Number of Plays: 6 (since I started recording my gameplays, I have dozens more from 2017 and 2018 that are lost to time)
Game Length: 15 minutes
Mechanics: Hand Management, Hidden Movement
Release Year: 2017
Designer: Tim Fowers
Artist: Ryan Goldsberry
Introduction
How tense can a single deck of cards feel? Can you imbue all the excitement and fear of a get-away chase into a simple little card game? Prior to 2017 I would have been skeptical, but that’s the year Fowers Games published Fugitive, a 43 card two player game, set in the world of Burgle Bros. Thematically, this takes place at the end of a Burgle Bros game with the Rook trying to escape from the Marshall who is hot on his tail.
Fugitive has the distinction of being the first game I ever backed on Kickstarter. I was caught up in the excitement of getting more from the Burgle Bros. world, especially considering Burgle Bros. was both mine and my wife’s favourite co-op game. To this day, it sits high on my top games of all time list.
How to Play
To begin a game of Fugitive, the 0 card is placed in the centre of the table, and the cards with the number 1, 2, 3, and 42 are given to the Fugitive. Then, the rest of the cards are broken into 3 decks, 4 – 14, 15 – 28, and 29 – 41. These decks are shuffled and placed where both players can access them. The Fugitive draws 3 additional cards from the first deck, and 2 more cards from the second deck. The only thing the Marshall gets is a dry-erase board to scribble down notes.
Gameplay alternates between the Fugitive and the Marshall. The Fugitive will draw a card from any deck, then they may place a hideout. The Marshall will draw one card from any deck, then make a guess as to which hideout the Fugitive as placed on the table. If the Marshall wants, they can guess more than one hideout at a time, but if they get any wrong, none of the hideouts are revealed.
Fugitive is a quick two player only game where one player is trying to evade the other. To win, The Marshall needs to discover all the Fugitive’s hideouts. For the Fugitive to win, they must play the #42 card onto the table. The catch is, the Fugitive can only play cards in ascending sequential order, and only able to skip over 3 numbers at a time. At the start of the game with the #0 on the table, the next card played must be a 1, 2, or a 3.
The Fugitive can break this rule by playing additional cards face down when they place a hideout. Each other card will have a number of footprints under the number. The number of footprints played is the number the sequence can be extended. By playing two cards with two footprints each, the Fugitive can make a leap from card #3 to #10! This is a gamble however, should the Marshall discover that hideout, the footprint cards will be revealed as well, giving the Marshall even more information.
Review
Fugitive is a fun game. My favourite memory of this game happened when I first introduced it to my brother. I made him play the Marshall role first. Simply because I was the more experienced player, I managed to escape with relative ease. He quickly proclaimed that the Fugitive role is obviously the easier role to be in, there’s not enough time for the Marshall to find ALL the hideouts!
Then we switched. As the Marshall, I generally employ the road block strategy of stocking up on cards from the last deck, filling my hands with high valued cards. The Fugitive is lulled into a false sense of security, meandering around with half a dozen or more face down, hideous. Once they get to the last third of their escape, it’s too late. With all my previous guesses, I’ve deduced the vast majority of hideouts and correctly guess over half of them with a single turn. They are forced to stall as they need to draw more cards to stock up on footprint icons in order to make the long leap between hideout spots, not realizing the sheer amount of information that I already have. They’ll only have a scant few places to hide, and I already know them all. The trap snaps shut, and the Marshall wins!
To an inexperienced player, both sides feel impossible. As the Marshall, you’re in the dark, it’s difficult to make the logical leaps necessary to deduce how the Fugitive is snaking their way through the city. As the Fugitive, it feels like you have a spotlight on you, every move you make is telegraphed and the Marshall is just toying with you, like a mouse cornered by a cat.
I need to commend Fugitive, as it manages to achieve a great deal of thematic tension in a mere 43 cards and 15 minutes of gameplay. The feeling of momentum, the tension of hiding, and the joy of misdirection are all present in this little game. Much like its spiritual prequel Burgle Bros., adding an appropriate soundtrack can ratchet up the ‘Catch me if you can’ vibe that this game evokes.
The production is also top-notch. The box is styled as a tiny briefcase with a magnetic latch. The cards have a good linen finish, giving them a premium feel and the art on each card is unique and shows the story of the Fugitive enlisting the help of his comrades to evade the Marshall.
