→ May 31, 2024
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Donut Shop.

Donut Shop is a light-ish new game from 25th Century Games and Jeffrey D. Allers, designer of New York Slice and Heartland/Gunkimono, blending some set collection and tile-laying mechanics into a game with a short rule set but too long and amorphous a playing experience. It definitely looked more promising before it came out of the box.

In Donut Shop, players add 2×2 tiles to a common tableau to try to create patterns they can score by covering them with donut boxes that range in size from 4 to 12 donuts. There are five flavors, each of which can have sprinkles or some other decoration on them, as well as ‘wild’ spaces that show a little pile of five donut holes. On your turn, you must place the one tile in your hand fully adjacent to another tile on the tableau – at least one edge must fully line up with the edge of a single tile already on the table – and then choose one donut flavor to score. You get 10 cents for each donut of that flavor on your tile, plus 10 more cents for each matching donut orthogonally adjacent to the tile AND each matching donut adjacent to those.

At this point, you can end your turn, or you can take a donut box from the supply to cover part of the tableau as long as you have the correct cards to do so. The cards represent customer orders, and you must have one card for every flavor of donut you’re covering with the box – one card can cover as many donuts of one flavor as you need, although you may choose to play additional cards for more rewards. You get a fixed value for the box, plus an additional 10 cents if any of your cards show a sprinkles bonus on the bottom and you covered a donut matching that flavor that also has sprinkles. There are also coffee bonuses independent of donut flavors; if you trade in two coffee cards with one box, you get 15 cents, and if you trade in three you get 25 cents.

At the end of your turn, you must take a new donut tile and a new order card. You can do this in any order, as long as the first item you take is face-up, so the second is face-down. You may only have one tile at a time, but there is no limit on order cards. The game continues until the players either exhaust the donut tile supply or the order card supply.

There are two major issues with Donut Shop that ended up souring me on the game. The bigger one is its length: It takes way too long to get to the end of the game, by which point the very simple mechanics become rote and uninteresting. This game needs to be about half as long as it is, given the short rules and the overall theme, and when I played it with my seven-year-old and when my 11-year-old played with two friends, we all agreed it needed to end sooner – the second group didn’t even play till the conclusion.

I also don’t like how hard it is to set up any moves even a turn in advance. If you try to build towards a larger box, nothing can stop your opponent from just grabbing the space once they have the cards, and that’s really easy to do later in the game when both players will likely have a decent supply of order cards on hand at all times. In addition, while the supply of donut boxes is limited, but in a two-player game there are too many smaller boxes, so you have a very strong incentive to fill small orders early until those boxes start to run short, which feels very paint-by-numbers rather than strategic. It doesn’t penalize long-term planning, but it fails to reward it.

There might be a better game in here somewhere, even a smaller-box game, maybe if you weren’t all building the same tableau or were competing more directly for tiles and cards – if I could see you needed a tile and might take that first, that would be a different game but increase the interaction without it being as simple as “I’m covering the donuts you were going to cover next turn.” I also don’t think the 20-40 minute listed playing time is accurate – we had a two-player game run at least 45 minutes because it just takes too long to get through the supply, so perhaps an earlier end condition would help. I love tile-laying games but this one doesn’t hit any of the reasons I enjoy them.

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→ May 29, 2024
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Seven Games.

The title of Oliver Roeder’s book Seven Games: A Human History is a misnomer in two ways: It’s not really a book about games, and it’s far more a history of computers than of humans. It is, instead, a history of attempts to use what is now unfortunately referred to as “AI” to tackle the myriad problems posed by seven popular board and card games from human history, from chess to bridge. Each of these games presents the programmers with specific, novel issues, and while machine-learning techniques have succeeded in solving some games (like checkers), others have and may forever prove inscrutable (like bridge).

Roeder is a journalist for the Financial Times and clearly a gamer, and someone who loves the games for what they are beyond their competitive aspect (although it becomes clear he is a fierce competitor as well). He writes as an experienced player of all seven games in the book, even though he must have varying skill levels in each – I’d be shocked if he were much of a checkers player, because who on earth in the year of our lord 2024 is a great checkers player? His experience with the games helps infuse a book that could be a rather dry and grim affair with more than a touch of life, especially as he enters tournaments or otherwise competes against experts in games like poker, Scrabble, and backgammon.

