Do you have control issues? Does the idea of relying on others to achieve your goals make your skin crawl? Are you the type of person who detests group projects and ends up doing everything because your teammates won’t do their portion of the work up to your level of expectations? Well, have I got a game for you!
Quirky Circuits by designer Nikki Valens and published by Plaid Hat Games is a cooperative action programming game for 2 – 4 players, and each mission plays in about 15 to 30 minutes. Quirky Circuits boasts 21 scenarios across 4 different characters to test your mental mettle and optimization skills. Each scenario will offer different objectives, from cleaning house while avoiding vases, to preparing and delivering sushi to hungry customers.
Released in 2019, Quirky Circuits sports an adorable calico on the box atop a roomba, chasing down a dust bunny as chaos reigns in the background. The cover and art by Danalyn Reyes is bright and colourful through the production. With 4 different characters, each sporting their own deck of action cards, depicting how the character is performing the action on the card. There’s charm and cuteness throughout the entire production that is sure to attract anyone passing by your table.
To play Quirky Circuits, all players told the only communications allowed are ‘BEEP BOOP”, and then are dealt an equal number of action cards. Players play their cards face down into a queue along the bottom of the board and after each player has played at least one card, they can indicate their intention of being ‘done’ by placing their hands flat on the table and passive-aggressively spew beeps and boops at the players who are needlessly pushing fate.
Once all players have agreed to end the round, the queue of actions is flipped up and executed. Once the command has been entered, there is no going back! After the queue has been exhausted, the cards are swept up, shuffled, and redistributed. The battery marker that acts as the game timer depletes by a single stage, and players continue on their quest.
Quirky Circuits is the kind of game that makes you assess why you’re coming to the gaming table. If the goal of the game is to win, making sure everyone is on the same page with priorities and strategies prior to playing is essential, as conflicting priorities will literally spin your character around in circles. If your goal is to have fun, then removing that fog of war also leaks the fun out of the game. I’d argue a perfectly played game is just an exercise in sorting cards. Yes, winning feels good, but overcoming the puzzle against all odds is immensely satisfying, and even losing in a spectacular fashion is more fun than following a pre-determined strategy and winning every-time.
The chaos and silliness is the beating heart of Quirky Circuits. We played a game where we were on the precipice of winning. It was the final turn possible, everyone played all their cards. By some stroke of luck, we sucked up the final dust bunny and were headed for home. We narrowly made it back to the spot adjacent to the final square. All that was left was to turn left, then move forward a single space. We flipped the second last card, it was a turn right. With dejected and heavy hearts, we flipped the final card, which was a move backwards. Elated, we threw our hands in the air, celebrating and laughing at our stroke of luck! The joy and full bellied laughter was an experience that most games can’t even come close to.
I’ve played a few other limited communication cooperative games, The Mind by Wolfgang Warsch, Magic Maze by Kasper Lapp, and The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine by Thomas Sing are all games that I’ve enjoyed in the past. All feature limited communication, and share the same core joy of overcoming the puzzle through telekinesis, or pure luck. Where Quirky Circuits stands above these other titans is in its emergent narrative. Like, one time we had Gizmo move past a post that held a vase, leaving it unscathed. The next few cards had Gizmo backup, turn to face the vase, backed up a square, and RAN at the pillar, sending the vase crashing to the floor. Then, turning and continue on it’s original path. The story in our heads became Gizmo waltzed by the unscathed vase, then backed up saying “NOT ON MY WATCH, BUCKO!”. And it’s these stories and experiences that will stick in our minds and hearts, not an immaculate win rate.
If you want to hear me read this post out loud, you can listen to my Whatcha Been Playing Wednesday segment on Cardboard Conjecture podcast!
Introduction
Civilization building games aren’t something that I explicitly seek out. I’ve played a small amount of Sid Mayer’s Civilization (mostly Civ 4 and 5), and I’ve played dozens of games of Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization on both Board Game Arena and on the Android app. Those two games capture the civilization building gameplay so well, I feel satisfied. I’m never seeking new experiences because that quota has been filled.
In Nations, you’ll need to balance improving your infrastructure (by purchasing building and military technologies, and employing your citizens on them), with the stability of your nation, and your military might. Completing wonders, hiring advisors, and claiming colonies will provide persistent benefits over the course of the game that could give you the edge. Wars and famine on the other hand threaten to steal away your resources, costing you precious victory points if you end up in a deficit of any resource.
While there’s no direct conflict, there are lots of points to interact with each other. On the Progress board, where all the cards come out, taking the precious cards before others can get to them is an important aspect, as is hiring the limited number of architects to complete your wonders. Whoever has military supremacy gets to go first each round, and should anyone declare war, each other player needs to meet or exceed the might threshold that the warmongering player was at when they declared the war, lest they suffer the ill effects. A way to offset those effects is to maintain your stability, a stable nation is able to weather the effects of the war, for every point of stability a nation has, they lose one item less during a lost war. Every player who lost the war will lose a single victory point, regardless of its stability.
Players take turns preforming a single action during their turn (take cards from the progress board, deploy workers, hire an architect, or pass) until all players have passed. At the end of every round, players produce all the goods from their workers (depending on which technologies they’ve been deployed to), the player order is adjusted, war is resolved, and two historical events happen. Generally, these events involve giving boons to the player with the most of a certain resource (often stability), and a detriment to the player with the least of something (often stability). Ties in this regard are as unfriendly as you can imagine, if you’re tied for ‘most’, no one gets the benefit, and if you’re tied for least, all tied players get the punishment. Finally, a famine happens, in which all players need to discard some amount of food (revealed at the start of the round).
