Month: December 2017 (Page 4 of 11)

Designer: Alexander Pfister

In Mombasa, you play an 18th century chartered company involved in trade in Africa. But not slaves. Seriously, there was enough people wondering about this once the theme of the game was announced that the developers felt compelled to assure players that this game is totally not about slaves.

It is, however, a very good albeit dense Eurogame. Players will go searching for diamonds, trade goods such as bananas, coffee and cotton, and explore the continent. It’s well-balanced and very good.

Interesting Mechanic: Tableau management. Players have a fistful of cards they can play, but they can only play three cards horizontally. At the end of the turn, the cards you’ve played go to three columns above your game board. They then choose one of the COLUMNS to take into their hand. Players need to carefully plan in order to set up monster turns later in the game.

Mombasa is a dense game and it really needs 4 players to shine. However, the core mechanic that drives action selection is really well done, and is well worth your time.

(Photo Credit: Shut Up and Sit Down)

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg

Do you fantasize about being a dwarf, perhaps for their lovely beards and charming drinking songs? Farming pumpkins? Mining ore? Going on quests? Making babies? Keeping donkeys as household pets?

Caverna is a game by the same designer who designed Agricola. Uwe will show up again, but not Agricola – it’s a sprawling flawed game, and Caverna fixes most of those flaws. Players will place workers, which will allow them to expand their farms, harvest food, gather resources, and engage in a little light animal husbandry, but without potentially unbalanced profession cards and with a far less oppressive people feeding mechanism.

Interesting Mechanic: Expanding Action Space Options. That being said, one of the best game mechanics from Agricola does make an appearance, and that is the ever expanding board of actions. Early in the game, there are only a handful of spaces you can place your dwarf. As the game ages, new action spaces which unlock new resources and/or offer greater efficiency become available. As you the player are also unlocking new meeples by making babies, the game continues to be highly contested for the most valuable resources.

Agricola generally gets the ink, but Caverna offers an easier to teach, easier to understand and more balanced gameplay experience for your farming simulator. Also, it has dogs and donkeys, which Agricola specifically lacks.

(Photo Credit: Pokemon Central)

Designer: Michael Kiesling

Azul is a gorgeous, zen-like ceramic tile based game with a surprising amount of ‘fuck you’ hidden in there.

Azul is played in a series of rounds. In each round, four random tiles are placed on each of the coaster-looking disks on the table. Players go in order, taking all of the tiles of one color from a disk, and putting the rest in the middle. You can choose to take from the middle as well, which can get you large piles of tiles of the same color, but also loses you a victory point if you’re the first player. Players are ultimately trying to get exact counts of the tiles they need — if they get more than they need to fill the pattern location they’re trying to fill, they lose victory points for the overage.

Interesting Innovation: really, the whole game. The game really shines on paying attention to the overages. Savvy players may find themselves choosing between grabbing a couple points, or making a slightly less-than-optimal choice to leave their opponents with guarunteed overages. I’ve seen a guy get about seven more tiles than he could score before. He lost.

(Photo Credit: Plan B Games)

Designer: Richard Garfield

In this simple diceroller by Richard Garfield, designer of Magic: the Gathering, you play an epic monster engaging in a battle royale against other monsters as the screaming citizens of Tokyo flee in terror.

On each player’s turn, he rolls 6 dice (and can reroll any number of them twice). Based on the dice results, players can earn victory points, attack the leader, heal up, or buy a powerup, giving your hero unique abilities. The goal is to get to 20 victory points first.

Interesting Mechanic: King of the Hill. King of Tokyo is basically ‘King of the HIll’. Every attack die that is rolled attacks only the monster in the center of Tokyo (attack dice he rolls hits everyone else), and whoever is King cannot use healing dice while in town. However, he does earn victory points by hanging out downtown. This makes quite a press-your-luck game, as if you’re winning, you also have an inescapable target on your back.

King of Tokyo is a fast, easy game that is still a lot of fun. It seats up to 6 people and is simple enough that even kids can play it, while still keeping the interest of older gamers.

