Mechanics: Bag Building, Hand Management, Area Control
Players: 2 or 4
Bigfoot and I played War Chest by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson as it had been on both of our ‘want to play’ lists for a while. I have a strong affinity for two player abstract strategy games, even if they don’t hit the table very much for me anymore. While I don’t think this is going to radically change my gaming habits any time soon, I do think War Chest is special and deserves a closer look.
The theme of War Chest is about as strong as any other abstract strategy game. “In War Chest you take on the role of medieval battlefield commanders, vying to take control of tactical battlefield positions”.
To begin a game of War Chest, each player is dealt 4 unit cards and takes the corresponding unit chips from the box and places them in their own supply. Each player than takes two chips from each unit and places them into their bag, along with their own royal chip. The bag is shaken and the game begins with each player drawing 3 chips.
Basically put, each round you and your opponent will draw chips from your bag, take actions with those chips, then redraw when you’ve both depleted your hands and repeat until one player has managed to lay out all 6 of their control tokens to win the game.
The units in War Chest are what give the game colour and texture. Some have passive abilities, like the Pikeman, who had a stipulation that when a unit attacks it from an adjacent location, they also take a damage, or the Knight who can only be attacked by a unit who has been bolstered.
Some units have restrictions, like the Archer who cannot take the generic attack action, but must use it’s tactic (which allows it to attack a unit two spaces away), and others just have a tactic that you can activate, like the lancer, who can choose move one or two spaces in a straight line, then attack, allowing you to close a wide gap quickly.
War Chest has a lot of push and pull to it. Because you need to have matching chips in your bag to activate units on the board, you’re compelled to fill your bag with as many chips as possible so you can activate your unit more often, but there’s a delay. The unit you’re recruiting chips for won’t be drawn until your bag runs out and you can refresh your bag, where you put all your discarded tokens back into your bag. If you do to have a unit on the board and 3 matching chips in your bag, great, you can start activating that unit frequently, but they’ll have a target painted on their back. Your opponent can see how many tokens you’ve recruited into your bag, and activating a unit requires you to discard a token face up, meaning your opponent knows when a unit is spent and can move in for the kill.
There’s 9 different actions you can do with each chip, which fall under 3 categories. Deploy, where you put your chip onto the board. Maneuver, where you discard a chip to take an action with a matching chip on the board (such as move, attack, bolster, control, or tactics). And finally, you can discard a chip face down to claim the initiative, recruit (move a chip from your supply into your discard pile), or pass.
Getting things done in War Chest is a slow affair. Your bag starts with 9 tokens, two from each of your 4 units, meaning it’ll take 3 rounds before your discard pile goes back into the bag. Assuming you deploy two of your units, that only leaves you with one matching chip for those two units in your bag. That’s only one Maneuver action per bag refresh. It can take 3 or 4 bag refreshes just to get a chip into position. Because it takes so long to do anything, combat feels dangerous. When you have a unit in the line of fire, you immediately start sweating and hoping against hope that you’ll be the first to attack, lest the progress you made with this token is undone with one fell swoop.
On the subject of attacks, when you’re attacked, you remove the attacked chip from the game. Your available chips will slowly dwindle over time. Again, because your opponent can count, they can figure out when they’ve effectively rendered a unit useless. The risk of being attacked can be mitigated by bolstering your units, placing another chip creating a stack. When you’re attacked, the top chip is still removed from the game, but the lower chip remains where it is. Now you don’t need to spend the extra actions returning a subsequent unit to the same position. Again, the push and pull of War Chest shows up, if you bolster, you have less chips in the bag to activate that unit on future turns. Everything is a trade-off.
The goal of the game isn’t to eradicate your opponent, but instead to control 6 points on the board. You control a point by moving a unit onto a control point, then discarding a chip matching the unit on that spot which allows you to place your control token. Once you have a control token down, you can deploy future units from this spot (assuming it’s unoccupied). Should your opponent manage to get one of their units onto your control space, it only takes one control action to remove your token, and install their own.
One of the games that we played, Bigfoot managed to win without attacking me a single time. The threat of combat was enough to keep me back and he managed to get all of his control tokens down. In another game, a single crossbowman was deployed to the board, and with 4 matching chips in the bag, he proceeded to move it into position and cripple my forces with multiple attacks. I had no units that could close the gap quick enough to get in and take out that one devastating unit.
