→ 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
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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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→ August 6, 2010
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Burger Joint & the small Dominion expansions.

I received a review copy of the two-player game Burger Joint from Rio Grande a few weeks back, but wanted to play it a few more times before offering my thoughts. The game is extremely simple and the mechanics work well, but my wife and I didn’t find it engaging and thought the number of usable strategies was limited; however, it might be an ideal game for younger players because it’s so clean and simple to pick up and involves (mostly) things with which they’re already familiar.

The game’s concept is that two restaurateurs are competing to be the first to build a chain worth 12 total victory points, achieved by upgrading burger or pizza joints to diners and diners to bistros. He builds or upgrades these restaurants by taking resources – cubes in six different colors which loosely parallel ingredients you might find in burger or pizza joints – which are placed in the center of the game at the start of each turn, allowing players to select the cubes by alternating selections one by one. A player may store a maximum of seven of these cubes at the end of each turn, and since the requirements for a diner (four cubes of four specific colors, differing slightly for each player) differ greatly from those for a bistro (three cubes of each of two specific colors), there’s some resource management involved from turn to turn, possibly the most important part of the game.

Bistros are potentially worth the most points but the player can sacrifice some of those points to acquire a bistro with a special skill, such as the ability to exchange one or two cubes for a random cube from the bag, or for a cube of a specific color; one bistro is worth 0 points, one is worth 3 and has no special ability, and several are worth 2. Diners are worth one point apiece. A player’s third, fifth, and sixth burger/pizza joints are each worth one point, although a player may lose those points by upgrading some of those buildings to diners.

There’s one other way to obtain points – buying “publicity,” which utilizes cubes that the player doesn’t need for buildings (but that the other player does). Each level of publicity purchased allows the player to steal one cube from his opponent, but it takes several levels of publicity to get just one victory point and twelve to get to four victory points.

The cube requirements to build each building type and to obtain publicity are extremely well-balanced, and even with the randomness of drawing eight cubes from the bag each turn to split between the two of us, we didn’t finish any game with a score more lopsided than 12-10. The rules are well-written and very straightforward, and other than one quirk in how cubes are distributed to the central board from the bag – each player has exclusivity over certain colors depending on which diners each player owns at that moment – there’s no forced complexity to balance the game or make it harder for one player to pull ahead.

That extreme balance may be part of why we didn’t fall in love with the game, though. There seemed to be one basic strategy, and by the third game we noticed we’d converged on the same set of decisions. We both felt publicity wasn’t worth the heavy resource expenditure, which would probably mean eschewing the 2-point plays available in the bistro column. Each level of publicity requires three cubes, and on average it’s nine cubes per publicity point, while a bistro that might be worth 2-3 points only requires six cubes, and a one-point diner requires four. Because the colors required for publicity differ so heavily from those required for diners or bistros, it’s largely one or the other, and we didn’t feel like the publicity track was a good investment.

As a result, we just played for bistros, and the only real decisions there were when to go for the higher-point ones as opposed to the lower-value ones with better cube-exchange abilities. There’s some strategizing involved in cube selection, but again, we both figured it out fairly quickly…

…which makes me think this game might be ideal for younger players, for whom the level of strategic thinking required is just right. I can’t imagine that it would take an eight- to ten-year-old more than a few minutes to grasp the basic concepts here, and the short game time (under a half hour) is perfect for the attention span of a child*. It’s also very portable, with three small game boards (one per player plus the central board for cubes) and a bag of wooden cubes, and simple to set up and put away. For adults, however, I just think it’s a little light and ended up feeling repetitive after a few plays.

*Admission: I have a short attention span, which is why my blog posts are roughly 1/3 to 1/2 a posnanski in length.

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One of you commented on my Small World review that the BoardGameGeek store – which looks like they hired a bunch of Geocities customers to do their web design – sells some limited-edition expansions for that game and for Dominion. I ordered them all and we’ve used the Dominion expansions, comprising three new cards, several times already.

The best of them by far is Black Market, a Kingdom card where you create a separate “black market” deck that includes some selection of Kingdom cards not in use in the current game – so if you decided to leave out Market in the ten cards you’re using, you could stick a market or two in the black market deck and still have them available. When you play a Black Market card, you draw the top three cards from the black market deck and may choose to purchase one of them; whether you purchase it or not, you get +2 coins for that particular turn, so the downside is still solid.

The Stash card is a new treasure card with value 2 and cost 5; when you reshuffle your deck, you can place the Stash card wherever you want. I could see someone buying a few of these and loading the top of the deck with them to ensure they come up in the next draw, but buying just one or two didn’t make much of a difference because you never know the order of the rest of the cards in the deck.