I’ve found that Fugitive doesn’t always make a great first impression. A few people I’ve introduced to the game bounced off of it, citing it too stressful, or too difficult to play well right off the bat. It’s anticlimactic when the Fugitive gets fully caught only a few rounds into the game, thanks to some lucky guesses by the Marshall. It’s a shame because I really enjoy this game. Unfortunately because it’s a 2 player only game, it doesn’t hit my table very often, as it’s quite rare that I sit down at a table with only a single opponent. That being said, it’s a great game that I would happily play at any opportunity.
Artist: Jacqui Davis, David Montgomery, and Beth Sobel
Release Year: 2015
Mechanics: Worker placement
Players: 1-6
Introduction
Viticulture has a storied past. It started out as a project on Kickstarter way back in 2012, long before the platform hosted a deluge of tabletop games that now makes up almost a third of the platform’s revenue.
Once Viticulture was successfully funded and released into the public, the revisions began. The second edition introduced Grande workers and other mechanics are hard to imagine the game without now. The 2014 expansion, Tuscany, ballooned the game by including several new mechanics such as Mamas and Papas that give players asymmetric starting positions, unique buildings that you could build on your farm that provided a unique action only you could use, an extended game board, special workers, arboriculture where you could plant and harvest tomatoes, apples, and olives, a cheese expansion, and even a module that has you offering gifts to a retired Capo. Needless to say, it was a lot.
Not all workers are created equal
In 2015 Viticulture Essential Edition (EE) came out, incorporating some of the most popular modules from the Tuscany expansion into the base game, and throwing the rest away. In 2016 Viticulture: Tuscany Essential Edition was released, featuring 3 more modules from the original Tuscany expansion (Extended boards, structure cards, and special workers). This is the version I’ve played the most, and will be focusing on today.
How to Play
Viticulture is a worker placement game where you’re competing against your fellow vintners as you each grow your meagre vineyards into bustling and prosperous farms. The game begins with an inheritance, your Mama and Papa bequeath you the resources that will lay the foundation for your farm. Each player places their rooster pawn on the turn order track, and then in player order, you can either place a meeple on a space to take the corresponding action, or pass.
It’s not uncommon for people to pass entire seasons, on the Extended board there are 4 seasons, and you only start with 3 meeples. When you pass, you’re unable to place any more meeples in the current season. All those who haven’t passed can continue to play. Once all players have passed, you progress to the next season, and resume taking actions in player order.
As players pass during winter, they recover their workers, age their grapes and their wines, collect any royalties they may have accrued, and choose their spot on the turn order track for the next year. On and on, players take their actions throughout the years until someone hits 25 victory points. At that point, the end of the game is triggered. Players finish the current year, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
Viticulture: Essentials Edition begins by asking its players what actions they want to ignore. Players start with 3 workers, half their maximum capacity, and the main board contains 16 action spots. With only 3 actions available to you in the first year, you need to assess what your Mama and Papa left you to make the best start. Your inheritance may have included some grapes that you can plant on the very first turn, while other farms feature a nice set of trellis, allowing you to spend more time drawing grape cards, hoping you’ll find a variety that can take advantage of your existing infrastructure. No matter what you choose, the race is on!
Viticulture feels like it should be an engine building game. You need money to build up your farm to be more efficient. Money will allow you to train workers, build more supporting structures and bigger cellars, so you can age and produce wine at iridium quality (Cough I’ve been playing too much Stardew Valley cough) and sell it for a huge profit. Because Money is so constraining at the beginning, players may be fooled into prioritizing coin generating actions, thinking their early investments will pay off in dividends, it’s a trap! Excess money isn’t worth anything in the end, and before long you’ll have more money in your coffers than you can reasonably use. Because Viticulture ends the year someone achieves their 25th victory point, good players should approach this as an action efficiency game. There’s no need to plant vines that you’ll never harvest, or build a windmill after all your fields are sown. Each action should be in service of furthering your goal of getting those 25 victory points.
Unfortunately, this is where the luck comes in. Viticulture features 4 decks of cards. Grapes, Orders, and Spring and Summer visitors. The grape and order cards work together, dictating the value of the grape as they come off the vine and goes into the mash tub. You use grapes in the mash tub to create wine. The higher quality the grape, the better the resulting wine will be. The order cards simply request 1 – 3 wines of varying types and qualities to be delivered to the docks in winter, and offer between 1 and 6 victory points, along with some persistent royalties which will generate some coins every year thereafter.
Making a few bottles of very good wine should work out, right?
