→ March 25, 2019
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Comanauts.

Comanauts builds on the mechanical foundation of the 2018 title Stuffed Fables, using a similar framework with a more involved and more adult-oriented story, with spectacular artwork and a high-quality ‘adventure book’ that guides players through the story. It’s a shame that gameplay is so convoluted and the rules so poorly written; I am not sure I’ve ever had a more frustrating experience trying to decipher how to play a game, especially when it came to looking for named components or getting answers to specific game situations.

Comanauts players work together to try to solve the game’s core mystery of what happened to Martin, a scientist who may have been about to prevent the end of the world when a lab accident (perhaps not an accident) left him in a coma. The players will explore his psyche and go through events from his past, real or imagined, to try to figure out what happened to him and how to prevent the approaching cataclysm. Each player gets an avatar with a few unique skills and items, and can play up to three over the course of the game before the players lose with the death of the third one. Gameplay unfolds like a Choose Your Own Adventure game* as players move to a new area, explore a small map, uncovering clues, facing challenges, and usually fighting enemies before they achieve some exit condition and leave for the next place.

* There is an actual Choose Your Own Adventure Game, and I have had it for months, but we’ve never played it because it isn’t quick and requires multiple sessions to play a story to completion. I’ll get to it eventually … I think.

It is unfortunate that the Comanauts designers married some good writing and narrative game structure with some truly dismal mechanics decisions. On each turn, a player draws five dice from the game’s common dice bag; dice come in eight colors, and specific colors apply to specific tasks. Black dice power hostile characters when they appear. White dice give you light bulb tokens you can use to reroll dice or to use your character’s unique power. The other dice may apply to certain skill tests … but if you happen to run into a clue that requires you to roll a yellow die to see if you succeed or fail, and you didn’t draw a yellow die in that round, tough luck. It’s just dumb – it’s pointlessly random and will do nothing but frustrate players. Arkham Horror handles these tests in a much smarter fashion, giving players a fair chance to pass such tests without making it too easy.

The game’s combat system is also a failure pretty much from start to finish. Enemies generate either when you hit a certain space on the map and fail a test or when you’ve drawn too many black dice during your turns on that page, after which, you will probably get your asses handed to you, because there isn’t a great way to defend yourself beforehand, and defeating enemies outright is difficult. You have to draw the right colors of dice (purple dice are wild, which helps a little), and then usually roll two of them for a high enough total to vanquish one hostile character – and those enemies come in threes. You can store one die on your card for defensive purposes, but if you roll against an attack and fail, not only do you take damage but you lose that die, so if you get attacked by all three enemies in a round, and you fail the first test, you’ll lose all three of your health tokens and die. It’s just not a well thought-out system, and while the game does give you the backup of two additional avatars to churn through in a game, discarding a character and setting up a new one is not play, it’s administration.

I lost count of the number of times I had to go back to the rulebook for the explanation of something, which absolutely kills my enjoyment of a game. Some of this was as simple as the adventure book saying we should take a specific avatar from the supply and put it on the board, without telling us what the avatar looked like (none of them have names on the cutouts). Some questions were more involved – when we escaped from the Noir scene with a new avatar we’d rescued, does that avatar come with us, since she came in the base game with a card of her own and special skills? Does she join our gang, so to speak? Even simple questions like when dice are ‘discarded’ and when they’re returned to the bag aren’t adequately answered in the rulebook. I can only think the designers assumed Comanauts players would already be familiar with the mechanics because they’d played Stuffed Fables, but I have only seen the earlier game without ever actually playing it, so I was at a loss from start to finish here – and finish is pushing it, as we gave up after over an hour that probably had us just 60% of the way through the scenario.

There’s a campaign mode here as well that would let you follow the storyline through multiple scenarios, but that’s for folks who grasp the core gameplay here far better than my daughter and I did. Unfortunately this one’s not a keeper, a shame given Asmodee and Plaid Hat’s history of strong titles.

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→ November 26, 2018
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Arkham Horror.

Fantasy Flight Games just released the third edition of its popular Arkham Horror cooperative game this fall to positive reviews, the first new version of the game since the 2005 edition, with somewhat streamlined rules and four scenarios to play in the base game. I had no experience with the previous versions – the original is from 1987, but Fantasy Flight’s 2005 version is considered a major improvement – but played this version a few times and found it easy to get into once you get past the daunting setup. It’s a co-operative game you can also play in solo mode, and follows the typical format of Lovecraft-themed games where you can die or go insane, but that’s not the losing condition in this edition. The balance here is solid and the format allows you to throw up a lot of defenses to try to give yourselves time to solve the mystery, but if you don’t do so in time, allowing too many horror tokens to pile up, you can still lose the entire game.

Arkham Horror is a Cthulhu game, so you’re going to play investigators trying to find and eliminate Lovecraftian monsters before they kill you or drive you insane, but in this game you can just replace a dead or insane investigator with a new one, losing any extra cards or bonuses you’d accumulated. The board has a different setup for each scenario, with five neighborhood tiles, each comprising three districts, and streets connecting them. Scenario cards tell you where to generate new monsters, place clue tokens, or potentially roll for benefits as you move your investigators around the board. Each scenario has you trying to rack up enough clue tokens to trigger the next phase, eventually winning the game by completing some final task – often beating a more difficult monster spawned after you’ve hit the final clue threshold.

The clues themselves are just tokens, not actual clues; you’re not solving a puzzle or mystery here, but accumulating those tokens while you also try to add cards to boost your investigators. Each investigator has a unique profile of health and sanity points, and gets a specific number of dice for each of the game’s five types of tests, which are measured by dice rolls; you roll that number of dice, and if you get at least one 5 or 6 among all your rolls, it’s considered a success. Investigators can add cards that give them items, spells, and even allies who add more benefits and can absorb some types of damage to spare your main character.

Game turns are simple, although you’ll take so many turns that an entire game will probably run two hours or more. You get two actions, including moving your investigator, attacking an enemy, warding off horror tokens (if too many accumulate, bad shit happens), starting an Encounter in your space to draw a neighborhood card, fleeing from a monster, and so on. You’ll spend most of the game moving to new spaces to either defeat a monster or try to draw a clue, since each game phase is triggered by gathering some set number of clues that lets you flip a scenario card to see the next step, or occasionally to go clear out some horror tokens from a space before they cause negative effects specific to that scenario.