The Envoy card was our least favorite. You draw the next five cards and one of your opponents gets to select one for you to discard, after which you take the remaining four. How this is preferable to Council Room or even Smithy is lost on me, and the fact that Envoy doesn’t give additional actions isn’t helpful.

It looks like at the moment you have to order the Dominion expansions through some eBay listsings accessible through the BGG Store link above. If you’re a regular Dominion player as we are, the Black Market card is worth trying (and it comes with Envoy), but I’d probably give Stash a pass.

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→ July 6, 2010
→ By

Lost Cities.

As much as I love the new wave of German-style boardgames, the category lacks viable two-player options. Many games, like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, require a minimum of three players, while others, like Zooloretto and Power Grid, include two-player variants that don’t work as well as the three-plus rules do. We’ve found a couple that work well for two players – Carcassonne, San Juan, and Dominion are probably the best – but the list is relatively short.

Lost Cities is a real rarity among great German-style games in that it’s strictly a two-player game, only the second (along with the card game Catan, a two-player offshoot of Settlers) in our collection, and it has the twin virtues of being quick to learn and quick to play, so that you can run through several games in an evening rather than devoting the entire night just to setting up Puerto Rico. Lost Cities – which went in the less common direction by spawning a multi-player game, Keltis, which ended up winning the Spiel des Jahres – is simple, portable (just a deck of cards and a small board that isn’t fully necessary once you know how to play), and has an excellent blend of strategy and chance that prevents the game from becoming repetitive yet gives the player some control over his fate.

Each player in Lost Cities may begin, over the course of the game, up to five “expeditions” using cards; each expedition costs 20 points once initiated, but there’s no cost associated with an expedition that’s never started. The deck of cards contains twelve cards in each of five colors, representing the five expeditions: One card each from numbers 2 through 10, and three “investment” cards that allow the player to double, triple (if he plays two), or quadruple (if he plays all three) his profit or loss from that particular expedition. On each turn, a player plays one card to an expedition or discards one to the board and draws a single replacement from the deck or the discard piles. When the deck is exhausted, you add the values of the cards in each expedition, subtract 20, and then multiply the result by 2, 3, or 4 depending on the number of investment cards that expedition, gaining another 20 point bonus for any expedition that contains at least eight cards.

The catch is that cards must be played in order – investment cards come before card 2 – but the deck is fully shuffled and players only hold eight cards in their hand at any given time. Thus, players face decisions like holding on to high-numbered cards while hoping to get lower numbers or investment cards to fill out the expedition, or risking beginning an expedition where he isn’t close to the 20 card points required to turn it profitable. If you discard a valuable card, your opponent may pick it up, unless his expedition has already gone past the number of the card you’ve given up. When the game is nearly over, a player may choose to pick up discards rather than draw from the deck to try to delay the end and allow him to play more cards – but the other player can just keep drawing from the deck to try to end it sooner.

Once we got the hang of it, we found that games only lasted ten minutes or so, meaning that one of us can try avenge his/her losses in the same night, breaking up one of our major frustrations with the Catan card game or massive multi-player games like Puerto Rico and Agricola*. There’s no particular skill required beyond arithmetic, so even the most ardent RBI-lover could handle the math, and the basic strategies are straightforward and shouldn’t take long for new players to figure out. I’d boil down those strategies to two archetypes that the players can blend as needed: You can try to hit home runs on one or two long expeditions with investment cards, or go for 5-10 points on four or all five expeditions. Your optimal strategy or mix of those two depends on the cards you draw, but since you only see eight at the start the game, you have to make some educated guesses – you could argue that there’s a little probability involved here but I’m not saying anyone needs to bust our their old permutations formula – and at some point will end up at the mercy of the deck and your opponent.

*Yes, I now own Agricola, a birthday present from a determined wife who bought one of the last copies from the game’s last print run – it’s out of stock just about everywhere until at least August – and we’ve played it twice. When I get through a few more games, I’ll write it up.

The simplicity of Lost Cities meant that I could even play with my four-year-old daughter, who wanted to play as soon as she saw the cards in my bag while we were in St. Kitts. We never keep score, but to make it interesting for her, I told her she just had to make sure each card she put down was bigger than the one before it, she had to match the colors, and her goal was to make each column add up to more than twenty (she’s not adding to twenty yet, but it turned into a whole conversation about how you add numbers together). We’d play the game and she’d be excited that, say, three of her five expeditions reached the magic number of 20. Those of you with children probably understand this more than those of you who haven’t crossed that chasm yet, but it was fun for both of us to play like that, and she enjoys playing games she sees mommy and daddy playing.

One final advantage to Lost Cities: It’s cheap for a German-style game, and so in many ways this could serve as a gateway game to the bigger, more complex entries that tend to dominate the rankings at BoardGameGeek.

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