How to manufacture FOMO: Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition

Posted on April 2, 2021April 23, 2021 by Jeremy Olson

What could be better than detailed miniatures?

This week I bring you a rant, courtesy of a recent crowdfunding campaign for a co-op favorite of mine: Robinson Crusoe Adventures on the Cursed Island. Portal Games is crowdfunding a collector’s edition of the title promising to make it better than ever before, and initially I fell for this hook line and sinker. And then I dug into the campaign a bit, and the more I thought about it the more ticked off I got. I have gone from being all in to questioning whether I would spend a dime on the campaign and wanted to share a bit about why that is.

But first, a little bit of background on the game. Robinson Crusoe is a brutally hard co-operative game where players try to survive on a desert island. The game has overarching scenarios that can tweak this goal, from the basic goal to signal a ship to be rescued all the way to fending off cannibals or dealing with King Kong. But the story of the game plays out differently each game thanks in part to decks of cards that contain events and adventures that happen on that particular play. It produces a ton of great gameplay variety and really captures the theme. I have enjoyed it since when I picked up the original back in 2012, but that version suffered from some rules clarity issues that could make the game very frustrating and unintentionally more difficult than it should have been. More on the rules piece later, as it’s another reason why this campaign ticks me off.

The game in play, beautiful even without all the bling.

However, the first issue I want to discuss is a general gripe I have with crowdfunding these days. This campaign is literally designed to make you feel like you are missing out if you don’t back it. This is a sort of perverse art form that has developed more each year since the earliest days of Kickstarter. Every day of the campaign promises a new stretch goal reveal that will be EXCLUSIVE to this edition of the game. These range from more miniatures, a volcano shaped dice tower, or even mini expansions like the cave module. The idea is to give you little endorphin rushes to either keep your funds if you have already pledged, or lure you in with the worry that one of these bonuses you’ve simply got to have, and you’ll miss out if you don’t back now. Quite literally a more polished and pernicious evolution of the late night “act now and we’ll throw in more!” infomercial. To me this feels kind of sinister and predatory. It reminds me of an experiment I heard about once where a grocery store sold more of an item simply by putting “limit 10” signs on it. Human psychology can be easily manipulated and these sorts of exclusives can encourage some pretty reckless purchases.

Don’t miss out on the exclusive volcano!

I understand why companies do it, they want you money and they want it directly, not watered down through distribution and retail channels. The economics of it also allow you to simply offer more for the same dollar amount without these additional cuts being involved. But personally I much prefer a campaign where there are purchasable add-ons or just the core game itself improves for all buyers if the campaign is super successful. These have less of a frenzy about them but it is also less manipulative. The recent campaign for the second edition of John Company which I’ll talk about more next week is an example of a straight-forward but successful campaign.

The second issue is what is contained in the collector’s edition. Namely, 18 or more finely detailed miniatures. Minis are the hottest item in crowdfunding. Since games that include them often cost more, these games often raise eye watering sums of money. I must admit, I don’t like miniatures in general. So I am definitely a bit biased against them here. I think my main issue is that they require MORE work from the player to really take advantage of them. You need to pick up a whole other hobby of miniatures painting to properly finish the board game you just shelled out a lot of money for. Frankly I’d rather spend that painting time actually playing the game. But besides this inherent bias of mine there’s also the fact that the game before now has never suffered from a lack of miniatures. It was never designed with them in mind, and so in essence you are paying for very expensive pieces that worked fine as wooden pawns. Honestly, the pawns might even work better, since the game has you stacking them at times, something that is not possible with miniatures without some circus balancing. Yet here they are, driving the cost of the collector’s edition through the roof, and taking up a whole lot of space in the box besides. You might say, well then the collector’s edition is not for you. Which I would agree with except for that brings me to my third issue.

Teaching tools should not be crowdfunding exclusives

Which is that they are solving the rules once and for all with an open and play kit. This spiral bound book is designed to teach the game to new players with playable scenarios and examples walking through each step. It brilliantly solves the rules headache of the first edition and makes it easier than ever to get into the game. Great! Except… it only comes with the collector’s edition. If you want this open and play option, you have to buy the whole pie, minis and all. There is an upgrade kit for people like me which contains just the collectors edition add-ons without the game, so they are trying to do right by their old customers… except not. The most important part of this package and the one that should be universal is tethered to 18+ minis and all the other random stuff they throw in the box. The minimum to get in on that collector’s edition is $100.00, a pretty steep price if you are not excited to pain the miniatures.

And so I backed away from the collector’s edition… slowly and with some grumbling, but I will not fall for the FOMO(fear of missing out), and I will not pay for plastic when I really just want to improve what I already have. There is a silver lining however. The campaign is for two different items, and while the collector’s edition is dead in the water for me the Book of Adventures might be a winner. This is a collection of over 50 scenarios, giving players new ways to play with the game they already have. It is similarly over-produced and full of FOMO with exclusive paper and limited edition hardcover shenanigans. But it does feel like it adds a lot of longevity to the game as now players can further vary set-up and the goals in addition to finding a unique play with the cards that come up. I stand by the game as an excellent title and they did address a lot of the rules issues I had with some of the more recent editions if you want to check it out. But honestly, unless you love painting miniatures just get the original game at half the price and you’ll have a blast.

Who’s who of board games: Phil Walker-Harding

Posted on March 26, 2021April 23, 2021 by Jeremy Olson

Today I want to highlight an underrated game designer who designs some of the most approachable fun games in the industry, but doesn’t get the buzz that others receive. That designer is Phil Walker-Harding. I most appreciate how his designs use their theme to teach the game in an intuitive way. I first stumbled into his work with Archaeology: The Card game, a 10 dollar impulse purchase at my local game store way back when I first got into the hobby. Honestly the name alone seemed ridiculous so I figured I’d give it a shot. While the theme is not about to set the world on fire, Archaeology: The Card Game proved to be a clever family style set collection game with a nice dose of push your luck involved for good measure. Players “dig” up treasure from a deck in the middle of the table. The more of one type of treasure a player has, the more points it’s worth, but only if you sell it to the museum and lock in that score. While you are collecting there’s always the risk of a sand storm causing you to lose part of your collection, or another player using a thief card to steal something valuable. The game rewards balancing between pushing for one more card to improve your set, or cashing out for points early, and the theme helps the rules of the game make sense.

