A couple of quick hits this week from the wonderful world of board games.
A few of my crazy creatures
First a great first impression with Evolution: Climate. This beautiful card game captures all of the turmoil and drama of nature and evolution in a nice tidy one hour playtime. Players create new species, add various traits, increase the population and size of their creatures and then hold on and try to survive the round without anything going hungry.
The basic gameplay is really approachable, but immediately some really interesting strategies arise from these simple rules. Do you make your species a carnivore, hoping there’s another player’s species that you can manage to eat this round? Do you focus on more herbivore traits and try to grab as much food at the central watering hole before other players snatch it all up? Do you change size or develop defensive traits to fend off that jerk across the table who keeps eating your mutant furry turtles? These are just a few of challenges of this deep card game. This particular version also includes a climate element so that animals that do not have the proper warmth or cooling can be in big trouble depending on how the weather changes!
And really, I can’t say enough about the art. These water color pictures could happily be wall art, but here there are dozens of these pieces tucked into a great game.
Roll for It!
The second game is one that I am surprised no one invented fifty years ago or so, as the basic concept of the game is incredibly simple. It’s called Roll for It!, and that’s exactly what you do. Players each have six dice, and there are cards laid out each turn that have a certain goal of what dice to roll, along with the points that card is worth. Players take turns rolling and assigning dice to cards, and if they complete the goal, they get the cards and the points. That’s it, roll the dice, assign to cards. The tactical decisions come from whether to go for the cards with more challenging six dice goals, or to go for simpler goals that take less dice to complete. Any dice actively assigned are dice that you are not rolling your next turn, so going big can mean not scoring many points at all if your luck doesn’t work out. A cute game to kill some time with, but not my favorite dice chucker by any means.
Red Scare
And finally, in news about upcoming games, here’s a strange new concept. A game about Russian spies called Red Scare where the innovative new element is a pair of special glasses that allow you to see text that other player’s can’t. I am always intrigued by a new gameplay concept, and maybe this will put a new twist on those betrayal and hidden role games I’ve written about before.
Few things are as iconic in modern board gaming as the perennial classic Catan. This juggernaut has been an entry point into modern board games for over twenty years, and is still one of most powerful board gaming brands to arrive since the advent of Monopoly. However, my deep dark secret is that despite being passionate about board games, I never played a single game of Catan. That finally changed last Thursday, but the results were a bit… mixed.
But let me back up a moment and cover Catan itself. It’s not going to win any awards for a riveting premise, as the game is about resource gathering and building settlements and roads on an island in pseudo-europe. However, the game was a revolution compared to many of the popular games of the time. For one thing, it is not a roll and move game like Sorry, Monopoly and their ilk. It also has the concept of trading with other players, which acts as a natural catch up mechanism. That player in the lead? Don’t trade with them, but amongst players further behind some mutual cooperation can go a long way. Catan also has a hexagonal board that can be set up differently every time you play, for infinitely more variety than a lot of games at the time. It also has some lovely “take that” player interaction with the robber, an action which allows you to steal cards from other players and shut down their resource production.
Variable board game set up!
Catan was not the first game to do a lot of these things, but it broke through and became one of the first so called “Euro” style board games to be a hit in the US. For the twenty plus years since it first came out and to this day Catan has been a gateway for thousands of people into board games beyond Monopoly. Since then it has seen many expansions, different versions including a Star Trek edition, and even a novelization. Not sure how they accomplished that last one, but they made a movie out of Battleship, so I guess anything is possible!
However, by the time I joined the hobby some years ago, there were literally thousands of games to choose from. The group I joined thought Catan was old news, and so the opportunity to play it never really up. In the meantime I played hundreds of other games that followed in Catan’s footsteps, and truly fell in love with the hobby.