I imagine every unit can be devastating in specific circumstances. While I’m still a beginner at this game, I can see there’s significant depth ahead of me. Like most abstract strategy games, this is best played against a single person multiple times, with both of you learning and growing together. Previous games experiences informing the decisions as you move forward. A unit that was ineffectual in one game can be the clutch unit in another. When a meta forms and develops over multiple plays as you and your opponent sharpen your skills against each other, something special is made. I suspect that as you play War Chest more, you’ll start drafting the starting units instead of dealing them randomly. This would allow you to craft your army in response to your opponent, offering even more strategic decisions.
It would be remiss if I didn’t mention the luck factor. Because you need matching chips in your hand to activate your units on the board, a lot of the game is putting yourself into the best (and potentially dangerous) position, and hoping you draw the correct chip that will allow you to activate a unit that’s in striking distance before your opponent can, or even further, that you can control a location before the unit gets wiped off the map. To me, the luck in War Chest comes across more as risky than anything else. If you’ve found yourself in a potentially dangerous situation it may be worth burning an action to ensure you get to go first after you draw your 3 chips in the next round.
War Chest feels ripe for expansions, and at the time of this writing, two have already been released War Chest: Siege and War Chest: Nobility. Both add more units and vary the battlefield, giving players new challenges to crash against. While I don’t feel ready to add expansions into my game yet, I’m glad to know they already exist.
If you’re looking for something along the same lines as War Chest, I can personally recommend Santorini. It’s a great strategic game with interesting asymmetric gameplay. If asymmetry is not your bag, I’d recommend Hive or Tak. I find such joy when playing these games against players of equal skill. Of course, there’s always Chess and Go if you want to wade into those waters, but with a skill ceiling so high it can be hard to find players of an similar skill.
I was inspired by the Board Games Hot Takes podcast’s recent episode where they discussed the games from the Board Game Geek top 100 list that they haven’t played yet, and discussed 5 of the games they want to play and 5 that they don’t want to play. I feel personally attacked by Tim for not wanting to play Food Chain Magnate, which is my #1 favourite game of all time!
Before I begin, some numbers. As of the time of this writing I only own 9 games in the top 100, but I’ve played 71 of them. From the remaining 29 games I broke all of them into two groups, ones that I do want to play (20 games on this list), and ones that I don’t want to play (9 games on that list). Without further ado, lets get on with the list
Games I want to play
Aeon’s End
Aeon’s End by Kevin Riley is a cooperative deck building game that has a couple of unique aspects that really interest me. I should preface this by saying I inherently enjoy deck building games (Like Hardback and Super Motherload to name a few). I think the aspect that Aeon’s End is most famous for, and what has me most interested is the mechanic where you don’t shuffle your discard pile when reloading your deck, making you think about the order in which you discard your cards. I like the idea of being able to plan a strategy and combo, and be sure that you’ll pick up the cards in the correct order.
I also like that Aeon’s End doesn’t feature a card river (like Star Realms or Paperback). While a card river can offer a lot of variety and interesting states of play, I prefer the feel of a designed puzzle. I want my game states to be winnable and not have the cards that work best during the end game appear right at the very start.
Android Netrunner
Richard Garfield and Lukas Litzsinger’s Android Netrunner is a behemoth that I’ve always wanted to get into. Being a two player head to head game it requires you to have a partner who gets equally into it with you, or a small group that you can cycle between. The asymmetric nature of the game, one player taking on the megacorporation and the other taking on the role of the hacker makes me extra excited. Unfortunately I’m not really in a space to dedicate the amount of time necessary to really get into Android Netrunner properly, and I’m not willing to wade into the world of Netrunner enthusiasts and play against strangers online.
If you’re interested in learning more about Android Netrunner, Tom Brewster from Shut Up & Sit Down released a video recently detailing why you should consider playing this game, despite lack of support from the publisher, Fantasy Flight Games.
