→ February 8, 2010
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Thurn and Taxis.

We finally played the boardgame Thurn & Taxis with more than two people last night – we had a Game Night on Game Night with a couple of friends – so I’m confident enough to review and recommend the game. It’s fun, it’s quite simple to pick up, and it moves quickly; it’s probably most comparable to Ticket to Ride among games I’ve reviewed before, but with a little more complexity in scoring, allowing for more ways to win the game without the rigidity of fixed routes.

T&T, which won the Spiel des Jahres in 2006, is played on a map of southern Germany and the borders of a few nearby countries, with 24 cities marked on the map across nine different regions. The object of the game is to amass points by building, turn by turn, postal routes (the House of Thurn und Taxis* ran a postal company in north-central Europe for over two centuries) that connect these cities based on cards drawn from the main deck of 72 cards (3 of each city), with six cards visible at any time. Routes must run at least 3 cities, and you must add to your route each turn or “close” it, placing houses on the cities in the route and collecting any point bonuses; if you can’t add to an open route on your turn, you must discard it and start over, an often fatal error. But your ability to place houses on cities in a route you close is limited by a rule that says you may only place one house per region in a closed route, or place houses in only one region of the route, meaning that a route of seven cities across three regions is inherently inefficient, as is a route that includes many cities in which you’ve already placed houses.

*Yes, I’ve read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and no, I neither liked nor fully understood it, two things that are most likely connected.

The bonuses are the key to winning the game, of course, as you earn points by placing houses on all cities in a region (or pair of regions in the case of smaller regions with one or two cities each), by placing at least one house in all nine regions, or by building routes of five or more cities. Each bonus declines by a point when each player achieves it. There’s also a sequential series of bonuses, where you receive a carriage card for building routes of at least 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 cities, in order, without skipping any of the cards, with the points ranging from two points for the three-city route to ten points for the seven-city route. When a player gets the 7-city carriage card, or places the last of his 22 houses, the game ends, with each player taking one more turn.

Those are almost all of the rules of the game, summarized in under 400 words, but those rules allow enough different strategies to keep the game interesting. You have enough houses for all but two of the cities, so you can try to win by placing all your houses first (there’s a penalty of one point per house left in your pool at game end), but have to sacrifice one or two of the regional bonuses to do so. You can try to race to the seven-carriage card, but may be short in region bonuses, or be late for the long-route bonuses. And you’re always at the mercy of the cards in the pool and the deck.

That proved to be the major wrinkle between two- and four-player games. In the two-player game, I found it easy to look ahead a few turns, because I knew what city cards were likely to be available to me the next time around. In the four-player game, not only is that impossible, but the player who chose cards right before me was executing a similar strategy and going after similar routes, so if a card I needed was in the pool, he’d have a chance to grab it, and I clearly wasn’t fast enough to make the mid-game adjustment. (Also, it is absolutely the wrong game to play with your friend the operations research consultant, even more so if he’s the player going right before you, doing critical-path modeling in his head while he steals the cards you need. But I’m not bitter.) Those adjustments aren’t required in a two-player game, so while the two-player game is fun, there’s a solitaire-ish element to it, while the four-player game has just enough randomness to throw a wrench in your strategy and force you to rethink plans on the fly. Like Stone Age, it seems to me to have a good balance of luck and strategy for this type of game. It’s definitely a good starter game for any of you looking to jump into German-style board games, with enough sophistication to satisfy someone who’s already into the genre.

—

Some of you have asked me questions, here, on Twitter, and in chat about games by skill or complexity level. Our collection of German-style games has grown to the point where I think I could categorize them roughly for you by my perception of their complexity, both in terms of learning the game for the first time and in terms of repeated play. Links are to reviews on this site or to the top ten rankings for three games (Babel, Metro, Settlers) that I only wrote up there.

Lowest complexity:

Moderately low complexity:

Moderate complexity:

  • San Juan (long, complex rules, but very simple to play after that)
  • Stone Age (moderately complex rules, a few simple strategies)
  • Babel
  • Carcassonne (simple game, complex scoring strategy)

Moderately high complexity

Highest complexity:

  • Puerto Rico (played twice, many rules, long setup, complex strategy)
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→ January 8, 2010
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Zooloretto.

