Let’s flash back to 2008. I was 17 and had just moved into my first apartment in Winnipeg, leaving behind the tiny village in northern Manitoba that I had called home for my entire life. I desperately needed a job to pay the rent for my super sketchy apartment, and the only place that would hire me was the local Pita Pit, paying minimum wage.
With the experience I got From Pita Pit, I moved onto other restaurant jobs, including Joey’s Only Seafood, Chesters Chicken, and Wendy’s. It wasn’t long before I was promoted to shift supervisor at Wendys. I took their training seriously and for two years it was a good enough job to keep my bills paid and food on my table. Unfortunately the training stopped and rather than waiting to move into higher management, I chose to pursue a diploma in Culinary Arts.
I left Wendys part way into my first year of college. When I left, I described working in fast food as ‘absolutely soul grinding’ and I couldn’t get out of that restaurant fast enough. Looking back on that period of my life, I have an odd sense of bittersweet melancholy. For some reason, I miss my Wendys. I’m sure I’m just lumping my time at that job together with a time in my life where I was excited about my schooling and all the new friendships I was developing.
It’s with those rose-coloured glasses that I picked up Food Chain Magnate. This was early in my gaming career and easily my most expensive game. With almost no information other than a fast food theme that I felt drawn to, I payed the $120 and brought it home. After all, I love food and restaurants, any game with this theme is sure to be a hit for me! How bad could it be?
How to Play
Food Chain Magnate is an economic game where the player with the most money wins. That’s the goal, make the most money, there are no alternate objectives, no prizes for having the best food or the most restaurants or the most brand recognition. The only thing that matters is money. Every round of Food Chain Magnate moves through its 7 phases, and if there is still money to be earned from the central bank, a new round is started. On and on it goes until the bank has been depleted and one player stands richer than the rest.
I’ll be honest, I wrote out a ‘how to play’ summary that ended up being nearly 2,000 words long. I’m going to wager that if you found yourself on this page, it’s because you already have an opinion on Food Chain Magnate and aren’t here to learn how to play. If you’re intrested in learning how to play, I’d recommend just reading the rulebook. It’s only like, 7 pages long and does an incredibly good job in laying out how to play in an easy to digest manner.
The gang’s all here!
I will say that playing Food Chain Magnate isn’t difficult for the average player. If you have someone who knows how to manage the phases and can shepherd the game along, most of your questions can be answered by just reading the cards. The trick comes in playing well.
Review
The first time I cracked Food Chain Magnate‘s box open and laid everything out on my table, it was almost too much to bear. I found a solo variant on Board Game Geek and slowly played it, spending the better part of an afternoon and a literal litre of coffee to learn how to play Food Chain Magnate.
The very first time I laid everything out on my table
Where I’m at now in my gaming career, and with 16 plays of Food Chain Magnate under my belt, I’m ready to argue that it’s actually not technically difficult. The flow of each round is smooth and the natural progression of the game eases players into the tempo. The tempo ramps up considerably, but it’s rare for something to happen that you didn’t expect or at the very least couldn’t see coming. Unless of course you’ve been playing on your phone during someone else’s turn, at which point I have no sympathy for you.
To begin my review proper, I need to say that while I just said that Food Chain Magnate isn’t a difficult game to play, it is HARD. Being a no-luck, perfect information game, Food Chain Magnate is merciless in its punishment. Splotter’s design philosophy is “if you can’t lose on the first turn, what’s even the point of turn one?”. Food Chain Magnate doesn’t care that a poor initial restaurant placement can sink your entire game, or that the person in the lead gets rewards for doing well and there is no welfare system in place to assist those who are struggling. It is absolutely, 100% the case that someone new to Food Chain Magnate playing at a table with a group of experienced players will get stomped into the ground and walk away from this experience with a poor taste in their mouth.
Decide if you’re planning for a short or long game before you even take your first turn
Listen, I love Food Chain Magnate. I love Splotter’s design philosophy and mostly agree with their train of thought of ‘no mercy’. I can tell you that I I don’t want all my games to require such careful considerations and harsh punishments. Food Chain Magnate isn’t a game I recommend to everyone, or even want to play every single day, but under the sharp shell lies a delicious puzzle where every thread you pull can have wild and drastic effects on gameplay.
