→ January 17, 2011
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Forbidden Island.

Forbidden Island is another cooperative board game by Matt Leacock, designer of the fantastic cooperative game Pandemic (reviewed earlier this month), with similar mechanics and a similar goal. It’s more visually appealing than Pandemic, coming in a tin box rather than cardboard with nicer artwork on the island tiles, but is a little simpler to play and definitely simpler to win, making it a better family game than Pandemic but perhaps a little less challenging for a group of 3 or 4 adults.

In Forbidden Island, two to four players take on adventurer roles to capture four relics on the titular island and attempt to escape as a group before the island sinks. As the game goes on, the water level rises, making certain tiles flood and, if they flood again while already flooded, sink permanently, after which they’re removed from the game; players must therefore choose between capturing relics and running around the island restoring flooded tiles.

The island itself varies in each game, similarly to Settlers of Catan – the set of tiles is drawn randomly to build a 3-4-5-5-4-3 island, and no fixed position for any of the nine critical tiles, the tile required for departure and the eight tiles for the four relics. To capture a relic, one player must possess four cards showing that relic (within the hand limit of five cards) and then move to either of the two tiles with that relic on their corners, using one action to take the relic. When the team has captured all four relics, the players must all go to the departure tile and play a special Helicopter Lift card to lift all four players off the board and into victory.

On each turn, a player has four actions to use, including moving to an adjacent tile, restoring (“shoring up”) a flooded tile adjacent (horizontally or vertically) to where he’s standing, giving a card to another player on the same tile, or playing four cards to capture a relic. Diagonal moves are prohibited, so most of your actions will go to moving around the island, with a fair amount of thought going to positioning yourself for future moves. But because the board is fairly simple to navigate, it doesn’t have the same critical-path modeling feel as Pandemic, which may be good or bad depending on your point of view. I prefer Pandemic’s operational complexity; your mileage may vary.

Each player plays one of six roles giving him special abillities. The Engineer can shore up two tiles for a single action. The Pilot can use one action each turn flying to any tile anywhere on the island, regardless of its distance from his starting point. The Explorer can move or shore up a tile diagonally. The Messenger can give a card to another player even if they’re not on the same tile. The Diver can move through multiple flooded tiles or even the empty spaces where removed tiles sat for a single action. And the Navigator can move another player up to two adjacent tiles for a single action to set him up for his next turn. The key to winning is, of course, figuring out how best to use the special abilities of all players, using them as often as possible; most roles are helpful although the Diver isn’t as useful as the others in a two-player game.

A few island tiles are flooded at the start of the game, and each player completes his turn by drawing two to five cards from the Flood deck. Each Flood card shows an island tile; when a player draws an island’s card, he flips the tile over to show that it’s flooded or, if it’s already flooded, removes it from the game permanently. As in Pandemic, several times during the game, the stack of used (played) Flood cards is shuffled and placed back on top of the Flood deck, so an island that has already been flooded is going to be flooded repeatedly as long as the game goes on. The timing of those shuffles depends on when the Waters Rise! cards are drawn from the master Treasure deck that includes relic cards and five special ability cards: three Helicopter Lifts (move one player anywhere on the island, with no action required) and two Sandbags (shore up one tile immediately, also for no action). A player draws two Treasure cards at the end of her turn, discarding if she’s over five cards in her hand.

There are several ways to lose Forbidden Island, although we only lost via one method. You lose if both island tiles that show a particular relic sink before you capture it, thus leaving you unable to do so. You lose if the departure tile sinks. You lose if an island tile sinks with a player on it and he’s unable to swim to an adjacent tile because those have already sunk. And you lose if the water level rises a certain number of times – nine times if you play the Novice level or just six times if you play at Legendary level. We lost when the departure tile sank too quickly for us to shore it up because we drew Waters Rise! cards on consecutive turns; other than that, we played up to the Elite level (one below Legendary) and finished the game with plenty of time left on the theoretical clock.

The relative ease of winning with two players didn’t make the game less fun to play, but it wasn’t as challenging or frustrating as Pandemic. I prefer the higher level of difficulty, even though I can still say “Bogota” to my sister and her husband they’ll remember exactly which session of Pandemic I mean and how aggravating that loss was. If you’ve played neither game and want to try the cooperative concept, Forbidden Island is under $13 on amazon, or about half the cost of Pandemic, making it a great introduction to this style of game and this designer’s mechanics.

