→ November 16, 2022
→ By

Dungeons, Dice, & Danger.

Richard Garfield created two of the best-known properties in tabletop gaming – Magic: the Gathering, the original collectible card game and the most popular deckbuilding game ever; and King of Tokyo, a dice-rolling, push-your-luck game that I think is fantastic for family game nights. Now he’s joined the roll-and-write craze with Dungeons, Dice, and Danger, which takes the format and marries it to that classic of role playing games, the dungeon crawl.

Dungeons, Dice, and Danger comes with five dice, four white and one black. On each player’s turn, they’ll roll all five dice and then must create two pairs from the five to mark off two spaces on their scoresheets, which show one of four different dungeons. The scoresheets have maps, with a number in each regular room space, and some spaces that show monsters and have one or more numbers and various boxes to fill. You can only check off a box adjacent to one you’ve already marked, or one of the green start boxes around the edges of the map. The other players may also mark off rooms, but they only get to use the white dice to form those pairs, unless they use one of their three special black die markers to use the black one on that particular turn.

Monsters require multiple turns to defeat; you must roll any of the numbers shown in the monster’s room, and then mark off one small box in that room each time you get a matching number. Once you’ve filled in all of the boxes, you’ve killed the beast, earning several gems (marked on a track at the bottom of the page), and may proceed to any rooms through that one. Some monsters show numbers that are only outlined; you have to visit the adjoining room with that number to ‘activate’ that number in the monster’s room, allowing you to use that roll to deal damage to the monster.

The first player to defeat a monster gets 2-3 gems as a reward; subsequent players will still get one. Every player can also gain a gem by marking off any room with a gem in it, and can gain 3 gems by completing either of the two objectives in the lower left of the scoresheet, which vary by map. At game end, you get three points per gem, and on maps with gold in certain rooms, you get two points per gold pile marked.

There are also two treasure rooms on each map, and when you mark one of those rooms, you get to choose one of the three special benefits on the right side of the map. You can get three extra black die spaces for the rest of the game; you can absorb three damage points without marking the spaces on your health track; or you can mark off two rooms adjacent to ones you’ve already visited. There are also spaces where you just have to have two matching numbers on the dice, but it can be any pair, which isn’t explained in the rulebook.

There’s a catch, however: As in dungeon crawl games, you can ‘die’ in DD&D. If you can’t mark off two rooms or squares on any turn, you lose one health point for each dice pair you couldn’t use. There are ten spaces in the health track, and if you lose all ten, you’re out of the game. There’s also a points penalty after the first two lost health points, going up to 20 points off in the last space. You can also lose health points for being the first person to defeat the big foozle on each map, usually two boxes checked, although you get up to 6 gems for the achievement.

There’s also a solo mode, as in most roll-and-write games. Here, you are always the “passive” player – you can never use the black die without marking off one of those spaces on the right side of your sheet. You always get the maximum reward for defeating a monster, and always take the damage when you beat the biggest one on a map. You can avoid the damage from failing to use one pair of dice if you used the other pair to deal damage to a monster.

There’s some strategy to DD&D, because you’re trying to set yourself up to have as many possibilities as you can for the next roll. There aren’t that many 7s on any map, and not enough 6s and 8s. Mapping out future moves is the one bit of control you can have in the game … but ultimately, I think there’s too much randomness. Planning only gets you so far when the maps are drawn in such a way that as the game nears its end, you’re going to have only a few options available to you, and you don’t have any way to alter the dice. That’s not to say that the game is too difficult; I played all four of the maps, solo, and scored 90+ on three of them, topping out at 111 on the third map, all of which put me in the top two tiers in the scoring guide. I busted completely on the fourth one, which I think requires a fair bit of luck on the dice to complete, and busted at the very end of the second one, still scoring in the 90s because I defeated every monster but the last one. In most turns, though, I had one valid choice. There was just a single set of pairs that would both mark off rooms or boxes on my scoresheet without requiring me to take damage. The result was that the game felt rote, rather than one where I was in reasonable control of things. I love roll-and-writes, and I could see why someone might love this, especially with a theme I haven’t seen in the genre before, but this was just below the bar for me, a C+ game rather than a B-.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 7, 2022
→ By

Museum Suspects.

