→ March 19, 2020
→ By

Men at Work.

I generally don’t play many ‘dexterity’ games, meaning games that have some kind of physical component inherent in the play, like Jenga or the 1800s game Crokinole. There are tons of these games on the market but most just aren’t very good, often asking players to do things that are too easy or too difficult, and usually just rewarding the player who had the most fortunate timing rather than rewarding some specific skill or strategy. That made it a surprise that I enjoyed the 2019 game Men at Work, a dexterity game of stacking and especially of balancing, which builds in a way to keep you playing even if you make a mistake and gives players multiple things to do over the course of an entire game.

who can it be now?

Men at Work, designed by Rita Lodl (who appears in the game on one card as ‘Boss Rita’), has players building a construction site of girders and workers, where each player will get a specific instruction on their turn to place one of those two things with some specific additions or restrictions, such as matching a girder to a color already on the site. The initial setup has three girders and one or two workers on grey support blocks so that none of the girders is touching the playing surface. On your turn, you add the girder or worker, sometimes also placing bricks or tiny beams on the arms of the workers as well, while trying to keep the structure balanced so that nothing slips or falls to touch the table beneath. If any parts touch the table, you’ve caused an accident and must remove all such components, and then you lose one of your three safety certificates. If you lose all three, you’re out of the game.

Your moves are determined by a deck of two-sided cards. You flip a card to show two instructions, one for placing a girder and one for placing a worker. The card left on top of the deck will show a girder symbol or a hard-hat, telling you which instruction to follow, and two colors of girders, indicating you must place one of those colors or must place the new worker on a girder of either color. About a quarter of the way through the deck, the Boss Rita card will appear, after which the real scoring begins. If your move adds a new highest point to the construction site, you get an employee of the week token; the first player to get N tokens, where N varies by the number of players from 4 tokens to 6, is the winner. If your move doesn’t add a new highest point, which sometimes isn’t possible, you still must complete the move without causing an accident or risk losing a safety certificate. Play continues until someone reaches the target number of employee of the week tokens, or only one player still has safety certificates remaining.

The one key rule in Men at Work is that you’re supposed to place everything on the structure using just one hand, which is hard enough to remember, let alone to execute. I played this with a seven-year-old who had no problem at all understanding the rules – she only needed help with interpreting card instructions that weren’t all that clear, such as the different cards that say to put the worker on first and then add the bricks/beams, and those that have you put a brick/beam on the worker and then put them all on a girder at once – but I improvised and let her use two hands while I used just one. That was enough to keep the game balanced (pun intended) until eventually the structure got large enough that it was easy for one of us to knock almost the whole thing down with one errant move. It took us about 20 minutes of actual play time (not counting me reading the rules and looking up several cards for more explanation) from start to finish, and there was a lot of laughing in the process too. It’s still not my preferred genre of game but this is high on my list of titles you can play with kids of just about any age.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 30, 2020
→ By

That’s Pretty Clever!

In 2018, a fairly unknown designer named Wolfgang Warsch ended up with three of the six nominations for the annual board game awards known as the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) and the Kennerspiel des Jahres (often translated as the ‘expert’ game of the year, or the connoisseur’s game of the year), winning the Kennerspiel for his fun press-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg. One of those other nominations was for the game known as That’s Pretty Clever! (Ganz Schön Clever), a roll-and-write game with a crazy scoresheet that lends itself to all kinds of real-time decision-making.

That’s Pretty Clever! gives you six dice, each a different color, that you’ll roll three times on every turn. You also have a scoresheet with five scoring areas, one for each die color except the white die, which is always wild. You roll all six dice and choose one to score, but then must set aside all dice with values lower than the one you chose, placing them (if you’d like) on the ‘silver platter’ in the game box. You roll all remaining dice, choose another one to score, set aside those with lower values, and then roll any dice still remaining and score one more. You’ll do this sequence four to six times, depending on the player count. When an opponent rolls, you’ll still get to choose one die to score. After that opponent has finished all three of their rolls, you can choose any die from the silver platter and score it. Multiple players can choose to score the same die in this stage. You can still score more dice than this, however, if you choose wisely when scoring dice you automatically get to score.