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Thanks to a reader recommendation, I’ve set up an amazon.com aStore that includes all board games I’ve recommended and that will eventually include the entire Klaw 100 (I think I’ve added 30-35 titles so far). It’s also linked permanently on the Amazon link above.

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→ January 6, 2011
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Jaipur (game).

If you missed it yesterday, I chatted right after the Hall of Fame announcement.

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Back in July when I complained in my review of Lost Cities about the shortage of good German-style two-player games, two of you recommended the card game Jaipur, an Indian-themed trading game with a solid mix of luck and strategy. The recommendation was spot on, as it’s one of the better pure two-player games we’ve tried, not quite as good as Lost Cities but perhaps our second-favorite in that category.

In Jaipur, each player is a trader looking to collect and sell cards of six different types of goods, ranging from jewels to leather. Each good sold brings in a token worth 1 to 7 bonus points, with the first goods of a type sold within a round worth more than the same goods sold later. But there are also bonuses for selling 3, 4, or 5 goods of one kind in a single transaction, so there’s a tradeoff between selling early to get the best goods tokens or waiting to collect more cards and receive a bonus for a larger trade. There’s also a 5-point bonus for having the largest herd of camels (also cards), although camels have some strategic value beyond their points.

Each player begins the game with five cards showing goods or camels, and the market opens with five cards as well, three camels and two randomly drawn from the deck. Players place their camels in a pile in front of them, so they don’t count against the hand-card limit of seven. On his turn, a player may take one card from the market; exchange as many of his own cards (hand or camel) with the same number of cards from the market; take all of the camels from the market at once; or choose to sell goods to the Maharaja (what you’d call “the bank” in other games). The round ends when the deck is exhausted or when three of the six piles of bonus tokens for goods are exhausted.

Because cards are drawn from the shuffled deck, there’s a relatively high degree of randomness involved in Jaipur, and you may go through a round where you just can’t get cards of a certain good – but the fact that there are more cards of each good in the deck than there are tokens of that good on the table mitigates that and allows you some flexibility. We found that there is a strong strategic element to Jaipur, including deciding when to sell and how many to sell, when to go for a bonus and when to try to steal the highest tokens out from your opponent who might be collecting the same good, and when to exchange several cards even though doing so may restock the market for your opponent. It’s light strategy, but enough that there are clearly better and worse ways to play the game, and on every turn you’re thinking about your options or watching what your opponent is taking so you know what she’s collecting and what cards are left in the deck.

Jaipur, like Lost Cities, is also extremely compact, with just the single deck of about 60 cards and a handful of tokens that you could just throw in a zip-top bag, so I imagine it would travel well. Even in the box, it’s one of the smallest game packages I own. If you care about graphics and art, everything’s done in bright colors and the images are appealing in a cartoonish way, although I would gladly play this game with bad art and dim colors.

I interviewed Reiner Knizia recently for an upcoming mental_floss article, and brought up my affection for his game Lost Cities. He said many people call it “the spouse game,” because in many couples you find one game-player more serious about gaming than the other, but Lost Cities seems to sit perfectly in between those two poles. That’s not the case in our house, as my wife likes about 90% of the games I like, but I love the “spouse game” description because it gives such a concise description of where Lost Cities and Jaipur are on the strategy scale. I’d still recommend Lost Cities first, but if you liked that and are looking for another game in the same general area of strategy, ease of learning, and fun, I’d recommend Jaipur for your next two-player purchase.

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→ December 31, 2010
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Ingenious app.

I’m starting to feel like the president of the Reiner Knizia Fan Club, as I’ve raved about two games he designed, the card game Lost Cities and the Samurai app (an adaptation of a board game he published in 1998). I’ll now do the same about (the app for Ingenious, another award-winning board game that is a perfect candidate for adaptation because the machine can ensure the scoring is done accurately. And since Ingenious plays very quickly, it’s become my go-to app when I know I have just a few minutes for a quick game. At $1.99 for iPhone or $3.99 for the iPad, it’s a steal given how often I play it.

Ingenious is an abstract game, meaning there’s no theme or graphics, just a large hexagonal board made up of smaller hexes, with six per side. Each vertex is filled with a single color, each color unique (that’s six colors for the Jack Morris voters in the audience). Players place two-hex pieces on the board – most contain two colors but some contain two hexes of the same color – and receive points for placing them adjacent to the same colors on the board, including any pieces beyond the immediate piece that extend out in a straight line from the piece the player just placed. Points accumulate in each color, so each player has six separate scores.

