We all have these games, right? The games we love to play, but for some reason or another, just CANNOT seem to earn a victory? Today I’m presenting the 5 games that I have with the most plays, and 0 wins. Here we go!
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar – 4 plays
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini is an incredibly interesting game. For those who said “gesundheit” after I said Tzolk’in, here’s the introduction. Tzolk’in is a worker placement game that features a series of gears on the main board. On your turn, you can either place one or more workers on the lowest spots on each of the outer gears, or pick up some or all of your workers. At the start of each round, the centre gear turns one space, which in turn rotates all the other gears. As your workers ride their gears, the actions they are able to preform get more and more lucrative. Sounds easy, right?
So why have I never won Tzolk’in? Really, at only 4 plays, it’s not the most outrageous claim. I will say that for a long time I harboured resentment to Tzolk’in and refused to play it. Only recently did I give it another chance and found some enjoyment in the system.
Tzolk’in is a slow strategy game. You really need to be planning 4 or 5 turns ahead, and orchestrate your grand move. Pulling all of your workers off their spots at the same time, and ensuring you have enough resources to do all that you want to do. Turns out, I’m not a very good coordinator.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Tzolk’in. The problem is me. And that I’m dumb. That’s about it.
Yokohama – 6 plays
Yokohama by Hisashi Hayashi, is a gorgeous game about running your president and merchants around the pyramid shaped town, while trying to earn goods and trade them for points. You drop merchants off all over the board, then move your president to one of the spots, and collect stuff based on how many merchants you had there. You can erect trading stalls for extra points and merchant power in future actions. There’s a ton of great mechanics going on in Yokohama that makes it a cool and interesting game. My challenge, lies in the fact that Bigfoot has won 5 of the 6 games I’ve played. Sometimes games just speak to certain people and they run away with it every time.
Evolution – 6 plays
Evolution by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin has a similar problem to Yokohama. Bear has won every single game I’ve played. In Evolution, players are growing and developing species to become the fattest of them all. By playing trait cards from their hand, they can either expand their species population, size, or spawn a whole new species all together. Of course, they can also play trait cards to each species to make them unique, to adapt to the world around them.
I quite enjoy Evolution, there are so many unique situations that come up just based on all the traits and how they get placed onto each of the cards. I don’t know how Bear does it, but he seems to stymie me no matter what strategy I try. If I play defensively, he manages to build an amazing food generating engine. If I become a carnivore, his creatures suddenly develop pack herding, and/or climbing, and/or hard shells, and I starve. If I’m the one who’s gorging at the watering hole, with a ton of amazing defences, out comes the intelligent carnivore who pokes the perfect holes in my defences.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that every strategy has a counter, and Bear is superbly proficient at finding the holes in my hard shell armour.
Hardback – 11 plays
This one is a bit of a sore spot for me. My wife and I both love Paperback by designer Tim Fowers, so when Hardback hit crowdfunding, I didn’t even hesitate. Both Paperback and Hardback are word based deck building games, but Hardback seems more in line with other deck building games like Star Realms, where the cards have suits and can synergize with one another. A few other very important differences between the two, Hardback has a push your luck element where you can draw extra cards from your deck, but you HAVE to include those cards in your word, and instead of having wild cards that clog up your deck, you can turn any of your hand cards backward and use it as a wild. Subtle, brilliant changes that make for an excellent follow-up.
Hot damn, has my wife figured this game out. I don’t really know what I’m doing wrong, but she kicks my butt 6 ways to Sunday. I’ve asked her what her strategy is, and she just says “get lots of points, quickly!”. Thanks for the tip…
Through the Ages (both versions) – 37 Plays
This is the one that surprised me the most. Through the Ages and its follow up Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization by designer Vlaada Chvatilis a brilliant civilization building game. Run entirely by cards, players draft technologies, wonders, and leaders to try to make their civilization the most cultured. There’s a fine balance to strike between generating enough food and ore to build your civilization, and earn science to develop it further. There’s a lot of spinning plates to manage in Through the Ages, and if you neglect even a single one, you’ll wind up paying for it.
