→ February 8, 2010
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Thurn and Taxis.

We finally played the boardgame Thurn & Taxis with more than two people last night – we had a Game Night on Game Night with a couple of friends – so I’m confident enough to review and recommend the game. It’s fun, it’s quite simple to pick up, and it moves quickly; it’s probably most comparable to Ticket to Ride among games I’ve reviewed before, but with a little more complexity in scoring, allowing for more ways to win the game without the rigidity of fixed routes.

T&T, which won the Spiel des Jahres in 2006, is played on a map of southern Germany and the borders of a few nearby countries, with 24 cities marked on the map across nine different regions. The object of the game is to amass points by building, turn by turn, postal routes (the House of Thurn und Taxis* ran a postal company in north-central Europe for over two centuries) that connect these cities based on cards drawn from the main deck of 72 cards (3 of each city), with six cards visible at any time. Routes must run at least 3 cities, and you must add to your route each turn or “close” it, placing houses on the cities in the route and collecting any point bonuses; if you can’t add to an open route on your turn, you must discard it and start over, an often fatal error. But your ability to place houses on cities in a route you close is limited by a rule that says you may only place one house per region in a closed route, or place houses in only one region of the route, meaning that a route of seven cities across three regions is inherently inefficient, as is a route that includes many cities in which you’ve already placed houses.

*Yes, I’ve read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and no, I neither liked nor fully understood it, two things that are most likely connected.

The bonuses are the key to winning the game, of course, as you earn points by placing houses on all cities in a region (or pair of regions in the case of smaller regions with one or two cities each), by placing at least one house in all nine regions, or by building routes of five or more cities. Each bonus declines by a point when each player achieves it. There’s also a sequential series of bonuses, where you receive a carriage card for building routes of at least 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 cities, in order, without skipping any of the cards, with the points ranging from two points for the three-city route to ten points for the seven-city route. When a player gets the 7-city carriage card, or places the last of his 22 houses, the game ends, with each player taking one more turn.

Those are almost all of the rules of the game, summarized in under 400 words, but those rules allow enough different strategies to keep the game interesting. You have enough houses for all but two of the cities, so you can try to win by placing all your houses first (there’s a penalty of one point per house left in your pool at game end), but have to sacrifice one or two of the regional bonuses to do so. You can try to race to the seven-carriage card, but may be short in region bonuses, or be late for the long-route bonuses. And you’re always at the mercy of the cards in the pool and the deck.

That proved to be the major wrinkle between two- and four-player games. In the two-player game, I found it easy to look ahead a few turns, because I knew what city cards were likely to be available to me the next time around. In the four-player game, not only is that impossible, but the player who chose cards right before me was executing a similar strategy and going after similar routes, so if a card I needed was in the pool, he’d have a chance to grab it, and I clearly wasn’t fast enough to make the mid-game adjustment. (Also, it is absolutely the wrong game to play with your friend the operations research consultant, even more so if he’s the player going right before you, doing critical-path modeling in his head while he steals the cards you need. But I’m not bitter.) Those adjustments aren’t required in a two-player game, so while the two-player game is fun, there’s a solitaire-ish element to it, while the four-player game has just enough randomness to throw a wrench in your strategy and force you to rethink plans on the fly. Like Stone Age, it seems to me to have a good balance of luck and strategy for this type of game. It’s definitely a good starter game for any of you looking to jump into German-style board games, with enough sophistication to satisfy someone who’s already into the genre.

—

Some of you have asked me questions, here, on Twitter, and in chat about games by skill or complexity level. Our collection of German-style games has grown to the point where I think I could categorize them roughly for you by my perception of their complexity, both in terms of learning the game for the first time and in terms of repeated play. Links are to reviews on this site or to the top ten rankings for three games (Babel, Metro, Settlers) that I only wrote up there.

Lowest complexity:

Moderately low complexity:

Moderate complexity:

  • San Juan (long, complex rules, but very simple to play after that)
  • Stone Age (moderately complex rules, a few simple strategies)
  • Babel
  • Carcassonne (simple game, complex scoring strategy)

Moderately high complexity

Highest complexity:

  • Puerto Rico (played twice, many rules, long setup, complex strategy)
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→ January 29, 2010
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Power Grid.

The final piece of this week’s package on prospects for 2010, players who might jump on to the 2011 list, is up. If you missed the main list, it starts with numbers 1 through 25. I’ll have one more piece on prospects next week, possibly Tuesday. As for Ulysses, I have four sentences – running twenty-odd pages – to go, so I’m hoping to write it up on Sunday or, at worst, Monday.