I am not sold on trading my time to play Catan
So sitting down to Catan last week was almost like a sort of time travel. I pulled up a chair with none of the nostalgia or reverence folks have for this game, and ultimately came away pretty disappointed. There just didn’t seem to be a whole lot of decisions on a given turn, and for a game that looked to refine on the luck fests of the era, there was still plenty of luck at play here. For example, every turn players roll two dice to determine which corresponding tiles pay out resources to all players. If you have set yourself up poorly, or your luck on the other players’ rolls has been poor it could come to be your turn, and another poor roll just leaves you without much to do but pass the dice to the next player. The trading mentioned before is intended to mitigate this but there is a lot of reliance on dice rolls in general.
Catan still has a place on a lot of people’s shelves, and fans will play it purely out of nostalgia as the game that introduced them to a newer style of board games. But in my experience, you can’t go back to a game like this if you have already found more modern board games that have evolved beyond it. There ARE some games from back then that do hold up, even under modern scrutiny, and I hope to cover two of those here in the coming weeks. But for Catan, it’s one I am glad I have checked of the list, but not one I need to return to.
Tragedies are just waiting to unfold. But where, and to who?
The game boils down to a puzzle where the time traveling players try to suss out what role each character has, and what scenario the opposing mastermind has set up. There are four variables at play that the mastermind or players tweak on each day (turn) of a particular loop. These are panic, goodwill, intrigue, and the physical location of the cards. So if for example the police officer has 3 panic, and is in the city, on the third day a certain event will happen.
It all felt very mechanical, and not terribly dramatic. Perhaps this was just because our mastermind for this session didn’t really tell a story using these different elements, but this felt like a case of seeing the wizard behind the screen and not feeling terribly invested in how things played out.
It was also repetitive. To be fair, that’s inherent to a game whose structure is built on going through the same “loop” multiple times to solve the puzzle. But is frustrating to ALMOST solve the scenario, only to have the tragedy occur and have to repeat 90% of your previous actions with one small tweak. I suppose I know just a little bit more about how Bill Murray’s character felt in Groundhog Day.
Still, there was a seed of something amazing here, and perhaps with the right group and a little bit more drama and roleplaying, this could be a great experience. Since we are all relatively new, we were playing the introductory scenario, which was a bit dry. This may be a game where practice makes perfect, but I am unable to tell whether it’s worth that commitment.
The other game I wanted to discuss is called Moons. It combines two of my favorite things, astronomy and trick-taking games (like Hearts or Spades). There are four suits, based on the four gas giants in our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Each rank of card is represented by one of the many moons of that particular planet, including uber-nerdy flavor text about that moon. The basic gist of the game is to try to win tricks with the highest card in order to take planet tokens that are worth points at the end of the game. The wrinkle comes in that playing the lowest off-suit card can also win you tokens. Classical trick taking gambits are on full display here, and knowing when to lead, how to draw out cards from other players and when to relinquish control are all critical to success.
Never lead with Uranus…
Still, it’s hard to improve on the classics like Hearts. The art and theme go a long way, but we’ll see if has the staying power once the new coat of paint wears off.
It’s always fun to discover new games, I am looking forward to checking a few ones out this coming weekend and will definitely share them here if they make the cut!
Looking to learn some new games or a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon? Schenectady Wargamers Association, the same folks that organize the annual Council of Five Nations gaming convention, hosts monthly Game-a-thon events at Proctor’s in Schenectady.
These happen on the second Saturday of every month. This month’s schedule looks to have some fantastic board games on the docket.
In the morning schedule:
Imperial Settlers is a great, cutthroat engine-building card game where players build up a village of structures in order to raze and pillage their opponents. It features multiple different civilization-based factions, from Egyptians to Japanese samurai. Definitely fun for gamers who like a more confrontational game, but also very skill based with minimal luck outside of the draw of the cards.
