Every year I encourage the members of my regular game group to create a top 100 games of all time. Today I’m finishing the 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 dislike.
Hate is a very strong word, and most of these games I would still play. These are games that I would call ‘fine’ and would play if Bear was really keen, but are not games I would ever suggest playing on our game nights.
Todays victim is Bear. He swings much further over to the thematic and direct conflict sides of the spectrum than the other members of my game group. He’s probably the person whos tastes differs the most from mine. He agrees that Food Chain Magnate is a fantastic game, but he detests Galaxy Trucker. All things shake out I suppose.
Terraforming Mars #2
Sometimes I wonder if my distaste for Terraforming Mars stems from a series of poor experiences. Every time I sit down to play Terraforming Mars I struggle to get anything done. More than once I’ve been given a starting corporation that suggests a direction to follow, only to have that direction be a red herring (like starting with the corporation that benefits Jovian tags, only to never see a single Jovian card, even with the drafting variant). The deck of cards is massive, and the number of cards that I see in the game is low and fixed. It’s prohibitively expensive to chase milling the deck. It’s frustrating to be dealt an initial hand of cards, pick a strategy to chase, only for that strategy to be neutered by the luck of the draw.
Further to luck of the draw, many cards have prerequisites that must be met before the card can be played. Thematically, these cards are great! The planet needs to have a certain amount of oxygen before life can be sustained, or it needs to be cold enough for glaciers to still exist so you can melt them, But in a gameplay sense, drawing cards that have already had their conditions surpassed feels lame. You only get 4 cards per turn, and now one of those cards is dead on arrival.
Terraforming Mars is also entirely too long. In my experience, two of the three terraforming requirements rocket up their tracks, completing within a few generations. Then the third one drags along at a glacial pace. I’ve heard that people can finish a game in under two hours, but that has not been my experience. In a game where luck is a significant factor and someone falling behind in an engine building game means catching up feels neigh impossible.
I also complain about the component quality, the player boards are woefully thin, and horribly susceptible to being jostled. It sucks to have to chase down an aftermarket tray to keep everything in it’s place. The cubes have a nice shiny metallic paint, but they’re easily scratched and dinged showing their wear very prominently.
When Terraforming Mars comes together, it absolutely sings. It feels good to get an engine running and to take turn after turn, triggering combos and converting resources to realize your objective. I like the tempo considerations, biding your time with actions waiting to see if someone is going to pass or make a run on one of the objectives you have your eye on, and I enjoy the thematic of the game. I love the narrative of bringing Deimos down to massively increase the temperature of the planet at the mild sacrifice of your neighbour’s tree farm. Unfortunately it’s a song I’ve only heard other people talk about.
I don’t begrudge anyone who loves Terraforming Mars, but it’s not a game I enjoy playing, and would opt to play something else that gives me similar feels, such as Earth, Ark Nova, or even Race for the Galaxy (which has a lot of the same complaints, but plays in less than an hour).
Twilight Struggle #5
I can see the brilliant design work that lies within Twilight Struggle by Anada Gupta and Jason Matthews. A Cold War game where one player assumes the role of the USA, while the other leads USSR. The cards take players through the decades with various events and major political upheavals within the time frame. Like many two player only games, I can see how Twilight Struggle can rocket up someone’s favourite game list if you have a willing and eager partner to play over and over with, especially if you’re both exploring and growing at the same pace.
Twilight Struggle‘s multi-use cards are exciting and brutal if you’re caught flat-footed. Knowing which cards can come up is a major part of playing Twilight Struggle well, which makes it a frustrating learning experience. Cards can be played as events or operations, and cards can be ‘associated’ with the USSR or the US, which means if you play a card that’s associated with your opponent’s nation for the operation points, the event still occurs. An aspect of the game is recognizing how to best play the worst cards in your hand, which is painful. I don’t like treading water, or winning wars of attrition.
