Mapping the world with tiles

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

From an early age I had a fascination with maps. I would pour over the maps at the beginning of novels, daydream about the maps in my video game instruction booklets during class, and leaf through each month’s national geographic hoping for a foldout of some distant place to come tumbling out.

It is no wonder then that I have a soft spot for tile laying games. When I was young, we had a children’s game Rivers Roads and Rails, wherein different tiles each had one to three of the different modes of transportation. I do not remember the rules, I am not even sure they mattered to me then. I would simply connect the different tiles in a myriad of different ways to see how the network would grow.

Even before stumbling into the game store years ago, I had developed a love for the Xbox 360 version of Carcassonne. Almost by accident I had stumbled into this great tile laying game. I was looking for something affordable that could be played with my roommates, and while the theme of laying down map tiles in the French countryside didn’t seem too appealing, the game soon won all of us over.

In hindsight, it’s no surprise that it was such a hit. Carcassonne won a Spiel des Jahres in 2001 and is a classic to this day. Much like Monopoly, it has exploded into a multitude of different themes and versions, with a Wild West version, caveman themed Hunters and Gatherers, and even a Star Wars version last fall.

In the game players lay a tile each turn, and have wooden figures colloquially called “Meeples” that they use to claim different terrain features. Meeples placed on the road become thieves, in the castle they are knights, when placed on monasteries they are monks, and those that are laid down in fields become farmers which introduce a light area control element to the game. The meeples placed out on the board cannot be reclaimed until the road, castle or monastery is complete. Each feature is completed a different way, with big castles scoring the most, but also being the most difficult to finish.

Here the beauty of tile laying games comes through. What starts as nothing, tile by tile, becomes a map busy with activity, and different every time you play. Each tile placed out into the map produces a cathartic feeling of creating order. Roads must connect to other roads, fields to fields, castle walls to other castle walls. While an intense game of Carcassonne can look a bit unorganized, larger more family friendly rounds often end with satisfyingly complete features at every corner. Above all else, the tile laying feature of the game adds a delightful puzzle like element as the orientation and features of the tile matter, much like a classic jigsaw piece.

The beautiful tiles of Taluva stack to form an evolving island.

Several other games have come along over the years to add their own twist on the tile laying formula. Taluva added a third dimension to the mix by allowing players to layers tiles on top of eachother. Each tile has three features, one of which is always a volcano. Volcanos can be stacked on top of other volcanos as an eruption to create an island with mountainous features. Here the challenge is not connecting and completing features as in Carcassonne. There are no roads or castles, but instead players try to place all of at least two of three types of buildings. Tiny huts spread from the valleys up the player-created hills, and are destroyed by volcanic eruptions. Temples require a minimum horizontal spread of villages, and towers must be placed on at least the third level of the island. The resulting play experience is still a spatial puzzle, but also a game of cat and mouse, trying to carefully place tiles that benefit you, while not simultaneously helping other players.

Alhambra, another Spiele des Jahres game of the year winner has players building their own tile cities instead of sharing a central play area as in Carcassonne and Taluva. In this way each player is solving their own puzzle, but it is by no means a solitary experience. Players must buy tiles for their cities from a central market, with four different market spaces that each accept a different color of currency cards. On a turn players can take currency cards, or build a tile. Paying for a tile with exact change grants a bonus turn, so smart money management is important along with smart tile placement. The market also plays into the scoring of the game, as players vie to have the most of each color building before each scoring round.

Finally a great game that twists the Carcassonne format is Glen More. Similar to Alhambra, each player is building their own village instead of interacting on a central landscape as in Carcassonne. The unique aspect of the game is instead of drawing tiles from a stack, they come out into a central circle. Players can select any tile from the circle, but they don’t get to take another turn until they are at the tail end of the chain. So there may be just the tile you need, but if it’s several tiles ahead, you may need to wait while other players take several turns before you get to go again. But if it’s the right tile, it just might be worth it. The game also introduces some simple resource management, as tiles produce, wheat, stone, wood, sheep or cows that are used to build other tiles, or most importantly, to distill whisky!

The central board in Glen More has many tile options, but the further away the tile, the longer before your next turn.

However, with so much more going on, Glen More needed to pare down the puzzle like elements of Carcassonne. Instead of building features, tiles have a central river running north south, and a central road running east to west. Road tiles must match road, and river must match river, but otherwise the only placement rules are much more flexible.

I have only highlighted a few of the many tile-based games that have filled the hobby in recent years. There are many more, with countless themes from building a spaceship with tiles, to the Sim City like Suburbia, to a personal favorite that captures the early plymouth settlers, Keyflower. Two of the six games just nominated for a Spiel Des Jahres Game of the Year award use tiles as a central element. There is something that’s just inherently fun about piecing together different tile elements to build a whole, be it a kingdom or a spaceship, that is your very own.

How to judge a game by its cover

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

Today I have a foolproof guide for how to select a board game for you collection, purely based on its cover. This may seem impossible, given the traditional and well proven advice to not judge a book by its cover, but I assure you with these few steps you will be playing the best games possible in no time!