Mechs Vs. Minions
Mechs vs. Minions was Riot Games foray into the board game space. I’ve heard it was a passion project for a few of their staff members (Chris Cantrell, Rick Ernst, Stone Librande, Prashant Saraswat, and Nathan Tiras are credited as designers), which sees to be true as they’ve only published two games since 2016 (their other game Tellstones: King’s Gambit was released in 2020 to very little fanfare). Mechs vs. Minions is a cooperative action programming game set in the League of Legends universe. In Mechs vs. Minions players are programming their actions far in advance and trying to complete objectives while dealing with the chaos that is combat and damage that can throw your entire plan off one step and send you spiraling off into a corner.
I haven’t played very many action programming games, but they intrigue me. I like chaos and needing to plan out 5 moves in advance, and I delight when plans go awry. The only thing that has prevented me from buying this game is the prohibitive shipping cost that I just can’t justify. I’ve had Mechs vs. Minions on my wish-list for years and apparently my wife has come very close to buying it for me on several occasions, but each time she adds the product to her cart, she balks at the shipping cost. I do have an acquaintance in town who I know owns this game, perhaps one day I’ll carve out some time to play it with him.
Too Many Bones
Much like Mechs vs. Minions‘s sticker shock preventing me from pony-ing up the cash to buy the game, Too Many Bones shares a similar fate. At an eye-watering CAD $200, Too Many Bones is a bit of a white whale for me
Too Many Bones by Josh J. Carlson and Adam Carlson is a dice rolling adventure game for 1 to 4 players where each player controls a unique character with multiple classes to choose from. This box from Chip Theory Games contains no cardboard aside from the box itself, everything is made out of waterproof materials, like plastic or neoprene. I’ve seen more than one person rave about the gameplay and the excitement that Too Many Bones delivers to it’s players, and it’s a system that I desperately want to dive into, but at this point I’m too far behind. The latest crowd funding campaign had a reward tier called “The Ultimate Completionist” that included everything that has been produced for Too Many Bones up to this point, and they were asking for USD $1,100 (a discount of $231 off MSRP). That’s a current that I’m not willing to wade into.
War of the Ring: Second Edition
I wish I had a better reason to want to play War of the Ring: Second Edition by designers Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi, and Francesco Nepitello, but my reasoning is simply because I love the Lord of the Rings. that’s it. I know this is a big, epic 2 player only game and the likelihood of me actually finding a copy is rare, and I generally don’t like direct conflict or war games, but I feel in this case that my love for the theme will overcome my distaste for the mechanics.
Games I don’t want to play
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
I have a bit of a rant about why I don’t like Gloomhaven, which I’ll include when I finish Bigfoot’s Trash Taste post, but the crux of my issues with Gloomhaven are that your hand is functionally the timer for the game. The options available to you dwindle as the game goes on, feeling like a noose tightening around your neck. Your hand is being depleted quicker and quicker and you need to complete the objectives. Most of the scenarios I’ve played end not because we take too much damage, but just because we run out of time, this actively punishes you for exploring.
Most of your strongest actions will burn the card instead of sending it to the discard pile, which means to do a big cool thing, you just straight up remove the card from your supply for the rest of the scenario. it’s that fundamental aspect that I dislike, I feel like I’m being punished for doing the big cool thing or for exploring, and that’s not how I like my games to feel. If I’m playing a combat-centric game, I want to be a big damn hero, not a rag-tag adventurer just barely making it out of each encounter alive.
In case you were wondering, I’m also not a fan of the Souls-borne genre of video games either.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 & 2
My experience with Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 kind of soured me on the rest of the Pandemic Legacy games. I didn’t like the consequences of a bad game, if a city (or cities) fall because of unlucky card flips, that city was much harder to work around and more likely to be a pain in the butt in subsequent games. I felt disincentivised to branch out and try new characters; the ones we’ve been using all game have gotten several improvements and until they’re lost forever, there’s was no real reason to deviate.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is Otter’s favourite game, and I’m sure he cringes every time I slander it (actually when it’s written, it’s libel. But it’s not libel if it’s the truth). I don’t know if the follow up games resolve my issues with the system, but I’m not willing to commit myself to 12 – 24 more plays to find out.
