1639: Analysis Paralysis

One thing you’ll almost inevitably have to deal with at some point if you play tabletop games is the matter of “analysis paralysis” — those moments where everything grinds to a standstill as one player takes ages over their turn, trying to determine what the best possible course of action will be.

It’s a problem most evident in Eurogames, which tend to have the largest variety of different decisions to make each turn, as compared to more theme-focused titles where the emphasis is more on the ongoing narrative created by your play session. A typical Eurogame provides you with a wealth of options every single turn — and in many cases, those options get broader and broader as the game progresses. This means that as you get closer to the end of the game, turns slow to a crawl until, in some cases, you have to abandon the game altogether because it’s getting too late — not a desirable outcome for anyone involved.

For the group I regularly play with, this is a particular issue with Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola, a worker-placement game that I don’t like all that much, but which is enjoyed enthusiastically by two of our number and as such we break it out every so often according to our “different person picks each session” rota. For the uninitiated, Agricola is a game about building up a small medieval farm, and as the game progresses, more and more different action spaces become available to choose from, meaning the game gets increasingly complex as it progresses. This naturally leads to analysis paralysis, particularly as competition heats up for the more obviously useful spaces towards the end of the game.

So tonight we decided to try something different: timed turns, a la competitive chess. My friend Sam had acquired a funky little timer cube which had a different digital timer on each of its six faces, and we allocated ten minutes per player for the whole game, pausing the timer once a decision had been made so that players could move pieces and tokens around the board without being pressured by the clock.

It really, really worked! By the end of the game, the players most prone to analysis paralysis had nearly reached — but not exceeded — their ten-minute time limit, while the members of the group more inclined to take their turns quickly — usually by deciding what they were going to do during other players’ turns rather than ignoring what was going on around them or getting distracted by phones, tablets or pieces of cake — had a couple of minutes left on the clock by the end of the game.

We all agreed that it made the game feel markedly different. One of the most traditionally analysis paralysis-prone players noted that he felt like he wished there was a little more time, but conceded that this was probably the point of the whole exercise. We also agreed that it wasn’t necessarily desirable to play like this all the time, but that on occasions where it was necessary to get through games in a timely manner — playing on weeknights, say — it would be a good idea to implement in the future. More leisurely play sessions can still be had on those occasions where we have time for them — weekends away, holidays, that sort of thing.

I still didn’t win Agricola, but I think I enjoyed the experience a little more than usual, which is saying something. And if I hadn’t made a stupid mistake in the final turn, I would have probably done somewhat better than I ended up doing. Oh well! There’s always next time.

1429: Call me Farmer Heathcliff

Before we get started, a shout out to the person who found this blog by searching for “are there any games on facebook that arent crap” [sic]. In answer to your question, good sir and/or madam, the answer is “no”. Thank you for your time.

Right then, to business.

Tonight we played a game of Agricola: Farmers of the Moor, the expansion to Agricola. Agricola is still not my favourite game in the world, but the expansion does add some interesting new elements to it — and, crucially, multiple ways to do well. By way of example, the top two players out of our four-player game this evening scored 61 and 60, adopting two totally different approaches to one another. (I came third, with 27 points, but at least I didn’t come last, which I count as a personal victory.)

My difficult with Agricola is a matter of prioritisation, and of finding an efficient strategy to do the things I want to do. I get that you should spend the early game building a house, the mid-game building up your family and the end-game racking up as many points as possible, but I find it very difficult to determine what are the best possible actions to achieve those things, and on top of that, what the best Occupation and Minor Improvement cards to achieve those things might be. My tablemates are always talking about “synergies” and “combos” but I have real trouble spotting all but the most obvious combinations.

I know that part of the problem is that I just haven’t played it enough compared to them. I should get in more practice with my own copy — yes, I own a copy, despite having somewhat mixed feelings about it — or the iOS version. But it’s one of those things that when I consider actually sitting down to play it, I start thinking I’d rather do something else instead. Not in the “I’d rather light my own eyeballs on fire” sense; it’s just something fairly low down the list of things I feel like doing, somewhere behind “playing Bravely Default”, “playing Final Fantasy XIV until 5 in the morning” and “watching several episodes of The Office back-to-back”. (Incidentally, The Office — the American incarnation — is something I’d very much like to talk about, but I’ll save that for another day.)

On the whole, we had a decent game this evening and I was reasonably pleased with most of my game — right up until the last turn where my lack of contingency plan was brought into stark focus by someone taking the one space that would screw me over almost completely. Consequently, I spent the last turn frantically gathering the food needed for survival rather than racking up points — and even then, I forgot the fuel needed to heat my home and took a two-point hit for having a sick person. Bollocks.

