Spoilers for the book ahead. You have been warned.
I’ve always identified as ‘a reader’. Reading books is a core part of my identity. From the Scholastic book fairs as a child to wandering through giant book stores as an adult, I’ve always loved books. My tastes have drifted from fantasy, to autobiographies, and back to fantasy, but I’ve always been rooted in fiction.
A couple summers ago, my wife took an audiobook out from the library on a lark. She had a bunch of commutes coming up and needed something to fill the time when she was driving in a straight line (thanks Saskatchewan). She saw a book by the author of A Man Called Ove called Beartown was available, and figured she’d give it a shot. She had quite enjoyed A Man Called Ove, and hopefully, this would be another hit.
And it was. But not in the way that we thought it would be.
Beartown is a tiny community in northern Sweden, stuck in the far side of a forest. The factory is dwindling, the economy is sagging, and people are moving away. Any community faced with this hardship has to rally behind something, and Beartown, is a hockey town. The junior hockey team has a chance to compete in the national semi-finals, and actually have a shot at winning! If they do, it would breathe new life into the community. A hockey academy would be built in Beartown, pouring much needed capital into the community. The hockey team represents hope, a light in the cold, dark winter night that Beartown is going though. At the head of that hope is Kevin, the star player. He’s the one who scores the goals, he’s got the skills and drive that could lead him to the NHL, and he’s the one that’s going to lead the Beartown junior hockey team to national victory.
So when they win that semi-final game on their home turf, it’s cause for celebration. A raucous house party where the players are celebrities. Copious amounts of booze consumed by lightweight teenagers leads Kevin to comit a violent act against Maya, the General Manager’s daughter, that tears the town asunder.
Beartown was a difficult read for me on a number of levels. First, I come from a small town in northern Canada. I’m intimately aware of the types of people who are drawn to, and remain in, those communities. I keenly aware in how stupid ‘hometown pride’ is, and how important it is to ‘fit in’, to ‘be a team player’, because get on one persons bad side, and suddenly you’re isolated. There aren’t any new friends to make, new jobs to seek out. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, whatever drama has befallen you.
I left my small town the moment I graduated from high school. At 17 I left it behind and moved to the big city of Winnipeg, only returning to visit once a few years later. My mother now lives in a different small town, where I end up visiting once a year or so, and every time I do, I’ve filled with such disdain. I despise the small communities and the people who choose to live away from the urban centres. I’m fully aware that it’s my own bias, but, it’s the feelings that fill my heart.
So that’s tough point number 1. I think hometown pride is stupid, so reading about a group of people who scream “We are the bears from Beartown!”, people to stay in a dying town because they’re ‘tough’, just makes me shake my head. I don’t have respect for that kind of hardheadedness, but, that’s coming from someone who couldn’t wait to leave their hometown. a hometown where there aren’t a lot of good memories left behind.
Beartown doubles down on the team mentality by putting the hockey team front and centre. Everything is for the team, the individual doesn’t matter, the team comes first. Coaches who’ve poured entire lifetimes into the club are thrown aside by the sponsers who think they know better. The players are idols, getting away with calling their teacher ‘sweet-cheeks’ in class, skipping school, proudly proclaiming that they could fuck any girl at the party. There are no concequences for their actions, because they’re the hockey team.
I’m no longer an outcast, but I sure felt like one when I lived in my hometown. I didn’t fit in, and those who don’t fit in are made keenly aware of it. If the collective turns their back on you, there’s nothing in a small town to seek out. I can’t tell you how much happier I was when I moved to the city and found a group of like-minded individuals. Hell, I wasn’t even that odd, I liked books, anime, video games. I’m a cis-gendered straight man, I can’t imagine the torture that someone who didn’t fit that mould would have felt. In a city, even if a fraction of a percent are of the same mind, it’s still a significant number of people. If there’s drama or a rift within a hobby, there’s other people that you can turn to. It isn’t so insular and suffocating, there’s freedom in being able to piss someone off, without being completely ostracized from your community.
