July 19, 2019  ·  No comments yet

Exit: The Catacombs of Horror.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Exit games since I first tried & reviewed them a year and a half ago. The series, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2017, comprises a series of single-play games that mimic the experience of an escape room, asking you (solo or in a team) to find a series of codes to solve the puzzle, generally destroying the game’s components as you go. They’re fun, appropriately difficult, usually playable inside of an hour, and come with a structured system of hints in case you get stuck. My daughter and I do these as a rainy-day activity, and I think we’ve played at least five so far, enjoying most of them.

The series steps up in difficulty with its newest title, Exit: The Catacombs of Horror, a longer title playable over two sessions, with puzzles that promise to be harder to solve … which is true, because this game was almost certainly not playtested, with puzzles that are far less straightforward than those in previous titles. The puzzle you have to solve to finish the game is a joke – even after reading the third hint card, which is supposed to explain the solution, I still have no idea what the designers expected players to do. There’s a huge failure of design here: You don’t make puzzles more difficult by making them too obscure to solve.

Exit’s puzzles come in all sorts of forms, but there are some common types, from deciphering codes in texts, finding hidden characters or images in printed materials, cutting and/or folding the materials to reveal patterns, or finding images that look like numbers. All of the game’s codes comprise three digits, so you know that will always be your goal; you use a decoder disk, entering the three digits under the symbol for the puzzle you’re solving, and you get a number for a card in the answer deck, which tells you if you’re wrong or refers you to the next clue. These puzzles generally range from very direct to a bit weird, often when the game wants you to see a number in an image or in something you’ve drawn; they take an especially liberal view when it comes to visual representations of numbers in sketches or lines.

The Catacombs of Horror, however, increases the difficulty by making things harder to see or to follow. One puzzle requires cutting images out of one of the cards, but the dashed lines that would tip you off that the designers want you to cut are almost impossible to see; my vision is fine, and I had a hard time spotting the lines, so I can’t imagine how hard it would be for older players or anyone requiring glasses. Another required finding blue dots on a large poster, except one of the blue dots was located on a teal flashlight, so the colors were nearly identical. There’s a puzzle that requires assembling a little cardboard box and threading a string through it, then looking through cutouts in the box’s sides and deciphering the number shown by the strings, once they’re pulled taut, which was a complete flop – yeah, I get why they said that looks like the number 2, but no average person is going to get that. It’s too inside-boardgaming for me, and I say that as someone who’s played most of the titles in the series.

Then there’s the final puzzle, which I won’t spoil because I can’t. I still don’t really get what the designers wanted me to do, even after a detailed reading of the last card – and my daughter, who loves these games but had lost interest before we finished this one, didn’t understand it either. It involves a lit candle, a ‘column’ with arrows that you place in a little plastic stand (which didn’t work – the column was way too flimsy and narrow for the stand), and then … a shadow? It’s the only time we’ve played an Exit game and given up. There’s no way they tested this final puzzle with regular game players, and I feel like the English translation of the last hint card (the third – each riddle has three hint cards, the first just a guide to start you, the third the solution) was inadequate.

I’m still interested in the series – there are four other new titles this year, and I see at least three previous titles we haven’t tried yet – but I can’t recommend The Catacombs of Horror unless they revise it, especially the final riddle. If you’d like to try the Exit games, I suggest The Abandoned Cabin, The Pharaoh’s Tomb, or The Secret Lab as a starting point – and feel free to ask me questions in the comments if you get a little stuck.

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July 16, 2019  ·  No comments yet

Kodama Duo.

Kodama: The Tree Spirits is one of my favorite family games, still one my daughter will ask to play years after we first got it, because it’s the rare game that’s appropriately competitive but also fun to play: The action you take on each turn, adding branch cards to grow your tree, is its own end, with a subjective component and the point-scoring aspect that forms the heart of the game. The base game has enough cards for anywhere from two to five players to play at one time, and in our experience plays as well with two as it does with higher player counts.