The vast majorities of these plays have been via Board Game Arena, and I’ve played with at least half a dozen players, but no matter who I’m competing with, I’m routinely at the bottom of the pile. I’ve played the Android app dozens of times against the computers, and I do fairly well there! I just can’t seem to crush *ahem* I mean best any human opponents. Probably something to do with empathy or some other aspect of my personality that makes me unfit to be a warmonger.
And those are the 5 games that I have the most plays in, with absolutely 0 wins. What are the games that you just can’t seem to grasp a victory in?
Apparently 2024 is the year that I dive into Valdimr Suchy games. In the last 6 months I’ve played Pulsar 2849, Praga Caput Regni,Evacuation, and now, Woodcraft gets added to that pile as well. With this experience, I’m starting to get a feel for Valdimr’s designs. Medium-heavy euros with tight a tight economy, and an interesting action selection mechanism, and Woodcraft fits that definition incredibly well.
Learning Woodcraft isn’t terrible. I used both the rule book and the Game in a Nutshell How to Play video. Between the two, it wasn’t hard getting started. There were a few non-intuitive things, like the helpers all have production on them, but production doesn’t produce during an income phase. We all expected that would have been the case just due to the terminology, but no. gaining production is completely separate from income. There are a few other tedious rules, such as when you plant wood into your pots, you can take a free cutting action. This isn’t represented anywhere on the boards in a helpful manner, and I completely missed the rule in my excursion to learn the game.
In Woodcraft, players take on forest sprites who love to build beautiful creations out of wood. During the game you’ll buy and sell lumber, grow your own trees, hire assistants, collect tools to store in your attic, improve your workshop, and fulfill contracts. With only 14 rounds (13 in a 4 player game), your real task is to make every action count.
The contacts to fulfill generally have various wood requirements (3 different types of wood in the game, represented by green, yellow, and brown dice), and each wood has a pip value requirement that has to be met exactly. To do this, you’ll probably use the saw to cut a die into two, maintaining the sum of the original die, splice scrap wood to increment the pip value, and even glue two dice together to form a larger die.
It’s surprisingly fun to cleave dice into two, or stitch them back together to fulfill the contracts. Many of the contracts reward you with various goodies, sometimes even including more dice. There’s a great feedback loop of spending money to get resources, using the resources to fulfill contracts, which give you more money. Money in this context is blueberries.
Generally for a first play, I try to dip my toes into every mechanic. That said, Woodcraft is the kind of game where there are 5 different things you want to do, but you only have time to focus on 1 or 2 of them. You cannot do everything in Woodcraft, and the winner is probably going to be the person who does their one thing the best. At the end of our first game, one player managed to earn 3 tools, despite the attic having like, 12 spots to hold tools. Perhaps the next time I play, I’ll really try to focus on the attic and see how well it goes.
Woodcraft feels like a solo game. The interaction comes from someone taking contracts or helper cards before you, claiming public objectives before you, and selecting actions on the action wheel. The further back the action is on the wheel, the better the benefits you’ll receive for taking that action. It’s frustrating when the player right before you takes the action you wanted, gets the bonus benefits for it, then moves it up into the segment of the action wheel that doesn’t give you any benefits for playing it. Beyond that, you’re pretty free to run your own game.
I made a critical blunder in the middle of the game that probably cost me 2 whole turns to fix (representing about 15% of my entire game), which put me squarely into last place. As with most of Suchy’s games, the economy is tight. Every blueberry can be used, and taking an inefficient action can cause a terrible bottleneck that you need to dig yourself out from.
There’s a definite puzzle in the game of Woodcraft, that action efficiency challenge has me wanting to go back and get better. It’s not really a game that you can appreciate at a single play. I feel like the more you understand the levers and consequences at play in this game system, the more you’ll be rewarded with those sweet, sweet chestnuts (Points. Chestnuts are points). And that’s really why this is a first impressions post and not a full review. I have thoughts on Woodcraft, conflicted feelings, but I know there’s a lot more depth to plumb. I just don’t know if I’m going to put forth that investment to get good and find the joy in this tight puzzle.
A Steam key was provided by the Developer, Monster Couch
I’ve already reviewed Calico back in 2021, and if you’ve followed along my Top 100 games list (2024 edition) you might have noticed that Calico sits at slot #14. I LOVECalico, how difficult the puzzle is, the tension of trying to complete competing objectives, and the juxtaposition of the cozy and cute aesthetic.
