→ November 1, 2011
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Glen More.

Glen More is the first board game from German designer Matthias Cramer, who was subsequently nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres award in 2011 for his next game, Lancaster (losing out to one of our all-time favorites, 7 Wonders). I haven’t played that latter game, but Glen More is one of the most interesting new games I’ve come across, second only to 7 Wonders in that department, with particular points for introducing a new selection mechanic for a tile-based game.

In Glen More, players are Scottish clan leaders and begin building their territories with a single village tile and a single clan member (experienced boardgamers will recognize it as a meeple). On his turn, a player takes one or more tiles off a track that goes around the outer edge of the central game board and places it (or them) adjacent to any tile he has already placed. When he places a tile, that tile is “activated” as are any adjacent tiles, meaning the player may receive up to nine actions and/or resources for placing a single tile. Standard tiles may provide resources (wood, stone, cattle, sheep, and wheat), allow for the conversion of resources into victory points, allow for the production of whiskey from wheat, or add new clan members. The game also includes several special tiles that grant bonuses at the time they’re placed or at the end of the game.

The selection mechanic is the biggest difference between Glen More and any other game where players are building territories or edifices independent of other players (such as in Alhambra). Glen More’s track includes twelve spaces, of which eleven are occupied at any time by either a single tile or a single player token. On his turn, the player whose token is at the head of the chain may jump back as far as he likes on to any tile and claim it; therefore, if he is still ahead of all other players in the chain, the player can go multiple times. (Once all players have passed over a particular tile, it is discarded from the game.) Therefore, it is likely that players will receive uneven numbers of turns, something balanced out slightly by a game-ending penalty for players who have more than the minimum number of tiles. The mechanic forces players to weigh the opportunity cost of jumping far back in the chain to claim a specific tile – not only does this leave other tiles to competing players, but it may be a while before the player who moved so far gets to select again.

The other two main strategies in the game involve balancing resource production with conversion into points or whiskey and placing tiles in the most advantageous manner. You need some resources to buy certain tiles, and there are good tile pairings (such as a pasture and/or a cattle tile plus a butcher tile to convert them into … well, delicious victory points) to target. But you can get caught overproducing without enough options to convert or spend those resources, or have the opposite problem where you can’t take certain tiles because you lack the resources. (There is a market to buy and sell goods, but it’s limited, and once three resources of any kind have been purchased by players, the market has no more until a player decides to sell one back.) Whiskey production, while fun on a more general level, also leads to victory points for players who produce more than the player with the fewest barrels has, and can be used to buy certain valuable tiles like taverns, which produce 7-8 victory points whenever they’re activated.

The placement issue is the trickiest one in the game. There are multiple restrictions, but the key one is that a tile can only be placed horizontally or vertically adjacent to another tile with a meeple on it, meaning players must keep their meeples placed to allow for continuous expansion. Village tiles grant “movement points” to allow the player to move his meeples around, or to promote one to chieftain and remove it from the board for future points, but these opportunities are limited. A player also needs to consider the potential for future activations of the tile when placing it – you don’t want to place a tavern at the edge of your territory where you might not activate it again during the game, to pick an obvious example.

Glen More includes three scoring rounds and a final round of additional scoring, much as Vikings did. The intermediate scoring rounds grant points for whiskey barrels, chieftains, and special tiles; the player with the fewest in each category gets zero points, and other players receive 1-8 points depending on how many more tiles they have than the player with the fewest has. A delta of one receives just one point, but a delta of five or more receives eight points. At game-end, players score for their special tiles (some of which carry significant bonuses) plus one point per coin, and then lose three points for every tile they have in their territories above that of the player who has the fewest.

The game is designed for 2-5 players, but with two or three players there is a dummy player represented on the track by a die that has values of 1, 2, or 3. When that die is at the head of the chain, it’s rolled and jumps back over the number of tiles shown on the die. The tile selected is discarded, as well as any others that ended up ahead of all players plus the die in the chain. The dummy-player variant for two players is pretty common – Alhambra and Zooloretto both use it – but in Glen More it works much more smoothly; losing tiles is a bummer, but you’ll adjust your strategy and won’t lose anything too significant along the way. Without the die, tile selection would be way too predictable, and with four players there’s enough variation that that element of randomness wasn’t necessary.

By far the best part of Glen More is the number of ways to win. If there’s a single dominant strategy, I haven’t seen it, and from reading the forums on boardgamegeek I don’t see evidence anyone else has. You can mix it up based on the tiles that come to you, or just pursue a specific strategy (whiskey!) because it’s fun without costing yourself the game. The rules could be a little clearer on activation and player movement, but we figured those out on the fly once it became clear we’d misread them on the first pass. The fact that it plays as well with two as it does with four puts it in very select company among German-style games, most of which don’t scale down to two or only do so with clumsy rules variations. And for whatever reason Glen More isn’t as expensive as most games in the genre – it’s available for as little as $25.50 right now on amazon, including shipping. If you don’t mind a bit of a long ramp-up on learning the rules, I highly recommend it. It’s one of the best games we’ve played on the more complex end of the spectrum, and doesn’t take as long to play (under an hour) as most complex games take.

