→ September 19, 2018
→ By

Founders of Gloomhaven.

If you go over to Boardgamegeek.com and browse their enormous database of games (over 100,000 and always growing), you’ll see the #1 game is something called Gloomhaven, a mammoth, $140 game that, in my personal opinion, isn’t actually a board game: It’s a role-playing/miniatures game that comes in a board game sort of box, but isn’t something the average person would consider a regular tabletop board game. It’s expensive, huge (the box weighs 20 pounds), and requires playing over many sessions, while borrowing heavily from the mechanics of RPGs. It may be great, but that’s not a board game to me, or, I think, to most of my readers.

The designer of Gloomhaven, Isaac Childres, has extended the brand by developing a true tabletop game in the same universe as his hit title, one that is also still complex but plays very much like a regular, heavy strategy game, and manages to introduce some clever tweaks that produce a novel playing experience. This new title, Founders of Gloomhaven, somewhat de-emphasizes the Gloomhaven part – the title on the box has Founders in huge letters and puts the “of Gloomhaven” part in a tiny font that’s easy to overlook – but still comes with a million pieces and an elaborate set of rules and mechanics to satisfy the hardcore gamers in your group. The rules are not well written or organized, unfortunately, and my first playthrough was marred by a lack of understanding of the real point of the game, along with questions we had to head online to answer, but at least when I tried the game a second time I knew what my goal was and what basic actions were required to get me there.

Founders of Gloomhaven is a game of hand management and pickup-and-delivery mechanics that also works in tile placement, route-building, worker placement, a technology tree, and some basic economic elements, so … yeah, there’s a lot going on here. Each player controls two or three of the eight basic resources at the start of the game, and players will build resource production tiles of their own while also paying to get ‘access’ to the resources owned by other players so that they can build better buildings that require delivery of those resources. Eventually, larger “prestige buildings” will appear on the board, and players will earn larger point totals by delivering resources to those while also creating new actions for players to use with their workers.

The real core of the game is in how you connect these resource buildings to the upgraded buildings, which produce level 2 and level 3 resources, and to the prestige buildings, using roads, bridges, and gates. There are ornate rules about where you can place buildings – primarily that you can’t just place new tiles next to your own tiles already on the board – and you must use those connector tiles to create uninterrupted paths from the resources’ origins to their destinations. That means you will often want to forego certain actions or income to place more roads and thus create multiple paths to ship your goods around the board, especially if your competitors might have their own resource production buildings they’re trying to connect to the same destinations.

On a turn, you play one of the five action cards from your hand (six in a two-player game, with a card to collect Income added to the hand) to the table, take its main action, and then let other players take a similar but lesser ‘follow’ action. These include Construct, where you build a personal building like a house (freeing up a worker meeple), a bridge or a gate; Recruit, where you pay one or two coins to add an adviser card to your hand, giving you an upgraded version of one of the five basic actions; Upgrade, which lets you build an advanced resource building for either 4 or 6 coins, as long as you can deliver the required goods to it; Trade, which lets you place resource stalls on the board or pay to get access to someone else’s; and Call to Vote, which triggers a vote on the next prestige building to enter play, gives you some income or road tiles or influence tokens while paying more income to all other players. Your income increases as you bring more resources on to the board, so the game has an incentive built into the rules to keep the board growing and the pace moving along, although money is scarce within the game and you’ll make tough choices every round on what to do. (I rarely build houses, even though I’d get more worker meeples from them, because they’re pricey and I don’t think they pay off as well as upgrades do.) You can also use a card from your hand to take a basic action, like taking one coin, placing one road, or moving a worker to an open space.

Each player also plays as a unique race that owns one specific resource and that has a worker placement space on the main board for the player to use once s/he has built at least one house. The choice of race affects what other basic resources you can own at the start of the game, but beyond that doesn’t seem to have much effect on game play.

The points awarded for delivering resources don’t strictly go to the player who delivered each specific resource, which is one of the most important and most confusing aspects of the rules of Founders. If you deliver leather to a prestige building that rewards 4 points for that delivery, for example, but your leather production building took hides from someone else’s trade stall, you would have to give one point to the other player and keep just 3 for yourself. This means there’s a lot of accounting to do each time there’s a resource delivery, and it’s probably the biggest factor in increasing game time, because as the board fills up, placing any upgraded building or prestige building will likely result in a pause to figure out who gets how many points.

The game ends once six prestige buildings are on the board and completed, meaning someone has delivered each resource required by that building. Our first play-through, with two players, took about 2.5 hours, a little above the 120 minute time shown on the box. I also played a solo game that took an hour or so, although I am fairly certain I played a bit loose with some of the rules (mostly because I’d already had two drinks, which is not great for modeling paths in your head, it turns out). The solo mode has you playing against the clock, trying to complete seven prestige buildings in seven rounds, with certain costs increasing on you as the game progresses; either I missed a rule somewhere or there needs to be a better way to obtain income, both currency and influence tokens, to give you a fighting chance here. (I did “win,” technically, but again I think I skimmed some rules here.)