Back to Beartown, and, here’s where the spoilers really set in. Maya, the GM’s 15-year-old daughter, is raped by Kevin, the 17-year-old star hockey player. When I first read the premise of the book, I was really worried that the main conflict of the story was going to be characters trying to cover up the crime so Kevin could play in the final. Instead, as soon as Maya comes forward with her accusations, Kevin is plucked from the bus literally on the way to the final game. Beartown loses the championship, and a rift sets in. Maya is hated by everyone, they cost her everything. “Why couldn’t she just wait until after the game?” “The police shouldn’t be involved, we could have dealt with this internally!” are phrases thrown around by the men in the hockey club.
Fredrick Backman has some really amazing quotes in this book. So many feelings and emotions that I’ve felt in my heart and soul, but never had the words to put them to.
“For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.”
“Culture is as much about what we encourage as about what we permit … That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with”
“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.”
“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It’s incomprehensible because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who’s lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying”
“It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything”
Seriously. If I had been reading this on my ebook, I would have been highlighting so many passages. I loved reading this book and coming across passages that just lit up lights inside my head. Giving words to feelings that I’ve been searching for so long. Backman also leans heavily into foreshadowing, sometimes too much for my liking. Every now and then I would feel a passage was written clumsily, but, as you can tell from my entire blog, this is just the pot calling the kettle black.
Beartown has a deep melancholy feeling to it. The weight of the struggle is almost too much to bear. Between friendship, loyalty, honour, and just plain right and wrong, Backman handles the extremely serious and sensitive subject matter with aplomb. One character I particularly loved was Ramona, the old bar owner who’s been drinking her breakfast for a decade, ever since her husband died. There’s a scene where someone is trying to proclaim that “Hockey makes people do crazy things” and she fires right back “Religion doesn’t start wars, guns don’t keep people. It’s fucking MEN” which, honestly, makes me stand up and applaud. So often we pass off responsibility for actions, make excuses for the horrific things that occur, but at the end of the day. Humans are choosing to hurt humans.
The character who I hated the most was the head coach, David. He was supposed to be this shining example, his strategy for building up the best junior team was to pour love into these boys for the last 10 years. Then, when this happens, he’s quick to say “Don’t want to get into politics, I just want to coach hockey”, as if these boys aren’t humans with lives outside the game. David is a soon-to-be parent, but offers no remorse for Peter, whose daughter was attacked. He only bemoans that they didn’t wait to present the crime until after the game. David buries his head in the sand, and, when it becomes clear that Maya and her family aren’t going to run away from town, he turns tail and takes up the head coach position for the rival town’s team. The cowardice this character displays infuriates me. As a parent, I hated his lack of empathy. As a man, I despised his adherence to the status quo.
Beartown explores a lot of themes, as there are a lot of characters, all with their own lives and struggles. Even if the book is spoiled now that you’ve read this blog post, I still highly recommend reading this book. Fredrick Backman made me feel raw feelings that I didn’t really know were there. I know I’ll be continuing onto the sequel, Them Against Us very soon, which, my wife assures me doesn’t let up on the emotional turmoil.
At the end of the weekend, I was left laying on the couch eating ice cream, feeling utterly destroyed. I had somewhat forgotten, in the age of easy to consume content, that art, real art, makes you feel things. It forces you to look at situations and events that are so far removed from our day to day lives. A Pogrom in Romaina is utterly incomprehensible to me, as is sexual violence, but they’re very real things that happen. When we forget that real people go through these traumas, we’re in danger of becoming complacient. Heaven forbid we ever fall so deeply into our own safe little bubbles and think “These things don’t really happen”. As a parent, I’m plauged with intrusive thoughts of harm befalling my children, and it’s something I have to deal with. I can’t protect my children forever, nor will I rob them from the fullness that comes from adventure and exploration. I’ll equip them the best I can, sit back, chew my fingernails and worry, and kiss their wounds that inevitably come from life. But what I can do, is champion that we as people always need to be better. We cannot protect and glorify those who seek to do harm to others. We need to protect the vulnerable around us, and hold those who live in positions of power accountable for their actions. We need to continue to tell the stories that make us uncomfortable. We need to teach everyone around us that we won’t be complacent when evil befalls our loved ones.
I hope this divergnce from board game reviews has been intresting for you. It’s certianly a very different skill, and while I don’t really feel eqipped to offer substitive critics of the art I engaged with this weekend, these blog posts are an accurate represntations of my thoughts and feelings. My heart has been hurting this weekend, and writing about my feelings is a pretty good band-aid.