(Photo Credit: Panke-Spieler Berlin)

Designers: Nate French, Matthew Newman

The original Arkham Horror was the definitive Cthulhu-based adventuring board game for quite some time, but was also a finicky, swingy game that could go from zero to sixty at a ‘holy fuck’ rate of speed. Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a vastly better balanced, streamlined experience by the same company. In this cooperative game, players will seek out weapons and equipments, deal with their inner demons, and try to seek the secrets of whatever demonic horror is in whatever entirely too creepy location they’ve decided to wander into against their better judgment.

Interesting Design Mechanic: Clues. Arkham Horror: the Card Game does an admirable version of telling a storytelling experience in a very simple way. You set up the story cards in a certain order. You seek out generic clues, and when you find enough clues, you proceed to the next chapter of the story. This is a very simple mechanic that allows a detailed story to be progressed without an active storyteller while also being agnostic to whichever character (and character abilities) you have chosen.

Arkham Horror isn’t going to replace D&D for its storytelling, but if you’re looking for a well-balanced, interesting Cthulhu game that fits into a relatively short period of time, Arkham Horror: the Card Game may be a good fit.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Realm)

Designer: Stefan Feld

You are a merchant prince of Burgundy, and you seek to build up the family estate. Seek to flesh it out with pastures, castles, harbors, and… er, fields of knowledge. Or something.

Castles of Burgundy takes place over 25 turns, broken into 5 equally long phase. On each turn, players will roll two dice, then use those two dice to perform one of a small handful of possible actions: trade, hire workers, start construction, or finish a construction. When a new tile is constructed, it becomes a new hex and is added to their estate, at which point it is scored and, in many cases, fires off new mechanics.

Interesting Mechanic: A Euro with Dice. There was a time that most eurogames disdained dice, as the randomness of the dice simply undercut the value of the player’s tactical decisions. Particularly disdained was the idea dice being used as a chance for failure – i.e. high dice ‘hitting’ and low dice ‘missing’. Castles of Burgundy makes it work by having dice, but also by making their values relatively unimportant. Mathematically, whether you need a six or a two has nothing to do with which number is higher, and instead is based on which number is home to a tile you want to place. The game also is very generous in giving tools to manipulate those dice.

Many people consider Castles of Burgundy to be Stefan Feld’s finest game. I don’t (we’ll see him show up again later), but I do consider this to be one of his more accessible works. It’s thinky, with tons of options, and yet the dice rolling constrains the player a great deal, and helps to address the paralysis analysis that makes a lot of Euros unplayable against some people.

(Photo Credit: Opinionated Gamers)

Designers: Bruno Cathala, Serge Laget

This game is about nobility, about fire under pressure, about the ability to work together to solve problems, and of course, the ability to cry “TRAITOR!” and point to your neighbor at the slightest provocation.

Shadows over Camelot is a cooperative game — mostly. Each player is a Knight of the Round Table, criss-crossing the kingdom to fight wars, complete quests, seek out the holy grail, and otherwise combat the progression of evil, which advances at the start of each turn. Each victory results in a white sword on the table, whereas a defeat places a black one. The game ends when 12 swords are on the table – if more white ones are there than black ones, the table wins.

Interesting Mechanic: The Traitor. At the start of the game, each player is dealt a card which may be a traitor card or not (of 8 possible cards only one is a traitor). The traitor wins if the party fails, which means finding ways to sabotage your efforts and that of the group as a whole without drawing attention to yourself. The traitor mechanic quickly pushes the game into paranoia and suspicion. Traitors can be officially accused, but false accusations can be disastrous for the war effort.

Shadows over Camelot is not the only coop game to have a traitor mechanic, but it is the best. People who like sowing paranoia and distrust among their closest friends will find this one a classic.

(Photo Credit: Defective Yeti)

Designers: Robert Dougherty, Darwin Kastle

Build a fleet, and take it to war. Star Realms is a tight, well-balanced and interesting deckbuilder designed for two players.

