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: 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

A Deckbuilding Look at The Quest for El Dorado

The Quest for El Dorado (2017) is exciting because it’s an entrant in the deckbuilding field by master designer Reiner Knizia. It’s also exciting because it’s one of the scant games that uses deckbuilding as an engine to drive play on a gameboard, with Trains (2012), Tyrants of the Underdark (2016), Automobiles (2016), and several wargames being among the few prior releases that did so to this same depth, and at this same level of quality.


The Game

The Quest for El Dorado (2017) is a racing game, and in fact it’s the game that encouraged me to write my current series of articles on racing games, in large part because it’s a pretty great one. The object of the game is to travel across several tiles to be the first to get to El Dorado. Each of those tiles is filled with hexes of a variety of terrain types, with the most important ones being green jungles, blue waters, and yellow villages. Players will actually get to choose their route across the tiles, strategically selecting between long but easy routes and short but difficult ones. Continue reading

The Anatomy of Racing Games: What Makes a Great Race

Racing games are the least common denominator of board games. Candyland (1949) certainly isn’t a well-respected game nor are other roll-and-move games. However, there are also plenty of modern racing eurogames which are great. I’ve got quite a few of them in my permanent collection, including Around the World in 80 Days (2004), Cartagena (2000), Fast Flowing Forest Fellers (2008)The Quest for El Dorado (2017), and Snow Tails (2008).

So what makes the difference?

I think six different attributes contribute to great racing game play — elements that have largely appeared since the eurogame explosion of the ’90s. I’ve listed them here in decreasing order of importance. Great racing games don’t usually have all of them; in fact, that’d probably be too much! But the really good racing games tend to feature several of these attributes, particularly the higher ranked ones. Continue reading