It feels like a lot of the game is exploiting your opponent’s weaknesses, or push them into making a bad decision. Controlling Defcon, mitigating your opponent’s events, and spreading your nation’s influence across the map are all subjects worthy of their own strategy guides, and getting into each of those systems is a challenge. There are 4 ways for the agme to end, if someone has 20 VP, if either side controls Europe when the Europe scoring card is played, or, if your opponent causes the DEFCON level to reach 1. If none of those three events happen, then there is a final scoring. I’ve only played Twilight Struggle 4 times, but I’ve never seen a game reach the end game scoring phase.
Twilight Squabble reduces Twilight Struggle into a very short rock-paper-scissors game about trying to push your opponent into DEFCON that I enjoy more (mostly because no matter how badly I’m doing, it’s over in a matter of moments. Root is another asymmetric war game that I enjoy more, mostly due to the cutesy woodland aesthetic.
Dominion #28
The grand-daddy of deck builders, Dominion is a game that spawned a new genre of games. Donald X. Vaccarino’s game of buying cards from a central market to put into your discard pile, then re-shuffling the discard pile to become your draw deck was my absolute favourite game mechanic for a long while. Unfortunately for Dominion, I started playing board games in 2014 and games like Clank!, Star Realms, Super Motherload, Paperback, and Concordia hit my table first. By the time I finally got the opportunity to play Dominion, it felt like a step backwards. Also, the people who are willing to play Dominion now are the people who fell into it HARD. With custom storage solutions, half a dozen expansions, and arguments over how to set the initial seed, it simultaneously feels like too much (in terms of variability) and not enough (in terms of complexity).
I’m also not a fan of how static the game state feels. Once the seed is set, you can more or less plan out your strategy from turn one. Unless you’re playing with cards that affect other players, it’s more just you against your deck. I do love the combos the game can generate, and nailing a massive turn is immensely satisfying, but I feel the sun has set on Dominion and I missed the glory days.
As I said before, Most of the deck builders I really enjoy have a board component that gives me something to do with my cards, like Super Motherload, and Clank!. If I want a pure deck builder, Paperback or Hardback are my go-tos, but only if I want to get stomped on by my partner who is crazy good at both those games.
Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game #33
I’ve only just watched the Battlestar Galactica TV series, solely because the first time I played Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game (hereby referred to as BSG:TBG) all the other players were making references to the plot lines, spouting quotes from the show, and making thematic decisions. I had chosen to play Lee Adama (Apollo), and was playing him like a chaotic warmonger with a death wish, which the other players told me was ‘wrong’ and didn’t fit the characters profile
As a game, BSG:TBG is fine. It’s long, fairly complex, and difficult. In BSG:TBG, it not about building an unstoppable force, and more about limping across the finish line. Add to that, I’ve never been a fan of bluffing games, as I feel guilt when I accuse someone and they fire back, offended that I would dare cast suspicion their way, even if it turns out I was right all along. The gameplay of BSG:TBG is mediocre and random. You spend cards to test skills, draw more cards, and try to make your way to Earth. If someone cast suspicion on you, you may just be thrown into the brig, which saps the fun out of the experience. Also, this is a long experience, 3 – 4 hours total. And it’s somewhat deflating when you spend 2 hours as a human, trying to do your very best only to become a cylon halfway through and now need to sabatoge the last two hours of work you’ve put into the experience.
I’m a fairly conservative person (in temperament, not politically). I’m content to sit in my chair for two hours and quietly contemplate our choices with rational discussion. A victory is celebrated with a muted “sweet” and a betrayal is greeted with a quiet “dang”. Having several people of my temperament does not make for a good social deduction game. We have a fried who lovesBSG:TBG, and has the perfect temperament to play. My enjoyment doesn’t come from the game mechanics, but from watching this loose cannon fire off accusations from turn one, boisterously proclaim that everyone is a Cylon, and hoot and holler when a big moment happens. It’s the other players that create the fun in BSG:TBG, not the game itself.