A solo game after four rounds.

The scoresheet has five sections and each scores completely differently. The yellow area has a 4×4 grid with four spaces already X’d out, and then two spaces each showing a number from 1 to 6. If you score the yellow die, you cross out a space with the number showing on the die. (You can always use the white die for the same purpose, since it’s wild, but I won’t repeat that in each section.) When you complete a row or the top left to lower right diagonal, you get a bonus: you can fill in another square in a different (specified) section, or you get a +1 bonus that allows you to choose to score an extra die at the end of someone’s turn – even your own, or you get a fox bonus, which I’ll explain in a moment. When you complete a column, you score 10 to 20 points at game-end.

The blue section also has a grid, but this one goes from 2 to 12, and you score it by combining the blue die’s value with the white die’s. Thus not every space is equally easy to cross out, and when you get a blue bonus in another section, you might want to mark the 2 or the 12 since they’re generally hard to get. You score points at game-end based on the number of spaces marked in the blue section, with the values increasing faster as the number of spaces increases.

The green, orange, and purple sections are all rows that you’ll fill out left to right. The green row requires dice values greater than or equal to what’s shown in the space, starting at 1, going up to 5, then restarting at 1. The orange row is the easiest to fill in – you just write the die’s value in a space, with no restrictions. Some spaces let you double the die’s value; the last space lets you triple it. The purple row is the trickiest, as you can only fill in a space with a number greater than the one in the space before it, unless the prior number is a 6, in which case you can start over. All three of these rows award bonuses for certain spaces, but the purple row gives you a bonus of some sort on every space starting with the third one, so I think it’s the most valuable section on the sheet. At game-end, you score the orange and purple by adding all the numbers you’ve written in the squares, and you score the green by looking at the number above the last square you’ve filled, with values increasing kind of like they do in the blue section.

There are also a few bonuses you get at the start of each round – a free re-roll of all dice, a +1 bonus, and at the start of the fourth round the choice to fill in one square anywhere on your sheet, either with an X (for yellow, blue, and green) or a value of 6 (for orange and purple). At game end, you add up all five of your section scores, and then you count how many fox bonuses you got, with a maximum of five. Find your lowest section score, and then multiply that by your number of foxes, and add that to the five section scores for your total. Over 200 is pretty good; I’ve cracked 300 once in pen-and-paper, while my high score in the app – which works well but assumes you know the game already – is around 285.

I’ve played this dozens of times between pen-and-paper and the app, and I find it incredibly addictive. Despite the simple mechanics, it doesn’t become repetitive because you are always making multifaceted decisions – choosing a die to score usually means relinquishing other dice for the remainder of that turn; choosing when to use those powerful +1 bonuses involves weighing the value of saving them for later, when maybe you can start a daisy-chain of bonuses that will let you fill in four or five boxes with one die. There’s a sequel game I haven’t tried called Twice as Clever! that’s apparently good but not quite as elegant as this original, which has already entered the rotation of games we bring on trips because it’s so simple, portable, and easy to teach.

You can also see my reviews of Warsch’s other games, The Mind, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and The Taverns of Tiefenthal, over at Paste.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 12, 2019
→ By

Sushi Roll.

Phil Walker-Harding is a mainstay on my year-end board game lists at this point, with Bärenpark (2017) and Gizmos (2018) making my annual top tens the last two years and Silver and Gold obviously set to appear on my list this year. He’s shown himself able to design clever, replayable games across a broad range of mechanics, with Imhotep and Cacao among his other hits and the new Adventure game series (which I have but haven’t tested out yet). He’s also the designer of Sushi Go! and its bigger offshoot Sushi Go Party, one of the best games I know of for 6+ players, and has now added a second brand extension to this title with the … eye roll-inducing title Sushi Roll, a dice-drafting game that captures some of the feel of the original but streamlines it for faster play.

