Playtest

It was our great fortune to have seven amazing independent game creators on hand during the XOXO Tabletop event: Luke Crane (Burning Wheel and Torchbearer), Chris Darden (Dungeon Roll), Brad O'Farrell (Story War), David Malki ! (Machine of Death), Jonathan H. Liu (The Emperor's New Clothes), Tyler Segel (Relic Expedition), and Playtest's own Max Temkin (Cards Against Humanity and Werewolf). You can read bios of these incredible designers on the XOXO Tabletop Announcement.

XOXO Tabletop

In addition to the above we curated a collection of independent and Kickstarted games. These sixteen titles amply illustrate the diversity and vibrancy of the scene, and we encourage you to check them out.

The XOXO Playtest 16

The Resistance & The Resistance: Avalon (Don Eskridge, 5-10 players, 30 minutes):  Unmask the traitors in your midst, or sabotage the plans of the majority, in this elegant and exciting adaptation of Werewolf.

Get Bit (Dave Chalker, 2-6 players, 20 minutes): Remember: You don't have to be faster than the shark, just faster than your friends.

Sushi Go (Phil Walker-Harding, 2-5 players, 20 minutes): Grab the best combination of sushi dishes as they whiz by. And once you've eaten it all, finish your meal with all the pudding you've got!

Eight-Minute Empire (Ryan Laukat, 2-5 players, 8 minutes or so): Build an empire and conquer the land in this super-quick area control game. It's easy to learn and perfect for when you only have a few minutes.

Morels (Brent Povis, 2 players, 30 minutes): Harvest mushrooms to sell or eat in this tranquil two-player rummy variant.

Guts of Glory (Zach Gage, 2-4 players, 15 minutes): A mouth-cramming, deck-spewing, competitive card game set in the post-apocalypse. Fun for all ages and skill levels, Guts is easy to learn yet intensely tactical.

Masquerade (Michael Bujtas, 3-6 players, 30 minutes): A 61 card deck tells the story of an assassination attempt on the King, with each card representing a unique character in the plot.

Escape: Curse of the Temple! (Kristian Amundsen Østby, 1-5 players, 10 minutes): A cooperative, real-time game, in which players must escape from a cursed temple before it collapses around their ears.

Flash Point: Fire Rescue (Kevin Lanzing, 1-6 players, 45 minutes): Players work together to rescue the victims trapped inside a burning building before the fire gets out of control or the building collapses.

Corporate America (Teale Fristoe, 3-6 players, 90 minutes): Use the government to line your own pockets in this cynical and satirical take on politics.

D-Day Dice (Emmanuel Aquin, 1-4 players, 45 minutes): Organize improvised units for an attack against a machine gun nest. Collect resources, advance on the beach, and succeed ... or die trying.

Among the Stars (Vangelis Bagiartakis, 2-4 players, 30 minutes): Build space stations throughout the galaxy to promote trade among the races, strengthen diplomatic relations, and help maintain the fragile peace

Sentinels of the Multiverse (Christopher Badell, 2-5 players, 60 minutes): Play one of 10 superheroes, against an evil mastermind, in this cooperative game set in the world of comics.

VivaJava: The Coffee Game (T. C. Petty III, 3-8 players, 90 minutes): Find the perfect blend of beans to create the next best-seller in the coffee houses and kitchens of the world.

Eminent Domain (Seth Jaffee, 2-4 players, 45 minutes): Will you colonize nearby planets, or take them over by force? Harvest resources for trade, and do research to improve your technology. Build the best civilization and win the game!

Freedom: The Underground Railroad (Brian Mayer, 1-4 players, 90 minutes): A card-driven, cooperative game in which the group is working for the abolitionist movement to help bring an end to slavery in the United States.

Announcing XOXO Tabletop: 

Last year at XOXO, we saw attendees hanging out in our cafe, at the tables on the street, and in the bars nearby playing board and card games they love or, in some cases, prototypes of games they’re working on.

This year, we decided to try something new. In the Unmarket, near our registration tables, we’re offering a library of independent board, card, and RPGs to borrow and play throughout the weekend, curated by Playtest’s Matthew Baldwin and Max Temkin.

Let's get this out of the way: Dungeon Roll is a solitaire game. It says on the tin that it's suitable for 1-4 players, but with more than two you'll be checking Twitter while your opponents do their thing. Even when playing head-to-head, the only activity you have to do while waiting for your turn is play the part of a dice-rolling robot, which isn't really fun, or even really "playing."

So yes, it's a solitaire game. But as a solitaire game, Dungeon Roll shines.

Here's the premise: you're forming a party to go spelunking (the game calls it "delving") in a dungeon.  Your party is formed randomly, based on a roll of seven six-sided dice, though occasionally you'll have the ability to improve on this roll through the use of special powers. As you reach deeper levels of the delve, you encounter an increasing number of monsters (the types of which are also determined randomly), and must fight them off. Different party members ("adventurers") are better at slaying different monsters. Occasionally you'll get reward instead of a monster. Or you may meet a dragon. But if you finish a level without dying — that is, without losing the last member of your party — you have the choice to escape the dungeon and keep your points, or go deeper and risk them for more. Finish three delves, successfully or not, and the game's over.

Did you catch the part of the description that mentions opponents? It's not there. Your opponent here is fate. And there ain't nothing wrong with fate as an opponent. But like they say, everyone dies — or does their best to avoid death — alone. Multi-player Dungeon Roll ends up being the most severe form of communal solitaire.

I had read that it was best played with two players, so the first couple games my wife played with me. And besides the lack of interaction, we had one big problem: the instructions are way too confusing. Which is weird, because it's a pretty simple game. So the crime here isn't that the game is complicated — it's not — is that it appears unnecessarily complex while you’re ramping up. It left us in an uneasy state of not being sure if we were getting it at all. 

(I've since read on the BGG boards about the very issues we were having and it sounds like the gamemaker, to his credit, is on top of things, and plans to revise the instructions in future printings. Soon this will hopefully be a moot point.)

After a couple disappointing experiences (during one of which we played a major part of the game completely wrong because of the above issues), my wife went to sleep, and I tried out the solitaire version. And damn if I didn't have fun. The problem-solving parts of my brain that had been asleep so far kicked into gear. Strategizing ideas rushed in like an angry orc army and brought some endorphins along for the ride. I understood how choices early on would affect my fate later on; that is, I was forced to develop strategy. There was several aha moments. I finally saw what the maker was going for.

A few notes about the design: The physical construction involves a lovely treasure chest-shaped box that doubles as a contraption you use to pluck out treasure during the game. (I also used it for an actual treasure hunt with my kids, and it also served that purpose very well.) The cards have nice drawings on them, though a better balance could be struck between the illustrations and the type, which often required squinting from this old man. The only real crime in the design is the over-reliance on symbols instead of spelling things out with text. (And sometimes multiple symbols for the same thing, ugh.) Always, always err on the side of clarity, please.

In the end, Dungeon Roll is a solid press-your-luck-type game that rewards repeated play — if you like solitaire games. It may tip a little too heavy on the randomness side of things, but as long as you know that going in, you won't be disappointed. Even beyond the puzzle of the game itself, there's the challenge of using each character, and their unique special powers, optimally. 