Arkham Horror

Setup takes a while, primarily because each of the base-game scenarios has a unique board, tokens, and monsters, the last of which must be separated out from the complete set and shuffled into a game-specific monster deck. Once you’re rolling (pun intended), though, the game can move along as quickly as the players want to play it; game length is then a function of the storyline and the number of things you have to achieve or collect to get to the next stage. Turns themselves don’t take that long, and combat can be resolved with a couple of dice rolls. (One of the best benefits you can get in the game, from items or allies or spells, is the ability to reroll one or more dice.) If there’s a downside to Arkham Horror beyond its length, it’s that the clues aren’t anything more than green discs – you’re not actually putting together a story or solving any sort of mystery, just collecting good things and avoiding bad things. There is narrative text throughout each scenario, both on neighborhood cards and on the scenario cards that dictate the flow and rules of that specific session, but it’s all window dressing – you don’t need to know or follow any of that story to play the game.

I haven’t played the previous editions of Arkham Horror or the related game Eldritch Horror, but from what I’ve read, this third edition of AH borrows much of the mechanics of Eldritch Horror, and has streamlined this game’s design to reduce some of the randomness – investigator characters start with specific items/spells, the ‘mythos’ tokens at the end of each player turn are a bit easier to predict and plan around – while also giving players four scenarios out of the box instead of one. Those all sound like upgrades to me, at least.

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→ November 18, 2013
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Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

The cooperative boardgame Flash Point: Fire Rescue is Pandemic set in a burning building. While the setting and endgame conditions differ, the core mechanics are very similar, enough that it should be simple for Pandemic or even Forbidden Island players to pick up the basic rules and move on to the complete game. It’s enjoyable thanks to the same cooperative elements that make Pandemic fun (and stressful), but I don’t see anything terribly novel in Flash Point that advances the cooperative game field.

In Flash Point, the board is a giant rectangular building divided into 48 squares (six by eight), and it’s about to become enveloped by fire. The players represent firefighters who must enter the building and rescue seven victims before the building collapses or before they lose four (or more) victims to the blaze. Only three victims are on the board at any time, and some of the victim tokens turn out to be “false alarms” – blank tokens that can waste your time as you navigate the fire to get to them. Once a player reaches a victim, s/he must carry the victim out of the building to the ambulance parked outside, a slow process that puts both victim and player at risk from the advancing conflagration. When a victim is rescued or is lost, or a false alarm token is exposed, the players add a new token, called a point of interest (POI), to replace it, ensuring there are three on the board at the start of every turn.


When a fire starts to burn, right, and it starts to spread…

On his/her turn, each player gets four moves, called action points, to use as needed. Moving to an adjacent space costs an action point; putting out smoke in the space where the player stands costs one AP; putting out fire in that space costs two AP; carrying a victim to an adjacent space costs two AP. A firefighter can’t end his/her turn in a space that’s on fire, but a player can save any unused AP until the next turn. The basic “family” game has all players operating with the same four AP and restrictions; the full rules give each player a specific role, again similar to Pandemic, with bonus skills (e.g., flip over any victim token for 1 AP to see if it’s a false alarm or an actual victim) or additional AP to use in certain ways (e.g., three bonus ones per turn that can only be used for movement and can’t be saved).

After each player takes his/her turn, he rolls the two dice, one six-sided die and one eight-sided, to spread the fire somewhere in the building. If the space indicated by the roll is empty, and isn’t adjacent to any space with a fire token in it, then the new space gets a smoke token and no real harm is done (yet). If the space is already smoking, or is adjacent to a fire token, then the space ignites and gets a fire token. If the space is already on fire, however, an “explosion” occurs, similar to an outbreak in Pandemic, where the fire spreads out in all four directions, blowing off doors and damaging walls. Each wall segment can take up to two damage tokens before it is destroyed, and if players must place all of the game’s 24 damage tokens on the board before rescuing their 7th victim, the building collapses and all is lost.

The full rules create ways for the fire to spread even more quickly due to hazardous materials and hot spots places on the board at the beginning of the game. When fire hits a hazmat token, it causes another explosion like that described above; a player can carry a hazmat token out of the building for 2 AP per move, although the hazmat just has to be taken to the outer track rather than brought to a specific point as a victim does. When fire hits a hot spot, the player must roll the dice again to place yet another smoke or fire token, which may cause another explosion and hit another hot spot, so the process can continue for several iterations. These advanced rules come with one major bonus for the players, however: For 4 AP players can use the fire engine’s deck gun to spray water into one of the building’s four quadrants, hitting one random square within the chosen quadrant and dousing fire and smoke in that square as well as the two to four adjacent squares. I’ve found this to be essential to beating the game when using the full rule set.

With just two players, we found that limited cooperation was required because we could get victims out of the building quickly enough to avoid the fire. With four players, teamwork becomes essential for that reason: Someone has to control the fire to keep a path clear for the player(s) carrying victims out, and to make sure the building doesn’t collapse too quickly. Choosing where to focus your firefighting efforts is similar to choosing where to head in Pandemic – you’re practicing containment, as eradication, difficult in Pandemic, doesn’t exist here. Even if you were able to put out every fire token on the board, the building will just reignite on a future turn. You have to move quickly and efficiently to beat the game, as rescuing seven victims takes a lot of turns and the fire moves more rapidly as the game progresses.

A full game takes 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how quickly you make decisions as a group and whether you choose to use all or merely some of the full game’s features. It’s essential if you love cooperative games and enjoy the mechanics of Pandemic, but I find the game a little derivative without enough new twists to distinguish it from its predecessor and would always reach for simultaneous global epidemics over the burning building.

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→ November 10, 2013
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Elder Sign.

My buyer’s guides to catchers and DHs, corner infielders, and outfielders are all up for Insiders over at ESPN.com.

Elder Sign is a cooperative dice-manipulation game set in the Cthulu world created by the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. One to eight players act as investigators seeking to explore a mansion haunted by the minions of an “Ancient One,” the main enemy who will awaken if the players take too long to complete enough tasks to allow them to defeat him. If he awakens, the players must then battle with him against fairly significant odds or lose the game entirely.

The theme is elaborate, but the game is pretty simple: You’re playing Yahtzee! with different dice, and you can use various cards and investigator skills to alter the dice to try to get the specific rolls you need. Every room card has one or more tasks that you must complete by achieving specific rolls on the set of six green dice. You may need to use multiple dice to complete a task, but you can only complete one task per roll – if your roll completes several, you complete one, removing those dice, then roll the remainder to try to complete another task. Once you’ve completed all of the tasks on a card, you get the rewards shown on the room card, from extra item cards to the elder sign points that you use to defeat the Ancient One. If you fail to complete any task on a roll, you must give up one die to reroll and often pay a “terror” penalty as well. If you fail to complete all of the tasks on a card you’ve begun, you pay a penalty that usually costs you one or more Stamina or Sanity points – and if you run out of either, your investigator is out of the game.