In Sushi Roll, players will roll dice at the start of each round, choosing one die and then passing their ‘conveyor belt’ board with all remaining dice to the left, after which players roll their new dice, choose one, and pass them around. There are five different colors of dice, each of which has a totally different set of images and ways to score: nigiri, worth 1-3 points each; maki, where the player with the most symbols in each round gets six points; tempura, which you collect in sets that can be worth 8-13 points if you get three of a kind; desserts, which score only at game end, six points if you have the most but negative six points if you have the fewest; and green dice that give you extra menu or chopstick tokens, or let you gain wasabi, which can triple the value of a subsequent nigiri die you place on top of the wasabi.

Sushi Roll box and components

Let me see that Sushi Roll…

The menus and chopsticks give you additional abilities to use on your turns, with each player starting the game with three menu tokens for re-rolls and two chopstick tokens for swaps. You can spend a menu token to re-roll any or all of your dice after your initial roll. You can use a swap token to take one die off of another player’s conveyor belt in exchange for one of yours – one of the only ways that player order, which rotates after each player chooses one die, matters in the game, and the only time you’ll directly interact with another player during game play. (The maki and dessert scoring involves other players, but only at the end of rounds or the end of the game.)

Walker-Harding has definitely hit on the right balance of game length and strategy; there are enough dice in each round, ranging from 16 (two players) to 21 (three players), that you can plan ahead a little bit. You see all of the dice around you, and can at least sort of guess what dice might come your way over the next few turns, so that you can make more informed choices with each draft. Of the five types of dice, only one, the white (nigiri) dice, score immediately with no impact beyond that selection; three of the other dice colors score depending on other dice you collect and possibly what other players get, while the last color, the green dice, offers a little of both. That’s distinct from roll-and-write titles, which are all the rage this year, but which mostly comprise independent rolls and choices.

I’d still put Sushi Go Party! above Sushi Roll, since the former has less randomness and offers more choices within each game and from game to game, while also scaling up to 8 players where Sushi Roll plays 2 to 5. I also don’t think Sushi Roll plays that well with two because it becomes too obvious what dice you might get, and because it’s too easy for the players to take entirely different paths and end up with little to no conflict. (The -6 point penalty for having the fewest dessert icons doesn’t apply in a two-player game.) The two-player mode might benefit from the addition of a dummy player that, say, takes dessert tokens first, then maki tokens, which would directly impact the way the two players score those categories. For 3-5 players who either want a new twist on Sushi Go! or who just love dice games, however, it’s a credible re-imagining of the original that is very true to the earlier games’ mechanics.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ August 22, 2019
→ By

Second Chance.

Uwe Rosenberg has two new games out in his seemingly unending series of polyomino-based (think Tetris) titles that started with Patchwork and continued with Cottage Garden. I reviewed Patchwork Doodle, the first of these two new flip-and-writes, last week; Second Chance is very similar, also a flip-and-write where you try to fill out a 9×9 grid by revealing cards with polyomino shapes and drawing those on your paper, but it is the far easier game to learn and play, but with a really clever twist when you get stuck that can cause massive frustration to other players (by design, I think).

The conceit is as above; everyone starts with a unique, 8-square pattern that they’ll fill out in the center of their papers, oriented however they’d like. The deck of polyomino shapes is shuffled and you draw and reveal two cards on every turn. Each player picks one of the two shapes and draws it on their paper, again anywhere and in any orientation they’d like. (You can rotate or flip the shapes in any way you need to.) The game comes with three reference cards that show all of the shapes in the deck, which are also displayed inside the box itself, so you can sort of plan ahead around certain shapes with the understanding that two shapes you need could both appear in the same turn.

The big twist comes when any player can’t place either of the two shapes shown, usually as you get close to the end of the deck. That player gets a “second chance,” and turns over the top card on the deck. If they can place the shape, they do so and continue playing. If not, they drop out; if they’re the first player to do so, they fill in any empty space on their grid with the number one. (If two players bust on the same turn, they both get the 1.) No other player can use that card, so it’s possible that a key shape you wanted will never be available to you because another player burned that card for their second chance.