The board game Zooloretto won the Spiel des Jahres award in 2007, beating out four games I’ve never heard of, although I suppose that’s not automatically a bad thing. It’s a fun game, on the lighter side of the German-style games we’ve played, more at the level of Ticket to Ride than, say, Stone Age or Puerto Rico, but it brings the benefit of being very easy to pick up and quick to play.

Each player in Zooloretto has a small board that represents his zoo, with three separate enclosures containing spaces for four, five, and six animals respectively, as well as a barn and several places for vending stalls. Each turn involves drawing tiles from the pool, with tiles including animals of eight different species, vending stalls, and coins that can be used to purchase the right to move animals or stalls around your board, expand your zoo to add one more enclosure, to discard an animal you can’t place, or to buy an animal from another player’s barn. The goal is to maximize the number of victory points for your zoo at the end of the game, with the biggest bonuses coming for filling any enclosure (with the limit of one animal type per enclosure) and other points coming from placing more animals and stalls, but two-point penalties for animals in your barn, which is where you stash any tile you can’t place until you can either place it somewhere or discard it.

The one major twist is that players do not draw tiles directly, but instead must place them on one of several delivery trucks, each with space for three tiles, placed in the center of the table. There’s one truck per player, but no player owns any single truck, and on your turn, you may choose to take one of the trucks (even if it’s only partially filled) instead of placing another tile. So when placing tiles on trucks, you have to consider whether another player will grab the truck you’ve so carefully filled for your own purposes, and sometimes may draw a tile an opponent doesn’t want and thus choose to place it on a truck to discourage him from taking it (or to screw him if he does). There are also some animal tiles labeled with a gender, and if you get a male and a female of the same animal type in an enclosure … wait for it … you get a baby animal tile, free, so you can fill the enclosure faster. There are also coin bonuses for filling your two smaller enclosures as well as the expansion enclosure, and for a single coin you can swap any two groups of animals, which offers opportunities for more points and to potentially duplicate coin bonuses (making it a nearly zero-risk investment if done correctly).

The game is sold as a 2-5 player game, but the two-player version is explicitly listed as a variant in the rules, and the dynamic changes dramatically. The two players use and fill three trucks instead of two, and so instead of competing with other players for a specific animal type, the only constraint is the fact that in each round, one or more tiles will be removed from the game because they were on the truck that neither player chose. Filling enclosures is much easier, there’s less need to buy an animal from the other player’s barn (I think we’ve done that twice in five games), and just generally less tension because you know in all likelihood you’ll get the tiles you need.

I did manage to play this as a simple matching game with my three-year-old daughter, using four animal types for the two of us, just two trucks, no money or stalls, and using the one-type-per-enclosure rule. She thought it was great and even understood when I switched two of her animal types to make room for her to add another panda* to her zoo. My daughter thinks it’s important for everyone to finish whatever game we play, and she’s not concerned about who finishes first and has no concept of points, so it really boiled down to matching and counting. Heck, even stripped down to these simple rules it’s still a better game than Candyland.

*So for some reason, my daughter was pronouncing panda “ponda,” as if she was English. We have no idea where it came from, and while it cracked us up, we did tell her it was pronounced “panda” and, after a few days, she dropped the British accent. The first time she said it correctly, I told her, “You know, you used to say ‘ponda’ bear.”
Her response? “When I was a baby?”
“No, sweetheart. Yesterday.”

I’d definitely recommend this as a starter game for anyone interested in playing better board games but a little wary of the heavier strategy entrants in the field. Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne are more challenging, but Zooloretto’s concept and look put it ahead of Carcassonne, and the scoring in Zooloretto is more intuitive than Carcassonne’s bizarre yet critical farm scoring scheme. I would also guess that this game would be the easiest of all of the games I’ve reviewed here for a child to learn to play well; Ticket to Ride is just as simple to play, but there’s more advance planning required than there is in Zooloretto. And who doesn’t love panda bears?

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→ December 30, 2009
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Stone Age.

Santa was pretty good to me in the board games department this year, and our favorite so far is Rio Grande’s Stone Age, a 2-4 person game with some shades of Settlers of Catan but without the initial-placement phase that plays such a huge role in determining who wins in Settlers.