Food Chain Magnate is one of the few games where I’ve actually sat and pondered what optimal openings exist and how to counter particular strategies right from the start. You see, aside from the 30+ possible employees, there are 16 milestones that everyone is racing towards. These milestones can be incredibly powerful, and missing out some of the key ones absolutely could cost you the game.
The Milestones
A milestone is claimed when someone fulfills it’s requirement. Everyone who managed acheive the milestone on the same turn gets to claim the milestone. That milestone then becomes ‘locked’ for the rest of the game, permanently unavailable for everyone else. This makes the first few turns of Food Chain Magnate critical. On one hand players can copy what everyone is doing to ensure you get access to the same milestones. On on the other hand if you do something completely different you may find yourself as the sole owner of a very powerful persistent benefit.
These milestones include things like a freezer that lets you store food (everyone else has to discard unsold food at the end of each round), adding $5 for every burger, pizza, or drink sold, granting you the ability to use multiple trainers on the same person, rocketing them up the corporate ladder, or permanently offering a $15 discount on salaries, allowing you to have talented staff early in the game. Some of these milestones are legendary, and exploiting properly them is the key to winning Food Chain Magnate.
The quiet before the storm
The very first turn of Food Chain Magnate sets the foundation for the rest of your game. Like a massive ship, it can be incredibly difficult to turn quickly or react to sudden changes. A food chain CEO needs to be like a ship captain. When a sailor sees trouble ahead, calls for the sails to be adjusted, the rudder gets cranked all the way to the side, and the massive ship turns very slowly. In Food Chain Magnate you need to anticipate and be ready for the demands of your guests. You need to be catering to their demands before they even knew they had demands. Just reacting to other players actions is a sure fire way to miss. If you’re planning your next turn’s productions based on the demands of the current round, then you’re already two turns behind.
The first turn of Food Chain Magnate can feel like a whimper. Each player gets to recruit one entry level employee. That’s not very exciting at all! Company growth is almost exponential, every employee that you add gives you another action, allowing you to control the situation on the board and hopefully earn the hard earned cash that will win you the game.
The employees
It’s difficult to see how the gears of Food Chain Magnate‘s mechanics are interlocked and how each action changes how each future action will be taken. Every player is trying to suss out your strategy and either build their own exploitive engine whose growth will eclipse yours, or try to undercut you and steal your business.
Turn order feels critical in every round. at the beginning Food Chain Magnate it’s incredibly advantageous to go last, as you have the ability to react to anything anyone else did on their turn, You can also use the fact that no one is after you to choose to do something completely different, knowing that no one has a chance to react. midway though the game however, it becomes critical to be first, as turn order is the tie breaker for almost everything, and Food Chain Magnate often comes down to ties.
Pricing wars in Food Chain Magnate are not uncommon, if you and an opponent are the same distance from a house that keeps demanding food, it’s tempting to lower your price as getting $4 per sale is better than making no sales at all.
So this begs the question, do you go the McDonalds route and try to sell one hundred million $4 burgers, or do you posture yourself as the cream of the crop, and only sell a dozen $40 burgers? All this will depend on your opponents, as everything they do will push and pull you, forcing you into a dastardly dance of capitalism.
One of the things I love about Food Chain Magnate is that every employee can be the one that wins you the game if you find yourself properly prepared and in the right situation. if two people are racing to the bottom in a pricing war, you can eclipse their profits by flooding the market with demand, and use the Luxuries Manager to boost your price by $10. Couple that with a garden and CFO and all you need is a handful of sales to make a lot of money.
I can keep going on and on about the various situations and how Food Chain Magnate creates fascinating scenarios, but I’ve rambled on for long enough. The long story made short is that Food Chain Magnate is a wonderful, brutal design. The tempo of the games grows organically and exponentially, and I never feel like the game obfuscated what the consequences of my actions are. Every mistake I make is my own fault. A two player game is a cutthroat knife fight as you battle for control of the 9 square hamlet. A 5 player game feels like an all out war, with all the treachery and backstabbing you’d expect from corporations fiercely competing to carve out a section of market share.