The new edition shows how games have changed in ten years.

It’s no longer in my collection but this was a great approachable card game to stumble across. It has since been re-implemented in the improved Archaeology: The New Expedition. It is interesting to view the two versions as a case study for how art and design changed between the initial 2007 release and the 2016 rerelease. Price also changed however as the new version costs $20 and is a bit less of an impulse purchase!

Another game of his that is quite underrated is Dungeon Raiders. This one is a personal favorite, partly because I have the first edition that has some real silly art. Here too is an aspect of push your luck. Players each play as a different dungeon crawl character, Wizard, Thief, Barbarian etc. Players are trying to escape the dungeon together and so need to cooperate, but only one player, who has the most loot, is the winner. A dungeon deck is built out of cards where some rooms are face up and explored while others are face down and unexplored. Players have a set of cards numbered one through five and must strategically play these cards to overcome obstacles, defeat monsters and grab loot. Turn order plays a huge deal and the game functions a bit like a closed bidding system with some dungeon crawl flair. A nice twist is that the player with the most wounds at the end of the game cannot win, so players are encouraged to pay attention to each other player’s health in addition to their loot. This reminds me of a mechanic in High Society, an auction game by Reiner Knizia where the poorest player at the end of the game automatically loses. It creates a kind of double win condition where just chasing the highest score is not enough, you have to not overcommit in achieving that score. It prevents scenarios seen in other games where players succeed by over-optimizing one aspect of their game.

Sushi go spells out its rules on every card.

Building on these earlier small successes Phil Walker-Harding put out the extremely popular Sushi Go on his own in 2013. This family-friendly take on a card drafting game was an independent release initially but grabbed the attention of GameWright to be re-published and hit more mainstream success. The game has players strategically picking which cards to keep out a dwindling hand each round. It removes the confusing iconography of it’s peer 7 Wonders and spells out what each card is worth. It also has very approachable cute art that invites players in rather than intimidating them with complex symbology. It is his biggest hit and was so successful that it was expanded in the 2016 Sushi Go Party with even more ingredients for making a delicious and adorable sushi dinner.

Imhotep has some serious table presence.

He nearly landed a Spiel Des Jahres, but lost to the tough competitor Codenames in 2015 with Imhotep. Unlike his previous card games this is a board game with chunky wooden pieces that players literally build Pyramids, Obelisks and other monuments with. It has his signature push and pull nature as players load boats to travel across the river to construct these various Egyptian monuments. The order of pieces on the boat matters when it ultimately unloads on the other side of the river and players can also choose when they want the ship to cross, working to time it when it is most beneficial for their own piece and most confounding to the other players. Like all of his games the title rewards knowing what risks you can take and has some spiteful interaction. The different monuments act like different mini-games with each scoring differently. It was later expanded with Imhotep: A New Dynasty adding even more different monument types for tons of replayabilty

He hit it out of the park again with Barenpark, the tertris-y game about building… bear parks? Players draft tiles from a central board to attempt to fill up squares of their rapidly expanding park. Covering up certain icons on your board rewards you with more tiles and also more terrain to place them on. Players are rewarded for completing goals first and these vary from game to game. This is one of the simplest so called Polyomino games and has that very satisfying spatial aspect down to a tee.

Gizmos uses the marble dispenser to drive a simple yet satisfying game.

Doubling down on the 3d toylike nature of Imhotep Phil Walker-Harding later put out Gizmos. This game has a cardboard constructed central dispenser of marbles which are the resources that drive the game. Players build gizmos, essentially a card tableau, that allows them to more effectively collect and convert these marble resources as well as score points. The game rewards putting together little engine like combos so it has a lot more meat on its bones than the initial toylike appearance would let on.

Most recently Phil Walker-Harding put out Cloud City, his most three dimensional game yet. In the game players place tiles that allow them to place buildings of three different heights. The goal is to place these buildings in such a way that you can build skyways stretching between them. The longer the skyway, the more points that it’s worth. Here similar to Barenpark this simple premise is jazzed up a bit with some placement goals that change each game.

I think PWH is a bit overlooked in the industry circles because he very much designs gateway style family friendly games. These games are simple. Approachable, and a great entry to the hobby. But as a result, they don’t often wow jaded industry veterans. This is a shame because while the hobby seems to focus more and more on deluxe miniatures, kickstarter stretch goals, complex and often convoluted systematic rules and legacy style campaigns, there is something to be said for a game that you can bring out with non-gamer friends, parents or family. While people in the hobby are often willing to struggle through a more complex teach, most folks just want to hit the ground running and be enjoying and understanding the game as quickly as possible. This is where PWH excels and has built a pretty sterling reputation of always having clean, clever but simple designs. If you see his name on the box, you know what you’re getting, a simple but very solid and well made game.

Online board gaming sucks

Posted on March 19, 2021April 23, 2021 by Jeremy Olson

Table presence is part of the board game experience.

Sorry in advance for the clickbait title. But now that I’ve got your attention let’s talk about the state of online board gaming, one year into the pandemic. A year ago I wrote about the different ways to play online. The lockdown was new, and no one was likely to see anyone outside of their immediate household any time soon. One year on, we are in a similar place, with some hope on the horizon as vaccines roll out to a broad population. But for the most part, we are stuck with the solutions that we had then, and after more time with each method I have come away with a preferred method of gaming online, but all of them have major downsides which I want to highlight here.

