boardgames — Page 17

→ June 15, 2013
→ By keith

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ability-card games, apps, boardgames, complex games, highly recommended, strategy games

→ May 14, 2013
→ By keith

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.

—

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, boardgames, card games, two-player games

→ December 17, 2012
→ By keith

Stone Age iOS app.

Stone Age is one of our favorite boardgames (which I reviewed in 2009) for its mix of moderate strategy, simple mechanics, a small amount of randomness, a strong theme, and appealing graphics; I ranked it 4th overall on my new boardgames ranking, and third when looking at games strictly in two-player mode. The new iPhone/iPod app version of Stone Age is an excellent implementation of the game’s mechanics with an innovative UI that is easy to learn (although not entirely intuitive) and excellent graphics, although the AI could be stronger and the lack of an iPad-friendly option is disappointing.

If you haven’t played the boardgame, it’s a simple game of worker placement and civilization building where players compete to accumulate points through three methods: obtaining technologies, building buildings, or earning multiplier bonuses on core civilization points like number of workers or number of tools. On each turn, players alternate placing workers on various game board spaces that do things like add a worker (you place two at one hut, known colloquially as the “love shack”), add farmland to give you an extra food token per turn, acquire any of the four main resources, or claim cards or buildings that must be purchased with those resources. The quantity of those resources – wood, clay, stone, and gold – you obtain on a turn is a function of the number of workers you placed in that area and on the roll of dice, one per worker placed, giving the game its main random element. Buildings and cards are also shuffled in each game and you can only purchase ones that are visible on the board.

Gameplay in the app is very straightforward. On each turn, you simply drag from the large worker icon on the left side of the screen to the area where you want to place one or more of your workers, and if it’s to one of the resource sections where you may place multiple workers, you get a fresh screen where you tap the spaces you want to fill. When collecting your workers, you simply tap the workers one by one, in the order you want, and resolve each worker’s situation (rolling dice, paying for buildings, etc.) before moving on to the next one. The app has some small time-saving features such as automatically choosing your free resource in wild-card situations when you’re the last player to choose, although there is inevitably some downtime between your turns while AI players resolve their own workers.

Implementing a game with a fairly sizable board like Stone Age’s for the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod is a significant challenge because of the difficulty of making all of the relevant information easy for players to access. Stone Age’s designers rethought the entire layout of the game, using familiar graphics but relocating virtually everything to make it easier for players to make their moves and obtain the information they might need before making moves. The three special spaces – the farmer hut, the toolmaker hut, and the “love shack” – are now in the center of the screen, since they’ll usually be filled first. To the right is a column with the four available community cards, with the least expensive one on the bottom of the stack; above that column is a dial showing how much of the deck remains. Along the bottom are five circles showing the five possible resources for worker placement, and in the center of each circle the player can see how much of that resource he already has on hand. Along the top are the four building piles, with a clever if not immediately obvious way of showing how many building tiles remain in each pile (there are stones lined up along the side of each building) and, for buildings with variable resource requirements, barrels in front of the building showing how many different resource types are required by that building. The upper left shows how many tools, buildings, and people you have as well as how much food you produce automatically each turn. The one non-obvious bit of information comes from tapping on the icon in the upper right that shows the community card deck – doing so reveals what technologies you’ve already acquired and what game-end bonuses you hold for tools, food, people, or buildings. I understand that sounds like a lot for one screen, but most of it is clear once you know where to look, and the game uses large screen-covering dialog boxes for most in-game events, like paying for buildings or feeding your workers.

The AI players are not that strong; there are three levels available and the toughest level is fairly easy to beat if you stick to a simple strategy of attacking two or three bonus types while ignoring the others. These toughest AI players tend to pursue one such bonus strategy doggedly, producing respectable results but never racking up a ton of points without substantial luck in the dice-rolling. I’ve also noticed that AI players tend to end the game with lots of unused resources, often 12 or more, which is insane when there are still buildings available for purchase. I’m also disappointed that this app didn’t debut in a universal edition that was also optimized for the iPad, even if the screen layout was identical, because pass-and-play works much better on the iPad – especially when the app allows players to sit around the device without having to hand it off. You can double the screen size for this app on the iPad but it’s not as clear as graphics optimized for the device would be.

The actual implementation at the heart of the app is very strong, though, another in a trend of boardgame adaptations with clean, bright graphics and relatively easy-to-learn mechanics. I’d love a stronger AI presence and I assume an iPad-friendly version isn’t far down the road. If you tend to play live (pass-and-play or online/synchronous) against friends, it’s definitely worth buying, and even just playing against the AIs has been fun for a half-dozen or so games so far.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, boardgames

→ November 16, 2012
→ By keith

Top 40 boardgames.

This is the fifth iteration of my own personal boardgame rankings, a list that’s now up to 40 titles, up ten from last year’s list. It’s not intended to be a critic’s list or an analytical take on the games; it’s about 80% based on how much we enjoy the games, with everything else – packaging and design, simplicity of rules, and in one case, the game’s importance within its niche – making up the rest.

I don’t mind a complex game, but I prefer games that offer more with less – there is an elegance in simple rules or mechanics that lead to a fun, competitive game. Don’t expect this to line up with the rankings at BoardGameGeek, where there’s something of a bias toward more complex games, which is fine but doesn’t line up perfectly with my own tastes.

I own every game on this list except Diplomacy, Caylus, and Tigris & Euphrates, playing the latter two in their iOS app forms. As always, clicking on the game title takes you to amazon.com; if I have a full review posted on the site, the link to that will follow immediately. I’ve linked to app reviews where appropriate too. I’ve got most of these games in my aStore on amazon and am gradually adding the rest.

Finally, I’ve added a complexity grade to the end of each review, low/medium/high, to make it easier for you to jump around and see what games might appeal to you. I don’t think there’s better or worse complexity, just different levels for different kinds of players. My wife prefers medium; I’m somewhere between medium and high. This isn’t like ordering a filet and asking for it well done.

40. Tikal: Full review. Strongly balanced game of board exploration, but the length of time between any single player’s turns, especially with three or four players, is a real drawback. Players compete to control temples and acquire treasures while building out a board representing a Central American jungle; control of those temples can change from turn to turn, and each player’s ten “actions” presents an enormous list of potential decisions to position his/her pieces for maximum points in each of the scoring rounds. That makes it interesting to play, but also leads to the long gaps between turns. Plays two to seven, but doesn’t play well with two. Complexity: Medium.

