I pre-orded the 2018 reprint of Stone Age the minute I was able to. A medium-light worker placement classic that heavily involves dice? I was sold years before I ever played it. And I was still sold after I bought it. And still yet after I read the rules. But then I played it. Never before had a game fallen from my esteem so precipitously, and for so many reasons. Its pace is glacial, its structure shallow and repetitive, and one of its core mechanics is 3rd grade division. Yeah, I really don’t get praise for this one. Production-wise, I have no complaints. The card and tile stocks are hefty and satisfying, and the game comes with a dope faux-leather dice rolling cup. Even the art is attractive (except for the character faces, but maybe that’s just what people looked like back then). Sure, its primitive human tribal theme isn’t the most creative, but it’s certainly not played out either. All in all, the first impression the game gives off is one of quality. Unfortunately, actually playing the game feels less like developing a tribe of primitive peoples and more like repeating half a dozen unrelated tasks over and over until 60-90 minutes have passed. A game of Stone Age plays over a series of rounds in which players take turns selecting actions with their tribespeople, then take turns performing their selected actions all at once. And of course, in true worker placement fashion, you must feed your ravenous multitudes at the end of each round or face a…
Some games are bad but I see why people like them. Innovation is bad and I have a hard time seeing how anyone could think otherwise. It’s an obtuse and visionless card game that brings very little to the table and asks a TON of its players. It’s random, chaotic, frustrating, and boring. Its core system is barren, and its meta is non-existent. Never before has a game offered so many ways for cards to interact without any of them being interesting. To play a game of Innovation you start by shuffling and laying out ten different decks of cards. The decks are named after different eras of history and numbered chronologically, while the cards are named after technological innovations that were introduced to the world during that era. One card each from decks 1-9 is randomly removed and used to represent that era’s “Achievement.” 5 “Special Achievement” cards are then placed alongside the standard achievements with various rules on how to earn them. All players draw 2 cards from deck 1 and the game is ready to begin. A player takes 2 actions on their turn, and there are four actions to choose from: 1) draw a card, 2) play a card, 3) activate a card, and 4) score an achievement. Cards come in 5 different colors, and when you play a card it goes on top of any other cards of the same color in a stack. Since you can only activate the top cards of each stack, the…
I’m not sure if The Grizzled is supposed to be fun or not, but it isn’t. Being someone that largely prefers games that are fun to games that are not fun, this puts me somewhat in opposition to it. Let me clarify that this has nothing to do with its morose WWI theme or attempt at evoking the abject despair of trench warfare. When I say “fun” I suppose what I’m really saying is “enjoyable” or “interesting”. In this sense, undeniably horrific films such as Idi i smotri or Schindler’s List are still experiences that I would qualify as “fun”. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that The Grizzled is unenjoyable and uninteresting. Rather, it is clumsy, confusing, and a failure at every level in immersing you in its theme. The Grizzled‘s rulebook begins with an “Intention Note” which illustrates the designers’ goal with the game: essentially, to emphasize the personal struggle of WWI soldiers to emotionally endure its hardship by forging intense bonds with their compatriots. Unfortunately to me, this note reads like an attempt at preempting criticism because the designers knew their game wasn’t very good. Then again, I am a cynical sort and tend to see examples of this sort of creative insincerity pretty much everywhere. What I can say for certain is that any rulebook that includes sentences like “At the same level as literature and cinema, games are a cultural medium which is undeniably participative.” is impossible to take seriously. What a clumsy sentence. What does it even mean? Games are…