I’m keenly aware that this is a board game review blog, and that I’m ill-equipped to offer a proper review on something so outside my wheelhouse, but sometimes you need to step outside your comfort zone. This weekend, I engaged with art that left me emotionally raw, and I feel compelled to share them here. I hope you enjoy this divergence from the regular, cardboard content that normally appears here.
My partner and I love live theatre. One of our first dates, I was trying to impress her and bought tickets to a local production of Pride & Prejudice, and it ignited a love for plays in both our hearts. We’ve been to dozens of plays over the years, but unfortunately, a lot less so since Covid happened and we brought a baby in our household.
This week, my wife organized childcare, procured tickets, and picked me up from my office for dinner and a date. The dinner was a delicious sweet and sour pork belly from Foo, one of the few restaurants that we go back to specifically for that dish. Then we meandered down to the playhouse, and sat down, unaware of the emotion damage we were about to receive.
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story written by Hanna Moscovitch, directed by Christian Barry, with songs by Ben Caplan & Christian Barry is a dark folktale story about two Romanian refugees, Chaim (played by Eric Da Costa) and Chaya (played by Shaina Silver-Baird), finding each other at the docks of Halifax, waiting in line to get cleared medically. They part ways, but come back together when they meet in Montreal. He’s a plucky 19-year-old, she’s a 24-year-old widow. He remembers her, asks to marry, and she reluctantly consents “If it’s her father’s wishes”.
Much of the story is told through the rough but powerful voice of the narrator, ‘The Wanderer’ (preformed by Ben Caplan). He skips merrily from side to side of the stage, singing of the cold, the joy of matrimony, and the bleakness of fleeing your home. His bushy beard matches his strong baritone, and while his jubilant high notes get the audience clapping in beat, while in the solemn moments you could hear a pin drop. The score mixes folk, rock, and lullaby, utilizing woodwinds, violin, saxophone, and even a megaphone at one point. Chaim and Chaya perform double duty in playing various instruments while The Wanderer narrates.
Living in Montreal where everything is cold, Chaim and Chaya eventually have a baby. Chaim has been working on the railways, good work at $8 a week! One night, he tries to join his friends in watching a film at the theatre, but gets stopped by an anti-Semitic message. Suddenly, a crack forms, and he remembers the pogrom that killed his entire family. He goes home, and his child has a fever. Chaya’s sure it typhus, the ailment that claimed her husband’s life, but the doctor refuses to see her, and she doesn’t know why!
It’s at this turning point that The Wonderer, with a cloth draped over his head, sings a hauntingly beautiful Yiddish melody. My heart was in my throat, not knowing if the child lives or dies. Spoiler, he lives. And the cast goes on to live a full life. Chaya dies at 77, Chaim at 92. They have 4 kids, and 16 great-grandchildren, who all achieve so much.
The story of Old Stock is the true story of playwright Hanna Moscovitch’s great-grandparents. While creative license was taken, the story remains true. It left me contemplating humanity, and how could anyone fathom to hurt other humans! How can people have such hate in their heart that they tear through a community. I reflect on how blessed and lucky I am that I live in a place where me and my child don’t have those worries. We have safety, stability, and freedom.
Old Stock is dark and thought-provoking. I found The Wanderer’s wild energy utterly charming, and encourage everyone to seek out this play. Some parts are crass, and being confronted with the very real suffering that feels so far removed from my daily life left me uncomfortable, the raw emotions I felt are a good reminder of why art is important in the first place. In the age of media, that seems made solely to entertain, it’s a good reminder that art evokes deep and complex emotions. It lets you see a snippet of someone else’s life and story, and sometimes that reminds you that while so easy to just divide humans into Us and Them, we’re all still humans, and the pain we inflict on others is real.
Disclaimer: A copy of Trekking Through History was provided by Underdog Games for review purposes
Introduction
I have a trick when it comes to introducing people to hobby board games. I find the easiest, most colourful, aesthetically pleasing game with a theme that they already enjoy, and use it to ease them into the hobby. Underdog Games has been producing some very bright and vibrant games with absolutely no expense spared on the production. Neoprene mats, tarot sized cards featuring full sized art, and chunky components make for excellent introductions into board gaming. Add in an educational twist, and suddenly you’ve got a game for both parents and kids to enjoy!