Should you happen to draw grapes that require a support structure (the trellis and the irrigation tower), you’ll need to choose if it’s worth building that structure before you can plant that grape, or if you should take another draw from the deck. The difficulty is, other players will be drawing from that deck too, making that action space coveted at the beginning of the game, and if you happen to draw another grape card that has the same restrictions, then 2 turns have now been wasted instead of just one. Thankfully, Viticulture features the Grande worker, who can take any spot, even if all the action spaces are full. This feature really helps alleviate the pain of having the other players take the action spot that you desperately wanted to take
The wine order cards are similar, in that luck can swing the game. It’s unfortunate if you happen to have a very strong red wine production farm, and you find yourself continually drawing white and sparkling wine orders. You can continue to draw cards to mitigate this luck, but in an action efficiency game, every wasted action hurts. It’s difficult to keep up with players who are blessed with lucky draws.
The visitor cards are a different kind of luck. Many will offer benefits and bonuses that can propel your farm higher and faster if used correctly. A great visitor can save you a whole year of actions, allowing you to convert resources that would normally take two or three whole actions to do so, or providing a discount on a structure that you desperately needed, but were one or two coins short. Some visitors are great early in the game, and it stinks when you draw them when you’re approaching the end of the game.
Hope I don’t need to make a rose or sparkling wine any time soon…
I’m not always against randomness in games. The amount of cards available does make Viticulutre feel more varied and replayable. I just end up with a bitter taste in my mouth when I see lady luck bless my opponents while I’m stuck with a handful of useless cards. Milling the deck is not optimal play here.
I’m perpetually fascinated by iterative board game designs. I find it hard to consider a specific edition of a game in a vacuum without considering all the previous versions that came before it. It’s also interesting to consider how the wider board game playing audience reacts to these changes. When two people talk about their experiences playing Viticulture, their experience might not be the same. Once you find your favourite way to play, it can be hard to deviate.
I ran into this ‘problem’ after playing Viticulture: Essential Edition with Tuscany Essential Edition half a dozen times with my friends, but then tried playing the classic version of Viticulture on BoardGameArena and was struck by how significantly the game has changed since its original release. Without going into the nitty-gritty details of all the differences, Viticulture Essential Edition with Tuscany Essential Edition is my favourite way to play. It feels smoother, more varied, and I’ve had a better experience overall. While you don’t need the expansion content to enjoy Viticulture, there may be some modules that sing for you specifically, and it’s easy enough to introduce new players to any amount of the available expansion content. It all integrates seamlessly, to the point where I was surprised to discover all the things that weren’t included in the original game.
I enjoy Viticulture. The setting of making wine in a Tuscan farm feels relaxing and unique. Aside from blocking action spaces, a few of the visitor cards offer ways to interact with your opponents. Either tasking them with giving you something (like 2 cards each), or offering a small benefit to each other player and rewarding you with points for each player who takes advantage. I like this kind of interaction, and I’m glad there’s no way for players to steal wine from each other, or destroy things they’ve built. In a race game, it’s more fun to go faster than your opponents rather than win by dragging them all down into the mud.
Viticulture: Essentials Edition with Tuscany: Essentials Edition is a great medium weight euro worker placement game. There’s mild interaction and luck, which may or may not detract from the experience. It’s smooth, inoffensive, and the setting is great for introducing new adults into the hobby. While this isn’t a MUST-HAVE game for me, I’m glad it exists, and I’m glad someone in my gaming group is quite keen on playing it, as I generally have a good and relaxing time while playing this game.
Artists: Tim Baron, Matthew Ebisch, James Lyle, Kaysha Siemens, Adam Stoak
Release Year: 2014
Mechanics: Cooperative, Set Collection, Hand Management
A copy of Kings of Israel was provided by the publisher for review purposes
Introduction
There’s a knee-jerk reaction that happens every time someone mentions that a piece of media is ‘Christian’. Memories of kitschy messages layered on sub-par productions, fictionalized idyllic stories that lean too heavily into prosperity for the good guys and a lack of danger or consequences is generally what comes to my mind. Some people have complex and traumatic experiences with the church or religion, and will refuse to engage with that media, because no one likes trying to be bombarded with propaganda, especially if they’ve already rejected the message a dozen times.