Phil Walker-Harding has been busy this year, with at least five brand-new titles I can think of hitting the U.S. market as well as the redesign of the 2006 game Fjords (originally someone else’s) and a new Adventure Games entry. One of the new games is Museum Suspects, which is kind of just the kids’ deduction game Outfoxed redone as a game for slightly older kids, with a fun deduction element but a huge random factor that makes it hard to play it well.

In Museum Suspects, you build the central board by placing tiles showing sixteen animals with different, ridiculous outfits on in a 4×4 grid, and players will peek at clues to try to eliminate some of those suspects to figure out which one(s), if any, committed a robbery at the museum. There are eight different clue types that differ each game; during setup, you’ll pick one of the four clue cards from each category and place them face down along the sides of the board in random order. Some clues tell you to eliminate an entire row or column, or a quadrant, while others tell you to eliminate all suspects with a hat or a scarf of a certain color. The game lasts six rounds, so you don’t get to see all the clues, and requires that you place a token on a suspect in every round.

On your turn, you choose a clue you want to look at. If it has no investigation tokens on it, you just get to look, but if it already has a token on it, you must have a token of equal or higher value to be able to look at it. After you’ve peeked, you place one of your numbered investigation tokens on the clue, making sure it’s at least the same value as the highest token that was already on it. You’ll marking off several squares on your personal scoresheet to eliminate up to four more suspects for each clue. Afterwards, you place another of your investigation tokens on one of the suspects on the board. If that suspect turns out to be one of the guilty parties, you will receive that many points at game-end. If you believe that none of the sixteen is guilty, you can place a token on the Emergency Exit tile to try to gain points for that outcome instead.

After six rounds, you reveal all eight clues and all players jointly flip over suspect tiles as the clues eliminate them. Then you hand out points based on the values of players’ investigation tiles on the remaining suspects – a player may place more than one such tile on a suspect, just doing so on different turns – and determine who has the highest total. There’s no tiebreaker, but it’s possible for nobody to win if you all guessed wrong.

The core mechanic here is almost identical to the deduction part of Outfoxed, which is a very fun cooperative game for kids as young as 5. To distinguish itself and play well with older kids, Museum Suspects really needed to do something different beyond making it a competitive game. If we knew which clue type was in which location, for example, you could plan which clues to target – you might see that looking at the clue showing one type of animal would be more fruitful than looking at the clue about a type of hat. Instead, it’s just random, and so are your choices – and you have no idea whether it’s worth going after a certain clue with one of your stronger investigation tokens. The game also isn’t great with two players, because the small competitive aspect of the investigation tokens on the clue cards doesn’t work – you can more or less avoid each other’s clues and tokens, and neither of you will have any incentive to use your more valuable ones on clue cards.

Museum Suspects just misses the mark for me; I’d actually rather play Outfoxed, even though that’s clearly a game for younger players. This game doesn’t let you develop any sort of strategy, and even in a game for ages 8+, that’s a minimum requirement. You could house-rule it, where you know what clue is placed in each location, following the precise order that’s shown in the rulebook (which isn’t meant to dictate their placement – I asked Walker-Harding and he confirmed). I judge games as is, though, and I didn’t think this one worked.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ October 27, 2022
→ By

The Red Cathedral.

The Red Cathedral slipped through the cracks of my reviews over at Paste, as it came out at the very end of 2020, and I didn’t get a copy until Gen Con of 2021, so it missed my 2020 best-new-games list but was ineligible for the 2021 list. I’ve played it a few times now, including its very good solo mode, and I have to say it’s one of the best games of its weight (sort of medium-heavy) I’ve ever played, and is both great value at under $35 and for such a small box.

Players in the Red Cathedral will work to construct the building of the game’s title, which has six sections per player and varies slightly in shape in each game, with base, middle, and top sections that can be accentuated with different ornaments. Players move dice in six colors around a rondel to gather resources they can use to build sections or ornaments, or to collect coins, but choosing which die to move isn’t as simple as just figuring out what resource you want – you can get much more stuff if you pick the right one, or you might not move a die to prevent your opponents from getting an even bigger windfall. You gain points mostly for building cathedral sections and ornaments, although there are other ways to gain a point here or there.