39. Maori: I haven’t reviewed this one yet, as I just got it earlier this month and have only played it (and lost, as it turns out) three times. It’s a light two- to four-player game, relatively high in the luck department for this list, with more opportunities to screw your opponent in a two player game, whereas with four players you’re focusing more on your own strategy and less on others’. In the game, players compete to fill out their own boards of 16 spaces by drawing island tiles from a central 4×4 grid, where the available selections depend on the movement of a boat token that travels around that grid’s perimeter. Players must form completed islands to receive points, and lose points for open spaces. Currently out of print, but amazon has plenty of new copies through marketplace sellers. Complexity: Low.

38. Alhambra: Full review. After playing it a few more times, I do like it more than I did the first time around, but the method used to acquire money is an awful mechanic that really screws the game up (for me) with more than two players. One of the cooler-looking games in our collection. Complexity: Medium.

37. Oregon. I need to play this some more, but it does have promise as a 2-4 player game that actually works with two players. Each player competes to place meeples and buildings on a rectangular grid by playing cards that match the row and/or column in which he’s placing the pieces. Points increase when players form larger groups of farmers on adjacent squares, place buildings next to farmers already on the board, or accumulate coal and gold tokens by building mines. It’s pretty simple and quick to play, but not that deep strategically. Complexity: Low.

36. Race For The Galaxy: Full review. I’ve played this game a few more times using a freeware version I found online with very strong AI players, but that’s only served to underscore for me how much this game resembles work. It’s a deck-based game where players must know the cards in the deck well to be able to execute a strategy, and are more or less told by their initial card what strategy they must pursue. I don’t game to add to my stress levels, but this game requires such intensity of purpose that, despite a good theme and precisely designed mechanics, it feels like a responsibility rather than like fun. Complexity: High.

35. Zooloretto: Full review. A fun game, but a bit of a trifle compared to the others further up this list. You’re a zookeeper trying to fill his zoo’s three enclosures (expandable to four) with animals that arrive each turn on trucks available to all players, but each enclosure can only hold one type of animal at a time. There’s a cost to switching animals around, and there’s a penalty for picking up animals you can’t house, with points coming for filling an enclosure or filling all spots but one. I’m a little surprised this won the Spiel des Jahres, as it lacks the elegance of most winners of that award, and the two-player variant rules included in the game don’t work at all. I have played a simplified version of the game with my daughter, who loves the animal tokens and the well-drawn zoo boards. It’s a good starter game in the German-style genre, but not the best. Complexity: Low.

34. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups, and one of the oldest games on the list. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme. Complexity: Low.

33. Asara. Full review. Light strategy game that feels to us like a simpler, cleaner implementation of Alhambra’s theme and even some of its mechanics, without the elegance of the best family-strategy games like Stone Age or Small World. Players compete to build towers in five different colors, earning points for building the tallest ones or building the most, while dealing with a moderate element of randomness in acquiring tower parts. It’s also among the best-looking games we own, if that’s your thing. Complexity: Low.

32. Jambo. Full review. A two-player card game where the deck is virtually everything, meaning that there’s a high element of chance based on what cards you draw; if you don’t draw enough of the cards that allow you to sell and purchase wares, it’ll be hard for you to win. Each player is an African merchant dealing in six goods and must try to buy and sell them enough times to go from 20 gold at the game’s start to 60 or more at the end. We played this wrong a few times, then played it the right way and found it a little slow, as the deck includes a lot of cards of dubious value. I’m due to replay and reevaluate this one, though. It’s also among my favorite themes, maybe because it makes me think of the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disneyworld. Complexity: Low.

31. San Juan: Full review. The card game version of Puerto Rico, but far, far simpler, and very portable. I like this as a light game that lets you play a half-dozen times in an evening, but all it really shares with Puerto Rico is a theme and the concept of players taking different roles in each turn. It plays well with two players but also works with three or four. I get that saying this is a better game than Race for the Galaxy (they were developed in tandem before RftG split off) is anathema to most serious boardgamers, but the fact that you can pick this game up so much more easily is a major advantage in my mind, more than enough to balance out the significant loss of complexity; after two or three plays, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how to at least compete. The app version is very strong, with competent AI players and superb graphics. Complexity: Low.

30. Yspahan. Full review. I should love this moderate-strategy game that combines worker-placement, building, and trading/shipping into one fairly quick-moving game, but the need to choose and play a tight strategy from the start detracts a little from the fun value. Players compete to place goods in clusters of buildings called souks on the brightly colored game board, with completed souks worth points at the end of each of the game’s three “weeks.” Players also earn points and privileges by building up to six special buildings, and can accumulate points quickly by sending goods to the caravan – or can ship other players’ goods from souks to the caravan to screw them up. Requires at least three players. Complexity: Medium.

29. Tobago. Full review. Solid family-strategy game with a kid-friendly theme of island exploration, hidden treasures, and puzzle-solving, without a lot of depth but high replay value through a variable board. Players place clue cards in columns that seek to narrow the possible locations of four treasures on the island, with each player placing a card earning a shot at the coins in that treasure – but a small chance the treasure, like the frogurt, will be cursed. The deductive element might be the game’s best attribute. Complexity: Low.

28. Diplomacy. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the history of Diplomacy (and seven other games) for mental_floss in 2010, concluding with: “One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the GAMES Magazine and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.” I think that sums it up perfectly. I haven’t played this in a few years, unfortunately, although that’s no one’s fault but my own. Complexity: Medium.

27. Agricola: The most complex game we’ve tried, with the steepest learning curve. Very well made aside from the square animal pegs, which we replaced (at the suggestion of one of you) with actual animal-shaped pieces I bought via amazon. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved, and require some knowledge of the game to play it effectively. My wife felt this game felt way too much like work; I enjoyed it more than that but it is undeniably complex and you can easily spend the whole game freaking out about finding enough food, which about a billion or so people on the planet refer to as “life.” Complexity: High.

