1238: Inns and Cathedrals and Traders (and Builders), Oh My!

(Aside: I usually hate it when people use the “x and y and z, oh my!” trope for titles, but I couldn’t resist this time. “Keep Calm and [insert humorous thing here]” can still fuck off, though.)

Andie and I played a game of Carcassonne this evening. It’s one of our favourite games, both in physical format and on iOS, and it’s probably the one we play together most, with Ticket to Ride being a close second.

Recently, I picked up two of the expansions to Carcassonne as I’d heard that they added some interest to the base game. Not that there’s anything wrong with the base game as is, but it can sometimes be interesting to add some additional mechanics, or change a few things around. And sure enough, Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders both change Carcassonne to a noticeable degree — and, for my money, make it a considerably better, more interesting game in the process — without breaking what makes the original game so good.

For the uninitiated, Carcassonne is a tile-laying game in which you and up to five other players take it in turns to draw tiles representing areas of French countryside out of a bag, then place them in such a manner that you gradually build up a map. When you place a tile, you can put one of your little wooden “followers” (affectionately referred to as “meeples” by most board game geeks) on one of the tile’s features to “claim” it. When you finish the feature in question — making a completely enclosed wall for a city, having something at both ends for a road, completely surrounding it with other tiles for a monastery — you score points. At the end of the game, you score additional points for any half-finished features, and also for any “farms” you have claimed — these are fields in which you’ve placed a follower, in which you gain an additional 3 points for every completed city that borders that field.

The fun in Carcassonne is in strategically placing the tiles in such a manner that you can complete features while simultaneously screwing over your opponents. The “farmers” mechanic in particular is highly competitive, but focusing too much attention on it can cost you the game.

What Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders do is add a few little twists on these basic mechanics.

Inns & Cathedrals is the simpler of the two expansions. In the additional tiles that make up the expansion, there are several road tiles that have an inn on them. If you add an inn to a road that you’ve claimed, you get 2 points per tile instead of the usual 1 when you complete it, but to balance out the increased reward, there’s an additional risk: if you fail to complete it, at the end of the game, you get nothing for that road instead of the usual 1 point per tile. Similarly, if you place a cathedral in a city, you get 3 points per tile and flag in that city when you complete it instead of the usual 2, but nothing at the end of the game if you fail to complete it. Starting one of these features can be a gamble — particularly as the cathedral pieces are among the most awkward city tiles available — but can be enormously lucrative. Alongside these new tiles, there’s also a “big meeple” piece for each player that has the strength of two normal followers — great for aggressively stealing territory from other players.

Traders & Builders, meanwhile, adds three distinct mechanics. Firstly, the “trader” mechanic means that if you finish a city (by laying the last tile), you claim all the “goods” represented on the various city tiles, even if you don’t have any followers in the city. At the end of the game, the player who has the most of a type of good gains 10 bonus points, and there are three different types of goods, allowing for a potential bonus of up to 30 points for a savvy trader.

Meanwhile, a new “builder” piece can be placed in a city or on a road that you’ve already claimed. On subsequent turns, if you add to the city or road the builder is on, you immediately get an extra turn. Careful placement of the builder is a must, as it’s quite easy to get him “stuck” and be unable to enjoy his benefits.

Finally, a new “pig” piece can be added to a farm you already control, and this means that if you’re still in control of that farm at the end of the game, you’ll gain 4 points per city in that field instead of 3. This can potentially be quite a big difference.

Both expansions also include a selection of new tiles with interesting new designs that add intriguing strategic possibilities.

What we found with the two expansions was a much higher-scoring game than usual, with much bigger “swings”. In other words, the fact that things like the inns and cathedrals let you score considerably more points than usual meant that it was much more possible to “catch up” to a player who is seemingly screaming ahead in the points stakes; at the same time, the “goods” mechanic can completely change the standings at the very end of the game, as happened this evening, when I was all set to win and then Andie’s monopoly on all the goods in the kingdom caused her to snatch victory from my clutches by a measly two points. Dammit!

Anyway, I’m glad I picked up these expansions; they add a lot to the base game, and I can see why a lot of board game geeks out there never play without them. I’m interested to try it out with more than two people — with the expansion, the game now supports up to six players altogether, which sounds like a recipe for disaster in the best possible way.

Anyway. E3 starts tomorrow, and I’m spending the day with the fine folks at Eurogamer, so I’m looking forward to that. I’m also proud to announce that USgamer, my new professional home, will be launching tomorrow, so watch this space! That space. Whatever.

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.

#oneaday Day 521: It’s Your Turn Now

I’ve discovered the most terrifying thing in the universe: the man who very politely, but incredibly loudly, tells you “It’s your turn now!” on the iPhone version of Carcassonne. It’s terrifying because hearing someone’s voice when you’re not expecting to — such as, say, when you’re trying to get to sleep — is a frightening thing. Quite why a murderer or rapist would say “It’s your turn now!” is… no, hang on, that sort of works, doesn’t it? Shit.

But anyway. The terrifyingness of Carcassonne is not what I wanted to talk about — at least not directly, anyway. I wanted to take a moment to talk about asynchronous games, how awesome they are and where they can go from here.

The iPhone (and, presumably, Android) is home to a wide range of excellent asynchronous-play games, allowing people to play at their own pace at a time to suit them. The upside to this is that people even in wildly disparate time zones can play games against each other. The downside is that it’s easy to forget what games you’re playing, particularly if your push notifications decide not to work properly.

But that downside isn’t sufficient to dampen the awesomeness that is the ability to play Carcassonne with someone across the other side of the world. The “…with Friends” series (Chess, Words and Hanging) are all excellent examples of How To Do It Correctly, too, providing a simple, intuitive interface to games that most people know how to play. The quirky and entertaining Disc Drivin’, too, offers a fun experience, even if whoever goes first has a clear advantage over everyone else. (That’s my excuse, anyway.)

Certain social games are taking steps to incorporate asynchronous features, too. Dragon Age Legends, for example, allows players to recruit their friends’ characters — complete with equipment and abilities — into their party for combat. This allows people to play with their friends without their friends actually being there — defeating the object of a multiplayer game, you might think, but actually making the best of the fact that it’s pretty rare for you and all your friends to be online at the same time.

Consider this taken to the next level, though. Why haven’t we seen an asynchronous MMORPG yet, where players can party up with AI-controlled characters based on their friends’ equipment and ability lists? It works in Dragon Age Legends, though admittedly that’s a very simple turn-based game. But most MMORPGs have AI built in for enemy and ally characters anyway, so why shouldn’t there be a way for players to “play” even when they’re not actively logged in to the game? I think that’d be kind of cool, actually — and it would certainly get around my biggest bugbear with MMORPGs, which is the fact that a good 90% of my friends live in a completely different and mostly incompatible timezone to me.

On a related note, then, if you live in Europe and want to play Champions Online, Spiral Knights or anything else you’d care to suggest (preferably of the free to play variety) do please get in touch!

#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.