I got the board game Power Grid on the recommendations from several of you, and it’s currently the fourth-ranked game on Boardgamegeek. It’s a brilliant game with a few drawbacks that are easily surmounted, fairly simple to learn with some game-to-game modifications, and (as far as I can tell) no easy strategy to win.

The idea of the game is to build a power grid across a map of Germany or the U.S., including power plants and power stations in connected cities. You can have up to 3 power plants that run on coal, oil, garbage, uranium, coal/oil (hybrid plants), or green sources; except for green power, the others require players to purchase resources in each turn to fire the plants and power the cities. The first player to build a network of 17 cities, with the capacity and resources to power them, wins the game, with the magic number varying slightly depending on the number of players.

The great hitch in the game is that the power plants each take different inputs and power anywhere from one to seven cities, and they come up for auction rather than selling for fixed prices, while resource prices vary as well depending on how many players are chasing those inputs, which can change as each player upgrades his plants. It’s a complicated economic question: costs vary, and the marginal revenue from powering another city is positive but declines slightly as the number of cities in a network increases. I imagine that someone could build a model (I’m thinking Monte Carlo simulation) to figure out what these plants should be worth, or roughly what they should be worth depending on when they come up in the game, although I think that might ruin the fun.

With three or more players, two competitive dynamics come into play. One is the map – for the first part of the game, only one player can occupy a city; in “step 2,” it’s two players per city; and it’s never more than three players per city, giving multiple opportunities for a player to block others and prevent them from expanding their networks, deliberately or as part of naturally expanding their own networks. A player could have the money and power plants to expand his network but be slowed dramatically because he has to pay extra – a lot extra on the western side of the map – to go through someone else’s network, and while I’m not sure if it could happen in practice, I think I could see how a player could end up pinned in for several turns while he waits to accumulate the cash to expand out of region. The other is the competition for resources, which are refilled at fixed rates for each step of the game, so they can be depleted if too many players need them to power their plants – in fact, I can’t see how in a five- or six-player game you wouldn’t run into shortages, forcing players to change their plants and perhaps driving up purchase prices. And uranium is refilled so slowly that there’s a severe disincentive for two players to run nuclear plants simultaneously.

I did mention drawbacks. One is that it’s a mediocre two-player game, because the constraints don’t really constrain. You have room on the map, resources won’t be depleted, and the auctions don’t get too crazy – my wife and I engage in de facto collusion, so we buy plants at face value unless it’s a green one. Three works, although I’ve only played two games with three, and I imagine four would be perfect and five-plus would be a little cutthroat. With three players, each game took over an hour, so a five-player game could certainly run two.

Another is that the board is drab. I don’t care that much about artwork, but my wife really dislikes the game because she says it looks depressing – and she’s right about the cards with the power plants on them, which depict varying levels of air pollution. It wouldn’t stop me from playing the game, but it will stop some people, and for what these games cost I think it’s fair to consider the artwork.

And the third is that the mechanics of the game are complex. To keep the game in balance, the game author had to put a number of unnatural rules in place, including artificial constructs like the shift from step one to two (when any player has seven cities in his network) or two to three (when the “Step 3” card comes up in the power plant deck) and a table for how many resources to add back to the resource market at the end of each round … it’s a lot to keep track of over the course of the game, and we usually screw something up, somewhere, like forgetting to put coal back in the market one turn only to wonder three turns later why coal is so expensive. Even the order in which the players go in each round varies – you set a new player order each round, but then for some phases in the round, players go in reverse order. Yeah. I imagine the more you play, the more natural it becomes, but I don’t see it ever become as intuitive as most of the games we enjoy.

I’d recommend Power Grid because I enjoy playing it, especially the economic twist from the power plant-resource interaction, but I know from your feedback that you guys are split between folks who like the quicker-to-learn games like Ticket to Ride or Dominion and those who think I should be playing more Agricola and Puerto Rico. Power Grid, to me, is more for the second camp than the first.

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→ January 8, 2010
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Zooloretto.

The board game Zooloretto won the Spiel des Jahres award in 2007, beating out four games I’ve never heard of, although I suppose that’s not automatically a bad thing. It’s a fun game, on the lighter side of the German-style games we’ve played, more at the level of Ticket to Ride than, say, Stone Age or Puerto Rico, but it brings the benefit of being very easy to pick up and quick to play.

Each player in Zooloretto has a small board that represents his zoo, with three separate enclosures containing spaces for four, five, and six animals respectively, as well as a barn and several places for vending stalls. Each turn involves drawing tiles from the pool, with tiles including animals of eight different species, vending stalls, and coins that can be used to purchase the right to move animals or stalls around your board, expand your zoo to add one more enclosure, to discard an animal you can’t place, or to buy an animal from another player’s barn. The goal is to maximize the number of victory points for your zoo at the end of the game, with the biggest bonuses coming for filling any enclosure (with the limit of one animal type per enclosure) and other points coming from placing more animals and stalls, but two-point penalties for animals in your barn, which is where you stash any tile you can’t place until you can either place it somewhere or discard it.