What do I enjoy that’s similar to BSG:TBG? Eclipse is a space war game, but no cooperative. I enjoy the Pandemic spin-off games or Burgle Bros. if I’m looking for a cooperative experience, but they don’t t have any hidden traitors (although I can’t think of a single game that I enjoy that has a hidden traitor element).
Backgammon #39
It’s roll and move. Come on. It’s not that intresting.
Actually, my mom and I play Backgammon every now and then and it’s surprisingly enjoyable, but only because we razz each other. Bear swears up and down that Backgammon is best when playing with stakes and using the doubling die to make a single game count for more. Being risk-adverse, I’d rather not put anything other than the time it takes to play a game on the line. It can be exhilarating when all hope is lost but a lucky double 6’s roll cinches a come-from-behind victory. But over-all, it’s a game about rolling dice and moving your discs. The player who rolls better will win, unless they do something reckless like leaving their single pawn unprotected in their opponents house, in which case, they deserve the loss.
It’s pretty rare that I learn a game digitally. I find it so much harder to learn a game by watching videos on YouTube then starting a game on a website like Boardgamearena.com or Yucata.de and just seeing how it goes over a couple of days. I end up acting like those old point-and-click adventure games, where I just click anything that’s available to click and hope to stumble onto the answer. Generally, reading the rules gives me a framework of how to play, but I find it quite difficult to conceptualize or strategize until I’ve played a game through at least once.
Vikings is a game that I played a dozen times on Yucata.de before picking up the physical edition. The online implementation is great, but like most of us who are ‘in the board game hobby’, given the choice between playing games in a web browser and playing a game in the table, we’ll take the table every time. And I’m glad I did, Vikings by Michael Kiesling is a gem of a game.
How to Play
To play Vikings, each round 12 tiles are laid out around the central spinning wheel. Any boat tiles are placed at the highest available number and any island tile is placed at the lowest available number. Then 12 Vikings are pulled from the bag and sorted into their colours and placed next to each tile. Blue Vikings go among the lowest number, then yellows, greens, reds, blacks and finally greys Vikings are placed at the highest number. At the beginning of the game you’re given coins depending on the number of players and a single island start tile.
On your turn you need to buy a tile and Viking pair, and place the tile into your tableau. The amount you pay for a tile and Viking combo is dictated by the wheel in the centre of the table, from 11 gold all the way down to 0 gold. You can only take the 0 cost tile if the Viking next to that island is the only one of its colour available.
After buying an island and Viking, you need to place the island into your tableau. If you manage to place the island tile in the same colour row as your Viking, you can place the Viking right onto that piece of land, otherwise your Viking has to sit at the top of the board until a boatswain ferries it onto an empty tile. It’s also important to note that the island tiles come in three varieties, start, middle, and end. If you have a start tile in your tableau, then you can put a middle or end tile against it, but you can’t put two start tiles adjacent to each other.
When someone does manage to take the free tile, the price wheel rotates clockwise until the 0 spot is lined up with the next available Viking, thereby making everything else cheaper. If you choose to buy the most expensive tile available, you’ll also get a special tile that offers some significant benefits.
If the tile you take happens to have an invading boat instead of a piece of island, the Viking defaults to sitting on the beach at the top of your board, and the boat is placed along the top row on your tableau. Any boat along the top of your tableau will negate some of your Vikings in that column, rendering them useless.
When I’m teaching Vikings, I feel a bit like I’m teaching Galaxy Trucker. “These blue Vikings are fishermen, they feed 5 Vikings in your commune. You want as many of these as possible. The yellow Vikings are gold smiths, they earn you 3 gold each. You want as many of these as possible. The red Vikings are nobles, they give you two points per red Viking. You want as many of them as possible!” Every Viking has their role, and the left side of the player board will remind of as to what each one does.
Review
Vikings by Michael Kiesling defies expectations. When you hear Vikings, you’ll think exploration, pillaging, and mayhem. In this box you’ll instead find a fast economic game about fiscal responsibility and real estate management. In fact, the only thing that really makes Vikings feel like a Viking game, is the meeples with the horned helmets.
