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…
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…
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…
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…