There are two scoring tracks in The Red Cathedral, although they’re overlaid on each other and you don’t have to keep track of two separate point totals (like in Rajas of the Ganges, although I like how that determines the end of the game). There’s the Reputation point track, which just looks like a regular scoring track around the edge of any game board; and the Prestige track, which starts out with a marker every 4-5 spots, but those gaps quickly drop to 3 spots and then 2, eventually lining up with the Reputation track in the 40s. This matters a lot early in the game, because you can drop down one Prestige point to gain two coins, and because placing ornaments gains you one or three Prestige points depending on whether you add one gem or two (in the two colors) to the cost. You can only build an ornament on a section that’s already completed, although you can do so on someone else’s section. You’re limited to four ornaments, two for middle sections and one each for the top and bottom sections.

The dice rondel is the real heart of the game and its most clever aspect. There are eighteen spaces on the circular track, divided into six zones. At the start of the game, the five dice go into five separate zones after someone has rolled them all. On your turn, you may pick any die and move it forward the number of zones shown on its face (1 to 6). Then you collect the reward for that zone, resources, coins, or points, times the number of dice currently in that zone, which can be up to three – so you might get, say, 6 bricks, or 3 green gems. Then you re-roll all dice in that zone for the next player.

Each zone also has a “guild” card next to it that offers you a choice of two benefits when you move a die to that quadrant of the rondel. For most of those cards, which change every game, you can choose either something for free, or you can pay coins/exchange resources for something better. Thus every time you choose moving a die as your main action, you have to consider where the other dice are, what resources you’ll get, what guild card is there, and how this might leave the dice for the next player.

Your other choices of actions are to place one of your six banners on an unclaimed segment of the cathedral or deliver resources to a building site to complete a section or build an ornament. Four of those six banners start out in spaces in your inventory, which can hold up to ten resources when all the banners are placed, so you have a strong incentive to get out and claim some sections early on to free up room on your board. Delivering resources is the one frustrating part of the game: you can only deliver up to three resources in one turn, but many sections require four or five resources to complete, so it’ll take you two separate turns to do it. You can, however, deliver to multiple sites at once, so a little more planning can make this less inefficient.

The game ends when someone completes their sixth section, after which you add up the scores. Most of your points come from completing sections, which vary in their returns and may give you some coins but fewer points rather than just a higher point total; and ornaments, which, as I wrote above, come in the form of Prestige points and are more valuable earlier in the game. Ornaments only require one or two resources to build, but if you can also spend one green and one purple gem when building one, you max out your turn with three Prestige points.

The box suggests a game time of 80 minutes, which is probably true when everyone knows the game; the last time I played, with two friends who hadn’t played before, we ran closer to two hours for the full game, although I can say all three of us felt like it was a great game. (I lost, though.) There is a smart solo mode here that works well to mess with you by limiting your options, although I think it’s far more satisfying to play this with at least one other person so that the competitive aspect of dice selection comes into play.

There is an expansion called Contractors that came out earlier this year, which adds a lot of new elements, including another game board, diamonds as a wild resource, an additional (black) die, and more. The more games I play, the more skeptical I become of the majority of expansions; a few are good, like Pandemic’s On the Brink, Ticket to Ride’s 1910 (even if just for the full-sized cards), or Carcassonne’s Traders and Builders, but most just complicate the original’s game play without making it truly better. I can’t tell you if Contractors does that, because I saw it on a table at Gen Con and watched a little bit of game play, after which I thought, “I don’t need that.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 4, 2022
→ By

Ready Set Bet.

Ready Set Bet is a raucous betting game that’s great for a larger group, with up to 9 folks able to play at once (and if you have ten, once can serve as the race’s announcer), from John D. Clair, the designer of Mystic Vale, Cubitos, Dead Reckoning, and Space Base. He’s also a Dodgers fan, if memory serves correctly, but regardless, all of his previous games have been more gamers’ games, while Ready Set Bet is much lighter and is more of a party game at heart – but a surprisingly fun one given how common and boring the betting theme can be.

Ready Set Bet involves four horse races, and players will bet in real time, placing their tokens on the giant central board, as someone rolls the dice to move the nine horses along the race track, betting until three horses pass the red line on the track. At the end of each round, all bets are paid off, and some bets require players to pay a penalty if those bets didn’t come through. After the first three rounds, each player gets their choice of two cards to give them an extra power through the rest of the game or a one-time bonus. After four rounds, the player with the most money wins.

The horses are represented by the numbers 4 through 10, plus two more horses that bear two numbers, 2 and 3 as well as 11 and 12. The dice you roll to move the horses are just two regular six-sided dice, so the horses in the middle (6, 7, and 8) have a natural advantage, but in Ready Set Bet, if you roll any total twice in a row other than 7, that horse moves several extra spaces to try to compensate. I’ve had the 4 horse win because I happened to roll it three times in a row, which moved it nine extra spaces and gave it an insurmountable lead.