Oh well. Fortunately, I managed to get Yeoman Farmer (take no negative points, except for unused farmyard spaces and Begging cards — of which I had neither) out when things looked like they might go a bit pear-shaped. If I hadn’t managed to get that out, my pathetic farm at the end of the game would have had a truly embarrassing score; possibly my worst of all time.

Still, as my tablemates say, it was a training game — it’s only the second time we’ve played with the expansion — and so we all probably have a lot to learn, still.

1217: Board Game Geek

I really like board games, as those of you who have been reading for a while will know. While I’m perhaps not quite as “hardcore” into the hobby as some on the Internet — largely due to not getting to play quite as often as I’d like — I do firmly count myself in that contingent of geeks who enjoy shuffling cards, fiddling with cardboard chits and moving wooden and/or plastic pieces around on a table. There’s something inherently fun about it as a physical activity, and the social side of things shouldn’t be understated, either — it’s a great thing to do with friends if you don’t feel like going out, and is an activity that can easily be “scaled” according to how many people you have and how much time you have available.

Next weekend, I’m taking a short trip away with some friends of mine to make merry and play a ton of board and card games. I’m really looking forward to it, since it will be some uninterrupted time to enjoy ourselves without having to worry about being home on time or anything like that. (I will add at this juncture that Andie is enormously understanding and patient regarding my geeky hobbies, and that I appreciate it enormously — especially when she joins in!)

Anyway, in preparation for said weekend, I catalogued the games I have available, and it seems I have amassed quite a sizeable collection over the last few years. I am happy about this, and I like displaying them as a talking point. (If you come over to our place and you see anything exciting-looking that you’d like to play on my shelf, just say the word and I’ll be more than happy to bust it out.)

For those less familiar with the hobby, it’s difficult to know where to start. So I thought today I’d spend a moment going over some of my favourites from “The Davison Collection” and why they’re worth a look. Not all of these games hit the table regularly in our gaming group due to our varying tastes, but I enjoy all of them for various reasons.

Ticket to Ride

If you’re just getting into board gaming — and by that I mean “ready to step beyond Monopoly and Scrabble” — there are few games I can recommend more than Alan R. Moon’s classic Ticket to Ride. It’s as simple as that.

Ticket to Ride’s theme is that you are claiming train routes across North America, circa 1920. (Alternatively, in one of the many other versions of the game, you might be traversing Europe, Scandinavia or all manner of other places — each alternative version also features slightly-modified rules for variety.)

This isn’t a dry, complicated business simulation, though; quite the opposite. Ticket to Ride is actually a relatively simple game of set collection. You’re dealt a hand of coloured cards at the outset of the game, and on each of your turns you can do one of three things: draw two more cards, either from the selection of five face-up cards on the table, or from the face-down draw pile; claim a route by playing the corresponding number of like-coloured cards to the discard pile and scoring points for it; or drawing new “route tickets” that provide long-term challenges to be scored at the end of the game. That’s essentially everything you need to know to get started — there are a couple of extra rules involving when you can and can’t draw rainbow-coloured “locomotive” wild cards, but essentially those three actions are all you need to know to start playing Ticket to Ride.

Once you’ve got the rules down, a game of Ticket to Ride is done and dusted in maybe 30-45 minutes, depending on how many players you’ve got. It’s a great game to introduce “non-gamers” to the hobby, and a good “start of evening” game to get everybody warmed up.

Carcassonne

Staying with the theme of “easy to understand, hard to master” games, we have Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s Carcassonne, a deceptively simple yet enormously competitive game that is as fun with two players as it is with five.

There are very few rules to learn in Carcassonne. On your turn, you draw a square tile from a face-down stack, then place it somewhere on the table in such a manner that it connects to something else. Pretty much every tile connects to something, so I believe it’s impossible to get into a situation where you can’t play anything at all — though clever play by your opponents may mean that you might not be able to play exactly where you want to.

Points are scored in Carcassonne by completing “features” on the map. These include cities, roads and cloisters. Each of these is claimed by placing one of your little wooden “meeples” on the tile you just placed to mark your ownership of the feature, then completing it. Cities must have a complete wall; roads must terminate at junctions, cities or cloisters; cloisters must have the eight tiles surrounding them filled. You don’t get your meeple back until you complete the feature, so one strategy is to make it as hard as possible for your opponents to finish their features, thereby depriving them of further point-scoring opportunities in the later game. You also can’t “share” a feature with another player unless you claim an unconnected part of it and later join it up. You can add more than one meeple to a feature to defend it more strongly in the same way — you can’t, however, simply add multiple meeples to connected tiles of the same feature.

Carcassonne’s “long game” comes in its “farming” mechanic, the exact implementation of which depends on how old the edition you’re playing is. In most current editions of the game, farms are claimed by lying a meeple down on its side in the grasslands between roads and cities. This meeple can never be reclaimed, and scores no points at the end of the game. When the game ends, each field enclosed by cities and/or roads is calculated separately — the player with the most meeples in that field scores three points per city. Again, you can’t add meeples to a farm that has already been claimed except by claiming an unconnected area and later joining it up — a process which can often be quite tricky to complete.

