→ September 1, 2021
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Summer Camp.

Summer Camp has flown under the radar among new games this year because it’s a Target exclusive release (at least for now) and comes from a publisher not known for tabletop strategy titles, Buffalo Games, a publisher of jigsaw puzzles and party games. Yet Summer Camp is from Phil Walker-Harding, the mind behind Cacao, Gizmos, Imhotep, Imhotep: The Duel, and Silver & Gold, and it’s a straight-up deckbuilder, one that – dare I say it – is actually fun for the whole family. It’s so light and breezy for a deckbuilding title that you can play with anyone in the house who reads fluently. Right now, it’s $24.99 on Target.com, although I found it for 10% off in store a few weeks ago.

Summer Camp does have a modular board of 9 tiles that you arrange randomly in a 3×3 grid at the start of each game, forming three paths across the board, left to right, that your campers will try to traverse as you play. Each path is tied to a specific activity – Cooking, Water Sports, Outdoors, Friendship, Arts & Crafts – and has merit badges for campers who get all the way to the end of the path before the game ends, with more points for those who get there first. Along the paths, certain spaces give you a one-time bonus, allowing you to move any camper one more spot, to draw one more card into your hand, or to gain one snack bar (+1 energy for purchasing cards).

The heart of the game is your deck, which you’ll build as the game progresses, trying to get more powerful cards to drown out the relatively weak ten cards with which you start the game: seven Lights Out card, which have no value other than their purchasing power of 1 energy; and one card for each of the three paths that allows you to move your camper forward one space. Other than the Lights Out cards, all cards have an action on them – move 2+ spaces, move any camper one space, draw another card, discard & draw, gain 2-4 energy for purchases on this turn, and so on.

On each turn, you draw a fresh hand of five cards from your deck, and at the end of your turn, you discard all cards to your discard pile, shuffling the latter when your deck runs out. All cards have a value of 1 energy if you don’t use them, so you will never have a turn where you can’t do anything – even drawing five Lights Out card lets you buy one or more cards with a total cost of 5. There are also three stacks of generic cards, not tied to any of the separate path decks, that are always available to purchase – S’mores, cost 2, worth +2 energy for purchases; Scavenger Hunt, cost 3, which lets you discard 1-3 cards and draw that many again; and Free Time, cost 4, which lets you move one camper on any track one space forward. That’s a huge part of what makes this game more friendly to younger players and casual gamers – you will never have a wasted turn. You can always buy something, and the cheapest cards to buy are still useful.

There is some light strategy involved in how you move the campers, balancing the points value of getting the merit badges first – when you get all your campers to the first bridge, one-third of the way across the board, you get the top badge in that pile, and there’s another pile worth more points when you get all your campers to the second bridge – against the value of getting to the end of a path first. You also may move certain campers to trigger those space bonuses, especially the one where you get to draw another card, which can keep your chain of moves moving or just get you more buying power. If there’s a best way to build a deck here, I haven’t caught on to it yet; there is no card anywhere in the game that lets you trash any cards (like the Chapel card in Dominion), and the fact that only two cards are available from each path deck at any given time makes it very hard for one player to monopolize a good card or build a deck full of a specific type of card. That serves to balance things out, and may frustrate experienced players who like deckbuilders that give you more control, but for a game that is clearly aimed at family play – right down to the theme – it makes perfect sense. It’s great for ages 8+ and the box’s suggested play time of 30-45 minutes is about right once everyone gets the deck concept.

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→ November 17, 2020
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Fort.

The deckbuilder Fort is the newest title from Leder Games, who’ve had two pretty sizable hits with their medium-heavy games Vast and Root (which got a very strong digital port this fall from Dire Wolf). Unlike those games, though, Fort is light, quick, and whimsical, with artwork from Leder’s Kyle Ferrin that really works to enhance game play.

In Fort, two to four players compete to build the most appealing clubhouse or tree fort for neighborhood kids, playing cards from their hands each turn to acquire more pizza or toys and then using them to upgrade their fort from level 0 to level 5. All of your cards depict kids in the neighborhood, but they come in six different ‘suits,’ and cards may have a public action, a private action, both, or neither.