Picture this: you’re walking down the street, minding your own business, when a strange old man jumps out at you from behind a tree. “Name a breakfast cereal!” he shrieks into your face. You stammer for a moment like an imbecile and cannot think of a single one, despite having inhaled a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch not one hour earlier. For reasons no one can explain, you eventually shout “Cereal!” at the top of your lungs. The strange man laughs at you and disappears in a cloud of purple smoke never to be seen again. Now let me ask you this: was that fun? Was that an enjoyable experience for you? If your answer is yes, then you might like Anomia, which essentially consists of an endless sequence of these types of situations (sans the strange old man). I, however, find this abrupt tip-of-your-tongue sensation rather unpleasant (as does pretty much everyone I know), so to build an entire game around it is, for me, a bit of a non-starter. Anomia is a party game that doesn’t work with enough players to really be a party game and is mostly just exhausting and stressful. In it, players take turns drawing cards from one of two shuffled decks in the center of the table. Each card depicts a category and a symbol. Categories can be extremely broad (“Noun”) or quite narrow (“Bicycle Brand”), and the symbols are your standard arrangement of basic geometric shapes. Turns continue uneventfully until a player draws a card with…
My first Reiner Knizia review and it’s a negative one. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. You know what else I don’t like? Ra. The appeal of this game is beyond me. You spend three quarters of your turns drawing a tile from a bag to no immediate effect. Pretty much the entire game is down-time. Its theme is pointless, its cadence is awkward, and its decision space is tiny. Honestly, this is probably my least favorite design of Knizia’s that I’ve played, and I’ve played a lot. I really do not understand why this is considered one of Knizia’s classics. His earlier titles Modern Art and High Society are significantly better auction games and laid the groundwork for many systems we see in games today. Knizia is practically a master of the auction genre. So what’s the deal with Ra? Why does it completely ignore everything that made both of those games work? Gone are the tempestuous economies, careful value assessments, and creative twists on pacing and scoring. Ra has no economy or valuation dynamics that I can see, and its scoring system is rote set collection of the blandest kind. What happened? First, let’s touch on Ra‘s overall structure. Before the game begins, players are each dealt a hand of “Sun” tiles, numbered between 2 and 16, and a starting score of 10 VPs. Another Sun tile with a value of 1 is placed in the center of the game board. Players then take turns drawing random tiles from a…
I’ve always taken people’s criticisms of Feld’s designs as “soulless Euros” or “dry cube-pushers” with a grain of salt and roll of the eyes, but games like La Isla make it all too apparent there’s a kernel of truth to such disparaging remarks. This is a game with no attention paid to anything other than making a bunch of little systems talk to each other. It has no theme, no narrative, no player interaction, no meta, and only the thinnest veneer of strategy. It is also one of the most repetitive games I’ve ever played. Your turns are indistinguishable from each other. You do the same actions in the same order every single round. A designer with a smaller pedigree would’ve never gotten this published, at least not without a pretty significant overhaul. La Isla‘s flaws are way too obvious and way too severe. Hey, at least that means this should be a quick review! La Isla is a card game about capturing endangered animals on an island. You start by setting up the island and distributing 5 different species of creatures randomly across the board. Each creature space is bounded by 2-4 player spaces that you will be placing workers into to surround and capture them. Every turn, players draw 3 cards and assign them to 1 of 3 actions. One will be used to learn its pictured ability, one will be used to take its pictured resource, and one will be used to increase the point value of its pictured animal species.…
Mr. Jack is a simple two-player deduction game for ages 9 and up with a dead hooker on the box cover. Depending on your personal tastes that may be all you need to know about this game, but assuming it isn’t I’ll continue. 8 investigators have shown up to the scene of Jack The Ripper’s latest crime in the hopes of finally putting an end to his reign of terror, but 1 of the 8 are not who they say. In fact, they’re Jack himself! No way! Yes way. Throughout the game, one player acts in the interest of the hidden Jack, keeping his identity secret by sowing confusion, while the other seeks to bring him to justice. Mr. Jack may sound exciting on paper, but iffy theming, nebulous player roles, and an overly restrictive design reduces its narrative to a slow, mismatched tug-of-war. The game is played on a heavily-abstracted map of London with sewer entrances and street lamps scattered throughout. At each of the 4 corners is an escape route for Jack, 2 of which are cordoned off. The starting locations of the 8 investigators, covered sewer entrances, lit street lamps, and cordons are all predetermined and do not vary game to game. Before the game begins, the Jack player draws an “Alibi” card telling them which investigator they are impersonating. The investigators then have exactly 8 rounds to uncover Jack’s identity and catch him. If they fail to do so, guess wrong, or he escapes they lose (as does…
