7 Wonders Duel is about what you’d expect when you redesign a game that goes up to 7 players to allow only 2. That’s not to say it’s bad, only that its balance between systems to interact with and players to interact with is a bit off. Fortunately, the systems here are enjoyably tight and have been buffed up with a pristine level of polish by veteran game authors Bauza and Cathala. Nevertheless, a game of 7 Wonders Duel feels as much like playing against it as it does your opponent. Co-operative games notwithstanding, that is rarely a good thing. No aspect of the game’s design plays to the strengths of 2-player experiences. You spend more mental energy calculating cost benefit analyses and counting icons than you do on responding to the other player’s actions. Because of this, 7 Wonders Duel, though cleverly built, is a somewhat lifeless game of resource optimization and multi-tasking that falls short of creating a compelling competitive dynamic between its players. The main thing 7 Wonders Duel succeeds at, and much of the praise it has been awarded is due to this, is updating the diverse elements of 7 Wonders to work smoothly in the context of 1v1. It is still a tableau builder played across three rounds called “Ages”, but player-to-player card drafting, 7 Wonders‘ mechanic magnefique, has been significantly retooled into a solitaire-esque spatial puzzle where cards are arranged in overlapping patterns and players take turns selecting from those unencumbered. Thusly, player selections free up cards underneath, creating pathways toward others…
If I were to put together a university curriculum on modern board game design For Sale would be included in the first lesson of Introduction To Game Structure. Its implementation is an immaculately clean 1-2 punch of set ups and pay offs which is nearly as addictive as some of the more dangerous illicit substances floating around these days. I don’t think I have ever, in the dozens of times I have brought For Sale to the table, played only a single game of it before boxing it up again. It’s practically impossible. No one I have ever introduced to the game has disliked it, and I’m talking upwards of 20-30 people. For my money, this is about as universally enjoyable as a modern game can get. Its clarity of intent and surgically precise execution of its ideas is a standard by which most other light-weight games should be measured by. For Sale is an auction game. In many ways, it’s the auction game (at least as far as entry-level ones go; I’m not forgetting about you Knizia!). Players act as aspiring real estate moguls trying to buy properties for cheap and flip them for much profit. It is split into 2 highly distinct phases: Buying and Selling. At the beginning of the buying phase, players are injected with fat stacks of cash. Then, a set of “Property Cards” is dealt to the center of the table. Each property card has printed on it a numeric value between 1 and 30. Charmingly, all 30 cards contain unique…
*** Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game (2018) – Przemysław Rymer, Ignacy Trzewiczek, & Jakub Łapot
WARNING: I don’t do spoiler-free reviews. If you want spoiler-free, this is not the blog for you. Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game adds a lot to Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective‘s investigative formula and gains very little. Loaded with unnecessary mechanics, unintuitive gimmicks, and uninteresting text, you’d think the game would be a total failure, but fortunately that is not the case. On the contrary, it’s actually quite immersive! What we have here is a game with a very effective core system needlessly surrounded by a surplus of ideas, many of which don’t really work. Regardless, Detective remains a suspenseful and information-dense investigation game that challenges and excites at least more often than it confuses and disappoints. In Detective, 1-5 players take on the roles of agents for Antares, a nascent criminal investigation organization under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Antares is ostensibly “the most high-tech investigation agency in the world,” but sadly that idea does not mechanically manifest itself in any meaningful way. Yes, a good portion of the game is accessed via a dedicated website. No, that does not make it cutting edge — at least not any more than VHS games were cutting edge in the early 90s. Anyway, like Sherlock before it, the vast majority of playing Detective is choosing what to do from a list of available leads then reading a bunch of text describing what happens. Sometimes the text is on cards and sometimes the text is on the aforementioned website. Either way, I hope you like reading text, because boy does…
Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space is the perfect case study of a good game idea getting totally mangled by inept design. If its disaster of a title doesn’t completely scare you off (seriously, did it take four people to come up with that?), then what’s waiting for you inside the box likely will: a clunky, tedious hidden movement/social deduction game without a single interesting element to its implementation beyond the marriage of those two genres. Encumbered by a turgid pace, monotonous cadence, and chaotic decision space — not to mention its necessitation of copious amounts of straight up guesswork — Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space ultimately adds up to merely a much more complicated (and much more irritating) riff on the widely-maligned, yet seemingly perennial Battleship. Like many a bad game before it, Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space sounds thrilling on paper. A social deduction game where the goal is to escape a failing spaceship, and half the players are secretly murderous aliens who really just want to slaughter everyone? Awesome! And all movement is hidden in order to simulate a ship-wide power outage? Double awesome!! Yeah, if only. How the game works is every player gets a personal map of the ship which they use to track their own movement and any information they might have on the whereabouts of others. The maps are split into white and gray hexagonal spaces, where white represents a “Silent Sector” and gray a “Dangerous Sector”. Players take turns moving secretly about the…