Twilight Imperium: Any Edition
Twilight Imperium is the holy grail for some people. It’s a big event game that requires a lot of planning and scheduling to even get to the table, as it’s best when played with 6 players. Twilight Imperium is a game of galactic conquest, with lots of variability, and a epic saga emerging from the gameplay.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone talk about Twilight Imperium without regaling me with the glorious details of the rise and fall of their opponents during the game. While it sounds like an epic and amazing experience, I just don’t have the spoons to play a game that routinely takes longer than 6 hours to play, especially a game that has as much direct combat as Twilight Imperium. My actual nightmare would be to sit down at the table, get beaten in a combat in the first hour, and spend the next five hours trying to do anything while knowing there’s no chance of a comeback.
I’m envious of those who can prioritize and commit to playing Twilight Imperium at all, let alone more than once, but I know myself and I know I would enjoy myself so much more by just playing 4 different 2 hour games over 1 epic 8 hour space opera.
On Mars
I have a love/hate relationship by games designed by Vital Lacerda. They’re usually big, complex, and thematic games that simulate a facet of life, like building a car in Kanban or robbing a bank and evading the police in Escape Plan. In these games each individual turn is simple and straightforward, but there are half a dozen interlocking mechanisms and mechanics that you need to be intimately familiar with to succeed.
On Mars looks to stay on the same track as the rest of Lacerda’s designs, clocking in at a 4.66 out of 5 on BGGs complexity rating. While sometimes all I really want to do is to sink my teeth into a complex game, I’m at a stage of life (parent to a toddler) where the thought of a brain burning game just exhausts me. Maybe when I’m all growed up and have spare time again I’ll go on a massive Lacerda binge.
I will say that I absolutely adore Ian O’Toole’s cover for this game. It looks absolutely stunning!
Eldritch Horror
Somewhat ironically my birthday is October 31st, and I generally dislike the entirety of the horror genre. Eldritch Horror by Corey Konieczka and Nikki Valens looks to be a fine game; a streamlined version of Arkham horror where players embark on a cooperative adventure working to solve mysteries and protect the world from the Ancient One. I just have no love for the entirety of the Cthulhu mythos. If horror, mystery, and Cthulhu is something you enjoy, I’m sure Eldritch Horror is a treat. unfortunately I am not, so I am repelled.
Every year I encourage the members of my regular game group to create a list of their top 100 games of all time. Today I’m starting a new series in which I explore my friends’ favourite games and specifically look at the games they chose to put onto their top 100 that I hate.
Hate is a very strong word. To be honest, most of these games I would still play. These are games that I would call ‘fine’ and would play if someone was really keen, but are not games I would ever suggest playing on our game nights.
The first person I’m picking on today has chosen his alias to be Otter. He would identify himself as a classic Euro gamer; someone who enjoys trading cubes and deterministic gameplay over luck and dice. While not totally against the odd direct conflict game, his preferences are firmly in the economic side of the spectrum.
I’ve ordered this list, starting with the games at the very top of his list, not in the order of how much I dislike each one.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 – #1
Ooooh boy coming right out of the gate with a spicy take. I’m not a big fan of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1. There are a lot of aspects that could be contributing to my opinion, such as the fact that I haven’t finished the campaign yet, or the fact that I’ve only played it two players. I’ve purposefully hidden the paragraph below for those who may be sensitive to spoilers. Highlight the text if you want to read some of my reasons for not liking Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
Some of the reasons I don’t like Pandemic Legacy are very arbitrary. I don’t like that one of the viruses turns people into ‘faded figures’, which is very reminiscent of zombies, which is just a concept that I’m extremely tired of. I also don’t like that in a 2 player game it feels like we HAVE to use a certain subset of characters or we have no chance of containing the virus or even winning. I also don’t really like the consequences of a bad game, if a city (or cities) falls because of a unlucky card flip, that city is now harder to deal with and more likely to be a pain in the butt in subsequent games. Further to that we are disincentivised to branch out and try new characters; the ones we’ve been using all game have gotten several improvements and until they’re lost forever, there’s no real reason to deviate.
The paragraph above is white text with a white background. Highlight to read, but be aware there are spoilers.
In the end, I would so much rather play base Pandemic, which is an excellent experience beginning to end. Sometimes when I want to shake up my co-op game experience, I’ll pull out one of the alternate Pandemic versions, such as Fall of Rome, Rising Tide, or even The Cure (if I want to roll a lot of dice). That offers much more variety for me, and I don’t need to bring the same group of people back together again and again to play through a campaign.