What Roeder is really getting at here, however, is the symbiotic relationship between games and machine learning, which is what everyone now calls AI. (AI is itself a misnomer, and there are many philosophers who argue that there can be no intelligence, artificial or otherwise, without culture.) Games are perfect fodder for training AI modules because they tend to present short sets of rules and clear goals, thus giving the code and its coder targets for whatever optimization algorithm(s) they choose. In the case of checkers, this proved simple once the computing power was available; checkers is considered “weakly solved,” with a draw inevitable if both players play perfectly. (Connect 4 is strongly solved; the first player can always win with perfect play.) In the case of bridge, on the other hand, the game may never be solved, both because of its computational complexity and because of the substantial human element involved in its play.

In one of those later chapters, Roeder mentions P=NP in a footnote, which put an entirely different spin on the book for me. P=NP is one of the six unsolved Millennium Prize Problems* in mathematics, also called the P versus NP problem, which asks if a problem’s correct solution can be verified in polynomial time, does that also mean that the problem can be solved in polynomial time? The answer would have enormous ramifications for computational theory, and could indeed impact human life in substantial ways, but the odds seem to be that P does not equal NP – that the time required to solve these problems is orders of magnitude higher than the time required to verify their solutions. (For more on this subject, I recommend Lance Fortnow’s book The Golden Ticket, which I reviewed here in 2015.)

*A seventh, the Poincaré Conjecture, is the only one that has been solved to date.

You can see a thread through the seven chapters where the machine-learning techniques adjust and improve as the games become more complex. From there, it isn’t hard to see this as a narrow retelling of the ongoing history of machine learning itself. The early efforts to solve games like checkers employed brute-force methods – examining all possible outcomes and valuing them to guide optimal choices. More complex games that present larger decision trees and more possible outcomes would require more processing power and time than we have, often more time than remains in the expected life of the universe (and certainly more than remains in the expected life of our suicidal species), and thus required new approaches. Some of the attacks on games later in the book allow the algorithm to prune the tree itself and avoid less-promising branches to reduce processing time and power, thus leading to a less complete but more efficient search method.

Roeder does acknowledge in brief that these endeavors also have a hidden cost in energy. His anecdotes include Deep Blue versus Kasparov and similar matches in poker and go, some of which gained wide press coverage for their results … but not for the energy consumed by the computers that competed in these contests. We’re overdue for a reckoning on the actual costs of ChatGPT and OpenAI and their myriad brethren in silicon, because as far as I can tell, they’re just the new crypto when it comes to accelerating climate change. That’s nice that you can get a machine to write your English 102 final paper for you or lay off a bunch of actual humans to let AI do some things, but I’d like to see you pay the full cost of the electricity you’re using to do it.

I’ve focused primarily on one aspect of Seven Games because that’s what resonated with me, but I may have undersold the book a little in the process. It’s a fun read in many ways because Roeder tells good stories for just about all seven of the games in the book – I might have done without the checkers chapter, because that’s just a terrible game, but it is an important rung in the ladder he’s constructing – and puts himself in the action in several of them, notably in poker tournaments in Vegas. There’s also a warning within the book about the power of so-called AI, and I think inherent in that is a call for caution, although Roeder doesn’t make this explicit. It seemed a very timely read even though I picked it up on a friend’s recommendation because it’s about games. Games, as it turns out, explain quite a bit of life. We wouldn’t be human without them.

Next up: Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, a book by Daniel Everett, a former evangelical Christian missionary who became an atheist and turned to linguistics after his time trying to convert the Amazonian Pirahã tribe. He appeared at length in last year’s outstanding documentary The Mission.

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→ April 25, 2024
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Trio.

If the card game Trio were brand-new, I’d call it the game of the year. It is out in a brand-new English edition, though, and I can’t recommend it any more highly. It’s right up there with Scout, Love Letter, Coup, and Super Mega Lucky Box as smaller games you can play any time with any mix of people, kids included, or throw in a bag or suitcase for when you travel. I just played it with my niece (nearly 12) and nephew (8) the other day, and after six plays, when I had to leave for a game, they roped my parents into playing several more times.