The game includes a clock that advances fifteen minutes after each player’s turn. When the clock reaches midnight, something bad happens: A monster appears and is added to a room with an open slot, or a doom token is added to the Ancient One’s doom track, which, when filled, means the big guy wakes up (and he is pissed). There can be additional effects at midnight based on what room cards are on the table and what Ancient One is in play, but the bottom line is that none of these things are good.

Each investigator has a special skill, from the ability to reroll some or all dice to the ability to complete multiple tasks on one dice roll, the most useful one I’ve found in the game. Investigators can also acquire different item cards – Common Items, most of which allow the player to add a special yellow die to the green ones; Special Items, most of which give you a red die to roll; Spells, most of which allow you to store one or two of your rolled dice to retain a specific result for the next roll; Clues, which allow you to reroll any or all of your dice without having to surrender one first; and Allies, helpful assistants that might give you an extra skill or roll. Other cards may allow you to defeat a monster without a roll, regain a Stamina or Sanity point, or open up special rooms from the Other world, which tend to offer better rewards and smaller penalties.

Investigators work as a team to accumulate the number of Elder Signs required to defeat the Ancient One, but there’s very little in-game collaboration. The bulk of the teamwork involves figuring out which investigator is best equipped to tackle each room – the investigator who’s immune to Sanity and Stamina penalties within tasks is the ideal candidate to go after a room with several of those required to finish it, for example. Using Amanda Sharpe, the investigator who can complete two or more tasks on one roll, might be a waste on a card with only one task.

The other key decision is which rooms to try to solve before the next time the clock strikes midnight. Rooms that return one or more Elder Signs are always valuable, but a few room cards allow the investigator to remove a Doom token from the Doom track if they’re completed. Some rooms have negative effects at midnight, like adding more doom tokens or deducting one Sanity point from every investigator, so taking them out quickly is key to extending your time to complete the game. Other rooms and monsters “lock” dice so they’re unusuable until the room is completed or the monster is slain. (If you kill a monster but then don’t complete the room in which he was hanging out, the monster is still dead and you still get the benefits of dispatching him.)

I’ve found value in tackling rooms that open Other rooms when solved, because of the latter category’s more favorable risk/reward ratio. The game also includes the Entrance, a sort of shop where players can return Trophy points, acquired by completing rooms or defeating monsters, for additional clues, cards, or even Elder Signs, although I’ve found I only make use of the Entrance to return Trophies for healing or to buy Elder Signs.

Ultimately, however, this is a luck-based game where you are working to manage your luck by mitigating its effects. A basic understanding of probability helps, of course, but in general it’s best to throw everything you’ve got into each room’s set of tasks because of the high cost of failure and the fact that every item or trick you use for rolls reduces your dependence on random chance. It’s the kind of game that can have you muttering that the dice are loaded after ten straight dice don’t give you the one skull (“peril” … seriously, the terminology here is stupid) image you needed, so accepting that you’ll have outlier rolls that make your can’t-miss strategy miss is part of the fun. It’s a solid mid-weight game, good as a cooperative game that has more individual decision-making than Pandemic, but you have to be able to live with Elder Sign’s heavy reliance on dice to like it.

There is a modified app version of Elder Sign sold as Elder Sign: Omens for the iPad and iPhone. I played at least a dozen games without a single crash, and the graphics are very strong and clear, drawn directly from the physical game. The interface is clumsy, unfortunately, and I had a few instances where I clicked on something, expecting more information, only to find I’d made an irrevocable choice – a dialog making sure that I wanted to give up on a room before finishing would be a good addition. It’s also too many clicks to get information on rooms or what each investigator is holding, and even if you disable the videos there’s too much nonsense in between each investigator’s turn for my tastes. The app differs in a few small ways from the board game – I don’t think there are Ally cards at all, and once the big foozle wakes up the game is over. The base app costs $6.99 and includes four Ancient Ones to fight; three more are available as in-app purchases for $2.99 each, each of which also adds some investigator options. It’s worth the seven bucks to try it out before buying the physical game, although compared to other boardgame apps in the $6-10 price range you get less bang for your buck.

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→ October 5, 2013
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Pandemic iOS app.

The biggest iOS boardgame app release since June’s appearance of Agricola came this past Thursday, as the leading cooperate boardgame Pandemic was released for the iPad, bringing the same tension as the boardgame to a pass-and-play app with a slick, intuitive interface. If you don’t mind failing to save humanity over and over around your occasional successes, this is the app for you.

If you haven’t the physical version of Pandemic (which I reviewed in December 2010), it’s a different kind of game than most boardgames you’ve ever played. Two to four players work together to try to win, rather than competing. The board is a map of the world with various cities on it, connected by lines that indicate travel routes. The ‘enemy’ here is disease – four of them, each affecting a different region of the world and threatening to spread out of control and wipe out the human race. Cubes represent diseased populations in various cities, with one to three per location; when a city with three cubes in it acquires another one through the draw of a card or a spreading infection, an “outbreak” occurs and new cubes go into each city that connects to the original one. Eight outbreaks means you’ve lost. You can also lose if you have to place all 24 cubes of any specific color (one color per disease), or if you exhaust the deck of city cards before curing all four diseases. It’s difficult and cerebral, requiring you to make numerous decisions, often balancing short-term needs against long-term goals.

There is a way to win Pandemic, however. Each player collects city cards, two per turn, that can be used to cure a disease – five city cards of the same color, sent en masse to the discard pile while the player in question is in a city with a research station, cures that disease. In the meantime, however, players can go from city to city, removing cubes to try to hold off outbreaks. Each player has a specific role that gives him/her a special ability, such as curing a disease with just four cards, building a research station in whatever city he’s on, or moving other players around the board. There are also four special cards that allow the player to skip new infections for a turn, build a research station, remove one city card from the infection deck, or move one player to any place on the board. And the players’ deck also includes Epidemic cards, each of which triggers a new three-cube infection in one city while also raising the infection rate on a sliding scale that starts out at two cities per turn and eventually reaches four. You can adjust the game’s level of difficulty, which affects the number of Epidemic cards in the deck – from four (easy) to six (heroic).

The iOS app is an outstanding, faithful adaptation of the game that plays quickly and easily with only one very minor technical glitch through over a dozen plays (with no crashes). The interface is very clear and crisp, although the city names might be a little tough for some players to read without zooming in. (It helps to know your world geography here.) The screen has to deliver a lot of information at once, but the division of information across four side menus is easy to follow once you know the rules – all players’ cards in the right-hand menu, card history on the left, the current player’s cards and potential actions on the bottom, and the overall stats up top. Moving around is easy, as the game highlights cities to which the current player can move and confirms any move that would require the disposal of a city card. You can also undo your last few moves with a click of the undo arrow symbol in the upper left.

