The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Author: Damion Schubert (Page 13 of 125)

#84: Twilight Imperium

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)

#85: Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords

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)

#86: Catan

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)

#87: Saint Petersburg

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.

Image result for saint petersburg board game
(Photo Credit: Hiew’s Boardgame Blog)

#88: Majesty: For the Realm

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.

Image result for majesty for the realm
(Photo Credit: Z-Man Games)

#89: Nothing Personal

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.

Image result for nothing personal game

(Photo Credit: I Slay the Dragon)

#90: Android: Infiltration

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.

Image result for android infiltration

(Photo Credit: Game and a Curry)

#91: Valeria Card Kingdoms

Designer: Isaias Vallejo

You are the mayor of a medieval town. During the game, you will build a tableau of citizens, and use those citizens to generate resources (might, magic and gold) that you can use to recruit new citizens, kill monsters, and ultimately claim territory that offers powerful buffs to your fabled land. Killing monsters and conquering great territories is the typical path to victory.

How you earn those resources is the interesting thing, though. Your tableau of citizens each have a number from one to twelve. Every turn, a player rolls dice. If you hit those numbers, you get resources based on the numbers you roll. If you roll a 2, a 3, you’ll score any ‘2’s, ‘3’s and ‘5’s in your tableau. If you have two ‘2’ cards, that citizen will pay off twice.

Interesting Mechanic: Off-turn rewards. But you don’t just get rewards when YOU make those rolls. Each card has two reward amounts – one for when you roll it, and another (usually lesser) reward when another player makes that roll. This incredibly simple change both helps mitigate streaks of bad luck, as well as keeps people invested in the game when it’s not their turn.

Valeria: Card Kingdoms is a good, albeit imperfect game. In a couple of plays I’ve had, the early game is tense, but eventually everyone has full coverage and is awash in resources. Still, this is a very interesting mechanic, and one that feels like its worth more plays, and may inspire other similar, better balanced systems in the future.

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(Photo Credit: ICv2)

#92: Prime Time

Designer: Elad Goldsteen

In Prime Time, you will contribute to the continuing moral and philosophical decline of America by filling the boob tube with cheap crap meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.  Perhaps you’ll even develop the reality star that produces a know-nothing twit that gets elected president and brings the planet to the brink of disaster!  Huzzah!

You are a TV executive, that is currently running crappy, forgettable programming.  You’ll hire stars, develop shows, and secure advertisers in order to make a fortune.  Better shows and stars cost more money, and there’s an auction mechanic to claim them.  And some actors are better at certain things — you know, Sci-fi stars will do better for you in your shitty Star Trek ripoff than reality TV celebs.

Interesting Mechanic: Viewer Demographics.  For each day of the week, there are demographics that prefer to watch TV that day — blue cubes prefer Mondays, for example whereas pink ones prefer Fridays.  When players develop shows, they want to develop shows that are optimized to satisfy those demographics.  Players can look ahead in a forecast section of the board to see how demographics will change over time, and players can manipulate those cubes with HR.  It’s a neat way to capture a relatively complex problem.

There were two Television Planning games that came out near each other: Networks and Prime Time.  Both are entertaining, and most people prefer Networks as its an easier game to play, but I prefer Prime Time, as it’s a meatier, more innovative design.

Image result for prime time board game

(Photo Credit: Lincoln Board Games Group)

#93. A Game of Thrones: the Board Game

Designer: Christian T. Petersen

A tense, strategic territorial control game built on the George R. R. Martin books, you control one of the great houses of Westeros, and live out your fantasy of just punishing the Lannisters just because fucking Joffrey, man.

Game of Thrones is a surprisingly simple game, at least mechanically, where players attempt to claim 7 castles in fewer than 10 turns. Each turn starts with random events (some good some bad), and then players plan what they’re going to do. Possible actions include attacking, defending, supporting a nearby army, earning command points you can bid for bonuses, and others.

Interesting Mechanic: Simultaneous Action Reveal. This is really the meat of the game – each player has a host of tokens that they can place, face down, on each of their armies, which gives other players some idea of where their focus is, but you don’t see what they actually plan to do until all tokens are revealed simultaneously. At this point, players resolve these actions one at a time in turn order. This way of commanding your troops does a great job of creating tensions, creating opportunities to bluff and feint, and to draw your opponents into a trap.

Game of Thrones has a lot going on for it beyond the license, which it captures very well. It has allusions to Diplomacy without destroying friendships, and has a feel of Risk without taking 6 hours to play. While it’s not my favorite territorial control game, it still is very, very good.

Review - Game of Thrones: The Board Game

(Photo Credit: Shut Up & Sit Down)

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