Trio was originally published in Japan as nana (??), one of the Japanese words for 7, and both names ultimately make sense given how you win the game. The full deck contains 36 cards numbered 1 through 12, three of each, with the actual cards used varying by player count – for four or five players, you use the whole deck, but you’ll remove the 12s for three players, for example. All cards in the game are either dealt to players or placed face-down on the table.

You win Trio by doing one of three things: collecting three sets of cards of the same numbers; collecting two sets of cards where the sum or difference is 7 (so, 11s and 4s, or 2s and 5s); or collecting the set of three 7s. The catch is how you reveal cards – you can only ask another player to reveal their lowest card or their highest card, or do the same for yourself, or reveal one card from the table. You take two such actions, and if the two revealed cards match, you may take a third as well. If not, all cards return to their players’ hands or to the table, face-down. If you complete a set, you take those cards and your turn ends. The game continues until one player achieves one of the three winning conditions.

Thus Trio is a game of memory: you need to pay attention every turn to what’s revealed, and also to what’s not revealed. If a player shows their lowest card is a 4, they’re also telling you that they don’t have any 1s, 2s, or 3s, thus limiting where those cards can be. Other players may reveal the cards you need to complete a set over several turns, so if you can remember where those cards are, you can ‘steal’ a set without doing the work. I’ve been dealt all three of a number, which I was only able to play once it was the lowest rank in my hand. (That is, if my hand was 2-3-4-4-4-10-12, I couldn’t play the 4s until I’d either lost the 2 and 3 or the 10 and 12.) If you’ve got an eidetic memory, well, Trio might be a little too easy for you.

You can play a whole game inside of ten minutes, probably more like five once you’re rolling, and it plays well with anywhere from three to five people. Two players can play, but it’s not as fun for strategic reasons – you only have to remember your opponent’s high/low cards and the table cards – and social ones. And the box is tiny, so it is highly portable. I’m all in on this one – I played it a few times in person at Gen Con, a few times online, and then a whole slew of times this week. It’s fun, like board games are supposed to be.

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→ April 24, 2024
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Furnace: Interbellum.

Furnace remains one of my favorite engine-building games – if anything, I’ve come to like it more and more the more I’ve played it. The rules are short, and I think very straightforward, especially if you’ve played any sort of engine-builders before (like Gizmos), while you can play the game in an hour even with four people, and in a half hour or even a little less with two people if they know the game already. It even has a useful ‘dummy’ player called the Agent to use in two-player games that at least creates a little competition for token placements. The expansion Furnace: Interbellum came out in 2022, and it is a mixed bag of added features I really like along with some extra complexity that I think the game doesn’t need.

Interbellum does have enough good stuff to justify getting it, and although it doesn’t strictly contain modules, you can definitely pick and choose what to include. There’s really one piece here I didn’t care for, and you can very easily omit it from your games – the business school cards and manager tiles. Furnace’s main market for acquiring cards has a row of 6-8 Company cards, depending on your player count, on which players will place their bidding tokens in the auction round. You can add two or three business-school cards to the end of that market, and in each round, you place a manager tile on each of those cards. Players may place bidding tokens on those as well; if they win the auction, they get the manager token, and if they lose, they get compensation as usual, although with the b-school cards they get to choose among two options. You keep the manager token for just one round, adding it to any Company or starter card in your production line to do things like repeat the card’s actions or take a conversion action for free. It’s a lot of extra cognitive work to incorporate these into the game – you lose the simplicity of bid on cards, add cards to your production line, gather resources, and fire up the engine – but it doesn’t make the game more enjoyable.

Interbellum adds a variable bidding token that I also didn’t find that useful, and if you don’t use the added b-school cards you probably can’t use this token anyway. The token can be worth any value you’d like, but you must pay the value in coal – if you want to bid 6, for example, you have to pay 6 coal tokens when placing the bid. (The game’s standard tokens are valued 1 through 4.) It’s good to have a use for extra coal, as it’s pretty easy to end up with more coal than you can ever use, but this overcomplicates the elegant auction aspect of the game.