A Second Chance turn.

Play continues until one player fills out their entire grid, in which case they win the game; the deck is exhausted; or all players bust. In the latter two cases, the player with the fewest empty squares on their grid wins, regardless of whether they dropped out or were still alive when the cards ran out. If there’s a tie, any players with that 1 on their grid win the tiebreaker. Otherwise it’s a shared victory.

As with Patchwork Doodle, the Second Chance box says it plays 1 to 6, but you’re really just limited by the number of start cards, which I believe is a dozen. We haven’t had anyone win by filling out their entire grid, but my daughter came within a single square of doing so (and she won, of course, even though she busted.) It’s very easy to teach people how to play the game – you don’t even have to explain the second chance part in full until you get there, unless people are counting cards, so to speak – and it’s a quick learning curve to climb too. As with Patchwork Doodle, you’re mostly playing solitaire, but the challenge of filling out the whole grid here is more enjoyable because of the number of cards and variety of shapes on them. It’s also quite portable and I prefer the subtler artwork. I think given the choice between the two flip-and-writes, I’d pick this one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ August 16, 2019
→ By

Patchwork Doodle.

Patchwork is one of my favorite two-player games, and is probably the forerunner of all of the polyomino (Tetris shapes) games that have been flooding the market in the last year. Patchwork only plays two, and there’s very direct competition for the game pieces, each of which is unique, you use to fill out your 9×9 board, as well as specific rewards on a progress track that also serves as a sort of timer to restrict the length of the game. Designer Uwe Rosenberg has since created a line of polyomino games in the same vein as Patchwork, but that allow up to four players and run longer, including Cottage Garden and Indian Summer, while he experimented with mechanics like how players select their tiles; they’re good, but Patchwork is still the king.

This year saw Rosenberg bring out two new flip-and-write titles in this subgenre, Patchwork Doodle from Asmodee imprint Lookout games and Second Chance from Stronghold. I have both and have played Patchwork Doodle a bunch of times already; it does a solid job of bringing part of the Patchwork experience to more players (the box says “1 to 6+,” but the maximum is really ten players), but the game is also very streamlined and there’s zero player interaction, so it’s more of a brand extension than a sequel or a reimplementation.

This is a flip-and-write game, which means there’s a core deck of cards, and players will use those cards to write on their individual scoresheets. Each player here gets a sheet with a blank 9×9 grid, and gets one of ten unique start cards (which is why I say you can play with up to ten people), each of which shows a shape that will cover seven squares. You can fill in that shape anywhere on your board – I tend to do it somewhere in the middle, as placing it on an edge risks creating some hard-to-fill areas right out of the chute – before players take their first turn. The game itself comprises three rounds, and players will get to fill in eighteen more shapes across those rounds, scoring after each round, and possibly using any or all of their four special powers across the game.

The cards show more polyomino shapes, as you’d expect, although this time they’re not all unique. You start the game by flipping the top eight cads from the deck and creating a circle, placing the start token anywhere on that circle, and then having one player roll the die to move the token. The die lets you move the token 1, 2, or 3 spaces on to a card, which all players then get to fill in on their grids, after which the card is removed from the game. You do this six times in a round, after which you stop to score, saving the two unused cards to start the next round, when you’ll draw six fresh cards to bring the circle back to eight. In the last round, you’ll stop after the fifth card is used, and every player can choose one of the three remaining cards to fill in on their grid for their final move.

Patchwork Doodle components

Some example cards and player sheets

Players also have single-use powers they can bust out at their discretion over the course of the game. One lets you fill in a single square rather than using the card for that move. One lets you choose to use either card adjacent to the one with the token on it, whether one space ahead or one behind. One lets you make one straight-line cut to the polyomino shape on the card into exactly two shape, after which you fill in one of those shapes (but not both) on your grid. The last power just lets you reuse one of the three powers you’ve already used.