I am of the Christian faith, but I generally rebel against the media that caters to my religion. It always feels lacking, more of trying to push an agenda or message, rather than focusing on good story for the sake of art. But when the opportunity arose to get my hands on a couple of Christian themed board games, my curiosity was piqued. Are board games subject to the same criticisms that I have for other Christian medias? Read on to find out
How to Play
Kings of Israel is a cooperative game set in the Northern Kingdom of Israel during the reign of its kings up until Israel’s destruction by Assyria. Players represent a line of prophets that are trying to stem the influx of sin and dismantle the golden idols, while also trying to build enough altars to win the game.
A round of Kings of Israel has four phases. The King’s Godliness phase will either bestow a blessing on the players, or a punishment, depending on if the current sitting king is good or evil. After dealing with the event for the round, the Sin Increases phase has players revealing location cards, and distributing black sin cubes. Should a location receive a third sin cube, they also erect a golden idol. If players ever need to put out a sin cube, or an idol, but there are none in the supply, they lose the game. After the sin has been distributed, the Prophet’s Work phase begins. Each player gets four actions. They may move, remove sin or idols, draw resource cards, build an altar, make a sacrifice at an altar, or give resources to another player. Once all players have taken a turn, the End of Round Phase has the starting player card passed clockwise, and the timeline token moves to the next king in chronological order. If the timeline token hits the bottom of the track, Assyria invades and destroys Israel, resulting in a loss for the prophets.
The only way the players can win is if they manage to erect altars. 7 in a 2 player game, 8 in a 3 player game, and 9 in a four player game. There is also a 7 game campaign in the back of the book if you want to challenge yourself to walking up that scaling difficulty ladder.
Review
“Biblical Pandemic” is how I described Kings of Israel when inviting people to come play. The similarities are obvious, there’s plague cubes spreading across the map (although Kings of Israel only features one colour of cubes), and players have 4 actions on their turn where they are trying to move and clear the cubes from the board. What separates Kings of Israel from Pandemic is the resource cards, and how players win. Instead of drawing two cards at the end of your turn like you do in Pandemic, Kings of Israel has you spending your actions to draw cards. Players need to decide if they want to draw cards to the resources they need, or focus their time in clearing sin cubes and dismantling the idols. The former is the path to victory, but ignoring the latter will result in a loss for the prophets.
Kings of Israel is fast to get started, and quick to play. All the decks of cards get shuffled and are ready to roll, no need to separate out cards to ensure an even distribution. This means it’s both quick and random. In my most recent game, I drew a card that had me reshuffle the discard and put it all back on top with only 4 cards in the discard pile, putting each of those locations in danger of getting an idol almost immediately. With a bit of luck and some great blessings, we found it not too difficult to get out of tough situations, making the randomness feel fair.
Beyond the set-up for the decks, each round is quick too. You draw and deal with the blessing or punishment, draw location cards to spread sin, then each player does 4 actions. After all players have taken a turn, the first player card is passed to the left, and you do it all again. As with most cooperative games, if you have players who prefer to discuss every possible option, the game can drag on too long. The rule book says for an “easy mode”, players can play with their cards on the table, but there are no restrictions on communication on what’s in your hand. I’m hard-pressed to figure out why you wouldn’t just play with open hands anyway, as you could just ask “anyone got gold?” each round. Playing with the cards face up on the table just removes a small memory aspect from the game.
The goal of the game is to build altars. To build an altar you need to play a gold, a wood, and a stone card from your hand. There are only 6 of each of those cards in the resource deck, meaning you’ll need to get through the entire resource deck at least once in order to win the game. This lead to players taking their entire turn to just draw cards, milling the deck, trying to run the deck out, so we can reshuffle and get the resources we need from the discard pile into our hands. This is doubly painful when the punishment cards destroy build altars, or force you to discard one of the necessary resources from your hand. I don’t particularly like it when the boring play is the smart play. Sure, you can distract yourself to clear some cubes that may cause a problem next round, but if you don’t mill that deck, you can’t build all the altars, and you’ll lose anyway. Thankfully, that’s not often the case and may only come up as you get down to the final handful of turns.
Let’s talk re-playability. There are about 14 full rounds in the game. During that time you’ll draw 4 or 5 blessing cards, and between 10 and 15 sin and punishment cards. Some blessing cards are permanent buffs that can really alter how you approach the puzzle, and the order that the punishment cards can cascade pain upon your game. Add into this 9 ability cards, and I’d argue that the variability in Kings of Israel is fairly high, even though the goal is always the same. Each game will feel different and have you using different tactics to keep the forces of sin at bay, which is something I’m looking forward to.