The one technical glitch I mentioned was minor – I have had a few instances where the app wouldn’t allow me to open the right-hand menu showing which city cards the players held, but could exit to the main screen and resume the game to open the menu again. I have noticed an unusually high probability of an epidemic card appearing in the first first turn, which makes the game harder to win; I actually had a game end after only two of the four player-roles had a chance to go, because a series of outbreaks in the red (Asia) region used up all 24 cards, thanks to an epidemic on the first turn. Such unwinnable games are a part of Pandemic, although in my experience with the physical game, they’re pretty rare.

Pandemic is a game meant to be played in person, with lots of communication between players, so I didn’t mind the absence of online multiplayer; slowing this game down would also reduce the tension that’s a key part of why it’s fun. (Although my daughter might question that; after playing alongside me twice, she asked, “What’s the point of this game? Losing?”) The game also has no AI component; if you want to play solo, just choose the number of roles you wish to play and handle them yourself. That also means there’s no downtime: You are always in the process of doing something or deciding what to do, and never waiting on an AI player or an online opponent (or partner). For a competitive game, the lack of online multiplayer would be a drawback, but I don’t see it as one here.

The game doesn’t include either of the available expansions for the physical game, although I imagine those will eventually be available as in-app purchases. Its current price of $6.99 is about par for a high-end adaptation of a popular game, in line with the popular Ticket to Ride or Small World and with the more complex Agricola. If you’re into the physical version of Pandemic, or want a game for your iPad that is very challenging with high replay value, this is a must-have.

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→ November 16, 2012
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Top 40 boardgames.

This is the fifth iteration of my own personal boardgame rankings, a list that’s now up to 40 titles, up ten from last year’s list. It’s not intended to be a critic’s list or an analytical take on the games; it’s about 80% based on how much we enjoy the games, with everything else – packaging and design, simplicity of rules, and in one case, the game’s importance within its niche – making up the rest.

I don’t mind a complex game, but I prefer games that offer more with less – there is an elegance in simple rules or mechanics that lead to a fun, competitive game. Don’t expect this to line up with the rankings at BoardGameGeek, where there’s something of a bias toward more complex games, which is fine but doesn’t line up perfectly with my own tastes.

I own every game on this list except Diplomacy, Caylus, and Tigris & Euphrates, playing the latter two in their iOS app forms. As always, clicking on the game title takes you to amazon.com; if I have a full review posted on the site, the link to that will follow immediately. I’ve linked to app reviews where appropriate too. I’ve got most of these games in my aStore on amazon and am gradually adding the rest.

Finally, I’ve added a complexity grade to the end of each review, low/medium/high, to make it easier for you to jump around and see what games might appeal to you. I don’t think there’s better or worse complexity, just different levels for different kinds of players. My wife prefers medium; I’m somewhere between medium and high. This isn’t like ordering a filet and asking for it well done.

40. Tikal: Full review. Strongly balanced game of board exploration, but the length of time between any single player’s turns, especially with three or four players, is a real drawback. Players compete to control temples and acquire treasures while building out a board representing a Central American jungle; control of those temples can change from turn to turn, and each player’s ten “actions” presents an enormous list of potential decisions to position his/her pieces for maximum points in each of the scoring rounds. That makes it interesting to play, but also leads to the long gaps between turns. Plays two to seven, but doesn’t play well with two. Complexity: Medium.

39. Maori: I haven’t reviewed this one yet, as I just got it earlier this month and have only played it (and lost, as it turns out) three times. It’s a light two- to four-player game, relatively high in the luck department for this list, with more opportunities to screw your opponent in a two player game, whereas with four players you’re focusing more on your own strategy and less on others’. In the game, players compete to fill out their own boards of 16 spaces by drawing island tiles from a central 4×4 grid, where the available selections depend on the movement of a boat token that travels around that grid’s perimeter. Players must form completed islands to receive points, and lose points for open spaces. Currently out of print, but amazon has plenty of new copies through marketplace sellers. Complexity: Low.

38. Alhambra: Full review. After playing it a few more times, I do like it more than I did the first time around, but the method used to acquire money is an awful mechanic that really screws the game up (for me) with more than two players. One of the cooler-looking games in our collection. Complexity: Medium.

37. Oregon. I need to play this some more, but it does have promise as a 2-4 player game that actually works with two players. Each player competes to place meeples and buildings on a rectangular grid by playing cards that match the row and/or column in which he’s placing the pieces. Points increase when players form larger groups of farmers on adjacent squares, place buildings next to farmers already on the board, or accumulate coal and gold tokens by building mines. It’s pretty simple and quick to play, but not that deep strategically. Complexity: Low.

36. Race For The Galaxy: Full review. I’ve played this game a few more times using a freeware version I found online with very strong AI players, but that’s only served to underscore for me how much this game resembles work. It’s a deck-based game where players must know the cards in the deck well to be able to execute a strategy, and are more or less told by their initial card what strategy they must pursue. I don’t game to add to my stress levels, but this game requires such intensity of purpose that, despite a good theme and precisely designed mechanics, it feels like a responsibility rather than like fun. Complexity: High.

35. Zooloretto: Full review. A fun game, but a bit of a trifle compared to the others further up this list. You’re a zookeeper trying to fill his zoo’s three enclosures (expandable to four) with animals that arrive each turn on trucks available to all players, but each enclosure can only hold one type of animal at a time. There’s a cost to switching animals around, and there’s a penalty for picking up animals you can’t house, with points coming for filling an enclosure or filling all spots but one. I’m a little surprised this won the Spiel des Jahres, as it lacks the elegance of most winners of that award, and the two-player variant rules included in the game don’t work at all. I have played a simplified version of the game with my daughter, who loves the animal tokens and the well-drawn zoo boards. It’s a good starter game in the German-style genre, but not the best. Complexity: Low.

34. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups, and one of the oldest games on the list. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme. Complexity: Low.

33. Asara. Full review. Light strategy game that feels to us like a simpler, cleaner implementation of Alhambra’s theme and even some of its mechanics, without the elegance of the best family-strategy games like Stone Age or Small World. Players compete to build towers in five different colors, earning points for building the tallest ones or building the most, while dealing with a moderate element of randomness in acquiring tower parts. It’s also among the best-looking games we own, if that’s your thing. Complexity: Low.