Now you may think, since we’re judging games by their cover, that you would be looking for an awesome sci-fi vista, or perhaps an action packed fantasy battle. We are looking for fun games, so an exciting cover should be key, right?

But no! The secret is what I call, the Handsome Mans Principle or HMP. Illustrated wonderfully by this cross stitch my girlfriend made for me some years back

You see, nothing ensures a surefire hit quite like a stern, bored looking European guy on the cover of a board game. Take the fellow below. He is clearly getting up to some very important work with his quill pen. This is not a bait and switch, and there isn’t a fantastic space game hidden inside this box. What you see is what you get right down to the map in the background actually being an image of the game board itself. You may think this is a boring game, with the business like attitude of the poster boy, but I assure you it is fantastic, even if it is about trading goods during the 1100s.

There is a second tenant to the Handsome Mans Principle (HMP) , and that is that it works even better if someone is holding or looking at a map or document on the cover. Take for instance the game below:

Those are some very stern looking fellows and they are clearly looking at some important plans. This is a surefire hit, as it has both of the key tenants of the HMP. And it is indeed one of my favorite games, as players race to rebuild London after the great fire, building an engine with cards while trying to avoid the poverty penalty that comes with running that engine inefficiently.

However, there is one final tenant of the HMP that is missing from London. While it is great to have both stern looking European guys AND a document, it is even better if the name of the game is difficult to pronounce, or perhaps the name of a French city that no one has heard of.

Now we’re talking! These are some serious looking guys that have very important business to do, and hence, these are very awesome games to play! Each game features the riveting theme of medieval European living. Building towers and churches, expanding influence with powerful families, hiring knights and trading goods. What could be better?

So what if a game doesn’t meet these criteria? What if it only meets one tenant of the HMP? Let me tell you, I have been there my friend. One day I wandered into Zombie Planet and there was a nearly perfect game looking at me from the shelves. It was about farming in Europe, and even featured the Spanish word for farm as its name, La Granja. But it was missing something, and I just couldn’t pull the trigger. I asked my friend George, the store owner, if he could fix it for me, and he worked his artistic magic. When he was done, the game met that perfect trifecta of the HMP, and I walked out of the store a happy owner, eager to get it home and play.

Now featuring a suave looking fellow holding a map.

The reality is, a game, just like a book, cannot be judged by its cover. When I first started playing games, I would have avoided all of these games like the plague. Coming from a background in video games, books and movies, these all seem super boring. What could be fun about farming, or being a French noble, or trading in the Hansaetic league?

The reality is, I may never read a book, or watch a movie about those things. But when it comes to playing a game, the game itself often matters more than the theme, or story, that it tries to tell. Many designers from this board game revolution that has been happening since the mid nineties, come from Europe, and created games about the countries that they knew. Hence the popular term Euro Game. They often chose a theme that was as neutral as possible, instead of War, Fantasy, or Sci Fi, and focused on the game instead. No one ever thought building towns and roads and trading sheep could be fun, but a game about just that, Catan, has sold million of copies, and more importantly, has entertained families for more than 20 years. In a way, the neutral themes of these games mean that, more than ever, the game itself has to be great. A board game can have the most scintillating theme and beautiful art, but if it isn’t fun, it isn’t worth the cardboard its printed on.

So while you may not have a surefire hit on your hands by using the Handsome Mans Principle, make sure to give the more “boring” seeming games a closer look. You may be surprised at just how much fun is hidden behind those dour faces.

Game of the year nominees announced!

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

Look for this logo when hunting down great games.

It is “Oscar Season” for the board game industry! The Spiel des Jahres, or German Game of the Year, award nominees were announced on Monday. It is the most sought after award in the hobby, as just being nominated means more sales for your game, and winning ensures exponentially greater sales.

The award began back in 1978 and deals specifically with family style board games. A jury of judges reviews all games released in the German market over the past 12 months and selects games based on their originality as well as their accessibility. There are other awards that have cropped up over the years, with specific country best game awards (Portugal’s Jogo Do Anno), more hobby or publication specific awards (Board Game Geek’s Golden Geek Award, the Dice Tower Awards), but the Spiel des Jahres has remained the most prestigious, and most influential in the game market. In 1989 a Kinderspiel des Jahres, or kids game of year was introduced. Unfortunately many of these kids games don’t get released in the United States, so I won’t cover them in depth here. In 2011 the jury determined that there was a need to award games of greater complexity and introduced the Kennerspiel des Jahres, or expert game of the year, and I have loved many of the games announced for this new category.

The award is not just good for publisher sales though, it was also been useful in identifying games that are worth your time and money. In my own collection I have 10-12 spiel nominees or winners, and three of my favorite games of all time (Dominion, Kingdom Builder and 7 Wonders) were awarded the prize. As the board game industry continues to grow it is really helpful to have that award sticker on the box to separate the great games from the also rans.

This year’s Spiel des Jahres nominees are:

Codenames by Vlaada Chvatil. This is the best party game since Apples to Apples, and my vote to win it.. in part because it’s the only one of these nominees I’ve played so far! I have written about it previously when it made the rounds at Barnes and Noble. Below is Eric Martin’s fantastic overview.