Carcassonne has extremely simple mechanics that belie a huge amount of tactical depth. It’s quick and easy to play, yet has the potential to get enormously competitive — in other words, it’s a great game for board game newbies to cut their teeth on, and one that remains relevant even as you get deeper into the hobby.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a cooperative board game in which players take on the role of disease control specialists attempting to cure four viruses that are spreading across the world. Each player has unique special abilities, and a significant amount of collaboration is required to beat the challenges the game provides.

Like the other games on this list, Pandemic’s mechanics are fairly simple. To cure a disease, all you have to do is collect a set of like-coloured cards, then ensure you’re in a research station to discard the cards and discover a cure. The twist is that it’s a bit fiddly to trade these cards between hands, and all the while you’re faffing around collecting cards, the disease is continuing to spread across the world, meaning you occasionally have to prioritise charging off on an aid mission to stop the viruses spreading unchecked.

Pandemic is a challenging game. There are several ways to lose: running out of cards to draw; running out of coloured cubes to represent a disease; or allowing the number of “outbreaks” — occasions where an already heavily-infected city causes nearby cities to be struck down also — to reach its maximum. It is fairly likely that the players will lose the game, particularly when playing on the harder difficulty levels — but it is still fun despite its challenge factor.

Pandemic is a good game to encourage cooperation, communication and collaboration, and it’s great for those who aren’t good with super-competitive games or direct conflict. It’s strictly the players against the game — unless you’re playing the “bio-terrorist” mode that comes with the “On the Brink” expansion set — and thus either everyone wins together… or more likely, everyone loses together.

Whack a Catgirl

I’m not going to pretend this is the best game in the world, but it is silly and enjoyable — and not only that, it plays super-quickly, too.

In Whack a Catgirl, you are attempting to pelt an irritatingly cute anime-style catgirl with a variety of amusing objects. The basic mechanics of the game consist of drawing cards from a central face-up pool and either playing them immediately if they are an action card, or putting them in your “arsenal” in front of you if they are item cards. Once you have at least two “hearts” worth of items in front of you, you can lure Neko-chan the catgirl over to you with them — discarding them in the process — and then batter her over the head with another one or two of your items, depending on how many “hearts” you expended to lure her. Flinging items at Neko-chan allows you to discard them into your face-down score pile, which is totted up at the end of the game.

That’s basically it. The game mechanics are super-simple, but the fun in Whack a Catgirl comes from the silly cards and the theme. It’s fair to say that the humour and references on the cards are probably best suited to anime fans or at least those familiar with Japanese popular entertainment, but anyone can get a kick out of the amusing artwork and inherent ridiculousness of the theme.

Fun fact: this was one of the first games from Asmadi Games, who have come to somewhat greater prominence recently through their chaotic card game We Didn’t Playtest This At All.

Robo Rally

This is basically Logo: The Game, a reference which was totally lost on everyone I last mentioned it to. Come on! PEN DOWN, FORWARD 100, RIGHT 90? No? I’ll be over here, being an old fart.

In Robo Rally, you take on the role of one of several amusingly-named robots and must proceed through a series of checkpoints before the other robots do. Simple as that. Except it’s not quite that simple — the courses are extremely hazardous, the other robots have a habit of shooting at you if you’re in their firing line, and the amount of control you have over your robot can occasionally be inconveniently unpredictable.

A single turn in Robo Rally consists of drawing cards, then using them to “program” your robot’s actions for the turn. Cards allow robots to move forward and backwards and turn left and right. Once everyone has programmed their robots, everyone resolves their moves one step at a time. If a robot ends a move facing another robot, it fires at it and causes damage. If a robot moves into another robot, it pushes it along — something which can seriously fuck up a carefully-laid plan.

As a robot gets more damaged, more of its cards become “locked”, which means that the robot must perform that same fixed action on its turn. As you can probably imagine, this can be enormously inconvenient, particularly if it’s a “move forward” card that carries a significant risk of throwing you down a pit. Further complications are added by environmental hazards such as conveyor belts, lasers, walls and all manner of other problems. What initially appears to be a simple task quickly becomes very challenging — particularly with the chaos of the other players thrown into the mix.

Robo Rally is simple to pick up but hard to master. It’s a lot of fun, particularly for those who enjoy thinking about things logically, but be warned, it’s pretty rare you’ll be able to pull off the “perfect” plan every time!

