Month: December 2017 (Page 9 of 11)

Designed by Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge, Bill Norton, Peter Olotka, Kevin Wilson.

Cosmic Encounter is the sort of game you play if you long to be an Amoeba or a Virus with a penchant for stabbing your friends in the back.

You start the game with five planets, and four ships on each planet. You want to get your ships on 5 of the other guys’ planets. At the start of each turn, you’ll draw a card that tells you who to attack, and from there, you have to figure out how to go to war. You have several tools at your disposal, but most crucially, you can ask other players for help. If you get an ally to help you raid another guy’s planet and are successful, you’ll BOTH land ships on that planet and send their ships to the void. But they can ask for allies, too.

Interesting Innovation: Special Abilities. Cosmic Encounters is probably not the first game to give different races special attacks, but they are likely the most ambitious about it. The most recent reprinting of the game has about 50 of them. And many, many of them are gruesomely overpowered. The game pretty much depends on players identifying players who have huge advantages and ganging up on them to balance them, because the power differential between various races is titanic-sized.

A game 30 years old, Cosmic Encounters is STILL the premier game regarding diplomacy and negotiation, which is to say it’s a great game if you have a table full of wheelers and dealers – or who think they are.

(Photo Credit: One Of Us)

Once upon a time, there was a game company called Cheap Ass Games who decided board games were too expensive. They decided that you likely could borrow pawns and dice from other games, and therefore sold most of their games in paper envelopes printed on crappy paper. Since then, CAG has moved onto a more traditional board game development model, but their flagship game from that era (since reprinted at quality) still wacky and brilliant.

In Kill Doctor Lucky, you play a party guest at the house of Doctor Lucky, determined to kill him. The problem is, that’s true for all the other players as well. As the game progresses, Doctor Lucky will wander from room to room in his spacious mansion on a predetermined path that you can modestly adjust. Your goal is to kill him before anyone else does.

Interesting Mechanic: Escaping Line of Sight. And how do you kill him? Well, you need to get in the same room as him and be alone. Simultaneously, you also need to not be within line of sight of any other players. Trying to get in positions where you can be poised to ambush Lucky when it’s your turn, while ensuring you maintain line of sight of your opponents, is a tricky balance, and makes for an interesting challenge.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Quest)

Designed by Stefan Feld.

In Bora Bora, you manage a small pacific tribe competing against other tribes. To win, you’ll need to outperform them by doing crucial things such as building huts, praying and, um… collecting shells and getting really dope tattoos.

Interesting Mechanic: Dice Worker Placement. At the start of a round, everyone rolls three dice. They can place them on one of 7 potential locations. The benefits an action space gives is based on the number on the dice. So you get less resources if you place a 1 on a die — but it still may be advantageous! Because you can only place a die on a spot if that space is empty, or if it’s lower in value than any dice already on the space. This means that all die rolls have gameplay values: high rolls earn you more benefits, but low rolls are optimal for blocking opponents.

Bora Bora is a dense Eurogame from Stefan Feld. It’s a crowded, complex game, and I love it, but frankly I don’t play it very much anymore because it’s a beast to teach (mostly due to an overabundance of iconography).

(Photo Credit: Metagames)

Designed by Christian T Petersen

Twilight Imperium is a space 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) that is considered by many gamers to be the quintessential epic. Players are leaders of great alien civilizations, fighting to wrest control of the galaxy and, in particular, the ancient throne world of Mecatal Rex which sits in the center.

This game is a laundry list of game features. Players start by choosing a strategy (similar to role selection in other games), which determines turn order and grants them some unique benefits. After this, they can build their armies, research new technologies, form diplomatic relations, deploy their fleets and so on.

I don’t play Twilight Imperium often – usually no more than once every other year – because frankly life is too short to play too many 8 hour board games. But every time I play, I leave going “wow, that was an incredibly epic experience” before collapsing in exhaustion. Twilight Imperium recently put out a 4th edition, which is supposedly faster and is getting good reviews. That, however, I cannot comment on.

