Patience Ain’t a Virtue (or: More Carpe-ing!)

ToledoIt’s been a long time since I’ve written a gaming rant, so here we go …


Last Wednesday, I played Martin Wallace’s Toledo for the first time in five years. Back in the day I reviewed it as an entirely adequate family game, but it didn’t thrill me. Now that I’ve played it again half-a-decade later, I think I can better explain why.

For me, Toledo’s main problem is that it depends on its players dutifully storing away cards, like a squirrel planning for winter. Sure, you could play your cards fast and furious, but that’s a recipe for losing. That’s because card play in Toledo stacks: you’re allowed to play as many cards as you like during a turn, provided that they all have the same value.

In other words, like most eurogames Toledo is ruled by the tyranny of efficiency: you have to figure out how to eke out the most efficient plays, to save a fraction of a turn here or a fraction of a resource there. Ultimately, those little efficiencies add up, and the player who has fractioned the most wins.

Unfortunately, I find Toledo’s requirements for efficiency to be very dull. Basically, it depends on you sitting around, drawing cards while all the other kids have fun. The better you are at constraining your desires and doing the dull work of pulling together a nest egg, the better you’ll do in the game.

The big problem here is fun. For me the fun of a game is in the doing: moving your pawns, taking actions, joyfully grabbing resources, and generally being active. Just taking two cards, then watching from the outside as the other players take their fun-filled turns, that’s pretty much the antithesis of fun. It makes me say, “Please sir, I want some more” after I take one of my dull-filled turns and then have to wait five minutes to go again.

I mean, a turn like that is what I usually fight against in games. It’s why downtime and AP drive me crazy: because I don’t get to have much fun, which is the whole purpose of gaming, after all.

Toledo isn’t the only game that rewards players who are more patient about collecting their cards, and thus are able to put together a more coherent set. Road Rally USA does pretty much the same thing. You can collect cards or play cards, and the longer you collect the better you do, because only some of the cards can be played together.

And I thought Road Rally USA was mediocre too.

In my book patience ain’t a virtue. Gaming isn’t a Victorian morality play, and I don’t like being told that it’s better to sit around, than to go — that I should be being bored rather than having fun.

Yeah, I realize that some people think otherwise — that they feel like there’s some kind of skill in measuring how patient everyone is being and knowing exactly when to carpe diem. Heck, I gave my copy of Toledo to a friend, and he enjoys it regularly. But I find spending the whole game preparing to carpe to be pretty boring.

It’s like sitting around watching a great meal that you prepared as it gets cold.

I suppose that’s why I like game like Galaxy Trucker, which are pretty much the opposite of patience.


Watch for my future aphoric gaming rants: appearances shouldn’t be deceiving; money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy Park Place; a stitch in time saves nein; and fool me once and you probably won the game.

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4 thoughts on “Patience Ain’t a Virtue (or: More Carpe-ing!)

    • Anecdotally, Alan Moon hates saving/storing cards in TtR and plays cards constantly. But nobody said designers choose the most efficient routes in their games. 😉

      • And personally, I don’t feel that TtR is a patience game. You’re not rewarded for collecting more cards and playing them together.

        Instead, there’s a tension between whether you need to grab a card right away or grab a route right away — and taking the card usually feels like the better choice because cards of the right color are more likely to disappear than the route you need (unless someone else is getting dangerously close to you).

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