Now for the good stuff, starting with the addition of tokens for a fifth player – which, to be clear, I haven’t tried, but I’m on board with it in principle. The game also adds new Capitalist cards, the starting powers given to players to make it slightly asymmetrical, including one that replaces the most powerful Capitalist card from the base game, which gives its owner an extra value-2 bidding token. The new version of this card requires that the player place that token during a regular bidding turn, rather than giving them an extra fifth bidding turn after everyone else has gone. It also adds some new starter cards and a whole extra deck of 24 new Company cards, with instructions on how to integrate them with the base game’s deck (you remove 24 cards from it based on the background images). These cards bring a slew of new conversion and sale possibilities for turning your resources into other resources or into coins, which are the game’s victory points, along with immediate powers marked by a lightning symbol that occur either on purchase or on upgrade. This is good complexity – it works within the confines of the original game, making it more involved but not more difficult.

The expansion also adds a solo mode that gives the Agent coins over the course of the game, allowing it to win cards if it has the highest bid token or take compensation if it has a lower one. There are multiple Agent personalities, such as the Coal Baron, that change how it places its bid tokens and how it receives coins. I completely get it for the solo mode, but found it didn’t work well enough to be competitive in the two-player mode, and unlike the instructions for everything in the original game, the instructions on the Agent cards are quite confusing – and I can see from the discussion forums on BoardGameGeek that I’m not the only one who thought this.

I don’t buy or even trade for many expansions, because I have too many games anyway and there are very few games I play often enough to justify getting them. Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and Wingspan are obvious exceptions, but if it doesn’t enhance the original I’m probably not interested. Furnace: Interbellum does do that, and you could probably get it all in the original box if you ditch the insert, especially all of the new cards. You’re also paying for some stuff that, in my opinion, makes a great game a little too complicated for its own good.

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→ February 26, 2024
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Stardew Valley.

My daughter loves the video game Stardew Valley, even though, according to her, there’s no actual end or final goal; you just keep playing to accomplish tasks and get more gold or other rewards, without a destination. I find that idea maddening. Whether a game is competitive or cooperative, there has to be a way to win. Otherwise, it’s not a game – it’s work.

The tabletop version of Stardew Valley does have a way to win, although it’s pretty hard to pull off. It’s a cooperative game for up to 4 players, with a solo mode, where you play through four seasons, planting and harvesting crops, rearing animals, fishing, exploring the mine, and making friends with villagers, all to try to achieve four objective cards and renovate the six rooms in the community center by making the appropriate donations. You get 16 turns apiece, and just two brief actions per turn, so you have to be ruthlessly efficient, contrary to the laid-back approach of the video game version. If you achieve all ten goals before you reach the end of winter, you win; otherwise, you lose.


Each season has four cards within it, telling you what to do on the board before players take their turns, and then a cleanup card at the end of the season that reminds you to change out that season’s forage tokens for the next one’s and to choose an additional professional skill card for their chosen profession (farmer, fisherman, forager, miner). At the start of the players’ turn, they may sell goods from their inventory for gold or swap them with each other, and then each player places their pawn on any location on the board, either taking two actions at that spot, or taking one action and moving to an adjacent location to take a second action. The benefit of the latter choice is that the player may take a face-down foraging token from the board, which gives some reward – basic goods like stone or wood, foraged plants that can be gifted or sold, or fancier items like artifacts or minerals that can be sold or donated to the museum for hearts.

The main ways to gain resources and money are growing crops, animal husbandry, mining, and fishing. Planting crops requires buying seeds at the town center, watering them (or praying for rain), and then harvesting them automatically when they have been watered enough times to match the water symbol on the tile. Rearing animals requires building a barn or coop first, and then moving to the farm to collect eggs, milk, wool, or feathers. Any player can fish by going to the river, lake, or ocean, then rolling three dice and assigning them to any of the five fishing tokens in the display, taking the fish that the dice match. The mine has 12 levels, and each has its own map and monster; you roll two dice and gain the reward (or penalty) shown at the intersection of their two values on the map card’s 3×3 grid, which can include the power to move down another level. Lower levels have better rewards, and one of the potential end-game objectives is to reach level 12.