But first, before I beat up on the services too much, there have been some upsides. For one, as the only way to play games for the most part things like Board Game Arena, Tabletop Simulator and online implementations of games elsewhere have been essential to keeping the hobby alive. We are fortunate to have entered lockdown when so many services already existed to make this happen compared to a decade prior when such things were in their infancy. Second, this has forced folks to revisit a lot of old games or the same games repeatedly. With fewer options and largely older titles implemented online the cult of the new or flavor of the week factor in board games was much reduced. I have had friends come to me blown away by games that came out 5-10 years ago because they finally had the chance to play them repeatedly on BoardGameArena. This is a nice side effect of a limited menu, it forces more in depth exploration of each game that is available.

Other than these two factors, I will be very happy to have online board gaming in the rearview mirror. I want to start by analyzing what I think is the worst way to play these games: Tabletop Simulator. Early on in the lockdown this option looked promising. Just about every board game was represented, although the legality of creating a tabletop simulator mod was up in the air, it was open season in terms of selection. You could virtually shuffle cards, roll dice, and even flick pieces, just like in real life. I have had the “pleasure” over the last week or two of playing both Greenland and Hansa Teutonica, two favorites of mine that aren’t available anywhere else. What’s not to love? Well, just about everything about the experience frankly. Tabletop simulator games on average take about twice as long as the same game would in real life. Both of the aforementioned games should clock in at around 90 minutes, but took something more like 3 hours to complete. But secondly, and more important than the time commitment, the simulation of tabletop play lacks a lot of the joy of actual board gaming in person.

Tabletop simulator lets you play games virtually, but the simulation is ultimately kind of hollow

Gone are the cross table death stares when someone makes an aggressive move, or eye contact of any type really. Even with a zoom or something combined with the game, the face to face of zoom and the on screen play don’t really mesh in even remotely the same way. Instead you are a disembodied camera with a hand in this virtual space. You can pan over to the other players pieces and play area, pick them up to look at them closely without them even knowing it. You can see everything, but ultimately you actually pay attention to less as a result of not being there in person. Other than occasionally watching players to make sure they are following the rules given there is no programmatic logic I would vaguely ignore my opponents turns in Tabletop Simulator because if my camera was not looking at the right place I might miss them entirely. In Hansa Teutonica my friend nabbed up a few critical bonus points on the board before I even noticed. I cannot imagine this happening in real life as I would have been sitting at my chair at the table watching him take those moves versus panning around the board like a discovery nature documentary.

Additionally any action you take in a virtual space is not as fun as in real life. Virtual dice rolls are anti-climactic, especially if no one is really watching or anticipating the results. Placing cubes on a board, while admittedly not the most scintillating activity even in meatspace, has no gravity on a screen. The illusion of a game, which creates something out of cardboard, wood and cards just boils down to a virtual collection of art assets that you move about on a screen. Board games have a toy factor because they are physical. It drives the minis craze on kickstarter and all the blinged out components like the berries in Everdell or the beautiful Totems in Iwari. But if they are just art this toy factor evaporates. I will play games that are not available elsewhere on Tabletop Simulator but I always withhold judgement if I play a new game there as I know it is only a shadow of the true experience.

Tobago is full of beautiful toy-like pieces

So then let’s visit more automated app-like board games. Board Game Arena has done tremendous work over the last year to improve the platform. It has the most official games of any similar website and the interface is top of the line and very intuitive. BGA takes advantage of being digital and makes many games shorter to play because the setup, score calculation and options on a turn are all taken care of by the program itself. So already this is much less of a headache than moving virtual pieces around. What’s not to love? While I will admit I prefer this method if given a choice, it is still not the same thing for much the same reason. Interaction is different through a digital interface and the physical nature of the games is gone. We had a day of online games last week, and while I had a good time and it was wonderful to catch up with those friends, I left the experience feeling a bit hollow and sad at the end of it. A perfect example of the toy factor being missing was Tobago. This is a favorite of mine, it captures a spirit of adventure as players play cards to slowly whittle down where a treasure is buried on the island while driving their jeeps around to be the first to dig it up. The physical game has beautifully modeled palm trees, huts, jeeps and Moai statues that feel and weigh like they are made out of stone. The BGA implementation might have been a bit old, but the

The digital implementation, while streamlined, loses all of the table presence

graphics were drab and everything was just a flat 2d image. The gameplay held up, but it just wasn’t the same. A frustrating but different experience was with Beyond the Sun, a new 2020 game that just hit the service. I need to give this one another try in person because at some point you are clicking so many times that each turn felt more like a flow chart than a game. Everything also felt small and reduced to fit on a single screen, and even on a larger monitor it was hard to make out. The real game has these neat custom dice that are not rolled but used to represent the different pieces in the game. In an online implementation this aspect is completely lost. One of the reasons I dedicate a whole shelf to these space hogging games is because they give back equally to the space of the table when they are set up and here that is not the case.

So what’s the verdict? Well, unless your covid bubble happens to contain a whole board gaming group we are still stuck with these tools for a while longer. I will keep gaming online because it is the best way to play these things with friends at the moment. But you better believe that I will swap it out for the real thing as soon as it makes sense to get out there in person again. Give me all the messy setup and clean up, all the rules mistakes, dirty looks and table banter, all the dice rolls and chunky pieces I can handle. To me there is nothing better than the real thing; accept no substitutes.

Yearning for the golden days of RPGs

Posted on March 12, 2021March 12, 2021 by Jeremy Olson

Beautiful sprites and simple 3d in BOFIV

Let me talk today, a bit off topic from board games, about the heyday of JRPGs and how limited technology drove innovative game design choices. In 1997 Final Fantasy VII launched. It had a sexy razzle dazzle commercial that made the video game look like a movie. And people took the bait, hook, line and sinker. Millions of people bought a game in a genre that was previously only reserved for the most niche weebs like myself. So many people bought FFVII that other publishers thought it might be good to jump in the pool and bring over games that were previously left to languish untranslated in the Japanese market. Similar to how everyone had to copy Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo, everyone who was anyone had to have at least one RPG series, if not two, for good measure. It was truly the golden age of the genre.

