→ December 31, 2013
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Suburbia iPad app.

Unrelated to Suburbia – the death yesterday of School of Seven Bells founder Ben Curtis at age 35 (of lymphoma) spurred me to look back at my rankings of the top songs of 2012 and create a fresh Spotify playlist with a few extra tracks. Their haunting song “The Night” is on the list.

—

The boardgame Suburbia ranks in the top 100 on Boardgamegeek, with a combination of city-building mechanics and economic planning where what you do early in the game impacts how many points you can rack up late in the game. It’s reminiscent of more complex games like Agricola and Caylus in that respect, but with simpler gameplay and less direct interaction because players have more ways to change their plans on the fly. I’ve been playing the Suburbia iPad app for the last two weeks, and I enjoy the game itself but have found the app’s AI options way too weak to make the app replayable.

In Suburbia, between two and four players compete to build the most populated suburb around a central city by placing building tiles that are available for purchase in a common market. Each hex tile has specific costs and benefits. The benefits can include increases in income, population, or reputation; one-time cash infusions; or long-term effects that depend on what other tiles are adjacent to the hex, or in the same suburb, or in all suburbs combined. The costs include money but can also include a loss of income, population, or reputation, which may depend on what else is around. Place an industrial tile next to a residential one and you’ll lose reputation points because of pollution. Place tiles around a lake (free to add) and you’ll get extra cash.

The tile interactions are one of two keys to racking up large populations. You can’t do everything in your suburb, so it pays to concentrate early on one or two specific areas or tile types and try to build your income or population more quickly through synergies between tiles. You can add a farm or two, and then if you add restaurant tiles later they will be even more valuable. There are also tiles that include penalties for laying other tile types – if you add a high-end restaurant, adding a fast food restaurant afterwards will cost you an income point. The game’s tutorial suggests concentrating on income early and population later, as there are income and reputation hits built into the system when your population crosses certain thresholds.

The other scoring key lies in the various goals set out each game, 10 to 20 point bonuses for reaching specific milestones such as having the fewest office buildings or earning the highest income per turn. Four of these goals are visible and available to all players. Each player also receives one goal specific to him/her, not visible to other players, but that still requires beating all other players in that category to win it. Some goals even work against the main objective of maximizing your population, such as having the fewest residential tiles of any suburb. Without these goals, the game would be kind of boring because it would be so simple and too reliant on the central tile market, which uses the common mechanic of making two tiles available for free and all others in the queue more expensive, shifting them to the right as tiles are removed.

The app itself looks slick, with bright, clear graphics that allow you to read the costs and effects of each card easily. I only had one issue with stability, which occurred when I tried to use the game’s save feature – I couldn’t resume the game and had to kill the app process entirely to start a fresh one, which I guess is a pretty significant bug but wasn’t my main issue with the app. The AI players are terrible: you have your choice of five, and can use up to three of them (but can’t reuse any), and they’re all a little dim. They don’t plan well, which I imagine is a difficult issue for coding AI players, but they also miss obvious short-term moves or take actions that clearly reduce their chances to gain points. If I go first, I can beat the AI players just about every time. Going fourth of four reduces my chances a little, but I’m also a novice player and should get more of a challenge than this. I’m hoping that the expansion, Suburbia Inc., becomes available as an in-app purchase, and that the developers use that as an opportunity to introduce some harder computer players.

I’m due for an update to my top iOS boardgame apps rankings, but will review the Dominant Species app later in the week before I do the final list.

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→ December 20, 2013
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iOS games on sale.

There are a number of iOS boardgame apps on sale right now through Christmas (and sometimes beyond), so rather than tweet a bunch of links I figured I’d list the ones I recommend here. If you’re looking for recent content, my Top Chef recap went up Thursday night and contains links to everything I’ve written this week.

  • Small World 2, on sale for $4.99 right now. I love this game and app and gave the pre-update version a very positive review.
  • Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates, just $0.99 right now, as are all Codito titles except Puerto Rico. I liked this one from the start, but the update to the graphics earlier this year made it much easier on the eyes.
  • Le Havre, also $0.99 as it’s another Codito title. It’s from the designer of Agricola but brings in elements of Caylus; I think it’s the most complex boardgame I’ve ever played, and it works way better in an app version than it did tabletop because of all of the pieces involved. My review from June 2012 is from the original release.
  • Agricola, down to $4.99 from $6.99, but now with the I and K card decks available as in-app purchases. If you haven’t played the physical game, those decks come standard and offer a lot more occupations and opportunities for interaction with other players. You can read my review of the base game from July.
  • Caylus – Big Daddy’s Creations, down to $2.99 from $4.99. My original app review came before some minor bug fixes, and this probably still has the best, brightest graphics of any game app in the field.
  • Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition – Beamdog, down to $6.99. It’s not a board game, but a classic RPG that has been adapted to iOS. I’ve played and reviewed it; it’s very good, especially after a recent update included many of the features that originally appeared in the Throne of Bhaal sequel to BG2.
  • Sid Meier’s Pirates!, down to $0.99. Also not a boardgame, just another PC classic ported to iOS. My original review is from September of 2011; I liked it, but didn’t love it, because it becomes monotonous after an hour or two – but you’ll get your 99 cents’ worth.
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→ December 4, 2013
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Bora Bora.