Imhotep by Phil Walker-Harding. This game has not made it to the U.S. just yet, but with the award nomination announcement, its release date has been moved up to late June. It looks to be a great family game about building Egyptian monuments. Players assign blocks to different shared boats that then ferry them over to different building sites. However any player can move any boat so there is lots of room to cause havoc in the plans of other players. The order of the blocks on the boat itself also matters for how each block scores. Much like other Spiel Des Jahres nominees, the game uses simple actions to create a strategic experience.

Karuba by Rudiger Dorn. A fantastic looking game that combines the best things about bingo and tile laying games. Players all have a board with a start and end points for 4 different adventurers marked in the same spots. One player draws tiles and yells out the number on the tile, and they and all other players place that tile on the board, or discard it to move an adventurer. So everything is symmetrical, but how you use the different tiles announced will determine your success.

This year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres, or Expert Game Nominees are:

Isle Of Skye by Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister. This is an innovative tile laying auction game. All players draw three tiles each round and use coin tokens to secretly set the price for two of them, while axing the third. Then players reveal their prices, and in turn order each player can buy one tile from another player. Players keep any tiles not sold, but must pay the price they set. So there is a wonderful tight rope act of trying to price tiles to be attractive other players, but not pricing them out of the market. Players use these tiles to build a village and work to accomplish certain scoring goals that vary from game to game. In another interesting twist, all goals score at different times over the course of the five rounds, so timing is crucial as to when to go after any given goal.

Pandemic: Legacy by Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau is a fantastic Legacy style games. I covered these games with permanent consequences previously, and it’s no surprise to see this great concept get recognized by the jury. As a recap, in Pandemic Legacy each game is a month of the year, and decisions in any given game change the game permanently. There is also a storyline that plays out through a “legacy” deck of cards that introduces new twists as players work through the games.

Time Stories by Manuel Rozoy is an adventure game system. I also talked about this in a previous blog, specifically about the single use nature of the game’s set up. Each game is a module that represents one story and players work together to solve the case, kind of like a mystery. However, once a story is solved, its secrets have been revealed and replaying it would be like rewatching a movie, or rereading a book. However the concept has allowed the designers to create some very compelling story content in board game form, and deserves recognition.

The winners will be announced on July 18th, and I will post then to celebrate the winners. Best of luck to all the nominees, and I am looking forward to trying out the three games I haven’t played on this list before the winners are announced.

Building Rome in 90 minutes or less

Posted on May 20, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

The Civilization PC series has been a hit since the early 90s.

With the announcement of Civilization 6 last week my mind has been abuzz with excitement. Civilization is a grand strategy PC game covering massive spans of time. The board game industry has been producing similar games for years, and some say Sid Meier, the creator, was even inspired by the great boardgame Civilization from Avalon Hill in 1980. But the problem, for both the video game and the board game, has been one of time investment. Avalon Hill’s grand epic took as much as six hours, and its sequel Advanced Civilization ballooned to eight. Covering such a grand scale with any sort of detail seemingly requires a massive time investment, and as the years go on, it is no wonder that fans of such strategy games flock to the PC game. There the computer can handle all of the complexity and bookkeeping, and players are able to save and play over several days or weeks without taking up the entire dining room table.

The allure of this civilization theme in boardgames did not die out with the advent of the more convenient computer version. In recent years many board games have tried to capture the feeling of building a civilization without the complex and time consuming nature of older civilization games. Some games use the theme like a coat of paint, merely motioning towards the progression of humanity over generations, while others abstract the essence of the great Sid Meier classic, and condense it to a reasonable play length. Here are a few games that will make you feel like you are building an empire, and also perfectly fit how much time you might have in an evening.

A player's city in 7 Wonders towards the end of the game. — A player’s city in 7 Wonders towards the end of the game.

7 Wonders is a smash hit board game for doing the impossible. The game takes the theme of building a civilization and boils it down to a thirty minute game you can play with up to 7 people. Its secret is a simple card drafting system. Players receive a hand of cards, select one, and pass the remaining cards to the left or right. Since players all choose simultaneously, there is no time spent waiting for others to take their turn, and the game takes the same amount of time regardless of how many are playing. However, within this simple system, there are some tough decisions that mirror those in other civilization games. There are resources to manage and trade with your neighbors, military conflicts, scientific discoveries, great buildings, and of course the titular wonders. Now while it is an excellent game where the civilization theme comes through, it is not like the grand strategy games of years ago. 7 Wonders is an abstraction of those classics that focuses on the feeling of building up an ancient city instead of covering all of human history.

Cards splayed out in Innovation to show more icons.

Another card game that abstracts the civilization theme is Innovation. Created by the mad game scientist Carl Chudyk, Innovation boils civilization down to its fundamental technologies throughout the eras and creates a confrontational and chaotic card game out of them. Players play cards of five different colors into stacks in front of them. Each card is a technology represented by a unique action that players can take with that card along with several icons that represent aspects of a player’s civilization. Players can use attack cards against those with fewer icons of a certain type, or follow the actions of other players with whom they have the same or more icons, creating a back and forth battle of trying to stay ahead in the six different icons. The piles of cards can then be spread out up left or right to reveal more icons from past technologies, escalating the battle even further. Unlike 7 Wonders, which covers ancient civilization, Innovation covers the full history of human invention, from the wheel to nuclear fission. Players draw through 10 stacks of cards that represent the different eras of history, and attempt to claim ever increasing victory point achievements for each era.