There are two major tweaks to the common betting-game formula in RSB, both of which work quite well. The board has betting spaces for every horse to win, places, or show, and each space has a multiplier on it to represent the payout if that bet comes off. The multipliers are higher on horses farther away from the middle numbers of 6-8, but many of those bets also have a small penalty if you bet on them and the horse lets you down, although it’s generally just a dollar or two. There are also some betting spaces on the board beyond individual horses – betting that a horse in a certain color group will win, or betting on one of the “unusual scenario” cards that appear in rounds 2-4 that have conditions like one horse winning by a certain amount or at least four horses not getting past the one-quarter mark.

The other big tweak is that once someone places one of their tokens on a betting space, it’s occupied for the remainder of that race. Each player has a set of betting tokens numbered 2, 3, 4, and 5, and with fewer than seven players each player gets a second 3 token. To place a bet, you take one of those tokens and place it on any betting space that isn’t currently occupied. If your horse comes through, you get the value of your token times the multiplier on the betting space. There’s no benefit to keeping any of your tokens, so the incentive is to place them all before the third horse crosses the red line – roughly two-thirds of the way across the race board – and to do so sooner than other players do, since most of the betting spaces are limited to just one token.

I’ve played Ready Set Bet as a player, but also played it with family and served as the dice-roller and announcer, including my niece and nephew, who are now 10 and 6, respectively … and my nephew ended up winning outright, because he just bet big on any horse that got an early lead, and at one point got an extra 7 token by way of one of those end-of-round bonus cards, placing it on a 7x betting space for a horse that won. That points to the game’s accessibility, and the way that a little luck can balance things out. I didn’t expect to like this game all that much given the premise, but the simplicity of play and the way everyone, with folks aged 6 to 75 when I played with family, got into it ended up selling me on the game after all.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ September 16, 2022
→ By

Power Failure.

Power Failure is a clever small-box game from Genius Games that rethemes a Taiwanese game called Power On!, taking some of the concepts of the great route-building game Power Grid while including a key message about climate change. Sometimes a game just hits you the right way; Power Failure has just so-so ratings on BGG, for example, and my daughter really didn’t care for it, but I think it’s both clever and fun. It’s great value at $17 or less, as on Amazon or Miniature Market.

Power Failure has two main conceits: You’re building an engine of power plants that you can fire once per turn, with each plant type requiring different fuel (in the form of cards); and building and firing plants usually involves adding carbon tokens to the shared tower in the middle of the table. When that tower falls, it ends the turn of the player who placed the last token on it, and everyone else has to discard a card from their hands, simulating the environmental cost of generating energy, especially through dirtier forms like coal and natural gas. At the end of your turn, you can “fire” all your plants of one type, and then use the total power you generated to claim a City card that represents the power demand of one city, which is the only way to gain victory points in the game.

Beyond the tower, this is a hand-management game – you get a hand of cards that include power plants, fuel cards for some of those plants, and special action cards. On every turn, you can take three total actions, which can include selecting a card from the common market, playing a card from your hand (building a plant or using a special action card), or firing up all of your plants of a single type. You can do the same action type twice, and in the first two or three rounds you’ll use all three actions to play or draw cards.

There are three main types of power plants in Power Failure, coal, natural gas, and nuclear; plus renewable energy plants that require no fuel and fire automatically on every turn. All power plant types require that you add one carbon token to the tower when you build them. Coal plants require one coal fuel card each to fire them, and you have to add three carbon tokens per plant when you do so. Natural gas plants require one natural gas card each, and you add two tokens per plant when you fire. Nuclear plants don’t add carbon tokens, but you need two separate cards for each plant you fire, one for fuel and one to represent the handling of the nuclear waste. Some renewable plants generate a variable amount of energy, from 0 to 2 units, based on the number showing on the top card on the deck, so you can’t build an entire energy strategy around them, but they can be enough to supplement your other energy sources to get you to a better city card.

