Coup is a good game for people that don’t play games. It has bluffing, hidden roles, variable player powers, a dash of deduction, a pinch of probability, and many more modern game design goodies in a very compact package. When it exploded back in 2012 with a chorus of claims that it is “a lot of game” for its size, that’s because in a way it was. It’s an impressively deft design that mixes myriad mechanics with ease. The problem is these eclectic elements don’t add up to much, and Coup greatly misses the mark in several key areas such as narrative, balance of risk/reward, and social impact. This is a last-man-standing player elimination game where the winner is often the player that played the most passively. This is a bluffing game without bids or bribes, a hidden information game without much information in the first place, and a filler that is — in direct contrast with the genre’s name — unfulfilling. What Coup wants to be is a game about political espionage and subterfuge. To start off, you shuffle the deck of 15 role cards (3 each of 5 different types) and deal 2 face-down to each player alongside an initial supply of 2 coins. Players then take turns performing 1 of 7 actions. 3 of these are general actions, while the other 4 are tied to specific role cards. The general actions are: 1) take 1 coin from the bank, 2) take 2 coins from the bank, and 3) pay 7…
The first game of Two Rooms And A Boom is exciting. The second is a lot like the first one, but less exciting. The third is a lot like the first two, but not exciting at all. That’s a precipitous decline in enjoyment for any game, much less one that’s 15 minutes long. The reason? Two Rooms And A Boom, despite its orchestrated cacophony, has but a single note to sing. Two Rooms And A Boom is a social deduction game played by separating a (hopefully large) group of players into two teams: Red and Blue. This is done by shuffling a deck of cards and dealing one secretly to each player. One member of each team will be special, as their card will inform them. The special Blue Team member is the “President.” The special Red Team member is the “Bomber.” The players are then split between two rooms using any arbitrary means, and the game begins. It is played over 5 rounds (round 1 is 5 minutes, round 2 is 4 minutes, round 3 is 3, etc.). At the beginning of the first round, one player in each room is nominated to be the room’s leader. At any point in a round the leader may abdicate to another player or be voted out and usurped. At the end of each round the current leaders both choose a player from their room to send to the other. The Red Team wants the “Bomber” and the “President” in the same room at the end…
Say Anything‘s rule book is fourteen pages and only two have rules on them. The first five are a picture book about the designer leaving his oppressive New York City hedge fund job to make board games, which is super cringey and really rubs me the wrong way. There’s also a two-page ad for Say Anything. Yes, two pages of Say Anything‘s rule book is an ad for itself. Even more, there’s an additional two-page ad for the family version of Say Anything. Ridiculous. Anyway, this is a review of the game and not its rulebook, so I suppose I should get to it. Okay. You ready? It’s terrible. One of the worst party games I’ve played. I genuinely like Cards Against Humanity more than this game, and I hate Cards Against Humanity. Say Anything is an awkward, useless party game that reduces the simple act of asking people questions into a stilted mélange of embarrassment. Here’s how the game is played: on a player’s turn, they draw a question card and read it aloud to the other players. Here are some sample questions: Which celebrity would be the most fun to hang out with for a day? What would I want most for my next birthday? What TV theme song is the most fun to sing with friends? If you’re not already running for the hills to avoid playing this game you and I are very different people. Next, whichever players can tolerate being asked something so asinine write their answers on small dry-erase boards and…
Why Tsuro was one of the first modern board games I purchased, I have no idea. I remember it intrigued me, but I don’t recall why. It’s simplicity? It’s box art? It’s price? It’s a fairly unique game, so maybe that had something to do with it. After all, the purchase was made well before my realization that uniqueness in the tabletop space is frequently out of alignment with quality. Case in point: Tsuro itself. This is not a good game, not even close. About the nicest thing I can say about Tsuro is that it’s inoffensive. But oh wait, it’s a game designed by a white dude that draws aesthetic and thematic ties to ancient Chinese philosophy for marketing purposes. And oh no, in the introduction of the rulebook it even claims the game “represents the classic quest for enlightenment.” It’s 2019 yo, some woke somebodies out there must be outraged! Personally, however, there’s another passage in the rulebook I find far more offensive: the one that declares Tsuro a “masterful blend of strategy and chance.” Which, this being a board game review and not a Twitter rant, is the passage I’ll be addressing today. Let’s cut to the chase, Tsuro is so shallow you can practically exhaust the depths of its possibility space after only a brief explanation of its rules. So let’s do just that. Tsuro is a tile-laying game played on a large square grid. Players are dealt three tiles each, then place their pawns on their chosen starting point around the grid. On these tiles…
If the potential to assist players in committing suicide by cop was the primary factor in the assessment of board games, Ca$h ‘N Guns would be the greatest ever made. Alas that is not the case, so I am compelled to express the depths of which I despise the embarrassment of its experience. This is a game that’s appeal hinges entirely on a single flimsy gimmick: pointing foam guns at each other. There is nothing else to say about it. If you think pointing foam guns at your friends for a half hour sounds like a hoot, you will probably like Ca$h ‘N Guns. Personally, I think it sounds like hell (apparently not always though, something made me buy the game after all…). Maybe if the game built around this gimmick wasn’t shamefully rudimentary and uninteresting I’d feel differently, but I mean of course it is — this is a game about pointing foam guns at each other. Ca$h ‘N Guns is a high concept, low effort flub that fails in every way to be expressive of its theme and has so little going for it I’m surprised it even exists, much less has a second edition. The first time my friends and I played Ca$h ‘N Guns was such a dismal experience I’m reluctant to drudge up its memory. Every single person at the table loathed it; we didn’t even finish the game. To this date, it’s one of the most viscerally negative reactions to a new game I’ve seen. But why? What about…