I wax poetic about all of this, because despite loving games to this day and admiring how far we’ve come in terms of graphics and gameplay and even virtual reality, I am still living in the golden age through my nostalgia glasses. Firing up a PS1 game, and hearing that iconic Sony logo noise brings me right back to being in high school, in my basement, buried in the latest RPG release.

While cutting edge at the time FFVII has aged poorly.

Some of these have aged… poorly. The PS1 was not a powerful system, and Final Fantasy VII looks downright archaic by modern standards. But other examples in the genre stand the test of time and still hold up today if played in the right format. I recently fired up Breath of Fire IV and was amazed at how charming the game was 20+ years after the fact. Ironically games like these that weren’t necessarily pushing the limits of the processing power of the system are the ones that hold up the best.

Broadly speaking developers took 3 to trying to make an RPG on the system. The first is 3d models with pre-rendered backgrounds. This is your classic PS1 final fantasy title where the art of the backgrounds is the best that current technology could render and the camera angle is fixed while you wander these paintings of a sort with a crude 3d model. Other examples are Chrono Cross and Legend of Dragoon. These often age the most poorly because the pre-rendered backgrounds were created for a certain resolution and the 3d at the time couldn’t really push enough polygons to make the characters terribly readable or realistic. Another approach was to just double down on 2d and create beautiful painterly games like Legend of Mana or Valkyrie Profile. At the time folks were not always excited about this because 2d games were not the latest and greatest technology. But these games hold up relatively ok because they were not relying on the underpowered polygonal graphics of the early 3d system. The third type of approach is by far my favorite, and is the system Breath of Fire IV and others use.

Sticking to 2d worked well for Legend of Mana

Here the world itself is 3d, oftentimes with sprites mapped unto the 3d to give it more dimension, and the characters are traditional 2d sprites. To my mind this is the best of both worlds. You have these incredibly expressive animated characters paired with a somewhat rudimentary but immersive 3d world. Unlike the previous two examples, the three dimensions actually matter in that you need a camera system in order to rotate around your characters and navigate the world. Other games that use this style are Breath of Fire III, Xenogears, and the amazing Grandia. The design was created out of the limitation of the technology. Consequently when the ps2 and future systems came along and more mature 3d graphics were possible developers got away from this type of design. They literally don’t make games like this anymore, in part because those limitations are gone.

In recent times there is some energy being put towards trying to recapture the spirit of this generation of games, with mixed success. Square Enix, one of the most prolific creators during the heyday put together a studio that was unironically called RPG Factory. And just like a factory it rapidly produced three games in relatively short order that aped classic games like Chrono Trigger. But something of the soul was lost here, and it’s hard to define exactly what.

RPG Factory produces games aping this style

I have some guesses as to what might have happened however. For one thing, the Playstation 1 RPGs commanded the top talent of that era to work on these games that were then cutting edge. Some of those same names are still working in games, but are more likely working on current cutting edge vs throwback like titles. For another, imitation while the highest form of flattery is not necessarily enough to stand on its own. Trying to ape old titles feels more like a sort of pantomime than something truly inspired. Kind of like how a cover band is a good imitation but is always missing a certain something. Other modern games that aim for a classic feel or look are Octopath Traveler, that looks something like if you’re super Nintendo copy of Final Fantasy got put through some amazing Instagram filters, and Bravely Default II that has an almost twee aesthetic harkening back to earlier titles. And both of these are good and capture some of that classic feel in their own way, but they are not the A-team bringing all that they’ve got.

Octopath Traveler is certainly beautiful

I am fully aware that a lot of this is nostalgia on my part. A time and a place where I had a lot of free time to explore and fall in love with the genre. A player revisiting these games now without any context might wonder what the big deal is. But I would hope that some of the charm and ingenuity of these games would still come through 20 years later. It is striking to me how much technology defines video games and movies where it is hardly a factor at all in the board game world. Granted the manufacturing techniques of games have gotten remarkably advanced and you see more and more grandiose productions on kickstarter every week. But on the whole the hobby is much more timeless; there is not a certain style of board game produced in a 5 year span of the 90s like the games I am talking about. There are trends and fads like the hundreds of roll & write games produced in the last two years, and the me-too deckbuilders of the early 2010s, but these are also not driven by limitation, but imitation.

There is also the tragedy of how on earth to play these games in modern times even if you wanted to fight through their somewhat archaic nature. Sony has not proven to be the best curators of their old systems, so no modern system can play these right out of the box. Instead they can be played on PSP or PS Vita or a PS3 if you still have one kicking around. Original disc copies of Breath of Fire go for roughly $100 on ebay so that avenue is pretty price prohibitive, not to mention that PS1 games look terrible on modern TVs without a lot of tweaks. More obscure board games go out of print but if you do manage to track down a copy there’s never a question of how to play it. There are more illicit ways to play PS1 games out there of course, and people often seek out these methods because it is often the easiest in addition to being the cheapest.

During these strange covid times it is nice to escape into nostalgia once in a while. With that said, I think there is a weekend of Breath of Fire IV ahead of me, and maybe my non-high school self will not get stuck on a tough boss battle halfway through. What is your favorite nostalgia escape and in what media?