Last June I checked out the demo for Quilts & Cats of Calico, the digital implementation of this amazing board game. As of March 5th, the full game was released onto the world, and I’m here to give my review of this digital board game!
I’m not going to spend any time talking about how much I love the core game play of Calico, as you can read the post I linked above for all that good stuff. Instead, I’ll give my impressions on the video game as it stands on its own.
The first mode is simply “Play”, which gives you a normal game of Calico. As expected, you have freedom to choose the number of opponents, their difficulty, which of the cats you want present in the game, or randomize those choices. They even include the Family mode (without goals), and the lower variance mode (only two tiles of each colour and pattern are included in the bag). There’s also a bunch of extra rules that you can explore (such as only being able to play tiles next to tiles of the same colour, play without a hand of tiles, and more)
It’s difficult to gauge the strength of each AI opponent, but after 3 games against the hardest level, I still have yet to lose. Perhaps I’ve been lucky, or, Calico isn’t a deeply strategic game where having a neural network is a huge advantage over a human opponent, but much more tactical. Calico‘s puzzle is more about risk management, and choosing which of the scoring opportunities you’re willing to forfeit. That said, I feel like I’m quite a good Calico player. Which leads me nicely into the weekly challenges
The weekly challenges is a module that gives every player the exact same situation. The same objectives to choose from, the same order of tiles, the same cats, everything. Then, once completed, displays a leaderboard of the players who achieved the highest scores for the week, and encourages you to try and climb that leaderboard!
I’m reminded of the Sagrada app by Direwolf. I fancied myself a very good Sagrada player, until the weekly challenges put me in my place. Only once I managed to break into the top 100 players, after a few months of attempts. Calico‘s leaderboards are the same, where I’m currently scoring between 50% and 30% less than those at the top of the leaderboard. One difference is that the Calico weekly challenges lets you reply the scenario several times to try and get a better score.
There’s even a robust cat creator for you to create your own herd of cats, with numerous accessories, colours, and fluff and face options. I immediately set to creating my childhood cat, Sammich, and after doing so, I really grew to love seeing him pop up as one of the objectives. While it’s not a mode that I’m going to spend a lot of time in, I could see some people having a really great time creating a whole herd of cats.
My very first impressions of The Quilts & Cats of Calico are that this implementation feels overwrought. There’s 3D cats crawling across the board, thin white thread flies and sews in every tile you place on your quilt in a dramatic flourish, and the buttons and cat tokens twinkle and twirl and fly across the screen when they’ve been earned. I’m a lot more used to very bare bones and aesthetically faithful adaptions, such Istanbul, created by Acram Digital, or The Isle of Skye by Twin Sails. These implementations have no little to flourishes, and really try to emulate the table experience on the screen.
The really big draw of The Quilts & Cats of Calico for me, was the story mode. The story sets you down in the city of Tomkitty, with the military stationed outside. Your father has mysteriously disappeared, and you’ve set out to find your aunt, who will help you start your journey to become the next greatest seamstress. The world seemed to be a lot more keen on quilts and their magical properties to attract cats than in real life.
The story is a lot more dramatic than I expected, but ultimately, forgettable. The Factory has developed a machine called the Iron Loom that can pump out quilts by the minute, but they lack the charm to attract cats. There’s a military encampment outside the town gates for some reason, and you’re roaming from quirky character to quirky character to patch their quilts and scarves because your quiltmanship attracts the magical cats. The dialogue plays the part straight, it’s not self-aware or trying to be funny in the slightest: “The General has heard about you, and need to see you immediately.” “Make a new standard for the army of Tomkitty. Not just any standard – we want it to attract extraordinary cats. Are you up to it?”, then, “With the cats’ help, we can surely destroy the southern units… or….”. I struggled to tell my partner about the plot when she asked me about it.
So much drama!