Thus your goal is to build an engine of plants, likely concentrating on one type, that you can fuel and fire every other turn or so to try to fulfill a contract on a city card. The catch for coal and nuclear plants, which are cheaper to fire, is that they pollute. For every coal plant you fire, you must add three carbon tokens to the tower, and for every natural gas plant, you must add two. So you might build an engine with three coal plants, which would generate 18 power, enough to claim any contract in the game, but you have to add nine tokens to the tower, doing so one at a time. The tokens are hexagonal wooden pieces about a half-inch thick, and you can stack them flat or vertically, depending on how hard you want to make it for the next player. When the tower falls, your turn ends, you generate no power, and everyone discards a card, after which you reset the tower by starting out with three tokens and play resumes. There’s a little dexterity involved here, which does exclude certain people from playing, unfortunately. I do think the idea is clever because of the way it introduces variability into the mix – every form of power production pollutes at some level, but it’s hard to predict who will actually be the polluter to push the total over some threshold.

Games take 45-60 minutes, and I think it’s good for any age range that can handle the token placement part of the game. There’s some light text required, but it’s manageable for younger players. I also appreciate the color scheme, which is brighter and clearer than Power Grid’s fifty shades of grey. It’s a serious engine-builder at heart, though, with the dexterity element a small part of the game. You can play it mostly solo against other players, or you can play more competitively with a “take-that” strategy that swipes fuel cards your opponents might need. I think it’s a small gem of a game that deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten so far.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ September 13, 2022
→ By

Paris: La Cite de Lumiere & Eiffel.

Paris: La Cité de Lumière is a short but involved two-player game from 2019, bringing polyominos, tile-laying, and a unique drafting mechanism into a tight 30-minute playing time. It received a major expansion late last year in Paris: Eiffel, which debuted at Gen Con 2021 but hit the mass market this year, bringing further scoring cards to allow players to change strategies – but it doesn’t address my core issue with the game, the way the drafting forces you to potentially stop selecting building tiles.

Each player begins the game with eight square cobblestone tiles, each of which is divided into four squares that can be blue, orange, or purple, or just show a streetlight. One player is blue and the other is orange, while purple squares can belong to either player; you can only place a building on squares of your color or grey. In phase one, you may either place one of your cobblestone tiles on the game board, which is actually set inside the bottom of the box, or take one of the polyomino-shaped building tiles from the supply – but once you’ve placed all 8 of your tiles, you can’t take another building.

Paris: La Cité de Lumière base game.

In phase two, players alternate placing the building tiles they’ve taken on to the board. There are also eight Action cards placed around the board/box in each game, out of a set of 12 possible cards in the base game, which you can use to gain additional points or sometimes violate some of the rules of the game; each player has four action tokens that they will use to claim those cards during this phase, and once used a card can’t be reused. At game-end, you score for each of your buildings that is adjacent to a streetlight, earning the product of the number of lights and the number of squares covered by that building; and for your largest contiguous group of buildings, one point per square. You also gain a point for each postcard you used that shows a stamp, and lose 3 points for each building you took but failed to place (surprisingly easy to do).

The postcards are a huge part of the game because they’re so powerful. One allows you to place a fountain tile on cobblestones of your color or the neutral color, and then you get 3 points for each of your buildings that touches it. Another gives you a giant streetlight that lights up buildings two squares away rather than just adjacent spaces. Another gives you a purple cobblestone to place on a square of your opponent’s color, after which you immediately place a building on it. The game comes with a recommended set of eight cards for your first game or two, leaving some of the cards with complicated scoring for experienced players, although I don’t think there’s that much of a gap.

Paris: Eiffel adds eight more action cards, mostly based on actual landmark buildings in the city, and add new ways to score along with 3-D cardboard buildings you might place on the board. You still use just eight cards in the game, but can now mix and match from 20 choices rather than 12. The Eiffel Tower card lets you place the tower on a 4×4 area that contains at least one streetlight, after which those lights double their point value for scoring, while you also get two points for squares of your player color under the tower. The Obelisk (found in the Place de la Concorde) gives each player two points for every building they place that falls in the same row or column as the obelisk sits. Notre Dame and the Catacombs let you piggyback on one of your opponents’ buildings for more points or to count it in your largest building group. Quartres Pauvières lets you score for the number of board edges your buildings touch – 1, 2, 4, or 8 points.

The soring is definitely point salad-y, although the cards mean that the players get to pick their own scoring methods to some extent, and I think that’s probably the game’s greatest strength. It’s a novel approach to the asymmetrical two-player game. The weird drafting mechanism at the start just sinks the game for me, unfortunately. People do really love this game, though – it’s highly rated on BGG, which skews towards more complex games, but also has sold well enough to merit an expansion. It just isn’t my cup of thé.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ September 7, 2022
→ By

Corrosion.