Food Chain magnate has no mechanisms to help those falling behind. If you make a mistake and it puts you a turn behind everyone else, you very well may be unable to ever catch up. It’s entirely up to you to make the best of the situation you created. This also has the effect of making someone feel like they’re ‘out of the game’ 30 minutes in, and it’s no fun to sit in a game watching everyone else vye for the crown for 2 hours. And personally, even if I’m doing well in a game, I feel bad when someone is disengaged and obviously not having a good time.
Another common criticism of Food Chain Magnate is with the art. A lot of people are turned off by the way this game looks, calling it boring or bland. Personally, I love the 1950’s aesthetic, tying in the golden age of advertising really drives home the theme. I also recognize that at the start of the game the board is very plain looking. I maintain that Food Chain Magnate has a lot of important information to convey to players and it’s simple design aesthetic was chosen to minimize the information overload for an easier play over-all.
That’s a lot of demands
Another point I really want to bring up is the playtime. Everytime I think about playing Food Chain Magnate, I wince at the time commitment. Food Chain Magnate feels like a four or five hour game. Lately I’ve been recording just how long games actually take to play, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the average game of Food Chain Magnate is only two and a half hours (with 4 players). Food Chain Magnate does an amazing job of giving you a board game experience full of decisions and interactions and depth in a relatively shorter playtime. I’ve played other games that take a lot longer to play and have significantly less interesting decisions to make.
All in all, Food Chain Magnate is a beast. It demands players think ahead and prepare for future rounds. It insists that you ebb and flow with your opponents, responding and reacting to what they’ll do, rather than just to try and build your own little corner of the map where no one can bother you. It creates amazing and interesting decisions throughout its entire playtime. Playing is a joy and every single time I open the box and start playing this game, I celebrate. I love Food Chain Magnate so much, my heart accelerates during play. If that isn’t the sign of truly enjoying a board game, I don’t know what is.
Food Chain Magnate is my #1 favourite game of all time, and it has been for years. I have a hard time fathoming enjoying another game more, between the theme and mechanics, Food Chain Magnate just sings to me. I love the strategic decisions and the tense interactions between competitors. I get tingles just thinking about this game. I firmly state that Food Chain Magnate is the best game I have ever played. While I recognize that it really isn’t for everyone, it would be a disservice to call Food Chain Magnate anything other than a masterpiece in game design.
Artist: Jaroslav Jurica, Marek Loskot, Pavel Richter
Intro
Let me tell you a bit about my mom. Some of my earliest memories of my mother is of her morning ritual; she would sit at the kitchen table, steam pouring out of her coffee mug, and smoke lazily rising from the end of the cigarette gently held between two of her fingers of her left hand. In her right hand she held a pen, and on the table in front of her, a PennyPress puzzle book.
We had dozens of puzzle books in every room in the house.
My mom loves games and puzzles. When she wasn’t doing puzzles on paper at the kitchen table, she’d often be playing puzzle video games. Yoshi’s Cookie (SNES) and The New Tetris (Nintendo 64) were some of her favourites. As a child I also loved video games. Some of my first memories of Tetris were of my mom and I playing The New Tetris in the versus mode. She would mercilessly kick my butt to the curb. The phrase ‘git gud’ hadn’t been popularized yet, but that was the sentiment in our household.
Years later, I got my first job at the local video store. I used my first paycheque to buy a silver Nintendo Gamecube and Tetris Worlds. I practised and practised and practised at Tetris until I felt like I had improved significantly. My mom still kicked my butt, but less badly than before. I continued to practise until I finally emerged victorious! To this day my mom and I adore the memory of Tetris, and hold the versus mode in a special place in our hearts. However, when we play now I grind her into the dirt.
No, this is not candy
Why am I telling you all this? What does my hundreds of hours playing Tetris have to do with board games?
Let me introduce you to: Project L
How to Play
Project L begins with two stacks of tiles, differentiated by their different coloured backs. Next to each these stacks sits four face-up tiles, making up the offer row. Every player is given 2 pieces to begin their game, a single 1×1 yellow square, and a 1×2 green rectangle.
On your turn, you have three actions:
Take a new level 1 piece
Upgrade a piece
Take a puzzle tile (you can have up to 4 unfinished puzzles)
Place a piece on your puzzle
Master action (only once every round) — put a single piece on all your puzzles!