You also need goods to gift to villagers you befriend, another action you take in the town. You draw the top card from the villager deck and give them any gift, as long as it’s not identified on the right side of the card as something they hate. If it’s an item they love, you get two hearts; if not, you get one. If you give them a gift in their birthday season, you get an extra heart. Hearts have many functions in Stardew Valley, but the most important one is to reveal the required donations for the community center’s six rooms.

Each player starts the game with one of the four professions and a basic tool which can be upgraded multiple times with copper ore. After each season, every player takes two Profession Upgrade cards and chooses one to keep, replacing one of the two they already have if necessary. These make your actions more powerful and/or allow you to re-roll or redo some unfavorable actions, commensurate with leveling up in a role-playing game.

There are way too many components in Stardew Valley, and it could have been a much simpler box if they weren’t trying so hard to replicate the video game. It’s cute that there are new crops for each season (except winter), but that’s hardly necessary, nor are all of the types of ore and geodes. You can upgrade crops and animal products to “quality” versions, which are worth all of 1 extra gold coin when you sell them, hardly worth the effort. There are twelve card decks, and that’s counting the four profession upgrade card decks as one. There are two bags of tiles, one of a billion kinds of fish (and trash), one of artifacts and minerals. I count 286 separate tiles, plus the various gold and heart tokens. It’s design overkill, and nearly all of these could have been condensed or simplified.

The fact that the bundles are hidden at the start of the game is just a nuisance, as some of them have to be completed before autumn or the pieces you need will no longer be available – there’s a way to swap them out, but that’s an extra step for no good reason, and the rulebook doesn’t actually tell you that these requirements are time-sensitive. The game is hard enough to complete as it is, but if you don’t reveal those cards early – and you wouldn’t know this unless you read the separate strategy tips insert or read some online suggetsions – you can end up unable to complete the game. There’s also some forced resource scarcity here that isn’t easy to overcome, particularly stone, which you need to go down further in the mine, and there’s no way to buy or trade for it.

The game’s box suggests it will take 45 minutes per player, which was true for us, and I imagine would make the game unbearable for four players (that’s three hours, if you don’t want to do the math). It does feel like a game that will go faster the more you play it, once you have some sense of what actions are more useful given the goals for the game and your chosen profession(s). I do like Stardew Valley for what it is, although if they’d streamlined all the components and some of the rules – maybe making one fishing site, cutting down some of the event cards and item types, and using far fewer goods – I might have loved it.

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→ January 26, 2024
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Sail.

Sail was one of the most unusual new games I played in 2023: a cooperative trick-taking game where you’re trying to jointly steer a ship around obstacles and sea monsters to reach the end of the path before you run out of turns or your ship takes too much damage. It’s a retheme of a Japanese game called Hameln Cave, published in a tiny box by the folks at Allplay, who specialize in publishing ‘big’ games in small boxes, including Pollen (a retheme of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: the Card Game) and the underrated little dice-rolling game Sequioa.

Sail has a deck of cards in three suits where each number has a specific symbol on it, and the combination of symbols on the two cards played in each trick determines what happens on the map. You and your partner will each get a hand of cards, exchanging some before the first turn, and then you’ll play a series of tricks – without communicating with your partner – where you must follow suit if possible, which of course means trying to get rid of a suit and/or find a way to indicate what you have to your partner.

The map varies by game, and you can pick a scenario to suit your desired difficulty level, play through them in sequence as a campaign, or even design your own. Every map has obstacles in rocks and Kraken monsters, plus lines you must cross by the end of the Nth turn to stay in the game. You have a set number of turns to reach the finish line, the distance to which also varies by scenario. One major catch is that the spaces on the map are diamonds, so moving to an adjacent space isn’t the same as moving in a straight line, and you’ll have to try to tack back and forth to keep moving while also trying to avoid the islands and monsters. One great card combination lets you move straight to the diamond that only touches your current space at one point, but as you might imagine it’s hard to pull that off. If moving the ship would put the ship on an island or off the map, it doesn’t move at all, which results in a wasted turn.