Co-operative games are prone to a number of design issues that competitive games easily side-step: over-reliance on RNG, inert economies, tension through attrition, ease of min/maxing, etc. The flavorful chaos wrought by player opponents is not easily replicable by cards and cubes, which is why many co-operative games tend to feel more like complicated jigsaw puzzles rather than organic, mutable systems. That isn’t to say there aren’t riveting co-op experiences to be had around the table; in fact, there are plenty. Space Alert is a boisterous, real-time programming game that really gets your blood pumping. Descent and Fury Of Dracula have all but one player co-operating against a mastermind or villain, so the narrative tension is still player-derived. Kingdom Death: Monster has a surplus of agonizing group decisions that affect the way the story plays out in dramatic and unpredictable ways. I bring up these examples because Legends Of Andor has nothing so fancy. In fact, it is very much in the vein of the social puzzle co-operative games that are prone to all the issues I just listed off. And yet it is great. Not due to massive groundbreaking innovations or game-changing gimmicks that flip established mechanics on their head, no, Legends Of Andor is great through sheer artfulness, which is not something that can be said about very many games. Legends Of Andor is a fantasy adventure game somewhere between tower defense and dungeon crawl. Each game, players take on the roles of heroes and make their way through a different “Legend,”…
There are games that make my hands sweat and games that make me take notes, but Alchemists is the only game that makes me take notes with sweaty hands. A modern masterpiece that combines deduction, worker placement, and bluffing in equal measure, Alchemists mixes a multitude of mechanisms into an intoxicating send up of publish-or-perish academia. Upon first glance the game may seem like a whimsical take on Potions class at Hogwarts (and in a way it is), but underneath that boiling cauldron is a fire stoked by the heat of deeply burning brains. It’s no secret that Alchemists can be a somewhat intimidating learn, but many of the best games are. It’s not that the game is particularly opaque or unintuitive. It’s just that there’s so much going on. But there is a hefty reward for taking the time to familiarize yourself with its vast systems and idiosyncrasies: the enjoyment of playing one of the most exciting, unique Euros ever made. Stripped to its absolute core, Alchemists is a worker placement game played over 6 rounds. Players take on the roles of struggling researchers vying for reputation in the field of alchemy. Each round starts with players selecting different places in turn order which determines whose actions will activate first. Lower places in turn order earn you bonuses for selecting them in the form of “Ingredient” and “Favor” cards. Ingredient cards come in 8 different varieties and are combined to make potions, while Favor cards are used for various one time abilities such as extra actions…
Is this game for kids? I think it’s for kids. But if it’s for kids, why does it have the theme and art of a stuffy euro strategy game? Is it for non-gamers? Families? The elderly? It does bear a striking similarity to a certain ever-popular retirement home staple. Does it even matter? There’s not much of a reason to care as the game’s lukewarm time in the sun has already drawn to a quiet close. Well, I suppose insights into game theory and design have come to me from stranger places, so let’s give this review a proper go. Shall we? *ahem* Rise Of Augustus is a dead simple probability game about drawing tokens from a bag, and it is very, very, VERY similar to Bingo. Players start the game by choosing 3 of 6 “Objective” cards dealt to them and placing them in a row on the table. Each objective shows a set of icons on their left side indicating the token draws needed to complete them. They come in two types, “Senators” and “Provinces”, and may or may not have an activation power listed on the right. In addition to these objectives, players also get a reference tile telling them how many of each token type are in the bag to help them calculate odds and 7 wooden figurines for marking off the icons on their objectives as the respective tokens are drawn from the bag. In the middle of the table are placed several more objectives to choose…