26. Le Havre. Full review, including app. It’s a great game, one of the most complex I’ve tried, based on Agricola and on another game further up this list (Caylus), but my God, the setup is a bear if you’re playing the physical game, and a full game can take a few hours. I do like the game a lot on an intellectual level, and I think it’s a little more enjoyable than Agricola, but I can fully understand anyone who looks at the size and scope and says “no way.” The app version, on the other hand, removes the biggest obstacle to the game and the AI players are solid, even able to execute some niche strategies that require knowledge of the special buildings in the deck. Complexity: High.

25. Scotland Yard. App review. One of the few old-school games on the board, and one I’ve only played in app form. One player plays the criminal mastermind (I don’t know if he’s really a mastermind, but doesn’t he have to be for the narrative to work?) trying to escape the other players, playing detectives, by using London’s transportation network of cabs, buses, the Tube, and occasionally a boat along the Thames. It’s recommended for ages 10 and up but there’s nothing on here a clever six- or seven-year-old couldn’t handle if playing alongside an adult, and like Tobago has a strong deductive-reasoning component that makes it a little bit educational as well as fun. Complexity: Low.

24. Power Grid: Full review. This might be the Acquire for the German-style set, as the best business- or economics-oriented game I’ve found. Each player tries to build a power grid on the board, bidding on plants at auction, placing stations in cities, and buying resources to fire them. Those resources become scarce and the game’s structure puts limits on expansion in the first two “phases.” It’s not a simple game to learn and a few rules are less than intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a game that does a better job of turning resource constraints into something fun. I’d love to see this turned into an app, although the real-time auction process would make async multi-player a tough sell. Disclaimer: My wife doesn’t like this game because she says the board and cards look “depressing.” Complexity: High (or medium-high).

23. Glen More: Full review. Build your Scottish settlement, grow wheat, make whiskey. Sure, you can do other stuff, like acquire special tiles (including Loch Ness!) or acquire the most chieftains or earn victory points by trading other resources, but really, whiskey, people. The tile selection mechanic is the biggest selling point, as players move on a track around the edge of the central board and may choose to skip one or more future turns by jumping further back to acquire a better tile. Back in print at the moment, and maybe the game on this list that gets the least press relative to its quality and fun factor. Complexity: Medium.

22. Navegador. Full review. I love this game’s theme and better implementation of the explore-build-trade combination than Yspahan has, but it doesn’t work well at all with two players and really needs at least four to create enough competition on the board to make it more than just a few players playing solitaire at the same table. Players begin in Portugal with two ships apiece and have to sail to South America, around Africa, and eventually to Japan, opening up new areas, establishing colonies, building factories and shipyards, and buying and selling goods from their colonies according to fluctuating market prices. With enough players, it’s tightly competitive without feeling work-like, and the replayability comes from the interactions among players, since the game has only a miniscule amount of randomness. If you tend to game with four or five players, this would probably rank higher for you than it does for me. Complexity: Medium.

21. Vikings: Full review. Currently out of print, and unavailable through that link (which I’m including anyway because used copies may appear there in the future). A very clever tile placement game in which players place island and ship tiles in their areas and then place vikings of six different colors on those tiles to maximize their points. Some vikings score points directly, but can’t score unless a black “warrior” viking is placed above them. Grey “boatsman” vikings are necessary to move vikings you’ve stored on to unused tiles. And if you don’t have enough blue “fisherman” vikings, you lose points at the end of the game for failing to feed everyone. Tile selection comes from a rondel that moves as tiles come off the board, with each space on the rondel assigning a monetary value to the tiles; tiles become cheaper as the number remaining decreases. You’re going to end up short somewhere, so deciding early where you’ll punt is key. I’m sad to see it out of print. Complexity: Medium.

20. Lost Cities: Full review. This was the best two-person game we’d found, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, and the most portable game as well, since it can be played with nothing but the game cards. We’ve since moved on to some more complex two-player games, but for simplicity (without becoming dumb) this one is hard to top. The deck comprises 12 cards in each of five colors, including cards numbered 2 through 10 and three “investment” cards to double, triple, or quadruple the profit or loss the player earns in that color. Players take turns drawing from the deck but may only place cards in increasing order, so if you draw a green 5 after you played the 6, tough luck. You can knock out a game in 15 minutes or less, so it’s one to play multiple times in a sitting. The iOS app is very slick and plays really quickly – a great one for killing a minute while you’re waiting in line. Complexity: Low.

19. Puerto Rico: Full review. It’s grown on me, especially since I got to try it out a few times online via Tropic Euro, although I’ve had friends and readers tell me it can become monotonous after a lot of games. You’re attempting to populate and build your own island, bringing in colonists, raising plantations, developing your town, and shipping goods back to the mother country. Very low luck factor, and just the right amount of screw-your-neighbor (while helping yourself, the ultimate defense). Unfortunately, the corn-and-ship strategy is really tough to beat, reducing the game’s replay value for me. Complexity: High.

18. Samurai: Review of the iOS app, which is identical to the board game. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app, and aside from a slightly dated design and look to the pieces and the board, it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun. Very high replayability too. Complexity: Medium/low.

17. Through the Desert. Full app review. Another Knizia game, this one on a large board of hexes where players place camels in chains, attempting to cordon off entire areas they can claim or to connect to specific hexes worth extra points, all while potentially blocking their opponents from building longer or more valuable chains in the same colors. Very simple to learn and to set up, and like most Knizia games, it’s balanced and the mechanics work beautifully. Out of print at the moment, although I picked up a new copy around this time last year for $10 on amazon. Complexity: Low.

16. Orient Express: An outstanding game that’s long out of print; I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues. The publishers still sell the expansions, adding up to 30 more cases for you to solve. Complexity: Low.

15. Thurn and Taxis: Full review. I admit to a particularly soft spot for this game, as I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. (I don’t care for chess, which I know is considered the intellectual’s game, because I look three or four moves ahead and see nothing but chaos.) Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. Just don’t do what I did and play it against an operations consultant, lest you get your clock cleaned. Back in print this year and quite reasonable at about $25. Complexity: Low.

14. Battle Line: Full review. Among the best two-player games we’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind Lost Cities. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The iOS app is among the best as well. Complexity: Low.