I published a lot of content for ESPN Insiders the last 48 hours, including:

That’s all on moves that have already occurred, but I’ll continue posting this week as more stuff breaks.

One of our favorite new games of the past few years is 2011’s The Castles of Burgundy, which is one of the few games we’ve come across that brought an entirely new approach to the somewhat stale game styles like worker placement. The rules are lengthy but gameplay isn’t complex, and the game works a lot of decision-making into under an hour of playing time. It’s been a modest hit, rating very highly at Board Game Geek (12th overall) as well as with me, so it’s unsurprising that we’re now seeing other games with similar mechanics come along, such as the brand-new Ravensburger relase Bora Bora, a beautifully rendered game that borrows much from Castles of Burgundy but adds a new setting and a few minor twists.

In Bora Bora, two to four players set about building huts on the five islands on the game board so they can collect resources from the land and hire natives to perform various tasks, all with the goal of acquiring victory points to be tallied after the game’s six rounds. There are numerous ways to rack up these points, such as converting natural resources to buildings on your player board, placing priests in the central board’s temple, completing a task tile at the end of a round, buying jewelry with shells, or gaining status points in each round. Most point acquisitions come through a series of moves; for example, hiring a female native gets you shells, with which you can buy a piece of jewelry that is worth from 1 to 9 victory points at the end of the game, or that can be used to fulfill certain task tiles. Gaining natural resources helps you place a two-space building on the twelve-space building area on your player card, a move that is worth 10 points in the game’s first two rounds but just 4 points in the final two rounds.


The central board during the final round of play.

A round in Bora Bora comprises three phases: Rolling dice to place them on action tiles; using your natives for actions; and a scoring/roundup phase where the main board is refreshed with new native and task tiles. Your moves are dictated by dice rolls, as in Castles of Burgundy, although Bora Bora offers fewer ways to manipulate the dice. In Bora Bora, each player has his/her own set of three dice and can place those dice on any of five (for a two-player game) to seven (four-player) master tiles that allow actions like hiring a native, expanding to a different region on the map, or placing a priest in the temple. The wild card of those actions is the “helper” option, where the number on the die you place there converts into points you can use to gain shells or status points from workers, resources without having to expand your territory, or god cards and offerings to let you do more with your dice. Two players can use the same tile in a round, but a player may only place a die on a tile if the die’s roll is lower than all dice currently on the tile, creating a trade-off between using a high die roll on a tile to get more powers or resources and using a lower die to block your opponent(s) from using the same one.

The one way to tweak the dice in your favor is through pleading with the gods using god cards and offering tiles. There are five god card types, two of which allow you to change the way you use the dice: You can play a die normally but treat its face value as six for your move; you can place a die on a master tile even if it’s not lower than all dice currently on it. Other god cards allow you to score points for expanding into a new territory on the map, to employ additional natives during the action phase of a turn, or to help you complete a task tile on your card for which you just fall short of the requirements.

The task tiles turn out to be more significant as the game goes on because they offer additional bonuses of four to six points for things you may already have done, such as expanding to all five islands or having certain combinations of natives or resources already on your card. The end of the game offers even more bonuses for achieving the maximum number of something, like completing nine tasks, buying six jewelry tiles, or filling all twelve spaces on the building area on your card (called the “ceremony spaces” in a confusing bit of nomenclature).

Bora Bora suffers a little from its similarity to Castles of Burgundy, but also from pushing too far in the same general direction as its predecessor – players have so many options that gameplay can drag while you try to sort through them all. It’s easy to become paralyzed by all of the options before you because of how long-lasting some fo the effects can be; Castles of Burgundy doesn’t have that same depth, and it means Bora Bora has more in common with games like Agricola or Le Havre, where a decision in an early round can filter down through the rest of the game. It’s an ideal game to pick up if you love Castles of Burgundy but want something different or more complex, or if you are partial to games with great-looking components, since Bora Bora has bright colors and strong artwork. The extent of possible options for players and constant references to the rule book to explain the pictograms on certain tiles stretched the game out for us to the point where we’re going to reach for Castles of Burgundy first, but this represents a solid change of pace.

I wanted to slip in one more game review before posting my updated rankings later this week, so look for that post either later on Thursday or at worst on Friday, as long as the baseball world doesn’t go bananas again. You can see last year’s top 40 rankings while you wait.

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→ December 1, 2013
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Lords of Waterdeep app.

My analysis of the Phil Hughes signing is up for Insiders.

Playdek, the folks behind this summer’s spectacular iOS adaptation of Agricola, just released their most recent boardgame app, Lords of Waterdeep, a straightforward worker-placement/task-completion game with some modest interactions through the use of special Intrigue cards that let you sabotage your opponents here and there. (Amazon has the physical version of the game for $38; the game itself is currently ranked 28th on Boardgamegeek’s overall rankings.)