Should you complete a puzzle, remove it from the top of your player board, return your pieces to your supply, and place the puzzle in your scoring pile and take the reward from the top right corner of the (now completed) puzzle.
These tiles are wonderfully thick
Gameplay continues around the table until the black deck of tiles is depleted. Once that happens, you finish the round (so all players receive an equal number of turns), then everyone has one more turn. After that you may continue to put pieces on the puzzles from your personal supply, but at a cost of 1 point per piece placed.
Once everyone has completed their finishing touches, you total your score from your completed puzzles, subtract any points you lost doing the finishing touches and the player with the most points is the winner!
Review
The very first thing I want to talk about is the box cover. Project L‘s box is visually clean and aesthetically striking. The bold blue L on the matte black background stands out on a shelf. The lack of art here creates a mystery, “What is Project L?” you wonder, picking up the box and checking the back.
This is where my first criticism comes in. I appreciate the effect of having a stark black box and it looks fantastic. But I hate that there is no designer credit on the box. In the case of Project L, the people who make up Boardcubator (the publisher) are also the designers and have obviously made the decision to keep all logos and credits off the box. But I don’t like precedent this sets. Iworry that any other designer wanting to work with Boardcubator in the future will be strong-armed into a box cover without credits. Further, I don’t want any other companies using this as an example or an excuse to keep designer credits off the covers of boxes.
Designer and artist credits should not be relegated to the fine print
I get weirdly passionate when it comes to crediting creatives appropriately. I know the history of workers’ rights is rife with owners using every dirty trick in the book to oppress and keep from paying their creatives fairly. I’d hate for my favourite niche hobby to fall victim to terrible employment standards.
Moving on from that criticism, Project L is an excellently produced game. The acrylic tiles are glossy and rounded perfectly. They don’t feel cheap or too light in the hand. A few people have commented that they look like candy, which may or may not be a positive, depending on your proclivity for sweets and the number of small children in your life. The player aids are made of very light card stock, but that’s fine as they exist only to remind players of the few rules in the game.
So many options!
The final component are the pattern boards, which come in black and white and have inset grooves to lock your pieces in place. These tiles are thick, glossy and look fabulous. I’m less of a fan of how they’re rectangular, which also feels like an odd nitpick. I find it slightly tedious to re-orient all the tiles, and having a stack of tiles that isn’t aligned is simply not an option for me.
This bothers me to absolutely no end
Getting into the gameplay, Project L starts players off with a mere two pieces. The first few rounds of the game you are slow, taking puzzles, maybe taking more 1×1 pieces, or spending all of your actions to finish a single 4 piece pattern. After your first few puzzles and with more than 4 pieces in your personal supply, Project L falls into a predictive pattern. Take puzzles, do master action. Take puzzles, do master action. Repeat. The game lies in your ability to utilize the variety of pieces you have in your supply in a way that doesn’t waste actions or using 3 small pieces where one large piece would fit. Being able to spin multiple plates efficiently is the key to victory here.
During my first play of Project L, someone at my table exclaimed “This is just like Splendor!” which initially I agreed with. It had the same gameplay beats of choosing easy puzzles to build up your engine to effectively to accomplish the much harder goals. But after a few more plays of Project L, I’ve changed my tune. While Project L is reminiscent of other engine building games (like Splendor), it lacks the persistent benefits, which I feel is a very significant part of Splendor’s appeal. In Splendor you can amass a dozen or more gems and just take bigger and bigger cards for free, or at a steep discount. Project L on the other hand only gives you more pieces to play with (with the biggest pieces taking up 4 squares in a puzzle). Having more pieces is absolutely useful, but if you spend too much time just getting pieces, you’ll be left in the dust when it comes to scoring points at the end of the game.
It’s almost impossible to see the pattern on the back of the white tiles
The end of Project L arrives quickly. By the time players start pulling from the harder (or rather, larger) black tiles, everyone generally has enough pieces to play with and have settled into the routine of “take puzzles, master action”. The stack of tiles depletes quickly and suddenly the end of the game is triggered. Everyone gets one last action, then finishing touches, then the game is over.