You deal yourself a hand of five cards after each turn, since you may get to play cards on other players’ turns, and when your turn begins you can play one card from your hand that has at least one action on it. You get to execute the public and private actions if you wish; other players can follow the public action, but not the private one. If either action has the symbol X and a suit symbol, you can play further cards showing that suit to multiply that action – gaining more resources, for example. (Other players can follow by playing one card of the matching suit, but can’t multiply by playing additional cards.)

Any cards you play go to your discard pile at the end of your turn, as do your two Best Friend cards if they’re still in your hand. Any other cards you didn’t play go to your Yard, where you might lose them to other players during the Recruit phase. During your own Recruit phase, you get to take one card for free either from another player’s Yard or from the display of three cards from the main deck. So turns are quick: play a card and use its actions, discard, recruit, deal yourself a new hand of five cards. At the start of your next turn, you’ll take any remaining cards in your Yard and put them in your discard pile.

Nearly all of the points you’ll get in Fort come from upgrading your fort, which you do by paying resources, with the cost increasing as you move up the fort track. However, you do have some other avenues to gain points from cards. One is via Made-Up Rule cards, which each player gets when they get to fort level 1, which are private objective cards that can give you additional points at game-end for things like all your blue suit symbols on cards, for trashing both of your Best Friend cards, or for stopping at fort level two. Another is the Lookout, where you can tuck cards under your board, up to your current fort size plus one, which makes them unavailable for the rest of the game. There are cards that you can play that will give you one point per card in your lookout, and those cards do count toward Made-Up Rules. Your storage is limited to four resources of each type, but you also have a backpack space on your board, and can store resources in there up to your fort level plus one, and can play cards that will get you points for what’s there as well.

Fort encourages player interaction, which distinguishes it from a lot of deckbuilders. You can steal cards from other players in the Recruit phase. You can also play certain cards that encourage you to trash cards from other players’ Yards or even discard piles, often netting you resources for doing so. The gist is that you’re all competing to build the coolest hangout, and then you have to entertain the kids you attract enough to keep your competitors from wooing them away.

Ferrin’s art is great – it’s colorful and imaginative, and each kid has a nickname, many of which are wonderfully goofy. We all immediately had our favorites, from Puddin’ to The Ant to Bug to the Noodle Twins (no actions, but worth two suits), and there are two copies of many of those cards, so there are only a few cards where if someone else gets it you’re out of luck until it ends up in their Yards. (There are two cards that are unique, but shouldn’t be, which let you score one point for each pizza/toy resource you have. At least one of those cards is essential if you get the Make-Up Rule for keeping your fort at level 2.) It might almost make you think it’s a game for kids, but it’s probably too complex for players under 10 – it’s actually a retheme of a game I’d never heard of before, 2018’s SPQR – between some of the strategy and the iconography, which is language-independent but not intuitive. There are too many cards that have actions written in forms like (do this -> that) X suit, and I don’t think that’s going to be obvious to new players unless they’ve played a lot of games before.

Fort’s definitely one of my favorite new games of 2020, between the art, the interaction, the smarter twist on deckbuilders (a genre that often disappoints me), the replay value, and the small box for portability. I would take this over Root, which is one of the most highly-regarded strategy games of the last decade, at least, because it’s just that much more accessible, and plays in well under an hour once everyone knows the rhythm of turns. It’s also just plain fun, which is something I think gets underrated by the online board game community, which values high strategy (and complexity) over everything else. There’s something to be said for threatening your daughter if she thinks about stealing The Ant from your Yard that you just won’t get in a two-hour worker placement game. Now if you need me, I’ll be in my clubhouse.

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→ November 9, 2016
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Top 100 boardgames.

This is now the ninth iteration of my own personal boardgame rankings, a list that’s now up to 100 titles, up twenty this time 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 think I’ll probably hold the list at an even 100 going forward as it’s a monster to update each year.