While Lords of Waterdeep has a theme from the Dungeons & Dragons universe, it’s pasted on to a game that has neither might nor magic in it, using the Forgotten Realms for artwork and nomenclature but nothing more. Each player tries to complete Quests in exchange for victory points and resources, where Quests in certain categories may earn the player additional bonus points unique to his player identity. Resources include money and four different worker types, the availability of which are unequal and can vary over the course of the game. Players begin acquiring money and workers by placing “Agents” in open buildings on the board, as in Agricola, but can buy and place new buildings, as in Caylus, to open additional opportunities for all players to earn resources while gaining commissions (money, workers, Intrigue cards, or victory points) for the builder. And the aforementioned Intrigue cards add an interactive element: You can steal resources from other players, or assign a “mandatory” quest with a tiny victory-point value to an opponent who must complete that quest before any others.

The game comprises eight rounds, with two distinct phases. In the first four rounds, each player has two Agents to place on open building spaces; in the last four rounds, each player gets a third Agent to place. Building spaces offer various returns:

* Most just offer resources – one or two workers of a specific type, or money, or a combination of both.
* Three spaces offer access to the four visible Quest cards, with each bringing something along with the Quest card, such as an Intrigue card.
* Three spaces in Waterdeep Castle allow a player to play one of his Intrigue cards, with the twist that an Agent placed there can be reassigned later in the round once all players have placed their Agents once.
* Another space allows the player to build one of three visible Buildings and place it on the right side of the board, assuming he can pay the cost (in money) on the card.
* And the final space allows the player to take over the Starting Player (going first in each round) role while also granting him/her an Intrigue card.

Once occupied by an Agent, a building space is unavailable to all other players (except those with a specific Intrigue card) for the remainder of the round.

The dynamic of each round is simple: Place two or three Agents for resources, money, or Quest cards; to play an Intrigue card; or to buy and place a building; and, whenever you have the right resources, complete a Quest, an action that does not require the use of an Agent. At the end of eight rounds, the player with the most victory points – from completed Quests, from Quest-related bonuses, from money (1 point per 2 coins left), and from unused workers (1 point per cube) wins.

In my experience, the path to victory revolves mostly around bonus points. You want to complete quests with high point values, or, failing that, complete a lot of quests with lower values, but it’s most important to stick to the Quest types for which you’ll earn rewards. There are various Quest categories, such as Piety, Arcana, Warfare, Commerce, and Skullduggery, and each player character gives four point rewards for each Quest completed in two of those types. Where possible, I’ve only acquired and completed Quests in my two categories, and also have tried to complete a Quest that increases those bonuses – for example, in one recent game, I earned an additional two points for each Skullduggery Quest I completed on top of the base four points I got from my character.

I’ve also learned from watching the AI players that laying down Intrigue cards is a high-return endeavor because of the ability to reassign that Agent later in the same round – so it’s like getting an extra half-turn. Some cards have higher value early in the game, both Intrigue and Quest cards, so obtaining and playing those in the first few rounds (if possible) is key.

Lords of Waterdeep ultimately comes down to a lot of little decisions around resource allocation, with minimal (but non-zero) interaction with your opponents and only a few small ways in which you can strengthen your abilities over the long haul. You don’t have any choice of Intrigue cards, and your choice in Quest cards is limited to the four you see in the open pool at any given time. There’s a fair amount of luck in the game as a result, but I don’t think it’s enough to defeat a player with a focus on completing Quests that provide the right bonuses.

The app is moderately entertaining, with competent AI players on the hard and medium levels, but the board layout is atrocious. It’s impossible to view everything on the screen at once, as the developers seemed to hew too faithfully to the physical game, and there’s so much unnecessary detail that critical pieces of text are often obscured unless you zoom in to see them. Caylus and Agricola are both stellar examples of how to display a game board that can’t fit comfortably into one screen, but Lords of Waterdeep is an example of how not to do this. Even after several plays, I still felt like it was hard to follow what the AI players were doing, and frequently had to zoom back to place my final agent because it wasn’t clear what building spaces were still free.

There’s a major two-part expansion for the physical game called Scoundrels of Skullport that adds buildings, characters, Quests, and Intrigue cards, which I hope becomes available for the app as it promises to increase the game’s replay value. For now, it’s a mid-tier app for me, a little too perfunctory to become an essential game and in need of a UI overhaul, but a straightforward, nicely balanced game that was stable through several plays and included a thorough, clear tutorial to get a noob (like me) started. If worker placement is your favorite style, it’s worth picking up.

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→ November 18, 2013
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Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

The cooperative boardgame Flash Point: Fire Rescue is Pandemic set in a burning building. While the setting and endgame conditions differ, the core mechanics are very similar, enough that it should be simple for Pandemic or even Forbidden Island players to pick up the basic rules and move on to the complete game. It’s enjoyable thanks to the same cooperative elements that make Pandemic fun (and stressful), but I don’t see anything terribly novel in Flash Point that advances the cooperative game field.

In Flash Point, the board is a giant rectangular building divided into 48 squares (six by eight), and it’s about to become enveloped by fire. The players represent firefighters who must enter the building and rescue seven victims before the building collapses or before they lose four (or more) victims to the blaze. Only three victims are on the board at any time, and some of the victim tokens turn out to be “false alarms” – blank tokens that can waste your time as you navigate the fire to get to them. Once a player reaches a victim, s/he must carry the victim out of the building to the ambulance parked outside, a slow process that puts both victim and player at risk from the advancing conflagration. When a victim is rescued or is lost, or a false alarm token is exposed, the players add a new token, called a point of interest (POI), to replace it, ensuring there are three on the board at the start of every turn.