Tragedy Looper is the game I am most excited to try. The premise is that players are time travelers and they need to work together to prevent a tragedy from occurring. The game plays out in loops where players go through the same scenario but make different decisions. This repetition not only captures that sense of time travel, but is also an interesting gameplay mechanism. One player is the mastermind behind the tragedy and the other players try to solve it, combining cooperative and deduction like elements. Imagine Clue stuck in a timeloop.
In the evening schedule:
Colosseum is a fantastic classic about putting on a show in the Roman colosseum. This includes hiring performers from gladiators to comedians, and impressing the nobles. Tasty Minstrel just reprinted this game after it being out of print for nearly a decade, and it’s great to have it available in the market again.
Village is possibly the worst name for game since Chess 2 (yes, really), but is a great game. Players choose what their villagers do throughout the town in order to score points. It’s got the classic worker-placement mechanism, where players decide what each family member does by placing that villager on a certain location on the board. However there’s a twist, time passes, and you villagers eventually pass away. How they die and how they are remembered is a morbid but intriguing way of scoring points!
There is a small fee to play each game which goes towards renting the space at Proctors. Make sure to sign up in advance if you would like to save a spot in a certain game. There is also a board game flea market this weekend, which is a great chance to pick up gently used game, or sell some that are getting dusty on your shelves. I hope to see you all there!
Ever since I was young, my favorite science topic was always astronomy. Perhaps it was those saturated color images of distant nebulas and planets, or just the seemingly surreal nature of what can exist out in space. I eagerly asked my parents to get me a telescope in 6th grade… and it lay dusty in the basement, moldering away, forgotten. For a time this love of space was forgotten, until the new version of Cosmos reignited a latent passion for the subject again. So when I discovered the joy and complexity of Bios Megafauna, the natural next step was to explore Phil Eklund’s game of near-future space travel: High Frontier. After all, what could be better than a game about space travel by a real rocket scientist?
Since I had survived the rulebook of Bios Megafauna, I knew what to expect. Still, when you take a look at the map that comes with the game, it’s hard not to wonder if it’s modern art, or some kind of science diagram vs a useable game board. The key aspect of Eklund’s space opus is that it is near-future. While the technology addressed in the game does not yet exist, all of it is theoretically possible. This is not your average Star Trek or Asimov fueled science fiction, but genuinely speculative science POSSIBLE.
Charting the burns of a rocket can be overwhelming at first…
In the game, each player takes on the role of a space agency aiming to make a profit in the solar system. Players auction technological patents, launch rockets, and plot space travel and mining operations right here orbiting the sun. Every site you can visit in the game, barring one named after Eklund’s wife, is a real place that we know about through our current scientific knowledge.
Not that it’s easy to get there! Eklund’s game is fantastic at capturing just how challenging the science and planning behind space travel really is. The brilliance really comes in the map, and the cards that represent the different technologies.
The map, which looks like a spider web of confusing spaghetti and iconography is really innovative. Eklund realized he could not represent the scale of space, even our immediate solar system, in a reasonably sized board. Even doing things “to scale” based on distance would result in a giant black empty map. Case in point. So the innovation was to represent the map in terms of energy vs. physical distance. The spaghetti lines represent possible courses through space, and each pink circle represents a “burn” of rocket fuel. Mars is a minimum of 3 burns away, various asteroids are 4 or 5, etc. You can navigate the spider web of space travel in more energy costly ways, and more quickly if you have a lot of fuel… or you can slowly travel to a destination, one burn at a time over the course of several game turns, each representing a year of your space program. Through this genius change of scope, Eklund is able to represent a vast amount of information and travel destinations in a board that can fit on the table… if only barely.
Each black hexagon is a real charted part of our solar system, ready to be explored and mined.A typical card, and in classic Phil EKlund style it could have come out of a science textbook.