Side bar, that last complaint, bringing the same group of people back together again and again is the crux of most of my complaints with all Legacy and campaign games. If someone is dedicated enough to return regularly to play Pandemic Legacy again and again with me, I’d almost certainly rather be introducing them to the wider world of board games. I know this speaks to my own need for discovery, but Pandemic is such a great introduction to cooperative games that once I’ve gotten someone hooked with it, there’s so many other experiences I’m keen to share with them.
Alchemists #10
Alchemists designed by Matúš Kotry and published by CGE in 2014 was pitched to me as a Clue-style deduction game, but much more interesting and ‘gamey’. This pitch didn’t particularly excite me as I hadn’t played Clue since I was 9 or 10 years old and didn’t have particularly fond memories attached to that game.
What Alchemists actually is, is a worker placement game with a deduction element. The deduction either needs to be managed by an app, or have a player act the role of a moderator and manage the deduction element. Alchemists features 8 different ingredients all of which have a positive or negative value in 3 aspects (confusing, I know). The goal of the game is to deduce the aspects of each of these ingredients and publish theories proving you are the smartest Alchemist at the table. It’s entirely possible to publish false theories in an effort to rush your opponents into also publishing their half-baked theories, after which you and the scientific community at large can mock them mercilessly.
What I don’t like about Alchemists is that the system is opaque and obtuse, and you can get really unlucky. The method for gathering information is you first need to take an action spot, which may cost you money if someone mixed a red potion before you did. Then, you mix two ingredients into a caldron and they’ll pop out a result, consuming the two resources. The result you can use to deduce some information, and once you have enough information, you can figure out the individual properties of each ingredient. In one of my games I matched 3 different pairs of ingredients together and every time they turned out to be the the equal and opposite of each other, giving me almost no information I could work with and leaving me far behind everyone else. Eventually I was able to use that information to figure out each of the ingredient’s aspects, but it was too little too late. Everyone else had already published their papers and sold their potions to eager explorers.
Other things that rub me wrong are the lengthy playtime. Alchemists is easily a 2 hour game, longer if you’re learning how to play. It’s also difficult for new players, as they can’t really ask clarifying questions lest they give away some of their secret information. Hopefully whoever teaches this game can clearly impart the logic puzzle, or the new players will be left feelings stuck for a very long time. It’s also fairly punishing, making a mistake or missing timing your moves can dearly cost you, which feels particularly bad in a long game.
On a more positive note, I really love the art and production of Alchemists, and the rulebook was hilarious. If everyone is of an equal skill level, Alchemists can be a fun afternoon, but high academia is just not for me.
Stockpile #12
Sometimes it’s hard to discern where a heavily random game is good, and where it’s bad. Why do I love Galaxy Trucker, but despise Stockpile?
Stockpile is a stock market manipulation game where players each have a small amount of hidden information. Each round players will seed portfolios with shares in a company, then bid on which portfoliton you want to acquire. After acquiring a portfolio, you have the option to sell some stocks, then the market moves. Each of the 6 companies will move either up or down. If the stock hits the top of the track, it splits, doubling your stake in the company. If it goes bankrupt, all those stocks in your portfolio have become worthless.
Stockpile feels very random and unfair. The player who knows if a stock is going to go bankrupt due to a massive -3 movement has such a better piece of information than the player who knows that another stock is just going to go up by one. Often, you’ll have information about a stock, but then never have the opportunity to take action on that information. If you know American Automotive is going to go up 2, but you never see those shares, that information is essentially worthless. Sure, you could try to barter or psyche out your opponents, but that pales in comparison to actually knowing the hidden information and using it to your advantage. You can know that if the Automotive company is going up by 2 then the odds of the other stocks going down are marginally higher, but it’s just not enough to make meaningful decisions.
I do like the asymmetric player powers, and the expansion turns up the randomness even further by including dice that dictate how the market will move, making it even more volatile. If I’m going to play a game where I feel like I have no control, it may as well be extra random and I can make my own points by going heavily into bonds.