The twist, however, makes the game … well, I’ll call it clever. The winner is the player with the best “lowest” score among his six. If you neglect one of the six colors, you’ll lose. There is some benefit to maxing out a color at 18 points, as you get a bonus turn after doing so, but chasing 18s may leave you too unbalanced and you can absolutely win a game without reaching 18 in any color even if your opponent does.

For example, in that screenshot above, the player has a tile with red on one half and purple on the other. If he played that tile in the one open space on the top right with the purple side at the top, he’d get four points in purple (adjacent to two tiles, each of which extends out in a straight line for one more tile) and four points in red (adjacent to the top-left red tile, adjacent to the tile below that plus two more extending down and to the right in a straight line). And since red is his lowest color, that’s probably his best play.

The Ingenious app plays just two players and has no online component, but the AI has three levels and is very competitive, with the hardest level considering what you need in late-game moves and blocking you if possible. There is a solitaire mode which I haven’t played (I’d much rather play an AI opponent than a modified game for solo play).

My only real criticism of the app is that rotating tiles can be a little tricky. To move a tile into place, you just drag it, which works fine, but to rotate it, you have to make arcs around the tile, which only works well if the tile is well away from the bottom edge. If you’re placing it towards the bottom of the board, it’s better to press and hold on the tile until it pops to the foreground, rotate it there, and then drag and place. It’s a minor nuisance overall for a very simple but consistently challenging app.

I’ve never played the original board game Ingenious, which appears to play up to four players, but would be curious to hear any of your thoughts on it and how it differs with more than two players.

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→ December 29, 2010
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Pandemic.

After receiving a number of recommendations from readers and questions about it from others, I asked for and received the cooperative board game Pandemic as a Christmas gift from my sister and brother-in-law. (One benefit to this new interest in board games: Family members who complained that they never knew what to get me for Christmas or my birthday now have something to get me.) I can’t compare Pandemic to other cooperative games, as it’s the first one I’ve played, but it is a fun and very challenging game that had the four of us playing till 1 am the last few nights while dropping our share of F-bombs along the way.

In Pandemic, two to four players form a team fighting four simultaneous regional pandemics of diseases denoted by different colors – blue in the U.S./Canada/Europe, yellow in Latin America/Africa, black in the Middle East and south Asia, and red in east Asia. When the game begins, you draw Infection cards for nine cities that will contain cubes representing infected populations, with those cities containing one to three cubes apiece. More cities gain cubes as the game goes on, and there will be four to six new epidemics that create three-cube infection cells in new cities while adding cubes to cities that already have infections.

The players begin at the CDC Research Center in Atlanta and must work to cure all four diseases while preventing them from spreading to the point where they trigger one of the end game conditions – running out of cubes in any color, or experiencing an eighth “outbreak,” where a city with three cubes already is hit with another one. A player can cure a disease by collecting five cards in that disease’s color (there’s one card for every city on the board, with the corresponding color) and turning them in while standing at any Research Center. Players can build other Research Centers besides the one in Atlanta for easier mobility.

On each turn, a player can take four actions. An action can include moving from one city to an adjacent one; playing a city card to move to that city; playing the card of the city he’s on to move to any city; moving from one Research Center to any other one; treating (removing) one cube in the current city; passing a card to or taking a card from another player as long as both players are in the city on that card; or building a research center if he’s in a city and plays the card of that city. But each player has a role that makes one of those actions simpler; the Medic, for example, can treat all cubes in the city he’s in with a single action.

The complication, of course, is that diseases spread. The deck of cards contains four to six Epidemic cards that speed the spread of the four diseases, and reshuffle all the Infection cards you’ve already used to place cubes on cities. Thus cities that have already come up in the deck and received cubes will come up again, so players must split their time between collecting cards for cures and putting out fires to avoid outbreaks – especially since outbreaks can cause chain reactions that can advance you to endgame very quickly.

We played the Normal game with five epidemic cards and still found it extremely difficult. Even with four players working together, we won just twice in a more than a half-dozen plays, and both wins came just as we were about to exhaust the deck of city cards (the third possible endgame condition). It’s a massive operations research problem, where all four players jointly coordinate the movement and actions of four players to try to most efficiently balance the short-term needs to avoid outbreaks or a cube shortage and the long-term need to cure the disease. You can even choose to eradicate a disease you’ve cured – if you treat all cubes of a cured disease (any player can remove all cubes of a cured disease in the city where his pawn sits with one action), the disease is eradicated and all future infection cards in that color have no effect. But eradication costs actions you may need to use to treat uncured diseases or coordinate with other players to collect cards.