Some brief thoughts on the games I learned at PAX.

Alien Frontiers: I’ve heard a few raves about this worker-placement game, and jumped at the chance to give it a whirl during PAX. It is one of a number of newer worker-placement games that use dice as the workers, with the values determining what can be done with them. Along with the dice, Alien Frontiers adds another distinctly non-Euro element: “Take That!ism”. Some actions and cards allow a player to directly target opponents, allowing them to steal resources or otherwise complicate their plans. I have no objection to this when it’s done well; Lords of Waterdeep, for instance, also has this element, and I quite enjoy that game. But in Alien Frontiers, it seems like it’s a little too easy to dogpile on the leader, such that all the players wind up within one point of victory and the winner is he who gets slapped down the least. Wondering if our one play was an anomaly, I checked out the comments by several reviewers I trust on boardgamgeek, and saw my concerns echoed: “seem to always come down to everyone just about winning”, “too much kingmaking”, “endgame is weak & incredibly swing-y”. Suspicions: confirmed! If I want dice-as-workers, I’ll stick with Troyes; if I want a little politics in my Euro, Waterdeep remains the one to beat.

Dungeon World: I’m a sucker for both dungeon crawls and modern roleplaying games that put the emphasis on storytelling, so it’ll come as no surprise that I loved my first session of Dungeon World.  The system, based on Apocalypse World, boasts several innovations, foremost among them the fact that the DM never rolls the dice.  Instead, she sets up the situation (“the ogre swings his club at you”), and it is incumbent upon the player to drive the action forward, by taking “moves” (“I will attempt to Defy Danger by dodging out of the way”) and rolling two six-sided dice to determine the outcome. A 10+ means they accomplished whatever they set out to do; a 6 or less means they failed.  But the fun of the game comes when a move roll results in a 7, 8, or 9,  at which point the DM gets to decide what “partial success” looks like (“you can either: take the blow and full damage, or block with your sword arm, taking less damage overall but losing the use of your arm for the rest of the fight”).  No doubt my favorable impression of the game was due in part to Brendan Adkins, our excellent DM, but I really think the game works well as a rules-light D&Dish RPG, perfect for those who prefer storytelling to min-maxing.

Space Cadets: Dice Duel: Apparently this game hasn't been released, but there was a copy available for play in the PAX library. Players separate into two teams, each of which works to maneuver their ship around a gridded board, collecting crystals, using tractor beams to move things around, and firing torpedoes at their opponent in the hopes of taking them down. To accomplish this, teams roll dice and then assign them to various stations: the helm for movement, the weapons systems, the shields, and so forth. The gimmick is that all of this is done simultaneously, and in real time. In other words, a team will be frantically rolling dice and allocating them to the various systems as quickly as possible, hoping to get an edge over their opponents through efficient play and fortuitous rolls. In this respect, the game is like a much more convoluted Escape: The Curse of the Temple, which also has players rolling dice in real time and frenetically using the results to accomplish tasks. I am unconvinced, however, that the added complexity is an improvement. Escape is simple, but players are able to follow the action even while rolling dice as quickly as possible; In Dice Duel, however, no one player can track everything that is going on, which is kind of fun, but also a bit anticlimactic when you abruptly win or lose without having any idea what preceded the outcome. I may enjoy Dice Duel, but I’m definitely going to need a few more plays to make that determinatio

Pathfinder: The Adventure Card Game: This was the belle of the ball at Gen Con, and it’s easy to see way: hugely popular RPG theme (dungeon crawl) + hugely possible RPG license (Pathfinder) - the need for a DM. Like the roleplaying game on which it is based, P:TACG has a party of adventurers cooperating to explore, fight monsters, acquire loot, and ultimately confront a villain of some sort. Normally one player would have to run all this, but here everything is automated, and the players work collaboratively to beat the system itself.

A scenario has a number of location, each with it’s own draw deck. On a turn a player picks one of these locations and explores it, revealing and encountering the top card from its deck. Some of the encounters are Boons that a player can acquire, such as weapons, items, allies, and blessings; others, like monsters, are Banes, and the player must overcome them. In either case, the player rolls against one of his skills to determine success. When a deck is exhausted, the corresponding location is “closed”, and the adventurers move on to another of the sites. The overarching goal is to to flush out and defeat the scenario’s Big Bad.

Some of this is standard deck-builder fare, but P:TACG offers several novel twists on the formula (including a hand-size mechanic that is downright elegant). The biggest draw of the game, however, is that state persists from game to game; that is, if you acquire a sword or an ally or an item in one game, you can start the next game already owning it. Your characters also level up as they would in a RPG, so you slowly become more powerful and better equipped over the course of several sessions. You can play one-shots of course, but the game is really designed for a dedicated group, with players using the same characters for each session, and working their way through the Scenarios that compose the Adventures that compose the Adventure Paths.

A member of my game group picked up a copy of P:TACG, and we are in the process of setting up a monthly Pathfinder night dedicated to playing it. That probably tells you all you need to know about the game’s allure and potential.

Sentinels of the Multiverse:  Last year a reader of defective yeti wrote me of the blue to recommend Sentinels of the Multiverse, which he described as "a cooperative superhero card game in which up to 5 players work to defeat a supervillain". "Superheroes" and "cooperative" piqued my interested, but upon further investigation I came to the (erroneous) conclusion that the game was a deck-builder, a genre for which I have little enthusiasm. Even that wouldn't have stopped me from buying it though, as I will act on pretty much any recommendation, but I also couldn't find the game for purchase anywhere. It appeared to have been a Kickstarter project that was not generally available.

Since then the buzz around Sentinels has grown (it has been suggested to me several times in the last six months), so I picked up a copy at PAX, and am very pleased to have done so. The core game is fairly simple, with the players attempting to reduce the Villain's Hit Points to 0 before he knocks out all of the Heroes, or before time runs out. To that end, cards are played that deal damage, or heal damage, or have a variety of other effects. The cooperative element of Sentinels elevates it above standard "Take That!" fare though, and many cards amplify or modify the effects of others. On my turn, for instance, I might play a card that reduces the Villain's Hit Points by 3, or I might choose to instead play a card that adds 1 to the damage dealt by every other player until my next turn. Some cards remain in play and have lasting effect, such that, as the game goes on, the options available to players grow, as do the opportunities to clever, synergistic plays. Much of the fun of the game comes from working with the other players to find and exploit powerful, cascading chains of effects that will wreak havoc on the Villain's plans.

Sentinels is often likened to Magic: The Gathering, not only because cards interact with one another in interesting and powerful ways, but also because each player has a unique deck with an overarching "theme". Some of the heroes deal large amounts of damage but can do little else; others specialize in weakening or undermining the the Villain rather than hurting him outright; and so forth. The hero I played in my first game was Legacy, a quintessential team player, who could redirect damage meant for others to himself, and often chose to assist his fellow heroes rather than bask in the spotlight. With 10 different Heroes and 4 Villains (each of which also have their own decks and specialties), there are lots of combinations to explore as you play through a comic book series of your own making.

