New to Me: Autumn 2019 — Farewell to California

2019 was a bit of a changing of the guard for me. After 30 years living in Berkeley, across the Bay from San Francisco, and after more than 15 years of gaming with friends at Endgame (and later Secret) on Wednesdays and at my house on Thursdays, I’ve moved to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. I’ve been here almost two weeks now, and I haven’t had time yet to search out my next board game opponents, but they’ll certainly be different from the friends I had out in the Bay Area. So here’s my last look at new games played on the west coast of the United States.

As usual, these are games that were new to me (whether they were quite new or quite old) and I’m listing my ratings of the games as a mid-complexity eurogamer. Your mileage may vary.


The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

Wingspan (2019). The hotness lives up to its hype. I’ve already written extensively about this game, but in short it’s a tableau building game where you improve the power of your actions, both by making them stronger and by giving them variety. And then you try and accomplish goals, some short-term, some long-term. This is all done through bird cards: you gather food, you lay eggs, you collect the bird cards and then you play them. The cards in turn can hold eggs, can generate actions, and can earn victory points. It’s a well-themed, variable, and enjoyable game that’s not quite like anything else on the market.

(And I can buy myself a copy now that I’ve landed in Hawaii and won’t have to ship it over in a container. I mean, if I can find one in-print.) Continue reading

New to Me: Summer 2019 — Others Enjoy Them More Than I

These lists have always been a quarterly summary of the new games that I played and what thought of them, as a medium-weight eurogame-focused player. That don’t necessarily represent if these games are good or bad, just if like them. And that fact felt like it was on particular display this summer, when I played a number of games that were very good in the abstract, but less enjoyable for me specifically.

But I’m going to start off with the one game that may have be the opposite case …

The Very Good (“I Would Keep This”)

Blood Bound (2013). This is a pretty light and simple game that’s more about experience than strategy, and that’s not a category I usually love, but this one was pretty good. It was sort of the deduction of Love Letter meets the gameplay of Bang! There are two teams of players, and each team is trying to capture the leader of the opposite team: but you only know the probable identity of one other player — and nothing about whether they’re a leader.

The cleverness of the hidden teams part of this game is that its deduction comes in two parts: you have to guess both the affiliation of each player, and their rank within the team — and the second part can be quite dicey since there are nine potential ranks in each team, and many of them will be out of play, so the level “7” character will usually not be the leader, but could be.

The Love Letter aspect of this game comes from the fact that each player has a special power that they can use once. These can be cleverly played to help fellows and hurt opponents … if you can guess who’s who.

For a game that’s over in 15-30 minutes, this one has a surprising level of depth, and its two levels of deduction make it more interesting than many in the hidden teams category. Continue reading

New to Me: Spring 2019 — Sequels at the Top

My gaming has changed this year, due to the much-lamented demise of my old gaming community. My new groups seems to have gelled around slightly lighter play than the medium-weight games I prefer, and thus I’ve had a few more misses this time around. But I’ve also played some very enjoyable games in the last three months, most of which were sequels in one way or another. As usual, this list rates games based on my personal enjoyment as a medium-weight gamer, and they’re games I personally haven’t played before, whether they’re truly new or not.

The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

New Frontiers (2018). This is the fourth iteration of the Race for the Galaxy system, following Race for the Galaxy (2007), Roll for the Galaxy (2014), and Jump Drive (2017). This one is obviously the heftiest of the games, though it outweighs super-filler Race for the Galaxy by just a little bit.

As usual, you’re building developments, settling planets, and shipping goods to earn points. This new game goes back to the core role-selection play of Race for the Galaxy, which means that you do these things by selecting actions, and then other players get to take slightly less powerful versions of those actions. That’s a nice return, because Race for the Galaxy dramatically fell out of favor in local play as extensive expansions poisoned the game through too much complexity, then Roll for the Galaxy basically fired it. I love Roll, but its gameplay is quite different. Still, this isn’t quite the classic Race system. For example, you now have to have both settlers and money to settle a planet. Continue reading

New to Me: Winter 2019 — Knizia, Breese, Cards & More

This post got delayed a bit because of April 1st and 15th falling on Mondays, allowing me to post a few special articles. And then I got sick. (Sigh.) But this is still my “New to Me” post for the first three months of the year. As usual, these are games that I played for the first time (no matter how new or old they are) with a rating of how much I liked them (as a medium-weight eurogamer).