Every two rounds, there’s a ‘book’ scoring, in which each player earns a single point for every other player that they have more book points than. Then, the world progresses into the next age. After 4 ages, the game comes to an end. You’ll earn points for the colonies and wonders you’ve claimed, points for workers on technologies, and for all the excess resources you’ve accrued (1 point for 10 resources, a really terrible trade). Scores in Nations are MUCH lower than other Civ games, the average score is ~35 points.
Review
I think every review and how to play summary I read or watched of Nations before playing said something along the lines of “It’s kind of like a lighter Through the Ages”, which isn’t wrong. Both are card based civilization games. Naturally, games with similar themes and mechanics will get compared against each other. Nations feels lighter and faster than Through the Ages, but not by very much. I will concede that Nations was easier to play, less fiddly than TtA. But in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve only played Through the Ages physically once. During that play I found all the movement of cubes and cylinders and discs back and forth tedious. Nations does a bit better, in that you can only do one thing per turn. You don’t get to the end of a 6-step progress, only to realize you’re a single resource short and need to walk back your entire turn. I enjoy the turn structure in Nations; it creates tension as you need to prioritize what you’ll take with your first action and hope that the second thing you wanted will still be there when the turn comes back around to you.
The iconography in Nations was a bit confusing. Red is good, while black was negative (every accountant just shook their heads in despair). Circle icons only produce at the end of the round, while square icons take effect immediately. Once a player has passed, they’re out of the round. This can allow you to posture yourself as a peaceful, stable nation until your neighbours have passed, then move all your stable government workers into chariot positions, ratchet up your military and declare war in the last moments. Provided there’s a war on the Progress board that you can afford, and no war has already been declared.
Unlike Through the Ages, you won’t see every card in every game, and, there seems to be a much wider variety of cards. With 7 different types of cards in the game, and only a maximum 15 cards coming out every round (in a 3 player game), there’s a chance the card type you’re wanting isn’t going to show itself, or, if it does, doesn’t fit in your strategy well. Sure, the Samurai are powerful warriors, but they have a production cost of -1 gold. If you were already pinched for gold, and they were the only military card that came out that round, you might just be up the creek without a katana.
It’s common in Nations to feel a bit starved for resources, especially if a player is being a warmonger. Other players are forced to commit their few workers to keeping up with you in military might, or, keep their stability quite high to offset the cost of those wars. Coupled with famine sucking away your food stores, it can be hard to get ahead in all the different resources. Instead, you may find yourself sucking up the cost of redeploying your workers every round to cover any shortfalls that the round is introducing. It’s tough, but rewarding when you manage to have 11 grain and can move every employee into the mines for a few rounds.
One thing that really impressed me was a tiny touch, every card had a date and a place, showing when and where the item or person depicted on the card was representing. Augustus, 63BCE – 14CE, Roman Republic, the Hanging Gardens, 600BCE, Babylon. Marie Antoinette, 1755 – 1793, France. It felt great having that little historical anchor in this civilization game. Of course, some will complain that it’s not realistic, having Augustus lead a legion of Samurai into the Hundred Years War. And my retort to that complaint is that Augustus would never have fit on a card either, so, whatever!
A disappointment in Nations, is the art and graphic design is pretty dreadful. It’s the kind of art that I would expect to see on someone’s refrigerator. I feel hypocritical saying so, as my art skills are pretty much nonexistent. And maybe I’m spoiled by all the beautiful games that have come out in the last 10 years, but Nations is an eyesore. I would love to see a modernized version of this game be produced with colourful artwork, because I really did enjoy it! Nations was smooth to play, and while the rules were a little hard to wrap my head around, we all agreed that it was quite good! Streamlined and engaging, tense, and exciting. We thoroughly enjoyed playing Nations, and agreed that we absolutely would bring it back to the table soon, especially since Otter missed out on playing this game, and we think he would really enjoy it.
If you have Nations, sitting unplayed on your shelf, and you enjoy games like Through the Ages, but find them just a little too tedious or fiddly to play much, I highly recommend getting Nations to the table. And heck, if you enjoy Nations, but it’s fallen to the wayside in favour of much brighter, flashier, and newer games, this is your reminder that just because a game was published in 2013, doesn’t mean it’s not exciting or interesting. Get Nations back out and make your civilization stand head and shoulders above the rest!
Age of Steam (2002) by John Bohrer and Martin Wallace has a long and storied history, but I’m not privy to the details. The game has been reimplemented by Railways of the World and by Steam: Rails to Riches. There was also a lengthy legal battle between Martin Wallace and John Bohrer as to who owned the trademark for Age of Steam that seems to be resolved now to both Bohrer’s and Marin’s satisfaction.
But let’s not talk about that part of history, let’s talk about the actual game. Age of Steam is a train game in which you and your opponents are trying to develop your train company and delivering goods in the longest way possible. Efficiency will not be rewarded on the free market.
Gameplay begins with players selling shares of their company into the ether. You earn $5 per share you sell, but you’ll need to pay one $1 for every share you’ve sold per round for the rest of the game. You can sell as many or as few shares as you want, but just be aware that you’ll be paying for it every round.