32. Jambo. Full review. A two-player card game where the deck is virtually everything, meaning that there’s a high element of chance based on what cards you draw; if you don’t draw enough of the cards that allow you to sell and purchase wares, it’ll be hard for you to win. Each player is an African merchant dealing in six goods and must try to buy and sell them enough times to go from 20 gold at the game’s start to 60 or more at the end. We played this wrong a few times, then played it the right way and found it a little slow, as the deck includes a lot of cards of dubious value. I’m due to replay and reevaluate this one, though. It’s also among my favorite themes, maybe because it makes me think of the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disneyworld. Complexity: Low.

31. San Juan: Full review. The card game version of Puerto Rico, but far, far simpler, and very portable. I like this as a light game that lets you play a half-dozen times in an evening, but all it really shares with Puerto Rico is a theme and the concept of players taking different roles in each turn. It plays well with two players but also works with three or four. I get that saying this is a better game than Race for the Galaxy (they were developed in tandem before RftG split off) is anathema to most serious boardgamers, but the fact that you can pick this game up so much more easily is a major advantage in my mind, more than enough to balance out the significant loss of complexity; after two or three plays, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how to at least compete. The app version is very strong, with competent AI players and superb graphics. Complexity: Low.

30. Yspahan. Full review. I should love this moderate-strategy game that combines worker-placement, building, and trading/shipping into one fairly quick-moving game, but the need to choose and play a tight strategy from the start detracts a little from the fun value. Players compete to place goods in clusters of buildings called souks on the brightly colored game board, with completed souks worth points at the end of each of the game’s three “weeks.” Players also earn points and privileges by building up to six special buildings, and can accumulate points quickly by sending goods to the caravan – or can ship other players’ goods from souks to the caravan to screw them up. Requires at least three players. Complexity: Medium.

29. Tobago. Full review. Solid family-strategy game with a kid-friendly theme of island exploration, hidden treasures, and puzzle-solving, without a lot of depth but high replay value through a variable board. Players place clue cards in columns that seek to narrow the possible locations of four treasures on the island, with each player placing a card earning a shot at the coins in that treasure – but a small chance the treasure, like the frogurt, will be cursed. The deductive element might be the game’s best attribute. Complexity: Low.

28. Diplomacy. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the history of Diplomacy (and seven other games) for mental_floss in 2010, concluding with: “One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the GAMES Magazine and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.” I think that sums it up perfectly. I haven’t played this in a few years, unfortunately, although that’s no one’s fault but my own. Complexity: Medium.

27. Agricola: The most complex game we’ve tried, with the steepest learning curve. Very well made aside from the square animal pegs, which we replaced (at the suggestion of one of you) with actual animal-shaped pieces I bought via amazon. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved, and require some knowledge of the game to play it effectively. My wife felt this game felt way too much like work; I enjoyed it more than that but it is undeniably complex and you can easily spend the whole game freaking out about finding enough food, which about a billion or so people on the planet refer to as “life.” Complexity: High.

26. Le Havre. Full review, including app. It’s a great game, one of the most complex I’ve tried, based on Agricola and on another game further up this list (Caylus), but my God, the setup is a bear if you’re playing the physical game, and a full game can take a few hours. I do like the game a lot on an intellectual level, and I think it’s a little more enjoyable than Agricola, but I can fully understand anyone who looks at the size and scope and says “no way.” The app version, on the other hand, removes the biggest obstacle to the game and the AI players are solid, even able to execute some niche strategies that require knowledge of the special buildings in the deck. Complexity: High.

25. Scotland Yard. App review. One of the few old-school games on the board, and one I’ve only played in app form. One player plays the criminal mastermind (I don’t know if he’s really a mastermind, but doesn’t he have to be for the narrative to work?) trying to escape the other players, playing detectives, by using London’s transportation network of cabs, buses, the Tube, and occasionally a boat along the Thames. It’s recommended for ages 10 and up but there’s nothing on here a clever six- or seven-year-old couldn’t handle if playing alongside an adult, and like Tobago has a strong deductive-reasoning component that makes it a little bit educational as well as fun. Complexity: Low.

24. Power Grid: Full review. This might be the Acquire for the German-style set, as the best business- or economics-oriented game I’ve found. Each player tries to build a power grid on the board, bidding on plants at auction, placing stations in cities, and buying resources to fire them. Those resources become scarce and the game’s structure puts limits on expansion in the first two “phases.” It’s not a simple game to learn and a few rules are less than intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a game that does a better job of turning resource constraints into something fun. I’d love to see this turned into an app, although the real-time auction process would make async multi-player a tough sell. Disclaimer: My wife doesn’t like this game because she says the board and cards look “depressing.” Complexity: High (or medium-high).

23. Glen More: Full review. Build your Scottish settlement, grow wheat, make whiskey. Sure, you can do other stuff, like acquire special tiles (including Loch Ness!) or acquire the most chieftains or earn victory points by trading other resources, but really, whiskey, people. The tile selection mechanic is the biggest selling point, as players move on a track around the edge of the central board and may choose to skip one or more future turns by jumping further back to acquire a better tile. Back in print at the moment, and maybe the game on this list that gets the least press relative to its quality and fun factor. Complexity: Medium.

22. Navegador. Full review. I love this game’s theme and better implementation of the explore-build-trade combination than Yspahan has, but it doesn’t work well at all with two players and really needs at least four to create enough competition on the board to make it more than just a few players playing solitaire at the same table. Players begin in Portugal with two ships apiece and have to sail to South America, around Africa, and eventually to Japan, opening up new areas, establishing colonies, building factories and shipyards, and buying and selling goods from their colonies according to fluctuating market prices. With enough players, it’s tightly competitive without feeling work-like, and the replayability comes from the interactions among players, since the game has only a miniscule amount of randomness. If you tend to game with four or five players, this would probably rank higher for you than it does for me. Complexity: Medium.

21. Vikings: Full review. Currently out of print, and unavailable through that link (which I’m including anyway because used copies may appear there in the future). A very clever tile placement game in which players place island and ship tiles in their areas and then place vikings of six different colors on those tiles to maximize their points. Some vikings score points directly, but can’t score unless a black “warrior” viking is placed above them. Grey “boatsman” vikings are necessary to move vikings you’ve stored on to unused tiles. And if you don’t have enough blue “fisherman” vikings, you lose points at the end of the game for failing to feed everyone. Tile selection comes from a rondel that moves as tiles come off the board, with each space on the rondel assigning a monetary value to the tiles; tiles become cheaper as the number remaining decreases. You’re going to end up short somewhere, so deciding early where you’ll punt is key. I’m sad to see it out of print. Complexity: Medium.