The one major twist is that players do not draw tiles directly, but instead must place them on one of several delivery trucks, each with space for three tiles, placed in the center of the table. There’s one truck per player, but no player owns any single truck, and on your turn, you may choose to take one of the trucks (even if it’s only partially filled) instead of placing another tile. So when placing tiles on trucks, you have to consider whether another player will grab the truck you’ve so carefully filled for your own purposes, and sometimes may draw a tile an opponent doesn’t want and thus choose to place it on a truck to discourage him from taking it (or to screw him if he does). There are also some animal tiles labeled with a gender, and if you get a male and a female of the same animal type in an enclosure … wait for it … you get a baby animal tile, free, so you can fill the enclosure faster. There are also coin bonuses for filling your two smaller enclosures as well as the expansion enclosure, and for a single coin you can swap any two groups of animals, which offers opportunities for more points and to potentially duplicate coin bonuses (making it a nearly zero-risk investment if done correctly).

The game is sold as a 2-5 player game, but the two-player version is explicitly listed as a variant in the rules, and the dynamic changes dramatically. The two players use and fill three trucks instead of two, and so instead of competing with other players for a specific animal type, the only constraint is the fact that in each round, one or more tiles will be removed from the game because they were on the truck that neither player chose. Filling enclosures is much easier, there’s less need to buy an animal from the other player’s barn (I think we’ve done that twice in five games), and just generally less tension because you know in all likelihood you’ll get the tiles you need.

I did manage to play this as a simple matching game with my three-year-old daughter, using four animal types for the two of us, just two trucks, no money or stalls, and using the one-type-per-enclosure rule. She thought it was great and even understood when I switched two of her animal types to make room for her to add another panda* to her zoo. My daughter thinks it’s important for everyone to finish whatever game we play, and she’s not concerned about who finishes first and has no concept of points, so it really boiled down to matching and counting. Heck, even stripped down to these simple rules it’s still a better game than Candyland.

*So for some reason, my daughter was pronouncing panda “ponda,” as if she was English. We have no idea where it came from, and while it cracked us up, we did tell her it was pronounced “panda” and, after a few days, she dropped the British accent. The first time she said it correctly, I told her, “You know, you used to say ‘ponda’ bear.”
Her response? “When I was a baby?”
“No, sweetheart. Yesterday.”

I’d definitely recommend this as a starter game for anyone interested in playing better board games but a little wary of the heavier strategy entrants in the field. Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne are more challenging, but Zooloretto’s concept and look put it ahead of Carcassonne, and the scoring in Zooloretto is more intuitive than Carcassonne’s bizarre yet critical farm scoring scheme. I would also guess that this game would be the easiest of all of the games I’ve reviewed here for a child to learn to play well; Ticket to Ride is just as simple to play, but there’s more advance planning required than there is in Zooloretto. And who doesn’t love panda bears?

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→ January 3, 2010
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Dominion (board game).

Dominion, the most recent winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award, is a card game for two to four players in which players build a deck of cards through which they’ll cycle repeatedly, using money cards to buy new cards that grant the player more actions, more buying power, or the victory points used to win the game. It’s one of the hottest games going right now among fans of German-style games and ranks sixth on boardgamegeek’s master ranking of games, determined by user ratings.

A turn in Dominion comprises three basic steps: play one or more action card from your hand, buy one or more cards from the supply, and clean up the mess you just made in front of you. You end each turn by drawing the top five cards from your deck, and those cards constitute your hand for your next turn; when your deck runs out, you shuffle your discard pile and begin drawing again, so except for a few special cases when you acquire a card it’s yours to keep.

There are three major card types: money, actions, and point cards. You can use money cards to buy any type of card on the table, including more money cards (copper cards have buying power of 1 and cost 0; silver have buying power of 2 and cost 3; gold have buying power of 3 and cost 6). Your total buying power on any turn is determined by which money cards are in your hand, so you can have plenty of money cards yet be unable to buy on a turn because you didn’t draw them, leading to two strategic considerations – the ratio of money cards to other cards in your deck, and whether it’s better to have lots of copper cards or to concentrate your buying power in silver and gold. You need point cards to win the game, but they have no active function during the game and thus drawing one is a wasted spot in your hand.