Now is where I come back around to the theme. I really appreciate that Kings of Israel doesn’t proselytize. At no point does it beat you over the head with scripture, or force the virtues of the church down your throat. The flavour text on every card does contain a relevant verse from the bible, but it’s incredibly small and serves to enhance the theme. I also enjoy that the game doesn’t turn God into a vending machine, doling out blessings and prosperity at every turn. Instead, it shows both sides, his blessings and his wrath. The prophets aren’t universally loved and granted unrealistic divine protection, but are persecuted. To me, this more accurately reflects my experience with the bible, having read it cover to cover a few times. There’s a lot of violence and wrath in that book that seems to be skipped over during Sunday morning sermons and in most Christian media. It’s plain to me that designer Lance Hill has done his homework and handled the theme very respectfully.
As I said before, Kings of Israel is Biblical Pandemic. That phrase alone will tell you enough if you should seek it out or not. I’m looking forward to the next time I have my friends of faith over, as I have no doubt this game will be a hit with them. I think I would have been even more enthusiastic had I played it back in 2014 before the other Pandemic spin-off games Fall of Rome and Rising Tide came out. Kings of Israel is quick and easy to play, making it a great game to play with any collection of people, whether it be you and your kids, or a youth group. Funhill Games also produced some Bible studies if you want to teach more about the Kings, locations, or prophets that are featured in Kings of Israel.
Mechanics: Bag Building, Hand Management, Area Control
Players: 2 or 4
Bigfoot and I played War Chest by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson as it had been on both of our ‘want to play’ lists for a while. I have a strong affinity for two player abstract strategy games, even if they don’t hit the table very much for me anymore. While I don’t think this is going to radically change my gaming habits any time soon, I do think War Chest is special and deserves a closer look.
The theme of War Chest is about as strong as any other abstract strategy game. “In War Chest you take on the role of medieval battlefield commanders, vying to take control of tactical battlefield positions”.
To begin a game of War Chest, each player is dealt 4 unit cards and takes the corresponding unit chips from the box and places them in their own supply. Each player than takes two chips from each unit and places them into their bag, along with their own royal chip. The bag is shaken and the game begins with each player drawing 3 chips.
Basically put, each round you and your opponent will draw chips from your bag, take actions with those chips, then redraw when you’ve both depleted your hands and repeat until one player has managed to lay out all 6 of their control tokens to win the game.
The units in War Chest are what give the game colour and texture. Some have passive abilities, like the Pikeman, who had a stipulation that when a unit attacks it from an adjacent location, they also take a damage, or the Knight who can only be attacked by a unit who has been bolstered.
Some units have restrictions, like the Archer who cannot take the generic attack action, but must use it’s tactic (which allows it to attack a unit two spaces away), and others just have a tactic that you can activate, like the lancer, who can choose move one or two spaces in a straight line, then attack, allowing you to close a wide gap quickly.
War Chest has a lot of push and pull to it. Because you need to have matching chips in your bag to activate units on the board, you’re compelled to fill your bag with as many chips as possible so you can activate your unit more often, but there’s a delay. The unit you’re recruiting chips for won’t be drawn until your bag runs out and you can refresh your bag, where you put all your discarded tokens back into your bag. If you do to have a unit on the board and 3 matching chips in your bag, great, you can start activating that unit frequently, but they’ll have a target painted on their back. Your opponent can see how many tokens you’ve recruited into your bag, and activating a unit requires you to discard a token face up, meaning your opponent knows when a unit is spent and can move in for the kill.
There’s 9 different actions you can do with each chip, which fall under 3 categories. Deploy, where you put your chip onto the board. Maneuver, where you discard a chip to take an action with a matching chip on the board (such as move, attack, bolster, control, or tactics). And finally, you can discard a chip face down to claim the initiative, recruit (move a chip from your supply into your discard pile), or pass.
Getting things done in War Chest is a slow affair. Your bag starts with 9 tokens, two from each of your 4 units, meaning it’ll take 3 rounds before your discard pile goes back into the bag. Assuming you deploy two of your units, that only leaves you with one matching chip for those two units in your bag. That’s only one Maneuver action per bag refresh. It can take 3 or 4 bag refreshes just to get a chip into position. Because it takes so long to do anything, combat feels dangerous. When you have a unit in the line of fire, you immediately start sweating and hoping against hope that you’ll be the first to attack, lest the progress you made with this token is undone with one fell swoop.