Ascension

This is a “deckbuilding” game — a game where you start with a fixed deck of cards, shuffled randomly, and then gradually acquire more and more cards as the game progresses. These cards fall into two main categories — cards which help you buy things, and cards which help you fight things. Your points largely come around from fighting things by playing a high enough value of “fight” cards on the table — but in order to acquire said fight cards you will, of course, have to spend some time acquiring some cards that help you buy things.

Ascension’s mechanics are easy to pick up and games flow quite quickly, even with four players. The deckbuilding mechanic is a lot of fun and helps ensure that games are never quite the same, and it’s just thematic enough to keep fans of fighting fantasy monsters happy, while providing enough strategy for beard-scratching tactical fans to have things to think about.

Talking of deckbuilding…

Dominion

Dominion is an interesting game that has a lot of potential variations. Each time you play, you pick a random selection of card decks to use, meaning that each game has a different combination of special abilities available to you. Thematically, you’re building a kingdom by purchasing territory and constructing facilities, but in practice you’re collecting cards that work well together and allow you to do more with your turn than you can at the outset of the game. The basic mechanics are relatively simple, but the tactical possibilities provided by the cards mean that the game grows gradually in complexity as you collect more cards for your deck.

Dominion perhaps isn’t quite as accessible as Ascension is, but it’s probably the deeper game. Once you get your head around the rules and become familiar with the cards, games can flow pretty quickly — until then, however, be prepared to spend a bit of “thinking time” determining how the various cards can benefit you.

Honourable Mention: Agricola

I feel honour-bound to mention Agricola because my gaming group is such a big fan of it, but I honestly don’t enjoy it all that much when it does come out. This is largely due to the fact that I’m not very good at it, which I appreciate is a somewhat shallow reason to dislike it, but there you are.

Actually, the thing I dislike more than anything about Agricola is not that I always lose at it, but it’s that I don’t really understand why I lose, or how I can do any better. And looking up potential strategies online doesn’t really seem to help either. It’s just something I need to become more familiar with, I guess. I can certainly appreciate the interesting, complex but accessible mechanics at work in the game — I just have no idea how to do any better than I already do.

Time to practice, I guess.

1127: The Stench of Manure

There are a few games that our gaming group plays on a regular rotation. One of them is Days of Wonder’s Ticket to Ride, which is a fantastically accessible game that pretty much anyone can pick up and enjoy. The other is Z-Man Games’ Agricola, which is still relatively easy to understand, but which I find immensely difficult. (And, judging by a few comments I received on Facebook earlier, I’m not alone in that!)

Agricola, for the uninitiated, is a game based on the thrilling world of 16th century German farming. As experienced board gamers will know, however, fairly tedious-sounding themes like this are actually ideal for adaptation into a board game. You have a variety of different tasks to perform and inevitably not quite enough time in which to perform them. You have the opportunity for expansion and building. And you need to think ahead in order to enjoy success.

My trouble with Agricola has always been that I get overwhelmed by all the possible courses of action and end up picking just one, following it to the exclusion of all else. While this is a valid strategy if no-one else is doing the same thing as you, the second someone takes an action that you were planning to do, your whole plan falls apart, since in the cutthroat world of 16th century German farming, only one person may plough a field at any one time.

Such was the difficulty I’ve had with Agricola in the past that I had convinced myself that I don’t like it very much, and found myself generally resisting requests to play it in our group. (I like to play something I can win every so often!) However, in an attempt to better myself and also allow my friends to play the games they want to play a bit more often, I picked up my own copy of Agricola recently in the hopes of getting in a bit of practice and improving my own skills.

The nice thing about Agricola is that it’s eminently suitable for solo play. Sure, it takes a bit of time to set up and it has a tendency to sprawl across the entire table, but as a solitaire game it’s relatively quick and straightforward to play, and the nature of its mechanics mean that there aren’t too many difficult-to-remember rules adaptations for solo players. Consequently, it’s an experience fairly similar to playing with others, only without people getting in your way — and as such, it’s a good means of trying out a few different strategies.

I’ve played a couple of solitaire games so far, and my score improved between the two of them. I’m not sure if I was actually playing better or if I simply had better “luck” the second time around, but I did feel a bit more confident and comfortable with my choice of actions in the second game. Rather than feeling like I was “wasting” certain turns, as I was in my first solo game, I felt like each turn achieved something. In an attempt to study my own way of playing, I even made a note of how each turn unfolded — what I did and how it affected my score. I’m not sure how helpful those notes will be, though I will say that writing things down as I played actually helped me to think a bit harder about what I was doing. It’s not always easy to organise complex, abstract mechanics in your head — let alone plan several moves ahead and take into account the fact that anyone might scupper your plans at any minute.

The net result of me playing a few solo games of Agricola, though — plus introducing Andie to it earlier (she liked it! Yay!) — is that I feel a bit better about the prospect of playing it again in the future. I have no doubt my score will still be demolished by my companions, who have all played it much more than I have and thus know the good strategies and cards to look out for, but at least I’ll feel like I have a bit more of a fighting chance.

