The House Selling Game

Real life is full of games such as contract bidding, gift exchanging, and national voting — a topic that I’ve previously touched upon in a few different posts about “real-life mechanics”. These real-life games are no less competitive than the board games that we play around tables, and in fact might be much more important. As I wrote in my “Burning Freeways” article on blind bidding, the winning bidder earned $800,000 more than Cal Trans expected and could have made as much as $3.5 million over costs.

In that article I also briefly touched upon how the blind bidding of house sales can be affected by just the teeniest bit of external information from a realtor. At the time I hadn’t sold a house. Now I have, and I’ve learned a lot more about the various parts of house-selling, and as usual they offer up new possibilities for the designs of These Games of Ours. Continue reading

New to Me: Winter 2020 — Life on an Island

So on January 1st, I moved to an island: Kauai, the least populated of the four major Hawaiian islands. It’s got a population of just over 70,000 according to the last count, which makes it a fair amount smaller than the city of Berkeley where I used to live — let alone the whole California Bay Area. So the question was always how hard or easy would it be to find gaming. Fortunately, a nice little game store called 8 Moves Ahead appeared on the island a bit more than a year ago, and even more fortunately they’re heavily focused on play.

But the downside so far has been that that play has mostly been more American games, with Magic: The Gathering taking up most of the oxygen in the store from what I can tell. I’ve had some good sports willing to play my euros, and there are some limited euros available in the store, but as of this moment I don’t feel like I have a strong euro-interested game group. Room to grow, I suppose.

In the meantime, this first New to Me for the year is more Americanized than usual, and also obviously a lot shorter. I only made it to either three or four sessions at the store. That’s because in January I was coming up to speed on my new life here (including learning how to drive again after a multi-decade hiatus) and then in March, COVID struck hard.

But here’s what’s New to Me, and what I think about it, as a somewhat less American game player, more focused on medium-weight euros.

The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

On the Underground: London (2019). On the Underground has long been one of my favorites, as I love its very tactical play: how you can play tracks to grab instantaneous bonuses, and how you’re always reacting to what the passenger might want to do. I also think the way that you can build together multiple lines is quite clever. So, when I saw this new edition “London / Berlin”, I was very interested in getting it, mostly because it had a new map of Berlin.

As it happens I haven’t actually played the new map yet, but I did play the old London map in the new edition, and I thought it was a perfectly good new edition. The graphic design itself I thought was a wash. The new edition by LudiCreations is one of these “artsy” designs, and though the artwork is definitely more attractive, it was also harder to see the lines in the places along the center where there are 3-5 different spaces available. However, where the new edition really improved on the original is the fact the map is now laid out on a large-scale grid, and so you can see where stations are based on a letter and number (e.g., C-4). That’s probably going to be helpful to any non-Londoner.

And I’m looking forward to trying out Berlin. Someday, when I can go to a game store again. Continue reading

Co-op Case Study: The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

Recently I’ve been writing about Eric Vogel’s Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game. I wrote about how it encourages players to even out resources here, then I wrote over on the Meeples Together blog about how its solo play differs from true cooperative play. When my co-author and I at Meeples Together realized that we hadn’t yet published the Meeples Together case study on the game, which is actually one of the oldest in our archive of bonus case studies, we decided we’d better do so. Here it is!

This article was originally published on the Meeples Together blog.


The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game by Eric B. Vogel

Publisher: Evil Hat Productions (2017)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Adventure(ish), Card Management, Resource Management

Overview

The players take on the roles of Chicago wizard Harry Dresden and his friends. Players each hold a very limited hand of cards that they must play to jointly kill as many Foes and solve as many Cases as they can — but they also have to manage their Fate pool, which decreases with the play of every card. Continue reading

Co-op Case Study: Pandemic Legacy — Season Two

Pandemic Legacy was innovative enough that it’s worth talking about twice, so here’s a look at the second entry in the trilogy. And, whereas we played just a few games of Season 1, we played through the entire Season 2 campaign, with a win-loss pattern that resulted in 21 total games(!). Definitely a top co-op (and we’re looking forward to Season 3).

This article originally appeared on the Meeples Together blog.


Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 by Rob Daviau & Matt Leacock

Publisher: Z-Man Games (2017)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Card Management, Exploration, Legacy, Set Collection

Overview

The players take on the role of various specialists who are trying to salvage a post-apocalyptic world that ended 71 years ago. As in Pandemic (2008), they’re fighting disease, and as in Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015), that’s part of an ongoing campaign, but there’s also a lot more story and a lot more hard choices in this sequel. Continue reading

Co-op Case Study: Pandemic Legacy — Season One

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was an amazing innovation when it was released in 2015, and it continues to be one of the newest foundational games in the co-op hobby. What made it so great? It’s not just that it broke new ground with its Legacy-campaign play, but also that it integrated that fully into its existing simulation.

This article originally appeared on Meeples Together.


Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 by Rob Daviau & Matt Leacock

Publisher: Z-Man Games (2015)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Card Management, Legacy, Set Collection

Overview

The players take on the role of various specialists who are trying to cure four pandemic diseases that are ravaging the world. As in Pandemic (2008) they must balance removing disease cubes (to avoid losing the game) and collecting sets of cards (to win the game). However, there’s a twist: the game repeats over 12-24 sessions, with characters, the gameboard, and the rules all evolving over time. Continue reading

What’s for Dinner: Food-based Game Design

Food.

It seems a far stretch from game design, but it turns out to have puzzles and challenges of its own, and some of them could be great designs for board games too. So, this week, I wanted to talk about a few food-related design problems that have shown up in games (and one that perhaps hasn’t), because they could all be expanded and used more.

I feel like it’s a space that’s just ripe for plucking new ideas. Continue reading

Co-op Case Study: The Resistance

The Resistance by Don Eskridge

Publisher: Indie Boards & Games (2010)
Cooperative Style: Hidden Teams
Play Style: Voting

Overview

In The Resistance players are secretly divided into one team of rebels and one team of spies. Though the spies know which team everyone is on, the rebels do not.

Gameplay centers on missions that are assigned by a rotating leader. Each leader chooses a fraction of the players around the table to join the mission. The players then openly vote whether to OK the members for the mission. Once a mission has been OKed, its members secretly vote to determine whether the mission succeeds or fails — and a single act of sabotage causes the mission to fail!

The rebels are trying to succeed at three missions before the spies cause three missions to fail. Continue reading

Co-op Case Study: Saboteur

In October we discussed a few hidden-teams game. We’re back this month with two of the best known ones, starting with Saboteur, which followed in the footsteps of Bang! (2003) and is another of the foundational games of the hidden-teams genre.

Saboteur actually gets some attention in Meeples Together, where we talk about its relations to both partnership games and co-op traitor games, but here’s a full case study.

This article originally appeared on the Meeples Together blog.


Case Study: Saboteur by Fréderic Moyersoen

Publisher: AMIGO Games (2004)
Cooperative Style: Competitive, Hidden Teams
Play Style: Card Management, Pipe Laying

Overview

Miners play tunnel cards to advance the mine toward gold nuggets, but saboteurs are simultaneously trying to ensure that the gold is never found! And no one knows who’s who! Continue reading

New to Me: Autumn 2019 — Farewell to California

2019 was a bit of a changing of the guard for me. After 30 years living in Berkeley, across the Bay from San Francisco, and after more than 15 years of gaming with friends at Endgame (and later Secret) on Wednesdays and at my house on Thursdays, I’ve moved to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. I’ve been here almost two weeks now, and I haven’t had time yet to search out my next board game opponents, but they’ll certainly be different from the friends I had out in the Bay Area. So here’s my last look at new games played on the west coast of the United States.

As usual, these are games that were new to me (whether they were quite new or quite old) and I’m listing my ratings of the games as a mid-complexity eurogamer. Your mileage may vary.


The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

Wingspan (2019). The hotness lives up to its hype. I’ve already written extensively about this game, but in short it’s a tableau building game where you improve the power of your actions, both by making them stronger and by giving them variety. And then you try and accomplish goals, some short-term, some long-term. This is all done through bird cards: you gather food, you lay eggs, you collect the bird cards and then you play them. The cards in turn can hold eggs, can generate actions, and can earn victory points. It’s a well-themed, variable, and enjoyable game that’s not quite like anything else on the market.

(And I can buy myself a copy now that I’ve landed in Hawaii and won’t have to ship it over in a container. I mean, if I can find one in-print.) Continue reading

Co-op Case Study: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Dead Men Tell No Tales by Kane Klenko

Publisher: Minion Games (2015)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Adventure

Overview

Dead Men Tell No Tales puts the players in the roles of pirates looting a ghost ship. Their goal is to recover sufficient treasures before the boat goes up in flames or the defending deckhands overcome the piratical forces. Continue reading