Another season has gone by, and though I didn’t play anything new that was great in Summer 2014, I played a whole bunch of new games that were very good, and that I’d happily play again, so here’s my look at The Season of Very Good.

The Very Good

Damage Report (2014). Following in the footsteps of Space Alert (2008) and Escape: The Curse of the Temple (2012), Damage Report is a real-time cooperative game. It’s a game of logistical resource movement, where the real-time play is all about getting the right stuff to the right places in time, while a 3-minute timer of doom relentlessly adds to your problems.

As a real-time game, Damage Report does a great job of keeping you frenzied: you try and keep abreast of the larger picture while constantly being dragged down by the need to take your own moves and monitor your own timer. As a cooperative game, Damage Report does a good job of giving you opportunities for working together: you try and get the appropriate supplies to your friends (or on the flipside, reveal what supplies they could bring you) — and the challenges put in your way are tough. The phrase “logistical cooperation” doesn’t sound that exciting, but the game turns out to be joyously frantic and adrenaline-fueled. The cooperative play works, but the designer really got the real-time play right.

Lewis & Clark (2013). A very clever racing game that’s all about just-in-time resource delivery. The game is full of special power cards and resources that drive them, with the goal being to use those resources to push forward on the river. The catch is that every once in a while you need to refresh your action cards, and when you do so you’ll lose some of the ground you made if you haven’t mostly emptied your expedition of resources!

The game is very thinky, as you try to figure out how to manage your resources with the maximum efficiency. That left me of two minds about the game. On the one hand, I found it extremely clever, especially in its deck-building-like card management, and also very evocative with its varied card special effects. On the other hand, I found it near paralyzing at times as you try to think a few turns ahead and so how everything will turn out. Your like or dislike for the game will probably depend on what you think of serious puzzle games of this sort.

See my not-a-deckbuilding design article for more.

Star Realms (2013). This SF-themed deckbuilder is clearly a descendent of Ascension (2010) and it succeeds for a lot of the same reasons: it’s light, it’s fast-playing, it’s evocative, and it’s fun. The game’s most interesting element is the fact that it’s not centered on victory points, but instead on killing your opponents, which is a pretty great change of pace (and an interesting variation on my next entrant, Zeppelin Attack, which is also about beating up your opponents, but approaches the topic in a much more euro-way). There isn’t a lot of depth to the cards, which offer variations on a few major mechanics, but that’s part of what keeps it moving so fast.

See my Star Realms deckbuilder article for more.

Zeppelin Attack (2014). I’ve played this since its playtest days, and I’ve always found it to be an interesting deckbuilder, particularly for the intelligent ways that it deals with the tight constraint of having just 104 cards to play with. Beyond that it also includes a fun mix of aggressive game play that’s still very well controlled. Now that I finally have a published version in hand, I think the game has definitely taken a step up with Evil Hat’s beautiful artwork and great theming. I’m biased to like both the designer and the publisher, but I still think this is a very enjoyable deckbuilding design.

See my Zeppelin Attack deckbuilder article for more.

Five Tribes (2014). This was perhaps Days of Wonders’ most analytical and abstract board game ever. You pick up workers and then place them back down in a Mancala-like pattern in order to activate the powers of one of those workers. To make things more complex you also get to activate the power of the space you land in and might get to take control of it.

The result is very tactical, very thoughtful, and very susceptible to AP. However,  it also scratches the same itch as Wolfgang Kramer’s famous Mask series of games, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen anything in that category, so I’m happy to play a new entrant.

Origin (2013). A French game about the evolution of species. It’s one of the most beautiful games around, thanks to its carved wooden figures. The object of the game is to expand your tribes and earn victory points through the acquisition of certain spaces and the meeting of certain criteria on victory cards — which reminded me of Takenoko (2011).

The play is quite abstract, but it’s also quite interesting as you often have conflicting goals when you place a new piece, including: placing a certain type of figure, placing on a certain color space, placing in a certain location, placing to take a certain type of card, and achieving a certain level of innovation. It all combines to keep you on your toes! My only complaint is that the yellow cards in the game are sometimes take-that, and if used well they can swing quite a few points. It’s more than I’d like to see, though perhaps not a surprise in a French design.