The action cards, shockingly, are where the action lies in the game, although more action cards is not necessarily better. Dominion comes with 25 different action card types, but in any particular game you only use 10 of these, which may come from a predetermined set or be chosen at random, leaving you – assuming I did the math right – 3.2 million different combinations, meaning that the game need never be the same twice if you so desire. That in turn means that you can’t approach Dominion with a single strategy, because some games will be more skewed toward action cards that provide you with additional buying power when played, while others may be heavy on cards that grant you extra actions (fun, but not always practical unless you have a deck full of action cards), and so on. Some cards’ value is fairly straightforward; for example, the Village card grants you two more actions and the right to draw a card, but since you have the right to play one action card every turn, the net result is just that you get to take an extra action, which might be useless if you’ve got four money cards in your hand. Choosing the right action cards, including the right mix of action cards and then the right mix of action versus non-action cards, is the key to the game, but the variety of setups mean that there’s no single right answer, and even within one specific setup there will usually be multiple ways to win.

The artwork is nice enough, but the names of cards typically have no connection to the benefits each card provides (why would a village allow you to draw a replacement card and take two more actions?), so you’re not building a “dominion” as the game’s description implies – just a deck. There’s less imagination involved in playing this game than there is in Stone Age or The Settlers of Catan, although I’m sure that’s only a drawback for a limited number of players. Setup is simple if you use the tray and guide to put the cards away after each game, but that in itself is a process so you’re going to lose some time in either setup or cleanup whenever you play. Two-player games take us under an hour; having the third player added a little complexity with the small number of “attack” cards in the deck by increasing the incentive to buy and use such cards, but we can also now say with some certainty that it’s a quick game to pick up, since all three of us grasped it quickly.

The lone negative I can see in the game is that there is one very simple attack that works most of the time if you’re the only person executing it – spend the vast majority of your turns buying silver/gold cards and, when you’re able, buying the Province cards (which cost 8 units) that give you 6 Victory Points apiece. When the pile of Province cards is exhausted, the game is over, so if you buy more than half of those, it’s extremely difficult for anyone to beat you through the lower-value point cards. The strategy won’t work if multiple players chase it, and the Gardens action cards throw a wrench in it, as can the Thief action cards, but it’s simple and straightforward enough that it almost felt like a hack. Against experienced players, it would be worthless, but it could really mess up a casual game night. Beyond that objection, I strongly recommend Dominion, especially if you find games like Settlers of Catan or Stone Age intimidating.

Speaking of Settlers of Catan, I came across an article from Wired, written in April of 2009, on the game’s rise in popularity so long after its initial release, unusual in any business but even more so in one as seemingly dormant as boardgames, with notes on the history of the game and why German-style games are becoming more popular. (It also includes a great phrase for deriding older, “classic” board games: “roll the dice, move your mice.”)

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→ December 30, 2009
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Stone Age.

Santa was pretty good to me in the board games department this year, and our favorite so far is Rio Grande’s Stone Age, a 2-4 person game with some shades of Settlers of Catan but without the initial-placement phase that plays such a huge role in determining who wins in Settlers.

In Stone Age, each player has a small civilization and has to use his five “meeples” to gather resources (food, wood, brick, stone, or gold), build tools to improve resource production, develop agriculture so he gets additional food “free” on each turn, or make more people (but you have to deploy two of your people to that space to make another person – dedicated Stone Age players call it the “love shack”). The goal in Stone Age is to accumulate as many “victory points” as possible through constructing buildings, which you buy through the four non-food resources, and through game-end bonuses for the number of people in your civilization (you start with five and can end up with ten), your food production rate, the number of tools you have, or additional bonuses for your buildings. Of course, you have various constraints at work, including the need to feed your people each turn, the limited number of people you have, and other players competing for the same resources. On each turn, only one player can occupy each of the spaces that add to free food production, make a new person, or build a new tool, and later in the game there’s competition for buildings with high point values or “civilization cards” that increase game-end bonuses while also offering immediate benefits like free resources. There are also only seven spaces on each of the four non-food resources, and since each player has five meeples at the start of the game, it’s possible that you’ll end up boxed out of a resource you want to produce on a specific turn.

Because of the game-end bonuses for tools, farming, and meeples – in a 4-person game where 200-250 is a typical winning score, you can earn 96 extra points if you max out on tools and bonus points, 70 points on people, and 70 points on food production – as well as the potential bonus of 9 bonus points per building (we’ve never had a player reach 10 buildings, although it is theoretically possible to do so), there are a few basic strategies for winning at Stone Age, although competition in 3- and 4-player games will usually require each player to adopt a hybrid approach. All strategies require players to collect civilization cards, which can be purchased for 1-4 resources but must be claimed with meeples that can’t be used to produce any resources on that turn, creating an additional arena for competition on the board. Some cards represent civilization “skills” like art, weaving, or transportation that have no function within the game but add bonus points at the game end, with each player receiving points equal to the square of the number of unique skills he has, with a max of 64 points. There is a so-called “starvation” strategy that involves avoiding food and taking point penalties for doing so – you don’t lose any meeple for failing to produce enough food – although it seems to be a the consensus among fans that this is a flaw in the rules rather than a legitimate strategy.