Both games succeed in condensing the feeling of building a civilization into a tighter more focused package, but not without losing something in the translation. For example, there is no map in either game, and outside of the “neighbor” concept in 7 Wonders denoting specific interactions with the players to your left and right, there is no sense of place. This sacrifice in favor of brevity necessarily removes the exploration and travel aspects that were part of the original Civilization boardgame and the PC game series. To condense the experience each game focused on one aspect of the theme. In the case of Innovation, the game itself is the tech tree of a grander strategy game, while 7 wonders captures the city building and advancement found in the PC game.

The map in Deus give the game more of a sense of place than other light Civilization games.

One lighter civilization game from recent years manages to bring in the map but still keep the game length from exceeding that 90 minute sweet spot. Deus uses hexagonal tiles to represent a map with different resources to exploit and barbarians to conquer. All interactions with the board and other players, however, are done through cards played to different columns in a player’s tableau (the play area in front of them). Each column represents a different color of card and corresponding type of building that might be part of an ancient civilization. When a player builds a card, they place a token on the map representing that building.

Different card columns represent different aspects of your civilization.

Blue cards and ship tokens represent naval buildings, green farm buildings represent production, soldiers represent your military etc… In this way the game combines what is essentially a card game with a spatial element not found in the previous two games.

Each of these games extract an element of the grand civilization games on the PC and hones it into a game of its own. 7 Wonders captures the sense of city building, Innovation makes the tech tree live and breathe, and Deus captures the map and the balancing act of managing different aspects of a civilization. The key to keeping these games short is focusing in on a part of a larger whole, but still making it feel like a complete game in its own right. All three of the games capture that wonderful civilization theme, and will keep gamers plenty busy while they wait for Civilization VI.

Collection reflection

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

Today I do not want to talk about any game in particular, but more about board game collecting. You see, I have been very reflective about what a board game collection is these past few weeks. When I returned home from Essen last October, my suitcase overflowing with the latest cardboard wonders, I resolved to take a hiatus from purchasing new games. After all, I had just added a bumper crop to my collection, and I wanted to make sure I would get the most out of these latest purchases. However, it wasn’t just the extreme influx of games that inspired this self imposed break, and this was not the first time I had to take a step back and reflect on the wall of cardboard, and how to manage my collection

As with any hobby, when you are passionate about it, the excitement and anticipation of the hobby often outstrips the time you have to participate in it. When I first started playing board games, they were an escape. Consequently, whenever I needed a distraction from the stresses of everyday, I would research a new board game, and seek out a new target to add to my collection. As a result, I quickly ended up with more board games than I reasonably had time to play. In the hobby, folks joke about this as a sort of “acquisition disorder.” It first hit me a few years ago when I came home one day with a fresh walmart book shelf under my arm my previous shelves overflowing. I realized at that time that I needed to do something to keep this mania in check.

So I resolved to never have more board games than I had shelf space. Having just acquired a new bookcase, this would prove to be easy… at first. Sure enough those shelves filled over the months that followed, that particular time in life being one in which escapism into this hobby was often my best refuge. But when the time came, and the shelves were full, I stuck to my resolution. Even now, as I upgraded those shelves in January, I did not expand their capacity. Having some kind of limit, even if it is largely arbitrary, has kept the collection from going out of control. So what happens when I run out of space?

Board games, unlike many collections, like spoons or stamps, are valuable to me based on their use. After all, they are made to be played, and are not art in a museum. Nothing makes me happier than a game beginning to look worn from frequent play. Browsing new games always makes me reflect on the collection that I have. With so many games to choose from, what could a new game possibly offer? With each game that enters the library, another will most certainly get played less. And if this is the case, perhaps they can be let go, to make room for something new.

As I have mentioned before, my board games are not just a wall of cardboard, but one of nostalgia. Each game box reminds me of the great times I have had when that particular game has hit the table. But if a game has fallen out of favor, and is just collecting dust, is it worth keeping around just for that nostalgic reminder? Alternatively, if a game has never found a place, or hit the table due to being too complex, or requiring the right group, do you hold on to it in the hopes that it will have its day in the sun? All of this is further complicated by the fantastic collections of games that my friends each have, many of which also deserve a play on game night.

So it is time for cardboard survival of the fittest. These next few weeks I am blowing the dust off some old games and asking them to earn their place in the Cardboard Empire. Some don’t even make it to the trial, but are immediately relegated the trade/sell pile. A few are from my earlier days in the hobby and just don’t grab my attention like they used to. Sometimes when I test one of these games they remind me why they are a part of my collection in the first place.