On the subject of attacks, when you’re attacked, you remove the attacked chip from the game. Your available chips will slowly dwindle over time. Again, because your opponent can count, they can figure out when they’ve effectively rendered a unit useless. The risk of being attacked can be mitigated by bolstering your units, placing another chip creating a stack. When you’re attacked, the top chip is still removed from the game, but the lower chip remains where it is. Now you don’t need to spend the extra actions returning a subsequent unit to the same position. Again, the push and pull of War Chest shows up, if you bolster, you have less chips in the bag to activate that unit on future turns. Everything is a trade-off.
The goal of the game isn’t to eradicate your opponent, but instead to control 6 points on the board. You control a point by moving a unit onto a control point, then discarding a chip matching the unit on that spot which allows you to place your control token. Once you have a control token down, you can deploy future units from this spot (assuming it’s unoccupied). Should your opponent manage to get one of their units onto your control space, it only takes one control action to remove your token, and install their own.
One of the games that we played, Bigfoot managed to win without attacking me a single time. The threat of combat was enough to keep me back and he managed to get all of his control tokens down. In another game, a single crossbowman was deployed to the board, and with 4 matching chips in the bag, he proceeded to move it into position and cripple my forces with multiple attacks. I had no units that could close the gap quick enough to get in and take out that one devastating unit.
I imagine every unit can be devastating in specific circumstances. While I’m still a beginner at this game, I can see there’s significant depth ahead of me. Like most abstract strategy games, this is best played against a single person multiple times, with both of you learning and growing together. Previous games experiences informing the decisions as you move forward. A unit that was ineffectual in one game can be the clutch unit in another. When a meta forms and develops over multiple plays as you and your opponent sharpen your skills against each other, something special is made. I suspect that as you play War Chest more, you’ll start drafting the starting units instead of dealing them randomly. This would allow you to craft your army in response to your opponent, offering even more strategic decisions.
It would be remiss if I didn’t mention the luck factor. Because you need matching chips in your hand to activate your units on the board, a lot of the game is putting yourself into the best (and potentially dangerous) position, and hoping you draw the correct chip that will allow you to activate a unit that’s in striking distance before your opponent can, or even further, that you can control a location before the unit gets wiped off the map. To me, the luck in War Chest comes across more as risky than anything else. If you’ve found yourself in a potentially dangerous situation it may be worth burning an action to ensure you get to go first after you draw your 3 chips in the next round.
War Chest feels ripe for expansions, and at the time of this writing, two have already been released War Chest: Siege and War Chest: Nobility. Both add more units and vary the battlefield, giving players new challenges to crash against. While I don’t feel ready to add expansions into my game yet, I’m glad to know they already exist.
If you’re looking for something along the same lines as War Chest, I can personally recommend Santorini. It’s a great strategic game with interesting asymmetric gameplay. If asymmetry is not your bag, I’d recommend Hive or Tak. I find such joy when playing these games against players of equal skill. Of course, there’s always Chess and Go if you want to wade into those waters, but with a skill ceiling so high it can be hard to find players of an similar skill.
Well, it’s May 2022 and my family and I have contracted COVID-19 for the first time. I thought I would spend our isolation time reflecting on the series of games with the name that no one really thought remarkable until it overtook our world; Pandemic.
How to Play
Pandemic is a cooperative game where players are trying to discover the cure to four diseases ravaging the world. The game begins by dealing players cards out of the player deck, then seeding the deck with epidemic cards, which serve to make things suddenly very bad in a random location, and to increase the pressure on the players.
In Pandemic, you and your friends will take actions to move around the world, treat diseases (which removes one disease cube from the location your player pawn is in), build research stations, and trade cards with each other. The goal of the game is to discover all 4 cures by discarding 5 cards of the same colour while your pawn is at a research centre. Players all lose together if the player deck runs out, or if the outbreak tracker hits 0, or if you ever need to place a cube of a specific colour, but you’ve run out. With 3 ways to lose, players are sometimes forced to figure out which crisis is the most demanding before choosing which actions to take.
To begin the game, 9 cards are drawn from the infect cities deck, with 3 disease cubes placed on the first three cities, 2 cubes on the next three cities, and 1 cube on the final three cities. With this initial seed and some potential hot-spots, the stage is set. All players begin in Atlanta (the home of the CDC), and the game is on.
Review
Pandemic has become a venerable classic. It feels like it singlehandedly defines the co-op genre, at least as I know it. I started playing board games in 2014, at which point the 2012 reprint of Pandemic had filled store shelves and was actively being pushed onto new gamers. I’m very glad it was, because the concept of a fully cooperative game seemed so foreign to me that I probably wouldn’t have tried it without a push. After trying Pandemic, cooperative quickly became one of my favourite genres of board games.