When a fire starts to burn, right, and it starts to spread…

On his/her turn, each player gets four moves, called action points, to use as needed. Moving to an adjacent space costs an action point; putting out smoke in the space where the player stands costs one AP; putting out fire in that space costs two AP; carrying a victim to an adjacent space costs two AP. A firefighter can’t end his/her turn in a space that’s on fire, but a player can save any unused AP until the next turn. The basic “family” game has all players operating with the same four AP and restrictions; the full rules give each player a specific role, again similar to Pandemic, with bonus skills (e.g., flip over any victim token for 1 AP to see if it’s a false alarm or an actual victim) or additional AP to use in certain ways (e.g., three bonus ones per turn that can only be used for movement and can’t be saved).

After each player takes his/her turn, he rolls the two dice, one six-sided die and one eight-sided, to spread the fire somewhere in the building. If the space indicated by the roll is empty, and isn’t adjacent to any space with a fire token in it, then the new space gets a smoke token and no real harm is done (yet). If the space is already smoking, or is adjacent to a fire token, then the space ignites and gets a fire token. If the space is already on fire, however, an “explosion” occurs, similar to an outbreak in Pandemic, where the fire spreads out in all four directions, blowing off doors and damaging walls. Each wall segment can take up to two damage tokens before it is destroyed, and if players must place all of the game’s 24 damage tokens on the board before rescuing their 7th victim, the building collapses and all is lost.

The full rules create ways for the fire to spread even more quickly due to hazardous materials and hot spots places on the board at the beginning of the game. When fire hits a hazmat token, it causes another explosion like that described above; a player can carry a hazmat token out of the building for 2 AP per move, although the hazmat just has to be taken to the outer track rather than brought to a specific point as a victim does. When fire hits a hot spot, the player must roll the dice again to place yet another smoke or fire token, which may cause another explosion and hit another hot spot, so the process can continue for several iterations. These advanced rules come with one major bonus for the players, however: For 4 AP players can use the fire engine’s deck gun to spray water into one of the building’s four quadrants, hitting one random square within the chosen quadrant and dousing fire and smoke in that square as well as the two to four adjacent squares. I’ve found this to be essential to beating the game when using the full rule set.

With just two players, we found that limited cooperation was required because we could get victims out of the building quickly enough to avoid the fire. With four players, teamwork becomes essential for that reason: Someone has to control the fire to keep a path clear for the player(s) carrying victims out, and to make sure the building doesn’t collapse too quickly. Choosing where to focus your firefighting efforts is similar to choosing where to head in Pandemic – you’re practicing containment, as eradication, difficult in Pandemic, doesn’t exist here. Even if you were able to put out every fire token on the board, the building will just reignite on a future turn. You have to move quickly and efficiently to beat the game, as rescuing seven victims takes a lot of turns and the fire moves more rapidly as the game progresses.

A full game takes 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how quickly you make decisions as a group and whether you choose to use all or merely some of the full game’s features. It’s essential if you love cooperative games and enjoy the mechanics of Pandemic, but I find the game a little derivative without enough new twists to distinguish it from its predecessor and would always reach for simultaneous global epidemics over the burning building.

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→ November 10, 2013
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Elder Sign.

My buyer’s guides to catchers and DHs, corner infielders, and outfielders are all up for Insiders over at ESPN.com.

Elder Sign is a cooperative dice-manipulation game set in the Cthulu world created by the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. One to eight players act as investigators seeking to explore a mansion haunted by the minions of an “Ancient One,” the main enemy who will awaken if the players take too long to complete enough tasks to allow them to defeat him. If he awakens, the players must then battle with him against fairly significant odds or lose the game entirely.

The theme is elaborate, but the game is pretty simple: You’re playing Yahtzee! with different dice, and you can use various cards and investigator skills to alter the dice to try to get the specific rolls you need. Every room card has one or more tasks that you must complete by achieving specific rolls on the set of six green dice. You may need to use multiple dice to complete a task, but you can only complete one task per roll – if your roll completes several, you complete one, removing those dice, then roll the remainder to try to complete another task. Once you’ve completed all of the tasks on a card, you get the rewards shown on the room card, from extra item cards to the elder sign points that you use to defeat the Ancient One. If you fail to complete any task on a roll, you must give up one die to reroll and often pay a “terror” penalty as well. If you fail to complete all of the tasks on a card you’ve begun, you pay a penalty that usually costs you one or more Stamina or Sanity points – and if you run out of either, your investigator is out of the game.

The game includes a clock that advances fifteen minutes after each player’s turn. When the clock reaches midnight, something bad happens: A monster appears and is added to a room with an open slot, or a doom token is added to the Ancient One’s doom track, which, when filled, means the big guy wakes up (and he is pissed). There can be additional effects at midnight based on what room cards are on the table and what Ancient One is in play, but the bottom line is that none of these things are good.