There is some luck involved – you can have a bad combination of epidemic cards appearing close together with a concentration of cubes in cities of one color and see a game spiral out of control unless you’re sitting in that region – but there are enough disparate chance-based elements that it tended to balance out in our plays, so that we generally felt like we had a shot to win every game. The real challenges are coordinating that many players and choosing when you can avoid a short-term problem and go cure a disease, but those were what made the game fun and intense. It’s also a fairly quick play for that many people, about an hour if we didn’t lose early, and very replayable even within an evening because the mix of diseases, locations, cards, and roles differs each time.

There’s also a well-regarded expansion called Pandemic: On the Brink that adds five new roles, a fifth “mutant” disease, and even a way for someone to play the spoiler as the Bio-Terrorist. I haven’t played it, but expect I’ll pick it up in time, since we’ll probably be playing Pandemic quite often.

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→ December 24, 2010
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Reiner Knizia’s Samurai app.

It’s up about $20 from yesterday, but The Wire: The Complete Series is still over half off at $96.49 on amazon.com.

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I mentioned the other day that I’ve become extremely addicted to another iOS app, Reiner Knizia’s Samurai, by the prolific designer behind my favorite two-player game, Lost Cities. Samurai is based on a board game ranked in BoardGameGeek’s top 100, but I’ve never played it (I’ll be buying it after the holidays) so my impressions of the app won’t include any comparisons to the original.

The board Samurai includes an island or set of islands representing Japan and broken up into hexes, some of which have one or more icons representing peasants, soldiers (helmets), or buddhas. The object of the game is to capture as many of those icons as possible, but the victory condition is more based on capturing a plurality of each icon type than on the overall total of icons captured – you can, in fact, capture more icons than your opponent in a two-player game and still lose if he captured more in two of the three categories.

You capture an icon by surrounding it with tokens that influence it in your direction, placing one regular (“slow”) token per turn. Your slow tokens include peasant, soldier, and buddha tokens of varying strengths (1 to 4 points) and samurai tokens that influence all icons. You also receive “fast” tokens, of which you can place several each turn in addition to your one slow token; the ronin token is worth one influence point and goes on land, ship tokens are worth one or two points and go on sea hexes adjacent to land, and special tokens allow you to replay a slow token you’ve previously played or to switch two icons on the board to snatch one out from under your opponent’s thumb. When a hex bearing an icon is surrounded on the land side, it is captured by the player whose adjacent tokens exert the most influence. The game ends when all tokens of any single type are captured, or when four tokens are surrounded but uncaptured because of a tie in influence.

Samurai plays very differently as a two-player game versus a three- or four-player game. In the two-player game, it’s much easier to set up your next move or try to force your opponent to make a specific move, as well as to deduce some of your opponent’s strategy. With three or four players, your degree of control is so much less that your moves are more turn by turn rather than part of a larger game-long strategy, since it’s harder to predict what two or three opponents will do before your next move, leading to shorter setups for captures and more thought required in how your one move will push your opponents to do (or not do) something specific. It’s a simple mechanic that plays out in complex ways, yet with short turns still moves very quickly.

The iOS implementation has outstanding graphics and a very clear tutorial to get you started. I’ve found the AI to be very strong, especially in two-player games; in three-player games I’ve run into the occasional less-than-best move (unless I just didn’t understand what the AI was doing) but would never say I’ve had an easy win. Knizia is a mathematician by training, so his games are highly mathematical in nature, and I think that lends itself to stronger AIs because the programmer can model the game more easily. In Samurai, not only does that lead to more optimal moves by the AI, it also means the AI won’t miss a complex opportunity to end the game early by capturing the final icon in one category.

How addictive is Samurai? I had to leave my iPod Touch uncharged at one point to stop myself from playing the game when I should have been packing for our trip. I can’t seem to put it down unless I’ve won at least one game, because often I know I lost because of just one wrong move. I’ll have to pick up the board game, but I have a feeling this will be a top ten board game for me, maybe top five, given how phenomenal the app is. And I’m not the only ESPNer to think so – Jorge Arangure tweeted that he’s a fan too.

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I may post again this weekend, but if I don’t get back before Saturday, Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and please be careful if (like me) you’re out on the roads.

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→ December 22, 2010
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Carcassonne app.