♪ For every season, turn, turn, turn … ♫

As with any form of art, boardgame design is subject to trends. "Worker placement games”, for example, were all the rage in the years following the release of Agricola. Most games of the genre had similar hallmarks:  players used their turns to assign “workers” to spaces on the board; each space conferred to the player some benefit or reward, such as free resources, the ability to build improvements, or even the opportunity to recruit yet more workers to his cause; and each space could only hold a single worker, so occupying them (thereby denying them from your opponents) was the main form of player interaction.

The market eventually became saturated with worker placement games, and fell by the wayside when Dominion ushered in the era of Deck Building games. These days a worker placement game must be exceptionally well designed or feature a compelling twist to merit consideration. Lords of Waterdeep is a good example of the former, a game that adds little to the genre, but is so well designed that I frequently recommend it. Trajan, on the other hand, exemplifies the latter, a worker placement game (sort of) with a very clever mechanic, but one that dominates rather than supplements play.

Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar, meanwhile, meets both criteria, boasting an remarkable design and one hell of a hook. And the gimmick in this case is not only mechanical, but physical: six interlocking gears which sit in the middle of the game board. Each of the smaller gears represents a site of importance in Mayan culture — Palenque, Yaxchilan, Tikal, Uxmal, and Chichen Itza — while the large, central gear plays the role of the Mayan calendar. When the calendar gear is advanced between rounds, the site gears move in tandem. It's a system that’s not only practical (it saves the players a great deal of bookkeeping), but cleverly reinforces the premise of the game: the inexorable march of time over the course of a year in the Mayan empire.

Finally, a game with some teeth.

Each site has Action Spaces positions around the perimeter of its gear, and these spaces grant unique benefits to the workers who resides there. But unlike most worker placement games — where a player plunks his pawn into a space, uses the effect, and then retrieves all of his pieces at the end of a round — Tzolk’in employs a novel system of distribution. First, a player must either place workers or retrieve workers on his turn, but cannot do both. Second, the effect of an Action Space takes place when the worker is removed from the board. Third, and most ingeniously, the workers are not placed onto the Action Spaces directly, but rather into depressions within the gears. As time passes, and the central calendar cog turns, the site gears rotate as well, moving the placed workers up toward the more powerful spaces. Thus, the longer a worker sits on a gear, the better the reward it earns when he is finally returned to the owning player’s pool.

The Action Spaces for a site are loosely bound to the overall theme of the location: Palenque focuses on forestry and farming, Yaxchilan provides resources, Tikal permits construction, Uxmal allows you to purchase various goods and effects, and Chichen Itza is where players can make offerings to the gods in return for points and favor. This specialization is one of several thematic touches in what could have been a largely abstract game.

The gods work in clearly explained ways.

There’s considerably more to Tzolk’in — resource management, buildings and temples, technology tracks, and three different gods to appease — but the gears and the worker placement are the heart of the game, and what really make it shine.

I was profoundly skeptical that the game could rise above its “gimmick”, but after four plays I firmly believe that Tzolk’in would remain as highly regarded if the gears were removed entirely. The game would no doubt be accused of “fiddlyness”, as players would be required to manually advance all the workers between every round, but that just proves my point: the cogs facilitate the excellent gameplay, rather than replace it.

And another good sign in regards to the game’s depth is that it is becoming more interesting with repeated play. The first two times I played I had no idea what to focus on (corn? resources? buildings? temples?) and came in last place. The third time I won, without consciously knowing how I did so. I won the fourth time as well, and this time even had an inkling as to why. Like the best strategy games, Tzolk’in requires study and persistence to play well, and rewards those who makes the investment.

In this sporadic column we provide our initial impressions of the previous evening’s games.

Getting older is a drag, but if you play your figurative and literal cards right you at least accumulate opponents.

I owned the Avalon Hill version of Merchant of Venus in my early 20s, and never once played it. I could never convince anyone to join me in a three-hour game with a board that looks like a primer on quantum mechanics. Eventually I gave it to a thrift store (along with unplayed copy of Dune — SHUT UP, I KNOW!), and chalked it up as The Game That Got Away.

Fast-forward 20 years: not only does Fantasy Flight reprint the game, but I now have a stable of opponents friends with whom to play it. In fact, in the month that I have owned Merchant of Venus, I have played it twice: once a few weeks ago, and again last night. That’s 2∞ times more than my previous record!

MoV is the quintessential “pick up a deliver” game, in which players buy goods in one location and transport them to another. In this case, the locations are star systems, the goods are humorous sci-fi commodities such as Designer Genes and Impossible Furniture, and the players zip around the universe in spaceships as they strive to amass the most credits.

The Fantasy Flight edition contains two separate games, with different maps (the board is double-sided) and rules: Classic, which recreates the original Avalon Hill version, and Standard, the Fantasy Flight remake. I’ve played each once, enjoyed them both, and have yet to form a preference.

Standard introduces “Racial Technology“, ship upgrades you can purchase from the various alien civilizations, and while I am a total sucker for power-ups, they seem to vary widely in their usefulness. Maybe this is by design, but “Fuzzy Dice” in particular (which simply awards the owner a motherload of points at the end of the game based on a single dice roll) strikes me as bizarrely out of balance.

Classic, on the other hand, has Demand Markers that constantly vary which systems provide the best payouts for various goods, and they are the most interesting part of the game. The omission of Demand Markers from Standard is another odd choice, especially since the designers went through the trouble of replacing them with an analogous but less compelling mechanism. I am generally a fan of fantasy Flight remakes (e.g., the FF Arkham Horror is vastly superior to the original), but this one is a mixed bag.

Love Letter falls into two unusual categories, the first of which is Games That You Are Convinced Won’t Work Until You Play Them. Often these are games that are so complicated that you can’t visualize how all the disparate systems could possibly come together into an organic whole, but sometimes you come across a game so simple that you can’t imagine how playing it would be any more intriguing than flipping a coin.

The second unusual class into which Love Letter falls is what I call Two-Minute Games -- not because they can be played in two minutes, but because they feature such an economy of rules that they can be taught to others in that limited time frame. Love Letter is so simple, in fact, that I bet I can explain the core rules in 25 words or less. “Draw a card on your turn, then discard one from your hand. The discarded card takes effect. Have the highest ranked card at round’s end.” Done.

Were I actually teaching you the game, of course, I would open with the premise. Each of the 16 cards in the deck depicts a member of the royal household, which is composed of the Princess, the Countess, the King, two princes, two handmaidens, two barons, two priests, and five guards. In an attempt to woo the Princess, you have entrusted a love letter to one of these people, who has agreed to pass the missive along. Ideally your letter will be in the hands of the Princess herself by the end of the round; barring that, you just want your letter to be as “close” to the object of your affection as possible. Each member of the household has a rank from 8 (the Princess) to 1 (the guards), and you win by holding the highest ranked card at the end of the round.

Everyone receives a single, random card before play begins. On a turn, a player draws a second card and then discards one of the two from his hand. The discarded card has an effect, depending on the person shown. A Guard, for instance, allows you to name a player and a card; if the target holds the card you specified, he is out of the round. The Priest allows you to look at the held card of an opponent. And the Princess, the optimal card to own when a round ends, comes with a liability: you are eliminated if you discard her for any reason.