You have a limited amount of money to spend on getting Vikings and limited ways to generate more gold. You need to deal with Vikings of the wrong colour associated with exactly the tile you need so you’ll need to make do. Sometimes in a round there will only be one or two of the coveted starting tiles, forcing you need to balance picking other Vikings and hoping the price for that one tile drops a bit, but not too low that one of your opponents leaps out and takes before you.
The game comes with a couple optional variants, such as bidding for turn order, and advanced tiles that offer a benefit if you buy the most expensive tile available. I rarely use the bidding for turn order option, but I never play without the advanced tiles. They don’t add much to the rules or complexity, but they offer rewards for doing something unexpected, like buying the most expensive tile on the board. Sometimes the cheaper tiles aren’t that appealing it’s really nice to have a reward for spending a bit of coin on the more expensive tiles.
If you run out of money you can opt to use victory points to make up the difference at a rate of 1 to 1. You are never forced to trade points for gold, but if you can if you want. You better make sure that doing so worth your while, as at the end of the game the conversion back from gold to victory points is 5 gold to 1 point.
Vikings plays well at all player counts, but it does feel weird to play several 4 player games, then switch to a two player game. The number of Vikings and islands don’t change, so you just end up accumulating twice as many as you normally would have. It’s full of decisions and trade-offs that make each game feel different and intresting.
Vikings doesn’t coddle you with a catch up mechanism. If you start falling behind you are liable to stay behind. While there’s no way to directly interact with someone, a keen eye can deny someone a crucial component to their community. Thankfully, Vikings doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. With a bright colour pallet and unique spinner in the middle of the table and a 45-60 minute playtime, it’s easy to see why Vikings has is my most played Michael Keisling game. It’s a solid design and it keeps coming back out for more.
A prototype of Draft & Write Records was provided by the publisher for review purposes
Introduction
A great shame in my life is that I never grew up appreciating music. I lived in a very small town and the extent of my exposure to music were some old country cassettes and a bunch of recorders stuffed into the school’s storage. As a teenager I got my hands a few CD’s, like Sum 41’s All Killer No Filler, Green Day’s American Idiot, and The Killers Hot Fuss. I listened to these 3 CDs on repeat on my Sony Discman, but getting new or varied albums was quite a challenge. The closest town with a ‘music’ store was 4 hours away, and at the time, buying new albums was directly competing with my desire to buy books and video games.
As an adult, living in the world of streaming, I spend most of my time listening to Pokémon Lo-Fi remixes while I work, or to the local alt-rock radio station during my morning commute. Unfortunately, music is just background noise in my life, it’s never the focus.
What I’m trying to say here, is that I have no special affinity for musically themed games. But enough about my music history (or great lack thereof), let’s talk about Draft & Write Records by Inside Up Games!
How to Play
In Draft & Write Records players will embark on a weeks long quest to become the most popular band in all the land, or, the most popular band at your table. Each round of the game is structured after a week. On the first day of the week phase, 5 cards are dealt out to each player. Each player simultaneously selects one of the cards to keep, and passes the rest to their neighbour. All players reveal their card simultaneously, taking the associated action depicted on the card.
Players repeat this three more times, until they’ve played 4 cards total. The fifth card is tossed into a common discard pile, then the weekend arrives. During the weekend, all players evaluate the common goals. If anyone achieved them, they record the score on their sheet, and the goal is discarded. After all goals have been evaluated, the goal line is refreshed, and the game continues with a whole new week.
There are 5 different actions depicted on the cards, each action corresponds to a specific section of your player sheet. The centre is building your band, which has you playing musicians, production staff, and backstage staff. Each band member has a point value, and 4 attributes. You record the points and the attributes in a single section. Should an attribute match with an adjacent band member, you create a harmony, allowing you to cross off a section on the harmony track (which can net you bonus actions and victory points.