Although the number of main strategies is finite, each turn presents the player with myriad decisions. The first is where to place the meeples – on production spaces, on any of the three “special” spaces to produce tools/farms/meeples, on buildings, or on cards. The second is the order in which to resolve each of the meeples’ spots – do you roll for gold or wood first, or buy a card that might earn you an extra resource? The third is when to use your tools to round up die rolls on resources, although this becomes easier as the game goes on if you’re accumulating lots of tools as your core strategy. You also have the option to play a limited amount of defense by blocking opponents from resources they might need or buildings/cards they might want, and since one condition for ending the game is the exhaustion of any of the piles of buildings for purchase, you might place a meeple on a building but pass on buying it simply to keep the game going another turn or two.

There’s a modest amount of luck in the game, but it’s still a strategy game at its core. Players roll dice to determine resource production, so it’s possible to place several meeples on a resource (especially stone or gold) and walk away with little to no output, although a player can use more meeples on a resource and/or deploy his tools to smooth that out a little and largely eliminate the risk of a zero-output roll. The order of civilization cards and buildings that appear for purchase is also random, and there are certain cards (especially those that permanently add one farm or one tool) that are more attractive than others. It’s enough randomness to keep the game different each time out, like Settlers of Catan, but the fundamental strategies are always the same and you’re not completely at the mercy of the dice. The main benefit of the random element is preventing a player from having a fixed strategy before the game starts – seeing the first set of cards and what spaces you can occupy in the first few turns helps determine which strategies will be most effective in that particular game.

Stone Age is more family-strategy than hardcore-strategy; what you’re producing is generic, with no purpose to buildings or skills beyond the points they provide at the end of the game. A typical game takes just over an hour once every player knows the rules, and we found that after one game everyone was up to speed on the rules and concepts to play competitively. My wife insists that I mention that the artwork is excellent, with vivid colors and great detail – this will be more relevant after I post one of the upcoming reviews. And outside of Settlers and Ticket to Ride I don’t think we’ve been as into any game right out of the box as we have been with Stone Age.

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→ December 2, 2009
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Bang!

I have a new article up covering Billy Wagner, arbitration offers, and other random stuff. I did a rambling hit with Mike Salk on AllNight last night. It certainly sounds like I said the Dodgers didn’t offer arbitration to “Woof.” Maybe he’ll sign with the Phoenix Desert Dogs next week.

I’ve had the Italian card game Bang! for over a year now, but finally got around to opening it the other day, since it requires four people to play and we always reach for Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne whenever we’ve got a group of four for game night. We ran through Bang! twice, and I’m guessing the game is better with more than four players, but I thought I’d offer a quick take.

Bang! has a simple object but the game play is a little complex. Each player gets a role: one Sheriff, one Renegade, two to three Outlaws, and one to two Deputies. Only the Sheriff’s role is revealed. The goal of the Outlaws is simply to kill the Sheriff. The goal of the Sheriff and any Deputies is to kill the Outlaws and the Renegade. The goal of the Renegade is to be the last player standing, so he’s the least likely to win although he’s fun to play because of the greater potential for deceit. Each player also gets a character who has one specific ability that deviates from the standard rules of the game.

The game is entirely played with cards, with nearly half the cards in the deck devoted to shooting opponents (called, appropriately enough, Bang! cards) or cards used to deflect shots aimed at you (Missed!). The remaining half of the deck comprises special-use cards, from Beer cards used to regain a life point lost to a bullet to weapons that allow you to hit players farther away from you at the table to the Jail card that you can use to try to force an opponent to skip his next turn. Some cards are played once, but others remain on the table in front of you for use in future turns until someone plays another card that takes yours off the table.

On each turn, a player can play all of the cards in his hand with the restriction that he can only play one Bang! card – that is, only fire one bullet at an opponent – per turn, unless he has another card that invalidates that rule. Turns move quickly, since you only start each turn with as many cards as you have life points remaining, and neither of our games lasted as long as a half an hour. The bulk of the strategy revolves around deciding whom to attack and which cards to hold in your hand, since there are various situations where having a Bang!, Missed!, or Beer card in your hand when it’s not your turn is beneficial. For example, you can play a Beer card even though it’s not your turn if you lose your last life point, thus keeping you in the game a little longer.