When you first get your hands on Project L you expect solving each of the puzzles to be the crux of the game, but it isn’t. The game is effectively managing your pieces and actions. I’m glad the turns move quickly between players as it’s painful when you have a perfect plan that relies on a specific puzzle, but it gets snapped up by the player before you, forcing you to reconsider your entire turn. This however, is the entirety of interactions between players; there’s hardly a limit on the number of pieces (I’ve never run into a specific piece running out), there’s no way to slow down other players progress, and there’s no reason to even look at the other players until the game comes to an end. If strong player interaction is important to you, steer clear.
In summary, Project L is a fast, light, puzzle game with excellent production values. I find the latter half of the game a little predictable in that the only actions that seem worth taking are the ‘master build’ and the ‘take more puzzles’ actions. Project L is an excellent game to start or end an evening with, and anyone with a fond memory of Tetris will instantly like this game, even if it’s only due to the colourful pieces.
Designer: James Ernest, Heinrich Gumpler, Paul Peterson
Artist: Like, 25 people. Depends on the version you buy.
Intro
My favourite book of all time is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicles series. I absolutely love the way master wordsmith Rothfuss has crafted the story. My love for The Kingkiller Chronicles, and a lack of new books in the series has lead to a dangerous situation. In order to satiate my desire for more Kvothe, I feverishly consume nearly everything that is even tangentially related to the world that I’m desperate to return to. It’s that desire that lead me to owning 3 copies of the same game, with the only difference being the artwork each deck of cards features; each featuring a different set of artwork depicting the world of Temerant.
I bought the decks of cards not even considering the game that was being sold to me. Luckily I’m not the kind of person who likes to leave a game unplayed, even one bought solely for the art.
Each deck of Pairs comes with two rule sets. One is the normal rules that applies to all decks and the other is some variant for that specific set of Pairs. I’ve read over a few of the variant rulesets, but I’ve always default back to the normal, push your luck game that I use to pressure my friends and family into buying me treats.
How to Play
A deck of Pairs contains 55 cards. There are ten 10 cards, nine 9s, eight 8s and so on, all the way down to a single 1 card. Each round of Pairs begins by dealing every player a single card. The player who received the lowest card goes first. On your turn you have 2 options, either pass or hit. If you choose to pass, you take the lowest card from any other player and set it aside near you, marking your score and begin a new round by having all players discard any cards they had in front of them. If you choose to hit you simply receive another card and hope you don’t get a pair. If you do happen to get a pair, you keep one of the paired cards as your score, and begin a new round.
You continue to play like this until someone exceeds the score that ends the game (it’s variable based on the number of players – take 60 points, divide by the number of players, then add 1). The player who exceeds the end game threshold is the loser and they are obliged to buy the next round of treats.
Review
Pairs decks come in a variety of flavours; Fruits, Pirates, Barmaids, three different temarant packs, muses, goddesses, goblins, classic Vegas theme, and so much more! Touted as a new classic pub game, this is a just a deck of cards that you can play literally anywhere. It’s as portable as can be, super easy to teach and casual enough that people can drop in and out at their leisure.
The push-your-luck nature of the game lends to moments where you chew on a knuckle trying to decide if you should pass and take the 4 on the table, or push your luck and hope you just don’t get a 8 or a 10. You’ve seen a dozen 10s already, there can’t be any more left in the deck, right? I love the tension as my opponents are sucking in air through their teeth, hoping someone busts or gives up before their next turn.
Good…
I’ve found copies of Pairs on sale for as low as $5, it ends up being a great thing to give someone after a first meeting. You teach them the game, play a couple rounds, add some stakes, then at the end of the evening, just give them the deck of cards. I’ve run low on stock recently, but I’ve gifted over a dozen decks to friends and acquaintances over the past few years.
I’ve used Pairs as a fast, low stakes game while waiting for others to arrive, or just while catching up with friends you haven’t seen in a long time. Where more involved games would take over the conversation, Pairs can be played by intuition alone, leaving you free to chat or smack talk your opponents, egging them on to take another card when they already have a 7, 8, 9, and 10.