I was a bit surprised to see the designers had come out with a two-player version, Kodama Duo, but still gave it a whirl since the original is such a favorite for us. Duo does have a few rules tweaks that change the game for two players and make it a little harder, although I think the net result of the alterations is not positive – I prefer the original. However, the Duo box also includes enough additional cards for you to add a sixth player to the original game, which may be worth the cost by itself if you have enough kids around to get to six players.

I reviewed the original Kodama for Paste back in January 2017; click over there if you want a review of the base game’s details. The main difference in Duo comes to card selection. The game still has twelve turns in three seasons, but this time, you have to jump through a hoop before either of you gets a card to play. One player, the Chooser, draws the top three cards from the deck at the start of a turn. The other player, the Splitter, divides the three cards into two sets, one with two cards and the other with the remaining card. The Chooser then picks one of those two options, while the Splitter gets the other choice.

The player who ended up with two cards may only play one of the two to their tree, discarding the other card. The opposing player plays the one card they received, and then gets to take a Spirit token representing one of the game’s six features (where you get all your points in the game), using it to cover up any single feature already on their tree. You can only take a token if that feature was shown on the card your opponent discarded. At the start of the game, the six Spirit tokens are in the general supply, but they’ll eventually all end up on the two players’ trees, so when you select a token, you ‘ll take it from your opponent’s tree or relocate it on your own. (The rules are not well written around this, but the designers confirmed you can ‘take’ a token from your own tree and put it somewhere else.)

I think this rule is here because with just two players, there’s so much choice of cards in the base game that it might seem insufficiently challenging for two. Duo comes with exactly 36 cards, so you will draw them all over the course of a single game; thirty of them look like cards from the original, and there are also six single-feature cards, with exactly two instances of one of the game’s six features. But this isn’t an improvement over the original, and the idea of “splitting” three into two and one is … it felt silly, to be kind. I would have been much happier to just draw two cards each turn and alternate who picked first.

There are also different decree cards, which add a new wrinkle for four turns (one season), in Duo, and they don’t quite work the same way as in the base game, since most of them seem to rely on the spirit tokens or change how you split the cards (for example, one of the three cards is face-down to the Chooser until they choose). The decree cards are a big part of the appeal of the base game, so it was a shame that they worked so much worse here.

Duo does include additional cards and new decree cards that can only be played with the base game (marked 3-6 to distinguish them from the two-player decrees), which then allow you to expand the original to six players. Given the lack of added value in the pure two-player variant, I’d say get Duo if you want to play Kodama with six, but otherwise pass on it.

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July 2, 2019  ·  No comments yet

Claim.

Claim is a 2017 trick-taking game from designer Scott Almes, whose best-known titles are the Tiny Epic series (such as Tiny Epic Galaxies and Tiny Epic Zombies). Claim pits two players against each other in a two-phase game where the first phase allows players to battle to build their hands for the second phase, where the more traditional trick-taking mechanic kicks in, but is altered by the five factions (suits) in the game that have unique powers.

The Claim deck has 52 cards, and you’ll use half the deck in each phase. Each player starts the game with a hand of 13 cards, and in phase one, the top card in the deck is flipped over for the two players to try to win by playing the highest card. The Leader – the start player, or whoever won the last trick – plays first, and the second player usually has to follow suit; the higher card wins. In most cases, the cards used to bid are discarded, the winning player gets the face-up card from the deck, and the losing player gets the top card of the deck as a consolation prize – which, of course, can be better than the card the winning player got.

Phase one continues until the players have used their entire hands, by which point each player has a new deck of 13 cards to form their hands for phase two. Players then proceed to play another round of 13 tricks, this time with the winning player usually taking both cards. At the end of the game, players will count up how many cards they’ve won in each of the five factions; a majority of cards wins that faction, and with five factions you’ll usually have one player winning three or even four to win the game. Ties are broken by whoever has the higher-valued card in the faction.