I’m a fan of midweight engine-building games, from Gizmos to Fantastic Factories to Wingspan to Everdell to Furnace; it doesn’t seem to matter what else is in the game, as long as there’s a straightforward engine-building mechanic and the game doesn’t take two hours or require a 20-page rulebook, I’m interested.

Corrosion appeared in the U.S. last winter, another import by Capstone Games (publishers of Ark Nova, one of the best games of 2022 so far), and seems to have slipped a bit under the radar, but I like its twist on engine-builders: Most of the machines you build, and even some of the parts you use to build them, will rust after a few turns and must be discarded. Only the most expensive machines, which require chrome gears that don’t rust, last for the remainder of the game. It reminded me in theme of the CPRG Baldur’s Gate, where weapons and other items you get in the early part of the game randomly fall apart because of impurities in the iron mined in that region, but here is seamlessly integrated into an engine-building game with some contract bonuses and very light deckbuilding elements as well.

Players in Corrosion are trying to build the most valuable factories, using three types of gears (small, medium, and chrome) and steam to do so, taking actions by playing engineer cards from their hands and placing them in the sector matching their number. You can recruit better engineers to improve your deck, and you can build “one-shot” machines that work one time and are discarded, “turning” machines that operate several turns until they rust, and two levels of permanent machines that require chrome to build but are also worth victory points at game-end. You can also take bonus certificates that give you game-end points for certain conditions, although doing so requires trashing an engineer card from your hand.

Each player’s board has four sectors on it and a wheel that you will turn one sector at a time; when the wheel’s fourth segment, marked X, passes a sector, the player discards all gears stored in that sector and all one-shot or turning machines built in that sector, retrieves any engineers played to that sector, and then activates all turning machines in other sectors and all permanent machines on their player boards.

The game ends when the supply of award certificates or of special victory point markers (which players can get in several ways) is about to run out, which means you don’t actually get that many of your own turns, so Corrosion also lets you follow other players’ actions if you want. When one player plays an engineer card, any other player can mimic that card’s action by playing an engineer from their own hands of the same color and a higher value (cards are 1-4 and 4+, which is wild and matches any color). It allows you to fine-tune some of your action choices during the game so you’re not just restricted to the engineers in your hand, while also giving more value to the recruiting action, as all of the engineers you’ll add to your hand are valued 2 and up.

Corrosion also comes with an excellent solo mode where you’re just trying to maximize your score before you run through the automa deck four times; all the automa player does is remove some engineers and machines from the display, which can include the chrome machines that also carry special victory points. It’s more a matter of cycling through the machines and engineers, occasionally tripping you up by removing something you wanted but also giving you more options, and testing your ability to build a productive engine. I haven’t cracked 50 points yet, which is a low bar to clear, but I do find the solo mode fun.

The art is great here, but I do think the darker industrial theme makes this look heavier than Gizmos or Fantastic Factories despite being of similar weight, possibly even lighter weight than FF is; those games, which I do like better than Corrosion for other reasons, have bright colors and almost goofy artwork that make them seem lighter. Gizmos is definitely easier to learn, but the engines you build aren’t any less complex, maybe even more complex than those here but without the rust mechanic. Games should take 60-75 minutes once everyone has the idea. I give it a thumbs up, even though I would probably always pull Gizmos off the shelf before this one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ September 6, 2022
→ By

Get on Board: New York & London.

Get On Board: New York & London is the latest game from the designer Saashi, whose solitaire game Coffee Roaster is the best purely solo game I’ve ever played (and very accurate to its theme – the man clearly knows his coffee). This one is a two to five player game, a flip-and-write game with a fun route-building mechanic on a shared central board, as players compete to build bus routes to pick up and deliver passengers in the most efficient way for victory points.

The board here has two sides, New York for 2-3 players and London for 4-5, with only one rule difference between them (put a pin in that for a moment). Players start at different traffic lights on the map, and then will build a route from there by adding their own road pieces to cover individual blocks, never branching or doubling back, and marking off every icon their route touches on their personal scoresheets. There are twelve ticket cards that will determine how many pieces each player places per turn, and in what shape, with each player placing a different number/shape for tickets from what their competitors place.