For the games that don’t make the cut, there are many options. I give a few of them away to friends with an interest, or kids who might like the game. There are after school programs that always appreciate an expanding library. The board game community has also organized its own kind of auction system at boardgamegeek.com, and the website also allows users to list games for trade. One man’s trade pile is another’s treasure, and I have had great luck in the past swapping games that I was less than fond of for something a bit more up my alley. A little curation goes a long way. After all, every empire has its borders, and one corner of my living room is all I ever want this one to conquer.

International Tabletop Day 2016

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

This Saturday April 30th, 2016 is the 4th annual International Tabletop Day. Started in 2012 as an offshoot of the youtube series Tabletop, the event is a great way to celebrate the growing industry of board games and welcome new people to the hobby. There are several tabletop day events going on around the Capital Region:

Zombie Planet in Colonie will be hosting gaming for 24 hours starting at 10am on Saturday. There will also be a Pokemon Card Game tournament, a Warhammer 40k event, and a Magic: The Gathering event in the evening. The event page can be found here.

Foam Brain Games in Troy will also be getting in on the fun with open gaming during the day. Players will have tickets entered into a raffle for every hour they spend playing board games, and the dubious honor of having their name emblazoned on a duct tape trophy memorialize their gaming victories. The event page can be found here.

Puzzle Bakery & Cafe in Schenectady will be hosting gaming as well. Enjoy treats and drinks from the Cafe while gaming and stay after closing at 8pm for some after hours fun. The event is part of the Capital Area Gamers meetup page.

Vortex Video Games in Watervliet is also participating, and will have open gaming an promos available. Check out their event page to learn more.

All locations have a library of games available to try out and play, and all events are free! Also various board game promos or full games will be available in give-aways and raffles at the store.

If you are not in the Capital Region there are plenty of events going on worldwide! Check out the event locator on the official International Tabletop Day page.

Have an event that I haven’t listed here? Let me know and I will share the good news! Happy Gaming everyone.

Permanence: The surging popularity of legacy style board games

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

There is nothing more permanent in board games than a torn up card.

It’s Sunday night, and your favorite character was just killed off as a city fell into chaos. The outlook of the world is grim, as populations are overwhelmed with outbreaks of disease. Researchers are working in a lab across the globe to cure this plague once and for all. But a sudden plot twist shocks the room, and the shining light of a possible cure now seems impossible.

No, I am not talking about the latest episode of The Walking Dead, but a game night with Pandemic Legacy. In the new sensation to board games, Legacy games change permanently each time you play them. They also evolve as you play, and are filled with boxes, envelopes and pop-out cardboard sheets that unlock new rules and components as the game progresses and certain conditions are met. Much like a season of a tv show, once the story is told, the game is complete.

But let’s back up a step. The craziness all started back in 2011. Hasbro, looking to do something different with it’s classic Risk franchise tasked in house designer Rob Daviau with creating a new iteration of the game. The resulting creation, Risk Legacy, shocked everyone in the hobby. Here was a game that took the replayability and consistency people had come to expect from gaming, and threw it out the window. Players were asked to tear up cards permanently, add stickers to the board, and brandish a permanent marker to write on the board. To any board game collector, who sleeved their cards and made sure a single drop of soda never touched their precious game boards, this was not only sacrilege, it was madness.

New aspects of gameplay are revealed with each envelope

However, the game gave players something that they could not find in any other traditional board game: permanence. Decisions made in a single game would last for all future games. No two games were alike, a notion the designers were keenly aware of when they numbered each game board produced. In addition to the permanence of decisions made from game to game, there was also the joy of surprise as mysterious boxes filled with new cards, stickers and components were opened as players reached certain milestones. Game five would be different not only on how the dice rolled, and where players started, but may have new rules, new goals and consequently a very different feel from game one. This was truly an evolution in board games.

Much of the game is still hidden in numbered boxes, yet to be opened

A few years later Daviau brought his talents to another great design. Pandemic Legacy takes the classic cooperative gameplay of Pandemic by Matt Leacok and adds a similar layer of evolution and permanence to mix. The original Pandemic tasked players with taking on various roles (Medic, Research etc) and fighting the spread of infectious diseases around the globe. The diseases, represented by various colored cubes, would spread each turn based on a deck of infection cards that would specify the locations where cubes would be added. The game is a classic for the tension it created as players raced from continent to continent trying to keep ahead of the latest epidemic, with the threat of being overwhelmed and defeated by the game ever present.

Even the rules are not complete at the start, with slots to fill in as new rules are revealed.

Pandemic Legacy takes this core design and adds the concept of time. Each game represents a month of a single year. A legacy deck instructs players on which packet or box to open for each month, and just like in Risk Legacy, nothing stays the same. The legacy deck itself is an evolution of the format over the envelopes in Risk Legacy. The envelope format specified specific gameplay conditions that the players could skew towards, simply to meet the condition and open the new goodies. With the Legacy Deck, players draw cards until the hit a Stop card that specifies the next condition. Since there is only ever one condition in play at a time, and since they are revealed sequentially, the progression feel much more natural and maintains a better narrative arc. Here things are more personal than Risk Legacy, as players name characters and invest in them with player abilities and relationships. And there are conditions where a character can die, which would prove to be devastating with a character that had a lot of gameplay investment and was key to players’ strategy. Much like a TV show, the game is just Season 1 of what is sure to be many more, and over the course of the 12-24 games a story unfolds that is unique based on the decisions the players have made, and whether they’ve won or lost each month.