We’ll see, I guess. To the farm!

#oneaday Day 57: Startlegal Ballactegar

Board games really are great. The incredible lateness of this entry can be almost entirely attributed to them. The one which took up most of our evening was the adaptation of the new-ish Battlestar Galactica series, which I still haven’t got around to seeing and really should, from everything I’ve heard.

Fortunately, the game doesn’t require any specific knowledge of the show and doesn’t appear to include any spoilers. What it does provide, however, is a lengthy cooperative experience tinged with mistrust and doubt thank to the fact that at least one player is, at some point, going to turn out to be evil. The exact manner in which this player chooses to conduct themself is part of the challenge of the game, both for the non-traitorous players and the traitor themselves.

What the game does an excellent job of is introducing just enough in the way of random elements to the mix to freak everyone out a bit while allowing the Cylon player the opportunity to subtly undermine everything the others are working for. Later in the game, too, the Cylons have the opportunity to reveal themselves and cause havoc more directly.

The game, like other co-op experiences such as Arkham Horror, initially appears deceptively complex but it’s actually reasonably straightforward to play. It does, however, appear to take quite some time—again, like Arkham Horror. This is fine, but it does mean you need to set aside a substantial amount of time to play, and if you’re hoping to fit a lot of games into a day of board game geekery, this may be one to save for a time when you can focus on it.

Our first attempt was an unmitigated disaster thanks to a combination of terrible luck (three Cylon fleet attacks in a row) and the fact that we had not one but two traitors in our midst, one of whom made themselves reasonably obvious almost from the outset, while the other did a masterful job of undermining things very subtly. It was an entertaining experience despite our failure to save the human race, however, and now we understand the mechanics better hopefully future play sessions will proceed much quicker. I’m looking forward to trying it again.

So of you’re a fan of co-op with a touch of betrayal, Battlestar Galactica is a great game to give a shot, even if you’re only familiar with the TV series in passing.

And now to bed!

#oneaday, Day 341: The Five Best and Worst Holiday Board Games to Teach Your Family

As the Coca-Cola advert says, holidays are comin’. (To go off on the earliest tangent I’ve ever gone off on, the word “Coca-Cola” is seemingly indecipherable to Americans when pronounced with a British accent, as I discovered at the cinema the other night.) In fact, holidays are pretty much here, what with it being Christmas Eve and all. Actually, by the time you UK types read this, it is Christmas Day. Happy holidayweenukkahmas. Fuck it. Happy Christmas.

Anyway. You may be currently locked in a house with the rest of your family, in which case it will at some point become necessary to devise some form of entertainment in order to prevent you all from killing each other. It is probably a little late to recommend things to go out and buy right now, but you’ll know for next time. In the spirit of List Season, which always seems to coincide with holiday season, here are the five best and worst board games to break out during a lull in the conversation and/or turkey consumption. Well, maybe not the “best” and “worst”. But five good ones and five less appropriate (though still good) ones, in the order that I thought of them.

The Best

Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride is a relatively simple game. The basic goal is to collect sets of coloured cards in order to claim train routes on a board representing America, Europe, Scandinavia or one of the many other variants out there. Bonus points can be attained for claiming the longest continuous unbroken route as well as completing specific “point-to-point” routes between two cities across the board via any line. It all seems very simple until near the end of the game, when a lot of blocking each other’s routes comes into play. It’s simple enough for kids as young as 7 to understand and enjoy, yet there’s enough strategic play in there for the adults to appreciate, too.

Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a game about laying tiles on the table to build up a map of a geographical region featuring cities, roads and fields. Points are scored by claiming these regions with little wooden people commonly referred to as “meeples”. It’s another simple game that is expandable with about a bajillion optional expansion packs. There’s only one rule—the “farmers” rule—that is a little difficult to explain to everyone. The rest is very simple. There’s also a great iPhone and iPad version for those lucky enough to have Apple products under their tree, and there’s a similarly great version on Xbox LIVE Arcade, too.

Settlers of Catan

Catan is a game about building and trading. There is lots of interaction between players as you attempt to collect combinations of resources for building roads, settlements and cities. There’s also an element of luck thanks to a roll of two dice determining which resources are “produced” each turn, though the luck factor never overwhelms the strategy element. Catan is perhaps a bit complex for young kids, but is a lot of fun for older kids and adults. It’s also expandable with several additional packs, though not quite as many as Carcassonne.

Robo Rally

Robo Rally tasks players with racing through a series of checkpoints using their robots. Robots can be programmed using “instruction cards”, which allow the ‘bot to do things like turn 90 degrees left or right, move forward a certain number of spaces and a few other things. Each turn, players can give 5 instructions to their ‘bots from a pool of cards in their hand. It becomes a game about planning where you’ll end up and making the best of the options available to you. It’s simple to play, with lots of different variations and tracks included in the box.