Each investigator has a special skill, from the ability to reroll some or all dice to the ability to complete multiple tasks on one dice roll, the most useful one I’ve found in the game. Investigators can also acquire different item cards – Common Items, most of which allow the player to add a special yellow die to the green ones; Special Items, most of which give you a red die to roll; Spells, most of which allow you to store one or two of your rolled dice to retain a specific result for the next roll; Clues, which allow you to reroll any or all of your dice without having to surrender one first; and Allies, helpful assistants that might give you an extra skill or roll. Other cards may allow you to defeat a monster without a roll, regain a Stamina or Sanity point, or open up special rooms from the Other world, which tend to offer better rewards and smaller penalties.

Investigators work as a team to accumulate the number of Elder Signs required to defeat the Ancient One, but there’s very little in-game collaboration. The bulk of the teamwork involves figuring out which investigator is best equipped to tackle each room – the investigator who’s immune to Sanity and Stamina penalties within tasks is the ideal candidate to go after a room with several of those required to finish it, for example. Using Amanda Sharpe, the investigator who can complete two or more tasks on one roll, might be a waste on a card with only one task.

The other key decision is which rooms to try to solve before the next time the clock strikes midnight. Rooms that return one or more Elder Signs are always valuable, but a few room cards allow the investigator to remove a Doom token from the Doom track if they’re completed. Some rooms have negative effects at midnight, like adding more doom tokens or deducting one Sanity point from every investigator, so taking them out quickly is key to extending your time to complete the game. Other rooms and monsters “lock” dice so they’re unusuable until the room is completed or the monster is slain. (If you kill a monster but then don’t complete the room in which he was hanging out, the monster is still dead and you still get the benefits of dispatching him.)

I’ve found value in tackling rooms that open Other rooms when solved, because of the latter category’s more favorable risk/reward ratio. The game also includes the Entrance, a sort of shop where players can return Trophy points, acquired by completing rooms or defeating monsters, for additional clues, cards, or even Elder Signs, although I’ve found I only make use of the Entrance to return Trophies for healing or to buy Elder Signs.

Ultimately, however, this is a luck-based game where you are working to manage your luck by mitigating its effects. A basic understanding of probability helps, of course, but in general it’s best to throw everything you’ve got into each room’s set of tasks because of the high cost of failure and the fact that every item or trick you use for rolls reduces your dependence on random chance. It’s the kind of game that can have you muttering that the dice are loaded after ten straight dice don’t give you the one skull (“peril” … seriously, the terminology here is stupid) image you needed, so accepting that you’ll have outlier rolls that make your can’t-miss strategy miss is part of the fun. It’s a solid mid-weight game, good as a cooperative game that has more individual decision-making than Pandemic, but you have to be able to live with Elder Sign’s heavy reliance on dice to like it.

There is a modified app version of Elder Sign sold as Elder Sign: Omens for the iPad and iPhone. I played at least a dozen games without a single crash, and the graphics are very strong and clear, drawn directly from the physical game. The interface is clumsy, unfortunately, and I had a few instances where I clicked on something, expecting more information, only to find I’d made an irrevocable choice – a dialog making sure that I wanted to give up on a room before finishing would be a good addition. It’s also too many clicks to get information on rooms or what each investigator is holding, and even if you disable the videos there’s too much nonsense in between each investigator’s turn for my tastes. The app differs in a few small ways from the board game – I don’t think there are Ally cards at all, and once the big foozle wakes up the game is over. The base app costs $6.99 and includes four Ancient Ones to fight; three more are available as in-app purchases for $2.99 each, each of which also adds some investigator options. It’s worth the seven bucks to try it out before buying the physical game, although compared to other boardgame apps in the $6-10 price range you get less bang for your buck.

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→ October 5, 2013
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Pandemic iOS app.

The biggest iOS boardgame app release since June’s appearance of Agricola came this past Thursday, as the leading cooperate boardgame Pandemic was released for the iPad, bringing the same tension as the boardgame to a pass-and-play app with a slick, intuitive interface. If you don’t mind failing to save humanity over and over around your occasional successes, this is the app for you.

If you haven’t the physical version of Pandemic (which I reviewed in December 2010), it’s a different kind of game than most boardgames you’ve ever played. Two to four players work together to try to win, rather than competing. The board is a map of the world with various cities on it, connected by lines that indicate travel routes. The ‘enemy’ here is disease – four of them, each affecting a different region of the world and threatening to spread out of control and wipe out the human race. Cubes represent diseased populations in various cities, with one to three per location; when a city with three cubes in it acquires another one through the draw of a card or a spreading infection, an “outbreak” occurs and new cubes go into each city that connects to the original one. Eight outbreaks means you’ve lost. You can also lose if you have to place all 24 cubes of any specific color (one color per disease), or if you exhaust the deck of city cards before curing all four diseases. It’s difficult and cerebral, requiring you to make numerous decisions, often balancing short-term needs against long-term goals.