Key Mechanic: Claimed Objectives. I’ll admit, I don’t find too much about Twilight Imperium all that innovative – it’s really a game that rests on the breadth of the possibility space more than any one feature. That being said, I do like how most scoring in the game comes from Objective cards, most of which are visible to everyone. Most are worth only 1 or 2 points, and claiming it will result in it being replaced by a new card. However, this frequently sets up competing players in races to complete objectives, which can frequently result in one player left overextended for a goal they can no longer claim.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designed by Mike Selinker & others.

Pathfinder is an persistent RPG with an unusual twist – the player’s ‘character’ is a deck of cards.

The player’s deck starts with a small deck of cards. They respect the sum of his or her ability, as well as his life total – if a player would draw a card but can’t he dies. The sum of the deck are things he or she can do – weapons, spells, skills and armor and the like. As the player adventures, he or she will find new cards, which can replace existing cards in his deck.

Each adventure is made up of five or six locations, each represented by a stack of cards. During each player’s turn, they can flip cards in a location. If they find a skill or armor, they can roll to add it to their deck. If they find a monster, they can fight it. The goal is (usually) to find one specific boss monster in each fight. As you fight minibosses in other stacks, you close those locations, cornering the boss.

Interesting Mechanic: Multiple Ways to Use a Card. Each player deck of cards is small (about 16? cards) but each kind of card typically plays in different ways. Most weapons, after attack, get put back in the player’s hand and can be used on subsequent fights. Artifacts can typically be used and then buried (i.e. removed from the game, but you get it back next scenario) whereas potions are typically Banished (Removed from the game for good). Spells are recharged (shuffled back into the player deck – important as that’s your hit point count), which has the nice effect of letting spells be more powerful than weapons, but far less reliably available.

This may seem complex, but in practicality, you pick it up quickly, and it allows all cards to share similar mechanics on usage while ensuring that each of them feels very different mechanically.

There are now four Pathfinder: Adventure Card Game scenarios available, with the first being Rise of the Runelords, which is a very straightforward fantasy scenario. If you’re looking for a D&D-like adventure but want the experience to be more mechanical, this game merits a look. It’s got a pretty good iPad app too.

(Photo Source: Board Game Geek)

Designed by Klaus Teuber.

Formerly known as Settlers of Catan, in this game you will settle a new homeland, build some settlements, connect them with roads, and pound some sheep into bricks.

Catan is considered a classic game, and it’s popularity helped kickstart the era of modern board gaming.  I would consider it an Essential Gateway Board Games (i.e. games you can play with non-gamers in hopes you can turn them into filthy gamers).

Key Mechanic: Resource Generation.  My favorite mechanic is actually one I have rarely seen replicated in a game.  Each hex on the map corresponds to a different resource, and is pre-seeded with a number from two to twelve.  Players build settlements on the corners of hexes, and roll two dice at the start of their turn.  Whatever number they roll, every player who has a settlement next to a hex with that number gains the appropriate resources.   Clearly, sixes and eights are the strongest bets, but limited placement options may force players to make suboptimal choices (2, 3, 11, 12) and hope for a rare roll payoff.

Catan is an old game and has been surpassed in many ways, but it does do things no other game does well, and is considered a classic for good reason.

(Photo source: Board Game Geek)

Saint Petersburg is a tableau-building economic engine game set in the early 1700s, where players will hire workers and merchants, build buildings and eventually try to hire nobles, who will earn you victory points. Just don’t tell those nobles what will happen to their descendants in, oh, about 200 years.

On each turn, players will purchase one card from the library. That card will generate money or victory points, as well as have resource icons which create a little synergy, that let them buy more, bigger and better cards.

Interesting Mechanic: First Player Selection. There are four card purchasing phases of the game – worker, building, aristocrat and trading card phase. In each of those phases, a different tableau of cards is played. Who goes first is random – each player draws a card, and that determines the phase in which he’ll go first. While you don’t know exactly what cards will flip over, going first is a huge advantage, so savvy players need to ensure they have maximized their income to ensure they can best take advantage of when they have the best selection.