My wife bought me an iPod Touch 4G for Christmas – we exchanged gifts early because we’re visiting family for the actual holiday – and, as you might imagine, the first thing I did was load it up with board game apps. I’ve already mentioned the incredible adaptation of Carcassonne (EDIT: my #1-ranked board game), which I purchased for my wife when she got her own iPod Touch a month ago, but they’ve tweaked the app since then and now offer a higher-resolution version compatible with the iPad as well. If you’re a fan of the original board game, or if you’re interested in all these games I discuss but haven’t had a chance to try any, this is an outstanding app to buy.

Carcassonne itself is a tile-laying game with no actual board; players build the board tile by tile as the game progresses. Players take tiles one by one and place them, with no stored tiles in anyone’s hand. Each tile contains some combination of road, city, and farmland, and the player must place it adjacent to one or more existing tiles while ensuring that any shared edges line up – if the new tile has a road on one edge, it can only be placed next to a tile with a road on the shared edge. Players earn points by placing “meeples” on cities, roads, and farms; city points are doubled when the city is closed (that is, the city walls are complete), while farms only earn points based on how many closed cities they abut. The catch is that you must have the most meeples on any city, road, or farm to earn points for it. The majority of the time that won’t be a problem, but a player can force a merger of two or more structures to try to take over the points that another player might have earned from it.

The iOS implementation is phenomenal. The graphics are dead-ringers for the board game, but also bright and clear for easy reading on the small iPod Touch screen. Placing tiles is intuitive – slide into place, tap to rotate, click and hold to relocate. Any legal placement for the tile is shaded so you can survey your options much more quickly. Once you’re happy with where you’ve placed the tile, click on the meeple in box on the right, after which you’ll have the option to place the meeple in any legal spot on that tile. Areas on the board that can’t be filled by any remaining tile are covered with a large X. Most impressive is the easy screening – the zoom level will change automatically as the board expands, and you can modify it manually if you want to see more or less of the board.

The app comes with nine different AI players – two each at easy, hard, evil, and “weird” levels, plus a simple AI I haven’t tried. There are even local ELO scores, so you can watch yours increase if you beat either of the hard AIs. The easy players are not awful or stupid and won’t make moves obviously against their own interest, but aren’t quite as aggressive about trying to horn in on cities and farms you’ve already created. I’ve found the hard players to be an ideal challenge – beatable, but only with effort, which is all you can ask from what is essentially a spreadsheet and a decision tree. And the game’s mechanics, with tiles appearing in random order, mean that playing the same AI doesn’t get old as quickly as it might in other games.

The app also includes multi-player capabilities, both locally and over the Internet, as well as a solitaire version I haven’t tried. The only thing it’s missing right now is the ability to play with any of the board game’s numerous expansions, but the developers have said for some time now that they intended to work on adding those as in-game purchase options once this month’s major update (including iPad compatibility) was released. I imagine the AIs will require some tweaking for certain expansions that alter or enhance the point-scoring rules, but either way look for the game to continue to improve over the coming months.

I’ll review some more apps over the next week, but the next one will be a Reiner Knizia game, Samurai, that has proven similarly addictive and is faster to play than Carcassonne. And apparently my colleague Jorge Arangure is just as hooked.

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→ December 19, 2010
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More from Dominion designer Donald X. Vaccarino.

By now you’ve probably seen my piece on the Zack Greinke trade. I want to thank all of you who’ve reached out to me to comment on the section on Greinke’s battle with anxiety disorder. I have been bothered by the way Greinke, Joey Votto, and other players with mental illnesses have been depicted, and this seemed like the appropriate time to discuss it.

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I talked via email to Donald X. Vaccarino for last week’s mental_floss article on the making of his hit game, the Spiel des Jahres-winning Dominion, but ended up with far more material than I could use in that one piece. Here’s some bonus footage from the email exchange, covering some game details like cards, strategies, and which expansion to buy first. (Anything in bold/italics is mine; the rest is Vaccarino.)

Anything specific about the game that you love?

Dominion has a really nice solution to a classic game problem – or rather, a classic problem of the kind of game I tend to make. You have games where you play a card with a rule on it each turn, and it sits around in play for the rest of the game. And there are say four players. So after five turns, there are twenty cards in play. It’s impossible to pay attention to everything, to even make sure the rules are being followed. And well there are several things you can do to address this problem. Dominion’s solution is to hide away those cards in your deck. This is just a great solution. It drastically lowers the complexity of the game in this trivial way. Of course it’s not a solution I can generally use, without the game ending up as a Dominion variant.

How about your favorite cards?

My favorite cards from each set so far, as of this moment: Throne Room, Pawn, Smugglers, Apprentice, Peddler.