The map would not be nearly as interesting without the technologies on the cards however. Each card represents a possible space technology, from solar sails, to orbital laser mining equipment. Players must combine the right combination of rocket parts to get to where they’re going, and it’s not possible to pack the kitchen sink here. The mass of your rocket is a very real problem, starting with just getting it off the earth in the first place! Then there is the puzzle of putting together technologies that actually work together. Different rockets, buggies, and refineries require specific types of generators, and reactors, which have their own cooling challenges along with their own mass. Planning a successful mission to Mars involves getting the right pieces of technology together, plotting a course and fuel to get there and quite possibly relying on the atmosphere to slow you down before you hit the surface, certainly the most terrifying die roll I’ve ever made. But all of this makes the missions feel meaningful and real. So much so that the group I play with has a house rule where we name all of our missions. I will never forget for example how Socrates II and its crew did not make it past earth’s radiation belt.
The great news is that High Frontier third edition just hit shelves and is the most refined version of this masterpiece yet. I can’t wait to dive into the new changes as Eklund continues to refine rules and improve upon his gameplay systems, and the production of this latest edition really gives the game the components and quality it deserves. I’ll be sure to check in with a session report in the coming months, although it take a good afternoon to play this game so it might be a while.
Once again Eklund is puts on a master class of integrating real science with a board game. His games are intimidating for sure, but intensely rewarding. And he covers a broad range of subjects, and not just science. Bios Genesis covers the formation of life, right down to the acids, while his historical Pax Pamir and Pax Porfiriana cover Afghan and Mexican historical wars in incredible detail. I am thrilled to have stumbled upon his designs with Bios Megafauna and will be a fan for years to come.
Why design rockets when you can design board games? That is the question Phil Eklund asked himself when we made the unlikely career switch from working for JPL to running his company Sierra Madre Games full time. This turned out to be a huge boon for the hobby of board gaming, as Sierra Madre games are different than anything else out there on the market! All of Eklund’s designs put the science and simulation part of the game front and center, sometimes at the expense of ease of play or game balance. And while one of Eklund’s best designs is about what he knows best, Space and Rockets, his games cover a wide variety of genres, all of them being anything but ordinary.
There’s a lot going on!
I personally came across his games through a frivolous accident. Bios Megafauna looked intense from the back of the box when it showed up as the latest release at my local game store, and for eighty dollars I wasn’t about to grab a game that looked too complex for its own good. Then one following Black Friday sale the game was marked down to just twenty dollars, and on a whim I figured that at worst I would have nifty shaped dinosaur and mammal game pieces, why not give it a shot?
It proved to be a challenge to get to the table, and I had to promise to buy a friend of mine dinner if he’d just learn it and give it a shot with me. But once we wrestled through the rules, we discovered a game that was dripping with theme like nothing else I had ever played. Given how much Eklund focuses on the simulation of the topic he is making a game about, each game actually teaches the players a ton about the given subject, and the stories from each game vary wildly, and often sound like something out of a science or history textbook; something that could actually have happened.
Who can say no to tiny wooden mammals?
Bios Megafauna is a game about the evolution and climate of the Cenozoic and Mesozoic eras on the prehistoric continents of North and South America. Each player can have up to four different species, which they draft traits for in order for them to survive in the different biomes on the map, or feast on whatever else is living there as a carnivore. A simple enough premise on the surface, but all of the nuance of the science behind the theme is baked right into the game mechanics here. For example, new species evolve from your existing ones, taking some of the traits with them. However, overly specialized creatures become comet bait, so it is best to hedge your bets and not bring all of the traits over from the parent species. The whole board shifts with the climate changes causing the biomes your species are living in to go extinct. Immigrant species move into biomes and ruin your plans, and there are herbivore and carnivore contests that have multiple tie breakers, one of which is how many teeth a species has. In this game you are getting a ton of real science facts right alongside the actual gameplay mechanics. The rules also use all the actual science terms, for better or worse, and so just to play you need to learn about acculturating, rooter biomes and Milankovich events. The rule book even has footnotes quotes from actual sources on how the science of the game works.