I see two fundamental problems with Founders of Gloomhaven, starting with the rules themselves. They’re not well written or organized, and terms are used to mean slightly different things – “own” in particular has multiple distinct definitions in the game, as does “import” when referring to resources. The BGG forums for the game are filled with rules questions like those, or asking about the multifarious rules on tile placement. The other is that it seems to be too hard to get roads to place on the board – if ever a game needed a card like Catan’s Road Building development card, this is it. You can forego money in the income phase to take and place roads, but that puts you at some disadvantage in the next round, and that is one of just two ways when you can place multiple road tiles at once, the other coming with certain adviser cards you must purchase. The game can’t work without a big network of roads connecting resource stalls and buildings around the board – you actually don’t have enough claim tokens to set up unique resource buildings in each section of the board – so all this shortage does is add some needless length to the game.

One last positive aspect worth mentioning is that there is some collaborative effort to the placement of buildings, especially prestige buildings, because multiple players can benefit from any such placement. That speeds the game up a little it, and also encourages players to work together on building the network around the board (which comes with two sides, one of which is apparently harder than the other). For a game of this depth and potential time requirement, a collaborative aspect is both welcome and necessary.

The game has a list price of $80 but I’ve seen it regularly under $50; amazon has it right now for $45. I imagine it’ll appeal to Gloomhaven players for its theme, but this is much more of a game in the vein of heavy strategy titles like Great Western Trail or Whistle Stop from last year, games that focused on tile placement but also required you to manage multiple other tracks (no pun intended) at the same time that you’re building out the board. It’s solid, and offers some novelty in the semi-collaborative aspect, but I don’t think I’ll pull Founders off the shelves before some other heavy strategy games that play more smoothly or are just more fun.

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→ September 14, 2018
→ By

Lost Cities Rivals.

Lost Cities is one of the original, classic “couples” games, a strictly two-player game that’s quick to learn, has enough luck involved to allow someone who hasn’t played many games to compete fairly with an experienced gamer, and that has plenty of interaction to keep the two players engaged. It’s from Reiner Knizia, whose games are all built on a math foundation but keep that stuff under the hood. It has since fallen behind several other two-player games (notably Jaipur) in my own rankings & my house, but I’ll always have a soft spot for it because it was one of the first two-player games I ever tried and liked.

Kosmos has now released a new version of the game, Lost Cities: Rivals, that allows up to four to play at once, simplifies the scoring, and mitigates the luck factor at least a little bit so that players can strategize a little more over the deck. It still works with two players, but the design here, giving players money to bid on cards, is clearly aimed at getting the whole family to the table at once. It’s a nice filler game, nothing too novel, but again very easy for anyone to pick up and certainly appropriate for younger players (the box says ages 10+, but I’d say this is fine for kids as young as 8), and priced appropriately at $14.95 list.

The basic premise of Lost Cities: Rivals is the same as the original – players try to build ‘expeditions’ of cards in five colors by acquiring cards numbered 2 through 10 and playing them in ascending order. That is, once you’ve played a red 4 card, you can’t play the red 2 or 3 any more. The Rivals deck has two copies of each card numbered 2 through 5, and just one copy of each card numbered 6 through 10. On a turn, a player may uncover the next card in the deck and place it on the table for all players to see, or may bid on all face-up cards on the table, starting an auction that proceeds around the table until all players pass.

The scoring in Rivals is much simpler than in the base game. The original had you start with -20 points in any expedition you started, so you’d have to make up the deficit by playing enough cards to that expedition, with each card worth the points of its numerical value. That’s all gone in Lost Cities: Rivals, as you start with zero points in each expedition, score one point for each card you play to any expedition, and get a straight eight-point bonus for any expedition where you play at least four numbered cards.

Rivals also carries forward the ‘wager’ cards for each expedition; you can play one, two, or three such cards to any expedition before you play any numbered cards to it, and those increase your bonuses for each card to 2, 3, or 4 points. (The eight-point bonus for playing four cards is unaffected.) Each player begins the game with two random wager cards, while the remaining ten are shuffled into the main deck.

Players begin the game with equal stashes of gold coins – there are 36 in total, and you distribute them evenly among all players – to use to bid on cards on display. The deck is split into four piles, and when each of the first three piles is exhausted, the ‘bank’ of coins paid to buy cards is split evenly again among all players, with any remainder left in the bank. The player who wins the auction takes all cards but may discard one from the game entirely, and may not take any other cards s/he can’t legally play to his/her own tableau. Thus you may still want to bid on cards even if you can’t play some of them – there is value in discarding a card that’s valuable to an opponent, and there’s no penalty involved in winning cards you can’t play because you just leave them on the table.

The game moves very quickly since turns are short and decisions aren’t really that complex – it gets tricker towards the end when you’re hoping for certain cards and might preserve your coins to try to nab something important – with a full game taking under 45 minutes in our plays. It’s also very compact, like the original, something you could easily take with you on the road in its box or just by bringing the deck and throwing the coins in a small bag. I don’t think this will be in regular rotation here, though; it’s certainly light and simple, but I think we want a little more fun or strategy from games we’ll play often. This felt a bit too familiar, and other than the few times we were all seriously bidding on a set of cards, there wasn’t enough to get us laughing or taunting each other to make me want to pull the game out again.