There are only eight abilities, one per role, and yet the interaction between them make for a tense game of bluff and deduction. Take the three roles described in the paragraph above, for instance. Discarding the Priest, a player could look at the hand of an opponent, and perhaps discover the Princess; if he holds (or draws) a Guard on his next turn, he could then single out the same player, “guess” the Princess, and force him to discard it (thus knocking him out of the round). But the other player will first have a turn to react, and may discard the Handmaid, thereby becoming immune to all attacks until his next turn, or the King, which would allow him to trade his hand with any other player, handing them the Princess (and possibly the victory) whilst weaseling out of the crosshairs.

Love Letter does not contain an abundance of game; play a round or two and you've pretty much seen the gamut. But that won’t prevent you playing compulsively, and enjoying every game. The design strikes a deft balance between subtlety and brainlessness, allowing you to play even while mentally fatigued from earlier, weightier games, or a bit hazy after that second margarita. Indeed, with its simple rules, compact size, and quick playing time, Love Letter is a near perfect bar game, so long as you don’t mind the stares of the other patrons as you howl with laughter at the reversals of fortune, and rage against the perfidy of your erstwhile “friends”.

Earlier this week I reviewed The Castles of Burgundy, a recent design from Stefan Feld that I quite enjoy. Now let’s turn our attention to Trajan, a second 2011 release from Feld with which Castles shares many similarities.

Trajan is really a collection of mini-games, bolted together by a central mechanism called the action circle. The action circle dominates the right side of each player mat, and is composed of a six cups numbered I-VI. Two tokens are placed into each cup at the start of the game. On a turn a player selects a cup with at least one token in it, takes into hand all of the tokens from the chosen cup, and then places one token into each cup that follow the selected one in clockwise order, until he has none left to distribute. If cup II contains three tokens, for example, a player might take these three and place one each into the III, IV, and V cups, leaving the initial II cup empty as a result. The target cup — that is, the cup into which the last token is placed — determines which of the six possible actions the player can perform.

A player mat, with the action circle on the right

This form of action selection has, to the best of my knowledge, never before been used in strategy game of this caliber. But you may also recognize it as mancala, a game that predates recorded history. In other words, Trajan has a central mechanic that feels both familiar and strikingly original.

The six possible actions allow players to further their influence in ancient Rome, the milieu in which the game is set. The senate action gives the player political influence and a handful of victory points; the Military action allows a player to march his soldiers around a map of Italy, appropriating resources and scoring points; a player can draw cards after selecting the Seaport action, or redeem sets of these cards for points; and so forth.

Of particular interest is the Trajan action, which allows a player to claim a special tile and place it next to one of the six cups in the action circle. The tokens in the action circle come in six colors, and each Trajan tile shows the two colors necessary to trigger its effect. When the target cup has a Trajan tile next to it and contains tokens of the same color as those shown on the tile, the special effect occurs, granting an immediate advantage in one of the minigames and instantly awarding the player points.

The goods, which are acquired and sold using the Seaport action

If you noticed a preponderance of the word “points” in the preceding paragraphs, that’s because Trajan awards them for nearly everything a player does. I raised this as a concern with Burgundy —  that a player could concentrate on a few elements of the game and largely ignore others — and it’s even more pronounced here, where there is even less bleed-over between the mini-games. Burgundy at least provides cohesion in the form of a player’s estate, where all of the various tiles must coexist, and which forces a player to switch focus when regions on his board are full. In Trajan, on the other hand, a player could (for instance) pursue a Senate and Building strategy, and never once select the Military or Seaport actions. Some players might find this freedom liberating; I, however, prefer a framework for play, even something as abstract as “fill up your estate”. 

Trajan is also similar to Burgundy in that players are given both a menu of possible actions and constraints on their choices. Burgundy does this through dice, the values of which dictate what a player can do; a player of Trajan, meanwhile, can only take an action that he can reach via the action circle. The constraints in Burgundy tend to reduce over-analysis, as players do the best with the values they roll. But unlike dice, the action circle in Trajan is not random. A player can work out his moves several turns in advance, and usually attempts to do so.

Put another way, Trajan is considerably more strategic than Burgundy. That’s not a bad thing, obviously. In fact, many (and perhaps most) gamers will prefer Trajan to Burgundy for this very reason. But in my experience, the action cicrcle mechanism does not facilitate the game so much as become the game. I become so intent of figuring out how to work the action circle to my advantage that everything else — the building, the buying and selling of goods, the politicking — falls away. I eventually feel like I am just playing mancala, something I could have done without Stefan Feld’s help.

Until recently, designer Stefan Felt was primarily known for In the Year of the Dragon, Notre Dame, and Macao, three games that were well-regarded at the time of their release, but that have been fading from memory ever since. In 2011, however, Feld released two new games that may outlast their predecessors. One of them, Trajan, has received ample buzz, was crowned "Game of the Year" by GAMES Magazine, and received the 2012 International Gamer General Strategy Award. But after extensive play of both, it’s Castles of Burgundy that I've come to prefer.

Burgundy is in many respects an old-school Euro, a set-collection and tile-laying game with lots of routes to victory and low player interaction. Each person owns an estate, printed on a player mat and composed of 37 hexagonal spaces of six different terrains. The mats also have three hexagonal spaces in the lower-left corner, known as the player’s reserve.

The central game board has depots numbered 1-6, into which hexagonal tiles are semi-randomly distributed before each phase. The depots also hold the six varieties of goods that come into play as the game progresses.

The central board, the players mats, and many of the components

Six types of terrain, six types of goods, six central depots — what's with all of the 6s? The answer, and something that sets Burgundy apart from many heavier-weight euros, is dice. Each player has two, rolls them before each round of the game, and then uses them to perform actions. Though the player is free to choose from any of the four available actions, the value of the die used constrains how the action is performed.

The four actions are:

Gain a tile: Take a hexagonal tile from the central board and place it into reserve. The depot from which the tile is taken must have a number equal to the value of the die used.

Place a tile: Take a hexagonal tile from reserve and place it onto an estate. Each space in an estate bears a number from 1-6; the tile must be placed into a space with a number equal to the value of the die used.

Sell goods: Players will accumulate goods over the course of the game, with each of the six types having a different number. Only the goods with the number matching the used die can be sold.

Gain worker tiles: Before using a die for any of the other three actions, a player may modify the value up or down one for each worker tile spent. A player gains more worker tiles by selecting this action, which grants him two.

A player may also, once per turn, spent two coins to purchase a hexagonal tile from the central board. The game continues in this manner for five phases of five rounds apiece. After each person has had 25 turns, the player with the most victory points wins.

Many points are scored when tiles are placed into estates. The hexagonal tiles come in six different colors, and can only be placed in spaces of the same hue. Each color of tile also does something different upon placement. Beige tiles are buildings, and have an immediate, one-time effect, such as allowing a player to take a tile from the central board and place it in his reserve, or place a second tile from his reserve into his estate for free. Yellow tiles represent knowledge, and confer onto a player either a new ability (e.g., collect four worker tiles instead of two when selecting the “gain worker tile” action), or an end-game bonus (if certain conditions are met). Grey mines produce money; blue ships allow a player to gain goods; light green pastures instantly award points;, and the dark green castles permit a player to take an additional free action, as if he had a die of any chosen value.

