than from playing against anyone in person, since the AI player nearly always does what it can to grab Night cards, even if it means using all of its twigs, and will generally try to stop me from collecting enough high-value mushrooms – particularly morels and chanterelles – to cook. The hard AI also seems to have good deck awareness, knowing what’s left and also managing end game well enough that I found I had to change how I played to keep up.

I’ve played the app dozens of times with just occasional glitches, and no complaints about game play or the AI. I wish it kept track of total wins/losses against each AI level, but that’s a minor quibble. The graphics are bright and clear, and you don’t really need to be able to read the mushroom titles to play it as a result. Everything you need to know to play the game well is on the main screen, and the challenge is more one of keeping track of things in your head (or I guess on paper, if you want) rather than one of the app making this information harder to find. At $4.99 for iOS or Android it’s an easy recommendation for me.

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→ January 26, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 1/26/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, on the three-way trade that sent Sonny Gray to Cincinnati. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday. The 2019 top prospects package begins its rollout on Monday.

At Paste, I reviewed the cooperative game Forbidden Sky, from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock, who adds a fun STEM element to the same framework he’s used in Pandemic and the other Forbidden titles.

And now, the links…

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→ January 19, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 1/19/19.

Nothing new from me this week, between prospect writing and a trip to NYC the last two days to attend a MEL magazine event. The prospect rankings will start to run on ESPN.com on January 28th and will roll out over two weeks.

And now, the links…

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→ December 15, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 12/15/18.

This week’s MLB winter meetings weren’t great, but I did write up a few moves: Cleveland’s trades for Carlos Santana & Jake Bauers, the signings of Joe Kelly and Jeurys Familia, the Lance Lynn signing & Tanner Roark trade, the Rays’ signing of Charlie Morton, and the Phillies’ signing of Andrew McCutchen.

On the board game front, I wrote up every game I tried at PAX Unplugged for Paste, and reviewed the Terraforming Mars app (on Steam) for Ars Technica.

I resumed my free email newsletter this week, after a longer break than I wanted due to those same stupid meetings and stupid prospect calls getting in the stupid way, but you should join the over 5000 current subscribers for even more of my words.

And now, the links…

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→ December 8, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 12/8/18.

I had five pieces for ESPN+ subscribers this week, on the Robinson Cano trade, the Paul Goldschmidt trade, Washington signing Pat Corbin, the Yan Gomes trade, and the Jean Segura trade. I did not hold a chat this week due to other demands on my time.

I have updated my annual posts of recommendations of cookbooks and gifts for the cooks in your life. My top board games of the year columns for Paste and Vulture should both go up next week; I’ll post my year-end music rankings here the week of the 17th.

And now, the links…

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