Each player starts his turn with five cards. These cards have effects when played, such as giving them money to buy more cards, deal damage to their opponents or their starbases, draw more cards, make their opponents discard cards, and other effects.

At the end of the turn, the cards they played and acquired go into their discard, and they draw five new cards. If they do not have enough cards to do so, they shuffle their discard to form a new deck, and draw from the top. This is a deckbuilder similar to Dominion, where players effectively are building an engine on the fly.

Interesting Mechanic: Starbases. Unlike other cards you play on your turn, Starbases are not discarded. They stay on your tableau once played, until your opponent deals enough damage to force you to discard them. Starbases tend to have persistent effects, and enable color-matching synergy combos, which are at the heart of deckbuilding in Star Realms.

Bonus Mechanic: Trashing. Many deckbuilders have the concept of ‘trash a card’ – which is to remove a card from your hand or discard pile from the game, but Star Realms pushes it front and center, making it the central mechanic of one of the four factions. Trashing cards is underappreciated by most new gamers, but is crucial towards weeding out the crappy cards in your starter deck so you can more reliably draw your power cards. Trashing cards makes crazy looping combos fire much more reliably, and makes the genre in general much more fun.

Star Realms is a small, cheap deckbuilder that is great for two players, and has recieved a wealth of post-launch expansion support.

(Photo Credit: Monopolis Wonder)

Designer: Chad Jensen

This game is complete, unbridled, organized chaos. And it’s fantastic.

You play as one of the major creature classifications: bird, lizard, spider, mammal, insect, amphibian. Your goal is to become the most dominant of all of them through migration, exploration, speciation,, evolution or other standard actions. Your goal is to claim as much territory as you can, adapt to new environments, and rule the world. Each turn, you will place a certain number of meeples on actions, and then those actions will be resolved one-by-one.

Interesting Mechanic: Glaciation. One of my favorite ‘take that’ mechanic in all of gaming. Dominant Species is at its core a territorial control game, and the combat for territory is fast and fierce. But does one player have too much of a lead? Well, that’s nothing that a little ice age won’t fix. Glaciation will instantly make any single piece of territory inhabitable, and played correctly may divide an enemy’s force in half. It’s the nuclear option and it won’t make you any friends, but damn if it isn’t fun.

Dominant Species is a messy, highly swingy territorial control game. I’ve seen players go down to about three cubes, and yet find a way to claw back to the top. The game isn’t without it’s problems — most of the points are scored in the final scoring, which can hide a lead. Also, scoring is minorly obtuse, as you need to use a ‘dominance’ paradigm that is somewhat mathy and needs to be constantly recalculated. But if you don’t mind these things, this is an ambitious, starkly different game that takes world domination in an entirely new direction.

(Photo Credit: The Thoughtful Gamer)

Designers: Sérgio Halaban, André Zatz

In Sheriff of Nottingham, you live the high glamorous life of a customs agent, patrolling the borders of Nottingham seeking contraband that might be sold on the open market. Sure, he may say he’s a harmless chicken farmer, but those bags aren’t exactly moving and clucking all that much. But you might be convinced to not take a peek… for a fee.

Interesting Mechanic: Mutually Understood Bribery. Sheriff of Nottingham is, at it’s core, a game about lying, bribery and mutual understandings, wink wink nudge nudge. You fill a bag with goods and declare the contents of them, and pass them to the current Sheriff. The Sheriff then decides whether or not your bags merit closer inspection, and that decision might be made easier with a donation to local law enforcement, which is woefully underfunded by an underappreciative public. If he looks and you have contraband, you’re in trouble, but the penalties are staggering if his instincts are wrong. But don’t get too cocky – eventually you will take your turn as the Sheriff.

Sheriff of Nottingham is, at it’s core, a social game, and is far better in a group that is extroverted, silly and familiar with each other. It is a tad prone to lucky streaks – a player can get so lucky drawing goods that he rarely or never needs to lie – but this is a relatively quick game where the experience is generally more valuable than winning or losing anyway.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Meeple Lady)