Speaking of stakes, my most recent experience with Pairs was at my Mom’s house, with my aunt and uncle. Five of us were gathered around the table, the evening waning. We were making loose plans for dinner the next day when I pulled the copy of Pairs that I had gifted to my mom years ago. “Alright, whoever loses this game, has to buy wine for dinner tomorrow” I said to them, dealing out the first card to each player. After 15 minutes we were setting chores for the next day, and using a game to divvy out the responsibilities that no one really wanted to tackle. By the end of the night, they were looking into buying their own copy of Pairs.
Damnit!!!
I gifted a copy of Pairs to a friend who was travelling to Germany one year as a small game he could fit in his pocket. When he returned he told me how he was able to teach a pair of people, despite them not sharing a language. He gave them his copy of Pairs when they parted for the night and he remembers the evening as one of the highlights of his trip. There’s something special about a game so simple that you almost don’t even need words to teach with other people. It becomes a catalyst for creating a fun experience with people you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to connect with.
Pairs does offer a ton of rule variations; over 30 to be more specific. I find when adding more rules, Pairs loses it’s light and easy-to-play charm. Suddenly, where there was a light and breezy game, now sits rules that need to be remembered and enforced, bets to hedge and gambles to make. I prefer Pairs when it’s less of a centrepiece and more of a catalyst. A game that you play while hanging out with your friends as something to busy your hands rather than demanding the full focus of the evening. It’s a cute diversion and with a very low price of entry it feels more of a side dish rather than an entrée. Whenever I pull it out, I know we’re going to have a good time full of laughter and light-hearted regret.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing Cascadia by Randy Flynn. One evening in particular I played Cascadia, then immediately after played Calico by Kevin Russ. While the two games share some similarities, the biggest thing they have in common is that they’re both published by Flatout Games and AEG. Because these games share a publisher they often get mentioned in the same breath, so I thought it would be helpful to compare and contrast these titles. Hopefully this may help you decide which one is right for you!
Mocha just made himself at home in the Calico box
Cascadia is a tile placement, pattern building, hex grid, drafting game. Calico, on the other hand, is a tile placement, pattern building, hex grid, drafting game. On paper, the only difference lies in the contrast of themes (wild animals roaming Pacific Northwest landscapes vs. cute cats on a colourful quilt). Both have you placing tiles into a personal tableau trying to manipulate a pattern to achieve the most points in order to win.
Although the two games sound interchangeable, the gameplay experience reveals significant differences, making these two games unique and anything but interchangeable. The main differences between these two games come from the restrictions they impose upon players. In Calico, you have two tiles in your hand that you can place on your board. After placing a tile on your board there are three more tiles in a central pool that you use to refill your hand. Each player in Calico has a dual layer player board showing all the slots that will be filled over the course of the game. On each board the players have three objectives, which provide options for earning points. While the objectives are not restrictions, persay (you don’t have to place tiles according to the objectives), the player board is. Players may not expand their quilts in any direction they wish. Calico seems to delight in painting you into a corner and forcing you to make the best of a bad situation.
In Calico it’s not uncommon to find yourself in a situation where you’re desperate for a specific tile that makes everything work out just right. The lynchpin of your board requires a green polka dot tile, but because there are 35 other tiles in the game, the odds of that green polka dot tile coming out is rather low; absolutely not something you can rely on. There is also no way to mill through the bag or refresh the offer row; if none of the tiles in the offer row are useful for you, too bad. You now have a useless tile in your hand. Hopefully you can pivot your strategy to make use of it.
Cascadia on the other hand starts with 3 empty ecosystem hexes in front of each player, depicting each of the five animals once. In the centre of the table there are four sets of paired components, each comprised of one ecosystem tile and one animal disc. Each turn you’ll pick a paired set, and add the components to your tableau, adding the ecosystem tile first, then placing the animal disc on an appropriate tile in your tableau. Unlike Calico, there is no player board for Cascadia, so players are free to build their terrain in any which direction.
A second major difference is Cascadia‘s flexibility when it comes to choosing components. While Calico specifically has no options for changing the offered tiles, in Cascadia if you don’t like any of the pairs of land tiles and animal discs, you may spend a nature token to pick any ecosystem tile and any animal disc from the four on the table. If you don’t like the selection of animal discs on the table you can spend a nature token to draw new discs and put the old ones back in the bag. Finally, if the offer row shows three of the same animals, you may choose to wipe the three sets of components and be dealt fresh sets. If all four animal discs depict the same animal, they get replaced automatically.