13. Caylus. App review. Another game I’ve only played in its app version, Caylus is the best of the breed of highly-complex games that also includes Agricola and Le Havre, with slightly simpler rules and fewer pieces, yet the same lack of randomness and relatively deep strategy. I’ve also found the game is more resilient to early miscues than other complex strategy games, as long as you don’t screw up too badly. In Caylus, players compete for resources used to construct new buildings along one public road and used to construct parts of the main castle where players can earn points and special privileges like extra points or resources. If another player uses a building you constructed, you get a point or a resource, and in most cases only one player can build a specific building type, while each castle level has a finite number of blocks to be built. There are also high point value statues and monuments that I think are essential to winning the game, but you have to balance the need to build those against adding to the castle and earning valuable privileges. Even playing the app a dozen or more times I’ve never felt it becoming monotonous, and the app’s graphics are probably the best I’ve seen. Complexity: High.

12. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline. Complexity: Medium.

11. Tigris and Euphrates: Review of the iOS app. The magnum opus from Herr Knizia, a two- to four-player board game where players fight for territory on a grid that includes the two rivers of the game’s title, but where the winning player is the one whose worst score (of four) is the best. Players gain points for placing tiles in each of four colors, for having their “leaders” adjacent to monuments in those colors, and for winning conflicts with other players. Each player gets points in those four colors, but the idea is to play a balanced strategy because of that highest low score rule. The rules are a little long, but the game play is very straightforward, and the number of decisions is large but manageable. I’ve never played the physical game; the current version (sold through that amazon link) includes some minor expansions I haven’t tried. Complexity: Medium.

10. The Settlers of Catan: I do feel somewhat odd about dropping this in the rankings for the second year in a row, but the truth is we don’t pull this game out as much as we did a few years ago, and I’ve still got it in the top ten largely because of its value as an introduction to Eurogames, one of the best “gateway games” on the market. Three or four players compete on a variable board of hexes to acquire different resource types, build roads and cities, and reach twelve victory points before any other player. Resources are parceled out in part according to rolls of the dice, and you can lose resources if the Robber shows up on a roll of seven and you’re not prepared for it. The Seafarers expansion balances out the core game’s low value on the wool resource, but also makes the game take about 50% longer to play. It was, and is, a great starting point if you’ve never played anything on this list, and is also one of the few games here that has some traction outside of the boardgamer culture. You can even find this along with Ticket to Ride (higher up the list) at Target, which is about as mainstream as you can get. We’ve just got lots of other games we prefer after playing this one so often over the years. Complexity: Low.

9. The Castles Of Burgundy Full review. The highest-ranked new game on the list this year, Castles of Burgundy even scales well from two to four players by altering the resources available on the board to suit the number of people pursuing them. Players compete to fill out their own boards of hexes with different terrain/building types (it’s like zoning) by competiting for tiles on a central board, some of which are hexes while others are goods to be stored and later shipped for bonuses. Dice determine which resources you can acquire, but you can also alter dice rolls by paying coins or using special buildings to change or ignore them. Setup is a little long, mostly because sorting cardboard tiles is annoying, but gameplay is only moderately complex – a little more than Stone Age, not close to Caylus or Agricola – and players get so many turns that it stays loose even though there’s a lot to do over the course of one game. This is the best new game we tried this year. Complexity: Medium (medium-high).

8. Pandemic: Full review. We haven’t tried many cooperative games, but this one sets a very high bar. Two to four players work together to stop global outbreaks of four diseases that spread in ways that are only partly predictable, and the balance between searching for the cures to those diseases and the need to stop individual outbreaks before they spill over and end the game creates tremendous tension that usually lasts until the very end of the event deck at the heart of the game. I haven’t tried the On The Brink expansion, but several people (including my sister and her husband) rave about what it brings to the base game. If you’re looking for a cooperative game you can play with kids, try Forbidden Island, from the same developer but much easier to learn and to win. Complexity: Medium.

7. Dominion: Full review. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are four major expansions out there, including the potential standalone Dominion: Intrigue game – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think we have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. We own Dominion Seaside (which is outstanding) and Dominion: Alchemy (which I find a little weird), plus a standalone expansion further up this list. I can also vouch for this as appropriate for a young player – my daughter (age 6) understands the base game well enough to play it without me deliberately throwing the game to keep it competitive. Complexity: Low.

6. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is now our go-to two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour. It’s also incredibly portable. Complexity: Low.

5. Dominion: Intrigue. Intrigue can be combined with the base game of Dominion, but unlike other Dominion expansions (of which there are now approximately 82, with a new one released every other week, or so it seems) Intrigue is a complete game right out of the box because it includes the money and point cards. And it’s better than the original game when both are viewed without any expansions because it’s more interactive – Intrigue lives up to its name in the sense that you should spend much of your time either plotting against your neighbors or trying to defend yourself, which makes the “Big Money” strategy in the base game much less effective. The changes make the game longer, but more even, and more fun. Complexity: Medium.

4. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. I haven’t tried the expansion, Style is The Goal, yet. Complexity: Medium.

3. Ticket to Ride. Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 expansion to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. We also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. Complexity: Low.

2. 7 Wonders: Full review. 7 Wonders has swept the major boardgame awards (yes, there are such things) this year for good reason – it’s the best new game to come on the scene in a few years, combining complex decisions, fast gameplay, and an unusual mechanic around card selections where each player chooses a card from his hand and then passes the remainder to the next player. Players compete to build out their cities, each of which houses a unique wonder of the ancient world, and must balance their moves among resource production, buildings that add points, military forces, and trading. We saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that we couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up our first game. The only negative here is the poorly written rules, but after one play it becomes far more intuitive. Plays best with three or more players, but the two-player variant works well. Complexity: Medium.

1. Carcassonne. Full review. The best-of-breed iOS app has only increased my appreciation for Carcassonne, a game I still play regularly by myself, with my wife and daughter, and with friends here or online. It brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. We own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. We also have Inns and Cathedrals, which we’ve only used once; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.

Last year, I promised but never provided a ranking of games just for two players, so rather than make another pledge I won’t keep, I’ll rank them here, in reverse order. I’m only considering two-player value, so I’ve only included games I’ve tried in two-player format.

1. Jaipur
2. Carcassonne
3. Stone Age
4. Ticket to Ride
5. Dominion/Intrigue
6. Small World
7. Battle Line
8. Samurai
9. Castles of Burgundy
10. Lost Cities
11. Pandemic
12. 7 Wonders
13. Through the Desert
14. San Juan
15. Jambo
16. Thurn und Taxis
17. Orient Express
18. Tigris and Euphrates
19. Tobago
20. Asara

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, card games, complex games, cooperative games, family strategy games, rankings, strategy games, two-player games

→ November 14, 2012
→ By keith

Yspahan.