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→ August 27, 2018
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Kerala.

The family board game Kerala: The Way of the Elephant first came out in 2016, and I tried it for the first time at Gen Con 2017, jumping into a game of a few friends who needed a fourth player, but I hadn’t scored a copy until just last week. It’s a very light, fast-playing game with a decent amount of luck involved, but the way the turns go, every player is going to have to cope with the randomness in the same way, and ultimately the game plays out as a sort of competitive puzzling match where each player has to build out his/her set of tiles to maximize points and minimize penalties in the same way.

Each Kerala player gets two elephant tokens and a start tile, all in the same color, with five colors total in the game (the game plays two to five, but it’s best with at least three). On each turn, the start player draws one tile from the bag – 100 tiles if there are 5 players, slightly fewer for lower player counts – for each player, and then players select tiles from those drawn to add to their tableaus. You can only add a tile next to one of your two elephant tokens, and then move the token on to the new tile. Then the start player moves around the table, so over the course of the game you should pick first through last a roughly even number of times.

The catch in Kerala is in the scoring, of course. There are five colors of tiles, and you want to try to create one area for each color in your tableau – if you have two separate areas of green tiles, you will have to choose one to discard at game-end, losing two points for each tile you lose. (You can have two areas in your start color.) Most tiles have one to three elephant symbols on them, and you’ll score a point for each symbol on tiles you haven’t discarded in the end-game scoring. You also need to have at least one area of each of the five colors at game-end, or you lose five points for each color you don’t have.

There are three types of special tiles in the bag, and they can be extremely valuable or utterly useless, depending on when in the game they appear and what your board looks like. One allows you to relocate any tile you’ve already played to the table; otherwise a tile you’ve placed can’t be moved for the rest of the game. One allows you to jump either of your elephants to anywhere else on your tableau, which can be very useful if you’ve boxed one of your tokens into an inconvenient spot. And the third type has two colors on it, one covering most of the tile and one touching a single edge; you score five points at game-end if you match the edge color to the tile adjacent to it on that side.

Kerala allows you to stack tiles on top of each other rather than just adding to the edges of your tableau, which can help you connect areas or cover tiles that would lose you points, but can also cost you more points if you have to discard an entire stack – it’s two points per tile you discard, not just for the stack – and potentially traps your elephant somewhere that makes it hard to place more tiles. You can also pass twice per game, choosing not to take any available tiles; when you do so, you lay one of your two elephant tokens on its side. You do get one point at game-end for elephant tokens still standing, although it’s generally worth losing that bonus to pass on tiles that you can’t place without incurring the two-point penalty.

Rounds can easily take under a minute, and you can play a whole game of Kerala in about a half an hour, unless you have a player who hems and haws over every little choice (I know a few of these, but I’m not one). It’s listed for ages 8 and up and I see no reason an 8-year-old or even a child a bit younger couldn’t play this with a little advice from an adult – you’re matching colors and just lightly planning ahead, but there’s only so much strategy you can employ in a game that gives you no warning or way to predict what tiles might be available. Kerala is also a bit unusual in that the designer is a woman, Kirsten Hiese: Board game design is an extremely male-dominated field, and if you see a woman’s name in the credits, it’s usually either as co-designer or as the artist. My #1 game at Gen Con this year, Nyctophobia, was designed by a young woman, Catherine Stippell; Visitor at Blackwood Grove, another game I didn’t get to demo there, earned some positive chatter, and its lead designer is Mary Flanagan (also the lead on Monarch, a game with three listed designers, two of whom are women). But this is rare, and there’s no good reason for it, which to me is all the more reason to try to boost a game like Kerala, one that is fun and easy to bring out for the whole family to play, and that oh-by-the-way happens to be designed by a woman.

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→ August 10, 2018
→ By

Century Spice Road.

When reviewing anything – books, movies, TV shows, and, yes, board games – it’s often too easy to describe something by comparing it to another more familiar title, or to say it’s a combination of this title and that title. Come to think of it, that comes up quite often in baseball too – readers and especially TV/radio hosts often ask me “who does this prospect remind you of?” I generally don’t like to answer those questions, because I find those comparisons too facile and often not very revealing – you lose a lot of nuance, and the comparison becomes an anchor point for whoever is listening or reading. If I tell you such-and-such a pitcher reminds me a lot of Roy Halladay, you’re not going to think of anything but Roy Halladay – and any further elucidation comes in the form of a negative statement, like “he’s Roy Halladay but not X.”

So now I’m going to violate everything I just said earlier – Century Spice Road is really a lot like Splendor, in a good way. It has one significant twist in the mechanics that make it a great game for people who like Splendor (and really, if you don’t like Splendor, I’m not sure if we can be friends) but want something a little different. Splendor is a shade more elegant, and gets points for bringing this general mechanical framework to the table, but Century Spice Road is perfect if you’ve decided you want something similar to Splendor but not exactly the same.