The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

Key Flow (2018). Take Keyflower (2012), a game that I found most brilliant for its interrelation of auction and worker placement. Keep the worker-placement and resource-management elements of the original game, but replace the auction mechanic with a different sort of action selection: card drafting. Voila! You have Key Flow.

Though I think that Key Flow cuts out some of the best parts of Keyflower, the card drafting is a perfectly acceptable alternative, and the result is a game that’s a bit shorter and more approachable. Even though I love Keyflower and will continue to play it, I think Key Flow is pretty good too, just in a slightly different category.

This one is also a bit more solitaire and really, really intensive in its end-game scoring. (There really should have been a score sheet.) Continue reading

New to Me: Fall 2018 — A Season of Sequels

Other than my favorite gaming community ending its run, fall was a great season for gaming. I got to play several very new games, and many of them were very good. As usual this list is games that are new to me, no matter how long ago they were published, and as usual this is a rating of the games solely as I enjoy them, as a medium-weight eurogamer.

The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

Altiplano (2017). This new game by Reiner Stockhausen is very much a sequel to Orléans (2014). It’s another bag-building game where you draw colored disks, which can be used to power various actions. The difference is that where Orléans felt like a rather unique action-selection game, where you had to formulaically enable actions through the combination of specific “workers”, Altiplano instead feels like a resource-management game, where you’re pushing up through the supply chain, transforming lesser goods into greater goods. What a difference a bit of theming makes (and this also reminds me how wide the world of action selection is!).

Overall, Altiplano is a very tough and thinky game. You’re constantly trying to figure out the optimal use of scarce resources and which rewards you want to purchase from the board. Constraints are piled atop each other, but there’s also a lot of opportunity for careful, directed play. It’s not just that there are a lot of paths to victory (there are), but there’s also the opportunity to build a meaningful engine, allowing you to make better use of your resource-disks and also overcome the locale-based constraints of the game.

I don’t think this is a better game than Orléans, but it’s impressively different for a game that uses the same core bagbuilding and formulaic-action-construction mechanics, and so fans of the one might also want the other in their collection. (I’ve now got both in mine.) Continue reading

New to Me: Summer 2018

As usual, my New to Me reviews cover games that I’ve never played before, whether they’re new to the world or not. (They mostly were this time around.) And, as usual, they’re rated by how I personally like them, as a midweight eurogamer.

The Very Good (“I Would Keep This”)

Terraforming Mars: Expansions. I’ve now played through all the Terraforming Mars expansions, and I’d generally recommend them, with some qualms about one of them.

Hellas & Elysium (2017). This is a double-sided map that provides two different playing surfaces for the game: the south pole and the other side of Mars. Changing what the terrain looks like provides very valuable variety, but is of limited interest. However, Fryxelius took the next step and also included different milestones and awards on each map. This makes a huge difference, because it changes what you’re competing for in each game, and makes this supplement highly recommended. Continue reading

New to Me: Spring 2018 — A Last Look at Co-ops

This quarter finally ends my work on the book on cooperative board game design by myself and Christopher Allen. That’s because today marks the hand-off day for Meeples Together, which I’ll be talking about more in the next months. Meanwhile, that means that this was also my last chance to look at co-ops for the book, so whenever one came near me I leapt upon it. There were four more total. I still do plan to play co-ops in the future, as I’ll be starting a long running series of case studies related to the book sometime in the next several months … but it’s a bit of a relief to not have to at this point. 

In any case, this is everything I played this quarter that was new to me. As usual it’s rated by how much I like it (or not) as a medium-weight eurogamer. And, there was a lot of middle this month: not the best and not the worst.