Speaking of the rules, they can be a sensitive subject in a Phil Eklund game. The rules you receive in the box very well might be outdated by the time you crack into them, as Phil believes in “Living” rule books. This means that while the components and cards of the game will stay the same, anything and everything else about the rules is fluid. I played Bios Megafauna for the first time with a significantly different set of rules than what came in the box. It sounds crazy, but this can actually be a good thing, as the game is dramatically improved from these rules changes. Still, it’s definitely not a user friendly experience, having to go out on the internet to track down the latest rules versus just having it ready to go out of the box.
The stories that come out of his games are some of my favorite experiences in the hobby though. While the art often has all of the appeal of a middle school science textbook, I found myself invested in the emerging narrative of the game. In one game my bat like mammals just acquired a trunk so they could finally move into that browser habitat I had been eyeing, but I was concerned that my fellow players would just feast on me if I didn’t develop quills in the next turn or two. While most games themes are very abstracted, or lightly “painted on”, in Eklund’s games the theme is the reason you are there.
Once I got a taste of the wonderfully thematic feeling of an Eklund game, I was hooked. I began to seek out his other games starting with his magnum opus, High Frontier. That is a game for another day though, so I will cover it next time, in part two of the Scientist of Gaming!
Your favorite game has hit the table countless times. It’s still your favorite, but something isn’t right. Perhaps it feels a little samey or stale when you are making some of the same moves for the 20th time, or seeing the maybe you see some of the same strategies play out as the last game. When a game hits the doldrums like this nothing can give it a shot of new life quite like a well-timed expansion.
When expansions get out of hand…
Board game expansions are add on packs that allow a designer inject new cards, gameplay, and strategies into an existing game. For a popular game, this is a win for everyone involved. The publisher seeks to keep the game relevant and active in the gaming community, and the gaming community in turn gets some new content to revive a game that maybe they have seen too much of. Seems like a pretty sure thing, right? However, not all expansions are created equal. Depending on the type of game and the designer’s approach to adding new bells and whistles, expansions can sometimes be more of a headache than they are worth. Over the next few posts I’d like to explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of board game expansions.
The best expansions take a good game and make it great. They elevate and evolve the gameplay experience in a way that makes it feel impossible to going back to playing the game without the expansion. Instead of just adding a bit more variety these expansions introduce new concepts that blend seamlessly with the original rules, and make for a deeper game.
Innovation adds several new gameplay mechanics that blend seamlessly with the original.
One expansion that meets this criteria is Innovation Echoes of the Past. Innovation itself is a fantastic game I covered in my short civilization game article. It has a lot of tactical depth, and since every card in the game is unique and not all cards are in play in any given game, the original game always plays out differently. So what could a game with that much variety in the core box possibly need an expansion for? More of the chaos and unpredictability of the base game of course!
Echoes of the past is that one ingredient that really makes a recipe sing, the garnish on top of a great meal. The cards in this expansion only come into play intermittently, as players can only draw one of them at a time. However they are powerful and introduce several gameplay concepts that weren’t in the original game, so when they do come into play it is significant and changes the course of the game. It is a fantastic expansion that I would not play without!
The Leaders expansion gives 7 Wonders more long term strategy.
Another expansion that fits into this “essential” category for me is 7 Wonders Leaders. 7 Wonders is another game I covered in my short civilization post, and is also a great tactical game, with moment to moment decisions often mattering more than long term planning. The Leaders expansion is great because it gives the game a more long term strategy. Players draft four powerful leader cards at the beginning of the game, and can use these early decisions to guide the more tactical decisions down the road. For example if a player drafts a leader that gives bonus points for science cards, they can seek out more of those cards during the game to really hone that strategy. The base 7 Wonders game is an award winning treasure of a game, but I am always eager to throw this expansion into the mix.
Boarders in Subrubia Inc are worth a lot of points, but can hem you in if you’re not careful.