Space Alert

Space Alert is a thoroughly silly game where you start by listening to a CD filled with sci-fi alerts telling you where threats are appearing around your spacecraft. Using hands of “order cards” (a bit like Robo Rally‘s instruction cards) players plan in advance how they’re going to take care of all the threats and keep the ship running smoothly. The twist is the amount of time they have to plan all this is determined by the length of the track on the CD. If they dawdle too much, jobs won’t get done, normally with disastrous consequences. Said potentially disastrous consequences are revealed after the CD has finished, when the orders laid down are revealed and resolved on a turn-by-turn basis. It’s genuinely horrifying to see a well-laid plan screwed up and resolve itself in turn-by-turn slow motion, but it’s hilarious.

The Worst

Arkham Horror

Arkham Horror is a brilliant co-operative game set slap bang in the middle of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. However, its shortest variant takes three hours to play, with more difficult opponents taking four or five hours to take down and usually ending with the players’ defeat. It also has a bajillion rules to learn, which are easy enough to remember once you’ve played a game or two, but nightmarish to explain to newbies. Save this one for gaming nights with plenty of time to spare.

Power Grid

Power Grid is an in-depth simulation of competing electric corporations attempting to supply power to cities in either Germany or America. It has a few elements in common with Ticket to Ride but also has an in-depth simulation of supply and demand in its resource market, as well as a requirement to be good at both maths and forward planning. It’s quite heavy going for newbies and is rather depressing for people who don’t do well with numbers.

Monopoly

When was the last time you finished a game of Monopoly? Exactly. The simple reason for this is that people always forget two things: firstly, that the “you can take all the tax money if you land on Free Parking” rule is complete bollocks and was never in the game in the first place, and secondly, if you don’t buy a property when you land on it, it’s supposed to be auctioned off. Following these rules (which no-one ever remembers to) makes games a lot quicker. Alternatively, you could download the Board Game Remix Kit and make Monopoly worth playing again.

Warhammer Quest

Warhammer Quest is awesome, but has a big-ass rulebook, hundreds of bits of cardboard, cards, counters, miniatures and all manner of other things to deal with. While it makes an awesome Christmas present, it’s best saved for a night you can devote to it with a group interested in taking part in a full campaign.

Agricola

Agricola is a great game (that is a lot more interesting than its concept—”a game about 13th century German agriculture”—sounds) but takes approximately a thousand years to set up thanks to its hundreds of little wooden bits, thousands of cards and board that comes in far too many pieces for its own good. I also hate it because I never win and that means it’s bullshit.

So there you go. All of the above are worth spending some Christmas money on. Not all are worth trying to explain to your grandma, unless she has a particular interest in trying to take down Cthulhu.

#oneaday, Day 73: Strategic Mind

I’m shit at strategy games. I mean really shit. That doesn’t stop me playing and enjoying them, but I am just awful at them. I think it’s an inability to think ahead or do those mind-fucking mental calculations required to predict what situation you’ll be in ten turns down the road. If I start getting into thinking about that, I end up suffering from analysis paralysis and have to lie down for a little while afterwards.

This is frustrating when playing board games which you know are supposed to be really good, like Agricola and Power Grid. But I find myself consistently losing at them. Agricola is more of a problem than Power Grid, which I can normally do respectably in.

It could well be difficulty in prioritising things. In Agricola I’m never sure what action is the best thing to take, and seeing my regular opponents playing I’m always pretty sure that they are doing some sort of black magic to convince me I’ve had the same number of turns as them but in fact knocking me out for three rounds, getting into an extremely advantageous position and then waking me up as if nothing had happened. Of course, I know that’s actually not happening, that it’s just a case of me making poor choices. But it’s immensely frustrating, and prevents me from enjoying the game as much as I should – because, I hasten to add, it’s a great game.

Now games like Warhammer Quest and Arkham Horror? Fine. I work well as part of a team, so co-op games are good for me. Even Catan is fine, as the semi-randomised nature of the game means that I’m not totally reliant on my non-existent strategic brain. Ticket to Ride, too, is great. But as soon as the game comes down to nothing but my own skill and chance is kept to a minimum? I suck. Hard.

Perhaps I should find a way to practice strategic thinking. Does anyone have any suggestions?

One A Day, Day 46: Dungeon Lords

One of the group of friends I semi-regularly play board games with shared a new acquisition tonight – a game called Dungeon Lords. It’s a fairly lengthy game to play, but it’s bursting with character and fun, despite it being a self-confessed game for “hardcore gamers”.