Abyss (2014). I’ve said before that designers aren’t really creating auction games any more, but this is a release that shows that they are — if you stretch your definition. This fantasy-fish-themed French game is sort of a Dutch auction. Players are given the option to take individual currency cards, but when they don’t, the currency cards are placed into lots which slowly improve. Eventually, a player decides to grab a lot because it’s gotten good enough. This is all part of a resource management mechanic that eventually allows you to purchase piscine “Lord” cards, which are worth victory points and have special powers and which in turn allow you to take location tiles. My favorite element of the game is the evocative artwork and the thematic feel of the lords and locations, but it’s also got some tough decisions about what to take (or do) that are heavily influenced by the other players. The result keeps you on your toes. Many of the individual elements are pretty simple, but when you put them together you have an interesting game.

The Good

Koryŏ (2013). A Korean game of card play and set collection. On your turn you get a new handful of cards, then choose to play one or more of the same type, with the goal of earning points by holding the majorities of numerous sets. There are two catches: (1) everyone chooses their cards for play simultaneously; and (2) you get to use special powers for the cards you control. There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but this is a nice filler than runs in just 10-20 minutes, but has enough depth to keep it interesting.

Johari (2014). Yet another gem-selling game — something that’s a surprisingly popular genre. This time around you’re playing simultaneous action cards to try and buy and sell your gems in very restricted ways. Timing and turn order are crucially important, which creates the main tension of the game. The result is enjoyable, but there’s not a lot that’s new here. Nonetheless, it’d make an amusing night of gaming alongside Basari.

Freedom: The Underground Railroad (2013). I’ll have to admit, I had pretty high expectations for this game because of the great acclaim it’s been getting in the last year. In retrospect, I suspect a lot of that acclaim was due to the solid historical-educational basis of the game. Sadly, I was a little underwhelmed by the gameplay. It’s a co-op game where your goal is to get as many slaves as you can over the border into Canada. The biggest trick is that when you move slaves then slave catchers move in response, so you constantly have to figure out how to keep the slave catchers away from your escape routes. You also need to get slaves out of the plantations as quickly as you can, because there are new ones coming in. The slave-catcher movement system is clever, but it also turns the game into a somewhat fiddly puzzle.

Beyond that, there just wasn’t enough randomness or chaos in the game, which is something that I believe that co-op games need in high degrees. As a result, the game became a long but manageable game of careful movement. We won our game pretty easily at the higher difficulty level, and that shouldn’t happen in the first try of a co-op game unless you got really lucky, and there wasn’t enough luck in the game for that to be the case. Overall, it was a really nice historical simulation and an OK-to-good co-op experience.

The OK

Hot Tin Roof (2014). A new Leo Colovini game. Like most of its predecessors its a light, thoughtful, puzzling abstract. Its best feature is an action system that gives you money for unused actions. The idea isn’t innovative, since it dates back to at least the role selection of Puerto Rico (2002), but it works very nicely with a game where you might not be able to do some of the actions some of the time. The rest of the game is about building paths between cats and inserting traps for your opponents so that they have to pay you for the privilege of connecting their felines, and it’s … OK. A lot of the play seemed very methodical, but there were some options for strategy and tactics alike.

Splendor (2014). More gems! A game of collecting resources to buy cards which in turn act as permanent discounts making it easier to buy future cards. The ultimate object is to buy cards or earn bonuses which are worth victory points. Unfortunately, I found this game pretty boring. The actions (take resources or buy cards) are very simplistic, and the turns in which you do so just go on and on. It was very repetitive and also repetitive. The discount structure was interesting, and there’s one important decision point about when to break for VPs. There’s also real opportunity for other players to get in your way by purchasing the cards you were saving up for — which can elicit groans, usually the sign of a good game. However it wasn’t enough here to jazz up the monotonous gameplay.

The Meh

apocalypZe (2014). A zombie card game of trying to outlast your opponents by maintaining your own resources while sending raiders to attack their strongholds and scavenging lands. The basic idea of the game is sound and it had some good ideas for deck management, but the implementation unfortunately felt like an ’80s design. There was uncontrolled combat, which should totally focus on eliminating the weakest players one-by-one, and there was player elimination. Worse, the rules were really hard to understand, a fact that wasn’t aided by some rules systems being overly complex. This was a game that we didn’t enjoy and were eager to end.

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