How to Play
In Trekking Through History, you’re playing as time travelling tourists tearing the fabric of the space-time continuum in an effort to curate the most enriching three day vacation through mankind’s past.
Setting up the game tasks players with laying out the neoprene mat that serves as the market row and score tracker, then separate the three decks of cards based on the number in the upper right corner. Each card depicts an event in history, and prominently displays the date the event happened in the top left corner. In the bottom right corner, cards may show several symbols that you’ll earn if you choose to that the card into your Trek, while the bottom left corner tells you just how much time you’ll have to spend for that card.
On your turn, you simply take one of the cards from the row, and collect tokens matching the symbols on the card, as well as a token matching the space the card was on. The tokens fall onto your itinerary and may score you points or earn you time crystals. You move your token on the time track, and place your card into your Trek. A trek is a line of cards with an ascending date, which means if you take a historical event that happens further in the past than top card of your current trek, you’ll need to start a whole new trek (It’s also worth mentioning that you can only have one active trek at a time). Then, the player whose token is furthest back on the time track, gets to take the next turn.
The rounds ends when all players time tracker tokens reach the 12 o’clock spot. The cards in the market are wiped out, and the round 2 cards come in, which span from the earliest records of BCE, all the way to almost modern day events. After the third round, the scores are counted. Your final score is based on the points you earned during play, and each of your treks are scored based on how long they are. There’s a helpful reminder on the right side of the score track. The player with most points wins!
Review
Starting off with the physical production of Trekking Through History, the components are fantastic. All the tokens you’re collecting to fill your itinerary are made of moulded plastic, and are stored in a firm, plastic case. The player markers are large, chunky plastic stopwatches that move around the circular time board, and the main play area that contains the card river and score track is a stitched edge neoprene mat. Each of the large cards feature unique and vibrant artwork. All of this to say, the components of Trekking Through History make the game feel like a premium product!
The gameplay itself is very straightforward, pick a card, pay it’s time cost, and place it into your current trek. You’ll be compelled to wait for a card to slide along the card river, so it matches up with the bonus token that you really want, so you can earn bonuses from your itinerary. This is risky, however, as you really need to hope that other players won’t snap up your card. Treks can only move forward through time, meaning if the token you really want is associated with a card late in the timeline, you may find yourself making several shorter treks, and hoping you make up the difference in points. It’s quite satisfying when everything works out, however. There are great moments during the game where the perfect card slides into the right position, and claiming that event just so happens to trigger extra bonuses on your itinerary, rocketing your marker up the score track. When the combos hit, the game sings.
I love the time mechanic, I’ve loved the mechanic in every game I’ve played that featured it (Glen More, Patchwork, and Thebes are the games that come to mind). The cards that offer you a variety of resources, and sit further back in time require more opportunity cost to acquire, which offers an excellent trade-off. It can be frustrating when you have to take a card that launches you several spaces into the lead, then you sit there, watching the other players take turn after turn, letting the card you want slip right past the resource you needed, but the flip side is quite satisfying. If you happen to have them, the time crystals allow you to reduce the time cost when acquiring a card by 1 space per crystal you spend. We found ourselves using these to get multiple turns in a row more often than perhaps we should have, but it gave us greater control over that card market. Which in a game with narrow margins, every extra point counts!
Every card represents an event in history, and the back of the card shares some details about that event. Just like in HerStory, also by UnderDog Games, this feature educated us during our downtime of the game. Events or objects I’ve never really considered, like “Breaking the Sound Barrier with Chuck Yeager”, or “Race in the Paris-Rouen” were suddenly interesting. While waiting for my turn to come back around, I felt compelled to flip over the card. Even better were the conversations some of the cards inspired amongst my friends, like watching Freddy Mercury during the 1985 Live Aid concert. I love when a game helps pull the stories from our past, or encourages us to talk about hobbies other than the game we’re currently engaged it. It’s an easy way to introduce someone to stories from other cultures they may never have encountered otherwise.