The remaining combinations can run from the ‘not too bad’ to the ‘very bad,’ with many of them dealing damage to your ship. Cards numbered 1-3 have a Kraken symbol and when played with other cards numbered 1-3 or cards that just move your ship to an adjacent space, they damage your ship. The game begins with all cards numbered 1 or 2 in a separate Kraken deck, but those will enter the player deck any time you take damage from the Kraken. You might even take two damage if you both play a card numbered 1-3 in the same trick. You can deal damage to the Kraken, which allows you to take the lower card in the trick and discard it to the Kraken deck, improving your deck for the next round and also giving you more time, as you can lose the game when the Kraken deck is exhausted. If you both play cards with cannon symbols, you flip the next card in the deck and get something positive – moving the ship either to an adjacent space or forward, or discarding a low-numbered card to the Kraken deck.

Each round ends when one player wins their fourth trick, so you can extend rounds by trying to balance the number of tricks each player wins. When a round ends, you take damage based on where the Kraken meeple is on its board; this meeple moves up any time you take damage but the top card in the Kraken deck isn’t a numbered card but the Kraken card itself, after which you move that to the bottom of its deck and bump up the Kraken meeple so you take more damage after each round. If you ever take damage from the Kraken but there’s nothing else in its deck, you lose.

If you steer the ship on to the End Token on the map, you win immediately. As in most coop games, there are more ways to lose than to win: If you haven’t reached the End Token after 5 rounds, haven’t passed the checkpoints after rounds 2/4, exhaust the Kraken deck, or move the Kraken meeple to the final space, kindly labeled as “Dead.”

What really, really works about Sail is that it’s extremely tight – I don’t think this is a game you can ever win easily. I played this with my father, an experienced bridge player, and once we got the rhythm going, we did quite well … yet whenever we won a scenario, it was by the skin of our teeth. It made for an intense but fun gaming experience: there’s such satisfaction in pulling off the series of moves you need to win without being able to communicate. After a few rounds, we started to ‘read’ each other a bit more as well, so we could strategize without communicating, which I think is also key to this sort of game (The Mind would be the best-known example, I think).

You can buy it directly from Allplay for $1 cheaper than you’d pay on Amazon, including shipping, and you could check out Sequoia as well. I also just learned that they’re reprinting the Reiner Knizia classic Through the Desert, a top 100 game for me since I started making those lists, but which has gone out of print twice in the last decade or so. I own a copy of a prior printing but I’m excited that folks will be able to buy it later this year.

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→ January 23, 2024
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Nautilus Island.

Nautilus Island is a simple family-friendly game that first appeared at Gen Con this past August, combining set collection with a tiny bit of press-your-luck that’s great for younger gamers but that I found too simple for my own tastes.

In Nautilus Island, players will try to collect sets of treasure cards from the board, which represents a shipwreck and has stacks of cards aligned in rows, with some stacks face-up and others face-down. On your turn, you’ll move your Castaway meeple to the other side of the board, next to any row except the one you just left. Once there, you may either take the top card from every stack in that row, or play a number of cards from your hand, all of one color, equal to the number of stacks in your row (one to three). If there’s an active bonus token available for that card color, you can claim it. You then have the choice to ‘close’ your set, which precludes you from playing any more cards of that color for the rest of the game (although you may take them), at which point you take the most valuable Porthole token left for the number of cards in that set. For example, if you have four blue cards in your set, and you close it before anyone else has closed a four-card set, you’ll get the Porthole token worth 8 points. Those tokens decline in value as more players claim them. There are six different colors of cards, five of which you can collect in sets plus the yellow treasure cards that are just worth straight victory points. Once players have exhausted the stacks in any row of the board, the game ends, and players add up the points from their bonus tokens, Porthole tokens, and any treasure cards to determine the winner.

There isn’t that much strategy in Nautilus Island other than the turn order aspect of where you place your meeples. The number of stacks varies by player count, but the board always has at least one stack alone in a row at the front of the boat, and at least one row of three stacks at the back. After a round, when all players have placed their meeples on one side of the boat, the new turn order is determined by who’s closest to the front of the boat – so if you moved to the one-stack row at the very front, you had a less powerful move (take or play just one card), but you go first in the next round, which might line you up to get cards you really wanted. Beyond that, however, you’re just collecting cards, and eventually have to decide how much to push your luck around closing sets, because you only score for sets you’ve closed and for which you’ve claimed a Porthole token – once all tokens for a set size are claimed, future sets of that size are worthless.