20. Lost Cities: Full review. This was the best two-person game we’d found, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, and the most portable game as well, since it can be played with nothing but the game cards. We’ve since moved on to some more complex two-player games, but for simplicity (without becoming dumb) this one is hard to top. The deck comprises 12 cards in each of five colors, including cards numbered 2 through 10 and three “investment” cards to double, triple, or quadruple the profit or loss the player earns in that color. Players take turns drawing from the deck but may only place cards in increasing order, so if you draw a green 5 after you played the 6, tough luck. You can knock out a game in 15 minutes or less, so it’s one to play multiple times in a sitting. The iOS app is very slick and plays really quickly – a great one for killing a minute while you’re waiting in line. Complexity: Low.

19. Puerto Rico: Full review. It’s grown on me, especially since I got to try it out a few times online via Tropic Euro, although I’ve had friends and readers tell me it can become monotonous after a lot of games. You’re attempting to populate and build your own island, bringing in colonists, raising plantations, developing your town, and shipping goods back to the mother country. Very low luck factor, and just the right amount of screw-your-neighbor (while helping yourself, the ultimate defense). Unfortunately, the corn-and-ship strategy is really tough to beat, reducing the game’s replay value for me. Complexity: High.

18. Samurai: Review of the iOS app, which is identical to the board game. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app, and aside from a slightly dated design and look to the pieces and the board, it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun. Very high replayability too. Complexity: Medium/low.

17. Through the Desert. Full app review. Another Knizia game, this one on a large board of hexes where players place camels in chains, attempting to cordon off entire areas they can claim or to connect to specific hexes worth extra points, all while potentially blocking their opponents from building longer or more valuable chains in the same colors. Very simple to learn and to set up, and like most Knizia games, it’s balanced and the mechanics work beautifully. Out of print at the moment, although I picked up a new copy around this time last year for $10 on amazon. Complexity: Low.

16. Orient Express: An outstanding game that’s long out of print; I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues. The publishers still sell the expansions, adding up to 30 more cases for you to solve. Complexity: Low.

15. Thurn and Taxis: Full review. I admit to a particularly soft spot for this game, as I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. (I don’t care for chess, which I know is considered the intellectual’s game, because I look three or four moves ahead and see nothing but chaos.) Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. Just don’t do what I did and play it against an operations consultant, lest you get your clock cleaned. Back in print this year and quite reasonable at about $25. Complexity: Low.

14. Battle Line: Full review. Among the best two-player games we’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind Lost Cities. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The iOS app is among the best as well. Complexity: Low.

13. Caylus. App review. Another game I’ve only played in its app version, Caylus is the best of the breed of highly-complex games that also includes Agricola and Le Havre, with slightly simpler rules and fewer pieces, yet the same lack of randomness and relatively deep strategy. I’ve also found the game is more resilient to early miscues than other complex strategy games, as long as you don’t screw up too badly. In Caylus, players compete for resources used to construct new buildings along one public road and used to construct parts of the main castle where players can earn points and special privileges like extra points or resources. If another player uses a building you constructed, you get a point or a resource, and in most cases only one player can build a specific building type, while each castle level has a finite number of blocks to be built. There are also high point value statues and monuments that I think are essential to winning the game, but you have to balance the need to build those against adding to the castle and earning valuable privileges. Even playing the app a dozen or more times I’ve never felt it becoming monotonous, and the app’s graphics are probably the best I’ve seen. Complexity: High.

12. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline. Complexity: Medium.

11. Tigris and Euphrates: Review of the iOS app. The magnum opus from Herr Knizia, a two- to four-player board game where players fight for territory on a grid that includes the two rivers of the game’s title, but where the winning player is the one whose worst score (of four) is the best. Players gain points for placing tiles in each of four colors, for having their “leaders” adjacent to monuments in those colors, and for winning conflicts with other players. Each player gets points in those four colors, but the idea is to play a balanced strategy because of that highest low score rule. The rules are a little long, but the game play is very straightforward, and the number of decisions is large but manageable. I’ve never played the physical game; the current version (sold through that amazon link) includes some minor expansions I haven’t tried. Complexity: Medium.

10. The Settlers of Catan: I do feel somewhat odd about dropping this in the rankings for the second year in a row, but the truth is we don’t pull this game out as much as we did a few years ago, and I’ve still got it in the top ten largely because of its value as an introduction to Eurogames, one of the best “gateway games” on the market. Three or four players compete on a variable board of hexes to acquire different resource types, build roads and cities, and reach twelve victory points before any other player. Resources are parceled out in part according to rolls of the dice, and you can lose resources if the Robber shows up on a roll of seven and you’re not prepared for it. The Seafarers expansion balances out the core game’s low value on the wool resource, but also makes the game take about 50% longer to play. It was, and is, a great starting point if you’ve never played anything on this list, and is also one of the few games here that has some traction outside of the boardgamer culture. You can even find this along with Ticket to Ride (higher up the list) at Target, which is about as mainstream as you can get. We’ve just got lots of other games we prefer after playing this one so often over the years. Complexity: Low.

9. The Castles Of Burgundy Full review. The highest-ranked new game on the list this year, Castles of Burgundy even scales well from two to four players by altering the resources available on the board to suit the number of people pursuing them. Players compete to fill out their own boards of hexes with different terrain/building types (it’s like zoning) by competiting for tiles on a central board, some of which are hexes while others are goods to be stored and later shipped for bonuses. Dice determine which resources you can acquire, but you can also alter dice rolls by paying coins or using special buildings to change or ignore them. Setup is a little long, mostly because sorting cardboard tiles is annoying, but gameplay is only moderately complex – a little more than Stone Age, not close to Caylus or Agricola – and players get so many turns that it stays loose even though there’s a lot to do over the course of one game. This is the best new game we tried this year. Complexity: Medium (medium-high).

8. Pandemic: Full review. We haven’t tried many cooperative games, but this one sets a very high bar. Two to four players work together to stop global outbreaks of four diseases that spread in ways that are only partly predictable, and the balance between searching for the cures to those diseases and the need to stop individual outbreaks before they spill over and end the game creates tremendous tension that usually lasts until the very end of the event deck at the heart of the game. I haven’t tried the On The Brink expansion, but several people (including my sister and her husband) rave about what it brings to the base game. If you’re looking for a cooperative game you can play with kids, try Forbidden Island, from the same developer but much easier to learn and to win. Complexity: Medium.

7. Dominion: Full review. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are four major expansions out there, including the potential standalone Dominion: Intrigue game – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think we have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. We own Dominion Seaside (which is outstanding) and Dominion: Alchemy (which I find a little weird), plus a standalone expansion further up this list. I can also vouch for this as appropriate for a young player – my daughter (age 6) understands the base game well enough to play it without me deliberately throwing the game to keep it competitive. Complexity: Low.

6. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is now our go-to two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour. It’s also incredibly portable. Complexity: Low.

5. Dominion: Intrigue. Intrigue can be combined with the base game of Dominion, but unlike other Dominion expansions (of which there are now approximately 82, with a new one released every other week, or so it seems) Intrigue is a complete game right out of the box because it includes the money and point cards. And it’s better than the original game when both are viewed without any expansions because it’s more interactive – Intrigue lives up to its name in the sense that you should spend much of your time either plotting against your neighbors or trying to defend yourself, which makes the “Big Money” strategy in the base game much less effective. The changes make the game longer, but more even, and more fun. Complexity: Medium.

4. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. I haven’t tried the expansion, Style is The Goal, yet. Complexity: Medium.

3. Ticket to Ride. Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 expansion to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. We also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. Complexity: Low.

2. 7 Wonders: Full review. 7 Wonders has swept the major boardgame awards (yes, there are such things) this year for good reason – it’s the best new game to come on the scene in a few years, combining complex decisions, fast gameplay, and an unusual mechanic around card selections where each player chooses a card from his hand and then passes the remainder to the next player. Players compete to build out their cities, each of which houses a unique wonder of the ancient world, and must balance their moves among resource production, buildings that add points, military forces, and trading. We saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that we couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up our first game. The only negative here is the poorly written rules, but after one play it becomes far more intuitive. Plays best with three or more players, but the two-player variant works well. Complexity: Medium.

1. Carcassonne. Full review. The best-of-breed iOS app has only increased my appreciation for Carcassonne, a game I still play regularly by myself, with my wife and daughter, and with friends here or online. It brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. We own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. We also have Inns and Cathedrals, which we’ve only used once; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.

Last year, I promised but never provided a ranking of games just for two players, so rather than make another pledge I won’t keep, I’ll rank them here, in reverse order. I’m only considering two-player value, so I’ve only included games I’ve tried in two-player format.

1. Jaipur
2. Carcassonne
3. Stone Age
4. Ticket to Ride
5. Dominion/Intrigue
6. Small World
7. Battle Line
8. Samurai
9. Castles of Burgundy
10. Lost Cities
11. Pandemic
12. 7 Wonders
13. Through the Desert
14. San Juan
15. Jambo
16. Thurn und Taxis
17. Orient Express
18. Tigris and Euphrates
19. Tobago
20. Asara

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→ July 16, 2012
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Scotland Yard app.

In case any of you missed it, my top 50 prospects ranking update went up on Thursday. I’ll be back on the Baseball Today podcast on Tuesday.

Scotland Yard is one of the few mass-market boardgames from before Settlers of Catan ushered in the modern era of “Eurogames” to fare well in the comparison to the more sophisticated, less luck-based games that players like me tend to favor. It has a very simple mechanic, has cooperative elements, and involves a tiny bit of luck. The Scotland Yard iOS app, released early last month, is a very strong implementation that only falls short in that it’s a hard game to play with AI opponents or partners.

The game is semi-cooperative, with two to five players as detectives chasing one player, the thief Mr. X, around London, attempting to catch him by landing on the space he occupies in the span of 24 turns. On each turn, a player can move to an adjacent location or station using a taxi, a bus, or the subway. The detectives start the game with a limited number of passes/fares for each method of transportation, and when a detective uses a ticket, he gives it to Mr. X to use on a subsequent turn. The location of Mr. X is obscured for most of the game, but is revealed four times, after moves 3, 8, 13, and 18; on all other turns, the detectives see what method of transportation he used, but not his location. Mr. X also gets two “double move” tickets, allowing him to make two moves within one turn, and has several “black” tickets, where he can obscure his method of transportation as well as his location. Finally, he can take boats along the Thames by using black tickets, a method entirely unavailable to the detectives.

I’ve never played the physical boardgame, but the need for secrecy makes this tailor-made for an adaptation to a mobile platform, whether you’re using pass-and-play or online multiplayer. The graphics in this app are bright and pretty clear, no mean feat for a complex board with lots of fine lines representing paths for each method of transportation; the app also brightly highlights all acceptable moves for each player on his turn, and includes a countdown clock of variable move times for live games.

Playing solely against AI opponents, I found it more fun to play as Mr. X because you can’t coordinate with AI detective players when playing the other side. Yet escaping the detectives quickly became simple, even on the hardest setting, because they’re not deductive enough – for example, they never seem to grasp that when Mr. X reaches one of the stations on the Thames and uses a black ticket, he probably took a boat to a different part of the board. So while gameplay is clean and simple, it’s much better suited to play against live opponents, even if you want to supplement with an AI detective, or want to gang up on an AI-played Mr. X.

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→ January 17, 2011
→ By

Forbidden Island.

Forbidden Island is another cooperative board game by Matt Leacock, designer of the fantastic cooperative game Pandemic (reviewed earlier this month), with similar mechanics and a similar goal. It’s more visually appealing than Pandemic, coming in a tin box rather than cardboard with nicer artwork on the island tiles, but is a little simpler to play and definitely simpler to win, making it a better family game than Pandemic but perhaps a little less challenging for a group of 3 or 4 adults.

In Forbidden Island, two to four players take on adventurer roles to capture four relics on the titular island and attempt to escape as a group before the island sinks. As the game goes on, the water level rises, making certain tiles flood and, if they flood again while already flooded, sink permanently, after which they’re removed from the game; players must therefore choose between capturing relics and running around the island restoring flooded tiles.

The island itself varies in each game, similarly to Settlers of Catan – the set of tiles is drawn randomly to build a 3-4-5-5-4-3 island, and no fixed position for any of the nine critical tiles, the tile required for departure and the eight tiles for the four relics. To capture a relic, one player must possess four cards showing that relic (within the hand limit of five cards) and then move to either of the two tiles with that relic on their corners, using one action to take the relic. When the team has captured all four relics, the players must all go to the departure tile and play a special Helicopter Lift card to lift all four players off the board and into victory.

On each turn, a player has four actions to use, including moving to an adjacent tile, restoring (“shoring up”) a flooded tile adjacent (horizontally or vertically) to where he’s standing, giving a card to another player on the same tile, or playing four cards to capture a relic. Diagonal moves are prohibited, so most of your actions will go to moving around the island, with a fair amount of thought going to positioning yourself for future moves. But because the board is fairly simple to navigate, it doesn’t have the same critical-path modeling feel as Pandemic, which may be good or bad depending on your point of view. I prefer Pandemic’s operational complexity; your mileage may vary.