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→ September 2, 2011
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Tikal boardgame & app.

Winner of the 1999 Spiel des Jahres (Boardgame of the Year) award, Tikal has two to four players exploring a Mayan jungle, uncovering temples and discovering treasures for points, but with the added twist that you can steal control of temples or forcibly trade treasures with your opponents to maximize your point scores.

On a turn, a player draws the top hex tile from the stack and places it wherever s/he wants on the board as long as it is accessible from a hex that’s already placed. The tiles include temple tiles, treasure tiles, and empty tiles. A temple tile is worth points to the player who has the most worker tokens on it at each scoring round, and temple tiles can increase in value as players “uncover” higher levels, ultimately worth one point per temple level each time it’s scored. The treasures on temple tiles are “discovered” by workers and come in six types, with points per treasure increasing as you add more examples of each type – one point if you only have one treasure of that type, three points if you have a pair, and six if you collect all three. The empty tiles are useful primarily for a player’s ability to place one of two new base camps on one (or on a treasure tile from which all treasures have been collected), allowing the player to place new workers closer to unclaimed temples and treasures.

Once a player has placed a tile, he has ten action points to use on his turn. Actions include placing a new worker or his one leader token for one point; moving a worker to another tile for one point per “step” between tiles; uncovering a temple level for two points; collecting a treasure for three points; trading treasures with an opponent (in which s/he has no choice) for three points; placing a base camp for five points; or guarding a temple, thus protecting it for the player for the remainder of the game, for five points. Uncovering temple levels, gathering treasures, guarding temples, and scoring points for temples all require the use of workers, so placing and deploying them constitutes the critical decision in the game.

In those scoring rounds, players score for treasures as described above and for controlling temples. When multiple players have workers on a temple tile, the points go to the player who has the most workers on that tile, counting any leader tokens as three workers. But each player takes a turn in the scoring round before counting up his points, so before you score, you get to move workers around to control as many temples (or dig up as many treasures) as possible. And since the three scoring rounds before the final one are somewhat randomly timed, each player has to keep one eye on his positioning for the next scoring round – both how well he’s defended temples he’s controlled and how quickly he can move workers and/or his leader around to grab control of another temple. Guarding temples does help, but a player can only guard two temples per game, and when guarding a temple the player loses control of all workers on that tile for the rest of the game.

One other constraint covers new temple levels: Uncovering a level requires placing a small square game piece with the next level number on top of the highest current level. If all game pieces with the next level number have been used, that temple can’t get any higher.

Because there are multiple scoring rounds and the types of tiles revealed vary as the game goes on, Tikal almost plays like a game with two halves, similar but far from identical. In the first half, players are primarily uncovering temple levels and guarding their highest ones, but as the game moves on to the second half, the inability to uncover new levels means players use more action points on stealing control of temples and/or swapping treasures. Of course, the first half can set up the second half, such as controlling temples that are remote from the rest of the action, thus guaranteeing the player a few points without having to spend action points or workers to shore up his defense.

The main flaw in the boardgame is the length of time between a player’s turns. With each player given 10 action points and an ever-widening number of options on the board, a single turn can take several minutes as the player maps out a plan to use up all 10 points in the most efficient and effective way possible while also setting himself up for the next turn. The compensation for this is that the tension created by the knowledge that the other players are likely to screw you out of some points, so while nothing good is going to happen while it’s not your turn, you will want to watch to see just how badly you get screwed. I’ve also seen the suggestion on boardgamegeek that players use a timer to limit just how long each turn takes, which isn’t the worst idea for a four-player game.

Tikal players two to four players, but the board size doesn’t change, so with two players there’s somewhat less interaction or need to steal from other players. With four players, you’re fighting for smaller pieces of the same pie, and there’s more movement and intrigue involved.

One final positive on the game is the box, which is well-designed for easy cleanup given how many different tokens and tiles there are in the game.

Several other commenters at BGG compare Tikal to El Grande, saying the latter game uses a similar mechanic with a better implementation. I’ve never played El Grande, but I’m sure many of you have and am curious whether that should be an upcoming purchase and whether it plays reasonably well with just 2-3 players.