The game was co-designed by Théo Rivière and Johannes Goupy, who also co-designed last year’s Rauha and have contributed to the designs of Sea Salt & Paper, Orichalcum (still on my Shelf of Shame), and Draftosaurus, so they’ve got some pretty strong designs under their belts. This feels a bit like a throwaway design, though; my seven-year-old nephew loves it, and that’s worth something, but I’ve played this with adults and we all thought it was too light. Your best option on each turn is pretty obvious, and when to close a set isn’t that hard a decision if you’re old enough to figure out how many cards of each color might still be left in the stacks. You can play a complete game inside of 20 minutes with two or three players – I haven’t played with four but I can’t imagine it would run longer than about 25 with that player count. I’d recommend this if you have younger kids who want to join the big people at the game table but are between games strictly for kids and those for older or more experienced players, but that’s a narrow window.

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→ January 6, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

  • Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.
  • The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.
  • Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.
  • Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.
  • Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.
  • Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.
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→ January 4, 2024
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Match of the Century.

The World Chess Championship between Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky, the defending champion at the time, and American Bobby Fischer in 1972 was dubbed the “match of the century,” with Fischer winning after 21 games over 50 days to become the first American-born world champion in the honor’s history. Now you can relive this matchup – sort of – in the two-player board game Match of the Century, published in the U.S. by Capstone. It’s played with two decks of cards over a series of games to determine the champion. It’s a clever, tightly designed game, but unfortunately it’s very dry, and relies on a mechanic that both my opponent and I found very confusing. (My opponent was my father, who holds two master’s degrees, spent forty-plus years as an electrical engineer, and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.)

Each player has a small deck of cards that have two values, one for when the player is white and the other for when the player is black. Your hand size can vary from 5 to 7, and you also start each game by taking one to three pawns from the general supply. The board has four spaces for cards on each side, with a number from 1 to 4 in the middle row. The white player starts each game by playing one card to any of the four spaces on their side, and the black player must respond with a card. The cards’ values are compared – the white player’s card value for white against the black player’s card value for black – with each side adding up to two pawns to boost their strength. The winner gains those 1 to 4 points shown in between the cards, while the loser gets to execute the action or power on their card. A game ends when all spaces are filled, or when one player has gained enough points that the other can’t catch up. The winning player gains one match point; in case of a draw, each player gains one. The first player to six match points wins.

While the game isn’t from the same designer as the amazing two-player game Watergate, it has a similar look and feel, with asymmetrical decks and cards that can be played in several different ways. Watergate remains one of the most thematic games I’ve ever played – the effects of the cards tie so well to the characters and events from the actual scandal that I have always found it impossible not to get swept up in the story while playing, even though the actual third-rate burglary happened a year or so before I was born. Here, the theme doesn’t quite work as well, in part because chess is a game itself, and the game we’re playing here doesn’t look like chess at all – cards are labeled as knights, rooks, and so on, but it has no bearing on how those cards work. I thought far more of Battle Line or Air, Land, & Sea, two fantastic capture-the-flag games, than of chess, and I thought Match of the Century suffered a little in that comparison as well.

The confusion came about because you keep any unplayed cards from one game to the next (and unplayed pawns as well), so you have to flip your hand over when a new game begins, so your white cards become black or vice versa. I can’t tell you how often this screwed one of us up. Even if we both reoriented our cards, one of us would either play a card upside down (for the wrong color/action), or we’d play it correctly and then read the wrong side because of how they’re oriented on the board. I understand the intent, and I don’t see a better way to implement it, but in practice it was frustrating and detracted from the fun of the game.

The general reaction to this game has been very positive, and I think I’m in the minority here. My dad and I both enjoy games and puzzles, but we actually called this one after seven games (he won, 4 to 3, with a pretty masterful parry to my last move on the fourth ‘flag’ of the last game) because it was dragging and neither of us was having enough fun to justify playing it to the end. I’d much rather play Watergate, or even Riftforce, another capture-the-flag game, both of which are published in the U.S. by Capstone.