Scoring is a little confusing at first, although everyone I’ve played with got it after a round or two. When a round ends, you identify any completed rectangle on your grid, and then score one point for every space in the largest square inside that rectangle, plus one more point for every row outside the square. So if you had a 4×6 rectangle completed already, you would score 18 points: 16 for the 4×4 square, plus 2 for the additional rows that were in the rectangle but not the square. It’s just not intuitive, but the way the game plays out, it starts to make sense both for strategy and from a design perspective – the scoring absolutely affects where you choose to place your shapes.

After the last round, you score the largest square inside your chosen rectangle, then subtract one point for every space you didn’t fill in at all over the course of the game. You add up your three scores from the rounds, subtract that penalty, and that’s your final score. Games take 20-25 minutes, really depending on how quickly players choose which areas to fill.

There is zero player interaction here, which is true for most roll- or flip-and-write games, but you aren’t even competing in game-end scoring categories like in games like Welcome To; Patchwork Doodle is very much a solitaire game where you compete at the end of the game. Also, the box comes with six colored pencils that are kind of useless, so I recommend you gather your own before playing. It’s very portable – I just took it on vacation with my girlfriend, only to have her trounce me by filling in all but 5 squares on her grid – and easy to pick up once you grasp that square-in-rectangle scoring, but I would still suggest the original Patchwork if you’re going to play with two people.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ July 30, 2019
→ By

Curios.

Curios, which will be released this week at Gen Con, is a fun trifle of a deduction game, playing two to five players in a very quick little game that asks you to bet on which of four ‘artifacts’ will prove most valuable based on the cards in y our hand and those you see. It’s a clever little idea that could probably have been built into a more significant game, but instead it’s a fast-playing filler.

The heart of Curios is a deck of sixteen cards in the four colors of the artifacts, showing the values 1, 3, 5, and 7 for each. Regardless of player count, the dealer sets up the game by dealing one random card from each color, face down, next to each artifact’s card, which will be the value of those artifacts when the game ends. Each player then gets some cards at random to start the game, the number depending on the player count, and will then place their tokens on each of the artifact cards to claim artifacts based on the values they deduce from the cards they hold and others revealed during the game. Once the supplies of two of the four artifacts are exhausted, the game ends; the four hidden values are revealed and players add up the values of the artifacts they’ve collected during the game.

Where the game goes a bit awry for me is in the way the players claim those artifacts. Each card has columns with one space, two, three, and four columns (two); to place your tokens on a card, you must fill the leftmost empty column. You start the game with five such tokens, so you run out of ways to bid on different artifacts very quickly in each round. When you fill a column on a card, you take one artifact of that color; when all players have placed all of their tokens (or can’t place any more), the player with the most tokens on each card gets a bonus artifact.

At the end of a round, each player may choose to reveal one of their hand cards and gain an extra token for the next round. The benefit of having an additional token probably justifies doing this, although by revealing a card you share useful information with other players; in a five-player game, you only get two cards apiece, so it may make more sense to hold one back there than in a two-player game, where you each get four cards. Regardless of player count, the way the columns work means you find it very hard to ‘bet’ on more than one artifact in a round, which means that you end up with a lot of luck involved in every game – maybe too much in a game of deduction, especially with five players. I think it’s ideal with three, and it works as well with two because you set up a neutral third deck of the remaining four cards and reveal one each round, and it’s pretty portable, so as a quick filler game for travel that can introduce novice players to deduction games, it’s fine, but I prefer deduction games that rely more on your mind and less on luck.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ July 16, 2019
→ By

Kodama Duo.

Kodama: The Tree Spirits is one of my favorite family games, still one my daughter will ask to play years after we first got it, because it’s the rare game that’s appropriately competitive but also fun to play: The action you take on each turn, adding branch cards to grow your tree, is its own end, with a subjective component and the point-scoring aspect that forms the heart of the game. The base game has enough cards for anywhere from two to five players to play at one time, and in our experience plays as well with two as it does with higher player counts.