We found three problems with the game, one of which is easily fixed – a player can be eliminated or nearly eliminated before he gets a turn. A house rule that no player can be eliminated before he gets a turn is apparently a common solution. The second problem was that tying the card limit to the number of life points remaining means once you’re down a few points, you’ll find it hard to stay in the game without some luck or some help from an ally. The third problem was that a four-player game created something of an imbalance, with two outlaws against a renegade and a sheriff; two players are trying to kill one (the sheriff), while the other two players are trying to kill two targets. That imbalance means the sheriff is going to see his point total slip quickly unless he and the renegade happen to take turns before the outlaws do, and even the rule giving the sheriff one bonus life point didn’t help, as he was on the ropes quickly and eventually was killed in both games.

That said, I’d love to try this with five to seven people, since the next role added is a deputy, which should rebalance the game. The company’s site includes rules for a two-player variant, and the Dodge City Expansion expansion adds 3- and 8-player possibilities. (The online consensus seems to be that buying the complete set, Bang – The Bullet, which includes the expansions, is the best way to go.)

Boardgamegeek has a great forum post on Bang! where three kids, ages 9, 11, and 13, respond to some of the major criticisms of the game, and do so intelligently and sometimes humorously. The site also offers a Word doc that, when printed on both sides of a page, creates a handy player aid with condensed rules and card actions.

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→ November 25, 2009
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Top 10 boardgames, revised, with lost comments.

It seems to be list-updating time for me, and mental_floss’s rundown of Games magazine’s category winners for new games in 2009 prompted me to finally write this up and post it. Here’s my updated top ten, after which you’ll find the user comments from the original top ten that were lost in the database corruption that happened last December.

Quick notes: I hate Scrabble. I’ve never played Agricola. I dropped Risk, Acquire, and Monopoly from the list.

10. Babel. We bought this game on a trip to Austria in 2003, which meant getting the German rules, which meant I had to translate them … so who knows if we really played it correctly. But it was fun. It’s a fairly simple two-person game where each player is trying to build temples using five “tribes” at his disposal, but at the same time that you’re building, you’re using those tribes to try to slow down your opponent’s building or knock down his temples entirely. Our favorite move was the “Wanderung,” where you can make one of your opponent’s tribes wander off.

9. Taboo. Different type of game entirely from the others here – this is a “party game,” and maybe the only one I really liked. For those of you old enough to remember the TV game show Password, Taboo takes that general format (one person gives clues, the rest of his team has to guess the keyword), but adds the twist that there are five words the clue-giver can’t say. The challenge of trying to describe something without saying the five most obvious words is what makes Taboo fun. Our friend Pete was a whiz at giving clues because he had an endless supply of bad pop songs and commercial jingles on which to rely.

8. Diplomacy. Described by one friend of mine as “Risk for grownups,” Diplomacy requires seven players, but removes the luck element entirely after the initial setup. Players represent the seven “great powers” of Europe, set in 1900 (although there are endless variations), and must scheme, ally, attack, and backstab their way towards control of at least half of the map. The rules are incredibly simple, and there are a few thriving online communities of “Diplo” players, although playing online means that the normal etiquette of live play (such as “don’t stab the guy you just allied with thirty seconds ago”) goes out the window.

7. Wise and Otherwise Board Game. I guess this is part party game, but it’s more clever than most games in that genre. On each turn, one player becomes the “reader” and reads the first half of an incredibly obscure (but real) proverb. The other players have to fabricate plausible or funny second halves, while the reader writes down the real conclusion to the proverb, after which, all players must guess which conclusion is the correct one. You get points for getting it right, and for fooling other players, while the biggest bonus goes to the reader who reads all the completions so convincingly that no one gets the right answer. It’s like Balderdash, but the opportunities for silly answers are greater, and the problem with Balderdash is that you can often guess the definitions by looking at word roots.

6. San Juan. Full review. The card game/two-person adjunct to the board game Puerto Rico (which I haven’t played), San Juan is a hard game to explain but easy and quick to play. Using only cards, each player builds a small settlement of various types of buildings, producing goods using them to build faster and better structures. There’s some luck involved, as in all card games, but the deck is big enough and diverse enough that you’re unlikely to be buried by bad luck; you’re just forced to consider different strategies.

5. Metro. Another German board game – Germany seems to be where all the good games are designed these days – Metro is almost comically simple. 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.

4. Carcassonne. Full review. A boardgame without a board, Carcassonne is very easy to play (although learning how to maximize your score takes time) and emphasizes on-the-fly thinking over long-term planning. You draw one land tile each turn and build roads, cities, and farms by adding each tile to the table, creating a different map every time. You can play a solitary style or use an aggressive approach to grab some points from your opponents.