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The Tikal app for iOS received some pretty tough reviews when it was first released because it was a buggy mess, very crash prone, hard to decipher on screen, with really weak AI players; I bought it early and had all of those problems, but heard about a forthcoming update and decided to sit on a review until that update arrived. The update has made the app much more stable, cleaned up the UI significantly so it’s easier to follow what’s going on, and I think the AI players are a little better – but not a lot, making it more of a training app if you’re not going multiplayer through GameCenter (which I haven’t tried). At $4.99, it’s definitely worth the trial run if you have an iPad and want to try Tikal before you purchase the physical game. One comment I’d offer is that the game graphics are different from the boardgame, including trucks instead of workers, and the screen is a little dense on an iPod or iPhone. On the plus side, however, the AI moves pretty quickly, so you can run through a solo game without dragging, and the animations make it clear what the AI players are doing.

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→ June 20, 2011
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Small World app.

I have updated this post to reflect the 2013 upgrade to 2.0.

Days of Wonder’s game Small World is one of our favorite casual strategy games, one that presents players with a small number of complex decisions, relies much more on strategy and skill than on chance, that replays well, and that looks great. They’ve now released Small World 2 for iPad (not for the iPod or iPhone, though); it looks great and has the best live two-player experience we’ve found so far, although I’d still say Carcassonne is the best overall boardgame app.

The concept in Small World is one of constrained resources. The map is small and its territories will be rapidly filled up by the two players. The players each select a race & skill combination from the table (one is free, others cost from one to five coins) with which to conquer territories, but those races don’t come with many tokens, and since you must have at least two to take over an empty territory and have to use one token to hold a territory you’ve taken, you run out quickly and must put your civilization into “decline” so you can select a new one. You earn a point for every territory you hold at the end of your turn, plus various bonuses. And the decision on when to decline your current race skill/combination will also be based on when your opponent declines or is about to do so, on what options are available on the board, and on how many points you’re still getting from the last civilization you declined, which will most likely disappear when you decline a second one. (For more on the boardgame itself, you might want to read my review of it from last July. The issue I raised about the Diplomatic skill has been solved in the iPad version by eliminating that skill altogether.)

The game’s best feature, by far, is the mimicking of the tabletop by allowing for two players to face each other on opposite sides of the iPad; the player control bars appear on the top and bottom (viewed lengthwise) and the board doesn’t rotate. Pass-and-play isn’t really a hassle, but this is much easier, and given how much the iPad cost I feel a little better about just letting the thing sit on the table while we play. The game also allows you to choose a start player or have it determined randomly, and even lets you choose background music from your iTunes library.

Play is mostly intuitive, with simple drag-and-drop moves and clearly marked buttons for things like redeploying tokens or declining (click on your main race card and it gives you Info and Decline options). Instructions and key details on races and skills are easily available in-game. It offers no undo option if you should drag-and-misdrop, however, and the game doesn’t allow you to save certain skills (like the Sorceror’s ability) till the end of your turn, automatically moving you to redeployment if you’ve used all of your tokens. The graphics in Small World are outstanding, crystal-clear replicas of the physical game pieces, with even smaller tokens easy to discern.

The AI player is adequate, but no great shakes. It avoids stupid errors and usually chooses its race/skill combination well, but would probably be better served with a more aggressive attacking mode and faster recognition of impending doom (I’ve found that the right race/skill combo can wipe the AI off the map, depending on who the AI chose in the first place.) Like that of most AI players in other games, its short-term thinking is better than its long-term thinking. But if you’re just learning the game or enjoy a quick game even though you’re about 80-90% likely to win, it does the job.

In 2013, Days of Wonder upgraded this app significantly to add maps for three to five players, online multiplayer, and several in-app upgrades (new skills and races). They also raised the price to $9.99, but it’s well worth the cost given how much you’re now getting for your money.

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→ February 28, 2011
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Battle Line game and app.

Battle Line is another two-player card game from the prolific Reiner Knizia, the man behind Lost Cities, Samurai, and Ingenious, one that brings a little more randomness to the table than Lost Cities offers but with plenty of opportunities for strategy – the type of randomness that forces you to rethink your approach to the game, rather than the kind that makes you throw up your hands in frustration. There’s also a very good Battle Line app available for iOS, with good graphics and a solid AI but as yet no online play option.

The main deck in Battle Line includes 60 cards, 10 cards numbered 1 through 10 in each of six different colors. Players begin with seven cards in their hands and on each turn play one card and draw one replacement. In between the two players sits a line of nine flags, and at each flag players place cards to try to create a winning formation, one that ranks higher than the opponent’s formation at the same flag. A completed formation contains three cards. The first player to either win five of the nine flags or to win three adjacent flags wins the game.

A formation’s value is determined by the numbers and colors of the cards it contains. The game has its own lingo, but you’ll notice a correlation to poker hands as well. The top formation is the game’s royal flush – three consecutive cards in one color, with a tie going to the formation with the highest sum on his cards, leaving 10-9-8 as the best possible formation in the game. (If a player completes a 10-9-8 formation at a flag, he wins the flag even if his opponent has yet to finish his own.) Next highest is three of a (numerical) kind, followed by a flush, a straight containing more than one color, and last just any assortment of three cards. When both players have identical formation types at a flag, the above tiebreaker applies. It’s also possible to claim a flag before the other player has completed his formation if it is no longer possible for the second player to create a formation to top the one that’s already on the board.

