→ June 11, 2024
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Spellbook.

Phil Walker-Harding has designed some of my all-time favorite games, including Cacao, Silver & Gold, Super Mega Lucky Box, Imhotep: The Duel, Sushi Go!, Gizmos, and more. He’s been on something of a cold streak lately, unfortunately, with a number of games that felt unfinished or insufficiently tested, and it continues with his most recent big release, Spellbook, a game with a decent concept that ends way too quickly.

Players in Spellbook get a set of seven cards, each of which shows three ‘spells’ on it (with rare exceptions) that players can cast to gain additional powers throughout the game. On your turn, you may collect spell tokens in the seven colors, and if you collect at least three of a color, you can cast the associated spell, gaining either an immediate bonus or a new action for the rest of the game, plus victory points, but losing the ability to cast the other spells on that card. You may also store a token on your player board on every turn, with spells that allow you to store two or more if you cast them, which awards you the most points and also triggers the end of the game when someone fills all 14 spaces on their board.

In each turn, you get up to three actions, tied to morning, midday, and evening, with all spells fitting into one of those three times of day. In the morning, the base action is to take one visible token from the market or two random ones from the bag. In midday, the base action is to store one token on your board. In the evening, the base action is to cast one spell. As the game progresses, you’ll have better actions available from spells you’ve cast, such as allowing you to swap some of your tokens with those in the market, or allowing you to discard one token with a specific symbol to draw 4 from the bag, so the game speeds up. And that’s the problem: Spellbook ends before you can get anything interesting going at all.

If a player just muddled along and stored a token on every turn, they wouldn’t win, but the game would end after 14 turns, which might be a reasonable number – but the game should never last that long because of the actions available that let you store multiple tokens at a time. The game ends either when someone fills their board, which is the only way we’ve ever had this game end, or when someone casts a spell of all seven colors. I’m pretty confident that the cast-and-store strategy is the dominant one, both because it offers more points and because it ends the game more quickly, but that consistently left us with the sense that we’d barely played the game. Some spells aren’t that useful anyway, but you might cast only three of them before the game ends, and that just isn’t very fun to play. It wants to be an engine-builder, but that would require more turns, and there’s too much randomness involved in getting the tokens you need for spells (with one way to create a ‘wild’ token that’s too difficult to change the calculus). I have a hypothesis that larger publishers in board gaming are pushing to get more titles out rather than fewer, better-quality ones, and this feels like it supports my belief – at best, it just wasn’t tested enough, because there is no way people played this a bunch without saying the game ended too soon.

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→ 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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→ April 30, 2020
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Gingerbread House.

Phil Walker-Harding is probably my favorite game designer right now, one of the only names that would get me to buy a game just because I saw it on the box. Silver & Gold was my #2 game of 2019, and Imhotep the Duel was #6. Gizmos made my top ten for 2018. Cacao remains a favorite, and I think his Sushi Go! Party is one of the best games for 5+ players. Imhotep itself was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres. I’ve never played a PWH game I didn’t like, and still have one unplayed game of his (the first Adventure game).

Gingerbread House came out in 2018-19, and I think it’s slipped a bit through the cracks because he’s released several better games in the last two years that overshadowed it. I suspect the goofy theme and art might lead people to think it’s a simpler game than it is, although Broom Service had very similar art and that’s definitely more complex than this game is.

Gingerbread House is like a kicked-up Kingdomino, or a better reimagining of Kingdomino than Queendomino is, asking you to place two-square tiles on your 3×3 house card to gain tokens based on what you cover up. You’ll then collect those tokens and use them to buy points cards, while also gaining up to three bonus cards for each level you complete. There are specific twists to the rules beyond that, but that’s the framework of the game – you place one tile on each turn, collect two things (or maybe three), and then buy a card if you can.

There are four colors of tokens in Gingerbread House, and the cards you buy, which represent humans and monsters you’re trying to ‘trap’ by enticing them to your house, can require as many as eight tokens and can require tokens of just one color or up to all four. You’ll cover two spaces on each turn and take tokens matching those spaces, although if you cover two spaces showing the same symbol, you get a third one as a bonus. There are other spaces that give you an extra stairway (see below), or let you swap one token for another one, or let you reserve a card to try to pay for it later.

If you’re mathematically inclined, you probably caught on to the fact that you can’t cover a 3×3 grid with two-square tiles. You start the game with one ‘stairway’ file, which is a square ring that allows you to see what’s beneath it. You can place that for free at any time, but you must cover it with a regular tile on the same turn. You also get a one-square wild tile whenever you pay for a card, and must place it immediately, taking whatever token or symbol you’ve covered; if you later cover the wild tile, you can take any color token or treat it as if it were any of the other three symbols.

When you complete a level of your house, you get to take a bonus card that’s worth points at the end of the game. In the basic game, you just take the highest-points card still on the table. In the advanced game, however, you choose one of the bonus cards, which are dealt out at random at the start of each game, and can thus tailor your strategy afterwards to maximize the points you get from the cards you obtain. Individual character cards are worth 4 to 10 points, but bonus cards can be worth as much as 12 points, so if you play your cards correctly (pun intended), you can gain the equivalent of another character card or more from each bonus card. There are some bonus cards that only give you two points, but instead reward you with tokens based on what’s visible on your board at the time you take them.

That interplay between bonus cards and character cards is what makes Gingerbread House more than just a basic family game. You could certainly ditch the bonus cards and play with younger kids, but the bonus cards are what make this fun for adults. What Gingerbread House lacks is any real interaction between players. Unless two of you are gunning for the same card, and maybe one of you uses the ‘cage’ symbol to reserve it, you’re mostly working on your own. That’s fine – Gizmos is like that, Silver & Gold is like that, Bärenpark is definitely like that – and the game is fun enough for a couple of plays, but I don’t know that this has the same huge replay value as his better games.

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