The first scenarios scaffold you into thinking about the puzzle of Calico. You’ll do a mission where your only goal is to earn 3 cat tokens, then do a mission where you need to earn a few buttons, then a mission to get a rainbow button. And these are puzzles, you’ll often be given only the bare minimum tiles needed to complete an objective. As you get further into the story, special rules are introduced. Get a cat token while only placing same colours next to each other, that sort of thing. The whole exercise reminds me of those chess puzzles where you’re given a board state and told to mate in 2.
Nonsensical story aside, the story mode is a nice diversion. Each of the puzzles had you try to do something different, and sometimes it was a bit of a challenge trying to figure out exactly the way the pieces were supposed to fit in together. I particularly enjoyed the ones where it was required to place a tile next to another one where the colour or pattern matched. Those puzzles required the tiles to go down in a specific order, and were the most satisfying when I finished the puzzles. It was a nice diversion, and a good way to think about the puzzle of Calico, even if it’s not exactly making you a better player by showing you all the tiles and the order in which they’re coming out. But without that feature, the puzzles would be nigh impossible.
For aficionados of whimsical experiences, Quilts and Cats of Calico delivers a delightful adaptation. The serene music washes over players, creating a calming and relaxing atmosphere. The visual flourishes are not only aesthetically pleasing but also satisfying, adding to the cozy ambience. As cats lazily wander the game board, their presence enhances the overall charm. While my name may never grace the leaderboards, I found joy in unravelling the puzzles within the story mode. Meanwhile, my partner eagerly embraced the opportunity to create her own clowder of custom cats. Although this game may not win over new players, nor convert those who previously bounced off the Calico tabletop experience, it remains an excellent homage for those of us who hold it dear.
Last week I talked about 6 Nimmt!, which is a great little card game that needs nothing other than to shuffle the cards, deal them out, and play. Following up on that post, I want to talk about No Thanks, which I have been enjoying immensely lately.
No Thanks, designed by Thorsten Gimmler and first published in 2004 is a single deck of 33 cards, numbered from 3 to 35. The game begins by distributing the tokens to each player, burning 9 cards off the deck, then a single card is turned over. The start player has a choice. To either take the card and any chips that may be on the table, or, say “No Thanks”, and place a chip onto the table, passing play to the next player. Round and round it goes until someone takes the card and all the chips.
The game ends when the deck runs out of cards. Players earn points based on the face value of all their cards, then subtract a point for every chip they have in their supply. The catch is if someone has a sequence of numbers (like 25, 26, 26, and 28), only the lowest card in that sequence is scored. The player with the lowest score is the winner.
And that’s all you need to know to play No Thanks. Another game that can go from being in the box to playing in less than 5 minutes, and can support a wide range of players (from 3 to 7). I love games where each players turn is so small. Everyone stays in engaged as they’re constantly making decisions and evaluating the game state.
What separates No Thanks from a game like 6 Nimmt, is that in No Thanks, Everyone has access to the same information. There’s no hands of cards, or hiding how many chips everyone has, or trying to remember who took which card, everything is face up on the table. This makes significant room for goading your friends into making bad decisions. “Come on Otter, take the 33. You already have the 35, once the 34 comes up, you’ll be golden!”
While the excitement in 6 Nimmt is in the reveal of the card everyone chose each round, No Thanks revels in the excitement of the push-your-luck of letting the pot of chips grow and grow as the cards go around and around the table. It’s subtle, but a card that you initially dismissed and tossed a chip in becomes more and more tempting as that pot grows. Not only are the chips worth negative points at the end, they represent a significant amount of power. If you can drain someone of all their chips, suddenly they’ve lost the ability to pass, and you can stick them with a series of terrible cards, driving them into the ground.
Image Credit: Jose Luis Zapata De Santiago (@zapata131) via BGG
Of course, that situation is rare. Thoughtful players won’t allow that situation to happen to them, but it does give No Thanks the feeling of good strategy. When a player wins, it’s not because of blind, dumb luck. It’s because they played well. Whether they made good decisions on which cards to take, or if they just played the other players better, it remains to be seen.
Because a game of No Thanks is so fast, It’s real easy to play over and over again. It’s the kind of game that accompanies good conversation, or just an activity to engage with while you’re spending time with your favourite people. No Thanks is an absolute winner in my book. It’s more approachable than 6 Nimmt, which means it gets played with a wider variety of people. I find that it particularly shines during late nights at the campsite with a big bowl of snacks and some adult beverages as it’s effortless to teach and play. Any game that’s this approachable, and still exciting and fun to play is an easy recommend from me!