When a player fills all of the spaces in a contiguous group of like-colored hexes, he immediately scores points based on the size of the region and phase of the game. He will also score bonus points if he is the first or second player to fill every space on his board of a single color, regardless of whether they are connected.

A player board, with many hexagonal tiles placed

Castles of Burgundy is one of those games that sounds way more complicated when explained than it feels during play. It is a testament to Feld’s skills as a designer that the seemingly disparate systems described above are so well integrated that everything seems intuitive once you internalize the fundamentals.

The method of providing lots of options, and then limiting those options through the use of dice, is generally effective at preventing “analysis paralysis”, in which a player locks up while thinking through all the possible permutations of their turn. The randomness of die rolls skews the play more toward the tactical than the strategic (although this is in turn tempered by the worker tiles), and makes for the kind of brisk, medium-weight game that I prefer. That said, the four-player and three-players games can feel overlong — there is so little interaction that additional players beyond two increase the playing time while leaving the dynamics of play essentially unchanged. The game is listed as “best with two players on Boardgame Geek entry, and I agree with that assessment.

My nagging concern with Burgundy is that is sometimes feels like one of those do-whatever-you-want-and-score-points-for-everything kind of games. A player can focus on maximizing their score through pastures, or through yellow knowledge tiles, or by completing regions, or by accumulating and selling goods, and ignore (at least temporarily) the areas of the game that don’t interest him. This is not necessarily a bad thing — multiple routes to victory is often the hallmark of a rich and replayable system. But the only significant form of interaction between players the the taking of tiles before others can claim them, and a player denied something he wants is as likely to shrug his shoulders and switch his focus to something else as he is to gnash his teeth and curse. The end-gaming scoring even awards points for unspent money, goods not sold, and worker tiles not used. I recognize that these incentives allow for meaningful decisions in the last few turns of the game, but it adds to the perception that the game just doles out points for everything, even failure.

Still, Castles of Burgundy is my favorite Euro of the last few years. I’m sucker for tile-laying games to begin with, and I find the filling up of one’s estate to be an oddly satisfying experience. It’s even something that can be introduced to and enjoyed by non-gamers, though they will likely be terrified by the time you make it through the rules. Simply assure them that they will understand everything after the first few turns, and will be eager to play again after their inaugural game is over.

Before heading to PAX Prime 2012, I wrote down the games I wanted to seek out and try. At the top of the list was Story Realms, which I had the great fortune to play while attending the conference. Having crossed tat one off, I went in search of my #2 choice, but couldn't find it anywhere. This was due in part to the fact that the designer and sole retailer of the game, Brent Povis, was not at PAX this year. But there was another reason why copies extant: Morels received such great buzz two weeks earlier at Gencon that every available copy had been snapped up, with none left over for me to try.

Oh, well. Based on the fantastic word-of-mouth I ordered my own copy soon thereafter, and have been greatly enjoying the game ever since.

Morels is a rummy-style card game — “card game” because, aside from a handful of “foraging stick” tokens, the 94 cards are the only components; “rummy-style” because gameplay revolves around the drawing and melding of said cards. These commonalities with the traditional game of rummy make Morels feel instantly familiar, even while you are still working out how the game is played.

Each card in the game depicts either a species of fungus (including Lawyer’s Wig, Porcini, Hen of the Woods, and the eponymous Morel), a basket, a frying pan, or something that pairs well with a meal of mushrooms (butter or cider). The deck is shuffled before play begins and a “forest path” is created by dealing eight cards face-up in a row across the center of the table.

A player may use their turn to take one of the cards from the path into their hand. Either of the two cards closest to the head of the trail are free, but each card deeper in the woods costs an additional Foraging Stick. Thus, the third card from the start of the path costs one token, the fourth costs two, and so forth.

After each turn the card closest to the head of the trail is added to a special pile called “The Decay”, cards are shifted down such that all gaps are filled, and the empty spots are filled from the deck. The Decay can hold a maximum of four cards, and a player may use her turn to take these cards instead of selecting one from the path.

Players are constrained by a hand limit, and must occasionally use a turn to play sets of cards, both to free up space and to reap the rewards of melding. Mushrooms may be sold (and discarded) to acquire more Foraging Sticks, or can be cooked (and kept) to provide victory points at the end of the game. A player needs a “Pan” card in order to cook, and can only fry up sets of at least three;  selling, on the other hand, requires no more than two mushrooms of the same species. It is therefore common for players to sell junk to acquire Foraging Sticks, which are then used to get the shrooms that provide the biggest payout when cooked.

There are some special cards in the deck — butter and cider increase the value of cooked mushrooms; baskets increase a player’s hand size — but the core game is simplicity at it’s finest. The only complicating factor is the presence of “Destroying Angel” mushrooms in the deck; when taken, a Destroying Angel forces a player to discard cards from their hand. Because taking The Decay often results in the accumulation of unwanted cards (that nonetheless count against their hand limit), a crafty player can use a Destroying Angel to her advantage. But if you don't want to deal with the extra complexity that DAs introduce, you can simply resolve not to take them for the first few games, until you have a better idea of their function and utility.

For years my default two-player recommendation has been Lost Cities, as everyone introduced to the game likes or loves it. Morels changes enough of the rummy-esque draw-and-meld formula that Lost Cities employs so well to make it a different, and in many respects better, game. For one thing, there are no blind draws -- players select the card (or, in the case of The Decay, cards) they want and are willing to pay for. For another, Lost Cities is essentially abstract, while Morels has just enough cohesion between gameplay and theme that you can actually envision the row of cards as a forest path, or the playing of pan, mushrooms, and butter cards as the frying up of fungi.

The one aspect of Morels that bugs me is the need to move and deal cards after each and every turn. It’s not a lot of busy work, but significant given its frequency. To be fair, I should point out that I dislike the “shift cards and fill the row” mechanism in every game that uses it, up to and including my favorite, Through the Ages. And, honestly, a fun game that gives me some minor detail to grouse about during play is kind of win-win as far as I’m concerned.

A thing that you should know about Lords of Waterdeep is that it looks incredibly boring.

The box (which is a weird space-box that only closes halfway) sells Waterdeep as a Dungeons and Dragons adventure set in the "most fantastic metropolis of the Forgotten Realms®," and it has the cheesy fantasy art to match. But if you can get past the packaging - which thank god I did - you'll find an easy to learn, well organized game with deep strategy and agonizing decisions that will capture your imagination for game after game.

My copy of Waterdeep lives in the prestigious first cube of my board game shelf, next to Puerto Rico, Agricola, Carcassonne, 7 Wonders, and Catan. I don't know if Waterdeep stacks up to those games, but I can tell you it is almost certainly the best board game of 2012, and one that I love teaching to other people.

The Game

Although it looks like a dry Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, Lords of Waterdeep is actually a brilliantly designed euro-style strategy game designed by Peter Lee and Rodney Thompson and published by Wizards of the Coast. It's for two to five players, it takes about fifteen minutes to learn and an hour to play.

In the game, you play as one of the titular Lords of Waterdeep. As Lords do, you control a few agents, and each turn, you can dispatch them to locations around the city to do your bidding. The ultimate goal is to gain the most influence (points) by recruiting adventurers and sending them on quests.