The big catch is that the factions have different powers that can apply in phase one, phase two, or both. The base game comes with five factions – goblins, knights, dwarves, undead, and doppelgangers. A knight automatically trumps a goblin, regardless of numerical value, although you must still follow suit. You can play any doppelganger without following suit, and it becomes the suit of whatever your opponent played. (If you lead with a doppelganger, that is the suit for that trick.) In phase one, the player who wins the trick gets to keep any undead cards played by the two players and put them in their scoring pile for the end of the game. In phase two, the player who loses the trick gets to take any dwarf cards played in that trick – so, yes, you can lose the trick but still take both cards. (For example, I lead and play a Dwarf card with value 9, the maximum. You follow suit, playing a Dwarf 6. I win the trick … but you get both of the cards.) Only goblins have no special power.

The factions themselves are fun; each one asks you to think a little differently about how to approach it, and the hands you get in each round will require you to come up with different strategies. The one big negative in Claim is that the first round involves so much randomness – your starting hands are random, of course, but the player who loses each trick gets a random card from the top of the deck and can easily end up with the superior card. You could lose all of the tricks in phase one and still get a better hand in phase two. It’s not really a flaw, but a different kind of game, where you know you can play pretty well and still get beaten by the deck.

I picked this up at Origins, and since I bought the game, I got a bonus faction pack as well – ghosts, where you can choose instead to keep the ghost card you played rather than the card you’d normally get during Phase One. You can replace the dwarves, undead, or doppelgangers with ghosts in the original Claim game. There’s a separate, standalone game, Claim 2, with five new factions, and you can mix and match the factions from both games in certain combinations, so there’s fairly high replay value here if you get tired of the base game. It’s a solid filler, nicely portable (the whole game is the deck), quick to play, although I think there are better trick-taking games out there, like Fox in the Forest.

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June 28, 2019  ·  No comments yet

Century Eastern Wonders.

Emerson Matsuuchi’s Century Spice Road was a modest hit in 2017 that earned a lot of comparisons to Splendor, although it gave players more of an active role in trading the goods they were collecting before they cashed them in for points tokens. It’s the first game of what is now a completed trilogy with this summer’s release of Century A New World, three games that can be played alone or in any combination of two or even all three, each of which shares a core mechanic (you have four goods of increasing value, and will trade them up so you can collect certain combinations for points on objective cards) but approaches it in a unique way. Spice Road is a card game that focuses on hand management; A New World, which I’ll review for Paste next month, is a worker placement game a bit similar to Stone Age. The second game, Century Eastern Wonders, has players moving around a map, with a bit of pick up-and-delivery to it, but the heart of the game is route planning, as the board varies in each game and you will have to figure out the most efficient way(s) to get around the various tiles to get the cubes you need so you can score.

Once again, we have four goods, in the same four colors – yellow is the least valuable, brown the most valuable – and players try to collect sets of them and then go to one of the four port tiles at the corners of the modular board to trade in a specified combination of the goods for a points tile that is worth anywhere from 11 to 20 points. Each player has a boat to move around the board, moving at least one tile per turn. When you land on a tile, you can place a trading post on it, doing so for free if it’s empty and paying one cube for each opponent’s post already on the tile, after which you can use the trading function of that tile as often as you’d like, including more than once on this turn. (In a two-player game, you pay two cubes to build on a tile with your opponent’s post already on it.) All trades on the board are net-positive, so there are no bad tiles, but some are more useful than others, depending on what objectives are present at that time in the game. You can also move to a tile and choose to ‘harvest,’ taking two yellow cubes for free, rather than trading.

