Android: Netrunner is an asymmetric two-player card game based on the old CCG Netrunner Richard Garfield authored alllllll the way back in 1996 (can you imagine playing a game over twenty years old?!). Over the years, the design has proved quite popular and remains a tournament favorite for many dedicated players. A CCG-turned-LCG(™) that has been played competitively in some form or another for the last twenty-five years when so many others have come and gone, it must be good right? But how good? Better than… Magic: The Gathering? Yes, much better. It’s not even close. Whether its deeper or more complex is a much harder question to answer — and one I don’t have the tournament-level experience in either to adequately tackle — but Android: Netrunner is a far, far more enjoyable way for two well-played gaming enthusiasts to spend an evening together. Its exquisite theming, immersive world, unique player interactions, tense information exchanges, and flavorful scenarios all compliment a creative, asymmetric core system that commands the utmost attention of your tactical sensibilities. I just spent the entire introductory paragraph raving about how great the game is, so lets start off the review proper by griping about something that doesn’t really matter. What is the deal with the new core sets rulebook? It actually states on the very first page that you’re going to need to consult an online reference for some of the rules questions that arise during play because they aren’t covered by the text. That is stupid annoying; why would you not provide everything needed to…
Ah, the boss fight. Perhaps gaming’s greatest contribution to the artistic canon. No other narrative form has climaxes that can match the sheer moment-to-moment intensity and immersive properties of a properly designed boss fight. Of course I’m mainly talking about video games, but many a tabletop experience has tried their hand at them as well. Sadly, most of them stink; boost a standard enemy type’s stats and a throw in a shallow gimmick or two to avoid accusations of a creative laziness. And the ones that do get ambitious tend to do so by subverting all sorts of established game concepts, adding unwelcome amounts of additional admin and rules to remember. To be fair, it’s hard to fit a proper boss fight into the cadence of your average dungeon crawl, which tend to have combat systems largely predicated around mob management, area control, and equipment load outs. Squeezing satisfying showdowns into the final few minutes of an exhausting tabletop session is a difficult design challenge. Many games have tried and failed (Legends Of Andor) and many other games don’t even bother to try (Mage Knight Board Game). Then there’s Aeon’s End, in which the boss fight is the system — and it’s awesome. Aeon’s End is one of the only recent tabletop experiences that understands that board games aren’t video games but still wants you to enjoy epic boss fights. Kingdom Death: Monster did emerge from the shadows first, but it covers way too much ground to be accurately described as a boss fight simulator.…
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…
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,”…
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is the very definition of a classic. That a simple storytelling game from 1981 holds up effortlessly amongst a deluge of modern narrative and thematic designs is all you need to know. It is a unique and fascinating game that when first released nearly 40 years ago was practically a genre unto itself. Taking the core design principles behind the Choose Your Own Adventure novels — which began publication a mere two years prior — to great new heights, it added a staggering depth of choice to their fiction formula. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective‘s challenging, won’t-solve-themselves mysteries, rock solid investigation mechanics, and wonderfully immersive production design have kept it on the shelves of thematic game lovers for a very long time — an accomplishment that impresses more and more with each passing year as ever increasing amounts of players are won over by its singular charm. Now, I typically don’t talk much about components in my reviews as I don’t feel they have a very strong correlation with the quality of a game, but I’d be remiss not to state that Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is a visionary production. Case booklets filled to the brim with evocative text, newspapers that nail the look and feel of an old-timey publication, a detailed map and directory that allow you to call on hundreds of different suspects from all over London, etc. These are components that make you want to dive whole-heartedly into the game’s atmosphere, to really act out the role of a…
In 2017, Looney Labs released a spiffy new edition of Zendo, the classic inductive logic game first published back in 2001. That’s right, Zendo is a game of inductive logic. NOT deductive. What, you don’t know what an inductive logic game is? Don’t worry, neither did I (editor’s note: I still don’t), so allow me to attempt an explanation. Deductive logic games — which I’m sure you are familiar with — are games that present their players with a finite set of possibilities as systemically constrained by their design and tasks them with whittling said possibilities down to one. Some classic examples in this genre include Clue, Sleuth, and Mastermind. Inversely to these, Zendo, being all about that inductive life, presents its players with infinite possibilities and challenges them to find the microscopic needle in the cosmic haystack. Yikes, how could such a concept possibly manifest itself mechanically? The answer to that lies in Zendo‘s amazingly clever and creative design. The goal of Zendo is to uncover a secret rule as decided by a moderator before the game begins. The purpose of this rule is to govern how cute little structures of plastic blocks should be built. These blocks come in three shapes (in the 2017 version, the original had three different sizes of pyramids) and three colors, so a rule might be that a structure must have exactly one block of each color, or that two different shapes must be touching in a certain way, something like that. The designers included a good selection of these…
Can’t Stop has been one of my go-to gaming nightcaps for several years now, and I don’t expect that to ever change. It’s an impressive design that distills the thrill of gambling into a brief dice game that is simple enough for children, but exciting for all. Even 40 years on from its initial release it is one of, if not the best pure press-your-luck game there is. Although, its longevity isn’t all that surprising when you consider it was designed by the granddaddy of modern board games himself: the legendary Sid Sackson. If you are not aware of this dude’s massive contributions to the art form we all love, I highly encourage you to read up on him and play some of his games. He has some excellent, excellent designs that were waaaaaaay ahead of their time. Perhaps a review of a designer’s game is not the best place to be showering said designer with unreserved adulation, but I can’t help it in this case. Sackson is amazing; I love him. Okay, I’m done. Let’s talk about the game. Can’t Stop is a dice game played on a board that looks like a stop sign (now that’s good production design!). On this board are 11 columns numbered 2 through 12 that are made up of a number of spaces. The 2 and 12 columns are the shortest with the fewest amount of spaces and the 7 is the tallest with the most. Players are each given a set of 11 playing pieces…