Cancel culture in board games

Posted on March 5, 2021May 6, 2021 by Jeremy Olson

On February 9th 2021 one of my favorite board game designers, Phil Eklund, was banned from Board Game Geek, permanently. Eklund for reference designed High Frontier, the Bios Series and the PAX series that I have written about previously. Given that BGG is such a centralized hub for the hobby, this was pretty disappointing news. When you start to get into the hobby you discover this fantastic community on the site, and while it can be a bit confusing to navigate at times this is more than made up for by interactions with designers themselves. Got a rules question? There’s a chance the designer will pipe in and give you a definitive answer right there on the site. They often respond to reviews and other questions and directly engage with their audience. I remember early in my board gaming days I wrote a pretty negative review and the designer reached out to me privately to understand where I was coming from. I was blown away, and also considered maybe toning down any future negativity because heck, the people involved may be reading my review.

Eklund was active on the forums in the same way. Often helpful and always interested in engaging with the people who play and write about his games. But while there is no better place to discuss board games on the internet, other kinds of discussion are not as welcome, and for good reason. You see, while Phil Eklund designs some of the most fascinating games on the market, he is also a bit like a crazy Libertarian uncle. His view on the world today in addition to the science and history his games are about is often challenging. So for a while he could be found on the forums for his upcoming game Bios Mesofauna arguing about whether climate change was man made. In the original edition of Pax Pamir he wrote a now infamous essay about the advantages of English colonialism and occupation of India vs being a border state like Afghanistan. And in his final blaze of glory on the site he was arguing about the importance of mechanics in his games that capture historical events where women were captured and forcibly integrated into other tribes. Most of the discussion, if it can be called that, has been deleted from the site entirely. So like the big bang the exact spark point is hard to find, but while it is interesting to tackle challenging subjects like this in a game, being insensitive in any way to the fact that this gameplay mechanic essentially depicts rape is not ok.

Board Game Geek is not the only place Phil has come under fire. Eklund game rulebooks are well known for being 25% footnotes about the various scientific and historical reasons for how the game works. This is fascinating in a way, but presenting all of it as fact when some of it is definitely subjective is not so great. His publisher Ion Games has pledged to peer review his footnotes.

Both of these actions have caused a lot of Eklund defenders to come out of the woodwork, claiming this is all a violation of free speech. But the reality is, neither BGG nor his rulebooks are truly open platforms where anything is open for debate and discussion. BGG for their part have been trying to broaden what has in the past been an incredibly insular hobby. There is a reason why I can count my women gaming friends on one hand, and having a public debate about these sorts of topics is not about to broaden that audience. The moderators on the site have deferred to having a safe space vs. a completely open platform, and that makes a lot of sense. And for the publisher’s part, they want to keep the focus on the games themselves vs the footnotes. It is not in their interest to alienate players before they even play the game.

We live in challenging times where opinions and views about the world are more public than ever before and shared in more places than ever before because of all of the platforms that exist to share that opinion. And maybe that’s a good thing, with sunlight being the best disinfectant after all. But it certainly makes it difficult when someone you admire turns out to be shitty. I feel for all of my Harry Potter fanatic friends who have to wrestle with the fact that the author of their favorite books may have views that are radically different from their own worldview. And here I can relate as I look at a shelf full of Eklund games and wonder how to reconcile things. It is even more personal because Eklund is the only board game designer I ever interviewed for the blog, and I found him goofy and charming and brilliant in a way that mirrored his games.

The conclusion that I’ve ultimately come to is that I will continue to play his games. Eklund’s designs are ultimately sandboxes where there is history and science driving the rules of the game. Just like his libertarian ideals they are wide open systems where the interplay of rules creates a narrative and chance can change how history or science plays out vs the real world. I do not agree with his world views about many things, and I don’t plan to engage him in a debate about any of them on Facebook anytime soon. But in the space of the games, there is nothing else out there like his designs. To boycott or abandon those games because of the designer’s flawed views would be a loss. And given the publisher is taking these concerns seriously, I am not overly concerned with financially supporting the games either. It comes down to a separation of art and artist and ultimately Eklund’s designs have expanded my horizons and made me ask more questions. I cannot view that as a bad thing.

I remember a story about someone meeting Alton Brown and being disappointed. They said never meet your heroes, and I can see how that would be tragic if you admired his public persona and then realized he wasn’t who you thought he was. But does that make his cookbooks suck? At some point if he made the best recipe for cornbread and that was what you took away from his contribution to the world, then maybe that’s ok. Then again, you can find a good cornbread recipe on the back of the Jiffy box in the grocery store.

Eklund’s voice on a major board game website has been silenced, and while that will prevent the toxicity that has driven people out of the hobby, it is a loss in terms of the direct connection from designer to player. I respect BGG’s decision to make sure the dialog on the site is about games first and foremost. The games then will have to stand on their own. They are flawed, challenging, confusing but ultimately fascinating and open for the player to experience and decide for themselves.

The puzzle joy of My City

Posted on February 26, 2021April 23, 2021 by Jeremy Olson

The game I want to talk about this week is My City. My City is a family style legacy game but what does that mean? Well, when I’ve written about legacy games in the past they have generally been pretty involved and complex. Certainly not brain burners or games with massive rules books or play times, but definitely a bit more involved than Settlers of Catan. My City was nominated for the Spiel Des Jahres which is the German award aimed at family friendly games, so it certainly has the industry stamp of approval for being approachable, but how does it accomplish this?

It does so by adopting a lot of the mechanisms of Roll and Write games that I have discussed previously. The game is so simple up front that it only takes about 5 or 10 minutes to explain total. Each player has a city board that shows a lovely countryside broken into a grid of spaces with a river running down the center and a set of identical buildings in various shapes. The buildings are a bit like tetris pieces, long and short, L shaped or a cross etc. There are many games recently that incorporate these so called “polyominos.” Think of it like mutated dominoes that come in lots of strange shapes. Each turn a card is flipped over and players must place that building somewhere in their grid, adjacent to at least one other building, or next to the river if it’s the first piece. This functions like a sort of bingo, with a bit more flexibility. A building is flipped from the deck and depending on your strategy and how you’ve placed the other buildings so far that piece may fit perfectly into your puzzle, or it might really throw a wrench into your plans. The end goal of each game is to cover as much of the map as possible and group buildings of each of the three colors in as large a clump as possible. There is an additional wrinkle in that your city apparently loves a bit of greenery as each free that you leave uncovered is worth a point. But each empty space and each rock is worth a negative point.