Every intersection on the map has something there, and you score just about everything. Little old ladies are just happy to be there, so you score 1 to 3 points just for picking them up; everyone else has to be dropped off in some way, though. Tourists want to be delivered to tourist sites, and you get more points if you gather more tourists on your bus, up to 4 at a time, before getting to one of those sites. Workers want to go to office buildings, up to 3 at a time, with a bonus when you do so. Students don’t need to be dropped off in order at schools, but you do need to get your route to both to score, because your points are the product of the number of students you picked up and the number of schools on the route.

When you place a piece on a street where your opponent already has one, or, on the New York map, on a midtown block that’s marked in black, you cause Traffic, and you fill in one of the circles on the bottom of your scoresheet. The first few are just -1 point for every other circle, but eventually it’s -1 every time, and if you place a piece on a block that has multiple opponents’ pieces on it, guess what? It’s one circle for every piece already there. You can also choose to lose points if you want to alter the shape of pieces called for by the ticket – for example, if the ticket’s number calls for you to place three pieces all in a straight line, but you want to make one turn, you’d mark off one of the five spots at the top of the sheet. The first costs you 1 point, the next three cost you 2 points each, and the last one costs 3, after which, you’re stuck.

There are two other bonuses available, which can be worth up to 10 points each. Every player gets a card showing three lettered spots on the board, and will score 10 points if they get their bus route to hit all three of them. There are also two common objective cards in every game, where you have to pick up five students/tourists/workers or visit all three light blue or dark blue tourist sites, worth 10 points each for the first player to achieve it and 6 points for everyone after. Finally, there are four named sites on each map, a university, two tourist sites, and an office building, and when you reach one of those, you get a bonus equal to the number of matching people you’ve picked up in total to that point in the game.

It’s a lot of scoring rules, but the game play itself is simple and quick. Flip the next ticket. Add to your route, from the endpoint, matching the shape given by the ticket number and the guide on your scoresheet. You place those pieces, marking off everyone you pick up and every building you cross on your sheet, and if your route ends at a traffic light, you get to place a bonus piece for free. After twelve rounds, you’re done – add up your points (six categories), make your deductions (two), and you get your total. For two people it can take under a half an hour; for four, the most I’ve played with, it can take 45-50 minutes.

I do think the game shines at four players; the London map is a little better than the New York one, because it’s wider and gives you more flexibility. It’s worst with three, as the New York map gets too crowded, although I haven’t tried London with five. It’s probably fine for players 10 and up, maybe even as young as 8 if they know games, and I love the way the game encourages cognitive flexibility. You can also play this online at Board Game Arena, which has a great implementation. I think it’s likely to make my best games of 2022 list when I do that in December.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ August 30, 2022
→ By

SCOUT.

SCOUT was one of the three finalists for this year’s Spiel des Jahres award, losing out on the honor to the great game Cascadia, and just became widely available in the U.S. this summer with a new print run. It’s a small-box game from the Japanese publisher Oink, whose other tiny-box games include Deep Sea Adventure and A Fake Artist Goes to New York, and is their best title yet – a smart, abstract card game that’s very easy to teach but offers huge replay value.

In SCOUT, players receive hands from a deck of cards numbered from 1 through 10, with two numbers on each card, so it has a different value depending on its orientation. The dealer deals out the entire deck of 45 cards (removing a few for player counts below 5), and each player looks at their hand without rearranging any cards. You have to fight that instinct to sort them, which is difficult for most people. You can only flip your entire hand upside down, so you have two choices for your starting hand.

During the game, players will try to play sets (cards with the same value) or runs (cards in sequential value, ascending or descending) of greater value than whatever set/run is currently on the table, playing only cards that are adjacent within their hands. A set beats a run, if the number of cards in each is the same; a set or run of more cards than what’s currently on the table always wins; and if the type and number are the same, you need higher card values to beat the active set/run. So two 9s beats two 8s, a 5-4-3 run beats a 4-3-2 run, but a 9-8 run doesn’t beat a 2-2 set.

If you can play something better than what’s on the table, you take the current active set/run and put them face down in front of you, earning one point per card thus captured at the end of the round. If you can’t or don’t want to beat the active set/run, you can “scout,” taking one card from either end of the active group (but not the middle) and putting it in your hand, anywhere your like, oriented either way. The player who played that active set/run then receives a one-point token from the supply. This is the key to the game – taking the right cards to create new sets or runs in your hand, and doing so in a way that can create further sets or runs when you remove other cards by playing them.