There is a way to win Pandemic, however. Each player collects city cards, two per turn, that can be used to cure a disease – five city cards of the same color, sent en masse to the discard pile while the player in question is in a city with a research station, cures that disease. In the meantime, however, players can go from city to city, removing cubes to try to hold off outbreaks. Each player has a specific role that gives him/her a special ability, such as curing a disease with just four cards, building a research station in whatever city he’s on, or moving other players around the board. There are also four special cards that allow the player to skip new infections for a turn, build a research station, remove one city card from the infection deck, or move one player to any place on the board. And the players’ deck also includes Epidemic cards, each of which triggers a new three-cube infection in one city while also raising the infection rate on a sliding scale that starts out at two cities per turn and eventually reaches four. You can adjust the game’s level of difficulty, which affects the number of Epidemic cards in the deck – from four (easy) to six (heroic).

The iOS app is an outstanding, faithful adaptation of the game that plays quickly and easily with only one very minor technical glitch through over a dozen plays (with no crashes). The interface is very clear and crisp, although the city names might be a little tough for some players to read without zooming in. (It helps to know your world geography here.) The screen has to deliver a lot of information at once, but the division of information across four side menus is easy to follow once you know the rules – all players’ cards in the right-hand menu, card history on the left, the current player’s cards and potential actions on the bottom, and the overall stats up top. Moving around is easy, as the game highlights cities to which the current player can move and confirms any move that would require the disposal of a city card. You can also undo your last few moves with a click of the undo arrow symbol in the upper left.

The one technical glitch I mentioned was minor – I have had a few instances where the app wouldn’t allow me to open the right-hand menu showing which city cards the players held, but could exit to the main screen and resume the game to open the menu again. I have noticed an unusually high probability of an epidemic card appearing in the first first turn, which makes the game harder to win; I actually had a game end after only two of the four player-roles had a chance to go, because a series of outbreaks in the red (Asia) region used up all 24 cards, thanks to an epidemic on the first turn. Such unwinnable games are a part of Pandemic, although in my experience with the physical game, they’re pretty rare.

Pandemic is a game meant to be played in person, with lots of communication between players, so I didn’t mind the absence of online multiplayer; slowing this game down would also reduce the tension that’s a key part of why it’s fun. (Although my daughter might question that; after playing alongside me twice, she asked, “What’s the point of this game? Losing?”) The game also has no AI component; if you want to play solo, just choose the number of roles you wish to play and handle them yourself. That also means there’s no downtime: You are always in the process of doing something or deciding what to do, and never waiting on an AI player or an online opponent (or partner). For a competitive game, the lack of online multiplayer would be a drawback, but I don’t see it as one here.

The game doesn’t include either of the available expansions for the physical game, although I imagine those will eventually be available as in-app purchases. Its current price of $6.99 is about par for a high-end adaptation of a popular game, in line with the popular Ticket to Ride or Small World and with the more complex Agricola. If you’re into the physical version of Pandemic, or want a game for your iPad that is very challenging with high replay value, this is a must-have.

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→ August 2, 2013
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Hacienda app.

Some recent Insider content: my post-deadline column on the teams that did nothing this week, plus breakdowns of the Ian Kennedy trade, the Bud Norris trade, and the Jake Peavy trade. Also, my Klawchat transcript from earlier today. And finally, this week’s Behind the Dish podcast features former big leaguer Gabe Kapler, who talked to me about using advanced statistics in player development and about why I’m wrong to dislike the Notorious B.I.G.

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I picked up the iPad app version of Hacienda last summer, played it once or twice, then never went back to it after a handful of other titles hit the market and I got caught up doing … well, not doing what I was supposed to do, which was at least play the game enough to write a review of it. I just returned to it this week and it’s better than I remembered, a simple tile-placement game reminiscent of Through the Desert with different scoring mechanics and a tile-placement scheme that makes it easier to block opponents.

In Hacienda, two to five players players compete to rack up points through placement on a board filled with hexes that represent different terrains. Players may purchase cards that allow them to place land tiles or animal tokens, or purchase haciendas or lakes that allow them to accumulate more points. The majority of the board’s hexes contain pampas (open fields), but there are only a handful of pampas cards, so nearly all player tiles will go on the strips of non-pampas tiles around the board. (The app comes with a basic board and a more difficult “challenge” map.)

Placing at least three land tiles together forms a chain that earns the player two points per tile in the chain; placing a hacienda on the chain adds another point per tile. Animal chains, called “herds,” aren’t worth points on their own, but add points and money when they connect to the various market tiles on the board: 1 point for the first market a player reaches, 2 for the second, 3 for the third, and so on, plus $1 for each animal tile in the herd and another $1 for each land tile in the land chain adjacent to the herd. A player also earns a point for each of his tiles adjacent to any water hole on the board, whether he placed it or another player did. Finally, a player may purchase and place a harvest token to earn $3 per land tile in that chain, although in practice the AI players rarely use this and I haven’t at all. Each turn comprises three moves, which can include purchasing a card, placing a tile or token, or buying and placing a building or lake.

The game contains two phases, but the scoring contains a hitch – the score at the end of phase one is doubled and added to the score from phase two to give the final totals. The first phase ends when the supply of animal cards is exhausted; it’s reshuffled for the second phase, while the supply of land tile cards doesn’t appear to be exhaustible. (I may have that bit wrong.) That means an early deficit can be hard to overcome, even with near-perfect play in phase two, especially if you are split by your opponents or are running short of cash. It also puts huge importance on early moves and at least a little bit of strategy, because you have to think about what the board might look like several turns down the road and try to minimize the chances of your opponents screwing you over.