In Stone Age, each player has a small civilization and has to use his five “meeples” to gather resources (food, wood, brick, stone, or gold), build tools to improve resource production, develop agriculture so he gets additional food “free” on each turn, or make more people (but you have to deploy two of your people to that space to make another person – dedicated Stone Age players call it the “love shack”). The goal in Stone Age is to accumulate as many “victory points” as possible through constructing buildings, which you buy through the four non-food resources, and through game-end bonuses for the number of people in your civilization (you start with five and can end up with ten), your food production rate, the number of tools you have, or additional bonuses for your buildings. Of course, you have various constraints at work, including the need to feed your people each turn, the limited number of people you have, and other players competing for the same resources. On each turn, only one player can occupy each of the spaces that add to free food production, make a new person, or build a new tool, and later in the game there’s competition for buildings with high point values or “civilization cards” that increase game-end bonuses while also offering immediate benefits like free resources. There are also only seven spaces on each of the four non-food resources, and since each player has five meeples at the start of the game, it’s possible that you’ll end up boxed out of a resource you want to produce on a specific turn.

Because of the game-end bonuses for tools, farming, and meeples – in a 4-person game where 200-250 is a typical winning score, you can earn 96 extra points if you max out on tools and bonus points, 70 points on people, and 70 points on food production – as well as the potential bonus of 9 bonus points per building (we’ve never had a player reach 10 buildings, although it is theoretically possible to do so), there are a few basic strategies for winning at Stone Age, although competition in 3- and 4-player games will usually require each player to adopt a hybrid approach. All strategies require players to collect civilization cards, which can be purchased for 1-4 resources but must be claimed with meeples that can’t be used to produce any resources on that turn, creating an additional arena for competition on the board. Some cards represent civilization “skills” like art, weaving, or transportation that have no function within the game but add bonus points at the game end, with each player receiving points equal to the square of the number of unique skills he has, with a max of 64 points. There is a so-called “starvation” strategy that involves avoiding food and taking point penalties for doing so – you don’t lose any meeple for failing to produce enough food – although it seems to be a the consensus among fans that this is a flaw in the rules rather than a legitimate strategy.

Although the number of main strategies is finite, each turn presents the player with myriad decisions. The first is where to place the meeples – on production spaces, on any of the three “special” spaces to produce tools/farms/meeples, on buildings, or on cards. The second is the order in which to resolve each of the meeples’ spots – do you roll for gold or wood first, or buy a card that might earn you an extra resource? The third is when to use your tools to round up die rolls on resources, although this becomes easier as the game goes on if you’re accumulating lots of tools as your core strategy. You also have the option to play a limited amount of defense by blocking opponents from resources they might need or buildings/cards they might want, and since one condition for ending the game is the exhaustion of any of the piles of buildings for purchase, you might place a meeple on a building but pass on buying it simply to keep the game going another turn or two.

There’s a modest amount of luck in the game, but it’s still a strategy game at its core. Players roll dice to determine resource production, so it’s possible to place several meeples on a resource (especially stone or gold) and walk away with little to no output, although a player can use more meeples on a resource and/or deploy his tools to smooth that out a little and largely eliminate the risk of a zero-output roll. The order of civilization cards and buildings that appear for purchase is also random, and there are certain cards (especially those that permanently add one farm or one tool) that are more attractive than others. It’s enough randomness to keep the game different each time out, like Settlers of Catan, but the fundamental strategies are always the same and you’re not completely at the mercy of the dice. The main benefit of the random element is preventing a player from having a fixed strategy before the game starts – seeing the first set of cards and what spaces you can occupy in the first few turns helps determine which strategies will be most effective in that particular game.

Stone Age is more family-strategy than hardcore-strategy; what you’re producing is generic, with no purpose to buildings or skills beyond the points they provide at the end of the game. A typical game takes just over an hour once every player knows the rules, and we found that after one game everyone was up to speed on the rules and concepts to play competitively. My wife insists that I mention that the artwork is excellent, with vivid colors and great detail – this will be more relevant after I post one of the upcoming reviews. And outside of Settlers and Ticket to Ride I don’t think we’ve been as into any game right out of the box as we have been with Stone Age.

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