So far the major differences focus on flexibility – the borderless tableau as opposed to the restrictive player board, and the flexibility to change the components being offered in contrast to the “what you see is what you get” style in Calico. The final difference lies in the variety of tiles. Calico offers a larger variety of tiles, making it rarer to find the specific tile you need. In Cascadia, if you do find yourself in a situation where you really need a specific animal or ecosystem tile, there are only 5 different types of each tile. The odds of a tile that you need showing up are pretty good.
Salmon are overrated
My game group played Calico and Cascadia back to back. Two of the people at the table hadn’t played either game before. After playing both, they reported leaning more favorably towards Cascadia, as it felt less punishing. Personally, I delight in the shackles Calico slaps onto your wrists. I find more joy in squeezing out points from a restrictive puzzle, than bathing in points delivered freely by the system.
While playing Cascadia I found myself mathing out the average number of points per animal token I was taking, with ~3 points per disc being the sweet spot and avoiding anything offering below 2.5 points per disc. In all my plays of Cascadia, this best average score per disc seemed to hover between 2.5 and 3 (except for the one time the hawks were at almost 5 points per disc). Calico on the other hand, obfuscates the final score, making it much harder to accurately gauge just how much each tile is worth, especially because each tile may contribute to three different scoring opportunities (patterns, colours, and the scoring objective on your board).
Cascadia offers replayability with 5 different scoring objectives per animal type giving a wide variety of potential scoring objectives. While variety does not equal replayability, it is a nice touch to explore different objectives. On the other hand, Calico has much less variety in it’s scoring objectives, but I find Calico’s replayability largely comes from making the best of a tough situation in regards to the tiles that are available to you on each turn.
Both games have a significant number of scenarios and achievements to give your game an added objective to reach for. Personally, I’ve really enjoyed playing the Calico scenarios solo and look forward to seeing what Cascadia does to create an engaging solo player experience.
Both Cascadia and Calico are great games, but they have some very important differences that you should know about if you’re only looking to add only one to your collection. I feel like Cascadia would be more of a hit with younger audiences, or when trying to get your nature loving partner over to the table, while Calico is an excellent suggestion if you and your gaming partners are excited over a brainteasing puzzle. If the only thing that sways you is the presence of cats, then Calico is the right choice for you!
I hope you have enjoyed my thoughts on Calico vs. Cascadia. If you have any questions or want me to expand on something, please leave a comment below!
Number of Plays: 8 (Plus 30 games on Board Game Arena)
Game Length: 20 – 30 minutes
Mechanics: Hand Management, Set collection
Release Year: 1999
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Artist: Anke Pohl, Thilo Rick, and Claus Stephan
Intro
Once upon a time I had a roommate. He and I had been friends in high school and we had both moved to the same city. During our years as roommates we started playing Chess together. As it turns out, he was the perfect opponent to play head-to-head duel games with. Chess was played often, and Magic the Gathering soon made its way into our lives, along with Yu-Gi-Oh. Cycling between these decks, we were constantly going head-to-head, each of us adjusting our play style to directly combat the other.
Now, I live on the other side of the country from that friend, and have discovered the world of hobby board games. Although I still feel my heart pulled to games that pit one player against another in a head to head competition, I simply don’t have a partner to really throw myself against. My current game group has 4 members, and we prefer to play games all together instead of breaking into 2 smaller groups, making 2 player games not very attractive to us. I’ll often play 2 player games with my wife, but we really don’t like to bear our teeth and claws at one another. Lost Cities by Reiner Knizia is a two player game that doesn’t make you hit the other player over the head, but tasks you with hedging your bets and challenges you to bluff and manipulate the pace of the game to outscore the other player.
How to Play
The goal of Lost Cities is to have the most points at the end of the game, or series of games if you choose to play multiple times in a row (and you probably should). Each game consists of shuffling the entire deck and dealing 8 cards to each player. On your turn you need to play one card, and draw one card.
When playing a card, you can either play it in front of you, or to the discard. If you chose to play it in front of you, it must be placed in a column with the cards of the same colour, and the numbers must be ascending. Each colour has its own discard pile should you choose to play your card there instead. When you draw a card, you can either take the top card from the deck, or the top card from any of the discard piles.