And screwing your opponents over is quite possible in Hacienda. The hard AI players will block you, although sometimes they’ll do so in slightly odd ways. Because the best way to rack up points is to create a long, contiguous chain of land tiles, placing a single tile directly in your opponent’s path forces him to either leave the trail of non-pampas hexes or to pick up a few pampas cards so he can go around you. In the first phase of the game, it may be easier to just pick up and start a new chain elsewhere on the board, but in the second phase, you’re probably stuck with what you’ve got, which means that long-range planning is complicated by the possibility that your opponents will sabotage you.

The main drawback of Hacienda is that the scoring is not entirely obvious from looking at the board because of all of the multipliers that apply to various types of chains. The interactive component is a plus, but the inclusion of money adds a layer of complexity that doesn’t significantly improve the game; Through the Desert covers similar ground (pun intended) more elegantly.

The implementation here boasts outstanding graphics and quick AI players, although the lack of online multiplayer is a major drawback. The app also doesn’t allow for a random start player, which seems like an essential element for solo or pass-and-play games. Finally, tile/token placement isn’t that precise, although the developers say they improved that in the most recent update. The tutorial was clear and concise, and it’s easy to see what other players have done when it’s your turn.

I’d still recommend Through the Desert first if you like the sound of hex-based tile-placement games; in that game, you’re also trying to create long chains and connect them to specific landmarks on the board, but that’s just about it, with blocking opponents the only wrinkle in a game that stands out for its simplicity. Hacienda makes the core mechanic 50% more complicated but the resulting game is maybe 5% more interesting.

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→ June 15, 2013
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Agricola iOS app.

Agricola is among the top-rated board games on Boardgamegeek’s rankings, and one of the best-reviewed board games ever released, a complex strategy game with very little luck or randomness involved that requires players to make a ton of difficult decisions. I like the game, but I’ve never rated it as highly on my own rankings because of its extreme complexity: The decisions and tradeoffs are so tight, the game straddles the line between play and work. A successful game brings as much relief (that you didn’t screw it up) as pleasure (which is the point of games, no?), and it can take two hours to play a four-person game, more if you don’t really know what you’re doing. The design of the game is brilliant – it is so balanced, and the idea of forcing players to choose among a host of imperfect options, accepting that they can never check all the boxes, is pretty unusual even with all of the games on the market. But good grief is it frustrating to play, even when you’re doing it right.

Playdek just released its long-promised Agricola iOS app earlier this week, and as adaptations go, it’s just about perfect. The app runs smoothly, without a single crash through a half-dozen games so far. Rules and requirements are easy to access within the game. The graphics are superb, very clear and very bright, easy to stare at for the 10-15 minutes it takes to play a solo game against AI players. And the AI players are solid competition, even the “easy” opponents, at least for a novice player like me.

I’d only played the physical game twice, so I came to this app as a near-rookie, only understanding the basic concept of the game and the part of the mechanics that resurfaced in the later game Le Havre. In Agricola, each player is trying to build a farmstead, beginning the game with a husband and wife, each of whom can handle a work assignment every round. Tasks on the farm include collecting resources, plowing fields, sowing plants, rearing animals, and building additions. The point is to maximize your scoring opportunities while ensuring that you can feed your family at the game’s five Harvests, which occur more frequently as the game progresses. The catch is that you can lose points in any area where you don’t accomplish something – leaving any farm area undeveloped, failing to rear any of the three animal types, etc. And getting enough food each harvest is no easy task; it would be ideal to get a steady food supply going, but that’s hard to do early in the game, and by the time the game is nearly over, the harvests are happening faster and you’re also trying to max out your scoring.

One way the game reduces the potential for frustration is by giving players a slew of choices for work assignments, adding another choice in each of the fourteen rounds of the game, so that players can vary strategies and won’t often find themselves blocked from all of the moves they need. (Most work assignments appear on only two spaces on the board, and some appear on only one.) Another is with Minor Improvements, which appear in the full game but not the shorter “family game,” a quicker, simpler version that only includes Major Improvements. Improvements offer players ways to gain extra resources or convert resources to more food. Players can also choose Occupations, which function much like Minor Improvements and can also provide point bonuses or spend less on future construction. (Hardcore players of the physical game may be interested to know that the app only includes the E deck so far, but other decks will be available as future in-app purchases.) Understanding what Improvements and Occupations can do for you allows you to tailor slightly more focused strategies – fun, but also again skating dangerously close to ‘work.’


The town.

Playdek’s biggest challenge beyond crafting the AI players had to be the interface itself, as Agricola takes up a lot of space when played on a table. There’s a central board with the ‘town,’ containing all of the work assignments, which gets larger as you include more players. Each player has his own farmstead, with up to a dozen or so squares, as well as his own resource piles and room for Improvements and Occupations. And there should be central piles of those cards as well. The app does a solid job of including all of those views without sacrificing too much information. The player can switch from town to farm view with one click. A bar at the bottom of the screen shows his/her current resource levels, including a food counter that shows how much he’ll need to feed his family this round. The player can find out what an assignment space or a card does by double-clicking on it, and there’s an option to include the labels on all assignment spaces if you want. When you drag one of your workers to a space, it’s grey if you can’t place your worker on it (because you don’t meet the resource or space requirements), and beige if it’s available. After two games, I was familiar enough with the town to know where everything was without having to keep all of the labels visible.


