→ July 6, 2010
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Lost Cities.

As much as I love the new wave of German-style boardgames, the category lacks viable two-player options. Many games, like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, require a minimum of three players, while others, like Zooloretto and Power Grid, include two-player variants that don’t work as well as the three-plus rules do. We’ve found a couple that work well for two players – Carcassonne, San Juan, and Dominion are probably the best – but the list is relatively short.

Lost Cities is a real rarity among great German-style games in that it’s strictly a two-player game, only the second (along with the card game Catan, a two-player offshoot of Settlers) in our collection, and it has the twin virtues of being quick to learn and quick to play, so that you can run through several games in an evening rather than devoting the entire night just to setting up Puerto Rico. Lost Cities – which went in the less common direction by spawning a multi-player game, Keltis, which ended up winning the Spiel des Jahres – is simple, portable (just a deck of cards and a small board that isn’t fully necessary once you know how to play), and has an excellent blend of strategy and chance that prevents the game from becoming repetitive yet gives the player some control over his fate.

Each player in Lost Cities may begin, over the course of the game, up to five “expeditions” using cards; each expedition costs 20 points once initiated, but there’s no cost associated with an expedition that’s never started. The deck of cards contains twelve cards in each of five colors, representing the five expeditions: One card each from numbers 2 through 10, and three “investment” cards that allow the player to double, triple (if he plays two), or quadruple (if he plays all three) his profit or loss from that particular expedition. On each turn, a player plays one card to an expedition or discards one to the board and draws a single replacement from the deck or the discard piles. When the deck is exhausted, you add the values of the cards in each expedition, subtract 20, and then multiply the result by 2, 3, or 4 depending on the number of investment cards that expedition, gaining another 20 point bonus for any expedition that contains at least eight cards.

The catch is that cards must be played in order – investment cards come before card 2 – but the deck is fully shuffled and players only hold eight cards in their hand at any given time. Thus, players face decisions like holding on to high-numbered cards while hoping to get lower numbers or investment cards to fill out the expedition, or risking beginning an expedition where he isn’t close to the 20 card points required to turn it profitable. If you discard a valuable card, your opponent may pick it up, unless his expedition has already gone past the number of the card you’ve given up. When the game is nearly over, a player may choose to pick up discards rather than draw from the deck to try to delay the end and allow him to play more cards – but the other player can just keep drawing from the deck to try to end it sooner.

Once we got the hang of it, we found that games only lasted ten minutes or so, meaning that one of us can try avenge his/her losses in the same night, breaking up one of our major frustrations with the Catan card game or massive multi-player games like Puerto Rico and Agricola*. There’s no particular skill required beyond arithmetic, so even the most ardent RBI-lover could handle the math, and the basic strategies are straightforward and shouldn’t take long for new players to figure out. I’d boil down those strategies to two archetypes that the players can blend as needed: You can try to hit home runs on one or two long expeditions with investment cards, or go for 5-10 points on four or all five expeditions. Your optimal strategy or mix of those two depends on the cards you draw, but since you only see eight at the start the game, you have to make some educated guesses – you could argue that there’s a little probability involved here but I’m not saying anyone needs to bust our their old permutations formula – and at some point will end up at the mercy of the deck and your opponent.

*Yes, I now own Agricola, a birthday present from a determined wife who bought one of the last copies from the game’s last print run – it’s out of stock just about everywhere until at least August – and we’ve played it twice. When I get through a few more games, I’ll write it up.

The simplicity of Lost Cities meant that I could even play with my four-year-old daughter, who wanted to play as soon as she saw the cards in my bag while we were in St. Kitts. We never keep score, but to make it interesting for her, I told her she just had to make sure each card she put down was bigger than the one before it, she had to match the colors, and her goal was to make each column add up to more than twenty (she’s not adding to twenty yet, but it turned into a whole conversation about how you add numbers together). We’d play the game and she’d be excited that, say, three of her five expeditions reached the magic number of 20. Those of you with children probably understand this more than those of you who haven’t crossed that chasm yet, but it was fun for both of us to play like that, and she enjoys playing games she sees mommy and daddy playing.

One final advantage to Lost Cities: It’s cheap for a German-style game, and so in many ways this could serve as a gateway game to the bigger, more complex entries that tend to dominate the rankings at BoardGameGeek.

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→ January 3, 2010
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Dominion (board game).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ December 2, 2009
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Bang!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ August 18, 2009
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San Juan card game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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