With only 36 time to spend each game, and most cards costing between 2 – 4 time, Trekking Through History moves along quickly. Before you know it, you’ve picked up 13 cards between your three treks, and the end of the game is bearing down on you. There’s a lot of luck in the cards, considering only 6 cards are available to you when it is your turn. It can be entirely possible that there just aren’t any cards that will generate the resource you need! I don’t think Trekking Through History is the absolute best drafting or set collection game out there, but it’s one that would absolutely excel in a family setting. I wouldn’t hesitate to plop this down on a week night to encourage curiosity from the younger people in my life.
The deck of cards is thick, meaning players will always be seeing new events. The game flow is easy to follow, and it feels good when the luck just happens to fall the right way. It’s a fun and smooth game, and with the dates on the cards making each card valuable or worthless depending on the state of your current trek, it’s hard to inflict bad feelings via hate drafting. With short and long term goals pulling you in multiple directions, I felt engaged through my plays of Trekking Through History, and I really enjoyed the snippets of knowledge I acquired in between my turns. It’s attractive, fun, and quick to play. It’s probably not one that I’ll be pulling out with my regular game group often, but it’s the kind of game that I would put in front of my sister and her kids when they ask “What’s the board gaming thing you’re always going on about?”
I have very little experience with One vs. Many games. I’ve played Scotland Yard once, Betrayal at House on the Hill once, and Pandemic with the bio-terrorist expansion once. All of these experiences have been fine, but none of them have inspired a love for the genre for me. Bear backed the Beast Kickstarter, and has been eagerly anticipating its release, so, for this week’s game night, Beast was the game we played.
How to Play
Beast’s rulebook is deceptively thin, considering how much asymmetry the game holds. As a ‘1 vs many’ game, there are two halves of the conflict that need to be taught, as both sides need to know what powers and limitations the other has in order to effectively strategize.
With 6 different beasts, 6 different hunters, and 4 different contracts included in the game, there’s plenty of variety to choose from. We chose to follow the suggested first time set up with “The Great Cleansing” contract, with the Beast Fangrir being hunted by Helga and Assar. The gameplay is pretty simple, each of the characters has a set of ability cards, then, each player will draft 4 of the 16 action cards. Each card has a symbol in the centre, either red or blue, along with two potential actions at the bottom. The top action is what the heroes get to do if they play that card, while the bottom action is what the beast gets to do if they play that card.
The goal of the game is outlined on the contract, and for The Great Cleansing, the Beast had to kill two of the three villagers on the map. The hunters had to either survive until night of the third day, or, slay the beast.
The Beast is often “hidden”, with their figure on the map only denoting the Beast’s last known position. Whenever the beast moves, they play a direction card face down. If a hunter or villager manage to happen upon the Beast’s trail, the beast must put down a trail token. The Hunters have an ability to “search” a location, which, if the Beast is in that location, becomes revealed, and is now attackable. The Beast can become hidden again as soon as it moves from its spot.
Every round starts with the Beast taking their turn. Every player can play one or two cards on their turn, but only one card of each colour. No doubling up on red actions here! Around and around players take actions until someone passes. There is a rule stating that you cannot pass if someone has less action cards than you do. The round only ends once all players pass in succession.
After all players have passed, they enter the evening phase, where, both Beast and Hunters get to spend the grudges they earned during the day to unlock new abilities. Once all players have completed their evening phase, the morning begins with another action card draft. The game ends when either side of the conflict achieves their goal.
First Impressions
Asymmetric games are always difficult to grasp on the first play. Each character, Beast, and contract has their own nuances, and I can’t always foresee a character’s strengths or shortcomings and how they’ll play into the chosen scenario, so I’m always thankful when the game offers character suggestions for first time gamers to get into the experience quickly.
On the very first turn, I was able to deuce where the beast had moved to with 100% accuracy, moved into that spot, and hunted him successfully. This hit left Fangrir scared. He spent the rest of the round moving and attacking the bare minimum to accomplish his daily goal, then running away again, not leaving him exposed for a single turn.
At the start of the second day, Fangrir got a Beastly talent that allowed him to react to our Hunt card. When one of us played the Hunt card, he could spend a grudge to instantly move to an adjacent location, rendering one of our hunt cards worthless. There was one point during the second day when I was standing on the location and was 100% positive that I was on the same location as the Beast, but I didn’t have any cards with a Search ability, so, there was nothing I could do.