A player farm.

I’ve only found tiny flaws in the app version so far, nothing that seriously interfered with gameplay but, when the big stuff is all done right, these are the little things that stand out. The AI players seem to hang on basic decisions for five to ten seconds at times, and sometimes it becomes unclear what the app is waiting for (as in, is it my turn?). The tutorial is a little sparse and seems to be written for players who’ve tried the physical game at least once. The default animation and gameplay speeds were too slow for me, but turning them up in the options panel solved that problem. It might be easier if a greyed-out assignment space also explained why you can’t place a worker there. It also took me a few games to figure out that if you acquire more animals than you can house in fenced-in pastures or with stables, you can cook the extra beasts immediately if you have a fireplace or oven. They’re all minor issues – considering how many boardgame apps have crashed on me, the fact that one this complex played six games without such a hitch puts it in the best-of-breed category.

The two most comparable games in app form are Caylus, not as complex but with a similarly long view; and Le Havre, which takes many of the best features of Caylus and Agricola in what might be the most complex game I’ve ever seen. Caylus and Agricola both have bright, sharp graphics, while Le Havre’s are dimmer and less attractive. Le Havre gets everything on to one screen, while the other two force you to jump around or scroll more for the sake of larger images and clearer text. Caylus has the easiest AIs for me to beat, which means Agricola will probably have far more staying power for me – if it doesn’t turn out to be too frustrating when I’m playing the stronger computer opponents. It’s absolutely worth the $6.99 price tag, especially for a game that usually retails in physical form around $50, but with the caveat that the learning curve for this game is steeper than what fans of games like Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne might expect.

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→ May 14, 2013
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The Battle for Hill 218.

I have a new column up discussing the game’s top young shortstops, and recorded a new Behind the Dish podcast, speaking with ESPN’s umpiring analyst Jim McKean about last week’s great moments in MLB jurisprudence. My projection of the first round of this year’s Rule 4 draft will be posted on Thursday morning.

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Based on a two-player card game that is currently out of print, the app version of The Battle For Hill 218 ($2.99) plays incredibly simply, making it perfect for an adaptation to iOS, with a strong AI because the number of potential moves at any given time isn’t that large. It also plays very quickly against an AI opponent, with an entire game taking maybe five minutes, and the skill of the Hard AI player was strong enough that I found myself playing again and again because I was going to beat that sucker come hell or high water. (It took about 30 tries if you count my earliest screw-ups.)

The game revolves around a battle for the titular hill, which sits at the center of the playing area, between each player’s home base. Players have decks of cards representing unit types that are distinguished by the strength and direction of their attacks and by the directions in which they can support or be supported by other units, and on each turn a player places two cards. The goal is to take your opponent’s home base (by eliminating the unit there and then placing one of your units on it) before he takes yours; in the event that the players exhaust their decks and hands before either base falls, the player with the most active units still on the table is the winner.

The limited number of unit types available makes strategy fairly simple – you must set up a position on one turn that would allow you to knock out your opponent’s home unit and replace it on your next turn. That means that you need to set up a position that your opponent can’t overcome with his two card plays on the intervening turn, which, as I’ve played it, means that control of the two positions adjacent to the central hill are the critical ones, and most of the game will involve back-and-forth battles over one or occasionally both of those spaces. Controlling that space at the start of a turn means almost certain victory, as a player can use one of his two Airstrikes (eliminating any single opponent’s unit, with no card placement) and then place a Special Forces card (which, unlike other units, can be supported by another unit to which it is connected diagonally) on his opponent’s home base.


The hill is at the center, with the two home bases above and below it.

The randomness of the order of the cards mitigates the fact that the game revolves around the same basic battle each time. You start the game with five cards drawn at random from your deck, discarding two, and then on each turn you play two and then draw two. (One exception: The start player plays just one card on his first turn.) If a player’s home base is empty, s/he must play a card there first, but otherwise there’s a lot of flexibility with a typical hand of five cards and six different unit types. You have to think through each move based on all of the possible combinations your opponent might hold, and, in the case of the hard AI, assuming the opponent makes the perfect move in response. Learning to anticipate combos like the air-strike/special forces move – which beat me more times than I’d care to mention – and planning moves to prevent it, even a move or two in advance (to the extent that such a thing is possible) is a big part of the fun of the game. I don’t care for chess, because it involves so much long-term planning that it begins to feel like work to me, but nearly all good two-player games involve some of that element, and Battle for Hill 218 strikes a solid balance.

The tutorial in the app is insufficient, so you’ll need to either play the game a few times and figure out how the cards work via context, or go back into the Help/Manual menu to read about what the Supply, Attack, and Support symbols mean. The app is currently only available for the iPad, although the developers mentioned in an interview today on boardgamegeek that an upgrade making the app and offering async gameplay is in the works. At $2.99 it’s absolutely worth the cost even if you only intend to use it for local play.

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