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…
What do you get when you take Skull and add monsters, heroes, stats, and dungeons? A significantly worse game, apparently. Welcome To The Dungeon is a shallow attempt to add theme and additional flavor to a classic game that needs neither. Nerd versions of good games like this are embarrassing. Not every design needs a fantasy action re-theme, people. Worse still, every mechanical change Welcome To The Dungeon makes to Skull‘s system hurts the experience. So not only is it a lazy re-theme, it’s also a massively inferior design. Not the best combo! To begin a game of Welcome To The Dungeon the players collectively choose 1 of 4 brave heroes and lay them and their unique set of equipment tiles in the center of the table. Then, a deck of monster cards is shuffled and placed nearby. That’s it. Hey, at least the set up is quick! Players take turns by drawing cards from the deck and deciding to either add the monster to the dungeon, or keep the card and remove one of the hero’s equipment tiles. If a player doesn’t want to draw a card they may pass instead. When all but one player have passed, that player must send the hero into the dungeon with whatever equipment tiles are left. One at a time, the monster cards that have been added to the dungeon are flipped and resolved. Monsters deal specified amounts of damage to the hero unless a piece of equipment is still in effect that can dispatch them safely.…
Pandemic is not half as fecund a core design as it may initially seem. Its social puzzle approach to co-operative gaming and fresh theme were groundbreaking, don’t get me wrong, but its mechanical innovations were simply not foundational enough to be successfully transposed wholesale betwixt systems like Puerto Rico‘s and Dominion‘s were. Apparently, its designer Matt Leacock seemed to be the only one who didn’t notice this and Pandemic‘s two follow-ups, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, burst onto the scene a short while after it like no big thang. Forbidden Island is basically babby’s first Pandemic, which is all that needs to (or can) be said about it. Forbidden Desert, while a significant improvement, is still nowhere near unique or interesting enough an experience to stand on its own in its predecessor’s wake. It doesn’t help that both games are simple to the point of mindlessness. Now I get it, these are children’s games, basically just toys, and I probably shouldn’t even bother reviewing them. On the other hand I’ve played games with lower age ratings that I consider masterpieces, so let’s do this! Let’s start with Forbidden Island, a game about hunting for treasure on a sinking island. I’m going to forego my usual structural/mechanical overview and instead paint this one in broad, abstracted terms. This will only work if you’ve played Pandemic. If you haven’t then I’m not sure why you’re even reading this, but hey, you do you. Forbidden Island is often described as Pandemic-lite (notably by Leacock himself), but to me it feels more like Pandemic-minus (minus…
The first game of Two Rooms And A Boom is exciting. The second is a lot like the first one, but less exciting. The third is a lot like the first two, but not exciting at all. That’s a precipitous decline in enjoyment for any game, much less one that’s 15 minutes long. The reason? Two Rooms And A Boom, despite its orchestrated cacophony, has but a single note to sing. Two Rooms And A Boom is a social deduction game played by separating a (hopefully large) group of players into two teams: Red and Blue. This is done by shuffling a deck of cards and dealing one secretly to each player. One member of each team will be special, as their card will inform them. The special Blue Team member is the “President.” The special Red Team member is the “Bomber.” The players are then split between two rooms using any arbitrary means, and the game begins. It is played over 5 rounds (round 1 is 5 minutes, round 2 is 4 minutes, round 3 is 3, etc.). At the beginning of the first round, one player in each room is nominated to be the room’s leader. At any point in a round the leader may abdicate to another player or be voted out and usurped. At the end of each round the current leaders both choose a player from their room to send to the other. The Red Team wants the “Bomber” and the “President” in the same room at the end…
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…