This will be a very short review because there’s not much to say about PitchCar. If it wasn’t widely considered a classic dexterity game I wouldn’t have bothered to even play it, much less write about it. It is much more of a toy than it is a game, and an incredibly boring toy at that. I genuinely find setting up the game more interesting than the game itself. Truth be told, PitchCar is probably the most uneventful dexterity game I’ve ever played. I say that without an ounce of hyperbole. PitchCar is a racing game you play by flicking wooden discs around a modular track. You can build said track with as many twists, turns, and straight-aways as you like. Once built, each player individually does a qualifying lap around the track to determine turn order. The fewer flicks you take to complete your lap, the better your position. This part is extremely boring at higher player counts for obvious reasons. Following the qualifying round is the real deal. Players take turns flicking their discs around the track, each aiming to be the first to complete three laps. This is only slightly less boring than the qualifiers. If I was attempting to review this game from the perspective of a child, I might be more enthusiastic about it. But I’m not, because why would I be? PitchCar is a seriously uninteresting dexterity game compared to all the others I’ve played. Rhino Hero and Jenga both have way more tension due to their balanced mixture…
Before El Grande, The Princes Of Florence, and Tikal — but after already snagging his first two Spiel des Jahres awards in the 80s — eminent game designer Wolfgang Kramer released a humble little card game called 6 nimmt!. Though it’s been released under many different titles over the years, such as Category 5 and Take 5, it’s likely still best known to the world under that original German title. It has been reworked/reimplemented/re-whatever-ed many times since its original publication date in 1994 (the most bizarre of which being The Walking Dead Card Game in 2013), due largely to its exceptionally clean and easily iterated upon system. In addition, while most light-weight card games from the mid-90s have long since faded into obscurity, 6 nimmt! has displayed impressive longevity with consistent print runs and sales. Today, despite its simplistic nature, 6 nimmt! remains one of Kramer’s best known designs and seems to have become something of a minor classic. That’s a laudable feat for any game, much less one with barely a handful of rules, so let’s take a closer look! 6 nimmt! is a simultaneous action selection card game lasting exactly ten rounds in which players attempt to add cards from their personal hands to one of four shared rows in the center of the table. Players start with ten cards, one for each round, and the cards are numbered 1 through 104 without duplicates. Distinct from this numeric value, cards also have point values (it’s golf rules, ladies and gentleman — points are bad). Each round, players…
Betrayal At House On The Hill is one of the first board games I ever loved. It is also one of the first I ever hated. Like so many modern board game neophytes, with maybe a game or two of Dominion and Catan under my belt, my first impression of Betrayal At House On the Hill was one of delight and wonder at its seemingly infinite possibilities. The idea that a game’s objectives and victory conditions could be different every time it was played was mind-blowing. My friends and I played it many times over the first year or so I owned it, alongside a steady diet of titles from an increasingly wide selection of other games I’d been acquiring at a somewhat embarrassing rate. We began noticing something odd. We enjoyed every other game we tried more than Betrayal, aside from the rare massive whiff (which will remain nameless until I review those as well). Fast-forward roughly six years, and oh how tastes change. To say that I now consider Betrayal At House On the Hill to be a bad game would be a massive understatement. It is abysmal. Awful in every regard. A masters class unto itself in how not to make a game. The illusion it had cast me under has long since faded away, and it is abundantly clear that the true nature of its sprawling, open-ended design stems not from ambition, vision, or cogency — but simple ineptitude. When I dislike a game and am collecting my thoughts on it, I always spend a decent…
Disclaimer: The author of the following review has been using a misprinted Machi Koro card as a bookmark for the last three years. He felt obliged to inform his readers of this and ensures them that this fact is a mere triviality and has in no way affected his opinion of the game because why the heck would it? Ah, Machi Koro. The game of great first impressions and eventual disdain. I say that of course because every single person I’ve introduced the game to (myself included) have all experienced this, shall we say, phenomenon in nearly exactly the same manner and at exactly the same pace. In fact, this opinion seems widespread enough amongst us crazy board game enthusiasts in general that I believe an official term should be minted for it, so let’s do just that. We can call it the “Machi Koro Appreciation Depreciation Effect”, or the MKADE for short. So what specifically is the MKADE? Based on my own analytical observations of several different players of all different backgrounds, I have chosen to define it as a three-stage process in the gradual transformation of one’s opinion on the game of Machi Koro. The stages are as follows: “I really enjoy this game and would like to play it again very soon.” “This is not as fun as I remember it being.” “I never want to play this game again.” For the sake of immediate relatability I have decided to name each stage after common utterances I’ve heard in post-game discussions…
Greenland is an interesting game to discuss. Did I say game? I meant simulation. As a game, it’s much less interesting. I know, I know, that’s just about the most common criticism you can toss at an Eklund design, but it’s a common criticism for a reason. In Greenland‘s particular case, it’s because the game was obviously created first and foremost as an abstract mechanical approximation of the historical events it depicts. But, as a tabletop gaming experience, it struggles to even function. Everything from the overarching game structure, to the flow of a round, to each individual player action is maximally obtuse and filled with all manners of exceptions, edge-cases, and randomizations. Thing is, contrary to most other games plagued by issues such as these, it is perfectly apparent that in Greenland this is intentional. A cursory glance at the ridiculous rulebook for the game betrays this immediately. The deliberateness behind each rule is obvious, but damn there are so many. Eklund, visionary that he is, has tried to include as many aspects and nuances of his chosen theme in the design as possible. In doing so, he has created a chaotic, claustrophobic mess of systems without a shred of attention paid to the game’s rhythm, decision space, or social interactions between players. Okay, maybe that’s not 100% true, but it’s certainly what it feels like. From a low resolution perspective, I can absolutely see the validity in implementing mechanics that are as representative of your theme as possible and making that your chief design…