Thoughs on the so-called Chapel strategy?

Chapel is a powerful card; probably no other card will get to be as powerful for its cost. This was not a secret when working on the main set; I felt that the card added a lot to the game and was worth doing. The differences between it costing $2 and $4 were small, and favored it costing $2.

Note: The Chapel strategy involves using Chapel cards to strip down your hand so you’re running a very small deck stacked first with Silver and later with Gold cards, so you can buy a Province card on nearly every turn. It’s controversial because it’s you’re deck-destroying while you’re deck-building, and it can be tough to defeat without certain Kingdom cards available to opponents.

Recommendations for rookies?

For new players I recommend having a strategy, and not neglecting treasures.

Which expansion should people buy first?

Intrigue was specifically groomed to be the first expansion. I’d get it first. If for some reason you don’t want it, get Seaside (53% off at amazon right now) first. Both sets are simpler than Prosperity and Alchemy. I expect Prosperity to be more popular, but the changes it makes to the game are more exciting when you’ve already played the game without them for a while.

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Coming Monday: My review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One.

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→ November 29, 2010
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Rivals for Catan.

Amazon is still running several $1.99 album download deals, including Roots’ How I Got Over, The Walkmen’s Lisbon, and Spoon’s Transference. I bought the first two but have only listened to each part way so far. Reviews to come at some point in the indefinite future.

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Settlers of Catan may be my #1-ranked boardgame, both for the game itself and its importance in board game history, but it has one glaring flaw: It requires 3 players. Since my primary gaming partner is my wife and my daughter is too young for Settlers (and in bed by game time anyway), we use the 2-player games we own much more often. Klaus Teuber, the designer of Settlers, sought to remedy that several years ago with a two-player card game simply called Catan, but it got mixed reviews for longer game play and some frustrating rules that made it harder to develop any sort of strategy.

Mayfair Games just released the update to that two-player game, now called Rivals for Catan, that streamlines the play, making games shorter and reducing the possibility of massively negative in-game events. The artwork is noticeably improved and the cards are (mostly) easier to follow. What has not improved, however, is the luck/strategy ratio, which means that it remains hard to play this game with any sort of plan or design in mind unless you tweak the rules yourself or re-use the “tournament” rules from the original card game.

The basic structure of the game is the same as it was in the original edition. Each player starts with a set of cards representing his principality: Two settlements connected by a road, with six regions, each representing a specific resource (the five from Settlers, plus gold) and bearing a unique number from one to six. On each turn, the player rolls a single die to determine which resource(s) each player receives. Players can expand their principalities by using resources to build roads or more settlements, or to upgrade a settlement to a city. There is a small deck of event cards that are used when either player rolls the event die and gets a question mark (on just one of the six sides, rather than two as before), and forty-odd expansion cards that include buildings to add to your principality, military units that give you strength or skill points, and action cards for single use that allow you to do things like fix the die roll or choose which regions you’ll get when you buy a new settlement. The expansion cards are in several face-down decks, and each player holds three to five cards in his hand, drawing at random from the stacks (unless he pays two resources to look through a stack for a specific card).

There’s a new “basic” game that uses just those cards and features described above and has a victory condition of seven points. It’s a complete waste of time unless you need to play once to learn the game’s mechanics. It’s over extremely quickly and is almost entirely based on luck, since players can’t pay to sift through a stack when choosing a card. The game comes with three “theme” decks that add several simple rules as well as a few new event cards and twenty-four expansion cards (buildings, units, action cards) to allow for a little more strategy, but you’re still dependent on the cards you draw unless you want to pay two resources every turn to exchange one of your hand cards for one of your choice from any deck.

One thing I’ve learned from playing and researching board games and discussing them with all of you is that each player has his or her own ideal luck/strategy balance, and there are games all along the luck/strategy spectrum to suit you no matter your tastes. The current rules structure of Rivals for Catan has too much luck for me, but with one of the theme decks there is certainly some strategy (garnering resources, pursuing certain points bonuses) and I think that underneath this game somewhere is a better strategy/luck balance.

The rules indicate that an expansion pack is coming in 2011, restoring the “Tournament rules” (where you build your own deck, choosing cards from the original set and one theme set) from the expansion pack to the original Catan card game, which gives the game more of a Dominion-like feel and shifts control back to the players. Those rules are still available on the Catan site and are easily adapted to work with this game, but without them, you’re relying too much on dice rolls and card draws for this to approach the degree of strategy involved in the core Settlers game, let alone that in little-or-no-luck games like Puerto Rico.