Eastern Wonders adds an additional layer on top of this mechanism, as you gain points and bonus abilities as you place trading posts. Your player card has 20 spaces on it that are covered by posts at the start of the game. Each tile has an icon representing one of the four trade goods, and when you build a post on a tile, you take a token from that row on your card. Once you’ve emptied a column on your card, you may take one of the game’s bonus tokens, which can confer valuable abilities – moving one extra space for free each turn, getting a free pink cube when you harvest, storing 13 cubes instead of 10 – or just give you points at game-end. The second post you place from each row is worth a point at game-end, the third and fourth two points, and the fifth post three points.

Moving around the board gets more difficult as the game progresses. If you move to a tile with an opponent’s boat, you have to pay them a cube, so doing this is generally not a great strategy. Building posts on tiles that already have two or more posts on them, or just one in a two-player game, is costly, and you’ll often find yourself less willing to pay that penalty as the game progresses because you’re trying to scrape enough cubes together to fulfill another contract. The game ends as soon as any player finishes their fourth objective, with players just completing that round, so usually you’ll end up with one player getting four objectives and their bonuses and everyone else ending with three; it’s possible to win with only three objectives, especially if they have higher bonuses, but it’s harder, so there’s a bit of a race to the finish. You can improve your chances by figuring out optimal paths around the board that work a bit like engines – a sequence of three or four tiles that quickly let you go from some low-value combination (usually including two yellows from a harvest move) to the higher-value set that fulfills an objective card, or at least gets you some brown and green cubes you can then trade down for whatever you need for objectives on the board at that point.

Of the three games in the trilogy, Eastern Wonders is the most complex (although it’s still on the lighter side) and takes the longest to play, and while I like it quite a bit, I also think it’s my least favorite of the trio. The Eastern Wonders box includes a separate set of rules and a few additional components that let you combine it with Spice Road for a single game called Sand to Sea, although a glance at the rules seemed to rob the games of the elegance that makes them both fun. Eastern Wonders plays two to four, as do the other games in the series, but in our experience can easily run an hour for even a three-person game with fairly quick turns, longer than the other two require, and I would say this is the least appropriate of the three for younger players because of the route-optimization aspect. For adults and older kids, though, I recommend it.

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June 25, 2019  ·  No comments yet

Downforce.

Restoration Games has brought back a half-dozen old board games since the company was founded a few years ago, including one of my childhood favorites, Stop Thief!, which was kind of a precursor to modern games that ask you to download an app to help you play. (The original Stop Thief! came with a battery-operated “phone” that would give you clues in the form of sounds to tell you if you’d found something or even located the thief – and, if he escapes, sounds of him running or breaking glass so you can guess where he went.)

One of their first redesigns was the game now known as Downforce, which has existed under multiple names going back to 1974, when designer Wolfgang Kramer released his first game, an abstract game called Tempo. He repurposed the basic mechanics of that game for a series of car-racing games, including 1996’s Top Race, which seems to be the last iteration of this game until Restoration brought it back in 2017. This new version has slick graphics and very simple to learn game play that still has the same core mechanic where players play cards to move six cars around the track, but where the card you play likely moves some of your opponents’ cars forward too, and you can win the race but still lose the game depending on how every player bets.

Players begin the game with a hand of cards that varies with the number of players – you deal out the entire deck of 42 cards, ditching any remainder if you have 4 or 5 players – and then use those cards to bid for the six cars in the ‘auction’ that ends with all cars assigned to players. When you win a car in the bidding, you get two additional cards: one that lets you move that car 8 spaces (and doesn’t require you to move any other cars), and a card with a special power unique to you for that game, with some more useful than others. (My favorite is the one called Tricky, where you have the option to execute the moves on any card you play from the bottom up, rather than from the top down, so you can choose which is most advantageous and may be able to use the card to create or clear a bottleneck.)

Each player then plays one of their cards on each turn. The cards have from one to six rows, each row showing a number and a car color; the player moves all of those cars the displayed number of spaces, going from top to bottom, if possible. (Cars can be blocked when the track narrows in the three turns; you can and should use that to your advantage.) Some cards have spaces marked ‘wild,’ which you can assign to any car not already shown on the card. Players go around the table playing these cards until all six cars have crossed the finish line or the remaining players with cars on the track have run out of cars.