Century Spice Road is the first part of a game trilogy from Emerson Matsuuchi (Reef, Volt), the second part of which, Century Eastern Wonders, was out at Gen Con last week, with part three due out in 2019. The first two games can apparently be combined into a single game called Sand & Sea, which I will try out when I get my copy of Eastern Wonders.

Spice Road’s theme is a familiar one in the tabletop world – I’ve lost count of how many games involve merchants trading spices – while the rules are quite brief and simple. Players will collect spice cubes in four colors (turmeric, safran, cardamom, and cinnamon), and try to trade them in for bonus cards that can be worth 8 to 19 points depending on the cube costs. Players collect those cubes by playing cards that allow them to just take two or three cubes form the supply, and, more frequently, by playing upgrade cards that allow them to trade in some combination of cubes for another combination of cubes that is more valuable. (It’s not a zero-sum game; you’re trading with the market, which apparently is full of merchants who suck at math.) The cubes’ values are ordered, with turmeric the least valuable and cinnamon the most. Those values are reflected on all of the upgrade cards and on the bonus cards, so cards that require more cinnamon and cardamom cubes will be worth more points.

On a turn, a player can play a card from his/her hand, take a card from the supply, claim a bonus card with the appropriate cubes, or ‘rest’ to pick back up all cards s/he has played to the table. The queue of cards to take works with the same mechanic as many other games, notably Small World, where the leftmost (top) card in the stack is free, and you pay one cube of any color for each card you skip over to take another one, placing each cube on the card you’ve skipped. Sometimes that’s still a great play – your cube can only hold ten cubes at the end of your turn – and sometimes it’s smart to take a card from the queue because of the cubes other players have left on it.

The leftmost card in the stack of bonus cards rewards the player who claims it with a gold coin, and the next card to its right is worth a silver coin, although both piles of coins are limited to twice the number of players in that game. Game-end scoring is simple: add up the points on your bonus cards, take three points for each gold coin and one for each silver, and add one point for each non-turmeric (yellow) spice cube left on your caravan. When one player obtains his/her fifth bonus card (4-5 players) or sixth (2-3 players), players finish that round and score. Games take 30-40 minutes, turns are short, and the rules are very quick for new players to learn. It really is Splendor-ish, but with a little more engine-building to it, where instead of acquiring cards that give you permanent jewel/cube values, you play upgrade cards to boost the cubes you have. It’s a great lightweight game that capitalizes on the familiarity of an earlier game without feeling too repetitive.

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→ August 5, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 8/4/18.

For Insiders this week, I had a slew of trade writeups:

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday before I headed off to Gen Con 2018. You can see some of the photos I took there, the country’s biggest board gaming convention, on my Instagram. The writeup will come later this week.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter lately after slacking a bit during the spring (in large part because I can’t use the site’s editing function on an iPad), so, you know, do that signup.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The hard-to-believe true story of how an ex-cop led a conspiracy to rig the McDonald’s Monopoly game.
  • The Guardian rank a lengthy excerpt from a new book on denial and denialism, Keith Kahn-Harris’ Denial: The Unspeakable Truth. The excerpt covers a lot of ground, describing why denialism is more than just the denial of truth, why facts tend not to stop or change denialists’ minds, and the dangerous new phase of denialism before us.
  • The Verge has a longread on the gaming of Amazon’s listings and sales system by self-published romance authors. It’s just a bizarre subculture, and has led to a lawsuit over two authors’ use of the word “cocky” in their books titles. The journalist who wrote this piece, Sarah Jeong, just joined the New York Times editorial board; Vox, which owns the Verge, has a great piece on the non-troversy that alt-right trolls used to try to get her fired.
  • The Rumpus’ editor Lyz Lenz writes that writing still matters in the age of despair. Write like a motherfucker, as Cheryl Strayed (Wild) once wrote.
  • Why would the University of Michigan allow the presentation of “research” on homeopathy? Homeopathy is woo. After you dilute the substance in question that many times, all that remains is bullshit.
  • The Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial board called on the state to crack down on doctors who spread anti-vaccine lies, as California is trying to do.
  • There’s a huge Dunning-Kruger epidemic in the anti-vaccine community, which has also managed to diverted time and funds away from more important vaccine research towards needless studies debunking claims like the nonexistent vaccine/autism link.
  • Spike Lee accused the President of giving the green light to the KKK and other hate groups during a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian about his upcoming film Black Klansman.
  • Gizmodo details how two strangers tried to wreck an Alabama realtor’s life by spreading a false story about the realtor sleeping with someone else’s husband.
  • The Washington Post looks at the board game Twilight Struggle’s new relevance in this political environment. I happen to find the game wildly overrated; it’s long, hard to set up, and requires intimate knowledge of the two player decks to play it well.
  • This Psychology Today essay assailing the ‘lack of resiliency’ of today’s college students seems to me to paint with an excessively broad brush, and contradicts the message we give our kids today to reach out when they need help. I’m also a little skeptical of the veracity of some of the stories – they sound like they were crafted for viral tweets – but even if they’re true, I’d rather too many kids ask for help than too few.
  • The anti-LGBT group Alliance Defending Freedom has been working to undermine basic protections for LGBT citizens, especially trans youth, using disingenuous and even dangerous language.
  • Former big leaguer Adam Greenberg, whose MLB career consisted of two PA, one in 2005 and one in 2012, is now running for Congress in Connecticut as a Republican. The fact that he’s turning to politics is interesting in itself, but the NY Times author here, John Altavilla, spends almost no time on Greenberg’s policy positions.
  • Would-be populist – and clear Islamophobe and race troll – Ben Shapiro is backed by a wide network of billionaire conservatives, many of whom also support more reviled figures like Ann Coulter and the Breitbart site.
  • Turning Point USA, the hard-right conservative group founding by diaper-clad college students, has been courting and praising anti-Semitic troll Bryan Sharpe, who has denied the Holocaust occurred and uses the triple-parentheses notation favored by white supremacists to identify or out Jewish people.
  • These QAnon people are batshit insane.
  • The Pennsylvania gun rights lobby watered down a bill aimed at keeping domestic abusers from obtaining guns.
  • The Washington Post profiled New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, although the piece doesn’t question him enough about their opinion pages.
  • An Astros fan wrote an open letter to the team’s GM, criticizing the decision to acquire Roberto Osuna.
  • There’s a new shape in town – really, totally new to mathematicians and physicists, but something that appears in nature: the scutoid.
  • An “Instagram star” – seriously, how the fuck is this a thing – is in hot water after her cookbook included ‘recipes’ likely to sicken or kill people who try to eat those dishes. One example that would be obvious to anyone who knows food is the advice to forage for and eat raw morels. A good editor is important; a bad one can lead to a PR disaster. Also, maybe don’t give someone who just takes nice pictures a cookbook deal.
  • Jack White (ex-White Stripes) is now the co-owner of a baseball bat manufacturer.
  • And finally, a video, as comedian Aamer Rahman explains why there isn’t any such thing as “reverse racism:”
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    → July 19, 2018
    → By