Time stories is a modular game with new packs of cards that tell different stories.

Another game that has capitalized on this new idea of a consumable board games is Time Stories. Unlike the legacy style games I have described so far that emphasize permanent alteration, Time Stories acts as a game system with different modules that you plug into it. The board, dice, and pieces are the same, and each module is a self contained story with its own cards to plug into the system. Unlike the Legacy games, each module is one adventure that can take 3-6 hours.

Saving progress for the next game. A little bit more involved than clicking a save button.

There is even a special insert to “save” the game between plays, much like one saves in a video game. The gameplay is modeled after the popular PC adventure games of years past, where a panorama of cards set up the “scene” of a location, and players interact with the scene to solve puzzles and resolve the story. The basic concept has players time traveling to solve these different cases, giving both a narrative and gameplay justification for repeating certain parts of the story, each time armed with new knowledge from the previous play.

However, there are definitely downsides to this new kind of gaming. For one thing, who plays from game to game suddenly matters in a different way than before. When I walk into the gaming store on Friday night and plop down my latest favorite, it doesn’t matter who joins other than the number of players the game allows. All are welcome, and from game to game the group sitting around the table changes. With a legacy or consumable game like this, you’ll often want to play with the same players to really get the full experience of how the game changes from one play to the next. After all, few people jump right into the middle of season 3 of a TV show. Here too, they might be a bit lost, or at the very least a bit less invested in the state of the game if they have not played before.

There is also the concern of what you get out of your investment. Both Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy provide many games worth of fun, but unlike other board games, the game has a limited lifespan. And with Time Stories that lifespan is even shorter. While its model provides a fantastic story telling experience, and endless variety with its modular nature, many fans are not thrilled with the pricing of the system. The basic game is sixty dollars and comes with just one module. Additional modules cost thirty dollars each. While board games still hold up well for entertainment costs versus a night out at the movies, many in the hobby want to get the most value out of each purchase, and such a one-off consumable game

Still, even with these negatives, Legacy games are a fantastic innovation. Both Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy borrow from the narrative tension of the latest TV dramas, and are all the better for it. I haven’t even finished season 1 of Pandemic Legacy, and I am already excited for season 2. And later this year Daviau’s next design Seafall launches, promising to take the Legacy design concept to another level. It is the first such design without a traditional board game predecessor. If you have not tried these games, I absolutely recommend them. Risk Legacy is perfect for a group that likes confrontation and conflict, and Pandemic is perfect for families or couples that would prefer to work together. Breaking out the permanent marker, and tearing up cards can be quite liberating, even if it still feels a bit strange.

On the table April 16th, 2016

Posted on April 16, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

On the table is a semi-regular gallery of board games that I have played recently. There are so many games out there, it would be impossible to cover them all in depth. But with this selection of images I hope to illustrate just how varied modern board games can be, and pique folks’ interest to explore them further.

In Quadropolis, players select tiles for their city from a central board using selection arrows (left) that specify which tile in the row or column they will take.

Players can place the tile they just acquired in the row, column, or quadrant that corresponds with the selection arrow. So a tile selected with a two can be placed in the 2 row, column or quadrant.

Troyes is an in depth dice-action selection game. Each die corresponds to a type of citizen in the French City of Troyes, and players assembles groups of these "citizens" to accomplish tasks in the game. — Troyes is an in depth dice-action selection game. Each die corresponds to a type of citizen in the French City of Troyes, and players assembles groups of these “citizens” to accomplish tasks in the game.

While Five Tribes looks like a mess of color, it is actually similar to the game Mancala. Players pick up groups of people shaped figures "Meeples" and drop one meeple in each tile. The tile where the last meeple lands determines the action for that turn. — While Five Tribes looks like a mess of color, it is actually similar to the game Mancala. Players pick up groups of people shaped figures “Meeples” and drop one meeple in each tile. The tile where the last meeple lands determines the action for that turn.

All routes lead to Albany! In Steam players build rail networks during the early 1800s in order to deliver goods to corresponding colored cities. The later game turns into a railroad traffic jam.

Continuing the trend of games named after cities, in Orleans players place citizen tokens to take various actions on a central board. Each action requires the right combination of citizens, drawn from players' bags. — Continuing the trend of games named after cities, in Orleans players place citizen tokens to take various actions on a central board. Each action requires the right combination of citizens, drawn from players’ bags.

The central board in Orleans is where players aquire new citizens for their bag, create trade routes, and take various actions based on citizens they collect.

In Pirates of the Seven Seas, players fend of pirates ships to trade goods in the Caribbean.

Ship battles consist of taking all of the players' dice along with red pirate ships and rolling them into the game lid which doubles as a dice tray/map. Higher dice rolls destroy lower dice resulting in a dice battle royal with each roll. — Ship battles consist of taking all of the players’ dice along with red pirate ships and rolling them into the game lid which doubles as a dice tray/map. Higher dice rolls destroy lower dice resulting in a dice battle royal with each roll.