Each player also has one “scout and show” token, usable once per round, where they can do both actions in the same turn – take one card from the table, then play a new set or run to beat and capture the active one. The round ends when one player has no hand cards remaining, or if all players scout and the turn passes back to the player who originally played the set/run on the table. Players get one point per captured card, one per token received from other players scouting their cards, and then deduct one point for every card left in their hand (except for the player whose set/run ended the round). The game continues with one round per player, so everyone gets to be the start player once, after which you add up all your points from all rounds.

SCOUT is incredibly easy to teach, and quick to play, working really well at 4-5 players; I actually haven’t tried it with 2, because there are a bunch of extra rules that I think will make it far less fun and simple. There’s some strategy to when you choose to take cards, and how you integrate them into your hand to create new sets/runs and perhaps set up further sets/runs after you’ve played something, while you also have to keep an eye on opponents’ hands to see if anyone is getting close to playing their last card. Full games take a half hour or so once everyone has the hang of things. The list price is $23, but Oink’s second printing of SCOUT sold out almost immediately; I sprinted to their booth on my first day at Gen Con to secure a copy because I was sure this would happen. If you can get a copy somehow, or are willing to wait for the next print run, it’s a definite winner, with bonus points for the easy teach and for its portability.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ December 1, 2021
→ By

Furnace.

Furnace was one of the big hits of Gen Con in 2021, earning a big crowd around the two booths demoing it (Arcane Wonders is the U.S. distributor and had copies for sale, while the original publisher, Hobby World, offered demos). It’s a brilliant game that combines resource trading with engine-building over four rounds, with some simultaneous actions that can keep game play to 30-40 minutes once everyone knows the game. If you’ve played Century Spice Road, Furnace takes that game’s main feature and builds a way better game around it – and I like CSR quite a bit. Furnace is out of stock at amazon now but I believe another printing is coming.

In Furnace, players will bid on cards from a central market and add the ones they win to their own play areas, where they will create engines of card actions they’ll execute in order, one card at a time, to try to convert resources into other resources and eventually into money. Furnace’s most notable new mechanic is that there is value in losing the bid for a card: If you bid on a card but don’t win it, you get “compensation,” which is shown at the top of that card, separate from the card’s actions (shown on the bottom). Compensation can be straight resources, or the right to convert resources you already own into others. You get that compensation multiplied by the value of your losing bid, which can be up to 3 – so if you bid 3 and lost, you triple the resource gains, or get to do the conversion up to three times. Thus you will often bid on cards you intend to lose, or will bid on cards hoping someone else will outbid you.

The bidding is independent of your cash and your resources; each player has four tokens, numbered 1 through 4, that they bid on the cards in the display. Players go around the table, bidding one token per turn, until everyone has used all of their tokens. After the bidding is completed and players receive the cards they won or compensation they receive, they place those cards in their play area, next to the cards they already have – the basic game lets you reorder the cards every turn, but I prefer the advanced rule where you must keep them in a row and can’t re-order the ones you already have – executing the actions on those cards, top to bottom on each card, then left to right. You repeat these steps over four rounds, and the game ends.

The cards you acquire all have at least one action available now, and each has one action that is shown only in outline at the bottom. That action is available after you upgrade the card, which requires an upgrade token and an upgrade action, both of which are shown on every player’s start card; you can upgrade as many cards with that action as you have available tokens. The resource exchanges are always in your favor, as in CSR, so the only reason you might choose not to use one of those actions is later in the game when you won’t have a chance to cash out the second resource type. Early in the game, at least, it’s usually a good idea to convert everything you can, and then tailor your bids in the next round to whatever resources you seem to have and are able to generate.

The game also has five Capitalist cards that you can distribute randomly that give every player a special ability throughout the game, such as an extra value-2 token for bidding, or the ability to gain extra compensation when losing a bid. There’s a fair dispute among players about whether these cards are balanced enough, but they also aren’t necessary to play or enjoy the game.

Furnace is easily one of the best games of 2021, and has the advantage of being accessible, both in terms of rules and playing time, while also presenting players with sufficient challenge for even more experienced gamers. There’s some randomness in the card draws – when I taught my parents at Thanksgiving, we had an unfortunate first round where almost none of the eight cards in the market offered resources as compensation, so everyone got off to a slower start – but after that, it’s all up to you. It’ll certainly end up in my top 10 for the year, which is scheduled to run next week over at Paste.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,