Saint Petersburg is a good euro-style family game that is very good, despite the fact that it tends to be a little bit like solitaire. It’s hard to find now, but it’s still a treat when it hits the table.

(Photo Credit: Hiew’s Boardgame Blog)

Designed by Marc Andre.

In Majesty: For the Realm, you are assembling a medieval village, drafting millers, witches, noblemen, soldiers in the like. Each character you draft will grant you some number of victory points based on your tableau, and some will have other effects as well (such as killing people in other people’s villages). Final scoring is based on set collection – who has the most of each kind of hero, and how many different kinds of heroes you’ve collected.

Majesty is short game by the designer of Splendor (a reasonably good game that doesn’t make this list), and is a solid game with good components that is great filler in between bigger fare.

Key Mechanic: Spending to Dig. Acquiring citizens is simple – players choose from a tableau of six cards. The card on the end is free to draft, but the next one costs one meeple – placed on the card. If you want the sixth card, you will need to place all five meeples to get it. Players who draft one of the other cares in the future also claim all the meeples on it.

Players start with, and can never have, more than five meeples, meaning that if you dig for a card, you’re limiting your options in the following turns pretty sharply. This sort of mechanic is fairly common as a minor mechanic in many other games, but works well as the central driving engine of Majesty.

(Photo Credit: Z-Man Games)

Designed by Stephen Avery & Tom Vasel

Once upon a time, there was a game called Kremlin. In this game, you managed members of the Russian Politboro, politicking and assassinating each other, in an attempt to move up the ranks, with victory being earned by the player who waves at the May Day Parade three times. It was… not a very good game, but it was a very fun game. Since then, a few people have tried to copy it, and two have done it well: Chicken Caesar – which pushes the formula to be a purely political one – and Nothing Personal, which leans harder into game-like mechanics. Personally, I feel the latter has done a better job.

In Nothing Personal, you are a mob family trying to wrest control of the local mob scene. There will be a local heirarchy of mobs, of which you will control a subset of them. The roles in the heirarchy all have special powers. The hit man can whack another mobster (most likely controlled by another player), whereas the Accountant can make more money, and so on. Players play by attempting to influence these members, and use their powers to lock in their place in the heirarchy. But everyone is always a way to move up the ladder.

Interesting Mechanic: The Capo Ring. The Capo Ring is held by the guy who controls the mob boss. Each mobster gets to do one action, as directed by the player who controls him. If two players have the same amount of influence, the Capo Ring decides. Kapiche?

Nothing Personal is a great social game about climbing up a heirarchy. It’s also got great production values and drips with flavor. It’s definitely a better game to play with a table full of extroverts, though.

(Photo Credit: I Slay the Dragon)

Designer: Donald X Vaccarino

Your goal is simple, get in, hack some juicy data, and then send it off to Wikileaks before the rentacop catches you.

Infiltration is a game set in the Android universe (which is now home for Netrunner as well), where players are all on a futuristic data heist, breaking into a big, corporate high rise. The high rise is effectively a randomly generated 12-room dungeon, which are placed face down. Players move simultaneously, choosing to move forward (revealing a room if it hasn’t been revealed yet) or backwards. They also can hack into the computers there, which may have different benefits (detailed per room). Some rooms may have NPCs in them, which move and react automatically, and have to be dealt with. The player who gets out with the most data wins.

Interesting Mechanic: The Threat Dial. Players are on a timer, of course, before the cops arrive. As players take actions and the game progresses, the threat timer increases, and the alarm increases as well. The threat timer starts going up slowly, but as the alarm increases, the threat timer increases faster. If the threat timer hits 99, everyone still in the building is arrested, which adds a ‘press your luck’ mechanic to the game.

Android: Infiltration is one of those rare breeds, a gamer’s game that is still very quick and short, and the theme is solid. It won’t appeal to everyone, but people who like cyberpunk, heists and press your luck mechanics may find it quite a treat.

(Photo Credit: Game and a Curry)