New To Me: Spring 2016

It’s been a weak quarter for new gaming for me. Because of a business trip and a vacation, I missed out on about a month of my normal gaming. Still, I managed to get in plays of almost a dozen new games, expansions, and variants — just barely enough to people a new New to Me article. 

As usual, this listing is games new and old that I’d never played before, rated according to how much liked them.


The Very Good

BruxellesBruxelles 1893 (2013). This slightly older game is classic worker placement with a few twists. As usual, you use your workers for a variety of purposes like buying resources, selling resources, using resources to construct buildings, and taking specially-powered characters.

But wait, there’s more …

The first big twist is that the worker-placement spaces also control both an auction and a majority control. Yeah, it’s kind of a Frankenstein game, but it works. The auction lets you buy even more special powers, and is based on columns of workers, while the majority control earns you points and is based on sets of four adjacent workers.

The second big twist is that there are additional worker-placement spaces outside of the core ones that can give you nice rewards but which don’t involve you in the majority battles and which might cost you workers if you use them too much.

Overall, this game has a lot going on. It’s very clever, very strategic, and offers a lot of different paths to victory. In some ways, it’s the Platonic ideal of a eurogame, but it’s still an interesting one.

VicticultureViticulture: The Essential Edition (2015). Another worker placement game. This time you’re making wine, and that’s much of the delight because the game feels quite thematic. Play is divided between summer and winter, with each season having different worker placement options (which is a nice little innovation). Meanwhile, you’re trying to plant grapes, harvest grapes, turn them into wine, and eventually use that to fulfill orders. It’s a nice little engine and one that feels very true to the theming.

The other interesting element of the game is its cards — specifically the summer and winter cards. These are thematic, character-based cards that each provide special powers. I loved how much they shook up the game and made it even more colorful. I was less fond of the fact that they seemed unbalanced and could easily shift the game through (un)lucky draws. Still, on balance, the evocativeness won out over the unbalance for me.

Overall, a fun worker placement game, mainly for its great theming.

Viticulture has been released in a couple of editions since 2013, and this new Essential Edition combines elements of the second edition with its Tuscany expansion.

Broom ServiceBroom Service (2015). I’ve been pretty disappointed by Alea’s production in recent years, as it’s all been new editions of old games. Meanwhile their actual new products have just been revamps of old games, like Broom Service (2015), Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game (2016), and Broom Service: The Card Game (2016). It feels like the Ouroboros has continued eating its own tail until it disappeared.

With that said, Broom Service is quite a good revamp of Witch’s Brew (2008). In adapting from a card game to a board game, Broom Service maintains the core ideas of taking risks when playing cards that you use to collect resources and earn points, but it also really expands the game. You now have to travel to towers to earn your points, and there are two different ways to do so: witches who must be in an adjacent space and druids who must be in the same space. Meanwhile, points can also be earned by taming clouds with magic wands.

This could have made the game way too complex, but it doesn’t That’s because the designers simultaneously considered how to streamline the game — such as using single resources as the basis of point-generating potions, rather than varied sets. The result doesn’t feel much more complex than the original, but the board gives the play additional depth. (It also runs a bit longer.)

The Good

Castles of Burgundy Board GameCastles of Burgundy: The Card Game (2016). Alea’s repetitive production is part of a larger trend that I’m less than thrilled with: the increasing tenden to iterate the same games across the board game, card game, and dice game mediums. (It’s interesting from the design perspective, as I wrote about recently, but not always interesting from the viewpoint of a player looking for something new.) With that said, this is a pretty righteous conversion. The hard decisions of the board game are all here, as you try and get the right numbers to draw cards and to play them. But, this is mixed in with some more typical card game mechanics, such as the collection of triplets of cards. I didn’t love the huge mess this game creates, clearly showing why you don’t use cards for everything; it’s a problem that I’ve seen with other card game conversions. I also don’t think this comes close to replacing the original. Still, there’s nice strategy, nice tactics, and a really teeny box with a teenier price point.

Traders of Osaka (2015). Years ago a very clever set-collection card game called Traders of Carthage (2006) appeared. It was a great filler with a maddening strategy that required simultaneously balancing sets of goods you were going to sell with the possibility of losing other goods to pirates. I was never convinced it could be played well, but it was still a lot of fun. More recently the game has been released with a new theme as Traders of Osaka — which is a change that I find a bit befuddling because this is largely an abstract. Nonetheless, it’s still a strong game.