Suburbia INC also elevates the core game Suburbia and adds small tweaks that make the whole game better. This very sim city-eque tile builder was already good, but the expansion adds boarders, that throw the whole spatial aspect of the game for a loop. and end of round scoring goals that can be tempting to chase even if they don’t meet your end game goals. It is another example of evolving a base game just that little bit and I would not play Suburbia without it.
In all three cases these expansions elevate the original game. The sign of a great expansion in my mind is if it feels like it belonged in the game to begin with, where it blends in seamlessly with the original. Expansions are a wonderful part of the modern board game hobby because they can give new life to a game you already know you enjoy. Sometimes trying a whole new game can be a bit daunting, having to teach new people, including yourself and the always present concern that it might just not be a good game. An expansion is a much safer bet, like adding more toppings to your favorite ice cream sundae. However, it’s not always rosey, and in my next post I’ll touch on the bad side of expansions and how they can go awry.
What’s old is new again with Dominion second edition.
It is a frustrating feature of our consumer culture, that there is always the next best thing around the corner. Your favorite media or device of today is sure to be crushed under the inevitable March of progress. A shiny new phone for example is only the new hotness until the next model. Content creators have been asking us to upgrade our video libraries for years. Jumping from VHS tapes to DVDs, to Blurays, and even now a new Ultra HD video format asks owners to buy their favorite movies yet again. It also happens in my other favorite hobby, video games, with new game consoles coming out every few years, often incompatible with all of the old games that you already own.
Three playstation consoles, each unable to play the games of the previous system.
With all of this constant change, at least we can rely on board games to bypass this march of progress, right? Cardboard, like diamonds, is forever. Your parents’ copy of Monopoly still works today, and plays the same as it did growing up. Finally, here is a bastion where you don’t have to keep up with the Joneses, where a well taken care of game can last through the ages and still be enjoyed by your grandkids years down the line.
Well, I have bad news. Board games, just like all other media, can become obsolete. I have several games on my shelf that have suffered this cruel fate. What could cause such a thing you ask? The answer is in the sinister siren call of the new edition. Version 2.0 of your favorite games, new and improved in a variety of ways. Perhaps it is new, better art that makes the game look that much better. Perhaps it is a few critical rule tweaks that make it play that much better. Perhaps it revamps the whole game and just streamlines it to make it THAT much better. Whatever the change, these new editions often make the version sitting on your shelf look like a sad cardboard jalopy.
This is not inherently a bad thing. After all, new editions generally IMPROVE the original game, and make it better than ever. Why get upset when a good game can become great, and have a chance to reach a new audience? I agree that it can be a noble thing to strive to make the best game possible and improve upon the formula of the original, but sometimes these new editions leave existing fans in a lurch.
Take for example the new editions of Carcassonne. Because of the art changes in the tiles, even if players combine the new edition with their old expansions, the art is incompatible. New expansions released after a second editions are often incompatible with old editions, forcing players to buy a game again if they want to experience the newest content for a game. Even if a game is “compatible” if the cards have different backs or different sizes, it’s simply not an option to throw the old and new together.
An early favorite game of mine when I first got into the hobby was Thunderstone. It took the deck building of Dominion and combine it with exploring a dungeon and fighting monsters. I eagerly picked up new expansions and sought to own every card I could get my hands on. The game was certainly rough around the edges and had some flaws that I could see even in my fervor to own it all.
Original Thunderstone (left) vs New Thunderstone (right) Keywords and Art made for some incompatibility between editions.
Then one day the publisher announced Thunderstone Advanced. A new edition that improved the formula in every way. It seemed intriguing at the time, but would the new card work with my growing collection of card from the original? The answer… sort of. In these more complex card games, interactions between cards often depended on keywords, say cards with the word Silver were more powerful against cards that had the word Werewolf for example. The keywords between the new editions were not going to jive and so I felt left behind, hundreds of dollars invested into a game that was officially out of style.