Grand Austria Hotel #13
I really wanted to love Grand Austria Hotel by Simone Luciani and Virginio Gigli. With my hospitality background I adore the theme of serving coffee and cake to guests before seeing them to their rooms. In practice, however, Grand Austria Hotel feels plodding and tedious. Most of the decisions feels dictated by the dice, which somehow always seem to be exactly wrong. I’ve had instances where I look at the dice and think “This is awful! I can’t do anything with this!”, re-roll the dice, only to find that the re-roll is somehow worse than the original state!
Perhaps it’s foolish of me to expect something exciting when strudel is one of the main resources. I find myself frustrated every time I play, especially as I see my opponents racking up combos and hiring staff that cascade into dozens of filled rooms and fully progressed on the emperor track thanks to a well timed pull of a guest, or a perfectly timed dice roll. What makes Grand Austria Hotel even worse is the snake draft, which somehow seems to elongate the downtime in-between turns. “GAH” is all I can really say about this one…
The Oracle of Delphi #24
A Stefan Feld race game, I was so excited when I first sat down to play The Oracle of Delphi. I was on a bit of a Feldian kick, having just played The Castles of Burgundy and Trajan, so I was very excited to see what this new, colourful box had in store for me.
Unfortunately what I found was a race to complete three sets of four different objectives. At the start of the game you’re weak and trying to get anything done feels like a chore. As you complete some objectives you get benefits that make you stronger, but you’re also taking on penalty cards. If you get too many penalties, you have to skip a whole turn which feels AWFUL in a race game.
Two of the four tasks you’re trying to complete are pick-up and deliver, and the entire board is seeded from the start. The first player to go can end up with a huge advantage by being able to pick up and drop off resources directly next to the start while others need to cart their goods clear across the sea. The objectives that aren’t pick-up and deliver are entirely random, either rolling dice and hoping you clear the threshold or flipping a face down tile and hoping it’s your colour. These objectives just don’t make for an interesting game in my opinion.
Finale
There are a few other games on Otter’s list that I’m not the biggest fan of, including Lorenzo il Magnifico, Teotihuacan: City of the Gods, Ticket to Ride, and Mombasa, but I’ll leave roasting those games to another day.
Feel free to tell me I’m wrong in the comments; lambast my opinions and accuse me of being uncultured swine! I dare you to write 2,000 words slamming 5 of my favourite games of all time, which you can read about by clicking here.
Well, it’s May 2022 and my family and I have contracted COVID-19 for the first time. I thought I would spend our isolation time reflecting on the series of games with the name that no one really thought remarkable until it overtook our world; Pandemic.
How to Play
Pandemic is a cooperative game where players are trying to discover the cure to four diseases ravaging the world. The game begins by dealing players cards out of the player deck, then seeding the deck with epidemic cards, which serve to make things suddenly very bad in a random location, and to increase the pressure on the players.
In Pandemic, you and your friends will take actions to move around the world, treat diseases (which removes one disease cube from the location your player pawn is in), build research stations, and trade cards with each other. The goal of the game is to discover all 4 cures by discarding 5 cards of the same colour while your pawn is at a research centre. Players all lose together if the player deck runs out, or if the outbreak tracker hits 0, or if you ever need to place a cube of a specific colour, but you’ve run out. With 3 ways to lose, players are sometimes forced to figure out which crisis is the most demanding before choosing which actions to take.
To begin the game, 9 cards are drawn from the infect cities deck, with 3 disease cubes placed on the first three cities, 2 cubes on the next three cities, and 1 cube on the final three cities. With this initial seed and some potential hot-spots, the stage is set. All players begin in Atlanta (the home of the CDC), and the game is on.
Review
Pandemic has become a venerable classic. It feels like it singlehandedly defines the co-op genre, at least as I know it. I started playing board games in 2014, at which point the 2012 reprint of Pandemic had filled store shelves and was actively being pushed onto new gamers. I’m very glad it was, because the concept of a fully cooperative game seemed so foreign to me that I probably wouldn’t have tried it without a push. After trying Pandemic, cooperative quickly became one of my favourite genres of board games.
Now, I know there were cooperative games long before 2008’s Pandemic, but this game brought the concept into the mainstream (at least, mainstream for the board game hobby), and inspired a wave of excellent cooperative experiences after it. It’s hard to understate the effect that Pandemic and Matt Leacock has had on the board game hobby, but I’m not here to give you a history lesson. Let’s talk about Pandemic specifically.