The twist in the game is the existence of a second deck of ten Tactics cards, each unique, which may be drawn instead of cards from the main deck. These cards run from the lifeline (Hero and Champion, two wild cards that can stand in for any card you want, although each player is limited to playing one of these per game) to the attack card (Traitor, stealing a card your opponent has played and using it yourself; or Deserter, trashing a card your opponent has played). The number of Tactics cards you can play is restricted by how many your opponent has played – the delta must not exceed one, so once you’ve played your first Tactics card you can’t play a second until your opponent has played one.

Battle Line strategy breaks down into two major areas. One is deciding how to fill out formations – if you have the green 9 and the green 8, do you play those together and hope you get the 7 or 10, or do you break up the 9 and 8 to try to build the easier three-of-a-kind formations? But the more interesting part is deciding when to fill out formations. Holding back the second or third cards in a strong formation might entice your opponent to waste a valuable card there – but playing that second card might open the door for him to waste your cards by dropping a stronger formation there. And do you challenge his formations early or try to play at empty flags and create large obstacles in the center of the board? It’s one of those “simple rules but different every time” games, like Lost Cities, that work very well for a quick two-player match.

The game’s card constraints are more confining than those in Lost Cities, which makes it a little more random because of how much you’re at the mercy of the deck. In Lost Cities, you’re just waiting for a larger card in any color you’re using, preferably not too much larger. In Battle Line, you have more formations in play but are often looking for a specific card or one of two in a specific color, and can’t discard a card without using it as you can in Lost Cities. If you want a change from Lost Cities, however, Battle Line is the most comparable two-player game I’ve found.

The Battle Line app (a.k.a. “Reiner Knizia’s Battleline”), from Gourmet Gaming, features two AI opponents, allows you to play two-player against someone sitting next to you, and offers a basic game that involves six cards in your hand and no Tactics cards if you want a tutorial. The strong AI player uses Tactics cards well, doesn’t do anything stupid, and will seize on player mistakes nearly every time. Flags are claimed automatically regardless of the winner, and the graphics involved are very clear. The app had problems with crashing and with incorrect values on two Tactics cards, but both glitches appear to be gone since an update about three weeks ago. It’s been my go-to app of late when I don’t want to get sucked into a long game of Carcassonne since you can knock out a game quickly and there’s enough random variation to keep it fresh.

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→ January 25, 2011
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Race for the Galaxy.

Race for the Galaxy is a card game for two to four players that uses the same basic engine as San Juan while borrowing more heavily from San Juan’s parent game, Puerto Rico. Race junks the colonization theme in favor of a space-exploration one, where players settle worlds and build developments to create the top-scoring civilization. It’s a rich game, different every time, but ultimately has two drawbacks that prevent me from giving it a full recommendation.

Each player starts with a home world that has one or two powers, and then lays other cards representing worlds or developments along side it. Players acquire points for the cards they lay and for producing and consuming any of the four types of goods, represented by cards laid face-down on production worlds, then removed during the consumption phase in exchange for more cards or for points. The game ends when the supply of victory point chips is exhausted or when any player lays his 12th card.

In a turn, each player simultaneously chooses a role from the seven options: Two “explore” roles that allow for card draws; a “develop” role that allows a player to place a development card by discarding a certain number of cards from his hand; a “settle” role for placing a world card in the same way; “consume-trade,” where the player trades in one good in exchange for more cards, then consumes the rest (if he has cards with consume powers on the table) for victory points; “consume-x2,” where the player consumes goods for double points; and “produce,” where each empty card with a production ability produces exactly one good. All players use all selected roles in that round, but receive some extra ability or bonus for the roles they chose themselves – for example, the developer can develop at a cost of one fewer card than the regular price.

Nearly all cards bring some special ability to the table. Some cards allow the player to consume a good for a specific gain – usually a victory point, a new card, or one of each, with a handful of cards offering higher bonuses. Others take a point off the cost of developing or settling a world, or give the player a card draw when he does so. There are “windfall” worlds that only produce goods when the player chooses to be the producer or if the player has another settled world or development that has a windfall production power. So when players have 10-12 cards down, there’s a lot to track, and I’ve found it’s easy to overlook a bonus you might have on one of your cards.