After selling shares, players bid for turn order. It’s a classic rotating bid where players either up the ante, or pass. The first player to pass doesn’t have to pay anything, they get the privilege of going last for free. The final two players will need to pay their full bid, regardless of who actually wins the bid, and all other players will need to pay half their bid rounded up. Around and around players bid until the player order is decided. This is the first point where you’ll regret the number of shares you sold. You lost first place because you ran out of cash, why didn’t you sell more shares??
Once player order has been chosen, players then choose a special bonus for the round. Only one player can choose each action, which makes the player order fairly consequential. The actions are as follows:
First move – the player who chooses first move will get to move a good first, regardless of player order
First build – just like first move, but with the build action
Engineer – Allows the player to build 4 items instead of the usual 3
Locomotive – Moves the player’s link disk up the engine track one space. This allows goods to travel over more stops, and will earn more money in the end.
Urbanization – Allows the player to place a new city on the board, creating a new hub for goods to be delivered to, and possibly spawn from
Production – Allows the player to put two goods cubes back onto the production board, which may have them be placed onto a city during the production phase
Turn Order (pass) – Allows the player to pass once during the next bidding phase.
Every action has the potential to be useless, or, extremely important, depending on the current state of the game. If only you sold more shares, so you could go first and get your pick of the actions
Once all the actions have been selected, the build phase begins. Players can build up to 3 railway tiles leading out from any city. If they connect to another town or city, they own that rail link for the rest of the game. If the rail link just ends in the middle of nowhere, they’ll need to progress it during the next round, or they’ll forfeit ownership of that line, possibly letting someone else claim ownership. This is the second step where you’ll regret the number of shares you sold. You don’t have enough money to build what you want to build! Why didn’t you sell more shares??
After everyone has built, the move goods phase starts. Players take a turn moving a cube from a city, over rail links, until the cube arrives at a city of the matching colour. Every town or city the cube moves through is a new link, and when the cube is delivered, the player earns perpetual income based on how many rail links the cube passed over. Players are limited by their Engine track, which at the start of the game, is only 1, so direct sales only. But as the game goes on and players improve their engines to 5 or 6, a cube can snake through the entire board before landing at its destination, netting the player 5 or 6 income points. And here’s the hook, players don’t have to use their own rail links, you can move a cube over someone else’s rail line. But the player who owns the line will earn the money for that stretch of the journey. For example, if I move a cube over two of my links, then over two of Bigfoot’s rail links, and finally, over one of my own to deliver the cube to a city, I’ll earn 3 income, and Bigfoot will earn 2.
After the goods have been delivered, all players collect their income, based on their location on the income track, then debts come due. For every share you’ve sold, pay $1. For every space on the engine track, pay another $1. This is the third time this round you’ll regret the number of shares you sold. Why did you have to sell so many??
Then, taxes show up. If your income is over 10, it gets pulled back 2 spaces. If the income is over 20, it gets pulled back 4 spaces. This forces players to be cognizant of the growth of their company. It can also lead to a player giving another player a single income space to put them over the threshold of the next tax bracket, pushing them further down the income track.
Finally, dice a rolled and goods are re-seeded onto the board. At the start of the game, goods will be flying out, but by the end, if no one took the production action, players will be scrapping to deliver the last few, possibly unprofitable goods.
And that’s the game! Play continues round after round, regret after regret until after a specific number of rounds (depends on the player count), the game comes to an end. Players earn 3 points per space on the income track, plus one point for every track tile they’ve placed. Players also lose 3 points per share they sold throughout the game.
I quite enjoyed playing Age of Steam, it was tense, interactive, and at times, cutthroat. This was all of our first time playing, so we definitely missed out on some efficiencies. There were a couple of times when we were scratching our heads wondering why someone would ever do something, like take the pass action. Then a few rounds later, had a lightbulb moment where we realized just how powerful that action can be. I think Age of Steam would really shine if we played a few more times, the nuance of track design and understanding how to utilize the towns wasn’t obvious during our first play, I can absolutely see the potential for mastery here.
The first two rounds are tense and tricky as you’re playing with a deficit. You don’t have the ability to increase your income track to break even, let alone earn a profit, forcing you to sell shares next round. Around turn 4 things pivot where suddenly cash is flowing in, and skipping a move good phase to increase your locomotive starts to make sense. It’s mildly painful to make that choice though, do you deliver a 2 link good now, or upgrade, so you can deliver 3 link goods next round? Taking the low-hanging fruit is tempting, but as soon as you see someone deliver a 5 link good and leave you in the dust, the regret in your stomach will double.
I haven’t played any 18xx games, but after playing Age of Steam, I find myself wanting to explore those as well. During this play of Age of Steam, I found myself wishing I could buy other players stock, so they’d have to pay me at the end of the round, instead of buying and selling to the bank. Then I realized, that’s kind of the whole thing with 18xx games. Players generally don’t own a rail line, but they can invest and make decisions based on how many shares they have. I know each game is different and has their own nuance, but I find myself more intrigued by the genre than ever before.
The copy we played was the third edition, published by Eagle Games in 2009 I think? Some things were great, I loved that each player got little plastic locomotives to play with. The map was functional, with plain colours and very little texture to confuse the eyes. My big gripe came from the side boards. The Goods Display and Selected Actions board, and the income track and score board were on good quality cardboard, but were completely grey-scale! The colourful cubes and player disks quickly covered most of the boards, but still, what an eye-sore.