Publishers often do make an effort to not leave their existing fans behind. Many have introduced compatibility packs to bring existing players up to speed with any changes, without leaving them in the dust. Most recently Dominion, the granddaddy of the deck building genre came out with second editions of its two core sets, Dominion and Dominion Intrigue. Each set introduced 7 new cards to replace 6 cards in the original versions. Rio Grande published an upgrade kit that just included these new cards so that existing owners didn’t need to buy a whole new set. Pandemic put out a similar kit that just included the cards from the new edition so that owners could combine them with the new expansions.
The shiny new edition of Mission Red Planet (left) makes the old edition (right) look very dated indeed.
Often times, however, the old edition is just that. My old edition of Mission Red Planet with its crappy cards, lame skittle “astronauts” and flimsy board will never compare to the new Fantasy Flight edition in all of its splendor. I got plenty of fun times out of it, and it still plays the same as it always did, but I very much doubt it will ever hit the table again when the new shinier version is in someone else’s game bag.
Then again, I am also someone who anticipates these new editions, even when I own the original. A new version of one of my favorite card games Innovation is on the horizon. And you can bet that even though I own the original, I will be there on day one when the new edition comes out to enjoy the rule tweaks and beautiful new card design.
So perhaps while all of these new editions can leave original owners feeling a bit jilted, it’s not all bad news. All of the games I’ve mentioned were improved with their new edition, and surely picked up some new fans. And that is a wonderful sign that this great hobby is growing, and experiencing the same march of progress as other entertainment industries.
This weekend is a fantastic opportunity to try out these board games I have been writing about, as the biggest board game convention in the area comes to Proctor’s. The Council of Five Nations is the areas biggest, and oldest gaming convention, and promises to be a great way to spend this first fall weekend.
The convention starts TODAY September 23rd, 2016, and runs through Sunday. I have been remiss in not mentioning it sooner as I am unable to attend this year, but in past years it has always been a blast. The event list is full of fantastic board games, many of which I’ve written about on this blog.
There is an entrance fee at the door, and each game has an entry fee of 2 dollars, but this fee comes with the guarantee of a game master who will teach and run the game, and handle any rules questions. This is a fantastic way to learn new games and try some that look a little bit more daunting and that might be difficult to play just from the rules alone.
Some highlights from what’s on the schedule:
Concordia is a great game by a designer I highlighted the other week, Mac Gerdts
Concordia
Five Tribes is like the classic game of Mancala with an extra layer of strategy
Five Tribes
Colt Express has players robbing a 3d cardboard train and trying to avoid the deputy. It’s a Spiel Des Jahres winner from a few years ago, and looks great set up on the table.
There are tons of great games to choose from, and gamers from all over the Capital Region and beyond will be coming to town to roll some dice. And if you can’t make it this weekend, Schenectady Wargaming Association has monthly Game-A-Thons on the second Saturday of every month. So there’s always a chance to play new games and meet new people.
When it comes to board games everyone knows, Uno is certainly a family classic that’s on everyone’s lips. The game is simplicity itself, as players try to get out of their hand of cards while simultaneously making their opponents miserable and further from that goal. This delightful schadenfreude of making players pick up additional cards, skipping them, or bouncing the order of play back around the table puts the game in a category of card games called “Take That” games, where half of the fun is ruining your friends chances of winning.
As simple and universal as Uno is, it is a card game that doesn’t have a ton of meat on its bones. There are some decisions of when to use which card, but in general you either have a hand that you can play from, or you don’t and you have to draw. Much of the game ultimately comes down to luck, and this factor increases as more players come into the mix.
Luckily, small card games are one area where the board game hobby has flourished in recent decades. This is also one of my favorite categories of games because they are usually short, affordable and easy to get to the table at the beginning or end of the night. There are a few games in particular that really bring that Uno vibe, but have a couple of wrinkles that give them a bit more kick than the old classic.