    Istanbul app.

    Istanbul won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2014 and was one of my favorite new games of that year, ranking only behind Splendor on my personal list. Although the basic mechanics of individual turns revolve mostly around set collection, gathering items you can trade for rubies (required to win the game) or for money you can use to buy rubies, the real heart of Istanbul strategy is critical path modeling: figuring out the best way to move around the variable board to ensure you’re being as efficient as possible with your turns. Because the board itself is built each game, with a basic ‘short paths’ setup but millions of potential arrangements of the 16 tiles, you can master the concept but can’t go into a game with a set plan.

    Acram Digital has now introduced a port of Istanbul for iOS and Android, and it’s excellent right out of the chute, with just minor flaws even at its first release. The app particularly helps the novice player by making it hard to forget options you might have to enhance your turns; if you have earned a special ability or have the right to play a card that might help, the app reminds you of this, sometimes with a dialog asking if you’re sure you don’t want to use that ability, sometimes just with an icon right on the screen that puts the option in front of you. That makes game play much easier against the AI and more fair if you’re playing online against more advanced players.

    In Istanbul, each player is trying to be the first to collect five rubies, anywhere on the board. You can buy them with combinations of goods, with gold coins, by upgrading your ‘wheelbarrow’ three times (a total cost of 21 coins), or by buying both upgrades at the small mosque or the great mosque. The catch with all of those tiles, other than the wheelbarrow upgrade, is that the cost increases each time someone uses the tile, so getting there early can be beneficial … but it costs you the change to acquire upgrades that might make it easier to collect rubies later in the game. You move around the 4×4 board of tiles with your merchant and a stack of ‘assistant’ tokens; when you land on a tile and want to use it, you must leave one assistant there, or, if you’ve been there before and left an assistant already, pick that one back up. Once your stack is out of assistants, you can move but can’t take an action unless you pick an assistant back up or return to the Fountain tile and bring ’em all home. I reviewed the game in full for Paste back in 2015.

    The app is pretty much spot on; I had just one little glitch, found some spelling errors in the tutorial, and would like harder AI opponents, but that’s a modest list of criticisms for a brand new release – and it has yet to crash on me through dozens of plays. The app offers four board setups, including the semi-random setup described in the physical game’s rulebook, and lets you play one to four human or AI opponents, with three difficulty settings for the latter. The game’s icons are simple, but sometimes the function of a card or a mosque upgrade isn’t immediately clear; you can click on any of those and hit the (i) in the upper left corner to get a full description of what it does. There’s a tiny lag sometimes when you complete an action before the app gives you the icons to move to the next screen, not a serious problem but something that threw me off the first few times I played.

    The app also includes the ‘neutral assistants’ variant, where each player starts the game with one assistant in his/her stack that doesn’t belong to any single player, so if you go to a tile with a neutral assistant on it, you can pick it up and take the action even if you didn’t leave the token there in the first place. It’s definitely worth the $7 as is, although again, I think the hard AI players need to be stronger; I’m no expert at the game but can beat them more than half the time even on the harder boards.

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    → June 13, 2018
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    Compounded.

