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…
WARNING: I don’t do spoiler-free reviews. If you want spoiler-free, this is not the blog for you. I did it, everyone. I finished a legacy game. And let me tell you, it was quite the roller coaster ride! Boring one minute, frustrating the next — I never knew what to expect! I now totally understand the appeal of stopping in the middle of a game to fiddle around with stickers and scratch-offs and to punch out new components. And I totally understand the appeal of having to read new rules every time I play a game. And I TOTALLY understand the appeal of having to undo all the work I did in previous games because of a TOTALLY epic plot twist. Ah, Legacy! A revolution in tabletop gaming! Surely, much has been said about the gamification of the boring parts of life, the chores. But Legacy games are the truly brilliant inverse of that: the chorification of games! Genius, I tell you! Genius! Alright, now that that’s out of my system — and likely the majority of the folks reading this are incensed — let’s get real. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is not a good board game. At best, I would consider it competent. It “works”, I suppose. Never before in gaming has a contrived narrative structure and gimmicky mechanical bait-and-switches led to such undeserved adulation as this. I mean, according to the users of Board Game Geek (which seems to be about 95% of the board game enthusiasts in the…
Pandemic is widely considered a modern classic and deservedly so. When it emerged on the scene in 2008 there was very little like it. Its triple threat of social puzzle solving, clever mechanisms, and fresh theming were, to forgive the pun, infectious. Melding co-operative hand management, variable player powers, point-to-point movement, and set collection to create a fast-paced game of disaster mitigation was a truly groundbreaking accomplishment. There had been co-operative games before, sure, but none that presented its players with such an immediately accessible and tantalizing scenario to overcome. That an entire game of Pandemic took less than a single hour was but the period at the end of the sentence declaring Pandemic a bona fide smash hit, an achievement that would be foolish to claim it did not deserve. But looking past its reputation, influence, and accessibility, is it truly a great game? A game that immerses its players in its system, that forges an intoxicating social contract around the table that demands to be returned to again and again? No, I regret to say that it is not. For every mechanical innovation or brilliant idea it brings to the table, there is another aspect of it that is overly random, clumsy, or tedious. And though Pandemic is undoubtedly an important work in the pantheon of tabletop games, it is also one that is hard to muster up the desire to play very often due to its multitude of issues. Pandemic is a game about treating and containing the simultaneous outbreaks of 4…
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…