The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

Majesty: For the Realm (2017). Sometimes a very simple little game can really hit the spot. This is a simple Dutch-auction game where you purchase colored cards that you place in corresponding places in your kingdom. Most of the cards give you victory points in an exponential progression, increasing the valuation the more tiles you get. Some of the various areas in the kingdom also interrelate in interesting ways. A few of the cards further allow attack of your opponents, defense from their attacks, or recovery of the cards they destroyed.

There’s just enough color to be evocative, and there’s just enough choice to be interesting. It’s also very fast, allowing quick play, and very variable, as each of the locales in your kingdom has two variants for how it works. My only complaints are production related: the box is too big; the scoring components are simultaneously overproduced and not in the right denominations; and the game is overpriced because of that overproduction. Still, it’s on my “perhaps buy” list. Continue reading

New to Me: Winter 2018 — Another Season of Co-ops

For the last few years, I’ve been working on a book about the design of cooperative tabletop games with my co-author, Christopher Allen. We’ve recently finalized a contract with a publisher, and we hope to be offering the book to the public before the end of the year. That means that it’s our last chance to consider new co-ops before we lock the text down on July 1. So, this quarter, I played a lot of co-op games, and they’re all discussed here. (This isn’t the first time I’ve had a co-op heavy quarter, and it’s all been because of this book.)

As usual these ratings are my own feelings about the game, as a medium-weight gamer; they don’t necessarily represent the overall quality of the game. In fact this time, I’m well aware that I low-rated a few different games that are well-loved, and might be good designs for the right audience. And, as usual, these games are new to me, though a few are slightly older.

The Great

Robinson Crusoe (2012). Co-op #1. This is already a classic co-op — and a well-received one. After a play, I can see why. The heart of the game is serious resource-management play. If I wrote an elevator pitch for this game, it’d be, “what if Agricola were a co-op?” So you have to feed everyone, and that’s tough enough because it requires dangerous hunting and slightly dangerous gathering. But you’re simultaneously choosing a lot of other actions, such as exploring your island, building inventions, improving your shelter, and doing whatever’s required to finish the game successfully.

Robinson Crusoe is one of those games where you simultaneously feel like you need to do everything, and where you don’t ever have enough actions to do so — which is a tension that’s at the heart of many very successful designs. This feeds very well into the co-op system, creating a nail-biting game where things seem to be getting constantly worse, as your team becomes increasingly wounded and demoralized, but where you’re simultaneously advancing toward victory. Continue reading

New To Me: Fall 2017

As usual, this is my quarterly list of games that I played in the last three months that I had never played before. Many of them are fairly new games, but sometimes there are older games too, that I’ve just now played for the first time. Also as usual, the ratings all match my personal enjoyment of the game as a eurogamer who likes medium-weight games. YMMV. 

The Very Good

Terraforming Mars (2016). One of last years’ most popular games finally got a play from  me this fall. It turns out that it’s largely a card-driven engine-building game, not unlike Master of Orion: The Board Game (2016), which I also wrote about recently. You’ve got six different resources, which get produced each turn, and various cards can give you more production, more resources, or the ability to use the resources. There also is a board, which lets you build cities, waterways, and forests, and there’s definite strategy based on board position, but it’s the least part of the game.

Continue reading

New to Me: Summer 2017 — The Season of the Expansions

I love returning to my favorite games and playing them in new ways. That means that I’m usually a fan of expansions, and I played a good number of them this summer. But, there were new games too, including a surprising number of variants on old mechanics — whether they be Poker resolution or classic deckbuilding. As usual, this is a listing of games according to how much I like them, as a medium-weight euro-gamer, and they’re new to me (although I was pleased to play a lot that were just flat-out new this time around).

The Great

Hocus (2016). I am not a fan of Texas Hold’em, which I consider a bluffing exercise with probability memorization thrown in. Sure, you can be better at it than other people, but I don’t find it a fun game, or even a game. And, Hocus uses Texas Hold’em mechanics … but I love it.

Continue reading