The most important mechanics are worker placement and resource management - Waterdeep isn't reinventing the wheel here - but there are a few brilliant twists that make the game special.

FIRST, each player starts the game with a random, secret "Lord of Waterdeep" identity. This identity gives players a bonus for completing certain categories of quest. This gives you a secret incentive to collect specific types of quests, and keeps you on your toes by making it hard to predict exactly what everyone else will do in the game.

SECOND, though the game starts off with a scant 10 locations for you to place your workers on, you can send an agent to the Builder's Hall to add a new building to the map. Creating a new building provides a new location on the map for any player to use, but it also gives you ownership over that building, and you collect a toll every time a player uses it. The Builder's Hall lets the board grow and change in a new way every time you play the Waterdeep, and the toll mechanic gives you great rewards for investing in buildings early.

THIRD, the most important and innovative part of the strategy in Lords of Waterdeep is a location called Waterdeep Harbor. The harbor has spots for three players, and lets you do two things: 1). You play an intrigue card, and, 2). At the end of the round, once everyone has gone, you remove your agent from the harbor and re-play him on an empty spot.

Now, neither of these actions are powerful on their own. Intrigue Cards generally give you a small benefit (a few resources) or let you stick it to another player by assigning them a mandatory make-work quest, and the spaces left after everyone has gone are usually table scraps. But among the often-overwhelming 429 cards, cubes, tiles,  pawns, and other components in Waterdeep, the only resource that matters is your time. You have to accomplish more than everyone else in a very limited amount of time.

Waterdeep games are notorious for being very close. Players will constantly switch in and out of the lead, sometimes by as much as 20 points, but usually finish the game within a single point of one another. Those three spots at Waterdeep Harbor are often key to gaining that one-point edge over other players, and knowing how to turn intrigue cards and table scraps into those points is (in my experience) usually the key to victory.

Strategy

Lords of Waterdeep draws on worker placement and resource management mechanics that experienced gamers will be familiar with, but the real strategy in the game involves managing your priorities. Waterdeep calls for a delicate balance of playing boldly for immediate benefits and setting yourself up for long chain reactions that can change the dynamic of the game in your favor.

The tension in the game usually comes from waiting to see if an opponent will take a space you need on the board. It's agonizing to see your plans fall apart after you get blocked by another player and exhilarating to spring a plan into action that nobody else saw.

This is the most important source of player interaction in Waterdeep. Although there aren't many "take that" moments, every game I've played has been wonderfully and subtly social and interactive, with players applauding each other for taking great turns and cursing each other over ruined plans.

In addition to the player interaction through worker placement you've got:

Intrigue cards, which often involve trading or sharing with other players

Mandatory quests, another type of Intrigue card that lets you foist unwanted quests on other players

Buildings that you own and collect bounties on (or pay other players to use)

A location you can send an agent to that lets you become the fist player next round

Various methods to manipulate which quests are available to other players

Design choices

Every design choice in Lords of Waterdeep game is clever. Clever clever clever. When that kind of design works, it's brilliant. When it fails, it's incredibly frustrating - like Wizards of the Coast went out of their way to personally inconvenience you.

For example: Each building tile has a little space cut out of it on the lower-right corner. This not only helps you keep the buildings oriented when you shuffle them up, but when you play a building, you slide a little player token into empty space to mark that you own it. That's not only a practical design, it reinforces the idea that you own the building, and get to personalize it with your sigil and color. Adding buildings to the map in Waterdeep is very competitive, and it feels great to play one and deck it out with your token.

Also for example: I mentioned this before, but the box is a weird shape. It has a kind of half-cover that exposes bare box midriff in the middle when fully closed. I guess the box is designed this way to help Waterdeep stand out on a store shelf, but it's clearly confusing to people. On the top of the official Lords of Waterdeep FAQ page, right below "What is Lords of Waterdeep?" is the following Q: "The box on my copy doesn't fully close!  The insert doesn't seem to completely connect!  What do I do?"

Inside the box, there's a complicated vacuum form insert that is custom-made to keep the pieces in the game in place, accompanied by a chart in the rules to show you where everything goes. There's only one catch: it doesn't actually keep the pieces in place.

Mainly though, the clever design of Waterdeep works well, and I wish every game was this bold in its choices.

Waterdeep has a clear and consistent visual language helps people learn and play the game. In other games with worker placement mechanics, players are perpetually asking me, "Can I put my guy here?" Not so in Waterdeep; once you learn the visual clues everything makes perfect sense.

Finally - and I've saved the best for last here - I mentioned above that the resources you collect to complete quests (black, white, purple, and orange cubes) actually represent adventurers. This is a brilliant choice. Those little cubes could have been anything (different types of trade goods, for example) but they made it so that each quest you "spend" a group of adventurers on is analogous to a sending a tiny group of Dungeons and Dragons players on an epic quest. See? Clever.

Finally

Lords of Waterdeep is a game full of surprises. First, you will be surprised that it's not a boring D&D thing. Then you will be surprised by how easy it is to learn, and how concise the rules are. Then you will be surprised by how much you care about each action in the game, and how intense it gets by the end. Finally, you will be surprised when you take the the box off the shelf for your second game and the pieces spill all over the floor.

I was supposed to interview Waterdeep's designer Rodney Thompson, and I got as close as being introduced to him by some mutual friends and telling him how much I liked the game. But I quickly learned that Wizards of the Coast has a lot of policies and procedures about talking to media giants like Playtest, and found myself mired in bureaucracy. After much badgering, someone from a company called "360 Public Relations" offered to let me send him a list of five to eight questions which he would vet and pass along to Rodney.

I just wanted to ask the Rodney what makes his game is so good, and talk to him like a person (by all reports he is a funny smart guy), but the alternative was so unappealing that I abandoned the interview idea entirely.

One of the hallmarks of European board game design is the absence of direct confrontation. Interaction between players is usually mediated by some game system: the real estate in Catan, the economy of Power Grid, the single-use powers of Agricola, and so on.

War games, on the other hand, emphasize combat, with victory often going to the most ruthless and aggressive. 

"European-style war game", therefore, seems like an oxymoron.  What kind of war lacks open conflict between the main parties?

Answer: a cold war.

Twilight Struggle is the epic, two-player game of military tension between the greatest superpowers of the 20th century. And I'm not using "epic" here in the modern, Internet sense of "anything cool", although the game is undoubtedly that. I mean epic in length (3-5 hours), epic in detail (much of the rulebook is devoted to the history of the Cold War), epic in strategy (multiple playings are absolutely required to appreciate the subtleties of the design), and epic in scope (the game covers the years from 1945 to 1989 — assuming you don't irradiate the planet before the advent of glasnost).

The state of Central America. Photo by Raiko Puust.

One player assumes the role of the United States; the other, USSR. The board shows the key nations for which the superpowers will vie. Countries are grouped into regions (e.g., Europe and the Middle East), with those of particular significance designated "battleground states".

Over the course of 10 rounds, each of which represents 3-5 years of history, players take turns activating and resolving cards. A card depicts a major event in the Cold War, ranging from the forming of the Warsaw pact to the Iran-Contra Scandal, and boasts 0-4 Operational Points (OPs).