The track has three yellow lines across it, roughly at the quarter marks, and when the lead car crosses each line, every player bets on which of the six cars will win the race by marking it on their scoresheets (in secret). This can give you an incentive to help a rival player win if you realize your car isn’t likely to do so, and creates a way for a player hopelessly behind in the race to at least have a chance to win the whole game. Your final score is your winnings from your car(s), ranging from $12 million for first place to $2 million for fifth, plus your winnings from the betting (you can get money if the car you bet on at each point finishes in the top three), minus the cost you paid at the auction. A perfect bet, where you bet on the eventual winner in all three betting periods, would get you $18 million, enough to win some games even if you get nothing from your car.

Games take about 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the number of players and how quickly everyone takes their turns. My seven-year-old niece had no problem keeping up with the game after she sat and watched the adults play once, just needing a little guidance on using the cards to her best advantage. (I think it took a little longer for her to grasp the way the cards worked when certain cars would be blocked partway through a move.) And who doesn’t love a race car game … especially one that doesn’t suck?

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June 24, 2019  ·  No comments yet

Lanterns Dice.

The 2015 game Lanterns has been one of my favorite titles to play on my iPad for since the app version came out in 2016, which in turn led me to trade for the physical game as well. It’s a quick-moving game that appears light but has more depth to the long-term strategy than it seems, especially because players all place tiles into the same space and have to plan for the potential for someone else to screw up your little plan.

Renegade Games is about to release Lanterns Dice: Lights in the Sky, a spinoff, roll-and-write game that incorporates similar themes to the original but gets rid of most of the directly competitive elements of the original, asking players to fill out spaces on their individual sheets to match set patterns and create contiguous areas for more scoring. That lack of interaction on the table itself makes this a very different experience than that of playing Lanterns, which makes this more of a competitive solo game – what you do almost barely affects anyone else’s game or score. That said, it’s still a solid roll-and-write game because of the variability in game setup and because of some new quirks on the sheets that can let you chain together certain moves.

Lanterns Dice comes with four six-sided dice, each side showing a distinct color, and gives each player a sheet with a 9×6 grid of “pools,” each of which contains two triangles of different colors. When it’s your turn to roll the dice, you roll them into the tray and shake it until the four dice sit in the center, and then you orient it so one die faces you. You get to fill in one triangle of that color on your sheet; every other player has a die facing them at the same time, and they fill in triangles of those colors. On your roll, you also get a free fill from a color specific to that round, shown on the right of your scoresheet.

The primary goal in Lanterns Dice is to fill in complete pools (both triangles) to match any of the four patterns that you’ve chosen for scoring in that particular game. The box comes with eight patterns, two of which cover three squares, four of which cover four squares, and two of which cover five squares; you pick which four to use, using one small, two medium, and one large. The point value for each pattern declines the more it’s used over the course of the game, so being the first to score a pattern has a modest baked-in bonus of an extra point or two. You will also score at game-end for the second-largest contiguous block of completed pools on your sheet, so you need to create two disconnected chains and try to keep them close in size to maximize these points. There’s a third way to score by surrounding pools with boat symbols on them, filling in the four orthogonally adjacent pools but leaving the boat’s pool untouched.

The interesting aspect of Lanterns Dice comes from two other symbols that appear on certain pools on your sheet. When you complete a pool with a square platform, you get to fill in one triangle on any adjacent pool. When you fill in either triangle on a pool with a circle on it, you get one “gift,” tracked at the bottom of the scoresheet, and you can redeem those for valuable prizes. You can spend one gift to reroll your four dice one time. Each game also has three bonus moves you can buy with one to three gifts, such as letting you fill in a second triangle of the same color you rolled, or letting you fill in one or both triangles on a separate pool somewhere on your sheet. These can be very powerful if you plan them out a little, because you can set yourself up to get a chain of free moves, especially later in the game.