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→ November 22, 2010
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Top 21 boardgames.

UPDATE: I’ve set up an aStore link on amazon.com where you can find all of these games plus others I’ve since recommended in one place.

This is the third iteration of my own personal boardgame rankings, expanded from the original ten as our own collection has increased over the past year. 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. We are not hardcore gamers; 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.

The list includes 21 titles rather than 20 because I filled out most of the list, realized I never slotted in Power Grid, and didn’t feel like junking Zooloretto once I’d written it up. I own every game on this list except Diplomacy, and with one exception (Agricola) have played every game on here many times. 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.

21. 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.

20. Babel. One of the first games we purchased – on a trip to Vienna in 2003 – its star has dimmed over time as we’ve found better games in the genre. It’s a two-person game where each player is trying to build towers with cards representing five different civilizations, but each civilization has a special skill or power, including the power to knock down an opponent’s tower or make one of his groups of cards “wander off.” Those powerful attacks make the game much longer, and you can go a while without making much progress, which ultimately made the game a little frustrating for us.

19. Catan (card game): We had this before we got the board game, and while it’s a lot more complex than the original Settlers, the basic goal is the same: Build up your principality to reach twelve victory points. But there’s a lot more up and down in the game, with disaster cards to supplement the robber by destroying resources or decommissioning your knight cards. We found it would often take longer to play this with two people than it would to play Settlers with three, especially once we picked up the card game’s expansion set. This game has been superseded by the new Rivals for Catan, a copy of which is en route to me as I write. EDIT: Rivals of Catan review is now up.

18. Metro. Almost comically simple, but highly replayable. Players compete to build the longest subway lines on a grid that represents the city of Paris. There are different types of tiles, some of which include straight tracks, while others include all manner of twists. You can extend your own tracks on your turn, or you can use a tile to screw someone else. The game ends when all tiles are played; the player with the longest total track lengths across all of his lines wins. The ability to play on (and prematurely end) someone else’s line is a major criticism of the game, although you can kind of do the same thing in Carcassonne and nobody complains about that. If it’s an issue for you, just play with a house rule that you must play on your own lines unless such a move is impossible.

17. Wise and Otherwise. I thought I should have one party game on the list, and this would beat out Taboo for me. Wise and Otherwise is one of the family of games where one player holds the “right” answer and every other player tries to make up a fake answer good enough to fool someone else; instead of dictionary definitions, Wise and Otherwise gives you the first half of a proverb and asks you to complete the second half. It plays up when you’re with friends and can start working inside jokes into your fake answers.

16. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups. 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.

15. 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.

14. 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 last week, 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.

13. 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.

12. 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. It was out of print this summer but appears to be back. (Credit to my wife for finding one of the few remaining new copies out there for my birthday, ordering it from a site based in England.)

11. 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. Disclaimer: My wife doesn’t like this game because she says the board and cards look “depressing.”

10. 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).

9. 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.

8. 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.

7. 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.

6. 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. At $24 this is one of the best values on the list, along with Carcassonne and Lost Cities.

5. Lost Cities: Full review. The best two-person game we’ve 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. 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. Games are short but we can play many times in a sitting without a hint of boredom.

4. 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 only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. I did play this with some hardcore boardgamers – the host owned Caylus, which should say it all to those of you familiar with that behemoth – who found it a little lightweight, but they were probably just bitter that I won. (I kid.) (Somewhat.)

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.

2. Carcassonne. Full review. This game keeps growing on me, from the ease of learning to the tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter) to the portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase) to the great iPod app. 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.

1. The Settlers of Catan: The grand-daddy of German-style games, not so much in age but in impact. I’m not saying it’s my favorite game, but it is among my favorites for its simple, easy-to-grasp rules and a good balance of luck and strategy that keeps it accessible for novice players or players who just don’t want heavy strategy in their gaming. I am saying, however, that the game’s influence means some other game is going to have to blow me away before I take this out of the #1 spot. We own the Seafarers expansion, which solves one problem – wool is by far the least valuable resource in the base game, but it’s needed to build boats in Seafarers – and creates another: the game becomes much, much longer. But the base game was a revelation when it hit the market and when we first played it, one that continues to reshape the game market a few players at a time. If some play it and move past it to more complex games like Puerto Rico or even more elegant ones like Dominion, then Settlers still deserves credit as the ultimate gateway game, one that can still be played and enjoyed even by people who, like me, had to buy a new bookshelf just to accommodate their growing collection.