Now, I know there were cooperative games long before 2008’s Pandemic, but this game brought the concept into the mainstream (at least, mainstream for the board game hobby), and inspired a wave of excellent cooperative experiences after it. It’s hard to understate the effect that Pandemic and Matt Leacock has had on the board game hobby, but I’m not here to give you a history lesson. Let’s talk about Pandemic specifically.
The Pandemic system, as it’s come to be known, has a formula that many other games have iterated on (especially by designer Matt Leacock in his subsequent cooperative games, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, not to mention the other Pandemic spin-offs). The formula is thus: A player takes a number of actions on their turn, then draws some cards which are used to amplify actions or further the end game objective, and then bad stuff happens. While I’m simplifying it, the goal of the game is to manage the bad stuff long enough to accomplish your long term objectives. While randomness can play a part and utterly crush your team’s efforts, generally the experience is tense and gives you the feeling that you might just pull through, as long as you don’t draw one specific card that would cause catastrophic ramifications.
I want to talk briefly about the infection deck, because it is an absolutely brilliant mechanic. The infection deck is the engine that gives players something to do while they’re working on curing the diseases. When a city is drawn from the infection deck, it gets a disease cube placed onto it, then it’s placed into the infection deck discard pile. When an epidemic strikes, you draw a card from the bottom of the deck, put 3(!) disease cubes on that one city, then shuffle all the discarded infection cards together and place them on top of the deck. From that moment on the stress of the game leaps. Suddenly there’s a time pressure; all those cities that were somewhat fine, and not quite teetering on the brink of disaster are now in the crosshairs. At any time those cities can be drawn again during the infect cities step of the game, and if they do, it will spell trouble.
I always find Pandemic tense. With three ways to lose and only one way to win, you need to be quick on completing your objectives while not throwing away too many cards. It’s tempting to use the cards liberally to fly around the board, but doing so directly takes away from your ability to cure diseases. It’s also tempting to horde cards in your hand, but with a hard hand limit of 7 cards, you’ll quickly be discarding cards with absolutely no benefit. it’s important to strike a balance.
Speaking of balance I want to mention the character roles. Each person gets a role at the start of the game that offers them a special ability, but some feel significantly better than others. While some abilities are ALWAYS useful (like the medic, who can cure all the cubes of one colour with a single action, an ability that you’ll be using at least once per turn), others characters feel more situational (like the Contingency Planner who can re-use event cards). I always want to explore more characters, but I go into every game wanting to win and some characters just jive better with me than others.
Pandemic is a truly cooperative experience. As most people play with open hands and/or open information (because it’s a co-op game, there’s no reason to hide), it can be prone to someone gruffly taking over the table, dictating what each player should do on their turn, and turning it into a one player game instead of a team effort. I don’t fault the game for that, however; it’s up to the players to establish their own ground rules. Cardboard does a terrible job of maintaining boundaries after all.
I’m always surprised and how close my games of Pandemic end up. It’s incredibly rare that we win outright, without any fear that at least one of the lose conditions will overtake our efforts to save the world. Very often we win on the very last, or second to last possible turn, just barely curing the last disease through a convoluted series of actions that manage to get the last two cards into the last player’s hand so that they can just barely make it to the research centre with a single action to spare. And then there’s the blowouts – the bad luck games where you are given a binary option at the beginning. Cure red or cure yellow. With no further information you arbitrarily make a choice to cure red, only to have the next few cities to get infected be yellow, which is obviously followed by an outbreak in yellow, which triggers another and another and another outbreak, sinking your outbreak tracker deep into the doom end of the track.
The blowouts aren’t very common, but they do exist. I’m not sure if they can be ‘fixed’ or not, but they rarely bother me. Resetting the deck can be tedious if you want to reshuffle and try again right away, but it’s a small price to pay for a easy to learn and play game that offers such a interesting experience.
Because Pandemic is easy to learn, it’s often used as an on-ramp to the world of board games, showing players that there’s more to this cardboard hobby than rolling dice and slowly crawling your army around the world. There’s joy and teamwork, elation and tension, and it shows that not everything needs to be a competition.