I was a bit surprised to see the designers had come out with a two-player version, Kodama Duo, but still gave it a whirl since the original is such a favorite for us. Duo does have a few rules tweaks that change the game for two players and make it a little harder, although I think the net result of the alterations is not positive – I prefer the original. However, the Duo box also includes enough additional cards for you to add a sixth player to the original game, which may be worth the cost by itself if you have enough kids around to get to six players.

I reviewed the original Kodama for Paste back in January 2017; click over there if you want a review of the base game’s details. The main difference in Duo comes to card selection. The game still has twelve turns in three seasons, but this time, you have to jump through a hoop before either of you gets a card to play. One player, the Chooser, draws the top three cards from the deck at the start of a turn. The other player, the Splitter, divides the three cards into two sets, one with two cards and the other with the remaining card. The Chooser then picks one of those two options, while the Splitter gets the other choice.

The player who ended up with two cards may only play one of the two to their tree, discarding the other card. The opposing player plays the one card they received, and then gets to take a Spirit token representing one of the game’s six features (where you get all your points in the game), using it to cover up any single feature already on their tree. You can only take a token if that feature was shown on the card your opponent discarded. At the start of the game, the six Spirit tokens are in the general supply, but they’ll eventually all end up on the two players’ trees, so when you select a token, you ‘ll take it from your opponent’s tree or relocate it on your own. (The rules are not well written around this, but the designers confirmed you can ‘take’ a token from your own tree and put it somewhere else.)

I think this rule is here because with just two players, there’s so much choice of cards in the base game that it might seem insufficiently challenging for two. Duo comes with exactly 36 cards, so you will draw them all over the course of a single game; thirty of them look like cards from the original, and there are also six single-feature cards, with exactly two instances of one of the game’s six features. But this isn’t an improvement over the original, and the idea of “splitting” three into two and one is … it felt silly, to be kind. I would have been much happier to just draw two cards each turn and alternate who picked first.

There are also different decree cards, which add a new wrinkle for four turns (one season), in Duo, and they don’t quite work the same way as in the base game, since most of them seem to rely on the spirit tokens or change how you split the cards (for example, one of the three cards is face-down to the Chooser until they choose). The decree cards are a big part of the appeal of the base game, so it was a shame that they worked so much worse here.

Duo does include additional cards and new decree cards that can only be played with the base game (marked 3-6 to distinguish them from the two-player decrees), which then allow you to expand the original to six players. Given the lack of added value in the pure two-player variant, I’d say get Duo if you want to play Kodama with six, but otherwise pass on it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ June 24, 2019
→ By

Lanterns Dice.

The 2015 game Lanterns has been one of my favorite titles to play on my iPad for since the app version came out in 2016, which in turn led me to trade for the physical game as well. It’s a quick-moving game that appears light but has more depth to the long-term strategy than it seems, especially because players all place tiles into the same space and have to plan for the potential for someone else to screw up your little plan.

Renegade Games is about to release Lanterns Dice: Lights in the Sky, a spinoff, roll-and-write game that incorporates similar themes to the original but gets rid of most of the directly competitive elements of the original, asking players to fill out spaces on their individual sheets to match set patterns and create contiguous areas for more scoring. That lack of interaction on the table itself makes this a very different experience than that of playing Lanterns, which makes this more of a competitive solo game – what you do almost barely affects anyone else’s game or score. That said, it’s still a solid roll-and-write game because of the variability in game setup and because of some new quirks on the sheets that can let you chain together certain moves.

Lanterns Dice comes with four six-sided dice, each side showing a distinct color, and gives each player a sheet with a 9×6 grid of “pools,” each of which contains two triangles of different colors. When it’s your turn to roll the dice, you roll them into the tray and shake it until the four dice sit in the center, and then you orient it so one die faces you. You get to fill in one triangle of that color on your sheet; every other player has a die facing them at the same time, and they fill in triangles of those colors. On your roll, you also get a free fill from a color specific to that round, shown on the right of your scoresheet.