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Jambo (board game).

My series of articles for mental_floss on the history of board games begins today, with a look back at games from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. We’ll end up with some contemporary games at the end of the series, but not before going through the histories of some important games from East Asia, India, and Africa, and medieval Europe.

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Note: I revised this article about a week after it was first posted to reflect the fact that we were playing the game wrong at first. The review below reflects the correct rules. I think.

I picked up Jambo in September on the recommendation of dish reader Joe Huber, designer of the game Burger Joint, who declared Jambo his “personal favorite two-player game” in response to my lament (in the Lost Cities post) about great German-style games’ tendency to play best as 3- to 5-player games. Jambo is, indeed, an excellent two-player game, even though there are certain mechanics I don’t love. It’s a higher order of complexity than Lost Cities, but much of what’s added is random chance rather than deeper strategy.

In Jambo, each player is a trader in precolonial east Africa, with a market capable of storing six “wares,” of which there are six types available (silk, jewelry, salt, hides, fruit, and tea, although the drawing for that last one keeps reminding me of the cover of The Chronic). The goal of the game is to finish with the most money; end game is triggered when either player passes 60 coins, after which he completes his turn and the other player gets one more full turn before the game officially ends. Players earn money by buying and selling wares, most often through ware cards that allow for the purchase or sale of a specific combination of wares – usually three, but a few cards allow the purchase of six – for fixed prices. However, the deck of cards is full of “utility” cards that allow for exchanges of cards and wares, for direct purchases of wares, or for attacks against your opponent such as swiping a single ware from his market or discarding one of his active utility cards, making the game more interactive and opening up some other avenues for strategy.

The core mechanic, however, is buying and selling wares. Each three-ware card has three specific wares on it; they may all be identical, there may be two of one kind and one of a third, or it may contain three different wares. The gap between purchase price and sale price shown on the card is always 7 coins for a three-card combination. That is, if you draw two copies of the same three-ware card, you can buy them and immediately sell them for a profit of seven coins. And since on each turn a player receives five “actions” – the first is usually used to draw a card, so in practical terms we’re talking four actions – it seems to me that the ideal turn is one that starts with a purchase and ends with a sale, where in between you might use utility cards to ensure you have what you need to complete the sale. (You can’t use a ware card to sell unless you have those three or six exact wares in your market.)

The non-ware cards are where the game gets interesting, or at least gets interactive. There are two types of cards – utility cards, which are played once and used repeatedly; and people/animal cards, which are played once and discarded. (I misread the rules, and we played people cards as utility cards for a while, which really wreaked havoc with the game.) Each player may have up to three utility cards face-up in front of him – playing a card counts as one action – and may use them once per turn, with each use counting as an action. Most involve the exchange of something for something – cards, gold, and wares, sometimes allowing you to exchange like for like, sometimes allowing you to use one thing to buy another.

People cards are a wildly mixed bag, with the best of them allowing you to increase your profits on a sale or buy missing wares cheaply so you can complete another sale, but many of them are close to useless and just clog up the deck. Animal cards are all for attack purposes; the parrot lets you steal one ware from your opponent, while the crocodile (the most abundant animal card) lets you take one of your opponent’s utility cards, use it once yourself, and then discard it. You can fight off an animal attack with a Guard card, although I don’t think the deck has enough of them and acquiring one is a function of luck rather than skill or planning.

And that’s the only thing keeping me from raving unabashedly about Jambo: There’s a lot of luck in this game, more than I tend to like. You have no outright control over which cards you draw, of course, and only a few utility cards give you any improvement over that. The solution is simply to draw more cards, and there are utility cards that allow you to draw an extra card, swap a ware for a card, buy a card for gold, grab a ware card your opponent just used, or even rifle through the discard pile for a specific card you’d like to have.

But, unlike in a game like Dominion where you build your own deck, acquiring good cards in Jambo requires luck, and I didn’t feel like the deck was flush enough with good utility/people cards to allow me to set a couple of strategies up and then just pursue whichever one the cards offered me. We’ve played ten times, and each of us has had at least one game where the cards just killed us, including one where I spent five turns needing just about any ware card to win the game, never got it, and lost.

Bear in mind that I prefer games with lower luck levels than most people do – if you view a game as just a game, you’ll probably love Jambo even more than we do. I enjoy games for the thinking and strategizing as much as I enjoy them for their social aspect, and Jambo fell a little short in that regard for me. It is still an excellent two-player option that I think we will continue to play often even as the collection grows.

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