In the days that followed our Age of Steam play, our group chat was pretty enamoured with the game and expressing interest to go back and play it some more. I realized that I owned the Android app version of Steam: Rails to Riches, developed by Acram Digital, so I gave that a play to satisfy my Age of Steam cravings. If you’re interested in the app, you can find it on Android and Steam (and yes, I do appreciate the irony of searching for Steam on Steam).
I’m looking forward to returning to Age of Steam. There’s a level of mastery to be achieved, and a plethora of fan-made maps to explore. I enjoy the anguish of needing to sell shares at the top of the round, then regretting it for the rest of the game. The cat and mouse of bidding for player order, egging on two players locked in a game of locomotive chicken.
Food Chain Magnate is my favourite board game of all time. I get physically excited when pulling this game off the shelf, and before the expansion was announced, I would have argued that it was a perfect game.
I’ve owned the Food Chain Magnate: The Ketchup Mechanism & Other Ideas for a couple of years now, and I’ve had a chance to play through most of the modules at least once. I thought it would be fun to go through each of the modules and briefly talk about how they change the game.
Some of these milestones big and add several new components, while others are very small, perhaps only a single employee being added to the corporate structure. These modules can be mixed and matched as you wish, and the rule book offers some suggested pairings, such as “Nightlife: New milestones + Night shift managers” or “Asian Fusion: Sushi + Kimchi + Noodles + Ketchup”. One day I’ll play an epic game with every module included, but until then, here’s my thoughts on each module that comes in Food Chain Magnate: The Ketchup Mechanism & Other Ideas
New Milestones
This was the first thing I saw in this expansion, and upon reading about the new milestones and thinking about the ramifications of the new milestones, I literally started salivating. The milestones in Food Chain Magnate are pivotal, the milestones you acquire will form your strategy, and utilizing the benefits that the milestones offer you. Because of the importance and power of these milestones, it’s pretty common to chase specific ones at the start of the game. The new milestones turn the game on it’s head. Toss every strategy guide you read for the first game, because they’re useless without the old milestones.
Some of the new powers include “Earn $5 for every good marketed”, and “May pay salary with food or drink”, or “No longer needs to fire employees if broke”. Every milestone is unique and could be the crux of their own strategy.
I like this module on its own. Because such a core part of the game is changed, it takes a lot of brain power to keep in mind all the new milestones and abilities they grant. I don’t know if these new milestones would fall into the same ‘problems’ as the original ones, but the new milestones also have the Hard Choices (mentioned below) baked in. If you feel like your gamers of Food Chain Magnate have fallen into a rut, adding in the New Milestones is the perfect solution.
Hard Choices
As I said above, the importance and power of certain milestones lead to some rote openings. Players bee-lined for the milestones that would give them the edge in the game, after all, earning an extra $5 on each good can take the sting off of a pricing war. The first to train someone and the first to hire 3 people in a single round are generally the two that my group chases right off the start.
In a 4 player game, players diverge their strategies fairly quickly and all the milestones get snapped up after just a few rounds. The Hard Choices’ module puts a hard limit on some of the milestones, locking them out after the 2nd round. If you want that milestone, chasing it HAS to be your first action. After round 2, four milestones are removed: First burger / pizza / drink marketed, and the first to train someone. After turn 3, the first to hire 3 people in 1 turn is removed.
I think this module is better suited for lower player count games, where someone could theoretically earn multiple of these milestones. By only allowing players to earn at most one of these milestones, they’re forced to explore alternate strategies. Again, I almost always play at 4 players (although that could soon change as Bigfoot was quite sour after our last game) so this module hasn’t been helpful for me, but I could see it being an interesting addition to a 2 or 3 player game.
6 Players
There are now enough pieces, so 6 players can compete for fast food domination. I don’t know how crowded the board would get with 6 players, but I imagine this would be a very long game. 4 players is the sweet spot in my opinion, but I wouldn’t turn down a 6 player game.
The only thing this really adds is the map is now 4 x 6 tiles, giving players lots of room to throw down new restaurants and making planes slightly more powerful, depending on the layout.
Coffee
Coffee is the most recent module we played with and it was a bit divisive. With the coffee module, you can hire baristas to produce coffee. Customers will stop by either your coffee shops or your restaurants to grab a cup of coffee on their way to their destination. Customers will consume a coffee at every opportunity on their way to their destination, but not consume coffee at their destination. Coffee is sold at the same cost as other goods, including bonuses from gardens or cards.
The baristas produce very small amounts of coffee (producing 1, 2, and 5 coffees as you go up the chain) compared to their cook and chef counterparts, but they can be very powerful.
In our most recent game, I was successful in using the luxury manager to increase the base price of coffee to $20, and sold all my coffee to houses with gardens or parks, earning $40 per coffee. I also happened to be the first player to hit $100, which gave me the CFO bonus, increasing my income by 50%. This meant that by selling only 3 coffees, I earned $180 in a round while the other players engaged in a pricing war that drove the cost of goods into the ground.
The other players complained that there was no good way to combat the coffee strategy, other than moving their restaurants or putting down new, lower numbered houses in the hopes to force me to sell to non-garden houses. The core idea of the game is that players are competing for the demand on the board, the coffee seems counter to the spirit of the game.
I argued that I barely won. Yes, I earned a lot of money from only selling 3 goods, but my ability to produce coffee is severely limited. I think the counter to coffee is to flood the market with demand tiles and make money with quantity over quality. The luxury coffee strategy worked well for the early game, but had the game gone even just one round longer, I wouldn’t have been able to maintain my early lead. Selling 8 pizzas and 10 beers for $7 each with a $5 bonus on the pizzas is a great way to leave me and my 3 coffees in the dust.