The Agenda cards refer to a 4 by 4 grid of symbols in the top right corner. You’ll need 4 symbols in a row or column to unlock the bonuses on both sides of the line. The asset cards allow you to cross off matching icons on the asset section, and you’ll earn the bonuses if you manage to cross off the asset on both sides of the bonus.
The releases and the tours sections of the board aren’t actions represented on cards. The only way you can progress in those spaces is by unlocking the associated bonus peppered throughout the board. If you are ever in a situation where you cannot play a card, or you choose not to play a card, you must take a ‘fail’, which will deliver negative points. Too many fails will end the game for everyone.
The game is over if someone fills their fail track, fills their goal track, or, completely fills their band section. The points are tallied, and the player with the highest score is the winner!
Review
Draft & Write Records is coming to Kickstarter on September 27th. As always with anything that gets produced via a crowdfunding campaign, everything is subject to change.
As I alluded to above, I have no affinity for the theme; music has never been a big part of my life. I’ve made a few feeble attempts at learning some instruments, but it’s not a skill I’ve developed.
In Draft & Write Records players are drafting actions to use to fill out their player board. At first glance the board looks big, colourful, and busy, difficult to intuit how all the sections work together. Learning the game from the rulebook was straightforward and clear. Each section of your player sheet operates independently and the rule book walks through them one at a time.
Every round (or week) starts with 5 cards. On your turn, you pick one card, and pass the rest along. All players reveal their choices simultaneously, and take the action listed on the card they chose. After 4 actions, the 5th card is tossed into a central discard pile, and the goals are evaluated.
Front and centre of the board is the band lineup, featuring a lead singer, 4 musicians, 3 production crew, and 4 backstage staff. Each band member has 4 traits and a point value. If you can arrange your band members in a such a way that the traits alight, you’ll create a harmony, which lets you cross off a matching colour along the bottom of your sheet. This track is worth a fair amount of points, and helps lead to record deals.
Along the right side of the board are two different grids. In the top grid (your band’s agenda) you need to cross off 4 icons in a row to earn the bonuses on either end of the row. On the bottom right is a tablet depicting your bands assets, with a series of bonuses surrounded by icons. If you manage to cross off both the icons surrounding a bonus icon, you earn that bonus.
The joy of the ‘roll and write’ or ‘flip and write’, or now, the ‘draft and write’ genre of games is the ability to earn cascading bonuses. It feels so good when you take your single card, add a musician to your band list, cross off a harmony along the bottom, which gives you a free action in your agenda, which completes a row and a diagonal, gives you a record deal, a tour, and two more harmony dots you can fill in, which can cascade into more bonuses.
Of course, a turn like that can only really happen once per game and requires a lot of set up. Slowly building up your tableau in preparation for this moment can feel painful, but Draft & Write Records is pretty good at doling out little bits of bonuses as you work towards the big combo that will rocket your band into stardom.
It’s important to promote yourself on the radio!
The player deck can be absolutely massive if playing with the full complement of 6 players. You’ll only see 5 cards at a time, and your neighbours can’t affect your game, except for hate-drafting away the exact card you need. Personally, I didn’t feel compelled to scope out my competition’s sheets, or take a card that was of little benefit to me just to keep it out of the hands of my opponent. Most of your game will be spent just looking at your own sheet and trying to maximize your score.
In between each week is a goal evaluation phase. In the centre of the table are 4 goals that all players evaluate to try and earn points. They range from piddly 4 point goals like “Collect 2 piano symbols” all the way up to 24 point diamond goals requiring you hire 6x 1 point crew members. The goals deck is hefty, with 66 different goals in the version I played, which is great for variability and can lead players down lucrative paths they might not have considered before. Many of the goals also offer extra bonuses when they’re achieved, again, potentially triggering cascading bonuses and bringing a smile to my face.
Draft & Write Records feels much bigger and slower to play than many of the other “X and write” games I’ve played in the past, like Railroad Ink, or Cartographers. I enjoy the drafting element as it gives each player a different game to play. Maybe I’ll focus on building out my assets and harmonies more, while another player prioritizes going on tours. I like that our games will be different, and it’s not just giving every player the same choices and seeing who does best with them.