3. Orient Express. This is the only game on this list that is out of print, although the designers have told me they’re considering a reissue. Orient Express takes those logic puzzles you saw on the LSAT or in GAMES magazine and turns it into a murder mystery: You have to walk around the two train cars, interviewing suspects and crew members, searching cabins, and – when possible – sending telegrams for background info on the suspects. You must come up with a suspect and a motive to solve the crime, although you may also glean clues about the weapon or other factors. The original game itself comes with 10 cases., and there are at least 30 expansion cases available through the publisher’s website.

2. Ticket to Ride. Full review. An outstanding marriage between two styles – the German strategy board game and the American family game. You start Ticket to Ride with 45 train cars and several routes each connecting two U.S. cities; you get points for completing these routes and for connecting any two cities on the map, but other players are also trying to cross the map and you can end up blocked out of a specific city pair or unable to complete a route entirely. We play the U.S. version with the 1910 expansion; the Europe version is also excellent but I wouldn’t recommend the Swiss expansion.

1. Settlers of Catan. It’s not the simplest game on the list, but it’s the smartest, and it’s simple and quick enough to teach someone by playing a game with them, after which they’ll probably be hooked. Three or four players compete to settle the island of Catan, which involves tough decisions about placing settlements, trading for resources, developing units or towns, and overall strategy. There’s not much confrontation, and players are never eliminated. The first player to reach 10 “victory points” – achieved through a combination of building towns or cities, building the longest road, raising the largest army, or special one-point cards – wins. The game was such a success that there are multiple add-ons, including 5-6 player expansion, as well as a very good two-person card game (since the board game requires three players).

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→ September 24, 2009
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Carcassonne.

Klawchat at 1 pm EDT today. Tentatively scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto at 6:05 pm.

I’ve been promising this writeup for months but there always seems to be a book or a trip in the way, which is a shame, since Carcassonne is definitely one of my favorite boardgames now and clearly top-ten material.

Carcassonne’s concept is very simple, generally a hallmark of good boardgames. All players build the board as you go, using a collection of square tiles that depict various pieces of roads, cities, and pastures. You keep no hand tiles, drawing one piece per turn and placing it immediately next to one or more pieces already on the table. You must make sure that the edges match – if a tile has a city on one edge, that edge can’t be placed next to a road or a pasture – which limits your options. Along the way, you place your followers, known as “meeples” to hardcore Carcassonne players, on cities, roads, or farms that you build to try to earn points, with bonus points awarded for completing cities, using city tiles with pennants, and for certain tiles available in the many expansions to the core game.

It’s an easy game to pick up but the changing board and the fact that your opponents are simultaneously building, often nearby, make gameplay different every time. You can play a solitary game, especially if you’re just playing one other person, but you can also play in a way that tries to steal points from your opponents by merging one of your cities with one of theirs, since the points for a completed (“closed”) city go to the player with the most meeples occupying tiles in that city.

The trickiest part of the game is the use of farms, which can be more valuable than cities if played properly. When you play a meeple on a city or road, you get the meeple back to redeploy once that city is closed or that road is completed. When you play a meeple on a farm, however, he’s there for the rest of the game. When the game ends, a player gets points for each closed city that his farm abuts, but a player often doesn’t have much control over how his farm grows, and a player can end up with nothing for one of his meeples if farms merge as the board develops and he’s outnumber on that farm when the game ends. As a result, when and where to place meeples is the main strategic decision for Carcassonne players, since you have no control over what tiles you draw but have complete control over meeple placement.

We’ve played with two to four players; four players can take a while, but two player games run under a half hour for us, especially since my wife and I tend to play apart from each other on the board. I’ve played online a few times, including two games against players who spent all of their time trying to glom on to my cities (by creating a new nearby city and attempting to merge the two), and not only was the strategy annoying, it didn’t seem to work – you can keep the game close that way, but you can’t get ahead without building some cities and farms of your own, so I never pursue this strategy myself.

We’ve used two Carcassonne expansions. The game currently comes with the first River expansion, twelve tiles that you use to start the game; it provides some structure and helps break up farms, but it doesn’t substantially change gameplay. The second, Traders and Builders, adds a number of new tiles, as well as two new pieces: the Builder, which allows a player to draw an extra tile when adding to the city/road the builder occupies; and the Pig, which increases the final value of the farm on which he’s placed. Both the Builder piece and the new tile configurations added quite a bit to the game, changing strategies but also providing more flexibility and, depending on how you use the Builder, allowing you to avoid wasted turns.

I’ll do one more game post in the next few weeks, updating the top ten and reposting the comments lost from the original thread last fall.

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→ August 18, 2009
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San Juan card game.

Chat 3 pm EDT on the four-letter. ESPN 710 Seattle at 2 pm PDT. AllNight later on tonight. Waiting for confirmation but I should be on ESPN 1250 Pittsburgh tomorrow at around 11 am EDT.