Games take about a half an hour, and setup is really very quick – you just have to sort and choose the fireworks tiles showing the patterns you can match and score in that game. It’s a nice filler game, but I think it loses the facet of the original Lanterns that I liked most: the interaction among players on the main board, where you’re competing to place tiles in the most valuable places, and your placement can interfere with someone else’s plans. The dice game also isn’t as visually appealing as the base version, if that’s your thing. It’s a solid addition if you love the original or enjoy roll-and-writes, but I don’t think it’s going to be a regular play around my house.

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June 9, 2019  ·  No comments yet

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra.

Azul was my #1 game of 2017 and remains a huge favorite in my house for so many reasons – simple mechanics, high interaction, appealing components, solid play for two players and for four, and the most important fact: it’s a lot of fun. The game was such a huge hit that the designer and Next Move games have released a spinoff game, Azul: Stained Glass Of Sintra, that borrows about half of the mechanics of the original but asks players to achieve different goals, creating a slightly longer game but one I find just as entertaining.

The basics of Azul: Stained Glass Of Sintra are identical to the original. Tiles in five colors are placed on platforms in the center of the table, four per platform, and on a turn, each player takes all of the tiles of one color from a platform. Remaining tiles go to the center, from which players may also take tiles. As the round progresses, players then have to weigh the potential of getting stuck with tiles they can’t place, which also carries a penalty – this time, one that increases as the game goes on, rather than resetting every round.

Here, players have unique boards of eight columns of five spaces in different combinations of those colors. The player places as many of the tiles they’ve taken in a single column, moving their personal glazier token to that column. Once a column is filled, the player places one of the tiles on his board below the columns, discards the rest, and scores: 1 to 4 points for that column, plus points for every column to the right of that one for which the player has scored at least once previously in the game, plus one point per tile matching the special tile color for that round.

When a player fills a column, they flip it to the other side, which contains a different pattern; once that side is filled, the column is removed entirely. The bottom board thus has two spaces under every column, and there are bonuses at game-end tied to how many of those spaces you fill and in where – two different sets of bonuses, depending on which side of the boards the players use. My preference is side A, which gives you bonuses of 3, 6, or 10 points per 2×2 square.

The original game is a good bit simpler and more streamlined than this game, which takes slightly longer to play, but also gives you more options than the first game did. In the first game, it was easier to get stuck with tiles you couldn’t place. Here, you have more spaces to fill and more options, plus a way to pass your turn by moving your glazier back to the first position (you can only places tiles under him or to his right), which factors into the calculus at the end of the round battle to avoid getting the shaft.

There’s an elegance to the original that’s missing in this game, but the play in this game is also more open-ended, so you will usually feel like you have more choices. I don’t know that this is really a distinct game from the original; it’s more like a new flavor of the same thing. Some folks like original recipe and some like extra crispy. If you loved the first Azul as I did, though, you’ll at least like this version. (You can also buy the original game here.)

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May 15, 2019  ·  1 comment

Reef.

Emerson Matsuuchi has come on the gaming scene with a bang the last couple of years thanks to the trilogy of games under the Century banner, beginning with Century Spice Road, which is – and this is generally a compliment – a great game to try if you like Splendor. In between the release of Spice Road and the second Century game, Eastern Wonders, he also released a very light pattern-matching game called Reef, which is a fun trifle of a game that I think is a great game to play with younger kids or folks entirely new to gaming.

Reef’s setup and components are themselves quite simple. The game comes with coral pieces in four colors, and you use a fixed number depending on how many players are playing. Each player has a 4×4 board, and begins with one coral piece of each color, arranging the pieces as they wish on the four central spaces. There’s a deck of cards with two coral symbols on top and some sort of pattern on the bottom that you’ll try to match. You begin the game with two cards, dealt to you at random, and then there are three cards out on display.