My wife and I love cooperative games, and that love started with Pandemic. Since then, we’ve moved onto other great cooperative games like Burgle Bros and Now Boarding, both designed by Tim Fowers, and I’ve had a lot enjoyment playing the Pandemic spin off games, like Pandemic: The Cure, Pandemic: Fall of Rome, and Pandemic: Rising Tide. If you haven’t played Pandemic, or any other cooperative games, I can not suggest it enough. If you play it enough and start to feel tired on what the base box is offering, there are three expansions that drastically change up how the game is played, including many more character roles, a 5th disease, and mutations that make each of the diseases act in different ways.
Designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Artist: Dann May
Release Year: 2022
Mechanics: Pattern Building, Set Collection
Players: 2 or 4
A copy of Abstract Academy was provided by the publisher for review purposes.
Introduction
I have never aspired to being an artist. I’ve scribbled little sausage people in the margins of my notebooks while in school, but chose to spend my efforts with the written word instead. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that I’ve never applied paint to canvas.
That said, some of my family members are ardent artists. One will paint anything they can get their hands on, including their game controllers or the table they happen to be sitting at, and the other achieved a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Tangentially to this, I had aunts and grandparents who vary from incredible artists with paint to amazingly skillful with wood. What I’m trying to say is there is art all around me, but devoid in myself.
How to Play
Abstract Academy is a two of four player game where players are playing cards to a shared tableau in an effort to achieve the goals that are laid out at the start of the game.
What makes Abstract Academy unique is that the grid of cards doesn’t start out set; on your turn you can play a card orthogonally adjacent to any other card on the table, until there are 4 cards on the X axis and 4 cards on the Y axis. Once that requirement has been met, then the grid becomes locked.
Once the grid is locked, the ‘home row’ and scoring zones become set. The row of cards closest to you is your ‘home row’, your opponents cannot play cards in the row closest to you. Your scoring zone is the two rows of cards closest to you. Once the 4 by 4 grid of cards is completely full, you score each of the objectives. In the first round, you’ll be evaluating the colours. In the second round you’ll evaluate the composition of your scoring area, and in the third round you’ll have a mix of objectives from the previous two rounds.
After 3 rounds, the player with the most points wins.
Review
Abstract Academy‘s box is white with big colourful letters. If it were a much larger box it would certainly catch more attention. Thankfully the box is literally as big as it needs to be. Ninety-two cards is everything that makes up Abstract Academy. I really appreciate the packaging being slim and small, taking up almost no space on my shelf and making it very easy to travel with. What I don’t like is that the flap to open the box is difficult to open, and I suspect won’t stand the test of time.
The cards in Abstract Academy are excellent. The card stock is thick and glossy and the colours are vibrant, which is important in a game that focuses on the colours on the cards. The main deck of cards that you’ll be handling look to include various brush strokes and the textures of paint on canvas. If you’ve painted before, you’ll feel right at home.
The game was easy to teach, but had a few edge cases that made it slightly tricky. “You cannot play cards in your opponent’s home row, but the home row isn’t decided until 4 cards are played on the x axis. Also, you can play on your opponent’s home row if there are no other options.”
Once beyond the rules, Abstract Academy plays quickly. Turn by turn you’ll each place cards onto the tableau either trying to further your own goals, or try to hamper your opponents. If the goal is to have the most blue zones, you might play a card that connects a couple of their blue zones together, lowering their overall number.
It is possible to have an entire shut-out during a round where a single player wins all the objectives, which feels like it shouldn’t happen, but sometimes that’s just how the cookie crumbles. Each player will also get a personal objective each round where they’re trying to create a shape somewhere in their scoring zone. You get an objective every round, but if you don’t accomplish your goal it can carry over to the next round. That said, you can only accomplish one goal per round, so holding onto them round to round isn’t very helpful.
When evaluating the goal cards, ties are broken by the ‘Teacher’s Pet’ card. If you have this card and there is a tie, you must surrender the card to your opponent, but you win the tie. I actually really like this decision as it feels like the most fair way to distribute who wins ties.
Luck does play a role in how well you can do at Abstract Academy, but it’s not obvious. Sometimes you may find you need a very specific order of colours in order to accomplish a shape that you just can’t seem to get. You’ll flip the card around and around desperately wishing you could just flip it over and get the mirror image. Alas, the paint is not always in your favour.
Overall, Abstract Academy is a cool little two player game that is worth playing with the artist in your life. While the art theme is just a window dressing, I’m a fan of games using a theme to appeal to an audience wider than the those already in the board game hobby. It may draw someone in who has always loved art, but hasn’t experienced the joy of board and card games yet.
You can get Abstract Academy from the Crafty Games website and it includes a promo card when ordering directly from the publisher.