Back when I did my original post on board games, several readers recommended Puerto Rico, a 3-5 player game that can be played with two players but that is apparently better with more people involved. When I pointed out that my wife and I play a lot of these games ourselves, at least one of you recommended the 2-4 player spinoff, a card game called San Juan.

The game takes a while to explain but is very simple to play. In each round, there are phases (one per player) that allow players to build new buildings, produce goods, sell goods they’ve produced, or draw extra cards from the deck. The cards serve several functions: a player can use them to pay for buildings, a player can build the building on the card’s face if he has enough cards, and a player can stash them under a Chapel to sock away some bonus points for the end of the game. The game ends when one player has built twelve buildings in his settlement, after which the player with the most points is the winner. Having the most buildings doesn’t mean you’ll have the most points, as different buildings have different point values, and some buildings are worth bonus points based on what else each player has in his settlement.

Once you’ve started the game, it’s easy to follow and moves pretty quickly; as you add to your settlement, the rate at which you can produce, build, and sell improves, since each building has some bonus feature like reducing the cost of certain buildings or allowing you to produce an extra good during the production phase. All of the other two-player games we regularly play take far longer, so it’s great to have a fun alternative when it’s late and we want to play something fast.

The game also has a good mix of strategy and luck. There are clearly better and worse ways to build your settlement, and you have to make major decisions like whether to build another production building or whether to start building the violet-card buildings, which have the bonus features I mentioned above and are generally worth more points. You have to decide which cards in your hand to use as currency and which to keep so you can ultimately play and build them. The prices of goods change slightly from turn to turn, leading to sell-or-wait decisions. But you’re also at the mercy of the cards you draw, making the game different each time but also perhaps preventing you from always using the same strategy.

And since it’s just a big deck of cards and a few cardboard pieces to mark phases and prices, it’s extremely portable, which never hurts.

I still have to write about Carcassonne, after which it’ll be time to revise the board game rankings.

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→ July 10, 2009
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The Ticket to Ride board games.

I’ll be on ESPN Radio in a few minutes here, and on ESPN 1000 in Chicago around 9:25 pm CDT tonight.

Ticket to Ride is a series of board games from Days of Wonder, a U.S.-based game company that makes games that rival the top games coming out of Europe (mostly Germany). The original version of the game won the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in 2004, spurring a series of expansions and spinoffs. Over the course of two months, I’ve played the original game with its main expansion, one spinoff, and a spinoff of the spinoff.

The original Ticket to Ride is the simplest, even with the 1910 Expansion. The game board shows the U.S. and Canada, with about 30 cities connected by train tracks of varying lengths. Each player receives 45 trains and begins with a handful of “destination tickets,” with two cities and a point value that represents the minimum number of trains required to connect them; if you complete a route between two cities on a ticket, no matter how convoluted the path, you receive the number of points shown on the card, but if you fail to complete it, you lose that many points. (You do have some flexibility around the tickets you keep.) The tracks come in different colors, and you have to collect train cards of each color to be able to lay trains on those tracks; the longer the track between two adjacent cities, the more points you receive for placing trains on it. Of course, the tracks between cities are limited, so you may end up blocked from your intended route. There’s also a bonus for the longest continuous route (regardless of tickets), and in the “Mega” game variant, a bonus for completing the most tickets. It’s a pretty simple concept and everyone we’ve introduced to the game has picked it up pretty quickly, but the game is completely different each time because of the mix of tickets you receive and the way the board develops. A complete game with two people takes 30-45 minutes; a complete game with four people takes an hour or so.

The first spinoff we got was Ticket to Ride Europe, which brings the same basic mechanics to a new map, that of Europe in the early 20th century, but with several twists to make game play more complex. The differences include routes through “tunnels” (where the exact number of train cards required isn’t known until after you start building, so you may have to use as many as three extra cards) and “ferries” (which require the use of locomotives, which are otherwise wild cards that represent every color), and train stations that allow you to use someone else’s route between two adjacent cities as part of your own larger route. I found it to be slower to develop, but it requires more route-planning strategy, and the flexibility of the stations means it’s easier to adjust on the fly.

We love both of those games and would recommend them, but the one I didn’t like was the Europe spinoff for Switzerland. This map is smaller, designed for two or three people using 40 trains each (you use the trains and train cards from the Europe set, so the Switzerland expansion just comes with the board and new tickets). It was obviously issued hastily, as the instructions are woefully incomplete. Many tickets are extremely short – some require just two trains – which means you end spending a lot of time pulling new tickets, and you will almost certainly end up blocked by an opponent at some point during the game. A smaller board for a quicker game sounded appealing to us, but this implementation didn’t work for me.

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