New to Me: Summer 2015 — A Lot of Good

I played a lot of new games during the Summer — almost 20. And for the longest time, most of them were good but not better. Fortunately, toward the end of the season things improved and move games appeared in my Very Good to Great range. As always, this is a listing of games that I’d never played previously, and it’s my personal take on the games, as a medium-serious game player.

The Great

KeyflowerKeyflower (2012). This Richard Breese game is a couple of years old, but I played it for the first time a few weeks ago, so it makes the list. All of the Breese games I’ve played to date are dense combinations of classic Euromechanics, and this one’s no exception. In fact, it’s an auction/worker-placement/tile-placement game. (Seriously!)

I found the combination of auction and worker placement to be both innovative and interesting. Each turn you either place meeples as workers (to take advantage of a tile’s action) or else you place them as bids (to try and purchase a tile for future usage and/or victory points). The balance is a really tricky one because you might want to grab an action before anyone else, or you might try to make an all-important first bid; doing either also allows you to determine the color of meeple (currency) that must be used for all future bidding on working on that tile.

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A Deckbuilding Look at Don’t Turn Your Back

Don't Turn Your BackI haven’t talked about a new deckbuilder all year. As I’ve previously written, I think that’s because the genre has peaked. So I was happy to get my Kickstarted copy of Don’t Turn Your Back (2015), by Eric B. Vogel, because it gives me a chance to return to a topic that has often filled this blog in recent years.

I talked with Eric about the game in February, but now that it’s out I can talk more about my own experience with the game — about how it expands the field and where it has troubles. I should note that Eric is a friend of mine, and I playtested the game several times in 2014, so take what I write with the appropriate amount of salt!


The Game

Don’t Turn Your Back is a deckbuilding/worker-placement game. You buy cards and filter cards like you’d expect, making the best deck that you can. However, the game’s use of those cards is unusual. Instead of just playing them and taking their effects, you instead place cards on specific areas of a game board, each of which has limited spaces. Doing so produces specific results: Continue reading

Deckbuilding Interviews: Eric B. Vogel & Don’t Turn Your Back

Don't Turn Your BackLast year, I talked with my friend Eric B. Vogel about his first published deckbuilder design, Zeppelin Attack! Now that he’s got his second deckbuilding (and first worker placement!) design, Don’t Turn Your Back, on Kickstarter, I couldn’t resist talking to him again, to see how his ideas about deckbuilding have evolved in the last year.


Shannon Appelcline: Don’t Turn Your Back is your second deckbuilding game, following Zeppelin Attack! Why did you return to the genre?

Eric B. Vogel: For me it didn’t feel like a return to the genre so much. That’s because when you’re playing, the worker placement element feels most prominent. You really only shuffle every turn or two, buy one or two cards a turn, but you place 4-7 workers every turn. You also have the area control elements. I would say this game is 1/2 worker placement, 1/4 deckbuilding, and 1/4 area control. So to me, I felt more like I was creating my first worker placement game, instead of my second deck-building game.

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