The primary goal in Lanterns Dice is to fill in complete pools (both triangles) to match any of the four patterns that you’ve chosen for scoring in that particular game. The box comes with eight patterns, two of which cover three squares, four of which cover four squares, and two of which cover five squares; you pick which four to use, using one small, two medium, and one large. The point value for each pattern declines the more it’s used over the course of the game, so being the first to score a pattern has a modest baked-in bonus of an extra point or two. You will also score at game-end for the second-largest contiguous block of completed pools on your sheet, so you need to create two disconnected chains and try to keep them close in size to maximize these points. There’s a third way to score by surrounding pools with boat symbols on them, filling in the four orthogonally adjacent pools but leaving the boat’s pool untouched.

The interesting aspect of Lanterns Dice comes from two other symbols that appear on certain pools on your sheet. When you complete a pool with a square platform, you get to fill in one triangle on any adjacent pool. When you fill in either triangle on a pool with a circle on it, you get one “gift,” tracked at the bottom of the scoresheet, and you can redeem those for valuable prizes. You can spend one gift to reroll your four dice one time. Each game also has three bonus moves you can buy with one to three gifts, such as letting you fill in a second triangle of the same color you rolled, or letting you fill in one or both triangles on a separate pool somewhere on your sheet. These can be very powerful if you plan them out a little, because you can set yourself up to get a chain of free moves, especially later in the game.

Games take about a half an hour, and setup is really very quick – you just have to sort and choose the fireworks tiles showing the patterns you can match and score in that game. It’s a nice filler game, but I think it loses the facet of the original Lanterns that I liked most: the interaction among players on the main board, where you’re competing to place tiles in the most valuable places, and your placement can interfere with someone else’s plans. The dice game also isn’t as visually appealing as the base version, if that’s your thing. It’s a solid addition if you love the original or enjoy roll-and-writes, but I don’t think it’s going to be a regular play around my house.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ June 9, 2019
→ By

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra.

Azul was my #1 game of 2017 and remains a huge favorite in my house for so many reasons – simple mechanics, high interaction, appealing components, solid play for two players and for four, and the most important fact: it’s a lot of fun. The game was such a huge hit that the designer and Next Move games have released a spinoff game, Azul: Stained Glass Of Sintra, that borrows about half of the mechanics of the original but asks players to achieve different goals, creating a slightly longer game but one I find just as entertaining.

The basics of Azul: Stained Glass Of Sintra are identical to the original. Tiles in five colors are placed on platforms in the center of the table, four per platform, and on a turn, each player takes all of the tiles of one color from a platform. Remaining tiles go to the center, from which players may also take tiles. As the round progresses, players then have to weigh the potential of getting stuck with tiles they can’t place, which also carries a penalty – this time, one that increases as the game goes on, rather than resetting every round.

Here, players have unique boards of eight columns of five spaces in different combinations of those colors. The player places as many of the tiles they’ve taken in a single column, moving their personal glazier token to that column. Once a column is filled, the player places one of the tiles on his board below the columns, discards the rest, and scores: 1 to 4 points for that column, plus points for every column to the right of that one for which the player has scored at least once previously in the game, plus one point per tile matching the special tile color for that round.

When a player fills a column, they flip it to the other side, which contains a different pattern; once that side is filled, the column is removed entirely. The bottom board thus has two spaces under every column, and there are bonuses at game-end tied to how many of those spaces you fill and in where – two different sets of bonuses, depending on which side of the boards the players use. My preference is side A, which gives you bonuses of 3, 6, or 10 points per 2×2 square.

The original game is a good bit simpler and more streamlined than this game, which takes slightly longer to play, but also gives you more options than the first game did. In the first game, it was easier to get stuck with tiles you couldn’t place. Here, you have more spaces to fill and more options, plus a way to pass your turn by moving your glazier back to the first position (you can only places tiles under him or to his right), which factors into the calculus at the end of the round battle to avoid getting the shaft.