We chose to end the game after the second night, as it was getting quite late. It took us about 3 hours to set up, learn, and play through 2 full rounds of Beast. A lot of that length of play comes down to analysis paralysis. Both sides have a lot to consider on their turns, and when you’re staring at a hand of 8 cards trying to figure out which two you want to play, it can really slow you down. One of the games that Beast reminded me of was INIS, which is another drafting game. I imagine much like INIS, Beast gets better on repeat plays, when all players know what ability cards are available, and are more intimately familiar with both roles limitations and powers.
Bear was adamant that if we had continued into the third round, he would have taken the victory, but I’m not so sure. We needed to hit Fangrir 3 more times, while Fangrir needed to cross half the map and attack a villager. Between the two hunters, and Bears’ cautious nature, I don’t think he would have been able to pull it off without either running out of steam, or, getting pummled on the one turn he left himself vulnerable. It would really have come down to the cards that got drafted, and the reactions/items/beastly talents that would swing the game in either direction.
My big frustration with Beast came with the Beast’s hidden/reveal mechanic. I really disliked that all the Beast has to do to become hidden again is simply move, but for the hunters to find the Beast, they need to play a card with the “search” keyword. It was superbly annoying that I knew exactly where the beast was, I was standing right on top of it, but I just didn’t have a search card to play, leaving us at a weird stalemate. I feel that if I need to search to find the beast, then the beast should have a corresponding ‘hide’ keyword, or, I should be able to just attack a space that I think (or know) that they’re, and if I’m right, do damage to you, and if I’m wrong, get a punishment, like slay one of the pigs and give the Beast the corresponding grudge. Just, more freedom to actually progress toward the hunter win condition.
I don’t like games that handcuff you. The situation of “The goal of the game is to kill the beast, but you can only attack him if he’s revealed, and you only get one reveal card per round. Also, the Beast has a reaction card that nullifies that card once” really frustrated me. I suspect the reaction card to nullify the hunt card one time would be less powerful in a 4 player game, but it felt very swingy in our game, and I can only imagine would be pretty killer in a two player game.
I can really see how Beast rewards experience. The more we know what cards are in the deck, the better we can control the draft and what ability cards even get given to the beast, the better we can all find those crazy combos that make us feel powerful. I am really looking forward to learning what really makes those hunters different, and what surprises the other Beasts have in store for us. I also really wonder if that same mission would be harder or easier if we didn’t just follow the suggested Hunter setup. All things I’m excited to discover!
I recently took a minor vacation to visit my family, but travelling with a toddler is tough enough without carting around extra luggage, so I vowed to pack as leanly as possible. This meant bringing none of my games on vacation with me. Fortunately, there’s a few great game stores in Saskatoon, so I popped into a couple and one of the games I walked out with was a $12 copy of Don’t L.L.A.M.A.
Originally published as L.A.M.A, which is a German acronym that loosely translates to ‘get rid of your negative points’. In 2019 I saw the game in North America as L.L.A.M.A, and now, the version I finally bought is “Don’t L.L.A.M.A“. It’s odd that they chose to keep a name that was a German acronym, but created a separate acronym well after the original version was released. But hey, I shouldn’t judge. I’m awful at coming up with names, I can’t imagine how challenging it is applying a name and theme to what likely got sold to AMIGO as a themeless card game.
How to Play
L.L.A.M.A consists of a deck of cards, and a pile of black and white chips. The deck of cards contains 8 copies of the numbers 1 to 6, plus 8 Llama cards. Each round, the deck is shuffled, and each player is dealt 6 cards, and one card is placed face up as the starting card. Starting with the person who last played a card, they have 3 options for what they can do on their turn.
First, they can choose to play, which requires they play a card from their hand that either matches the card on top of the discard pile, or, is the next number in the sequence. Llama’s can be played on 6’s and 1’s can be played on Llama’s resetting the order.
Second, they can choose to pick up a card and add it to their hand. That’s it, turn is over.
Third, they can choose to quit the round. Doing so will allow the other players at the table to keep playing, but that player is no longer compelled to draw more cards. Once a player has quit the round, they cannot rejoin until a new round begins
And that’s it, players choose one of those three actions until either all players have chosen to quit, or, someone sheds all the cards from their hand. At that point, the scores are tallied.