New Districts
The new district’s module includes 5 new map tiles that are fairly unique. 2 of the tiles include apartments that have unlimited space for demand, but the demand must be satisfied in full. Other tiles include a house with a garden prebuilt, and another tile features 3 lemonade supply locations.
This module is one that I’ve just shuffled into the base stack of tiles and don’t bother separating out. One of the tiles requires the lobbyist to be included, but that’s hardly important. I do like more variety in these map tiles that I’m happy to have them available in every game I play.
Lobbyists
The Lobbyists allow you to change the map by adding roads and parks to the city. The parks act as communal gardens, attaching to several buildings at once. Every building near a park will pay double for their goods. If they have a park and a garden, they’ll pay triple. The roads allow you to make connections, at the expense of a road being closed for a whole round (road work detours, you know how it is).
The first Lobbyist played gives that player a whole extra map tile they can play along any edge of the map, extending it ever so slightly. In the last game we played, the tile was placed down, then a garden was laid on it, allowing a park to hit 3 different houses at once.
The Lobbyists feels more like a situational module. There are some games where I’m DESPERATE for an additional road, and others where I don’t feel the need for them at all. The inclusion of polyomino parks that can double or even triple the cost of a good is quite interesting!
Kimchi
Every dish tastes better with Kimchi, right? That was the logic behind this module, where a Kimchi master produces a single kimchi during the cleanup phase. Then, during the subsequent dinnertime phase, the Kimchi serves as a way to draw someone to your restaurant, bypassing the usual distance + price formula.
Basically, if multiple restaurants could fulfill a house’s demand, but one has kimchi available, that’s the restaurant they’ll choose to go to, no matter the cost or distance. Players can only employ a single kimchi master, so this is a powerful once per round effect, nearly guaranteeing that you’ll have SOME income during the round. This module pairs nicely with the luxury manager, and with coffee, as it gives a player some guarantee that someone will be willing to make the long trek past all their coffee shops to get their burger and Kimchi.
Sushi
Sushi is the ultimate luxury good. Houses with gardens will replace their demands with sushi at a one for one ratio (of both food and drink). This module is a way to stop someone from blitzing pizza to a bunch of garden homes and making out like a bandit. They still serve their low-class pie to the commoners, but the upper echelon of society that inhabit the homes with gardens will prefer sushi if it exists.
That said, houses without gardens will never want sushi, meaning the number of houses you can potentially satisfy after investing in sushi is vanishingly small. Unless you’re in cahoots with a local developer who’s throwing up houses around every corner…
Noodles
Noodles is the wildcard resource in this expansion. Basically, noodles can replace any food and drink, but houses will always prefer their actual demand over noodles.
I’ve played with this module once and saw it work very well. After a marketing blitz and several airplane and radio campaigns, the noodle master was able to satisfy the vast majority of their clients, pocketing them a hefty sum.
Ketchup
The titular Ketchup module is actually just a single milestone that can be added to any game. If someone sells your demand, you now have a -1 distance bonus for the rest of the game.
This can have some significant ramifications. If all else is equal, players will need to drop their prices by 1 just to compete with you. Forcing players to drop their prices to compete is a brutal strategy, as it can take multiple employees to drop the price far enough to ensure they’ll be the ones fulfilling the demand, choking their corporate structure, and they’ll be earning less money turn over turn. With enough pressure and the right mix of milestones, you could force players to start shedding their trained workers.
I don’t know how well of a ‘catch-up’ mechanism this ends up being, and I’m mildly disappointed there’s no ketchup tokens to play with, but it’s nice to know that if someone snakes a demand you generated, you’ll be rewarded with a bonus for the rest of the game.
Fry Chefs
The Fry Chefs are another employee you can hire. Unsurprisingly, Fry chefs goes great with Ketchup, as they work to mitigate price wars. When players race to the bottom on price, it’s nice to have a flat, fixed income that doesn’t drop (but doesn’t scale up either). A restaurant with a Fry chef employed earns $10 per house they sell to (they’ve added fries to their order). This bonus is a fixed income and doesn’t affect the unit price or distance equation in any way.
Night Shift Managers
The night shift managers are another type of managers that you can hire. Like the other managers, they can only report to the CEO (after all, managers managing managers is a ridiculous concept). Unlike the other managers, the Night Shift Managers have no slots, they don’t directly allow your corporation to have more workers per shift. What they do, is allow you to use all of your non-salaried employees twice in a single turn.
This is a great employee to have at the start of the game when your corporate structure is full of non-salaried employees. It’s effectiveness can start to wane as the game goes on and your employees become more specialized, but it’s still a fun employee to include.
Mass Marketeers
The Mass Marketers are relentless. Another single card module, the mass marketer employee triggers a second marketing campaign phase. Further to that, if multiple players play a mass marketer, every one triggers a whole other marketing phase.
This module has the potential to be absolutely bonkers. Demands flooding the market, which in turn, floods the board with cash and sends all players racing to hire enough chefs to satisfy the hungry hordes. Not only can several marketing phases happen within a single round, the duration for each marketing opportunity is only reduced by 1 at the end of the round.
Rural Marketeers
The Rural Marketeers adds in a highway off ramp and 4 giant billboards. A separate tile (called the rural area) is placed off to the side, away from the main map, and the only thing a rural marketeer can do is place a single giant billboard next to the rural area. The rural area acts as one giant house, sort of like the apartment buildings in the New District Modules.