In the end, Draft & Write Records is a fun game to play and achieving the cascading combos triggers a dopamine release that I find incredibly satisfying. If you’re a fan of the “X and write” genre, Draft & Write Records is worth trying, doubly so if you have any affinity for the theme.
Mechanics: Cooperative, Dice Rolling Combat, Variable Player Powers
Players: 1 to 5
A prototype copy of the game was provided for review purposes
How to Play
Familiars and Foes is a 1 to 5 player cooperative boss battling game where you play as an elemental fox familiar on a quest to save the good witches and wizards of Joralee. A game of Familiars and Foes lasts for 4 waves, and pits players against a variety of enemy monsters.
To begin the game, all players chose an asymmetric familiar, and their corresponding spell cards. One will be the basic spells that you can use right from the start of the game, and the other will be the advanced spells that need to be unlocked by completing a variety of basic actions. The back of the rule book has a chart that seeds the board with a number of foes based on your player count, and chosen difficulty level.
To begin a round of Familiars and Foes, players first draw the witch or wizard they’re rescuing. If the element of the sorcerer matches one of the familiars, great! They have access to an extra special power during this wave. If the mage in distress doesn’t have a matching familiar in play, they’re simply discarded.
The foes for the wave are set into their slots, with their health dependent on the number of players at the table. The turn order is set, and the game begins. Players on their turn can either preform a physical attack, cast a spell, or play their artifact.
Physical attacks tables are listed on each player’s sheet, with a varying threshold for successes and failures for each character. One character would hurt themselves if you rolled 6 or under, but would do 4 damage if the die exceeded 16. Another character had easier thresholds, but lower rewards.
Each character has their own set of spells, although the basic spells are all pretty similar. On your turn if you chose to play a spell you simply select which one you’d like to cast, pay the required mana, and roll the die, hoping to earn a success by exceeding the threshold, which is different for each spell. Again, higher risks mean higher rewards. If you manage to land a hit using a basic attack, each other player at the table had the opportunity to pile on, using the Ballyhoo mechanic. They pay a single magic point, then flip a coin. Heads, they deal two damage. Tails, they take one damage. If the Ballyhoo succeeds, the next player can pile on too. The Ballyhoo either continues until all players have piled on, or someone fails the coin flip.
At the beginning of the game, each familiar draws an artifact card that offers a powerful onetime bonus. On your turn, you can choose to use your artifact, but then it’s gone for the rest of the game. Each player also has a special ability that they can use 3 times during the game. Again, once those charges are gone, so is the ability.
Play continues from character to character as dictated by the turn order tracker, until it finally reaches the enemy. All the foes that are still alive at this point roll a die, and act according to their table.
Once all the foes are defeated, players restore their magic points to full health, and proceed with the next wave. Finish 4 waves and you’ve won! If all players have their health points reduced to 0, the Familiars have failed.
Review
I was not prepared for how adorable Familiars and Foes was. This game exudes charm and character. I absolutely adore the art all over everything. The Familiars are cute, and I desperately want their pushes to adorn my shelves, the enemies are charming and clever, and the little artist flourishes left me absolutely charmed. Even the Familiars’ Familiars, the frogs, are adorable. I’ll say it loud and proud right now, I would die for Spike.
The copy I got to play is a prototype copy, and the designers assure me that every component that I had my hands on will be upgraded during the course of their crowdfunding campaign. Everything physical was fine, but I am looking forward to higher quality card stock. The tarot sized cards I got were a little bowed during my first play, which is only slightly disappointing. All the cards sit on the table for the entire game, meaning the bending isn’t a big deal, but it’s a minor annoyance with the physical production.
That being said, I love the large cards. It makes it easy to read the text from across the table, and gives the artist lots of room to display their charming foes. Seriously, Familiars and Foes art direction has absolutely charmed me. The heroes, the villains, everything is a joy to look at.