There’s an elegance to the original that’s missing in this game, but the play in this game is also more open-ended, so you will usually feel like you have more choices. I don’t know that this is really a distinct game from the original; it’s more like a new flavor of the same thing. Some folks like original recipe and some like extra crispy. If you loved the first Azul as I did, though, you’ll at least like this version. (You can also buy the original game here.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ May 15, 2019
→ By

Reef.

Emerson Matsuuchi has come on the gaming scene with a bang the last couple of years thanks to the trilogy of games under the Century banner, beginning with Century Spice Road, which is – and this is generally a compliment – a great game to try if you like Splendor. In between the release of Spice Road and the second Century game, Eastern Wonders, he also released a very light pattern-matching game called Reef, which is a fun trifle of a game that I think is a great game to play with younger kids or folks entirely new to gaming.

Reef’s setup and components are themselves quite simple. The game comes with coral pieces in four colors, and you use a fixed number depending on how many players are playing. Each player has a 4×4 board, and begins with one coral piece of each color, arranging the pieces as they wish on the four central spaces. There’s a deck of cards with two coral symbols on top and some sort of pattern on the bottom that you’ll try to match. You begin the game with two cards, dealt to you at random, and then there are three cards out on display.

On each turn, you may take a card from the center of the table, or play a card from your hand. If you play a card, you execute two steps: You take and place the two coral pieces shown on top, and then you can score if anything on your board matches the pattern shown on the bottom. You can stack coral pieces, but the only color on a stack that matters for matching purposes is the one on top – so you look at your board from the top down to determine if you’ve matched the pattern. Regular patterns can include anywhere from one to four spaces, and may require you to have one or more stacks of specific heights. For example, it might require you to have two stacks, diagonally adjacent to each other, of height two with purple coral on top. You can score a pattern multiple times, but each stack can only contribute to one pattern per turn. Although you could potentially score more for certain cards, across many plays we’ve found it’s extremely rare to score more than ten points for any of these cards. (I believe my daughter did so once, and that’s it so far.) There are a few special pattern cards that can score quite a bit more – they give you two points for each stack topped by color X adjacent to your tallest stack of color Y, which can get you up to 16 points (four orthogonally adjacent spaces, four diagonally adjacent spaces).

The cards are well-calibrated so that the colors shown on the top don’t contribute to the pattern on the bottom, which means few if any cards beyond the special pattern cards are objectively more valuable than the rest. There’s a bit of strategy involved in collecting cards that will allow you to build toward a pattern on a card you already have while also letting you score something for the patterns on the new cards, but you’re limited to the three shown on the table and those will often be less than helpful. (You can take the top card from the deck in a blind draw, but have to place one or more point tokens on the lowest-valued card on the market, which is probably a terrible move.) With a hand limit of four, you can’t do too much long-term planning, and you’ll regularly have to change your strategy because the cards don’t cooperate or an opponent took the card you wanted.

The game ends when the supply of any color of coral is exhausted or, less likely, the deck of cards is exhausted. At game-end, each player can then score every pattern on cards in their hand, but only once apiece, so saving cards to try to score more points has a bit of risk involved.

That’s all there is to Reef – if anything, it’s simpler than my very detailed explanation implies – and the game doesn’t vary in practice with the number of players. It plays in a half hour or so, with moves very short and your decisions quite limited in practice; you can put your two new coral pieces on any of the sixteen board spaces, but most of those will make no sense at any given time. The flip side is that the game itself is shallow, pun slightly intended; I don’t see any way to play this with a long-term strategy, so you’re just drifting along with the current, playing the best cards that become available to you. Even holding two or three high-value cards doesn’t make much sense because you can usually score those patterns no more than twice and you need to churn your cards to get the coral pieces you need.

Reef’s pattern-matching should work for pretty young kids – it’s color and number matching, and there is no text reading required whatsoever – with turns short enough to keep them occupied, and stacking the coral pieces is oddly satisfying. Each color has a unique shape as well in case any players are unable to distinguish certain colors. As a lightweight, filler game you can teach and play quickly, Reef works, but I don’t think it’s going to be in heavy rotation for us.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,