That’s it in terms of up front rules overhead. The game is truly a spatial puzzle where players are sitting next to each other, enjoying the same puzzle and certainly going about it differently, but not interacting directly through the game. With enough pieces in the box 100 people could play this at once like a real bingo hall. Here is where it is similar to roll and write games, like Cartographers or Railroad Ink. The deck is the randomness that builds a different puzzle each game.

The legacy part of this then builds on this simple foundation. Here players are keeping score across multiple games, with each win counting as two points towards overall winner, and second place counting for one. Every three games a new wrinkle is introduced, telegraphed by the title of each envelope containing the next bit of pieces and rules. My group just finished the second chapter that introduces churches pieces into the mix, and the next chapter is ominously titled The Flood. Unlike other Legacy games that thrive on plot twists and surprise elements tucked away in non-descript numbered boxes and envelopes, here the arc is much more plain. There is not necessarily a story either other than historical development that happened to cities in general as they moved towards industrialization. The surprise and fun then comes in how the new chapters new mechanics fold into the existing experience.

The game lets you know what’s coming next, but how it plays is still a surprise

In another nod to being a more family friendly style of legacy game, the legacy elements here often help players who are behind catch up, while making the game more challenging for players who are in the lead. For example, the players who lose the first game get additional tree stickers to add to their board giving them more opportunity for points, while the winners each get rock stickers that are one more element on their map that they have to make sure to cover up. Much like a good game of Mario Kart there is a sort of rubber-banding here that helps players catch up and aims to keep the game tight until the last play. This is critical for a legacy campaign like this that plays out across multiple games. Losing a game is fine, but continuing to fall behind in combined scoring might sour the experience. My City plays out across 24 games and is broken into 8 chapters, so it’s important to make sure folks have a chance to win all the way through till the final play.

There is a flip side of the board that is for the so called “Eternal Game” which skips the chapters and legacy elements for just the basic game I have described above plus a few bells and whistles. I am not sure that game on its own is compelling enough where I would want to keep coming back to it. Currently the most interesting thing is seeing how the game changes, so a more static experience is… less exciting. But across 24 games even if I never play it again after that, this seems like a great starting place for trying legacy games with a group and definitely worth the investment. It doesn’t hurt that it is half the price of most other legacy games as well. It’s not terribly interactive between players but it is so light and breezy it leaves plenty of time for conversation and there is a certain joy in seeing a card flip that perfectly matches your plans while simultaneously hearing your neighbor curse under their breath since it is the exact wrong piece for them.

New Shelf, Who Dis?: Welcome to Cardboard Empire 2.0

Posted on February 19, 2021February 19, 2021 by Jeremy Olson

Welcome to the new iteration of the Cardboard Empire blog. The Times Union decided to wind down their blogs for fear that they were receiving criticism over their community blogs being interpreted as journalism. Which… is a pretty far leap. But regardless you won’t find any journalism here. Just soft warm opinions, no cold hard facts.

I have brought over the content from the old blog so it has a new place to live and hope to start updating this blog a bit more frequently in the near future. It goes without saying that board gaming has been more challenging lately as the regular public game night is out the window during the pandemic and private game gatherings are also pretty rare. However, gaming finds a way and I am hoping to get more games to the table (virtual or not) in the near future and report back here with my latest findings.

With that being said, the new blogging home brings a bit more freedom in terms of topics, so be prepared for some non-cardboard ruminations as well. The sky’s the limit, although I assure you it will all be quite nerdy regardless of the topic. I also hope to do more in-depth dives into some of my favorite games, more formal reviews as well as hopefully more interviews. So stay tuned!

The monolith to cardboard grows ever taller

Plenty has changed since this humble blog began on the TU 5 years ago, but just as I started then I want to start here by introducing you to the board game shelf. This is where the magic happens and while games have come and gone every one of these boxes contains cherished memories, or raw potential to create new ones. The shelf has grown vertically, a much coveted four cubes worth of new space, much of which was quickly filled by the previous overflow and games from the partner I now live with. And certainly despite the difficulty of actually playing games during covid the collection has somehow still grown. Lots of new exciting games to talk about and play.

I hope to update every Friday, so make sure to tune in!

New game roundup 2: Gods, tombs and chocolate

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Jeremy Olson

Board Game Arena continues releasing great new games so I wanted to touch on a few that I have been playing recently. First, a note. The site seems to filling out their 31 days with trick taking games. While I respect these and am usually curious to try a new one, they don’t exactly set the world on fire. So while I played one of the two trick taking games this week, I did not spend the 30 minutes to learn the second that I would surely never play again. Additionally, playing any trick taking game with players who are not familiar with them is kind of like a form of torture. This is even worse if it’s a partnership game and your partner doesn’t know the first thing about strategy for the game. So we can already put an asterisk next to my goal to play every game this month, but I have my limits, even when I am craving board game more than ever. And with that out of the way let’s get to the games.

The first game was the trick taking game that I did try this week, called Solo Whist. This is another game with bidding those types of games more advanced on the trick taking spectrum. Essentially you have to be able to look at your hand and the trump suit and be able to roughly predict how many hands known as tricks you will win, either by playing the high card or a trump card. Here there are several different kinds of bids called contracts, each more difficult than the last. You can only outbid another player with a more risky contract. You can bid prop, which means you thin you and one other player will be able to take 8 tricks combined. Any other player can follow this with a cop bid, meaning they will join you to try to take 8 tricks. You can bid solo which means you will take at least 5 tricks by yourself. You can bid Misery, which means you will lost every trick. You can bid abundance which means you will take 9 tricks alone and choose which suit is trump. And then there are three more contracts which are even more risky. The gist is, this is a game of chicken in trick taking form. It is quite fun as the other players at the table do everything in their power to make sure the successful bid of the other player fails. Definitely one I would play again, although it made me realize I am not that great at trick taking games that require bidding.