Dungeon Lords casts you in the role of one of the titular evil overlords. It’s your job to build a dungeon, populate it with monsters and traps and then settle down to watch the heroes try their hand at fighting their way through it. If it sounds like Bullfrog’s ageing PC game Dungeon Keeper to you, you’d be about right.

The game is split into two phases, each of which you play through twice. The premise is that you have two years to prove yourself as a Dungeon Lord and acquire your Dungeon License. To do this, you spend each year building and populating your dungeon, followed by a period of defending it against a party of adventurers who have gathered to face your challenges. In the second year, the adventurers are tougher, but you have slightly different options at your disposal for building.

Gameplay is based on players simultaneously choosing actions by laying cards face down. Two of your possible actions per round are laid face up as “forbidden” actions that you can’t do. At the end of each turn, two of your actions that you took become next turn’s “forbidden” actions, meaning a degree of forward planning is required for success. The actions allow you to do a number of things – collect resources, manage your reputation, hire imps (who are used for building the dungeon, mining gold and staffing the various rooms in the dungeon), hiring monsters or building rooms. All of these things are important – resources are needed to extend your dungeon and hire creatures, your reputation affects how powerful the adventurers who attack you are (a more evil reputation leads to tougher adversaries, leading up to an almost-invincible paladin as the ultimate challenge) and everything has the potential to score you points.

Once actions have been chosen, they are resolved in turn order. Up to three players can take the same action in a round, but the precise nature of the action varies slightly depending on who gets there first. Sometimes it’s the cost of things that vary according to turn order, sometimes it’s how effective the action is. It’s an interesting system that forces you to consider what your opponents are likely to do carefully, as well as prioritising your own needs for victory.

Eventually, you’ll have a “working” dungeon featuring a collection of corridors and rooms, and some monsters and traps to put in them. At that point, combat starts. Adventurers attack you as a traditional RPG party, with a tanking warrior at the front and rogues, wizards and priests at the back. Each type of adventurer has a particular special ability – warriors always go at the front, rogues reduce damage from traps, wizards can cast rather inconvenient spells and priests can heal the damage you’ve caused to the party. It’s up to you to carefully use the monsters and traps you’ve collected to try and slow their progress through your dungeon. It’s pretty much impossible to halt their progress altogether, but it is possible, with careful planning, to minimise the damage they cause. The game has some excellent tutorial scenarios to play through that are more like logic puzzles, and these give you an opportunity to see the sort of tactics you should be considering in the game proper.

Similar to farming sim Agricola, Dungeon Lords is a game where you mostly focus on your own efforts, but have to pay attention to what others are doing. There’s no direct interaction with other players, but your own actions can indirectly influence their success. For example, carefully managing your reputation to ensure you always get weak adventurers attacking can cause other players to take a beating. After one game, it’s clear that there are a lot of tactical considerations to learn.

It’s a really interesting game, and I’m looking forward to giving it another shot. It took a good few hours to play, but it didn’t drag – while actions are resolved one player at a time, there’s not much downtime before someone else gets a chance to do something. Plus the theme of the game coupled with the excellent artwork gives it a huge amount of character, encouraging a bit of improvisatory storytelling about what’s going on in the players’ respective dungeons. Check it out if you’re looking for something a little bit different.

Board Gamery

Happy December, everybody, and I hope all you vidyagames fans out there survived the November onslaught of awesomeness. I plumped for Fallout 3 and played it from beginning to end, loving every minute… but more on that another day. There have been plenty of “November games” blog posts all over the place so I thought I’d take a step back and blog about something different for a change.

I’ve mentioned board gaming before but I think it’s time we had a full-on post devoted to it. So here goes.

I’ve been a fan of tabletop gaming for many years, ever since my then-teenaged brother’s then-girlfriend introduced me to Hero Quest and Space Crusade, games which captivated me not only with their cool, super-detailed little Citadel Miniatures pieces but the fact that they told a story and did something far beyond games that I had played in the past had done. They had interesting mechanics that went beyond “roll and move”, they had an interesting twist on the traditionally competitive nature of other board games by pitting up to three players (the Heroes or the Marines, depending on if you’re talking about Hero Quest or Space Crusade) against one more powerful player (the Dungeon Master or the Alien).

I was so captivated by Hero Quest and Space Crusade that I managed to convince my folks to get me a copy of Advanced Heroquest for one Christmas/birthday/present-receiving opportunity – this despite the fact that I didn’t really have anyone to play with on a regular basis. AHQ took Hero Quest and took it to the next level, with a more “RPG” style system involving character statistics, equipment, hit rolls and all sorts of other interesting rules. More intriguingly, it featured both random dungeon generation, meaning a different experience every time, plus a comprehensive set of rules for solo play, so that my lack of gaming friends living nearby wasn’t an issue.

Fast forward a few years and we reach the present. At some point last year, my buddies Sam and Tom and I decided to sit down and play some board games. We started with Risk and then, following some lucky victories on eBay, we dug out Hero Quest and Space Crusade.