If all players have some experience with the game, it’s going to move fairly quickly. But the first drawback to the game is that it takes many plays to learn the game’s strategy, because you can’t map out a strategy if you don’t know the cards well, and you have to play several times to get to know the deck. I downloaded a free version with strong AIs and played at least 20 games (they take a few minutes), after which I knew the key cards for the two main strategies I use. That’s a lot to ask a newbie to do, especially one who’s playing for fun rather than with the goal of reviewing it. And without those games on the computer, I doubt I would have grasped some of the badly-written rules as quickly as I did. (It’s also extremely helpful to have the computer handle the scoring and keep track of Consume powers for that phase.) The cards also express their abilities in icons unique to this game, which seems to be a frequent criticism in online reviews, although I thought they were pretty straightforward once I learned them (and it’s fair to say that learning them is a time commitment not everyone will want to make).

The second is that there’s one strategy that will win the majority of the time, pointed out to me by Tim K. – the produce/consume-x2 strategy. Beating it requires a fair amount of luck in card draws; I’ve won with a military strategy twice, but needed to nail a couple of key cards to pull it off. There are many more production and consumption cards in the deck, meaning a produce/consume-x2 strategy is more flexible and more likely to work, especially if no other player tries it. (Your strategy choice is somewhat set by your start world; if you get the military world New Sparta up front, you’re at a disadvantage if you want to try the produce/consume-x2 strategy.) I’ve read descriptions of Trade and Develop strategies, but I think the extent of luck in card draws required to pull those off must be very high. And if another player shoots for produce/consume-x2 using low-cost blue good cards, he’ll probably finish before the Develop strategy can lay its first big-bonus development.

With some of your recommendations for Race for the Galaxy and its very high rating on Boardgamegeek (#13 as I write this), I was predisposed to like the game, but the combination of high randomness in card draws and high complexity in resolving consume phases doesn’t validate the high ranking. San Juan is simple when compared to this, and I understand that it’s too simple for some people, but the simplicity means that the randomness of card draws has a much lesser effect. Everyone has the same fundamental strategy because San Juan doesn’t allow for as much variation. Race for the Galaxy gives you the variation and thus the multiple strategies, but one strategy can rule them all, and keeping track of all those abilities and bonuses starts to feel a little like work. It’s good, better than most games out there, but I have high standards and Race doesn’t quite meet them.

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→ January 6, 2011
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Jaipur (game).

If you missed it yesterday, I chatted right after the Hall of Fame announcement.

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Back in July when I complained in my review of Lost Cities about the shortage of good German-style two-player games, two of you recommended the card game Jaipur, an Indian-themed trading game with a solid mix of luck and strategy. The recommendation was spot on, as it’s one of the better pure two-player games we’ve tried, not quite as good as Lost Cities but perhaps our second-favorite in that category.

In Jaipur, each player is a trader looking to collect and sell cards of six different types of goods, ranging from jewels to leather. Each good sold brings in a token worth 1 to 7 bonus points, with the first goods of a type sold within a round worth more than the same goods sold later. But there are also bonuses for selling 3, 4, or 5 goods of one kind in a single transaction, so there’s a tradeoff between selling early to get the best goods tokens or waiting to collect more cards and receive a bonus for a larger trade. There’s also a 5-point bonus for having the largest herd of camels (also cards), although camels have some strategic value beyond their points.

Each player begins the game with five cards showing goods or camels, and the market opens with five cards as well, three camels and two randomly drawn from the deck. Players place their camels in a pile in front of them, so they don’t count against the hand-card limit of seven. On his turn, a player may take one card from the market; exchange as many of his own cards (hand or camel) with the same number of cards from the market; take all of the camels from the market at once; or choose to sell goods to the Maharaja (what you’d call “the bank” in other games). The round ends when the deck is exhausted or when three of the six piles of bonus tokens for goods are exhausted.

Because cards are drawn from the shuffled deck, there’s a relatively high degree of randomness involved in Jaipur, and you may go through a round where you just can’t get cards of a certain good – but the fact that there are more cards of each good in the deck than there are tokens of that good on the table mitigates that and allows you some flexibility. We found that there is a strong strategic element to Jaipur, including deciding when to sell and how many to sell, when to go for a bonus and when to try to steal the highest tokens out from your opponent who might be collecting the same good, and when to exchange several cards even though doing so may restock the market for your opponent. It’s light strategy, but enough that there are clearly better and worse ways to play the game, and on every turn you’re thinking about your options or watching what your opponent is taking so you know what she’s collecting and what cards are left in the deck.

Jaipur, like Lost Cities, is also extremely compact, with just the single deck of about 60 cards and a handful of tokens that you could just throw in a zip-top bag, so I imagine it would travel well. Even in the box, it’s one of the smallest game packages I own. If you care about graphics and art, everything’s done in bright colors and the images are appealing in a cartoonish way, although I would gladly play this game with bad art and dim colors.