Kami has beautiful art and deceptively simple gameplay

The second game is a simple card game called Kami. This is apparently a game derived from Shogi, or Japanese chess. The art is beautiful and the game itself is deceptively straightforward. On a turn players play a defense card and an attack card. Other players the the table can only follow if they can play a defense card that matches the attack card just played. If no one can, the last player to successfully defend leads a new round. The goal is to play all the cards in your hand, so players want to play whenever they can to continue to shed their hand. However, it is sometimes wise to pass even if you can match another player in order to take control of the flow of the game. Players who lead a hand play their defense cards face down which makes it difficult to count cards and know exactly what cards have not been played yet. The final wrinkle here is a unique scoring system where you only get points for the last card played from your hand. While different from a trick taking game, Kami definitely requires some of the same skills, and so can be frustrating to play with players who do not understand the strategy. But there’s plenty to explore here for players who do enjoy that sort of game.

Luxor is a great family game with some interesting push and pull decisions and puzzle-like hand management

The third game is a Spiel Des Jahres nominee from a couple of years back called Luxor. In Luxor players are trying to get to the center of an ancient tomb while picking up as many treasure tiles as they can along the way. Each turn players play a card to move one of their adventurers a certain number of spaces into the tomb. The unique part here is that you can only play the left most or right most card in your hand, and you are not allowed to re-arrange the cards in your hand. Each round you draw back up to five cards but the new card goes in the center of your hand. In this way there is a sort of puzzle of what order to play your cards. Each treasure tile requires a certain number of your adventurers to land on it in order to pick it up. so you are often trying to sequence their movement so they end up on the right tile before other player claim them first. This goal is counter balanced by the fact that you unlock more adventurers the further you make it into the tomb, and get points for how far each adventurer makes it into the tomb at the end of the game. So slow and steady allows you to pick up a lot of tiles, but may leave you behind other players who have made it further into the tomb. In addition to treasure tiles there are spaces that allow you to draw more powerful cards into your hand, and additional tiles that come out after a treasure token has been claimed. I really enjoyed the puzzle of this game and I can see why it was a nominee for the German game of the year award. I would definitely recommend checking it out.

Cacao is a breezy tile laying game with a unique checkerboard structure that drives interesting decisions.

The final game that I played this week is another tile laying game called Cacao. In Cacao players are harvesting cacao beans in the jungles of Central America. Each turn players place a worker tile that has one to three works on each of its four sides. They then place a jungle tile to fill in any spaces left in a sort of checkerboard pattern. The workers on each tile interact with the jungle tiles to do various things to score the player points. They can harvest cacao beans, sell them for coins which are the points in the game, mine a tile for coins, move the players piece down a river which scores the players more points the further they travel along it, or fight for an area majority sort of mini game over temples. I have never seen a game that uses this sort of checkerboard worker placement game before. There is some good strategy here because you are trying to place your own worker tiles in a way that most benefits you, but does not give points to your opponents. The game is quick and breezy but has plenty of interesting decisions. This one was a winner that I would definitely play again.

Board Game Arena keeps releasing great games on the service and creating a great covid-safe way to play games with your friends. If you haven’t check it out yet I highly recommend giving the service a try.

New game round up: Flaming pyramids, island adventure and gerrymandering

Posted on December 7, 2020 by Jeremy Olson

Board Game Arena continues to put a wide variety of games up on it’s, one for every day and I have been trying to keep up with learning a new game every day. I have played the most recent releases and wanted to recap the latest editions.

The first is a very simple trick taking game called 99. This is a game similar to Hearts or Spades where players attempt to take sets of card by playing the highest card of whatever suit was lead. This game can be played with a traditional deck of cards so once you learn the rules its easy to teach other players in person. The unique part of this game is that players can bid for how many hands or tricks they think they are going to win and get more points by accomplishing this goal. They can double down on this further by showing their bid to other players, which gives them the opportunity to mess with their success. They can double down further by revealing both their bid and their hand of cards. It’s kind of like a game of chicken. The more players reveal, the more points they can win, but the more information they share with their opponents, the more difficult it is to accomplish their stated bid. This is a more advanced game than hearts, and it really encourages two key trick-taking skills, card counting and knowing how many tricks your can take given your starting hand. I must admit that after two major published games for the first two days, 99 felt like a step down. But all in all this is a nice trick taking game and I wouldn’t turn it down if someone asked.

Flaming Pyramids. Uno with math and physics!

The Second release is a game called Flaming Pyramids. This game places a bit like a spatial version of Uno… with fire. The goal is to get rid of all of your tiles. Players are working on a shared pyramid that they build up with tiles each turn. To place a tile it must match the color or the number of at least one of the tiles below it. There’s also the matter of weight. The two tiles below must have numbers that add up to more than the tile being placed on top, or else there is a collapse. Collapses can trigger more collapses as a sort of chain reaction occurs when tiles that previously supported others are removed. All collapsed tiles go into the active players stack, so this kind of chaos can mean you have a lot more tiles than opponents to get rid of. And then there’s fire. There are three type of building materials: straw, wood, and stone. Coal tiles only burn straw materials and blowtorches(!!) burn both wood or straw. The secret is to nest these in among some rocks and then watch chaos ensure in a later round when the collapse of other tiles cause them to hit paydirt. This seems like a fun family game and I would play it over Uno any day!