On each turn, you may take a card from the center of the table, or play a card from your hand. If you play a card, you execute two steps: You take and place the two coral pieces shown on top, and then you can score if anything on your board matches the pattern shown on the bottom. You can stack coral pieces, but the only color on a stack that matters for matching purposes is the one on top – so you look at your board from the top down to determine if you’ve matched the pattern. Regular patterns can include anywhere from one to four spaces, and may require you to have one or more stacks of specific heights. For example, it might require you to have two stacks, diagonally adjacent to each other, of height two with purple coral on top. You can score a pattern multiple times, but each stack can only contribute to one pattern per turn. Although you could potentially score more for certain cards, across many plays we’ve found it’s extremely rare to score more than ten points for any of these cards. (I believe my daughter did so once, and that’s it so far.) There are a few special pattern cards that can score quite a bit more – they give you two points for each stack topped by color X adjacent to your tallest stack of color Y, which can get you up to 16 points (four orthogonally adjacent spaces, four diagonally adjacent spaces).

The cards are well-calibrated so that the colors shown on the top don’t contribute to the pattern on the bottom, which means few if any cards beyond the special pattern cards are objectively more valuable than the rest. There’s a bit of strategy involved in collecting cards that will allow you to build toward a pattern on a card you already have while also letting you score something for the patterns on the new cards, but you’re limited to the three shown on the table and those will often be less than helpful. (You can take the top card from the deck in a blind draw, but have to place one or more point tokens on the lowest-valued card on the market, which is probably a terrible move.) With a hand limit of four, you can’t do too much long-term planning, and you’ll regularly have to change your strategy because the cards don’t cooperate or an opponent took the card you wanted.

The game ends when the supply of any color of coral is exhausted or, less likely, the deck of cards is exhausted. At game-end, each player can then score every pattern on cards in their hand, but only once apiece, so saving cards to try to score more points has a bit of risk involved.

That’s all there is to Reef – if anything, it’s simpler than my very detailed explanation implies – and the game doesn’t vary in practice with the number of players. It plays in a half hour or so, with moves very short and your decisions quite limited in practice; you can put your two new coral pieces on any of the sixteen board spaces, but most of those will make no sense at any given time. The flip side is that the game itself is shallow, pun slightly intended; I don’t see any way to play this with a long-term strategy, so you’re just drifting along with the current, playing the best cards that become available to you. Even holding two or three high-value cards doesn’t make much sense because you can usually score those patterns no more than twice and you need to churn your cards to get the coral pieces you need.

Reef’s pattern-matching should work for pretty young kids – it’s color and number matching, and there is no text reading required whatsoever – with turns short enough to keep them occupied, and stacking the coral pieces is oddly satisfying. Each color has a unique shape as well in case any players are unable to distinguish certain colors. As a lightweight, filler game you can teach and play quickly, Reef works, but I don’t think it’s going to be in heavy rotation for us.

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April 20, 2019  ·  9 comments

Stick to baseball, 4/20/19.

Nothing new for ESPN+ subscribers this week, although I’ll have another draft blog post next week, followed by a draft top 50 the week after (I got bumped by some other draft). My last ESPN+ post covered likely first rounders Alek Manoah and Josh Jung, with Manoah looking like a top ten pick when I saw him.

I reviewed the app version of Castles of Burgundy, one of my favorite high strategy games, for Ars Technica. MENSA also gave its Select tag to five games from 2019 and I’ve reviewed two already, Gizmos and Architects of the West Kingdom.

I rarely appear on podcasts due to time constraints, but when Kyle Bandujo asked if I’d come on his show, Trouble with the Script, to review the worst baseball movie I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t possibly decline. I think we properly eviscerated Trouble with the Curve.

My free email newsletter is becoming dangerously close to a weekly thing now. I must be mellowing in my old age.

And now, the links…

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March 25, 2019  ·  1 comment

Comanauts.