    The board game Compounded takes its theme from the world of chemistry, asking players to gather five elements to assemble any of the sixteen compounds available at any given time on the table, while boosting players’ abilities to form and fill compounds as the game progresses. The core game play is pretty simple, although the rules are more detailed than they probably need to be, and there’s one rule I could probably have done completely without.

    The elements that players will use to form their compounds are drawn at random from a bag, and no two elements appear with the same frequency – hydrogen is the most common, sulfur is the rarest. Compounds can be as simple as three elements, and can require up to eight. You can ‘claim’ one compound at a time, before you finish it, and can then place two elements anywhere on the tableau on a turn. Once you do finish a compound, you take the card, return the elements to the bag, earn three to seven points, and get to move up one of your four tracking tokens that affect how many elements you draw at the start of each turn (default is two), how many compounds you can claim at any given time, how many elements you can place on a turn, and how many elements you can store on your board (default is four). Some compounds also give you a bonus token or ongoing ability; for example, if you have three elements of any color, you can return them to the bag to take one element of your choice, but with the Pipette that ratio becomes 2:1 instead.

    The game progresses until one player has scored at least 50 points – the scoring track is a separate board showing the periodic table, so you have to at least get to tin – or one player has reached the top of three of his four tracks, or the deck of compounds is exhausted. That can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half in our experience, playing with three to five players. (It plays two with some rules variations.)

    The one rule that I would gladly ditch is the lab fire, which doesn’t do much but add some randomness and a little ability to screw your opponents to the game. Some compounds have one or two tiny fire icons at the bottom of their cards, indicating that the compounds are flammable. The deck of compound cards has five Lab Fire cards in it, and when one appears, players must add one very tiny fire token to every compound on the table that has the icon on it. Once all flame icons on a compound have been filled, the compound explodes and is removed from the board, and all elements on it are scattered to adjacent compounds (at the discretion of the player who had claimed but not finished it). There are also a few volatile compounds in the deck that explode when they’re completed and have a similar effect on the tableau. Players can complete their fire extinguishers – two oxygen, one carbon and use them to remove one flame token from any compound, although I think it’s better to save it until the end of the game for 4 extra points. And you may earn a one-time use Bunsen burner token that you can use to light someone else’s compound on fire, which is just mean.

    There’s more strategy required in Compounded that just figuring out which compounds you can easily finish; gaining the abilities to draw or place more elements each round is huge, and whichever player moves up the fastest on those tracks is going to have an advantage that will be hard for other players to catch. Getting those abilities does require some luck, however, as you have to draw the right elements to be able to complete the right compounds; we had one five-player game where one player never managed to finish a compound that would have allowed her to draw more than two elements at a time. There is a slight workaround – if you finish a compound with a graduated cylinder on it, you can then bump one track down a peg and another track up a peg, once per turn for the rest of the game – but it can lead to a serious imbalance if one player just gets the wrong draws from the bag.

    I’m all for more science-themed games, and chemistry games seem to be especially scarce, so Compounded is a welcome entry to the field. I did find some of the rules a little fiddly, and the Lab Fire mechanic didn’t really work for me other than to add more maintenance and move through the compound deck a little faster. The core game play itself, trying to figure out how best to deploy the elements you’ve drawn, is the best part of Compounded, and you can certainly tweak the other rules to work with just that basic mechanic for a cleaner experience.

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    → April 8, 2018
    → By

    Stick to baseball, 4/7/18.

    Three new pieces for Insiders this week – looking at the most prospect-laden rosters in the minors, and draft blog posts on the top prospects at the NHSI tournament and on Kentucky’s 6’11” RHP Sean Hjelle. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

    Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! You can buy it through HarperCollins directly or at any bookseller.