The first rural marketeer played gets the honour of placing the highway off-ramp, which dictates where the rural area can enter the board (and the distance to other restaurants). Like the apartment buildings, there is the potential for the demand to grow so great that no one can satisfy it, which is mildly annoying.
Honestly, I haven’t found much purpose for the rural marketeers, but it might just be because I’m biased in that I like the new district modules and the apartment buildings they provide.
Gourmet Food Critics
The gourmet food critic is a new type of marketeer. While the other marketing abilities are based of proximity to the marketing event, the gourmet food critic simply markets to every house with a garden. Parks, apartment buildings, and the rural area do not get marketed to.
Movie Stars
In the base game, ties are frequent, making player order and hiring a brigade of waitresses to lure customers into your restaurant. The Movie Stars allow you to control the ties more effectively. Each player can only have 1 movie star in their employ, but when playing a movie star, you’re able to choose your play order before any other player. In addition to that, during the dinner time phase, if there’s a tie that has to be broken by the number of waitresses, the tie is automatically won by the player with the highest tier movie star.
This is one of the few modules I haven’t played with. I can see why where they’d be useful. Quite often players may be tempted to leave a couple slots empty so they can go first or last, as being first can be crucial when breaking ties. Now, as long as you have a B-list movie star signing autographs at your tables, you can be sure of your preferred order of play.
Reserve Prices
The reserve prices module replaces the initial bank reserve cards. In the base game of Food Chain Magnate, the bank reserve cards allow players to seed the bank with $100, $200, or $300, theoretically allowing them to plan for a short or longer game. In reality however, most games end around 8 or 9 rounds regardless of the status of the bank. Several players putting in a high number MIGHT extend that game by a single round.
The new reserve cards now modify the base price of goods, either slashing them in half, or doubling them entirely. knowing which way the base price is going to go can be massively powerful. Flooding the market with demand and ensuring you have the chefs in place to satisfy demands from every corner could be the key to victory. Of course the opposite holds true, if you and another player are in a pricing war, lowering your costs $3 or $4 per good, having the base price of the item plummet to $5 can kill your strategy. You can’t make payroll on a handful of $1 hamburgers!!
Final Thoughts
I really love Food Chain Magnate, and I love the variety of modules this expansion offers. I adore exploration, and this enables me to play my favourite game in a dozen different ways. A big challenge is that the base game was so tight, so finely tuned that adding in these modules can upset the balance. Before playing with any of the expansion modules, I rarely saw the luxury manager come into play. But now she’s become a common card in our games. In a similar vein, with alternate ways to make money (like coffee, fries, sushi, noodles, and kimchi), pricing wars have all but vanished.
I think Food Chain Magnate: The Ketchup Mechanism & Other Ideas is an excellent expansion if the base game is something you absolutely adore, but are tired of rote strategies dominating the meta of your table. If you have a gaming partner (or partners) who are equally as enthusiastic about exploring the strategies of each module, and how they interact with each other, this is a must buy. If your group is only humouring you and playing Food Chain Magnate because it’s your birthday, then these modules are probably better left for another day.
Slay the Spire: The Board Game, designed by Gary Dworetsky, Anthony Giovannetti, and Casey Yano and published by Contention Games is currently running a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. As a fan of the video game it’s based on, I have been eagerly anticipating this game since it was announced nearly a year ago.
To start, here’s my Slay the Spire credentials. I’ve played Slay the Spire for about 71 hours on Steam, and an additional 60 hours on Android. My favourite character to play is The Defect, with which I’ve reached Ascension level 8. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to even just beat the game with The Watcher. After 16 runs I’ve just today finally managed to do. I think I’ve reached the 3rd act boss half a dozen times, but I kept on losing to that final hurdle. While I’d never call myself a Slay the Spire expert, I’d definitely class myself as an enthusiast.
When the Kickstarter campaign finally launched, my heart dropped. $135 CAD for the base game, plus $16 for shipping. $150 is firmly out of the impulse buy category for me. The campaign itself had extremely few details on what the board game did differently from the video game. I knew a straight port wouldn’t be possible, there’s much too much math involved to make it enjoyable or playable. Over the next few days, more details came out, and various creators who got preview copies published their content. While helpful, the lack of information on the actual pledge page is disappointing. What was helpful was the release of the Prototype rulebook, and a playable version of the game on Tabletop Simulator.
I roped in Bigfoot, who, like me, is an avid board gamer and has significant experience playing the Slay the Spire video game. This made teaching a breeze, he already knew the flow of the game, the iconography, and some of the strategy (like how important defence is, and why we should focus on tackling elites). He assumed the role of the ironclad while I took on The Silent.
How to play
Slay the Spire is a deck building dungeon crawl where the goal is to defeat enemies to earn rewards to acquire better cards and relics with special abilities until you finally defeat the boss. When normal combat starts, an enemy is placed into a row, one for each player. Enemy cards may also summon minions into their row.
Players have 3 energy each turn to play cards from their hands, and by default, draw 5 cards. A die is rolled which will affect everything that has a die ability. Some monsters will have different attacks based off the die roll, while others will simply do the same thing every time, while others will work through a series of static effects.
Players play their cards, generating block to shield themselves from damage, and swords, which do damage to the enemies. Players can target any enemy on any row with their attacks, enabling some great collaborative play. After all players have finished playing cards, any unplayed cards are discarded, and the monsters take their turn. Starting from the top left and moving to the bottom right, monsters attack. Any damage is negated by shields, but should those run out, then hp is reduced. If anyone’s hp drops to 0, the team has lost.