An old favorite of mine, players build settlements based on the landscape card they receive each turn and try to accomplish the varying goals for each game.

In Brew Crafters players play craft breweries and place tokens to expand their brewery, gather ingredients, and brew beer.

My brewery is small to start, but I've got some beer brewing for points and can gather specialists (top left) to help me along the way. — My brewery is small to start, but I’ve got some beer brewing for points and can gather specialists (top left) to help me along the way.

Airlines Europe has players vying to build up various airlines and acquire a majority hold in their stock before each scoring round.

In Mage Knight players use decks of card to explore the land and conquer foes.

I hope you enjoyed these pictures. Keep playing and happy gaming!

Traitors among us: Social deduction games

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

A board game is more than a collection of cards, dice and tokens. Often it is more about the interaction between the players that creates the game space than the components themselves. One genre that relies almost entirely upon interaction is the Social Deduction genre. These are games where the main gameplay is reading your opponents actions and words, while carefully monitoring your own.A card that defines your role in the game is the only required component. One might say they aren’t games at all, but more social experiments, and they would not be far from the truth of the origin of these games of deception.

In Mafia players can take on various roles, each with special powers.

Dmitry Davidof, the creator of the first social deduction game Mafia, originally created the game to combine his psychology research with his job as a high school teacher. The basic gist of the game is a group of players are assigned secret identity cards, either mafia, or innocent. The mafia know who are on their team, but the innocents only know how many mafia are in the game. The game has a night phase and a day phase. During the night phase, the mafia kills one of the innocents. During the day phase the innocents argue over who is a member of the mafia, and vote for a player to be killed (hopefully a member of the mafia, but collateral damage is inevitable). The mafia win if they outnumber the innocents, and the innocents win if they manage to kill off all of the mafia.

The fun of the game comes in the discussions during the day about what just happened. As innocents die off, the web of possible suspects narrows, but the risk of losing grows. Players must question each other, evaluate the words and body language of friends, and soon accusations are flying as the simple setup of the game creates genuine paranoia on the part of the innocents To add some additional dimension to this core conceit. The game also has several special roles that players can be assigned. These roles allow players to bend the core rules a bit, from a detective that can review one other player’s identity to a doctor who can protect a player from being killed each night. Even more confusion and paranoia emerges as players try to convince each other of their supposed actions during the night phase.

The Werewolf theme first the day/night nature of the game perfectly.

In 1997 Andrew Plotkin gave the game a Werewolf theme, which fit the normal by day evil by night nature of the game perfectly and became one of the most popular themes for the game. Both Werewolf and Mafia have countless iterations and spin offs still being played to this day. A key strength of the game is that it can be played with almost any number of people with one of the most popular versions, Ultimate Werewolf, boasting that it can be played with up to 75 players. However, with this many players, and all the secret happenings during the night phase the game require an impartial moderator to keep things running smoothly. This is one reason why it has become a popular game on web forums, with games happening over the course of hours or days, and forum moderators handling player’s secret actions.

Above all other games that I have covered so far on this blog, this genre relies on the player group to create the fun. I have played rounds of Werewolf where the telltale paranoia was absent, and the accusations half-hearted. And thus, boiled down to it’s basics, it became a random guessing game. I have also played social deduction games where round after round the claims of innocence and the despair of betrayal are as real as can be. The game is entirely improvisation outside of a few cards and rules. Another downside is the player elimination factor. If you are killed you are considered a ghost, and all there is to do is watch the game play out. While it can be interesting to watch the conspiracy and betrayal unfold, you are still out of the game, which can be frustrating, especially if it’s during an early turn.

Social deduction is one of the hottest genres in board games today, and each new game has a twist that differentiates it from its experimental ancestor. Some of my favorites are:

One Night Werewolf: Takes all of the drama and compacts it down into a single 15 minute round. It also removes the need for a moderator by providing a slick smartphone app that reads through the steps for each role.
The Resistance: Removes both the moderator and the player elimination from werewolf, ensuring that players aren’t sitting out on the sidelines, and swaps out the Day/Night phase with the concept of missions that the good guys are trying to pass, and the spies are trying to foil.
Are they building for good, or are they a witch?

New Salem: Takes the concepts of Werewolf and combines it with a simple card drafting game where players build a village. Buildings consist of three cards and must be completed to be scored. However each building may have Good or Evil aspects, leading to a literal Witch hunt as players accuse each other of building for nefarious purposes. Adding another layer of gameplay to the core social deduction has the benefit of giving players a tangible goal to chase in addition to the classic arguments about each player’s’ loyalty.
Everyone knows where they are, except the spy.

Spyfall: Takes the one of the core concepts of Werewolf and turns it on its head. Instead of a few knowing werewolves vs a bunch of clueless villagers, in Spyfall everyone is given a location card (Cruise, Auto Shop, Airplane etc) except for one player, the spy. Players must ask each other questions, and try to suss out who among them is clueless about where they are without giving away too much. If they spy player figures out what the location is, they can claim victory for themselves.