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→ December 14, 2023
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Hanamikoji.

I’ve owned the small two-player game Hanamikoji for probably seven or eight years now, and played it maybe twice when I first got it, but I set it aside and did what I unfortunately do with a lot of games I own but didn’t get as a review copy – I forgot about it. It popped up recently on Board Game Arena, so I got to play it a bunch of times, since a full game takes less than ten minutes, and I was reminded how elegant and great it is. It’s a capture-the-flag game, like Battle Line or Riftforce, with a simple scoring method and a strict set of possible actions that forces you to try to figure out what your opponent might be trying to do.

The theme of Hanamikoji isn’t that relevant except for the art, mostly by the wonderful Taiwanese artist Maisherly, who has also provided art for Walking in Burano, Realm of Sand, and Mystery of the Temples. The game itself is so simple you could make your own version with a bunch of index cards, although I would say just buy the game since it’s only about $17: The game has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 5 in seven different colors. The 2s come in purple, red, and yellow; 3s in blue and orange; 4s in green; and 5s in pink. A card’s frequency matches its value, so there are 21 cards in the deck.

Before each round, you shuffle all cards, remove one without showing it to either player, and then deal six cards to each player. The first player must draw one card and then take one of the four possible actions, which they will then not be able to take for the rest of that round. The second player does the same, and the play goes back and forth, with each player drawing one card and taking a previously unused (by them) action, until each player has had four turns.

In between the players sits a row of geisha cards, one in each color, and players will play cards to their side by the matching geisha to try to win each geisha’s favor with gifts. The four possible actions are to reserve a card to be played to the table at the end of the round (so a final, secret move); to discard two cards from your hands so they’re out of the round entirely; to present your opponent with three cards, where they choose one to play to their side, leaving two for you to play to your side; and to present your opponent with two pairs of cards, where they choose one to play and you then play the other. At the end of the round, you see who has more cards on their side of each of the geishas. Whoever has more cards on their side gains that geisha’s favor, and if the players have the same number on both sides, the favor doesn’t move. If one player gets the favor of four geishas, or gets the favor of three geishas worth a total of 11 or more (for example, the 5 and both 3s), they win.

If, as is most common, you complete the first round and neither player wins, the start player switches and you play a new round, but you retain the favor you won in the previous round, so if, say, you had the favor of the purple 2 geisha, and each player plays a purple card to the table, you would keep her favor. Play continues until someone meets either victory condition. If both conditions are achieved in the same round, the player with the 11+ points is the winner.

There are two tremendous strategic bits to Hanamikoji – when to use which actions, and predicting what your opponent might do. The order of your actions is entirely up to you, and in some sense depends on the cards you get. You may want to save the discard action until second or third, when you might already know some cards are worthless to you either way (e.g., the blue 3 geisha is already decided either way with two cards on one side, so the last card won’t change anything), but saving it till last might cause you to discard a card that would help you. Many players like to use the three-card action with three cards of the same color, since no matter what you get two and your opponent gets one, but that cedes the possibility of gaining control of two geishas rather than just one. The little decisions here go on and on in a way I find incredibly satisfying – like chess, but on a smaller scale.

Anticipating your opponent’s choices is, of course, inherent in lots of games with direct interaction, and here it comes into play in two ways. One is just trying to infer what geishas they might be trying to win, so you can choose where to parry and where to put cards to win your own geishas. You also need to understand their thinking, or at least try to do so, when choosing which cards to present to them in the three-card and two-pair actions, so that they’ll choose what you want them to choose. You can’t do this perfectly, since the card draws are random and you don’t see the cards they reserve or discard, but you can at least think about the odds of different scenarios. I love this part of the game, because, again, it’s a bit like chess, but with smaller trees of possible outcomes and a little randomness to help balance out small gaps in skill levels.

I’m due to revise my list of my favorite two-player games, and I have at least two newish ones in the basement to try (The Hunt & Broken and Beautiful, both from 2023) before I do so, but I think Hanamikoji has earned its way (back) on to the list. It’s so easy to teach, highly portable, has lovely art, and seems to be highly replayable, everything I’d want in a true two-player experience.

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