Should the players be victorious, they acquire rewards. Coins that can be spent at shops, potions offering clutch 1 time effects, and new cards they can add into their deck. Each character starts with a basic 10 card deck, and has a pool of 60 cards from which they can add from. Each character also have 20 rare cards which are very powerful, but harder to obtain.
First Impressions
A key component of Slay the Spire is upgrading your cards. At a rest site, you can choose to either heal hp, or, upgrade a single card. This can reduce the cost, or increase the ability of the card itself. The board game handles this by utilizing double-sided cards in sleeves. When you upgrade a card, just pull it out of its sleeve, flip it around, and put it back into it’s sleeve for the remainder of the game.
So what’s different from the video game? Well, the math has been reduced. All the strikes and defends generate 1 hit or shield respectively. Weakness now just reduces the number of hits generated by 1, and vulnerable doubles the damage the next time the target takes damage. Stats effects have been turned into cards that either effectively reduce your draw then disappear, or a card that goes into your discard pile that will cause trouble when it appears in your hand. Burns, which do damage if they’re in your hand at the end of your turn, or green spirals, which will sap your energy when drawn. The Silent’s poison is now persistent, it doesn’t tick down at the end of a round. Shivs offer a 1 damage attack, but can be saved from round to round, allowing you to build up for a big combo. The Defects orbs don’t cycle in order any more, you can choose to evoke any orb of your choice. As I mentioned before, a lot of items and monsters are controlled via a single die roll at the start of the round turning a lot of the encounters and relics from deterministic effects that can be planned around, into a more random experience. I suspect this was done to reduce the already significant upkeep this game requires.
Slay the Spire: The Board Game is a very faithful adaption of the video game. Halfway through the first act of the game I put on the Slay the Spire OST, and suddenly everything just felt right in the world. It really feels like Slay the Spire, even with all the difference I mentioned above. The relics seem to be much less useful in the board game. In the video game, the relics are the lynchpin of your engine. Here, they seem to offer minor rewards. I haven’t explored enough to say for sure, but I think a large part of what makes Slay the Spie (and other roguelikes) special and what brings people back again and again, is finding those crazed combos.
Let’s talk about the $15 elephant in the room. Just who is this game really for? I have a hard time imagining board gamers dropping $135 on this crate of cards when so many other deck builders already exist for much less cash. And anyone who wants to play solo can just buy the video game for as low as $10. Some will argue Slay the Spire: The Board Game is cooperative, you can use this a tool to introduce others to the game, but at it’s current price, you can buy 15 copies of the video game to give away as gifts. And for people who are already attuned to the video game, there isn’t much new for them to discover here, other than the ability to play with friends.
I understand the joy of tactile play. I adore board games, but I am not willing to drop that kind of money when I can play the video game on the go. That said, if you’re a board gamer who loves Slay the Spire, and/or loves cooperative games, this is a slam dunk. I do think the video game is the superior version, there’s no upkeep to track, no chance of missed rules, and the gameplay loop of building a deck, racing up the spire, dying, and just restarting from scratch is so fast and so fun. The physical production is super cool, but I shudder at the thought of tearing down after a game. Flipping all the upgraded cards, breaking down the cards back into their appropriate decks, etc. I think Slay the Spire: The Board Game is more of a luxury piece of merchandise for those who really love Slay the Spire. A beautiful and lovingly crafted game that is less meant to be played for hundreds of hours and more of a physical object for fans to own and showcase, much like the dozen steelbook video games I’ve purchased in the past.
I guess this is my new tradition. Get sick, review a Pandemic game. I didn’t catch Covid like last time, but I was sick enough that I cancelled my weekend plans. I chose to spend my time thinking about Pandemic: Fall of Rome instead of spreading the wealth of sore throats and achey joints to my family and friends.
Pandemic: Fall of Rome is part of the Survival Series of Pandemic games. The Survival Series was an opportunity for the original designer, Matt Leacock to team up with a co-designer from the region where the Pandemic World Championship was taking place. Originally, the Survival Series of games were very limited run and difficult to get after the tournament was over. In 2019 the series evolved to become the Pandemic System of games and now include games like Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, and more to come I’m sure.
While I don’t have a deep knowledge of Roman history, I have played a lot of Age of Mythology (2002) and Caesar 3 (1998). I feel my familiarity of the subject if fairly complete (/s).
How to Play
I’m going to assume that you already know how to play the base Pandemic game. If you don’t, you can click here to read the How to Play section of Pandemic to get a general idea of how to play a Pandemic game.
What’s the same in Pandemic: Fall of Rome? The core of the Pandemic game feels largely unchanged; if you know how to play Pandemic, it will start by feeling very familiar to you. On your turn, you take four actions. At the end of your turn, draw two cards from the player deck which is seeded with epidemic cards, then draw cards from the invade city deck which puts more barbarian tribes out onto the board. When an epidemic card is revealed, draw one city card from the bottom of the invade city deck and put 3 barbarians on that city, then shuffle the pile of discarded city cards together and place them on top of the city deck. The goal of Pandemic: Fall of Rome is to amass a certain number of cards of the same colour to form a treaty with each of the tribes. The game is only won when you’ve treated with all 5 tribes.