The score of each round consists of each unique card left in your hand. Llamas are worth 10 points themselves, but if you have multiple llama’s in your hand at the end of the round, you only score 10 points. As an example, if the round ended, and you had one 4, two 5’s, and two llamas, your score would be 19 points. You keep your score by taking the black or white chips, white chips are worth 1 point and black chips are worth 10 points. The first player to meet or exceed 10 points triggers the end of the game, and the player with the lowest score at the end is the winner.
That’s right, points are bad in L.L.A.M.A. And if you’re the player who manages to get rid of all their cards during a round, you get an extra benefit of returning one of your point chips to the supply, reducing your score.
Review
Naming criticisms aside, L.L.A.M.A is a great little card game by the renowned Dr. Reiner Knizia. Now, my family is no stranger to games, having played dozens of games from Sagrada to Hardback. They’re enthusiastic and always ready to play whatever I happen to pull out of my bag.
L.L.A.M.A hits the table quickly. Deal 6 cards, on your turn either play, draw, or quit. You can only play cards that match or continue the existing card on the table, and points are bad. GO! What first appears as a too simple, too easy card game slowly opens up into an interesting and satisfying push your luck game. Actually playing the game is painless, The decisions available to you are generally fairly obvious, meaning you aren’t expending a lot of metal effort on the game. This lets the game fade into the background as you chat idly with your friends or family
What really sold this game for me would be when someone had a bad run, broke the 40 point barrier to trigger the end of the game, and my brother-in-law just scooped up the cards, said “Again”, and dealt out a new hand. It’s easy to just keep playing L.L.A.M.A while enjoying good company.
Don’t get me wrong, I love games that consume the entirety of my brain space, but not every situation calls for that kind of activity. L.L.A.M.A is a game that accommodates anything from 2 to 6 players, and manages to straddle the line of being too luck-dependant, and letting new players get absolutely crushed on their first turn. It feels good when you can empty your hands of cards, and winning feels satisfying, but if you get hosed and end up pulling in 21 points two hands in a row, you just blame the luck of the cards and deal them out again without any real hurt feelings.
L.L.A.M.A ebbs and flows, sometimes you’ll be stuck with lots of points in your hands, and you’ll struggle with the choice to play the 5 or the 6. If you play the 5, it might come back around as the 6, and you’ll be able to shed both cards out of your hand, but if you play a 5, and the next two players play a 6, then a Llama, you’re stuck with that 6 points in your hand. And if you just play the 6, will the round make it all the way back to the 5 before someone goes out? Similar decisions need to be made when choosing to draw or fold. Is 6 points an acceptable fold point? If you draw again, it might be a 10 point Llama card, and Bigfoot only has two cards left. In the end, the stakes are low, as if you manage to go out, flicking a chip back into the supply is eminently satisfying.
I love the frustrated grunt that pops up when someone doesn’t play in the way you want them to. I recognize that it can be frustrating when you play your 5 card, then every other player also plays a 5, leaving you right back where you started, and the reverse of waiting and waiting all round for the deck to get a 4, so you can play your 5 card, only to have the two players prior to you rush through that number. It’s also frustrating when everyone else folds, and you’re stranded with nothing to do. However, when everyone else folds and you happen to have a perfect run in your hand, slamming down card after card is immensely satisfying.
It’s easy to call L.L.A.M.A dumb or compare it to other games like UNO, but there’s a great joy to be found in a game that flows so smoothly that it stays out of the way. L.L.A.M.A facilitates easy conversation, pleasant visiting, and it’s just a simple joy to play. I foresee myself bringing L.L.A.M.A out to a lot more events where gaming may not be the main focus, such as family reunions, pub nights with friends, or double dates with a couple that I don’t know terribly well.
I don’t know what it is about L.L.A.M.A‘s scoring, but I don’t really care if I’m the winner. The only thing I really care about is not being the person who hits that 40 point threshold to end the game. The production of L.L.A.M.A is simple. Bright, colourful cards, and white and black plastic chips. Nothing else is needed. While the decisions in L.L.A.M.A aren’t fast and furious, and the luck can mean that you might lose, no matter what choices you make, it’s so quick and easy to play that a shrug of your shoulder and a gruff “again” gets you right back into the game. It’s unobtrusive and fades nicely into the background, which makes it a perfect choice for a laid back evening with family you don’t get to see terribly often.