I never really gave ‘engagement’ much attention before I started this blog. I was never all that into social media, beyond having a Facebook account to keep up to date with the friends I left behind after I moved away. I wasn’t on Instagram, or Twitter, or Pintrest, or any other broad social media platform. I did watch a lot of YouTube, and there were a few years when I was mildly obsessed with Reddit, and obviously I had a Board Game Geek account, but for the longest time, I was a ghost. I had these accounts with all my subscriptions to get notified when something new popped up, and I would spend all my idle time consuming content, but I would never like or comment on anything.
Anyone who’s watched more than the smallest amount of YouTube content is familiar with the call to action. “Like, comment, and subscribe!” You see it everywhere now, on recipe blogs, at the end of news articles, and to this day, at the start, middle, and/or end of most YouTube videos. And the reason for that is that engagement is incredibly important for content. Having people like and comment on your content tells the social media algorithms that the piece of media you just consumed, was good or enjoyable, and makes it more likely to be delivered to others. It also serves as validation to the content creator that they aren’t just screaming into the void, that someone out there is enjoying their creative output.
Board Game Geek has a couple “Hot” sections on their home page if you scroll down a bit. It only takes 30 thumbs up to break into the top 5 slots of the “Hot In-Depth Reviews”, and it seems that rarely the top spot is even breaking 100 thumbs up or getting more than 10 comments, unless it’s a negative review of a wildly popular game.
The point that I’m trying to make here is that it feels like engagement today is much harder to come by. And part of that I’m sure has to do with the fractured nature of social media. If I watch The Nerd Shelves review of Furnace, should I give it a thumb up and comment on BGG or on their YouTube page? Or do I like and comment on their Twitter post? Or, do I start a conversation in their Discord server? Everyone will have different preferences on where they choose to type their words, but from my observation, it feels like more and more people are doing what I used to do. Silently consume the content, then move onto the next thing.
Looking at the stats on my own blog, in the month of March I released 12 posts (most of those being my top 100 games as of 2024). I got 1,351 views from 725 visitors. I got 14 likes and 4 comments, all month long. This was actually a great month in terms of traffic and engagement! For the entire year of 2022 I had 3,454 views, 72 likes, and a whopping 10 comments on all of my posts for the whole year.
Look, I know I don’t do all the things that encourage people to engage. I generally don’t include call to actions in my posts, nor do I spend much time on social media promoting my own posts. I really prefer to just let my blog exist organically. But I do want to encourage you to engage with your favourite creators. Commenting on their posts, even if just to stay “thanks for the review” is incredibly exciting, especially to smaller creators. A lot of creators put a fair amount of stock into their subscriber numbers, as shown by the frequency of “subscriber milestone” posts I see on Instagram, Facebook, and BlueSky.
I won’t lie, I like seeing my numbers go up. It validates all the work that I put into this blog. An average review for me represents several hours of work, including the time to play the game in question enough times to have an opinion on it (the actual sit down and write part is generally between 1 – 2 hours). There’s also a financial burden that I’m shouldering. My domain and WordPress account costs me about $80 per year, and that’s having the most basic of websites. Daniel Wynter of BoardGameFeast recently posted about how his website hosting costs quadrupled since last year, leaving him with a $300 bill and made him reconsider his options. I met up with The Nerd Shelves last November, and they showed me their livestream space. The lights, microphones, and cameras all cost real money, let alone the fact that they have to have space in their house for that equipment and set-up.
What I’m trying to say here is, content creators put forth their time, money, and energy into creating content, many just for the sake of creation. None of us are getting “YouTube rich“, nor are we earning enough money to recoup our costs creating this stuff, let alone making a profit that could be considered a ‘fair wage’ for the work that we do. If you like what people are creating, I implore you to let them know. Liking and commenting is exciting for us, we want to hear from you! Subscribing let us know that we have an audience, and encourages us to increase our output. I know I would continue to maintain this blog without it, but it sure feels a lot nicer to have feedback from readers, rather than feeling like I’m screaming into the ether.