    And now, the links…

    • Longread: Novelist Rana Dasgupta, writing in the Guardian, looks at the ongoing decline of the nation-state system and the lack of a promising structure to replace it.
    • The Useless Department of Agriculture ruled this week that organic food producers can use the bogeyman emulsifier carrageenan, derived from seaweed and blamed (without evidence) for lots of health ills. The real problem here is that the USDA shouldn’t be ruling on what organic means; it’s not clear any more that that term has any use, and one major reason is that the federal government has watered it down.
    • ICE is trying to deport a U.S. Army veteran, contrary to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ directive that they should not do that. I feel safer already!
    • The Thai government has had a long-running endeavor to open more Thai restaurants abroad, reasoning that it would help drive tourism to the southeast Asian country (which has a not entirely undeserved reputation for unsavory tourist business). It’s been successful enough, at least, that other countries are mimicking their strategy.
    • This week’s NPR Hidden Brain podcast, a repeat of an episode from about two years ago, covered the scarcity trap, or how a lack of something leads us to focus inordinately on getting it. Among other things, it helps explain why people who live paycheck to paycheck (or with less) have a hard time spreading out the funds they do have until their next deposit.
    • The Outline looks at why Wilmington, Delaware’s ongoing problem with gun violence hasn’t abated even as the national homicide rate has declined. Three major reasons: Urban poverty, the effects of trauma, and bureaucratic infighting.
    • JAMA ran an anti-glyphosate editorial recently without disclosing the authors’ substantial conflict of interest. The authors are running what sounds like a scam site offering to test customers’ urine for the presence of glyphosate for a significant fee.
    • The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece that includes a Q&A with Rob Manfred on MLB’s end run around the courts to suppress minor league salaries, and why Manfred’s answers don’t add up.
    • The Good Phight’s Paul Boyé looks at Nick Pivetta’s new, sharper curveball. Pivetta was a sinker/slider guy in the Nats’ system, and had no real weapon for left-handed batters back when I first saw him in 2015, when he had a wide platoon split. He had virtually no split in 2016, then had a huge reverse split in the majors in 2017. With two effective breaking pitches now, though, I’d absolutely expect him to show substantial improvement against right-handed batters.
    • Tim Grierson discussed the new film You Were Never Really Here with director Lynne Ramsey and star Joaquin Phoenix, who won Best Actor at Cannes for this performance.
    • A pair of stories around my alma mater: I saw folks claiming on Twitter that Harvard had somehow suspended its largest evangelical students’ group; the truth is that the Undergraduate Council suspended funding for an evangelical group that violated the Council’s rules on non-discrimination by expelling an officer who came out as LGBT. The UC is a student-run organization, not the university proper.
    • There’s also a stalking-horse lawsuit against Harvard alleging that the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants; the truth is that the lawsuit is arranged and funded by a white conservative who opposes affirmative action.
    • The headline here is terribly misleading, but there was a flurry of stories this week like this one, about a new study arguing that diet affects mental health, particularly depression. The quick-and-dirty: eat more fiber in your diet from vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. As a whole, the prescription doesn’t sound that different from the so-called Mediterranean diet.
    • James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock went public with his alcoholism last year, and in a new piece for Bon Appetit he describes his new diet and self-care regime, a combination of good nutrition, mindfulness, and pseudoscience.
    • Serious Eats has a guide to Italian amari, potable bitters that include Campari and Montenegro. The guide includes comments from Sother Teague, owner of tiny Manhattan bar Amor y Amargo, profiled this week on Liquor.com. I’ve been to Amor y Amargo and it’s superb; Teague uses only bitters, no sodas or fruit juices, in his drinks, creating clever flavor combinations with some serious alcohol kick.
    • George Will writes that there’s no good reason to prevent felons from voting; there’s a reason states like Florida do it, of course, but it’s not a good one.
    • Board game news: The Fireball Island Kickstarter was fully funded in an hour and crossed the $1 million funding mark inside of a week.
    • Z-Man Games announced Taj Mahal, the upcoming game from Reiner Knizia, due out later this year.
    • Asmodee Digital announced the imminent release of the Terraforming Mars app, with Steam coming first and iOS/Android soon after.
    • In what appears to be an April Fools’ Day tradition, Berkeley Breathed released a new “Calvin County” crossover comic, bringing Calvin back to the meadow of Bloom County.
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    → February 27, 2018
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    Abalone.

    Abalone is an abstract two-player game from 1987 that looks a bit like Chinese checkers but plays with much more complexity thanks to a short list of very narrowly defined potential moves. It got a digital release late in 2017 from Asmodee Digital that offers a variety of starting boards and has a mostly superb interface, although they might need a harder AI player for a future update. It’s available on iTunes and Google Play for $2.99.

    Abalone is played on the central, shared area of a Chinese checkers board, a hexagon with nine rows ranging from five spaces on the exterior to nine spaces in the center row. Each player begins with 14 marbles, black or white, and must try to push six of the opposing player’s marbles off the board to win. The potential moves are:

    1. You can move one marble one space in any direction, as long as the space is empty.
    2. You can move two or three marbles in a line forward, as a unit, one space. If the next space has an opposing marble in it, but your group has more marbles than there are opposing marbles in the same row, then you can push them one space backwards. So you can move two marbles, one behind the other, to push a solitary opposing marble into an empty space beyond it, and you can move three marbles in a line to push two opposing marbles.
    3. You can move two or three adjacent marbles on the perpendicular, rather than moving them in a line (moving them like you’re sweeping them with your hand), but can’t push any opposing marbles that way.

    The game requires players to consider offense and defense; setting traps is a huge part of Abalone, and avoiding them by setting up lines of three marbles when you can is just as important, but with 14 marbles (a number that will decline as the game progresses), that’s not easy to do. You have to watch the edges to make sure you don’t lose sight of a marble that’s in danger of being pushed off the board on the next turn.

    The easy AI player is really just a tutorial/newbie opponent, while the hard player is good but I think a bit too beatable. The hardest AI will take advantage of pieces on the edge, but its trap-setting capabilities are a little weak, and I have seen it fail to take the occasional risk-free ejection. (Sometimes you can eject an opponent’s marble, but doing so always puts your marble in the vacated space, and thus you might be giving your opponent an easy push.) I’ve lost to the hard AI player, but I beat it more often than I lose, needing as few as 63 moves to win and as many as 199.


    The nicest starting arrangement in Abalone.