While many of these games are light on rules and components, they can create fantastic gameplay through player interaction. They are not for everyone as their very nature inspires a lot of lying, accusations, and yelling. Some folks would, understandably ,rather puzzle out moves in a more strategic, low key game. But with the right crowd social deduction games are a blast and can create stories that live on long after game night is over.

No two games alike: Variety in gaming

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Jeremy Olson

Imagine a game of chess where each player used different pieces each game. A Queen swapped out for a catapult, the Rooks replaced by Ninjas. Imagine a game of monopoly where the properties changed location each game, and the player pieces each had unique powers. The games of our youth are durable and time tested, but one thing they can often lack is variety and change from play to play. There is, of course, some variability. The dice and chance cards make each game different, and the human element at play in even a luckless game like chess means that strategies will vary. But the games themselves, for the most part, are static.

Modern game designers have worked to add variety to games. To make a game as replayable as possible, and to have players excited for it to hit the table again and again, the experience can’t becomes stale or predictable. Players ask more and more for the games they buy to provide ever more strategies for victory, different pieces from game to game, and above all, an experience that is both deep AND broad.

Each game of The Duke promises a different play experience.

To provide such an experience, a game needs to be designed from the ground up to include this variety. That game of chess I describe at the beginning? It exists, although not as the much anticipated Chess 2.0, but as The Duke. The Duke owes its roots to Chess, in that you move units with set movement patterns around a grid like board trying to to capture your opponent’s key piece. Sound familiar? The difference is that you pull these units randomly from a bag, instead of having a set group of pieces at the beginning like in Chess. To add an additional twist, the units are two sided tiles with different movements/powers on each side. When you move a piece, you must flip it to the opposite side, which means even the pieces you have access to are constantly changing how they can best used to conquer your opponent.

You see this kind of ingenuity everywhere in the designer game market. In fact, one of my favorite designers, Donald X Vaccarino, stakes his reputation on nearly infinite variety in his games. His first design is a card game called Dominion. In Dominion, you are the lord of a kingdom with a deck containing some money cards and some land cards. (Land cards are end game points. After all if feudalism taught us anything , what is a lord without vast tracts of land?). You use this money to buy new cards representing the people and structures that might be part of a castle. A spy let’s you see other player’s cards, a woodcutter generates more resources, etc… The goal is to build a sort of card engine that helps you buy more land and ultimately win the game.

Over 200 cards, and more to come. I carry my full Dominion set in a customized artist briefcase. This is my desert island game for variety’s sake alone.

It is a fantastic game, and was one my first purchases when I wandered into a gaming store years ago, but the aspect of the game that gives it its longevity is the set up. Each game, ten kingdom cards are selected at random, making the strategies that are available for any given game different based on what cards are selected. The initial game came with 25 different cards to choose from, allowing for many different set ups with completely different cards. The game has been so successful that there are now over 200 different cards to choose from, making for 35,216,131,179,263,320 possible starting combinations. With odds like that, no two games will ever be the same, and each game requires a different tactical approach. This would all fall apart if every card was its own complicated mess of rules, but where Dominion succeeds most is in combining many different simple actions to create a depth of strategy.

Another game by Vaccarino is Kingdom Builder. Here too, variety is king, but in different ways than Dominion. In Kingdom Builder, each player tries to place their 40 settlements out on a hexagonal grid based board to score the most points. Each turn players draw a card that indicates one of the five different terrain types on the board, and places three settlements on that type of terrain. Settlements must be adjacent to each other whenever possible, presenting the fundamental puzzle of the game in following this rule of adjacency while still placing pieces in the most advantageous position. The key lynchpin of the design is that the board, powers, and the way to score points are different from game to game.

Different goals make each game play out differently.

Each game has players set up 4 boards as the map for that game, each with 1 to 2 different powers, and select 3 goals the define how to score points. One goal might be to have a big cluster of settlements next to each other, while another goal tasks players with creating long horizontal lines of settlements. Others challenge players to build next to mountains, or water.. Even playing on the exact same map with different goals will provide a very different strategic experience. I have played over 150 games of Kingdom Builder, and each plays feels both familiar in its basic cadence, and fresh in how I approach using the powers on the board to accomplish the goal.

Most modern designers work like Vacarrino has, to bake variety directly into the core concepts of their game design. The easiest way to accomplish this goal, as evidenced by the games I described, is to have variable set up. Unlike Monopoly or Chess, having variability in the how the game is set up before anyone makes a single move is key to having different play experiences. There is no better way to ensure that the journey of a game will be different than by having each journey begin at a different point of origin.

Board games are an investment, so it is no surprise that players want to play games that have longevity and variety. There is a lot of different options provided in the box for the Duke,Dominion, and Kingdom Builder, but what I did not touch on today is how designers continue to add life to a game through expansions. All three of these games have additional expansion titles that you can buy to add more options to the base game. The advantage in expansions is that they can add more of what players love without being a whole new game. There are often a few rule tweaks, but unlike learning a whole new game, any player that knows the original can jump right in. They can provide the best of both worlds, in being both familiar in terms of how to play, but new and exciting in how the a particular set up plays out. More expansions were just announced for both Dominion and Kingdom Builder, and I cannot wait to add the twists and turns they promise to my favorite games.