The Third game is a tile laying game called Small Islands. The tiles depict part of an island landscape with The only rule for tile placement is that each side must match the landscape in all four directions around it. Water must match water and land match land. Each round players draft a goal card which explains what is required in order to place a house on an island, and also how you will score for each house. In this way the actual game of the tile laying has different goals for the different players, unlike say a game like Carcassonne where all players are trying to score in the same ways. The players are still working on the game board however, so it is possible for other players to mess with your plans, perhaps unintentionally. There is also a timing element for when to end a round, which is triggered by a player placing out their ship tile. This is definitely a tactical name but was pleasant enough and I wouldn’t mind playing it again. The tropical nature of the art is certainly a nice diversion from the current winter weather.

The final game added in recent days is called Mapmaking: The Gerrymandering Game. This is a simple abstract game with a light political theme. At the start of the game each players tokens numbered 1 through 10 are spread throughout of a hexagon alongside other players. This is the political landscape that players that carve up into districts throughout the game. Each turn players place 4 borders trying to group together lower numbered opponent tokens with higher tokens of their own. However all the other players are trying to do the same thing, so the key is to place borders in such a way that the other players can’t undo your plans before your next turn. You can learn the game in five minutes so it is a great introductory game for folks who haven’t played many board games. However, fair warning it is a rather mean game as every good move for you is inherently bad for another player. As long as you are ok with this confrontation I recommend checking it out.

That’s it for today. I will be checking in with more impressions later this week as new games are added to the service. If any of the above sparked your interest head on over to Board Game Arena and check them out!

Welcome To and its sequel Welcome To New Las Vegas are available online

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Jeremy Olson

Happy Friday! We’re on day 4 of one new game a day on the online board gaming site Board Game Arena. I have been learning and playing a new game each day and wanted to share my thoughts on some of the recent additions. I will provide a recap of many of the new games next week, but first I want to write about two specific additions from this Tuesday.

The great news is that Board Game Arena added Welcome To which I wrote about in my Roll and Write post earlier this year, and it’s sequel Welcome to New Las Vegas to the service. Having Welcome To in a clean user friendly online format is great news. I recommended this game as one that folks could play remotely with friends using the physical game and printing additional player sheets online, but this online implementation just makes it that much easier to play the game with friends and family.

Since I had already learned this game, I dove into it’s sequel to see what new bells and whistles they had added to one of my favorite games. And the initial experience was… frustrating, to say the least. You know how some movies are perfect, and yet Hollywood chooses to make a sequel and completely misunderstands what made the original great? This was the feeling I got with Welcome to New Last Vegas. My general impression was that they had added too many rules and systems making what was a simple game with the original into a convoluted mess with the sequel.

To explain, it might make sense to briefly recap the original. In May I wrote:

In Welcome To players are building neighborhoods by filling in house numbers on one of three streets. Each turn there are three numbers to choose from three different stacks of cards and each stack also has a corresponding power, cleverly printed on the back of each card. In this way the face up card is the number you can play and the remaining deck’s top card indicates the power. The goal of the game is to build neighborhoods, groups of houses that all have a house number filled in and a fence on the left and right side of the group. This is easier said than done however, as numbers have to be sequential like a real street however the distribution of the numbers 1-15 are not even in the deck. You can’t always rely on getting the next number you need on a street so there is a push and pull on when to skip a number.. The various powers let you spruce up the neighborhoods by adding parks and pools for extra points, increase the real estate value for neighborhoods of a certain size, or bend the rules to repeat house numbers or manipulate a house number up or down.

The core of Welcome to New Las Vegas is the same. Players have three choices each turn and are now filling in casinos with numbers instead of houses. Gone are the neighborhoods and instead there are various ways to score points. So much so that what was once a single sheet game now has a separate score sheet and player sheet to keep track. Which is certainly an ominous indication of the increased complexity. Players are now trying to build sequences of odd or even sequential numbers in 4 streets instead of the original 3. In addition players can build Hotels by completing avenues, e.g. the vertical column of casinos on multiple streets. So here players are thinking in multiple dimensions. This is confused further by having several unbuilt casinos that need to be constructed in one turn in order to be able to write a number in them in a future turn.

From here things get even more complicated. There is now a spatial puzzle to play by driving a limousine around these various streets and avenues picking up bonuses in front of certain hotels, with a risk/reward mechanic whereby if you don’t make it back to the airport spot where the limousine starts you lose points. There is a golf course you can expand on the top street of the board that rewards you for building casinos next to each other without skipping any spaces. There is a mayor inauguration track that you can contribute to with players getting points for having contributed more than any other player. This track can also have spaces cashed in to bend the rules. There are shows, similar to pools from the previous game where you can circle a show if you use that effect and number on a casino that has a a star on it and receive increasing points depending on how many shows you put on.

All of this is topped of with the cherry on a sundae that is the money system in the game. Several of those activities mentioned above require you to circle a money icon to use. Constructing casinos, putting on shows, extending casinos to duplicate a number you’ve already written. At the end of the game if you have not accrued enough money to pay for these actions you can get dinged for 20 points, which is usually enough to knock someone out of first place.

So at first… I absolutely hated this. Who had thought all this systems overhead was a good idea? I walked away from my first place of the game ready to write it off and just return to the original. And to be fair, I will always start with the original with new players. It would be cruel to throw anyone into the deep end of Welcome to New Las Vegas without the basics of its predecessor. But then I played another round, and I read the rules again. And I lost… by less. And then I played a third round and focused a few strategies based on the goal cards from that game. Somewhere along the line everything clicked into place. What they have created is a very complex system of risk and reward. When you play Welcome to New Las Vegas you are actually playing several tiny games at once, pulling the different levers that the game offers you to give you more flexibility, but at a cost. This can result in the game feeling very scattered and fragmented in the first few plays. But once you get used to the systems, it does exactly what it set out to do. It does not create a better game necessarily, but there is more to explore if you can make it past the rough learning curve.

Regardless of what flavor of Welcome To you prefer, these are two great games and its great to be able to easily play them online.