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…
Upon opening the story book and beginning to read aloud the two-page prologue, I immediately knew that there was something strange afoot with Mice And Mystics. It wasn’t that the writing was particularly bad or the setting and theme particularly trite — nothing so plainly damning as that. Very simply, it was just the length of the dang thing. By the end of my recitation my throat was sore and I didn’t feel like playing a game anymore. The pacing of the game had been thrown off before the first turn was even taken. And then it hit me: I still had to read the chapter introduction. Mice And Mystics envisions itself as a hybrid of sorts between children’s storybook and co-op dungeon crawl. Cool! Problem is, the game inherits the absolute worst of both worlds: a simplistic narrative that no well-adjusted adult could possibly care about and some mucky rules overhead guaranteed to stymie the vast majority of children that come in contact with it. It is clear that Mice And Mystics wants to be a bridge between young and old, to speak to kids of all ages, to bring families together and give them a grand adventure to experience. But instead, it is a game with no discernible audience and a heap-load of design flaws. In Mice And Mystics, players take the roles of a prince and his cohort who are magically transformed into mice as they plan a counterattack against the evil queen and her minions who have overtaken their castle. It is…
It’s hard to take a game seriously when its rulebook contains an editor’s note suggesting players completely abandon its scoring system and play for just “the pleasure of guessing and being guessed.” And by “take seriously” I don’t mean that party games are meant to be “taken seriously” by their players, but that including such a note casts some serious doubt over the designers’ understanding of — and confidence in — the appeal of their own game. Now, I fully understand that party game stalwart Telestrations conveys a similarly flippant attitude toward its own scoring rules and “winning” conditions and other things that make a game a game, but let’s not forget that Telestrations is essentially just a commercial production of the public domain game Eat Poop You Cat (why they changed the name is anyone’s guess) and, as such, wasn’t designed as much as just came to be via pre-internet meme magic like that awesome “S” we all drew in grade school. The scoring of Telestrations feels tacked on because it IS tacked on. It’s not even really a game. No one plays Telestrations to win, they play it to trick their friends’ parents into drawing wieners. Which is as noble a cause as any, if you ask me. Okay, I’m getting side-tracked. The case of Telestrations is all well and good, but why not extend the same leniency to Concept (the game this is a review of, remember)? Well, for two reasons: first, this game was designed and therefore its mechanics — including the scoring system — should feel intentional…
This essay is an unabashed rip-off of this wonderful essay by the indomitable video game theorist Alex Kierkegaard but applied in greater detail to the tabletop space. So go read that, learn from it, and report back when finished. … You finished? Great! Let’s get started. ‘Gameplay’ is one of the worst words ever. Now typically when I don’t like a term or phrase in the gaming vernacular I just incessantly whine to my friends until they claim to agree with me to get me to shut up, but for this particularly cancerous cluster of phonemes I’m going to approach the situation with as much clarity and gravity as I can muster. Why? Because I whole-heartedly believe that using the word ‘gameplay’ severely damages people’s abilities to have effective conversations about games and game design, and thus the art form as a whole. The biggest problem with ‘gameplay’ is that the word is so exceedingly vague it seems to serve no semantic function other than putting up a smokescreen in front of an opinion that the person using the word doesn’t know how to adequately articulate. And you know what they say: behind sloppy talking is sloppy thinking. Did someone say that? Well I’m saying it now. I often hear ‘gameplay’ defined as the interaction between the player and the game, or the overall feel of a game while playing it. To that I say a word THAT broad is useless. We don’t have a word for the overall feel of a movie, or what it’s…
At the time I am writing this, Gloomhaven is sitting comfortably in the number one spots for thematic, strategic, and overall rankings over on Board Game Geek, and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future due to its insane, and (somewhat) understandable popularity. After all, Gloomhaven, by Isaac Childres, is the game that finally supplanted Cosmic Encounter as Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower’s favorite game of ALL-TIME after all these years, so it must be amazing, right? Well, at the risk of undermining whatever shreds of credibility you could’ve potentially afforded me before I even properly begin my first review, let me just say… it isn’t. Welcome to the first review in the Bozo’s Guide series — a series purely about analyzing and critiquing table top games. For this review, we’ll be taking a look at the second printing of the retail edition of this ultra-hyped colossus of a game. Gloomhaven is a cooperative dungeon crawler set in a rather generic fantasy universe featuring every popular board game mechanic that has surfaced over the last decade and a half: campaign play, legacy elements, deck-building, card drafting, simultaneous action selection/movement programming, storytelling, secret objectives, light role-playing, you name it. Before going any further, I’d like to posit that this alone explains a huge portion of the game’s popularity already. Even for the strategy purists and euro-gamers, the game’s elimination of dice from its combat system is extremely promising. Heck, on paper Gloomhaven appears to be the only game you’ll…