In most cases, a player may use a card for its event or its OPs, but not both. Invoking the "Fidel" event, for instance, allows the Soviet player to put influence markers in Cuba; the "Camp David Accords" event allows the US player to gain influence in the Middle East. Operation points, on the other hand, are used to increase a superpower's influence in various nations, reduce an opponent's influence, or foment coups (which, if successful, may both decrease your opponent's influence in the target country and increase your own). Events are generally powerful, but very specific; OPs are less powerful, but allow the player great latitude in determining how and where they are spent.

A player with sufficient influence in a country is said to "control" it. And control is the name of the game. When one of the periodic scoring phases is triggered, the superpower that controls more nations in a region, and/or more of the battleground states, will score a number of points. This mechanism of scoring, called "Area Control" or "Area Influence", is a mainstay of European-style game design, and is put to great use here. Thus, "European-style war game" is an entirely appropriate description of this remarkable hybrid.

The zero-sum nature of the Cold War is symbolized by the single score track, with US victory on one end, USSR victory on the other, and a "0" in the middle. When a player scores points, he moves the score marker that many spaces toward his end of the score track, and immediately wins if he gets to his goal of "20". You can see at a glance the balance of power at any point in the game: If the US has 2 points, things are relatively even; if the USSR has 18, they are on the verge of domination.

Complicating all this is the lurking specter of mutual assured destruction, with the DEFCON track recording how close the world is to Global Thermonuclear War. And China serves as a perpetual fly in the ointment of the superpowers, aiding both, but refusing to vow allegiance to either.

True to the theme, the players of Twilight Struggle never attack one other directly (though they may wage proxy wars in the Koreas or the Middle East, if doing so furthers their aims). They instead work to exert their influence across the globe, with success measured not by troops killed or land captured, but by their increase of prestige and dissemination of their propaganda.

Three of the 110 Twilight Struggle cards. Photo by Enkubus.

Twilight Struggle is not intended to be a simulation of the actual cold war. In fact, in the designer notes, Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews openly admit that they goal was to create a game that adhered to the mythology of the cold war, rather than to the reality. To that end, the "domino theory" — of dubious validity in actual foreign policy — is crucial to success in this game; nations are little more than pawns for the superpowers; and investing time and energy into the "space race" reaps tangible benefits. The game depicts the cold war as it was envisioned by those who were fighting it, not as it now appears to us in retrospect.

I enjoy roleplaying games, but rarely have the opportunity to play them. And so, in recent years, I have been acquiring board games that approximate the feel of RPGs without requiring a huge investment of time. Arkham Horror is among my favorites, as is Tales of the Arabian Nights. And to that list I expect to add the forthcoming Story Realms, a prototype of which I had the good fortune to play at PAX Prime.

As in traditional RPGs, most players of Story Realms take on the roles of characters, such as Lightbringers and Riftwalkers. Characters have six skills — Might, Talk, Move, Think, Explore, and Magic — each with a ranking from 1-3. They also have a "Talent" (e.g., Curious or Tricky), a backpack full of equipment, and a handful of additional powers and artifacts that further personalize the adventurer.

Player board for the Talespinner character

The remaining player serves as the Storyteller, and guides the party through the adventure. A game of Story Realms is composed of three scenes, during which the characters strive to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle. Counters placed on various tracks record the state of play during a scene. In a basic scene, the players may simply need to advance the counter on the Progress Track from 0 to a predesignated target; in a more complex scene, a counter may also be placed on the Threat Track, and players may struggle to move this marker backward to mitigate perils they face.

A player uses his turn to describe what his character is doing, and the Storyteller decides which of the six skills best fits the action taken. The player then rolls a number of dice equal to the ranking of the skill; if he invokes his Talent, or if he uses an item from his backpack that is well-suited for the task, he may receive bonus dice as well. The “Success” symbol appears on three sides of the the game’s custom dice, and a counter is moved on one of the tracks for each Success that is rolled.

During my game, for example, I played a Talespinner with the "Flashy" Talent. In one scene we came across a small girl in a forest, who was under attack from a ogre, and our goal was to get the child to safety. My character was lousy at combat, so I yelled at the monster in the hopes of distracting it from the girl. This, the Storyteller ruled, used my “Talk” skill (3 dice), and he awarded me a bonus die for my Flashy talent (which helped whenever I did something to attract attention to myself). I roleplayed my action and rolled the four dice; the Storyteller moved the counter on the Threat Track back three spaces, one for each Success I received.

I (at left) and two others play a demo at PAX Prime. Photo taken from the Story Realms blog.

Both Max and I will be at Pax Prime for the next few days, tweeting on the @playtest Twitter channel and posting occasional game previews here.  

Please let us know if you'll be there as well.  If not — if if you just want to prepare yourself for the insanity that is PAX Prime — please check out my report on last year's convention at The Morning News: 

[Attendees are] nicest bunch of 70,000 people you are ever likely to encounter. Over the three days of PAX I am welcomed into pickup games. I chat with the people next to me in lines about the rising prominence of deck-building in board games. When I walk into the video game free-play room and confess to having no idea what to try, those around me blurt out their recommendations with an enthusiasm bordering on zeal.

And here’s a fun fact: Over the course of the convention the Cookie Brigade raises $15,000 for Child’s Play, a charity launched by Holkins and Krahulik that supplies children in hospitals with toys and games. They do this by giving away pastries and asking gamers for voluntary donations. The next time you log on to the Call of Duty servers and are immediately shot in the head by a 14-year-old “teammate,” take solace in imagining that he chocolate-chipped in.

LJ: do you take game review requests? please review "king of toyko"! your fans demand it! me: Okay, done. LJ: it's SUCH a good game! do you love it? me: I do

When compiling my annual Good Gift Games Guide, I try to ensure that there is something for everyone: family games, two-player games, abstract games, word games, and so forth. The selections, in other words, are not ranked by preference. That said, the first two or three slots in a guide are invariable occupied by the GGGs that I most highly recommend. Last year, for instance, top billing went to Survive: Escape for Atlantis!. But I have to admit that in the months since I wrote that, the runner-up, King of Tokyo, has usurped Survive's title of Best GGG from 2011.

Cyberbunny and Gigazaur. Photo by Raiko Puust.

King of Tokyo casts the players as oversized monsters, vying for supremacy in the midst of a teeming (and screaming) metropolis. Each creature starts with 0 victory points and 10 units of health; if the former hits 20, the player instantly wins; if the latter drops to 0, it's sayonara Cyberbunny. Thus, a player can triumph in one of two ways: by amassing victory points, or by knocking everyone else out.

Game play is Yahtzee at its core: roll a handful of dice, set some aside, and keep going until you choose to stop or have rerolled twice. One side of every die has a "1", another side has a "2", and a third has a "3"; if you roll any of these numbers in triplicate, you score that number in victory points (rolling three 2s gives you two points, for instance).

The remaining three sides of a die show icons rather than numbers. Each rolled electrical bolt awards you an energy cube. Each heart restores one unit of your health. And each claw injuries your opponents. Deciding when to go for victory points, and when to pursue other strategies, is the crux of your turn.