The gameplay is fast and simple, which is good for a game you plan on playing with your family. On your turn you choose to either do a physical attack, or cast a spell, then roll the die to determine if you were successful or not. In some cases, a low roll would see you suffering self-damage, while high rolls would deal critical hits.
The spells each character can cast are listed on their player sheet, and generally ask players how much risk they’re willing to take on, in return for how much damage they want to deal to the foe. The choices are straightforward and simple. Once you’ve made your choice, you roll the die and let fate decide if you made the right choice or not. There are precious few chances to re-roll a bad result, meaning sometimes the game might be a cakewalk, while other times you’ll find yourself getting crippled by the first Foe.
I’ve often talked about how I like progression in games, how I want to get stronger as the game goes on instead of trying to just survive a series of attritional battles. In this regard, I wish there were ways to earn more artifacts during the gameplay instead of only having one at the beginning. That said, I do enjoy the achievement system that unlocks your stronger spells. It’s also a helpful teaching tool, reducing the number of actions each player needs to consider at the start of the turn, and gives players a reason to try all their basic actions first, before giving them the real juicy attacks. I also appreciate that each witch or wizard you manage to rescue offers a boon to their corresponding familiar, potentially giving you a game-saving benefit.
I’m a fan of the Rougelike genre. Rogue Legacy, Enter the Gungeon, Wizard of Legend, and Slay the Spire are some of my favourite video games. Familiars and Foes has aspects that remind me of those rougelike games. Each time you set the game up, you’ll be in for a different combination of monsters and different artifacts that can drastically change how you will approach the wave. I really enjoy this variability, and I am looking forward to seeing more foes, more artifacts, and more familiars, hopefully in the form of stretch goals or future expansions. I would like to see the asymmetry in the characters expanded on even further, or having different ‘advance spell builds’ available for each Familiar to increase the replayability.
I enjoyed Familiars and Foes more than I expected. The charming art captured my heart and helped build a narrative in my head. The game-play is simplistic; choose an attack and roll a die to see if you hit, but I’m okay with that. I’m sure this would be a hit with my 6-year-old niece, even if she needs an adult to help her manage the game system. The cute art draws her in, the simple rule set doesn’t scare her away, and the pure joy that comes from rolling the die and scoring that critical hit is unparalleled. Familiars and Foes is a great cooperative game to introduce younger members of the family to the joy of board games.
Every year I encourage the members of my regular game group to create a top 100 games of all time. Today I’m continuing the series in which I trash on my friends favourite games, because apparently, I hate fun.
Hate is a very strong word, and most of these games I would still play. These are games that I would call ‘fine’ and would play if Bigfoot was really keen, but they are not games I would ever suggest playing on our game nights.
Today I’m picking on Bigfoot. He would identify himself as a euro gamer, while not specifically some who delights in trading cubes, he does seem to excel at it. Bigfoot is generally ‘the person to beat’ and more than once we’ve finished a game only to find his score is more than the rest of ours combined. While he’s not totally against the odd direct conflict game, his preferences are firmly in the economic side of the spectrum. For each of the games on this list, I’ve included where in his top 100 each of these games sit
Gaia Project #2 & Terra Mystica #14
My dislike for Gaia Project stems more from my dislike of its spiritual prequel Terra Mystica than anything else. While Gaia Project does address some of the more common complaints from its predecessor, such as helping prevent getting pinned in the corner and unable to do anything, It doesn’t do enough different to make me enjoy it.
I find the actions in Gaia Project to be prohibitively expensive. My biggest complaint is that I don’t like having to manage four different resources (Ore, Knowledge, Credits, and Power), to do anything, and that I always seem to be short on at least one of the resources, grinding my progress to a halt. I also complain about runaway leaders, It’s tough to watch one player pass early because they ran out of a resource, and watch another player take action after action, rush up a technology track, gain more benefits and start the next round in a much better position. I know this can be resolved if you ‘git gud’, but I’m just a scrub.