The deck of Lost Cities is comprised of 5 different suits each with the numbers of 2 through 10, with each card being worth their numeric value in points at the end of the game. In addition to those 9 cards there are 3 handshake cards per colour. These cards have a value of 0, but their presence multiplies the final sum of that suit.
The game ends when the draw deck has been depleted. At that time, each player counts up the sum of the cards for each of their expeditions. Each expedition begins in a deficit of negative 20 points. You add the value of each card and the final result is your score for that suit (don’t forget to multiply the final sum depending on the number of handshakes you managed to put down. Yes, you can multiply a negative number). If you manage the herculean task of getting 8 or more cards of a colour down, you get a bonus 20 points for that suit, to be added in at the end, after the multiplication step. It’s rare, but it can happen!
Review
Lost Cities is fairly light in terms of rules overhead. Play one card, pick up one card, try to exceed 20 points for each colour you commit to. It is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy or boring. Lost Cities presents players with plenty of opportunities to shoot themselves in the foot. If you have a couple of high cards of each suit, do you play them down? If not, they’re just taking up space in your hand that could be used for holding more useful cards. Do you discard the yellow 5 because you have no other yellow cards? What if you inadvertently give your opponent everything he ever wanted?
All these questions slowly build to a crescendo as you and your opponent play card after card, slowly exhausting the draw deck. The tempo and cadence of play changes as each player gets more desperate, searching for the lynchpin card that will allow them to place the rest of their higher value cards that are just sitting in their hand waiting for their opportunity. Jumping from a 4 or a 7 can feel like you’re shutting the door on opportunities for points, but as the deck dwindles and tensions rise you’ll find yourself much more willing to skip over missing numbers to get the best cards out of your hand and onto the table.
When I introduced my wife to Lost Cities, she instantly hated it. With frustration she exclaimed that it was too random and you didn’t have enough options or choices and the deck somehow always seems to screw with you. A few days later she prodded me to play it again. The puzzle of Lost Cities had burrowed into her head. On repeat plays she found the strategies much more satisfying and it has become one her favourite games.
Lost Cities has become a staple of my travel games. Considering the whole game is just a deck of cards and a scrap of paper to track the scores, I often find myself sliding it into my bag and suggesting it whenever we have a few moments of downtime. Because it’s fast to teach and and offers a satisfying feeling in your heart when your plans all come together, it’s frequently my go-to pick when I want to introduce someone to board games.
Just this past weekend we were visiting a couple in-laws, and my wife’s uncle asked if I had brought any games with me (apparently my reputation as a gamer precedes me), so I introduced him to Lost Cities. We promptly played 5 games in a row. Each new game had him exploring the strategies and tactics available to the players, and he learned how to control the wax and wane of the deck to his advantage. It was a wonderful sight to behold.
While the winner of a single game of Lost Cities can be determined by how lucky their card draws were, I firmly believe that the better player will come out ahead, more often than not. To this end, it’s suggested to play three games in a row and whomever has the highest cumulative score at the end of the series is the overall winner. I really enjoy playing Lost Cities like this, as some rounds, getting a mere 15 points feels like an achievement, while other rounds you can find yourself breaking 100 points.
Lost Cities rewards the bold, but can also punish those who delve too greedily. The gambling feeling of placing a handshake when you barely have any cards of that colour in your hand can grip your heart in fear, especially when you start coming down to the last 15 cards in the deck, or if your opponent matches your move and starts playing the lower numbers. Your heart rate will rise as your agonize over which card to play, deciding to start another expedition late into the game, math-ing out exactly how many turns remain before the round ends and you’re forced to score your hands.
Lost Cities was released over 20 years ago, and it remains to this day one of my favourite two player games. I love how well balanced it feels, how easy it is to introduce to new players, and how rewarded I feel after playing dozens of games. Other games have been published with the Lost Cities name attached to it (Lost Cities: Rivals, and Lost Cities: Roll and Write being the two most recent), and while they do catch my eye, I haven’t bothered exploring any of these reimplementations or alternate versions. Perhaps one day I’ll embark on that expedition, but for now, I’m going to continue to play and recommend Lost Cities every chance I get.