If all of this sounds rather confrontational  —  well, it is. When Alienoid goes toe-to-to with The Kraken, there will be blood. Fortunately, the game employs a clever twist to ensure that, of all the things that wind up bruised, egos are not among them. The first person to roll a claw icon does not hurt anyone, but instead becomes the King, and places his figure on the Tokyo playmat. Thereafter, rolled claws deal damage like so:

If the rolling player is in Tokyo, he damages all other players

If the rolling player is not in Tokyo, he damages the player who is

Entering Tokyo, and holding your position there, awards victory points, so there's an incentive to paint the town red (with blood). But in doing so, you become a target for your opponents. Thus, you never single out another player for attack: you either attack everyone else (as the King), or you attack the King (who has no one to blame but himself, having put himself in the position of antagonist). Lots of mayhem, no hard feelings.

The dice. Photo by Mike Hulsebus.

King of Tokyo was designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: the Gathering. And if you are familiar with M:tG, you know what's coming next: special powers, and lots of them. In King, these powers take the form of Mutations, which players can buy with the energy cubes they have amassed. The effect of mutations include extra dice, new ways to gain victory points, additional options for healing, and a host of others. Though every monster begins the game the same, mutations give each a distinct flavor by the end.

Max and I attend a Wednesday gamenight, though not the same one, alas. In this sporadic column we will give our first impressions of the previous evening's games.

Fealty: "I am going to hate this game," I assured the gamenight host, as he finished explaining the rules. I was joking ... sort of. I didn't anticipate hating Fealty, per se, but there was no shortage of Ominous Foreboding as he described play. First, the game features virtually no theme. Second, the components are uninspired to say the least. And third — the proverbial nail in the coffin — the game uses blind bidding, my least favorite game mechanism after “do a shot”.

The blind bidding, at least, was not as bad as I’d feared. Players simultaneously play cards, and then place pieces onto a gridded board that depicts a medieval landscape. A positioned piece exerts a zone of influence, which will score points at the end of the game; pieces also limit the placement opportunities available to opponents, and disrupt the influence of enemies. These interaction may lend themselves to the think-and-double-think aspect of blind bidding that leaves me cold, but our inexperience with the game led us to choose our cards quickly and without much regard for the ramifications. We were more interested in seeing what would happen than in trying to predict the results beforehand.

Played this way, with an emphasis on speed, I found the game enjoyable. But I suspect that my enthusiasm will wane in direct proportion to the waxing of our skill, as snap decisions turn into tedious bouts of analysis-paralysis.

Troyes: Despite its high "Strategy Game Rank" on Boardgame Geek (it currently sits one notch below The Princes of Florence), fans of Troyes are quick to warn of the game's ridiculous learning curve. And they are right to do so. I read the rules Tuesday night, and was left with no clear idea of how the game was played; on Wednesday, when I explained the rules to my friends (experienced gamers all), I watched eyes glaze as I delved into the minutia.

Troyes isn't terribly complicated — its complexity is on par with other worker placement games such as Agricola. But neither is it terribly intuitive. There is almost no thematic framework to guide players in choosing from the multitude of options available to them, so abstract (and time-consuming) analysis is necessary to determine the value of any given decision. One everyone knows how to play,  Troyes moves along at a good clip. But the first three-quarters of our game last night was a confusing slog, as we struggled to learn the cards, the powers, the effects, the buildings, the currencies, and the many ways to score points.

All that said, Troyes strikes me as a good game, and perhaps even a great one. It uses (lots) of dice, but there are counterweights to the influence of luck. Each game uses a subset of the possible cards, which bodes well for replayability. And once you figure out how the hodgepodge of mechanisms are interrelated, you realize that they interlock surprisingly well.

As with Fealty above, the rules to Troyes led me to believe that I would never want to play a second time; unlike with Fealty, I was absolutely wrong.

Tucked away in the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony was a segment illustrating the evolution of Britain from pastoral island to thriving metropolis. Apparently many American found this transformation boring. I, on the other hand, was riveted — probably because, as the participants rolled up the grass and erected smokestacks, I could visualize myself playing the corresponding cards in Martin Wallace’s London.

Set after the Great Fire of 1666, and spanning the quarter millenia thereafter, London has players rebuilding the Capital through the play of cards, which depict buildings such as shops and train stations, infrastructure such as sewers and schools, populations such as refugees and paupers, and institutions such as the British Museum. Most of these cards confer a one-time benefit to the owner — money and victory points are the most common boons — when he chooses to “run” his city. 

Even as big a fan of Martin Wallace as I must admit that that his games can rarely be accused of elegance. They often seem as though they could have benefited from some additional development (and, indeed, several of his games have received this development and been reissued under a new name: Age of Steam/Steam, Brass/Age of Industry, etc.). One of his newest offerings, A Few Acres of Snow, asks the active player to select two actions from a menu of over a dozen, a panoply of options that can lead to paralysis. 

Players of London, on the other hand, use their turn to perform a single action from a possible four: draw cards, play cards, run their city, or buy one of the 20 London boroughs shown on the game board. This simplicity puts London within spitting distance of “gateway game” territory, something else rarely said of Martin Wallace's offerings.

Even with such a streamlined design, though, Wallace manages to pack in a fair amount of theme. The cards, of course, have a host of different effects that reflect their type: markets produce money, paupers can be sent to school (or prison), and so forth. Cards are placed into stacks, which allows a player to “build over” those of an earlier era with modern buildings of increased efficiency. And, when a city is run, players receive deleterious “poverty points” equal to their stacks of cards, minus the number of boroughs they have acquired; thus, having a lot of buildings in a small area breeds poverty, while expansion reduces the pressures of urbanization. As I said: simple and thematic.

Wallace also attempts to mitigate the lack of player interaction that plagues many other games of this ilk. The game board features a display area, which holds, face-up, cards from which a player can draw. When someone plays a card to their area, they must also select from their hand a second card and place it into this display area. Thus, the face-up cards available for you to draw are those that your opponents have seen fit to make available. This clever twist on the traditional draw-cards/play-cards system allows you to stay in your own sandbox if you prefer, though it behooves a player to keep an eye on what would benefit his opponents — and withhold it.

Comparisons between London and San Juan are inevitable and illuminating, as both have players building a city by playing cards to the table before them. (London, it’s worth noting, is very much a card game, despite the attractive and largely superfluous gameboard). One could almost imagine London as the San Juan prototype — if, during development, someone hit upon the idea of using cards instead of money to pay for buildings, and of jettisoning the board entirely, you’d be three-quarters of the way from one to the other. 

Whether you prefer London to San Juan largely depends on how the amount of polish you demand of your games. Personally, I enjoy the opacity inherent in a rougher-hewn design. Whereas powerful building combinations are fairly obvious in San Juan (e.g., a building that gives you additional goods pairs well with a building that allows you to sell additional goods), London requires analysis, and repeat plays, to suss out these opportunities for synergy. 

Where London falters, in my opinion, is in the ratio of complexity to playing time — 90 to 120 minutes is a bit long for a game in which player options are so constrained. It also, perversely, contains a few cards that require to owner to single out another player for abuse. Some game groups (such as my own, alas) consider any and all “take that!” elements in a game design as grounds for summary rejection.