Comanauts builds on the mechanical foundation of the 2018 title Stuffed Fables, using a similar framework with a more involved and more adult-oriented story, with spectacular artwork and a high-quality ‘adventure book’ that guides players through the story. It’s a shame that gameplay is so convoluted and the rules so poorly written; I am not sure I’ve ever had a more frustrating experience trying to decipher how to play a game, especially when it came to looking for named components or getting answers to specific game situations.

Comanauts players work together to try to solve the game’s core mystery of what happened to Martin, a scientist who may have been about to prevent the end of the world when a lab accident (perhaps not an accident) left him in a coma. The players will explore his psyche and go through events from his past, real or imagined, to try to figure out what happened to him and how to prevent the approaching cataclysm. Each player gets an avatar with a few unique skills and items, and can play up to three over the course of the game before the players lose with the death of the third one. Gameplay unfolds like a Choose Your Own Adventure game* as players move to a new area, explore a small map, uncovering clues, facing challenges, and usually fighting enemies before they achieve some exit condition and leave for the next place.

* There is an actual Choose Your Own Adventure Game, and I have had it for months, but we’ve never played it because it isn’t quick and requires multiple sessions to play a story to completion. I’ll get to it eventually … I think.

It is unfortunate that the Comanauts designers married some good writing and narrative game structure with some truly dismal mechanics decisions. On each turn, a player draws five dice from the game’s common dice bag; dice come in eight colors, and specific colors apply to specific tasks. Black dice power hostile characters when they appear. White dice give you light bulb tokens you can use to reroll dice or to use your character’s unique power. The other dice may apply to certain skill tests … but if you happen to run into a clue that requires you to roll a yellow die to see if you succeed or fail, and you didn’t draw a yellow die in that round, tough luck. It’s just dumb – it’s pointlessly random and will do nothing but frustrate players. Arkham Horror handles these tests in a much smarter fashion, giving players a fair chance to pass such tests without making it too easy.

The game’s combat system is also a failure pretty much from start to finish. Enemies generate either when you hit a certain space on the map and fail a test or when you’ve drawn too many black dice during your turns on that page, after which, you will probably get your asses handed to you, because there isn’t a great way to defend yourself beforehand, and defeating enemies outright is difficult. You have to draw the right colors of dice (purple dice are wild, which helps a little), and then usually roll two of them for a high enough total to vanquish one hostile character – and those enemies come in threes. You can store one die on your card for defensive purposes, but if you roll against an attack and fail, not only do you take damage but you lose that die, so if you get attacked by all three enemies in a round, and you fail the first test, you’ll lose all three of your health tokens and die. It’s just not a well thought-out system, and while the game does give you the backup of two additional avatars to churn through in a game, discarding a character and setting up a new one is not play, it’s administration.

I lost count of the number of times I had to go back to the rulebook for the explanation of something, which absolutely kills my enjoyment of a game. Some of this was as simple as the adventure book saying we should take a specific avatar from the supply and put it on the board, without telling us what the avatar looked like (none of them have names on the cutouts). Some questions were more involved – when we escaped from the Noir scene with a new avatar we’d rescued, does that avatar come with us, since she came in the base game with a card of her own and special skills? Does she join our gang, so to speak? Even simple questions like when dice are ‘discarded’ and when they’re returned to the bag aren’t adequately answered in the rulebook. I can only think the designers assumed Comanauts players would already be familiar with the mechanics because they’d played Stuffed Fables, but I have only seen the earlier game without ever actually playing it, so I was at a loss from start to finish here – and finish is pushing it, as we gave up after over an hour that probably had us just 60% of the way through the scenario.

There’s a campaign mode here as well that would let you follow the storyline through multiple scenarios, but that’s for folks who grasp the core gameplay here far better than my daughter and I did. Unfortunately this one’s not a keeper, a shame given Asmodee and Plaid Hat’s history of strong titles.

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