I interviewed Reiner Knizia recently for an upcoming mental_floss article, and brought up my affection for his game Lost Cities. He said many people call it “the spouse game,” because in many couples you find one game-player more serious about gaming than the other, but Lost Cities seems to sit perfectly in between those two poles. That’s not the case in our house, as my wife likes about 90% of the games I like, but I love the “spouse game” description because it gives such a concise description of where Lost Cities and Jaipur are on the strategy scale. I’d still recommend Lost Cities first, but if you liked that and are looking for another game in the same general area of strategy, ease of learning, and fun, I’d recommend Jaipur for your next two-player purchase.

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→ December 31, 2010
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Ingenious app.

I’m starting to feel like the president of the Reiner Knizia Fan Club, as I’ve raved about two games he designed, the card game Lost Cities and the Samurai app (an adaptation of a board game he published in 1998). I’ll now do the same about (the app for Ingenious, another award-winning board game that is a perfect candidate for adaptation because the machine can ensure the scoring is done accurately. And since Ingenious plays very quickly, it’s become my go-to app when I know I have just a few minutes for a quick game. At $1.99 for iPhone or $3.99 for the iPad, it’s a steal given how often I play it.

Ingenious is an abstract game, meaning there’s no theme or graphics, just a large hexagonal board made up of smaller hexes, with six per side. Each vertex is filled with a single color, each color unique (that’s six colors for the Jack Morris voters in the audience). Players place two-hex pieces on the board – most contain two colors but some contain two hexes of the same color – and receive points for placing them adjacent to the same colors on the board, including any pieces beyond the immediate piece that extend out in a straight line from the piece the player just placed. Points accumulate in each color, so each player has six separate scores.

The twist, however, makes the game … well, I’ll call it clever. The winner is the player with the best “lowest” score among his six. If you neglect one of the six colors, you’ll lose. There is some benefit to maxing out a color at 18 points, as you get a bonus turn after doing so, but chasing 18s may leave you too unbalanced and you can absolutely win a game without reaching 18 in any color even if your opponent does.

For example, in that screenshot above, the player has a tile with red on one half and purple on the other. If he played that tile in the one open space on the top right with the purple side at the top, he’d get four points in purple (adjacent to two tiles, each of which extends out in a straight line for one more tile) and four points in red (adjacent to the top-left red tile, adjacent to the tile below that plus two more extending down and to the right in a straight line). And since red is his lowest color, that’s probably his best play.

The Ingenious app plays just two players and has no online component, but the AI has three levels and is very competitive, with the hardest level considering what you need in late-game moves and blocking you if possible. There is a solitaire mode which I haven’t played (I’d much rather play an AI opponent than a modified game for solo play).

My only real criticism of the app is that rotating tiles can be a little tricky. To move a tile into place, you just drag it, which works fine, but to rotate it, you have to make arcs around the tile, which only works well if the tile is well away from the bottom edge. If you’re placing it towards the bottom of the board, it’s better to press and hold on the tile until it pops to the foreground, rotate it there, and then drag and place. It’s a minor nuisance overall for a very simple but consistently challenging app.

I’ve never played the original board game Ingenious, which appears to play up to four players, but would be curious to hear any of your thoughts on it and how it differs with more than two players.

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→ December 24, 2010
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Reiner Knizia’s Samurai app.

It’s up about $20 from yesterday, but The Wire: The Complete Series is still over half off at $96.49 on amazon.com.

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I mentioned the other day that I’ve become extremely addicted to another iOS app, Reiner Knizia’s Samurai, by the prolific designer behind my favorite two-player game, Lost Cities. Samurai is based on a board game ranked in BoardGameGeek’s top 100, but I’ve never played it (I’ll be buying it after the holidays) so my impressions of the app won’t include any comparisons to the original.

The board Samurai includes an island or set of islands representing Japan and broken up into hexes, some of which have one or more icons representing peasants, soldiers (helmets), or buddhas. The object of the game is to capture as many of those icons as possible, but the victory condition is more based on capturing a plurality of each icon type than on the overall total of icons captured – you can, in fact, capture more icons than your opponent in a two-player game and still lose if he captured more in two of the three categories.

You capture an icon by surrounding it with tokens that influence it in your direction, placing one regular (“slow”) token per turn. Your slow tokens include peasant, soldier, and buddha tokens of varying strengths (1 to 4 points) and samurai tokens that influence all icons. You also receive “fast” tokens, of which you can place several each turn in addition to your one slow token; the ronin token is worth one influence point and goes on land, ship tokens are worth one or two points and go on sea hexes adjacent to land, and special tokens allow you to replay a slow token you’ve previously played or to switch two icons on the board to snatch one out from under your opponent’s thumb. When a hex bearing an icon is surrounded on the land side, it is captured by the player whose adjacent tokens exert the most influence. The game ends when all tokens of any single type are captured, or when four tokens are surrounded but uncaptured because of a tie in influence.