My take on last night’s Toronto-Miami megadeal is up for Insiders, as is my Cy Young Awards preview, which includes my hypothetical ballots.

Yspahan was a finalist for the Spiel des Jahres in 2007 (losing to Zooloretto) and caught my eye because of its unusual name, referring to a city in Iran more commonly known as Isfahan, and the promise of a game that combined a worker-placement dynamic with one involving selling goods in a market. It didn’t quite live up to that description, and is more like a lite version of Puerto Rico, where players choose between building, placing your cubes in neighborhoods, and shipping goods on the caravans, but unlike the more complex Puerto Rico, in Yspahan it’s hard to win without balancing your strategy across all three main methods of scoring points.

Yspahan’s board consists of four neighborhoods, each of which is broken down into groups of buildings called souks, with the four neighborhoods separated by two roads that cross near the center of the map. Each player has a supply of goods that s/he can place on buildings on the board with an eye toward filling complete souks, each of which has a different point value tied to its size and its neighborhood. These goods can also be sent to the caravan, which, when filled (nine spaces in a three-player game, twelve in a four-player), returns additional points to the players with goods on it, tied to how many goods they have and where they sit on the caravan. Each player also has a small board of six special buildings that can be built by spending gold and/or camels; each building gives the player some special power or bonus for the rest of the game, and building at least three buildings yields immediate bonuses of five to ten points, with a maximum of 25 if a player constructs all six.

The twist in Yspahan’s mechanics determines how players get the right to place cubes in certain neighborhoods and how they acquire camels and gold. There are nine white dice in the game, rolled once per “day” in the game (which is divided into three weeks, for 21 total turns). The dice are placed on another board that comprises six spaces: camels at the bottom, gold at the top, and the four neighborhoods in between. The players sort the dice by number, placing all dice with the lowest rolled number on the camels space, the highest on the gold, using the remaining dice to fill up the neighborhood spaces from the bottom up. Therefore, the top neighborhood, labelled with a green vase, is the hardest to get because that space on the tower is often empty. Each player takes dice from one row on the tower and gets to either draw as many camels/coins as there are dice on those spots or to place as many cubes on a neighborhood as there were dice in that neighborhood’s row. The player can also choose to draw a card from the main deck, each of which grants some special privilege such as additional camels/coins or free placement of a cube, or to move the supervisor up to three spaces to a road space that sends any adjacent cube(s) from the board to the caravan.

Souks are scored and cleared at the end of every week, with each completed souk worth from 3 to 12 points, plus a possible 2 point bonus per completed souk for players who’ve built the Bazaar. Incomplete souks are worth nothing. The first row of caravan spaces is worth two points per cube, and the second is worth one, but the big scoring comes at the end of each week and again when the caravan is filled – each player gets one point per cube there, multiplied by the highest row on which s/he has a cube. So if a player has one cube in each row, s/he would receive nine points – 3 cubes times row 3. In playing live and on the authorized free PC version found here, I’ve found it impossible to win without racking up at least some points in all three major areas – souks, buildings, and the caravan – and I’ve always needed a little bit of luck, or at least an absence of bad luck in die rolls, to pull it off.

The flip side of that in-game balance is that Yspahan starts to get to close to the edge of strategy games where playing starts to slightly resemble work: If you play to win, or at least to compete, you have to do certain things by the end of the first week or else the game is nearly hopeless. It’s very hard to come back from an early hole like that, so the early part of the game becomes a to-do list, with a good chunk of your fate in the hands of the dice. The game reminds me of Alhambra in that regard, another game where the random element in the mechanics can put one player in a giant hole from which s/he can’t crawl out. Yspahan’s simpler than Alhambra and moves faster, and far more balanced than many games on the market, but despite that simplicity it has some of the intensity required by more complex games like Le Havre or Agricola, which isn’t entirely my cup of tea.

I’ll be updating my board game rankings by the end of this week, for those of you waiting for that post; here’s last year’s rankings to tide you over until then, with ten new titles for me to add to that list.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, strategy games

→ November 3, 2012
→ By keith

Navegador.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is up – you can go right to the top ten, to 11 through 30, or to 31 through 50. The buyers’ guides are also back, starting today with corner infielders, where I discuss (among other things) A-Rod as a trade target.

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Navegador is a beautifully-designed game with a great theme that’s strongly integrated into gameplay, combining exploration, production, and construction all into a single, easy-to-understand game that balances the three areas enough to allow players to win in several different ways. With three or more players, there’s enough competition for resources that players are forced to make tough choices and focus on single strategies before the game gets too far along. Unfortunately, the breadth of options for players makes it unsuited for two players because it’s far too easy for both players to get and do everything they want to.

In Navegador, players represent fleets of explorers – think Dutch East India Company – who start in Portugal and travel to Latin America, Africa, and south and eventually east Asia, exploring those areas, developing colonies, and acquiring trade goods to sell on the open market. Players begin with two ships apiece, but lose one ship if they’re the first to explore a new area of the ocean, although that player receives a token worth more points at the end of the game plus an immediate cash bonus.

Any player can purchase a colony once the adjacent sea area has been opened up, with sugar colonies from Latin America, gold from Africa, and spice from across Asia. (My wife insists the gold bars look like butter, which would at least make the food theme consistent even if it raises unpleasant questions about storage.) Colonies produce goods that can be sold on the market, but the price goes down the more a good is sold, after which the advantage shifts to players who build factories to process those goods – no colony required – which then drives the price for the raw materials back up. This creates the first of several “do what your opponents aren’t doing” dynamics that work much better when the game has more players.

Construction is the third leg of the game. There are five building types, including a factory for each good, plus shipyards, allowing players to build ships more cheaply, and churches, allowing players to recruit workers more cheaply. Each player begins with one shipyard and one church, so s/he can build one ship for 50 cruzados or recruit one worker for the same cost during that kind of turn. Each additional shipyard/church allows the player to build/recruit one more whatever for 50 cruzados; otherwise the cost for extras can run from 100 cruzados in phase one to 300 in phase three. Ships are required for exploration, while workers are required to build factories (three workers), shipyards (four), and churches (five). However, each building type becomes more expensive as the supply of available buildings declines, so building early can be a major advantage even thought it may box you into a specific strategy for the rest of the game.