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’ve expanded the list to include several games I have only played via iOS app implementations, rather than physical copies. As always, clicking on the game title takes you to amazon.com; if I have a full review posted here or on Paste magazine’s site, the link to that will follow immediately. I’ve linked to app reviews where appropriate too. I’ve got many of these games in my aStore on amazon as well, unless they’re totally out of print.

I’ve added a few titles at the end that I own but haven’t played, or have not played enough to offer a review of them or rank them. Many of those will appear on a future list once I get to play them more.

I’ve put 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, which I believe violates one of the Ten Commandments.

[Read more…]

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→ December 6, 2014
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Star Realms.

My Insider pieces on the Andrew Miller signing by the Yanks and the three-team Yanks/Tigers/Dbacks trade are up for Insiders.

The runaway success of Dominion, which appears twice in the top ten of my boardgame rankings (once for the original game, another for the standalone Intrigue expansion), has spurred a huge boom in deckbuilding games of all stripes, many hybrids that incorporate other game types, but some that just take the basic Dominion formula and tweak it with new themes and slight changes to mechanics. I haven’t seen any takeoffs quite as faithful to Donald Vaccarino’s original game as Star Realms, a Kickstartered two-player deckbuilder that borrows liberally from Dominion, with the primary difference the change in goal from victory points to direct combat.

In Star Realms, each player begins the game with ten cards, seven coin cards worth one monetary unit apiece and three combat cards worth one damage point apiece. On a turn, a player draws a hand of five cards and – stop me if you’ve heard this before – resolves them by making purchases and using action cards. Neither buys nor actions are limited in Star Realms, and action cards come in four different categories (colors) that have some interactive effects if played during the same turn. Each player begins the game with 50 authority points, and the goal is to reduce your opponent’s authority total to zero via attacks.

Each action card has one or more features that can be used any time it’s played, including monetary value, attack points, authority points (like a healing spell), or the ability to scrap (trash) a card from your hand or discard pile (think Chapel strategy if you’re a Dominion fan). Cards may also have a one-time ability that comes from trashing the card, again things like damage or added purchasing power. The interactions between cards allow for rapid gains in powers as the game progresses, and produces a slight benefit to focusing your card purchases in, say, two of the four categories/colors, although in my experience playing dozens of games in the app, you’re better off purchasing the best card available than taking a weaker card just to stay within a preferred color.

Those interactions are particularly useful when you play one or more bases, cards that remain on the table for future turns. Such a move gives you a better chance of one of those interactions the next time around, which can mean doubling your attack points or your cash, or getting the ability to draw another card or trash one. These bases also have their own point values for defense if your opponent chooses to attack one of them and remove the special ability it grants you. Some bases are Outposts, which also prevent your opponent from hitting your main base of authority points until s/he destroys the Outpost too. Unfortunately, once the attack points values start reaching 8-10 regularly by any game’s midpoint, no Outpost is going to survive another turn, which I find one of the game’s biggest flaws – if I play a card to the table intending to use it next turn, but there’s basically no chance it survives that long, then it hasn’t done me much more good than a typical card I’d play and move to my discard pile.

StarRealms

The iPhone/iPad itself is free, but better AIs are in-app purchases and well worth the cost – the free app is just a tutorial, in essence, but the hard AI was good for forcing me to learn some strategy. The campaign in the app is very entertaining because it changes the ground rules and/or starts your opponent with different configurations of cards and points, so the game itself gets a lot of variation. Without that, however, the game would have become stale for me; it’s too much like Dominion, and while the combat angle provides an element of direct competition that the base Dominion game lacks, it’s not like there’s a whole lot you can do to stop your opponent, either, so it’s more a matter of hoping the lumps you take are less than the ones you dish out.

By far the best thing about the physical game is its price: For $12, you get a real game with plenty of replay value that would fit in someone’s stocking. Try putting Power Grid or Agricola in an oversized sock hanging by the chimney and see if you don’t pull the whole mantle down in the process. There are also some expansions (called Crisis, coming in little packets like old-school baseball card packs) coming soon that I expect will address some of the weaknesses in the main game – the minimal utility of bases and the too-strong resemblance to Dominion. Until then, it’s a good game for the price, but more of a trifle than a staple like its ancestor.

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