PerspectivePerspective (2016). This game uses a rare mechanic: you hold a hand of cards but only your opponents can see their types (colors). That makes it kind of similar to Hanabi (2010). You’re trying to get those (unseen) cards to pattern match a victory condition card. To do so you play your cards allowing you to flip, trade, and identify your cards. In what I think is the best of a few variants for the game, you have a partner, which takes the you-can-see-but-I-can’t mechanic up to the next level.

I’ve played a few different games now that use this sort of play, and they all feel kind of fiddly as you fight to not accidentally see the wrong side of the cards. Perspective may actually be worse than most because of all the trading and flipping. Despite that, it’s quite interesting to play, in large part due to its innovation.

Castle RavenloftCastle Ravenloft (2010). I’ve previous played Wrath of Ashardalon (2010), another of the D&D Adventure System board games. Castle Ravenloft (2010) similarly makes great use of the tactical combat system from D&D 4e (2008); it also does a great job of showing the breadth of the system by varying the characters, monsters, and scenarios to create a very different play experience. Unfortunately, Ravenloft also really shows off the developmental issues with these games. Here and there, it contains powers that are just about impossible to understand, and it has at least one scenario (“4: Daylight Assault”) which is flat-out broken: a bad deck shuffle can literally make it impossible to win. I like these games, and I’m tempted to buy more of them, but you might need to tread a little carefully with Ravenloft as the earliest in the series.

The OK

Eminent Domain: Exotica (2016). The second expansion for Eminent Domain (2011). This time around, Jaffee introduces asteroids and a new exotic icon. They’re fundamentally good expansions that improve the variability of the game, allowing players to focus on asteroid and exotic icons. I like the new variability and the color for the game.

I’m just not too happy with how the expansions to Eminent Domain have worked. They each increase the complexity of the game and they’re also pretty hard to take out of the game once they’re introduced, because the various cards are thoroughly mixed in with the original cards. The result is a game that’s getting harder to play with the expansions — and it was a pretty hard teach in the first place.

XCOMXCOM: The Board Game (2015). The newest real-time science-fiction co-op game, following in the footsteps of the superb Space Alert (2008) and the very good Damage Report (2014)This time around, you’re being controlled by a computer app that tells you when to place various threats and when to respond with soldiers, fighter ships, and satellites. The gameplay is actually quite simplistic, which is the main reason it doesn’t hold up to the other real-time SF co-ops, which each had some really clever interconnectivity. There’s also endless rolling of dice in an (otherwise well designed) task system.

However, my biggest issue with the game is the wide discrepancy between the different roles. There’s a commander who’s mainly an accountant and a central officer who’s mainly an administrator; they get to make almost no meaningful decisions. Then there’s a squad leader who has to do all the hard pattern matching and decision making. Things get a little better as the game progresses and technologies give players more choices … but each player still feels like they’re making relatively small decisions.

The game still succeeds based on the tension created by the real-time pace, but without it there wouldn’t be a lot of game here.

Witness (2014). I’m not sure I’d call this a game; it’s more of a cooperative activity. After being presented with a scenario, each player gets a little bit of information about the scenario. The players then pass their information around the table by whispering, like they’re playing a game of telephone. Afterward, the players desperately write down what they’ve learned, after which they answer questions that are based on being able to put together all of the information that got telephoned around the table. Every bit as fun as it sounds, which is to say: your mileage will probably vary. I didn’t find a game based mainly on memory that particularly intriguing.

The Meh

Sun Moon StarsSun, Moon & Stars (2016). A card game where you’re trying to get celestial objects into specific conjunctions. Unfortunately, it mostly doesn’t seem to work. If you play conservatively, you’ll never align the stars for someone else by mistake, which means that you only win if you’re lucky enough to have one of your objects in front of you and then draw the exact card needed to move the other celestial object. More often, the snake wins because no one wins within two rounds of play.

This is one of those games where I can only figure that the designer played the game in some dramatically different way than my group did, because we just couldn’t get it to work. (More blind playtesting was probably needed.)

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1 thought on “New To Me: Spring 2016

  1. I think your comment about playtesting is good one. I also think that just approaching the game from different perspectives can help alot. I have personally played games where the group decides on a particular strategy that brings the game to a standstill, which I assume the designers did not intend.

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