    The app comes with more than 30 starting boards; some players think the official, classic board is “solved,” or at least confers too much of an advantage to the start player, although given the sheer number of moves required, the game being “solved” would still require you to memorize a ridiculous number of steps. There’s also a chance of a stalemate, especially with the AI players, where both players end up repeating a loop of steps indefinitely, until one player chooses to make a more aggressive move instead. I do think the various “Daisy” boards – the app includes four – present a better challenge, reducing the chances of a temporary stalemate, and as I quickly learned, they also give the start player a great opportunity to do something very stupid at the beginning.

    I’ve never been a huge fan of chess, because the game requires more study and more forward planning than I like in a game – it’s a serious intellectual challenge, but begins to feel more like work, and mapping out the potential scenarios creates a fairly large decision tree in my head. (I’m also not great at discarding moves – I think the best chess players can prune those trees because they know their opponents will make a specific move in response to each of their own moves.) Abalone has that chess-lite feel that I love in games – yes, there are lots of potential moves, but the tree is limited because you only have one piece type, and it’s definitely easier to figure out your opponent’s likely next move.


    I won this game rather nicely.

    The app is very easy to play even on the small screen, and lets you undo any move before confirming it. You can also see the last move with a rewind feature that’s very useful, and at game end it tells you how many moves the game took and replays the entire thing from the beginning. One minor quibble is that when you leave the app for a while, resuming a game requires you to enter the menu to start a new game and then hit the Pause button in the upper right, the only thing in the app that felt non-intuitive. The tutorial is also excellent.

    Abalone was briefly on sale for 99 cents, and I imagine it will be again at some point; I’ve found it quite addictive even as I’ve gotten to be good enough to beat the AI more than half the time (which I interpret as a weak AI, not that I’m some skilled player). It offers a pass and play mode as well as networked play, which might be the better option if you’re looking for a more serious challenge instead of a minor brain teaser. I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth from it already.

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    → February 19, 2018
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    Otys.

    Otys is a new-ish midweight strategy board game from Asmodee’s Libellud imprint, released here right around the holidays, and the first title from designer Claude Lucchini. It’s a sort of futuristic deep sea-diving themed game, where players try to gather resources to complete contracts, and must manipulate two sets of tiles to be able to make moves. There might be a better game in here somewhere, but I found it rather overdesigned, and the mechanics aren’t well-connected to the theme.

    In Otys, two to four players each work with a player board that has six tokens, numbered one through five plus a neutral “X” token, and eight diver tiles, each of which has a different ability. The board has slots for the numbered tokens, and then a column where you randomly stack the diver tiles in a way that has five of them adjacent to the five numbered slots. On a turn, you will pick one of the numbered tiles, slide it to the right, use one of the five “sponsor” tiles from the central board to get something (a credit, a battery, the right to use your diver’s skill twice, etc.), and then use the ability of the adjacent diver. Four of the divers get you specific resources. The others let you add abilities like gaining a new contract card only you can complete or trading credits for resources.

    The contracts come in two forms. The game has four resources – white, green, blue, and black, which I think mean actual things like plants and water, but it really doesn’t matter to the mechanics – and some contracts simply require you gather two to four specific resources to fulfill them, gaining points and sometimes a credit or battery token. The other contracts tell you to acquire specific combinations of any resources – so, two of one type, two of another, and one of a third – where you get to pick the colors, and then have similar rewards.


    The Otys board; diver tiles are in the center column.

    The big catch in Otys, and the only mechanic here that I thought was novel, is that each token/diver row on your player board has a storage space for resources, and to fill a contract, you must have all the right resources in one specific storage space. The spaces can hold three to six resources, but in practical terms, you’re going to use maybe two of them heavily, because gaining resources in all of your storage areas will leave you unable to ever fill contracts. You can also add tokens via one diver (the ‘explorer’) that let you pay two credits, take one resource or victory point or battery now, and then place that token on its other face next to a storage area, providing you with a permanent bonus whenever you fill a contract from that area. The divers are also double-sided, with each bringing an ‘upgraded’ side that lets you invoke its power for one fewer credit or that gives you something else in addition to the single resource.

    The numbered ‘key’ tokens must be placed in the ‘hacker’ track below your board after they’re used; you can only bring them back up when the track is filled, which at the start of the game would mean using all of your tokens at least once before using them again. You get one X token to place in any row where you’ve already used the key, and there’s a way – very poorly described in the English rules – to acquire more X tokens from the central supply. This mechanic felt trite, reminiscent of games from Puerto Rico and San Juan to last year’s Entropy, where you have to use all or most of your roles and then ‘reset’ your hand, and the combination of this mechanic and the diver one – when you use a diver, s/he has to ‘resurface’ by going to the top of the queue, with everyone above him/her moving down a spot – just made the game overly complex.

    The game ends when anyone gets to 18 points, after which you finish the round so everyone can try to complete one more contract. In practice, that means 3-4 contracts plus the random point or two you’ll add along the way, and it does play in about an hour. The theme has almost nothing to do with the game, and there are way too many restrictions and twists here for me to enjoy the experience. I wish more effort had gone into streamlining the rules, even if it came at the cost of some of the artwork or component design.

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