You can’t do whatever you want on a turn, however; there’s a rondel on the board that lists different turn types – Sailing, Shipbuilding, Worker recruiting, Market, Building, Colonization, and Privileges. Players move around it counterclockwise, advancing one to three spaces at no cost (destroying one ship for each additional space, a very high price), so sequencing your moves properly becomes a fundamental part of gameplay.

The Privileges tie into the end-game bonuses that determine nearly all of the scoring in the game. Each player automatically gets points for exploration, colonization, and buildings at the end of the game: One point per colony, two per factory (all types), four per new region explored, three per shipyard, and three per church. Players can increase those bonuses by gaining Privileges, sacrificing one worker to take a token that increases the per-unit bonus in one of those five areas by one or two, while also earning an immediate cash bonus for doing so. For example, a player may sacrifice one worker to take a one-point Colony privilege, earning two points per colony at the end of the game rather than just one, while also taking 30 cruzados per existing colony at the time s/he grabs the privilege.

The game is fantastic with three or more players (I haven’t tried with five, so I’m extrapolating from other experiences), because you’re going to be tripping all over each other on the board and will have to straddle the line between executing the ideal strategy and staying flexible because someone will inevitably try the same thing. With just two players, each person can achieve in all three major areas without much competition, splitting the new exploration roughly in half, grabbing plenty of colonies, working the market (you sell, I process), and building enough of all building types to do pretty much whatever you want. The game remains fun because the theme and mechanics are so well integrated, but there’s not much of a competitive sense to it, nor is there the tension you’d get with more players, where you spend time between your turns hoping your opponent doesn’t do the thing you were going to do. That means that, for us, as great as the game looks and as easy as it plays, we’re not going to get as much mileage out of it as most of the other games in our collection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, strategy games

→ November 2, 2012
→ By keith

Castles of Burgundy.

Just a reminder that my top 50 free agents ranking goes live on ESPN.com at midnight ET tonight. In the meantime, you can check out yesterday’s Klawchat and my appearance on Joe Posnanski’s Poscast.

The Castles Of Burgundy looks like Stone Age, plays a little like Glen More, but in terms of getting into it, it reminds me of 7 Wonders: The rules are complex and not that well-written, but gameplay is quick and strategy manages to be deep without becoming too much like work. It’s also one of the best uses of dice I’ve seen in a strategy game, utilizing them in a way that introduces a small element of randomness without throwing the game off balance or becoming a game of too much luck. The game plays two to four, with two-player games taking 30-45 minutes, and at just under $30 it’s one of the best values in German-style games.

So here’s a warning – I’m going to walk through all of the rules, which will make this game seem more complicated than it actually is. If you want the review stuff, skip down to the break.

In Castles of Burgundy, each player has a game board of hexagonal spaces that s/he will try to fill over the course of the game by acquiring various tiles from six different depots on the central board. On a turn, each player rolls two dice in his own color, with each one representing a potential action associated with the number rolled. (Therefore, you get two actions on each turn.) Possible actions include:

* Taking a hexagonal tile from the depot bearing the same number that the player rolled.
* Placing a previously-acquired hexagonal tile on a space on the player’s own game board that bears the number of the die and has the same color as the tile.
* Selling goods of the type indicated by the number on that die.
* Acquiring two worker tiles. Playing a worker tile allows the player to add or subtract one from any rolled die, including going from 6 to 1 or 1 to 6.

On each turn, a player may also spend two Silverings (coins) to buy one of the tiles in the black market, a central depot of four to eight tiles of all colors, not tied to any die rolls. This is critical to completing regions or maximizing point values, so getting Silverlings along the way is also critical; most of your silverlings will come from selling trade goods, adding mine hex tiles, and adding bank building tiles.

The purpose of the game is to earn the most victory points, and the variety of possible strategies in Castles of Burgundy comes from the myriad ways in which to earn points. There’s no single, ideal strategy, at least not that I’ve found, but the best approach is to build whatever you can early and then go for hex tiles later that add the most value to what you’ve already placed. In other words, what you play in the first round or two should determine what you do in rounds three through five. (The game comprises five rounds of five turns each.) The main ways to earn points, either during the game or at its end, are:

* Filling a contiguous region of one color on your board. This earns you a bonus tied to the number of hexes in that region, equal to (x²+x)/2 if you’re math-inclined, as well as a bonus tied to the round in which you fill the region, with the latter bonus declining as the game goes on. So filling a five-hex region in round two gets you 15 points for the region, plus 8 points for filling it in the second round.
* Filling every hex of a specific color on your board before your opponents. There’s a bonus of 5-7 points for doing it first, and 2-4 points for doing it second, depending on how many players there are.
* Placing pasture tiles with animals on them. These bonuses repeat themselves if you place more tiles with an animal type you’ve already placed. So if you place a tile with four cows on it, you get four points; if, in the same region, you later place a tile with three cows, you earn seven points.
* Selling goods. When you sell a stack of goods, you get two points per good sold, plus one silverling coin.
* Placing watchtower buildings, which are worth four points apiece. One beige region, used for buildings, may not contain two buildings of the same type, so there’s a cap on this bonus, unless you place the yellow tile that waives this restriction.
* Placing yellow “knowledge” tiles that provide additional bonuses at the end of the game, such as four points per bank placed, or four points per different animal type on your board.

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If that feels a little dry, it looked that way when I first cracked the rule book, but the actual game play is far quicker and smoother than you’d think. Your set of possible decisions is broad, but not overwhelming, and once you’ve played the game a little bit, you will find it easier to zero in on the set of sensible moves. The fundamental pair of actions in the game is taking a tile and placing it on your board, and since you only have three spaces to store a tile you’ve acquired but not placed, you have to balance those two actions – often just by using your two allotted actions to take a tile and then place it. There are numerous ways to get bonus actions as well, such as placing castle tiles or placing certain building tiles, allowing you to extend your turn, but the main conceit is the same: You want to fill up most of that hex board, and do it in a way that’s internally consistent to max out your points. With two players, you won’t find yourself competing much with your partner for tiles or goods you want, but with three or four the competition for specific moves will be more severe.