Each player plays one of six roles giving him special abillities. The Engineer can shore up two tiles for a single action. The Pilot can use one action each turn flying to any tile anywhere on the island, regardless of its distance from his starting point. The Explorer can move or shore up a tile diagonally. The Messenger can give a card to another player even if they’re not on the same tile. The Diver can move through multiple flooded tiles or even the empty spaces where removed tiles sat for a single action. And the Navigator can move another player up to two adjacent tiles for a single action to set him up for his next turn. The key to winning is, of course, figuring out how best to use the special abilities of all players, using them as often as possible; most roles are helpful although the Diver isn’t as useful as the others in a two-player game.

A few island tiles are flooded at the start of the game, and each player completes his turn by drawing two to five cards from the Flood deck. Each Flood card shows an island tile; when a player draws an island’s card, he flips the tile over to show that it’s flooded or, if it’s already flooded, removes it from the game permanently. As in Pandemic, several times during the game, the stack of used (played) Flood cards is shuffled and placed back on top of the Flood deck, so an island that has already been flooded is going to be flooded repeatedly as long as the game goes on. The timing of those shuffles depends on when the Waters Rise! cards are drawn from the master Treasure deck that includes relic cards and five special ability cards: three Helicopter Lifts (move one player anywhere on the island, with no action required) and two Sandbags (shore up one tile immediately, also for no action). A player draws two Treasure cards at the end of her turn, discarding if she’s over five cards in her hand.

There are several ways to lose Forbidden Island, although we only lost via one method. You lose if both island tiles that show a particular relic sink before you capture it, thus leaving you unable to do so. You lose if the departure tile sinks. You lose if an island tile sinks with a player on it and he’s unable to swim to an adjacent tile because those have already sunk. And you lose if the water level rises a certain number of times – nine times if you play the Novice level or just six times if you play at Legendary level. We lost when the departure tile sank too quickly for us to shore it up because we drew Waters Rise! cards on consecutive turns; other than that, we played up to the Elite level (one below Legendary) and finished the game with plenty of time left on the theoretical clock.

The relative ease of winning with two players didn’t make the game less fun to play, but it wasn’t as challenging or frustrating as Pandemic. I prefer the higher level of difficulty, even though I can still say “Bogota” to my sister and her husband they’ll remember exactly which session of Pandemic I mean and how aggravating that loss was. If you’ve played neither game and want to try the cooperative concept, Forbidden Island is under $13 on amazon, or about half the cost of Pandemic, making it a great introduction to this style of game and this designer’s mechanics.

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Thanks to a reader recommendation, I’ve set up an amazon.com aStore that includes all board games I’ve recommended and that will eventually include the entire Klaw 100 (I think I’ve added 30-35 titles so far). It’s also linked permanently on the Amazon link above.

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→ December 29, 2010
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Pandemic.

After receiving a number of recommendations from readers and questions about it from others, I asked for and received the cooperative board game Pandemic as a Christmas gift from my sister and brother-in-law. (One benefit to this new interest in board games: Family members who complained that they never knew what to get me for Christmas or my birthday now have something to get me.) I can’t compare Pandemic to other cooperative games, as it’s the first one I’ve played, but it is a fun and very challenging game that had the four of us playing till 1 am the last few nights while dropping our share of F-bombs along the way.

In Pandemic, two to four players form a team fighting four simultaneous regional pandemics of diseases denoted by different colors – blue in the U.S./Canada/Europe, yellow in Latin America/Africa, black in the Middle East and south Asia, and red in east Asia. When the game begins, you draw Infection cards for nine cities that will contain cubes representing infected populations, with those cities containing one to three cubes apiece. More cities gain cubes as the game goes on, and there will be four to six new epidemics that create three-cube infection cells in new cities while adding cubes to cities that already have infections.

The players begin at the CDC Research Center in Atlanta and must work to cure all four diseases while preventing them from spreading to the point where they trigger one of the end game conditions – running out of cubes in any color, or experiencing an eighth “outbreak,” where a city with three cubes already is hit with another one. A player can cure a disease by collecting five cards in that disease’s color (there’s one card for every city on the board, with the corresponding color) and turning them in while standing at any Research Center. Players can build other Research Centers besides the one in Atlanta for easier mobility.

On each turn, a player can take four actions. An action can include moving from one city to an adjacent one; playing a city card to move to that city; playing the card of the city he’s on to move to any city; moving from one Research Center to any other one; treating (removing) one cube in the current city; passing a card to or taking a card from another player as long as both players are in the city on that card; or building a research center if he’s in a city and plays the card of that city. But each player has a role that makes one of those actions simpler; the Medic, for example, can treat all cubes in the city he’s in with a single action.

The complication, of course, is that diseases spread. The deck of cards contains four to six Epidemic cards that speed the spread of the four diseases, and reshuffle all the Infection cards you’ve already used to place cubes on cities. Thus cities that have already come up in the deck and received cubes will come up again, so players must split their time between collecting cards for cures and putting out fires to avoid outbreaks – especially since outbreaks can cause chain reactions that can advance you to endgame very quickly.

We played the Normal game with five epidemic cards and still found it extremely difficult. Even with four players working together, we won just twice in a more than a half-dozen plays, and both wins came just as we were about to exhaust the deck of city cards (the third possible endgame condition). It’s a massive operations research problem, where all four players jointly coordinate the movement and actions of four players to try to most efficiently balance the short-term needs to avoid outbreaks or a cube shortage and the long-term need to cure the disease. You can even choose to eradicate a disease you’ve cured – if you treat all cubes of a cured disease (any player can remove all cubes of a cured disease in the city where his pawn sits with one action), the disease is eradicated and all future infection cards in that color have no effect. But eradication costs actions you may need to use to treat uncured diseases or coordinate with other players to collect cards.

There is some luck involved – you can have a bad combination of epidemic cards appearing close together with a concentration of cubes in cities of one color and see a game spiral out of control unless you’re sitting in that region – but there are enough disparate chance-based elements that it tended to balance out in our plays, so that we generally felt like we had a shot to win every game. The real challenges are coordinating that many players and choosing when you can avoid a short-term problem and go cure a disease, but those were what made the game fun and intense. It’s also a fairly quick play for that many people, about an hour if we didn’t lose early, and very replayable even within an evening because the mix of diseases, locations, cards, and roles differs each time.

There’s also a well-regarded expansion called Pandemic: On the Brink that adds five new roles, a fifth “mutant” disease, and even a way for someone to play the spoiler as the Bio-Terrorist. I haven’t played it, but expect I’ll pick it up in time, since we’ll probably be playing Pandemic quite often.

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