New to Me: Fall 2014 — The Season of the Mediocre

Sadly, Fall 2014 just wasn’t a great season for gaming for me — and especially not for new gaming. A few plays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas kept some gaming nights from occurring, while rain and rioting cut other game nights short. Even when I did play there were six plays of current obsession Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (more on that next year!), six plays of prototypes, and three plays of Kickstarter prereleases. I’m actually pretty surprised I managed ten totally new games, which I’ve detailed here (plus one that was only new in my mind).

Also sadly, the games that I played weren’t (on average) that great. This wasn’t another season of the very good … but instead a season of the mediocre. Ah well. Maybe winter will be better.


The Very Good

IstanbulIstanbul (2014). I find it very interesting that Rüdiger Dorn continues to create games where you move piles of discs around and leave some of those discs behind. Traders of Genoa (2001) and Goa (2004) are the obvious designs that include mechanics of this sort, and Istanbul is another. This new release is a complex resource-management game where you collect goods and make money on the path to ultimately collect gem-shaped victory points. The way that the “assistants” that you leave behind works is very clever because it forces you to sometimes return to the same locations and generally influences your play — making Istanbul a pretty innovative game. I also enjoy the fact that all the board spaces have special powers, which gives you the reason to travel to to them (much as in Traders of Genoa).

Zeppelin ConquestZeppelin Conquest (2014). This is another game from Eric Vogel that I’ve played since its playtest days, so I may be biased. Basically, it’s a two-player majority-control game, but it’s played on a very unique battlefield: three cards are laid out, each of which includes three locations to fight in. Each of those locations in turn has different rules like “win with zeppelins”, “win with soldiers”, “lose points for zeppelins played”, etc. You then battle across those nine battlefield by playing cards, and as you’d expect those cards each do three different things too. As a result, this is a game all about compromises (as many of the best games are). You have to decide which battles to fight and which to give up on (based upon what’s where on each card), all while carefully managing your cards and trying to stay just ahead of your opponents. I wish this game played with more than two players, and I wish it wasn’t just a POD release, but it’s a good game nonetheless.

The Good

Good Cop, Bad Cop (2014). A hidden teams game reminiscent of Bang! (2002) or The Castle of The Devil (2006, 2010). Each player/cop has three role cards which together define who they are: bad cops are trying to kill a good cop leader and good cops are trying to kill a bad cop leader. A very simple action system lets the players gather equipment, discern loyalties, and shoot each other. The result plays very quickly, can support up to 8 players, and is very accessible to players of all sorts. It isn’t very deep, and the endgame can drag a bit when all the loyalties are known, but other than that it’s a lot of fun.

TrainsTrains (2012). Nowadays, deckbuilders are getting combined with everything, so why not a train game. The integration is pretty simple: some cards let you play new tracks to the board, with additional costs for that track paid by your normal deckbuilding currency, while other cards let you play victory-point scoring stations. The gameplay is simple and the board/card integration is pretty much exactly what I’d expect. So, there’s nothing particularly special here. But it’s a nice twist on deckbuilding games that works.

Roll through the Ages: The Iron Age (2014). I was thrilled to see a new variant of Roll through the Ages (2008), but perhaps a little less thrilled by the result. Much as in the original, you roll dice to produce resources that you use to build developments, monuments, and other expansions to your civilization. It’s a nifty little abstraction of a civ-building game as dice rolling. The big difference from the original is that you have more variety here and so (probably) more paths to victory: you can build soldiers to win conflicts; you can build ports to increase goods production; you can build monuments for pure veeps; or you can build developments that improve any of these routes. I felt like there was many more options than in the original and so more paths to take … but I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing. The first Roll through the Ages was a quick-playing game, while this one got constantly bogged down by people deciding what to do. This may improve with play, and it’s probably still a perfectly good game that I’d play again, but I’m not sure this revision played to the original game’s strengths.

NavegedorNavegador (2010). An older Mac Gerdts  game, but one that I was entirely certain I hadn’t played before. It’s (unsurprisingly) got a roundel, and thus all the advantages that go along with that — including hard choices about what actions you take in which sequence as you go round and round. There are also a variety of resources to manage, and as is usually the case, Gerdts has kept these resources very tight, so that you’re always wanting more cash, more ships, and more workers. But, none of this felt very fresh, and I feel like a lot of it was done better in Concordia (2013).