Samurai plays very differently as a two-player game versus a three- or four-player game. In the two-player game, it’s much easier to set up your next move or try to force your opponent to make a specific move, as well as to deduce some of your opponent’s strategy. With three or four players, your degree of control is so much less that your moves are more turn by turn rather than part of a larger game-long strategy, since it’s harder to predict what two or three opponents will do before your next move, leading to shorter setups for captures and more thought required in how your one move will push your opponents to do (or not do) something specific. It’s a simple mechanic that plays out in complex ways, yet with short turns still moves very quickly.

The iOS implementation has outstanding graphics and a very clear tutorial to get you started. I’ve found the AI to be very strong, especially in two-player games; in three-player games I’ve run into the occasional less-than-best move (unless I just didn’t understand what the AI was doing) but would never say I’ve had an easy win. Knizia is a mathematician by training, so his games are highly mathematical in nature, and I think that lends itself to stronger AIs because the programmer can model the game more easily. In Samurai, not only does that lead to more optimal moves by the AI, it also means the AI won’t miss a complex opportunity to end the game early by capturing the final icon in one category.

How addictive is Samurai? I had to leave my iPod Touch uncharged at one point to stop myself from playing the game when I should have been packing for our trip. I can’t seem to put it down unless I’ve won at least one game, because often I know I lost because of just one wrong move. I’ll have to pick up the board game, but I have a feeling this will be a top ten board game for me, maybe top five, given how phenomenal the app is. And I’m not the only ESPNer to think so – Jorge Arangure tweeted that he’s a fan too.

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I may post again this weekend, but if I don’t get back before Saturday, Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and please be careful if (like me) you’re out on the roads.

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→ November 29, 2010
→ By

Rivals for Catan.

Amazon is still running several $1.99 album download deals, including Roots’ How I Got Over, The Walkmen’s Lisbon, and Spoon’s Transference. I bought the first two but have only listened to each part way so far. Reviews to come at some point in the indefinite future.

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Settlers of Catan may be my #1-ranked boardgame, both for the game itself and its importance in board game history, but it has one glaring flaw: It requires 3 players. Since my primary gaming partner is my wife and my daughter is too young for Settlers (and in bed by game time anyway), we use the 2-player games we own much more often. Klaus Teuber, the designer of Settlers, sought to remedy that several years ago with a two-player card game simply called Catan, but it got mixed reviews for longer game play and some frustrating rules that made it harder to develop any sort of strategy.

Mayfair Games just released the update to that two-player game, now called Rivals for Catan, that streamlines the play, making games shorter and reducing the possibility of massively negative in-game events. The artwork is noticeably improved and the cards are (mostly) easier to follow. What has not improved, however, is the luck/strategy ratio, which means that it remains hard to play this game with any sort of plan or design in mind unless you tweak the rules yourself or re-use the “tournament” rules from the original card game.

The basic structure of the game is the same as it was in the original edition. Each player starts with a set of cards representing his principality: Two settlements connected by a road, with six regions, each representing a specific resource (the five from Settlers, plus gold) and bearing a unique number from one to six. On each turn, the player rolls a single die to determine which resource(s) each player receives. Players can expand their principalities by using resources to build roads or more settlements, or to upgrade a settlement to a city. There is a small deck of event cards that are used when either player rolls the event die and gets a question mark (on just one of the six sides, rather than two as before), and forty-odd expansion cards that include buildings to add to your principality, military units that give you strength or skill points, and action cards for single use that allow you to do things like fix the die roll or choose which regions you’ll get when you buy a new settlement. The expansion cards are in several face-down decks, and each player holds three to five cards in his hand, drawing at random from the stacks (unless he pays two resources to look through a stack for a specific card).

There’s a new “basic” game that uses just those cards and features described above and has a victory condition of seven points. It’s a complete waste of time unless you need to play once to learn the game’s mechanics. It’s over extremely quickly and is almost entirely based on luck, since players can’t pay to sift through a stack when choosing a card. The game comes with three “theme” decks that add several simple rules as well as a few new event cards and twenty-four expansion cards (buildings, units, action cards) to allow for a little more strategy, but you’re still dependent on the cards you draw unless you want to pay two resources every turn to exchange one of your hand cards for one of your choice from any deck.

One thing I’ve learned from playing and researching board games and discussing them with all of you is that each player has his or her own ideal luck/strategy balance, and there are games all along the luck/strategy spectrum to suit you no matter your tastes. The current rules structure of Rivals for Catan has too much luck for me, but with one of the theme decks there is certainly some strategy (garnering resources, pursuing certain points bonuses) and I think that underneath this game somewhere is a better strategy/luck balance.