The Pandemic system, as it’s come to be known, has a formula that many other games have iterated on (especially by designer Matt Leacock in his subsequent cooperative games, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, not to mention the other Pandemic spin-offs). The formula is thus: A player takes a number of actions on their turn, then draws some cards which are used to amplify actions or further the end game objective, and then bad stuff happens. While I’m simplifying it, the goal of the game is to manage the bad stuff long enough to accomplish your long term objectives. While randomness can play a part and utterly crush your team’s efforts, generally the experience is tense and gives you the feeling that you might just pull through, as long as you don’t draw one specific card that would cause catastrophic ramifications.
I want to talk briefly about the infection deck, because it is an absolutely brilliant mechanic. The infection deck is the engine that gives players something to do while they’re working on curing the diseases. When a city is drawn from the infection deck, it gets a disease cube placed onto it, then it’s placed into the infection deck discard pile. When an epidemic strikes, you draw a card from the bottom of the deck, put 3(!) disease cubes on that one city, then shuffle all the discarded infection cards together and place them on top of the deck. From that moment on the stress of the game leaps. Suddenly there’s a time pressure; all those cities that were somewhat fine, and not quite teetering on the brink of disaster are now in the crosshairs. At any time those cities can be drawn again during the infect cities step of the game, and if they do, it will spell trouble.
I always find Pandemic tense. With three ways to lose and only one way to win, you need to be quick on completing your objectives while not throwing away too many cards. It’s tempting to use the cards liberally to fly around the board, but doing so directly takes away from your ability to cure diseases. It’s also tempting to horde cards in your hand, but with a hard hand limit of 7 cards, you’ll quickly be discarding cards with absolutely no benefit. it’s important to strike a balance.
Speaking of balance I want to mention the character roles. Each person gets a role at the start of the game that offers them a special ability, but some feel significantly better than others. While some abilities are ALWAYS useful (like the medic, who can cure all the cubes of one colour with a single action, an ability that you’ll be using at least once per turn), others characters feel more situational (like the Contingency Planner who can re-use event cards). I always want to explore more characters, but I go into every game wanting to win and some characters just jive better with me than others.
Pandemic is a truly cooperative experience. As most people play with open hands and/or open information (because it’s a co-op game, there’s no reason to hide), it can be prone to someone gruffly taking over the table, dictating what each player should do on their turn, and turning it into a one player game instead of a team effort. I don’t fault the game for that, however; it’s up to the players to establish their own ground rules. Cardboard does a terrible job of maintaining boundaries after all.
I’m always surprised and how close my games of Pandemic end up. It’s incredibly rare that we win outright, without any fear that at least one of the lose conditions will overtake our efforts to save the world. Very often we win on the very last, or second to last possible turn, just barely curing the last disease through a convoluted series of actions that manage to get the last two cards into the last player’s hand so that they can just barely make it to the research centre with a single action to spare. And then there’s the blowouts – the bad luck games where you are given a binary option at the beginning. Cure red or cure yellow. With no further information you arbitrarily make a choice to cure red, only to have the next few cities to get infected be yellow, which is obviously followed by an outbreak in yellow, which triggers another and another and another outbreak, sinking your outbreak tracker deep into the doom end of the track.
The blowouts aren’t very common, but they do exist. I’m not sure if they can be ‘fixed’ or not, but they rarely bother me. Resetting the deck can be tedious if you want to reshuffle and try again right away, but it’s a small price to pay for a easy to learn and play game that offers such a interesting experience.
Because Pandemic is easy to learn, it’s often used as an on-ramp to the world of board games, showing players that there’s more to this cardboard hobby than rolling dice and slowly crawling your army around the world. There’s joy and teamwork, elation and tension, and it shows that not everything needs to be a competition.
My wife and I love cooperative games, and that love started with Pandemic. Since then, we’ve moved onto other great cooperative games like Burgle Bros and Now Boarding, both designed by Tim Fowers, and I’ve had a lot enjoyment playing the Pandemic spin off games, like Pandemic: The Cure, Pandemic: Fall of Rome, and Pandemic: Rising Tide. If you haven’t played Pandemic, or any other cooperative games, I can not suggest it enough. If you play it enough and start to feel tired on what the base box is offering, there are three expansions that drastically change up how the game is played, including many more character roles, a 5th disease, and mutations that make each of the diseases act in different ways.
Designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Artist: Dann May
Release Year: 2022
Mechanics: Pattern Building, Set Collection
Players: 2 or 4
A copy of Abstract Academy was provided by the publisher for review purposes.
Introduction
I have never aspired to being an artist. I’ve scribbled little sausage people in the margins of my notebooks while in school, but chose to spend my efforts with the written word instead. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that I’ve never applied paint to canvas.
That said, some of my family members are ardent artists. One will paint anything they can get their hands on, including their game controllers or the table they happen to be sitting at, and the other achieved a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Tangentially to this, I had aunts and grandparents who vary from incredible artists with paint to amazingly skillful with wood. What I’m trying to say is there is art all around me, but devoid in myself.
How to Play
Abstract Academy is a two of four player game where players are playing cards to a shared tableau in an effort to achieve the goals that are laid out at the start of the game.
What makes Abstract Academy unique is that the grid of cards doesn’t start out set; on your turn you can play a card orthogonally adjacent to any other card on the table, until there are 4 cards on the X axis and 4 cards on the Y axis. Once that requirement has been met, then the grid becomes locked.
Once the grid is locked, the ‘home row’ and scoring zones become set. The row of cards closest to you is your ‘home row’, your opponents cannot play cards in the row closest to you. Your scoring zone is the two rows of cards closest to you. Once the 4 by 4 grid of cards is completely full, you score each of the objectives. In the first round, you’ll be evaluating the colours. In the second round you’ll evaluate the composition of your scoring area, and in the third round you’ll have a mix of objectives from the previous two rounds.
After 3 rounds, the player with the most points wins.
Review
Abstract Academy‘s box is white with big colourful letters. If it were a much larger box it would certainly catch more attention. Thankfully the box is literally as big as it needs to be. Ninety-two cards is everything that makes up Abstract Academy. I really appreciate the packaging being slim and small, taking up almost no space on my shelf and making it very easy to travel with. What I don’t like is that the flap to open the box is difficult to open, and I suspect won’t stand the test of time.
The cards in Abstract Academy are excellent. The card stock is thick and glossy and the colours are vibrant, which is important in a game that focuses on the colours on the cards. The main deck of cards that you’ll be handling look to include various brush strokes and the textures of paint on canvas. If you’ve painted before, you’ll feel right at home.
The game was easy to teach, but had a few edge cases that made it slightly tricky. “You cannot play cards in your opponent’s home row, but the home row isn’t decided until 4 cards are played on the x axis. Also, you can play on your opponent’s home row if there are no other options.”
Once beyond the rules, Abstract Academy plays quickly. Turn by turn you’ll each place cards onto the tableau either trying to further your own goals, or try to hamper your opponents. If the goal is to have the most blue zones, you might play a card that connects a couple of their blue zones together, lowering their overall number.
It is possible to have an entire shut-out during a round where a single player wins all the objectives, which feels like it shouldn’t happen, but sometimes that’s just how the cookie crumbles. Each player will also get a personal objective each round where they’re trying to create a shape somewhere in their scoring zone. You get an objective every round, but if you don’t accomplish your goal it can carry over to the next round. That said, you can only accomplish one goal per round, so holding onto them round to round isn’t very helpful.
When evaluating the goal cards, ties are broken by the ‘Teacher’s Pet’ card. If you have this card and there is a tie, you must surrender the card to your opponent, but you win the tie. I actually really like this decision as it feels like the most fair way to distribute who wins ties.
Luck does play a role in how well you can do at Abstract Academy, but it’s not obvious. Sometimes you may find you need a very specific order of colours in order to accomplish a shape that you just can’t seem to get. You’ll flip the card around and around desperately wishing you could just flip it over and get the mirror image. Alas, the paint is not always in your favour.
Overall, Abstract Academy is a cool little two player game that is worth playing with the artist in your life. While the art theme is just a window dressing, I’m a fan of games using a theme to appeal to an audience wider than the those already in the board game hobby. It may draw someone in who has always loved art, but hasn’t experienced the joy of board and card games yet.
You can get Abstract Academy from the Crafty Games website and it includes a promo card when ordering directly from the publisher.