The biggest innovation of the game was the supply and demand track for three resources, where players could alternatively drive the price up or done. More generally, there was a lot in the game that rewarded playing contrarian to the other players, and that was certainly what I liked the most. Still, it felt a little abstract and a little soulless — which is the reaction I’ve personally had to a lot of Gerdts’ games. I’d willingly play it again, and I’d appreciate its tough choices, but I probably wouldn’t be thrilled by the gameplay.

(When logging this game at BGG I discovered I had played it once before, four years previous. Nonetheless, I’d already written this mini-review, so I decided to keep it … and the fact that I didn’t remember the game at all probably says a lot.)

The OK

VillainyVillainy (2014). This richly detailed superhero game has a lot of fun and funny theming, and a gaming group that focuses on American style games might love it. Unfortunately, I felt it ran too long for its depth — or if you prefer, it was too random for its length. There were actually some neat mechanics, including fun building of characters, but even some of those fizzled out — such as the facts that goals were structured around giving certain statistics and specialities to various characters, but it was a logistical nightmare keeping track of who needed what stats.

The Meh

Dragon Slayer (2014). Basically a fantasy imagining of a Zombie Dice like game. You throw a complex array of dice and try to get enough dragon parts and an axe while shielding against fire. The result is almost entirely random, and the “hard” dice rolls are easy enough that they come up way too often. Worse, there’s almost no decision making: it’s largely obvious which dragons you should fight and  whether you should push on. The big twist in the came is that you can encourage other players to push their luck, but it only happens once per player each game, so it’s a minor element of the game. The best I can say about this game is that it wasn’t painful to play.

Demonslayer: The Siege of Mt. Kulun (2014). This deckbuilding game of killing monsters unfortunately felt like it was from the deckbuilding scene about 3-4 years ago, when publishers could still get away (barely) with putting out something that was pretty similar to Dominion — though this one lies even closer to first-and-a-half generation deckbuilders like Ascension and Thunderstone. You collect cards to get money, use that to buy monsters, then jettison all your money as you kill, kill, kill. It gets old long before the game is over, and there isn’t a spark of innovation to keep your interested.

Oar Else!Oar Else! (2013). I had high hopes for this raft-survival game, primarily because it includes an interesting inflection point, where you decide between going it alone and continuing onward with the rest of the crew. Unfortunately, the game is very poorly developed. The choice ends up being almost meaningless, and whether you succeed or not is based on a mixture of pure randomness and take-that play. There are also cards that don’t make much sense, card categories that are poorly organized, and the result isn’t much fun. It’s a pity, because there were some great ideas here.

Heads of State (2008). Another older game, and this one I really hand’t played before. It’s a majority-control game that has a pretty interesting basis: there are seven different types of tokens you can place on the board, with dramatically different costs and valuations. Unfortunately, that’s the only good thing about the game.

On the downside, it’s a bit of a Frankenstein, mish-mashing a bunch of reward mechanics like first-placement, majority-control, and wide-spread-placement. It’s also got bad problems with downtime: you can’t make any decisions before your turn because so much changes after every action, so you twiddle your thumbs until it gets to you and then everyone else twiddles their thumbs because you couldn’t plan beforehand.

Finally, this game manages to make every usability error in the book. It matches player colors with unrelated board colors; it has tokens that you have to pattern match to the board, yet it’s hard to do so; it has spaces on the board that look identical to the tokens, making it hard to see which spaces are empty; and even when those tokens are down on the board, it’s hard to scan and see who owns what. Though the mechanics weren’t great, it was these usability issues that made the game virtually unplayable.


I also played prototypes of two Kickstarter games, which I’ve written about elsewhere. I decided not to include them in this listing, under the theory that they might not have been totally finalized. Nonetheless, I’d have rated Monster Mansion as OK-to-good and Dragon Flame as very-good-to-great. For more, see my linked Kickstarter Previews.

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1 thought on “New to Me: Fall 2014 — The Season of the Mediocre

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