New to Me: Fall 2013

Though my new gaming was light in fall (primarily because my gaming was light in fall, due to the holidays), I’ve opted to publish my short list of new-to-me games while they’re all still fresh. (And it looks like I still managed almost a dozen new games.) As always this is an assessment of how much I like the games, rather than whether they’re great or not. I tend to prefer light-to-medium euros that don’t make me work too hard.


The Great

Caverna: The Cave FarmersCaverna: The Cave Farmers (2013). I thought Agricola (2007) was great the first time I played it, because it combined worker placement with scarcity and it also supported deep and thoughtful gameplay. It’s too long for me to play very often, but it’s still a great game that I love when I play. Caverna is essentially more of the same, but with fantasy theming, with some simplified game elements, with reduced randomness, and with an interesting new expeditions systems. Overall, it’s a great variant, that’s just (barely) far enough from the original that you might want to own both.

The Very Good

The New Era (2011). I played 51st State (2010) some time ago, and though I was impressed by the mechanics, which supported cards being played on each other in variable ways, something about the game left me non-plussed. I finally gave in to a play of the game’s successor, The New Era, and I was more impressed. Getting cards onto the table is tricky and the use of three sorts of cards (blue, red, and white) is really inspired. There’s also some great theming. My biggest problem with the game is that it’s possible to make awful decisions and do horribly … which is another way of saying that the game’s got some good depth and you can learn to play it better.

The Good

12 Days (2011). This is a trick-taking game by James Ernest and Mike Selinker that like The New Era is slightly old. It was put on the table because it’s a Christmas-themed game that’s all about gift giving: you give a card away, then you play a card into a trick each turn. It’s very simple play, but it’s enjoyable and is one of the best Christmas-themed games around.

Ticket to Ride: NederlandsTicket to Ride: Nederlands (2013). This is another Ticket to Ride map with a slight variant in the gameplay: you now have to pay tolls to build each segment of track, but you can get back that toll from another player if they build along the same route. It’s a fine variant, but nothing revolutionary. Like all of the Ticket to Ride maps, it’s useful if you’re looking for something beyond the original, but the mechanics aren’t enough to make it truly stand out from the rather large Ticket to Ride pack.

Global Mogul (2013). This is an interesting worker-placement-ish game whose main difference is the fact that workers can be stuck in certain places and that means you have to think about and conserve their use. There’s also a heavy element of economics in this game. Unfortunately, the game is held back from being very good by some pretty dodgy graphic design work, which is at its worst in some pixelated clip art. If you can ignore that, the gameplay is quite interesting with some complexity and depth.

Asgard's ChosenAsgard’s Chosen (2013). I wrote about this game in one of my deckbuilding articles. This is a clever and attractive combination of deckbuilding and wargaming. I also thought it could have used a bit of development, because as is it’s a little too complex, and that’s likely to keep me from playing it a lot in the future. Still, this is a deckbuilder that’s well worth checking out for its originality.

The Walking Dead Board Game: The Best Defense (2013). A cooperative game of card management: you have to keep the zombies from eating up the decks of cards, else you won’t have any resources (and they’ll kill your characters instead)! It’s got some interesting nuances for cooperative play, some good tension, and some wonky theming. Overall, pretty simple, but if you like zombies, it’s worth a look.

The OK

Police Precinct

Police Precent (2013). Yet another cooperative game; this one is about simultaneously dealing with emergencies, beating up gangs, and solving a murder. I think of it as the third member of the real-world co-op trilogy, also including Pandemic (2008) and Flash Point: Fire Rescue (2009). That’s not just for the genre/theming but also because the simulation systems underlying the threats presented by each game feel somewhat similar. However if so, Police Precinct is the least of the trilogy — mainly because it was badly served by not being professional developed or produced. The game system is actually mostly OK, and has some clever elements like the fact that you investigate by drawing from decks stacked with blanks … and can work to draw more cards to increase your odds for success. However, there are also a few sharp edges that hold the game back from being great.

The Witches: A Discworld Board Game (2013). A pretty simplistic adventure game for fans of the Discworld novels. You wander around solving problems and improving your characters, and you have to keep those problems under control lest everyone lose (though that’s not very likely). I think it’s a pretty good light game for families, but it was a bit simplistic for my groups’ play.

Würfel Bohnanza (2012). The Bohnanza dice game, not currently available in English, which might be just as well. You have long lists of orders that you have to fulfill, but you can do so on anyone’s turn. Though this semi-simultaneous-play rule was surely introduced to keep everyone involved, it dramatically cranks up the randomness. The result is kind of fun, but it barely feels like you’re playing a game as you roll the dice again and again.

The Meh

Skyline (2012). You roll dice. You randomly build tall buildings or not. You score points. There was so little strategy and so little excitement in this short dice game that I was ready to quit partway through. It’s a pity, because the dice are pretty cool, and could have been the basis for an interesting game.

Having given mediocre ratings to two dice games, I should now say that I rather like dice games if done right. Alea Iacta Est, Las Vegas, and Ra: The Dice Game regularly get played by my groups. I just don’t feel like either of these dice games had that same potential.


Five & Dimes: 2013

I’ve stopped posting Five & Dime lists because I don’t repeatedly play games enough. Last year there were just three:

Las Vegas (6). See, I told you I like dice games! This one gets repeated play because it’s a quick filler that’s easy to understand, but has some strategic depth to it — as long as you play with the “neutral” dice variant rule. Six games in, I’m still happy to put it on the table if I have 30 minutes to kill at the start or end of a game night.

TImeLine (6). This was my previous filler game, and it still gets some play because it plays in an even more sprightly 10 minutes or so. I’m actually surprised that eurogamers are willing to give it a go, because it’s essentially a trivia game. However it works because you don’t have to know the specifics of the trivia, you just have to be able to offer an educated guess.

Unpublished Prototype (6). The fact that I only played six prototypes last year suggests my friend at Vainglorious Games hasn’t been pushing them much. Mind you, one of my almost-nickels, Romans Go Home!, was his too.

Here’s the game’s that almost made nickels status:

Four Plays: Gauntlet of FoolsKingdom BuilderRomans Go Home
Three Plays:WondersInnovationMondoRoom 25The Settlers of CatanTokaido

I’m shocked by the lack of deck builders on that list. For the rest, I’ll say that Kingdom Builder is producing great expansions that make more willing to play the game, while 7 Wonders and Innovation both produced expansions that made me less willing to play the game. I should write about that some time.

Room 25 is probably the one game that doesn’t belong on that list for its merits: it got played three times just to work out how it played in multiple modes because it comes with like five variants. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out for it, as I wrote earlier this year.

And that was the quarter and the year in gaming!

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2 thoughts on “New to Me: Fall 2013

  1. Nice article, Shannon. Looks like we continue to agree more than we disagree. I look forward to your article on expansions’ effects on wanting to play expanded games or not. I may have to check out Kingdom Builder again because the base was definitely meh for me.

    • I feel like the Expansions to Kingdom Builder are more of the same, which is to say you won’t like them if you didn’t like the original. However, their model for expansions is good: it doesn’t muddy the original game, but it does offer variability from game-to-game.

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