Tag Archives: fifth avenue

The Alea Analysis, Part Five: San Juan (S#5), Fifth Avenue (#9), Louis XIV (M#1)

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Over the last few years I’ve slowly been updating, expanding, and revising my series of articles on Alea games. If you’d like to catch up, you can read about: Ra, Chinatown, and Taj Mahal in Part One; or Princes of Florence, Adel Verpflichtet, and Traders of Genoa in Part Two; or Wyatt Earp, Royal Turf, and Puerto Rico in Part Three; or Die Sieben Weisen, Edel, Stein & Reich, and Mammoth Hunters in Part Four.

This article brings Alea into the mid ’00s with a look at the transition from their old Small Box series to their new Medium Box series. It covers San Juan, Fifth Avenue, and Louis XIV.

Small Box #5: San Juan (A+)

Author: Andreas Seyfarth
Publisher: Rio Grande (2004)
Alea Difficulty Scale: 3
Other Articles: Alea Treasures #1: Louis XIV & San Juan (9/10), San Juan Review (7/04)
My Plays: 37

San JuanSan Juan returned to the gameplay of Alea’s prize-winner, Puerto Rico. On your turn, you pick a role that everyone benefits from, and you try and use the benefits of that role to build production buildings and special-power buildings that will ultimately earn you the most victory points. 

Strengths: Innovative Cards

San Juan’s biggest innovation and its biggest strength lies in the the idea that cards can be used either for what’s printed on them or just as a resource. Generally, I find it an amazing idea. First, it notably decreases the effect of luck in a card game, because you only care about what’s printed on about a quarter of your cards, meaning that you have a lot more choice than you would if you used every card. Second, it introduces a lot of variety to the game, because on a given play you’ll only see a small number of the cards in actual use; it may be many, many games before you’ve played everything.

San Juan built upon this strong basis by adapting the basic roles of Puerto Rico to its new card paradigm. Now, many of the roles focus on different ways to draw cards: through selfishness (the Prospector), through overdrawing and discarding (the Councillor, who also includes another mechanism for reducing the luck of card draws), and through a more complex production-sales mechanism (the Producer and the Trader). It’s an excellent example of simultaneously innovating and holding onto classic play. Continue reading →

A Game Designer in Every Box

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In the starry-eyed days of 1995 an increasingly notable company called Wizards of the Coast put out an innovative roleplaying game called Everway. It was widely lauded for its originality and the way that it moved away from the quantitative dice-based  mechanics of the rest of the medium. One of its most interesting mechanics was the way that it resolved actions using a Tarot-like “Fortune deck”. When an action was attempted, the gamemaster would determine the result by assessing how the meaning of a card and its orientation related to the situation.

Despite its critical acclaim, Everway was a commercial failure. Almost 15 years later you can still find very cheap copies of the boxed game. It was probably a surprising failure for the folks at Wizards, who had loved the game when they’d tried it in-house. But, years later, the employees have an explanation for the failure. “The problem,” they said, “is that we couldn’t include designer Jonathan Tweet in every box.” Not only had his originality and ability to think on his feet driven the fun of the in-house games, but he’d also set the tone of how the game should be played.

I think there’s an important lesson in here for board game designers too, one that struck me last week as I tried yet again to find the fun in Fifth Avenue. Continue reading →

If It’s Broken Don’t Replay It!

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Last month Larry Levy offered up a column that he called The Curse of the Learning Curve in which he opined that players should have patience with new games, lest they throw out something good just because of a bad first-time experience.

I can agree with some of Larry’s point. It does take time to really figure out some games. However I disagree with many of his specifics. In particular, I see a big difference between a game that offers a first-time player a shallower experience (because they didn’t understand the subtleties) and a game that offers a first-time player a broken experience (because it just didn’t work).

Broadly I see four different types of game design that are related to “the learning curve”, and in the first two cases I’d fault the designers and developers with bad design.

Continue reading →