This was the beginning of things – that and discovering Board Game Geek, a site with a big, lively community that discusses board games in great detail and offers excellent, articulate community reviews. (Board gamers seem to be typically rather more articulate than many video gamers, I’ve noticed.) Over time, we started to amass a collection of interesting and out-of-the-ordinary board games. I’d like to share my thoughts on a couple of them with you now.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a peculiar game from the off in that it’s not competitive at all. It pits two to four players against the game itself. The premise is that the players are all members of an elite disease-fighting organisation and have been tasked with curing four deadly diseases that are sweeping the planet. Each player has a unique “role” which gives them a special ability – the Medic, for example, is better at “cleaning” a city of disease, the Scientist discovers cures easier than the other characters, the Dispatcher can move other players on their turn to put them into a strategically advantageous position, the Researcher can exchange information (coloured cards that have to be collected as a set to discover a cure) with other players easier than the others and the Operations Expert can build a Research Facility (a location where cures can be discovered, and also a means of “fast traveling” between locations) anywhere at no cost.

It’s the balance between these roles and the strategy which you have to develop that makes this game so interesting… and it’s the random element thrown up by the fact that the diseases spread a certain amount each turn that makes it exciting and difficult. It often seems relatively easy to get to the “halfway” point with two of the four diseases cured before an epidemic sweeps through an area which had looked somewhat “quiet” before, leading to a situation difficult or even impossible to recover from.

Pandemic is simple to learn and encourages a huge amount of communication and strategising between players. I really like it, even though the “Heroic” game we’ve been playing recently (which makes the game more challenging by throwing more “Epidemic” cards into the mix) kicks our ass every time we play it. It’s the kind of game where you think “well, next time if we do this…” every time.

Our worst game lasted two turns. That’s two players’ turns, not two rounds of the table.

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

Agricola

I mentioned this on the recent Squadron of Shame podcast (see links to the right if you want to listen or subscribe) but it’s worth mentioning again. Agricola is currently one of the Geek’s top-rated board games. Players take on the role of a 16th-century German farmer struggling to get by in difficult times. Throughout the course of the game, you have to try and feed your family, grow your family (more family members means more actions per turn), plough fields, sow crops, breed animals and ensure that your farmyard is as full as possible.

The difficulty comes in the fact that all this has to be done in the space of 14 turns, which never seems to be quite enough time.

Each turn, players use one of their “family members” to take an action from the “action spaces” on the board in the middle of the table. This could be anything from taking resources, required for building pretty much everything, to actually building said structures, to baking bread to produce food. The interesting way the game works is that as it progresses, more and more action spaces become available so it gradually increases in complexity as time goes on – that and the fact that once one person has taken an action, no-one else can on that turn.

I am shit at Agricola. I’m not sure what it is – perhaps it’s an inability to look as far ahead as my buddies – but I enjoy it nonetheless as it’s satisfying to put together your farm, however feeble it ends up looking at the end of the game!

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

Mystery of the Abbey

Describe Mystery of the Abbey to someone and the first thing everyone says is “Oh, that sounds like Clue(do)“. Try it – here’s a description.

There’s been a murder at the Abbey. The players have to discover the identity of the culprit by gathering information, eliminating suspects through questioning and deduction before finally revealing the identity of the perpetrator.

It’s more interesting and thought-provoking than Clue, though, in that it requires you to spend a little time formulating your questions. Rather than simply “calling Colonel Mustard into the library with the candlestick”, you have to actually ask your fellow players questions, being careful to phrase them in such a way that reveals information to you and not to others. Players that you question can either take a vow of silence, in which case no information is exchanged, or answer your question, which gives them the automatic right to hurl a question straight back at you.

The Abbey setting provides scope for a number of interesting rules, too. Every four rounds, the investigative monks have to tromp back to the Ecclesia to take Mass. At Mass, as everyone knows, monks gossip, so players have to pass a particular number of cards (each card representing a monk who DIDN’T commit the crime) to the next player on the table. In this way, it becomes another challenge to conceal certain innocent monks from the other players for as long as possible.

Then there’s the Penance rules. These are some vaguely-defined but incredibly harsh rules that punish not following the way of the Abbey. If a player moves out of turn, or breaks a rule, or forgets to move the little bell that marks progress towards the next Mass, then the other players can call “Penance!” (by common agreement) and send the monk back to the Ecclesia to miss a turn atoning for their sins. The Penance rules are particularly harsh, especially given the fairly mild-natured manner of the rest of the game, but it gives the whole thing a slight air of tension which is enormously entertaining.

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

So there you have it. Three great games that I highly recommend you check out if you’re the slightest bit interested in going beyond what more “traditional” games like Monopoly can offer.