I’m not thrilled with the physical design of the game or its box, which doesn’t allow for easy storage. (Small World remains the champion there). The theme is mostly irrelevant here and not that well integrated to gameplay; you’re supposed to be a medieval land baron filling out cities or regions on an estate, but there’s very little sense to what buildings or tiles go on certain regions, and no sense that you’re building a cohesive unit on your board. There are a lot of small hexagonal tiles, some of which need to be shuffled for each game, and shuffling small cardboard tiles is like herding cats. I also found the rules to be a bit unclear, especially with the various building and knowledge tiles that have special functions that required us to keep the rulebook handy throughout the game.

The best aspect of the game is the tension between what you know you want or need to do to increase your points and what the dice and the random supply of tiles will allow you to do. That tension will be increased with more players; the supply of tiles scales to the number of people playing, but also increases the chances that one of your competitors will take the tile you want, forcing you to spend more time considering the timing element of your moves, which isn’t as present when playing with two players. Replay value here is fairly high, thanks to the dice element and to the inclusion of several different player boards – everyone can play on the basic board, or you can use one of the four alternative boards included in the base game, meaning each player would have a different estate to fill. It’s more complex than Stone Age, less so than Le Havre, on par with Glen More, and like the latter game it’s much easier to play once you’ve stumbled through a game or two. I’d also compare it in complexity to Puerto Rico, but without the one semi-dominant strategy (shipping) of that particular title, and a little more fun to play because it moves faster once you’ve got everyone on board.

Just a heads-up – I’m hoping to review three more games before doing this year’s rankings: Navegador, Yspahan, and Oregon. If time doesn’t permit that, I’ll post the rankings the week before Thanksgiving no matter what.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, strategy games

→ October 29, 2012
→ By keith

Asara.

Asara is a family-strategy game that revolves primarily around building towers that will be taller or otherwise more valuable than the towers your opponents are building, a bit of light game theory that keeps a fairly simple game interesting. It incorporates some light worker-placement mechanics with a moderate amount of randomness to give it replay value, along the lines of Stone Age (if less elegant), while fans of more serious resource-based games like Puerto Rico or Caylus would probably find Asara too streamlined. If you consider the theme as well as the mechanics, it feels like a simpler version of Alhambra, a Spiel des Jahres winner with a money allocation system that detracted from the game for me.

In Asara, players compete to build towers in five different colors, each color bearing a different price and earning different numbers of points in the four scoring rounds. Players add tiles – spires, bases, and two types of middle tiles – by placing Buyer cards in the four market areas, but with a twist: The first player to place a Buyer in an area in each round determines what color worker must go there for that entire round. Other players must either place a Buyer of the same card, or must place two Buyers of any color in lieu of the correct one. After placing a Buyer, the player must buy one tile in that area, eventually placing a card on the center ring of builder spaces to allow him to build new towers or add to existing ones. The board also includes market areas for acquiring cash, stealing the start player tile, or paying a “bribe” to look through any stack of unused tiles to buy a specific one.

There are four rounds (years) in which players use Buyer cards, distributed randomly at the start of each turn. At the end of each year, a player receives a point for every tower he’s already completed, and a point for each section with a gold star (a minority of the available sections) that he’s built, while the end-game bonuses are much more substantial, awarding points to the player with the tallest tower in each color, smaller bonuses to the player with the second-tallest tower in each color, and bonuses to the players with the most completed towers and with the tallest tower of any color.

The main trick in Asara, especially with three or four players, is to stay ahead of your opponents in a couple of the available colors. That can mean building taller towers in those colors, but it can also mean blocking them from obtaining tower sections they might need. There are only six or seven pieces available in the market for each section type during each round; if the one you want isn’t available, you have to pay a “bribe” to look through the remainder of the stack and take the piece you want. Buyer cards also come in specific colors, and once a specific color of Buyer has been played in a market, all remaining Buyers played into that market in that year must be the same color; if a player is out of Buyers of that color, he must play two Buyers of any color to buy from that market. A little observation and a little deductive reasoning can go a long way if you want to play Asara to its full extent, although it works as a casual game if you just focus on building more or bigger towers.

Asara’s best attribute is its artwork, which isn’t a huge driver for me but is worth mentioning when it’s really bad or, as it is here, really strong. Aside from two tower section types that are too similar in shape, the pieces themselves are high-quality and easy to work with, with setup fairly quick and gameplay moving along easily. The randomness of Buyer cards and of available tower sections in each year give the game replay value, but more randomness generally limits strategizing and the decisions involved are usually pretty simple. I also found this a little too solitary as a two-player game, with so many spaces on the board that you’re never sufficiently restricted in your actions – both players will be able to construct complete towers in all colors if they want, and it’s almost impossible to run out of money. The game also includes a “professional” variant that doesn’t add much to the core game – it makes it more complex but not more clever or fun, in my opinion.

I’ll update the overall rankings in a week or so, but I would say Asara’s worth grabbing if you already have the better family-strategy games like Stone Age or Small World, or even the game from yesterday’s review, Tobago. Asara’s well made and plays very easily, but just doesn’t have the oomph to make me want to pull it off the shelf over other games of similar complexity.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, family strategy games, games

→ October 28, 2012
→ By keith

Tobago.

I’ll be updating the annual boardgame rankings (that links to the 2011 list) in about two weeks, so as a prelude to that I’ll post reviews of the half-dozen or so new games I’ve gotten this year, some as far back as Christmas. First up is Bruce Allen’s Tobago, ranked #226 on Boardgamegeek’s master rankings and #27 on its “family game” rankings, which sounds about right – it’s a fun game, not that complex at heart, with two twists that make it a little more interesting to play, yet simple enough for younger players to learn without having to pore over the rules.

Tobago is set on an island containing several different terrain types across its hexed map, as well as three kinds of objects on certain hexes (palm trees, native huts, and statues). Players attempt to look for buried treasures on the island by narrowing down the treasures’ locations using clue cards tied to the terrain types. Clue cards may say a treasure is on a specific type of terrain, or next to a hex with a statue on it, or on the largest lake or mountain range – or they may say the treasure is not on a certain kind of hex. Once a treasure has been limited to no more than fifteen possible hexes, players place colored cubes on all possible locations for that treasure to know when its location has been identified.

