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…
Among The Stars is a derivative and highly repetitive card drafting game about building space stations. Players pass “Location” cards around the table and add them to their personal tableaus by spending “Credits” and “Energy Cubes”, which scores them points and activates abilities (which usually score more points). There are variable player powers and shared objectives to vie over for points as well, but they’re mostly inconsequential. The vast majority of player scores comes from the location cards. The game is played over four essentially identical rounds, and the player with the highest score after that wins. This exceedingly brief summary is about as far as I’m going to go into the overall structure and rules of the game, aside from some particulars which I’ll be getting to in a moment, as the focus of this review will be comparing Among The Stars to its two most obvious tabletop relatives: Suburbia and 7 Wonders. Spoiler alert: they are both far superior games. The set-up rules for Among The Stars begin with an immediate red flag: “The game can be played in two modes: Aggressive and Non-Aggressive.” Is it so much to ask designers to design their games instead of leaving it the players? I’m all for optional variants and other methods of extending the longevity of a game that may otherwise exhaust itself after a few too many plays, but to place this choice front and center in your game’s set-up betrays a serious lack of confidence in the appeal of your game. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just a…
Saboteur is a poor game that doesn’t do the little it does very well. As a bluffing game, it is pathetically one-note. As a take that card game, it is lifeless and undramatic. As a route building game, it is simplistic to the point of mindlessness. I know the game has earned its fair share of devotees over the 15 years since its release (there are some very enthusiastic reviews on BGG as evidence of this), but this is a view I do not share in the slightest. It’s a fairly unique title, sure, but it’s also shallow, repetitive, and obnoxious. In fact, the game’s flawed nature is so openly admitted to — even by its fans — that perhaps there’s not much of a reason for me to be writing this review. Thing is, though I agree with all the commonly acknowledged problems that Saboteur has, I personally find it to have many, many more. Saboteur is a game about a group of dwarves mining for gold. Some of the players play as good little dwarves trying to get to the gold stash, while others play as the titular Saboteurs: evil, butthole dwarves eager to stop the gold from being found. The game is played over a series of three rounds. At the beginning of each the map of the mine is set up by placing the entrance card at one end of the table and three “Goal” cards face-down at the other, one of which is hiding the gold…
Ambitious doesn’t even begin to describe Vast: The Crystal Caverns, a five-player, highly asymmetric take on the well-worn “Knight vs. Dragon vs. Goblins vs. Thief vs. Sentient Cave” theme. The workmanship here is plain as day, as evidenced by an impressive slew of mechanics and ideas that connect through an enticing narrative core that keeps the action centralized and on track. It’s no wonder that upon release the game garnered acclaim for its unorthodox approach to the traditional dungeon crawl and for aggressively pushing the boundaries of asymmetric game design. It is quite unfortunate then that, despite its ambition and creativity, the experience of Vast: The Crystal Caverns amounts to little more than dealing with an unwieldy mess of overly specific rules and player interactions. Even more, Vast‘s problems run so far and deep that it calls into question whether asymmetry on this scale is even desirable in a tabletop game. Leder Games seems to think it is, as they have since doubled down on the concept with the highly praised 2018 title Root. But alas, that is another game for another review, and currently we must get back to the disappointment at hand that is Vast. Let’s start with something (relatively) positive for once: the art. Vast is colorfully illustrated in a charming comic-fantasy style that personally calls to memory the Spaceman Spiff strips from Calvin & Hobbes. Judging by the art alone, you might think the game is a simplified miniature tactics game such as Arcadia Quest. It isn’t. Not at all. So there’s a…
Leo Colivini’s Cartagena is a brief, to-the-point racing game, so this will be a brief, to-the-point review. I like this game. It’s simple, unique, and just tactical enough to be engaging. Its rules explanation is accomplished on a single page (though the recent 2017 edition comes with several options and variants we won’t be getting into), and its set up, though modular, is quick and painless. Cartagena is a game that is easy to teach, easy to play, but somehow (for me, at least) not easy to dismiss. Cartagena has only the slightest veneer of a theme. Each player controls a squad of pirates trying to be the first to escape to safety following a jailbreak from the titular prison (which the game overview humorously pretends is based on real events). Really though, this is almost purely an abstract. It is played on a linear board covered with vaguely pirate-y symbols such as lanterns and pistols. Players take turns playing cards with the same vaguely pirate-y symbols on them, allowing them to advance one of their pirates to the next matching symbol available on the board — not entirely unlike the ubiquitous children’s game Candy Land. If a player doesn’t want to play a card, they may instead choose to move any of their pirates backward to the first space with one or two other pirates on it, which allows them to draw one or two additional cards. These are the only two actions available to the players, though they are allowed up…