The most Uno like modern game, right down to the reverse card is called Straw. The game is about the straw the broke the camel’s back, which according to this game happens at exactly 50 pounds. Players go around the table playing cards from their hands that represent various objects/weights that they are placing on the camel. Most objects make the weight go up, but there are, of course, magic carpets that can make the weight go down, and magical lamps that can be any weight 1-10. Much like a game of hot potato, the goal is to NOT be the player that reaches or crosses that 50 point threshold.
Straw is a lot like a game of hot potato with a poor camel’s back on the line.
The game happens over several rounds, and all players except the one that went over score the cards in their hands as points based on the weight. And that is the brilliant thing, as heavier things score more points, but are also the most risky to have in your hand as the number starts to climb. So there is an element of risk vs reward as the total climbs, do you keep your high cards, or try to dump them before you are stuck going over the limit? This simple tweak and the fact that there are several hands to even out the luck give this game a great Uno feel with hilarious moments of disaster for players at the table. And to wrap it all together there is a shoot the moon element with the titular “Straw.” If a player plays this card when the camel is at exactly 50 they are the ONLY player to score that round. Nothing feels better than escaping the jaws of defeat with a straw and rocketing ahead of the other players.
Another game that really captures the “Take That” nature of Uno is No Thanks. The game is simplicity itself to play but has some real teeth to it. Players start with hand of bidding chips that they use to NOT take cards that are dealt to the center of the table. Cards run from 3 to 35 and the goal is to have the LOWEST number of points at the end of a round. Player place bidding tokens on the current card up for bid, and the tokens are worth negative points, which can help you lower your score. Since you want to take as few card as possible, bidding continues around the table for several rounds. At a certain point players won’t be able to pass anymore, or the amount of cubes on the card will offset the damage enough that it is worth taking. This continues till all card are out, and then players score.
Just some number card and plastic bidding chips make for a great “take that” style game.
The real secret of the game is how it handles sequential numbers. If a player has a 17 and a 19 in front of them, they have 36 points. However, if you have a sequence of numbers, say 17, 18 and 19, you just take the lower number is your points. So suddenly, by taking the 18, a player actually improves their position, where that number would be poisonous to anyone else at the table. This gives the game a great push your luck element, as players will sometimes take a number hoping to round out the sequence later. And it also makes cards more or less valuable to each player, giving the main bidding aspect of the game a lot of depth. And just like Uno there is a lot of fun to be had in passing disastrous cards onto your fellow players at the table.
Finally there is one game that has more or less replaced Uno for me. That game is Parade, a benign looking game that has a strange Alice in Wonderland theme. But do not be deceived, behind the tea party with the mad hatter there is cutthroat game of dodging points and passing them onto your opponents. The game has cards in six suits number 0-10, with each suit represented by a color and character from Wonderland. Each turn you play a card from a hand of five out to a line of cards in the center of the table, the “Parade.” Depending on the card you play you work to avoid taking cards from the parade that are lower than the card you played or the same suit, as each card counts as it’s face value, and the lowest points wins. However, as players continue to dodge taking cards, the line gets longer and longer, and eventually it becomes impossible to not take a few cards.
The parade grows longer and the risk of taking cards grows greater.
This is where the key rule of the game shines, if you take a majority of any suit, each of the cards in that suit count as one point for you instead of their face value. Suddenly, taking the most of one color of cards as you can becomes a more viable strategy, for if you have the most you can turns those high face values into something much lower. And as the last play of the game players must add two cards of their hands simultaneously to their score pile, and this last adjustment can swing the majorities and lay waste to other player’s plans. The whole game feels a lot like a limbo as players must balance when to dodge cards and when to go all in for a certain suit. Once again there is that playful viciousness as players one by one dodge taking cards and you must navigate your hand effectively to dodge taking some yourself.
A night of Uno can still be a blast, and it’s a game that everybody knows. But next time you want easy to play card game that has a bit of an aggressive edge definitely take a look these fantastic games.