There are four active treasures at any time, and each card added to the column under one treasure type narrows the number of hexes that might contain that treasure. Once enough cards are in a treasure’s column to guarantee that the treasure is on a specific hex, any player can move his vehicle to that spot to raise the treasure, after which coin cards are distributed to players depending on how many clue cards they added to that column. Coin cards show between two and six coins; the player with the most total coins at game’s end is the winner.

The distribution of the coin cards represents the game’s first significant twist. The deck of coin cards contains two curse cards, which, if revealed, can cost any player who was involved in that specific treasure hunt his/her highest remaining coin card. Coin cards for a raised treasure are distributed via a sort of draft format: The player who raised the treasure gets first crack at a coin card, followed, in order, by the players who placed each of the clue cards in that column, from the most recent card to the first one. One additional coin card is added to the stack to be distributed for a treasure.

For example, in a two-player game, if Player A placed the first clue card under a treasure, Player B placed the next two clue cards, narrowing the treasure to a specific hex, and Player A raised the treasure, Player A would get the first option to take a coin card (or pass), Player B would choose (technically with two chances), and Player A would get the final one. Once a player takes a coin card, he’s removed from the queue for that treasure, so if Player A took the first coin card to appear, then for the next coin card, Player B would choose first, followed by Player A. If a Curse card appears, that treasure hunt is terminated.

The second significant twist to the game involves the statues, which produce tokens called amulets every time a new treasure is raised. These amulets appear on the edges of the game board, depending on where the statues are located, and may be picked up by player vehicles in the course of their turns. A player may use an amulet to ward off a Curse card, or may use an amulet for any of these additional moves:

• Playing an extra clue card beyond the one allotted per turn;
• Moving his/her vehicle up to three hexes or terrain areas;
• Removing a single treasure cube from the hexes that might contain that treasure, possibly reducing a treasure’s possible locations to a single hex;
• Exchanging all of his/her clue cards for a new batch.

These amulets can be hugely valuable as the game goes on, especially due to their power to circumvent the clue-card process. For example, a player can put his/her vehicle on a location holding a treasure cube, then use amulet tokens to remove other cubes so that he’s occupying the hex that must hold the treasure, allowing him to raise it and get one more token in the coin-card queue.

The lone obstacle I could see to family play here would be the logic required for placement of clue cards. Some plays are illegal because they would eliminate all possible locations for a treasure; others are illegal because they don’t add any information and thus don’t reduce the possible locations at all. (One such move: adding an “on a lake” clue card to a column already containing the “on the largest lake” card.) The actual mechanics of Tobago are really straightforward – on each turn, you play a card or move your vehicle, perhaps supplementing your turn with an amulet – and the game involves no text on the board or cards, so even younger players can follow along with just the images. The game also plays well with two players; the BGG forums show some complaints from players who found they couldn’t make a legal card play in two-player games, but we’ve never run into that issue. Gameplay takes about 45 minutes for two players, an hour or a little over that for three; we haven’t tried it with four, which is the maximum. Tobago also offers added replay value because the board itself comprises three reversible pieces that may be connected in different fashions, allowing for 32 distinct game boards. It’s a good chance of pace if you’re a fan of Stone Age or Small World but want something with simpler mechanics and less strategizing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, boardgames, family games, family strategy games

→ October 24, 2012
→ By keith

San Juan app.

The iOS implementation of San Juan is a bit expensive for a boardgame app at $7.99, second only to the best-of-breed app Carcassonne among adaptations of existing physical games, but at least San Juan can point to a very specific value the app offers to justify that cost – some of the strongest AIs I’ve come across yet in any of these apps. While that’s in part a reflection of the simplicity of the game itself, it means the app offers replay value that ranks among the highest of any of the boardgame apps I’ve tried. (I reviewed San Juan’s physical version three years ago.)

San Juan is the card game variant of the highly popular boardgame Puerto Rico, a slightly complex strategy game that has consistently ranked near the top of Boardgamegeek’s rankings (which are skewed toward complex games), making San Juan more of a gateway title that’s easier to learn and to play than the original. The entire game is built around a deck of cards that show various buildings players can construct, with the cards also standing in as goods to be produced and sold and as currency to be used from the player’s hand to construct those buildings. The physical game’s only other required pieces are five small boards showing commodity prices for the five goods players can potentially produce, with prices fluctuating slightly from turn to turn.

Strategy in San Juan is fairly straightforward – players get points for buildings constructed, and there are four ways to earn bonus points through specific buildings, three of which award points based on what else you’ve built, while the fourth (the Chapel) awards points for stashing cards under it over the course of the game. In most games the winning player employed one of those four cards and pursued the strategy from early on in the game; occasionally, a player can win strictly through aggressive construction of high-point buildings and filling out his space early, but I’ve found that requires some luck early on in acquiring and constructing the production buildings that make it possible.

The limited number of strategies likely helped the developers in crafting the AI players, but having played at least twenty three- and four-player games against AI opponents, I can vouch for the quality of their efforts. The expert-level AIs identify strategies early and pursue them strongly, with only the typical AI weakness of an inability to identify the human player’s strategy, thus sometimes making moves that help you more than the moves help the AI player itself. I’ve only found one game with AI players that take that aspect of gameplay into account, the aforementioned Carcassonne, which is one of the reasons that app remains the best of its class.

The graphics in San Juan are outstanding, clear and easy to read and navigate on a smaller screen, and gameplay itself is simple, mostly requiring drop-and-drag motions, with relevant information available through a single tap to zoom in on your own hand of cards or to see what buildings a rival player has constructed. I’d like to see an Undo option after a player selects a role – on each turn, you select whether you want to be a Builder, Producer, Trader, or one of two roles that involve gaining cards – although that wouldn’t be feasible for the Trader role once the commodity prices for that turn are revealed. I’d also like an option to speed up some of the graphics that waste time between turns or the time lost announcing who the Governor (first player to move) is on each turn, which would improve the game’s already significant replay value. Overall, I’d call this app a pleasant surprise given the price; for a spinoff of a generally superior game, the developers added value through graphics and strong AI play that make the cost pretty reasonable.

I’ve also purchased and played the app for Reiner Knizia’s Qin, but after encountering a bug I’ll wait for the next update before reviewing it. The game itself is very good, but I couldn’t finish one particular match because of repeated crashing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, boardgames, card games

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