What sets Pandemic: Fall of Rome apart from its predecessor? Well, event cards now have 2 effects, one being much stronger than the other, but will progress the downfall token if you chose that stronger action. Being set in ancient Rome there are no airplanes to get you around the board, instead the coastal cities have ports, and you have to discard a card matching the destination colour to use them. Research stations are now garrisons, where you can recruit troops to battle any of the 5 invading barbarian tribes. Speaking of battles, to remove cubes from the board you’ll need to march your legions into a space with the barbarians to battle, rolling die to do so. Sometimes you’ll be able to clear all the barbarians in a single action and sometimes you’ll find your forces decimated and actions wasted. The biggest change of all in my opinion is how the barbarians march their troops towards Rome.
When you draw from the invade cities deck, you’ll need to find the city represented on that card. If that city doesn’t have any cubes of that colour in the city, don’t place anything in that city. Instead, you’ll a path until you reach a city that does have a cube on it. You’ll then place the one invading barbarian cube onto the next empty city in the line, simulating their slow progression along the Mediterranean countryside. I should also say that the invade cities deck is seeded with 5 Rome cards thereby guaranteeing that cubes will eventually reach Rome should you do nothing to stop it.
To win Pandemic: Fall of Rome, you’ll need to sign peace treaties with all 5 barbarian tribes. Each tribe has a different distribution of cards in the player deck, and requires a different number of cards to be discarded to sign the treaty. Once a treaty is signed, the barbarian hordes will still march on Rome, but now you can turn barbarian cubes into legions with a single discarded card.
To lose, either the downfall marker will reach it’s end (the downfall marker progresses when you choose the more powerful action on event cards, or when a city is sacked), or, when the player deck runs out of cards, or, when you need to place a barbarian cube, but there are none left in the supply.
Review
I know there’s a subset of gamers that want their cooperative games to be brutally difficult. A 10% win rate is nearly too high for them. They want to be beaten, crushed, and like Batman after Bane breaks his back and throws him to the pit, to claw their way back into the light and emerge victorious.
That is so not me. My game time is so few and precious that I don’t want to lose, ever. A loss in a cooperative game feels like a failure, a wasted play. With that in mind, I really enjoy the Pandemic games, each game feels like it has a satisfying arc, and generally I feel like I should be able to win every game, but often on the very last turn. I think my actual win rate is closer to 70%, which isn’t too shabby.
Pandemic: Fall of Rome is my favourite spin-off Pandemic that I’ve played. I love the mechanism of the barbarian hordes marching across the Mediterranean countryside. I also enjoy the push and pull of needing to defend Rome or else you’ll lose, while the invading barbarians sacking the far-flung cities could also cause you to lose.
My biggest complaint about Pandemic: Iberia was that I found it very hard to move around, which makes sense for the time period that it was set in. Pandemic: Fall of Rome tackles that criticism by using boats. It’s trivial to move around to coastal cities, just discard a card matching the colour of the destination city to move to it, but moving inland can be a struggle. A large part of the decision space is choosing to leave the convenient coasts to move inland, so you can tackle the problems brewing in the land locked areas like Philippopolis.
The barbarian removal mechanism of marching your legions into battle in thematic and exciting. In one game I kept rolling poorly, and having my forces decimated, while my wife was cleaning cities with ease. This led us to spinning a narrative of her being a great military leader, while I was a mere ferryman, managing the logistics of war while she did the actual defending. I love when a game enables emergent storytelling.
While rolling dice is exciting, it can also swing your games from easy to difficult and frustrating. There’s no way to mitigate a dice roll, and you need to commit how many forces you’re willing to lose before rolling the die. Maybe you only need one die, but maybe. Should you find yourself defeated, the only recourse is to rebuild your army, and try, try again.
I’m not sure if I like or hate needing to use the dice to resolve combats, it does inject a bit more luck, sometimes rewarding you when you take a gamble, and other times absolutely punishing you when you put all your eggs into one basket. Either way, it can create some exciting moments
Another aspect of Pandemic: Fall of Rome that differs from it’s vanilla brother, is the event cards now have two abilities. There’s the basic event, and a much stronger version of the same event, but choosing that option will cause Rome to decline. It’s rare that I choose that option, the conservative player in me wants to preserve that decline tracker as much as possible, if it reached the bottom, we lose. But there have been moments where making the hard choice and taking that powerful event was the key to turning the tide of the game, and carried us right on to victory.
I can say that Pandemic: Fall of Rome does feel very different from base Pandemic, but I’m not sure if there’s enough to really differentiate them. If you’re familiar with base Pandemic, the similarities will be blatant. Make no mistake, this is still a Pandemic game, but Pandemic: Fall of Rome manages to feels like a fresh take on the Pandemic system, it isn’t just a simple re-theme. The randomness of clearing cubes, the need to move legions around the board to even have a chance to clear cubes, and the way the barbarian hordes march on Rome can make this game feel quite different in a lot of ways, but at the end of the day, you’ll still feel like you played Pandemic.
Is Pandemic: Fall of Rome good? Absolutely. Is it objectively better than Pandemic? I don’t think so. But personally, I’m much more inclined to keep Pandemic: Fall of Rome over the base box thanks to its more attractive theme, especially thanks to the exhaustion and destruction wrought by COVID-19. I don’t think any collection needs both of these games, and if you’re inclined to pick up expansions, Pandemic: Fall of Rome won’t be the right choice for you. And maybe it’s because I’ve played base Pandemic so much more, but I find myself preferring Pandemic: Fall of Rome, and if I were only going to keep one version, this is the one I’d keep.