Gaia Project and Terra Mystica both reward players who plan out far ahead, and are able to squeeze efficiency out of every last action, and I’m jealous of those who have cracked the puzzle and able to score more than 50 points in every game. I can see that Gaia Project and Terra Mystica are very deep games that reward those who put the time and effort into learning the system.
Somewhat ironically, I really enjoy Clans of Caledonia. It shares the resource generating buildings of Terra Mystica, but combines everything into one resource (gold). It also has a fluctuating market a-la Navagador, which is one of my favourite Mac Gerdts games.
Gloomhaven #6
My first experience with Gloomhaven wasn’t great. The other three people I was playing with were not exactly the best at learning and remembering all the rules to a game, so it fell to me to learn and run the game’s system for the group. We played 12 times over the course of a couple of months with 6 losses before we as a group decided not to continue with the campaign.
Flash forward to just a couple of weeks ago, I gave Gloomhaven another shot via the video game on Steam. This experience helped me figure out why Gloomhaven always left a sour taste in my mouth. My fundamental problem with Gloomhaven is I don’t like the core of the game, the card burning mechanic.
If you haven’t played, the core of the game is that you have a hand of cards – between 8 and 12, depending on your character. Every card has a top half and bottom half. On your turn, you pick two cards from your hand, and you do the top action on one card and the bottom action on another card. After you play those cards, they go into your discard pile. To get your cards back, you need to rest, which will “burn” one of your cards, removing it from your supply for the rest of the mission. If your entire hand of cards is burned and/or you can’t play 2 cards on your turn, you’re ‘exhausted’ and you’re out off the game for the rest of the mission
This means your hand is functionally your timer for the game, your options will 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 objective.
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 burn the card. It’s that fundamental aspect that I dislike, I feel like I’m being punished for doing the big cool thing, 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.
All that said, I can see why Gloomhaven is so beloved. It’s a tight and clever puzzle with lots and lots AND LOTS of good, tough decisions to make. When you manage to survive the encounter with a sliver of health left, it feels great! But I don’t derive joy from that kind of game. I don’t enjoy feeling powerless during a battle. I tend to swing more towards the Massive Darkness end of the spectrum. A big dumb dungeon crawl where I’m chucking handfuls of dice and slaying a Elite monster in a single blow.
There aren’t many dungeon crawl games that I enjoy, but I have had a bunch of fun playing Massive Darkness (Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien and Nicolas Raoult), and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth (Nathan I. Hajek and Grace Holdinghaus)
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar #26
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini is a game that absolutely has depth and the capacity for mastery. Tzolk’in‘s main hook is how it simulates the passage of time. In the centre of the board is a large gear, and connected to that gear are five other smaller gears with spaces to place workers. Every round, the centre gear will turn one space, moving all the workers one spot up their tracks. On a player’s turn, they can either play workers from their supply (costing corn if they play more than one) or take works off the gears and preforming the associated actions.
Tzolk’in absolutely rewards mastery and forward planning. It’s not enough to take Tzolk’in one turn at a time, you need to be making plans and moves several turns in advance. While it is satisfying when all your place can come together, I struggle with Tzolk’in in that I just cannot seem to balance long term strategies with short term goals. I can place a worker down knowing that I want to pull him off in four turns, but in just two turns I find myself up the creek with no corn and no workers and required to pull my workers off early only to have something to do!
Tzolk’in a neat game, and I appreciate that some will enjoy its strategic offerings more than I have. It’s fine, and I wouldn’t deny playing it again, but it’s not one that I’ll ever suggest to play.
El Grande #60
This one is easy, I simply don’t like area control/area majority as a mechanic. I don’t find it fun or interesting. El Grande is a pure distillation of area control, that’s all there really is to this game. If you enjoy area control games, look no further because this one will serve you well. It’s just not my cup of tea. You go and enjoy your gerrymandering, I’ll be over here playing dexterity games.
