New to Me: Spring 2014

It’s been a light quarter for my gaming, with me missing something like 6-9 of my regular gaming sessions. Still, I’ve got eight “new” games to talk about, running the gamut from awesome to (too much) meh.


The Great

PathfinderPathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013). The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is an astonishingly innovative deckbuilding game, primarily for the complex ecosystem of cards that it creates — one that carries on from one game to the next. The idea of a cooperative game that continues from session to session is also pretty rare, and it’s done quite well here: the whittled down deck of cards that you carry from game to game is very meaningful.

The rest of the gameplay is a bit more pedestrian, with random card draws and random dice rolls allowing you to accomplish tasks via a simple task resolution system. Still, it’s nicely put together and it’s just dripping with evocative theme. I was jazzed to continue playing it after my first adventure, primarily to see my character grow over numerous sessions of play. I racked up a total of six games over the quarter.

The Very Good

BrugesBruges (2013). I‘m generally a fan of Stefan Feld games, and this one holds up to the rest of his library. It’s a card-management game where you play colored cards in order to generate a variety of colored resources, to avoid colored disasters (because it is a Feld game), and to recruit unique characters. A lot of the play comes from making good use of your characters to create CCG-like combos. This game is tight and evocative, and I’m pretty sure it has a lot of replayability. However, it’s on the lightish side: I didn’t entirely like the (infrequent) take-thats, while some other players didn’t like the level of randomness. Those are what kept from being great for me. Still, it’s another game that racked up multiple plays: it hit the table three times in the month after I bought it.

ConcordiaConcordia (2013). Conversely, I’m usually not a fan of Mac Gerdt’s games. They tend to be a bit too staid, abstract, and/or thinky for me. I was surprised that I liked Concordia a bit more. It’s also a hand management game where you’re playing cards for special powers. However, it also features resource management, where you’re using the powers of those cards to build cities and gather their resources —which in turns gives you the resources for the next phase of expansion. There’s a lot of opportunity for thoughtful play, but it’s not overwhelming, and there’s the constant possibility that your opponents will mess you up, which keeps you on your toes. Like many of the best eurogames, you never have quite enough resources, cards, or turns to do everything you want. Once of my favorite early euros was Kreta (2005), which was sadly never released on the American market. This feels very much like a companion — but (surprisingly) it’s not quite as abstract or as thinky as Steffan Dorra’s game.

DC Comics Deck-Building Game (2012). This game makes me question what makes a game very good. There’s really nothing original here. It’s a pretty standard deckbuilding game with pretty standard mechanics and not much innovation. But, it played well. You could get draws that were terrific or terrible. You could really revel over the ability to beat up a super-villain. And, the theming was0 spot on: the cards were well chosen and the special abilities were often fun and occasionally appropriate. It does seem to have some balance problems: the game can easily spin out of control if someone gets ahead. Still, it’s fast and fun enough that you might be able to overlook that.

The Good

Mad CityMad City (2014). Yet another city building game, a topic that was popular last quarter. This one is a real-time game where you have just one minute to optimally arrange nine tiles — and also to grab bidding tokens if you think you’re winning certain majorities. The game has some problems with its components, and it’s quite abstract, but it was a surprising amount of fun, primarily due to the adrenaline rush you get from playing as fast as you can.

I usually list an “OK” category between “good” and “meh”, but nothing fit this time. Nonetheless, keep in mind that there’s a jump from my “good” to my “meh” games.

The Meh

King’s Blood (2003, 2006). Steve Jackson has some great marketing copy for this Japanese game: “Marriage. Royalty. Tragedy. Will your line reign supreme? … Build the family tree by arranging marriages, exiling rivals, and crowning new royalty.” Unfortunately, the game turns out to be super-Uno. Pretty literally. You’re playing cards trying to match colors and numbers in the hope of emptying your hand of cards. This bland, derivative game wasn’t helped by its hard-to-understand rulebook.

With that said, the game’s got one very clever mechanic. You’re playing cards to a genealogy in the middle of the table, with precise matches (color + appropriate sex) resulting in a child — and allowing for more card play. It’s a great idea, it’s just too bad that it’s paired with a dull card-matching game.

Dread Curse (2013). A piratical game where you’re using roles to constantly steal coins from other players. This is an extremely swingy take-that game with a high factor of rich-get-richer mixed in. In other words: pretty much not what I’m looking for in a game, because it simultaneously feels like your gains could be wiped out instantly and that the top player is unassailable. It’s also pretty random, and there are some serious developmental problems —mostly related to when cards are played and how that impacts the normal flow of play. My play of this game ended with one player yelling because he’d missed his opportunity to play a crucial card, but I wasn’t having much fun before that.

Ingenious Challenges (2010): The Dice Game. This is an Ingenious (2004) variant that has three different games in it: a dice game, a card game, and a tile game. I played the dice game, so that’s what I’m discussing here. I find the general concept clever: you’re rolling dice to try to take advantage of the recent die rolls by other players. It’s a very nice adaptation of the core idea of Ingenious that’s still entirely faithful to the dice medium. Unfortunately, the gameplay just doesn’t measure up. Every turn you roll dice and you hope to get unlikely dice, and when you don’t you throw the dice again and again. It feels like an exercise in frustration and randomness.


Pathfinder image thanks to Chris Norwood (kilroy_locke at BGG), release under Creative Commons license.

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