The rules indicate that an expansion pack is coming in 2011, restoring the “Tournament rules” (where you build your own deck, choosing cards from the original set and one theme set) from the expansion pack to the original Catan card game, which gives the game more of a Dominion-like feel and shifts control back to the players. Those rules are still available on the Catan site and are easily adapted to work with this game, but without them, you’re relying too much on dice rolls and card draws for this to approach the degree of strategy involved in the core Settlers game, let alone that in little-or-no-luck games like Puerto Rico.

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→ November 15, 2010
→ By

Jambo (board game).

My series of articles for mental_floss on the history of board games begins today, with a look back at games from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. We’ll end up with some contemporary games at the end of the series, but not before going through the histories of some important games from East Asia, India, and Africa, and medieval Europe.

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Note: I revised this article about a week after it was first posted to reflect the fact that we were playing the game wrong at first. The review below reflects the correct rules. I think.

I picked up Jambo in September on the recommendation of dish reader Joe Huber, designer of the game Burger Joint, who declared Jambo his “personal favorite two-player game” in response to my lament (in the Lost Cities post) about great German-style games’ tendency to play best as 3- to 5-player games. Jambo is, indeed, an excellent two-player game, even though there are certain mechanics I don’t love. It’s a higher order of complexity than Lost Cities, but much of what’s added is random chance rather than deeper strategy.

In Jambo, each player is a trader in precolonial east Africa, with a market capable of storing six “wares,” of which there are six types available (silk, jewelry, salt, hides, fruit, and tea, although the drawing for that last one keeps reminding me of the cover of The Chronic). The goal of the game is to finish with the most money; end game is triggered when either player passes 60 coins, after which he completes his turn and the other player gets one more full turn before the game officially ends. Players earn money by buying and selling wares, most often through ware cards that allow for the purchase or sale of a specific combination of wares – usually three, but a few cards allow the purchase of six – for fixed prices. However, the deck of cards is full of “utility” cards that allow for exchanges of cards and wares, for direct purchases of wares, or for attacks against your opponent such as swiping a single ware from his market or discarding one of his active utility cards, making the game more interactive and opening up some other avenues for strategy.

The core mechanic, however, is buying and selling wares. Each three-ware card has three specific wares on it; they may all be identical, there may be two of one kind and one of a third, or it may contain three different wares. The gap between purchase price and sale price shown on the card is always 7 coins for a three-card combination. That is, if you draw two copies of the same three-ware card, you can buy them and immediately sell them for a profit of seven coins. And since on each turn a player receives five “actions” – the first is usually used to draw a card, so in practical terms we’re talking four actions – it seems to me that the ideal turn is one that starts with a purchase and ends with a sale, where in between you might use utility cards to ensure you have what you need to complete the sale. (You can’t use a ware card to sell unless you have those three or six exact wares in your market.)

The non-ware cards are where the game gets interesting, or at least gets interactive. There are two types of cards – utility cards, which are played once and used repeatedly; and people/animal cards, which are played once and discarded. (I misread the rules, and we played people cards as utility cards for a while, which really wreaked havoc with the game.) Each player may have up to three utility cards face-up in front of him – playing a card counts as one action – and may use them once per turn, with each use counting as an action. Most involve the exchange of something for something – cards, gold, and wares, sometimes allowing you to exchange like for like, sometimes allowing you to use one thing to buy another.

People cards are a wildly mixed bag, with the best of them allowing you to increase your profits on a sale or buy missing wares cheaply so you can complete another sale, but many of them are close to useless and just clog up the deck. Animal cards are all for attack purposes; the parrot lets you steal one ware from your opponent, while the crocodile (the most abundant animal card) lets you take one of your opponent’s utility cards, use it once yourself, and then discard it. You can fight off an animal attack with a Guard card, although I don’t think the deck has enough of them and acquiring one is a function of luck rather than skill or planning.

And that’s the only thing keeping me from raving unabashedly about Jambo: There’s a lot of luck in this game, more than I tend to like. You have no outright control over which cards you draw, of course, and only a few utility cards give you any improvement over that. The solution is simply to draw more cards, and there are utility cards that allow you to draw an extra card, swap a ware for a card, buy a card for gold, grab a ware card your opponent just used, or even rifle through the discard pile for a specific card you’d like to have.

But, unlike in a game like Dominion where you build your own deck, acquiring good cards in Jambo requires luck, and I didn’t feel like the deck was flush enough with good utility/people cards to allow me to set a couple of strategies up and then just pursue whichever one the cards offered me. We’ve played ten times, and each of us has had at least one game where the cards just killed us, including one where I spent five turns needing just about any ware card to win the game, never got it, and lost.

Bear in mind that I prefer games with lower luck levels than most people do – if you view a game as just a game, you’ll probably love Jambo even more than we do. I enjoy games for the thinking and strategizing as much as I enjoy them for their social aspect, and Jambo fell a little short in that regard for me. It is still an excellent two-player option that I think we will continue to play often even as the collection grows.

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