overly-critical-gamers

[overly-critical-gamers]

Key to the Kingdom 

A “whirlpool of fun”, indeed. We went ahead and filmed our first play of this “classic”, so keep an eye out for the video soon.

[overly-critical-gamers]

Bermuda Triangle 

A game about placing your fate in the hands of a plastic spinner that dictates the movement of a rotating magnetic cloud. Also, there are bananas.

#video #review #boardgame #Bermuda Triangle

[overly-critical-gamers]

Stone Age 

Agricola was the first worker placement game I played and I remember almost nothing about the experience other than not doing well. Probably a year or so later I actually started playing games and Stone Age was among that early batch I encountered. It’s stuck with me as being one of my favorites.

You’ll be controlling a small tribe trying to survive and thrive by foraging for food, harvesting wood, mining clay/stone/gold, building huts, improving tools, studying agriculture, and reproducing. Players take turns deciding where to place their tribespeople, which is important because there are only so many slots available. In the case of acquiring resources, the more people you send to complete a task, the more likely you’ll return worthwhile rewards. For every meeple located in a space, you’ll add one die to the leather cup, then you’ll shake the cup and roll the dice. You divide the sum of the dice by a number related to the difficulty of acquiring that resource to determine how much you get (for food, you would divide your total by two and get that much food; for gold, you’d divide your total by six). This gives the game an interesting element of gambling where you could get lucky and harvest a stone or gold with just a single worker...but it’s unlikely and you’re better off playing it safe. Then again, sometimes you send four guys out to collect wood and they only come back with one log. That’s where the tools come in handy - they can be used to add modifiers to your results when necessary.

At the end of every round, you have to feed your tribe or suffer a penalty in points. This is a part of the game that gets a little thematically bizarre because you can spend resources instead of food to feed your people or you can just not feed them and lose points. I’ve played some games online where I’ve seen players completely ignore food the whole game because they preferred to apply their workforce to other endeavors. The other element to this is that you want more workers so you can do more things, but you have to feed those tribespeople as you reproduce...so it’s a game of choosing how to balance those things. Agriculture is handy because it automatically feeds more workers the higher you go up the track.

So you gather resources to contribute to the cost of building huts for points - pretty straightforward stuff, though there are huts that provide a variance in points depending on which resources are used to build them and how many, which is interesting because you could just build a bunch of cheap huts with wood trying to rush the game to a conclusion before other players have time to react (the game ends either when one of three hut piles is exhausted or the deck of cards runs out). Resources can also be spent on cards, which do all kinds of things like giving everyone resources or providing additional tools or agriculture...but the main thing going on with the cards is a set collection mechanic where you’ll get points at the end for building a set of relics and/or you’ll get multipliers for the various other things you can be doing in the game (like acquiring multipliers that give you more points based on how far you go up the agriculture track or how many tools you have, etc.).

I think there’s a lot to like here. There’s plenty of variance in strategy and the game feels different depending on who you play it with. Some people really want to reproduce all the time, so if they keep blocking that out you’ll have to do other things like focus on agriculture or finding a good combo in the cards. The art is attractive, the components are good (though you can see in the pictures here that we swapped out the resources with slightly upgraded versions from the Stonemaier resource kits), the leather cup smells like some kind of sweaty animal...what more could you want from a game?

There’s also an expansion that adds trading where you can use teeth acquired during hunting to swap out for other goods. It’s a bit annoying that this expansion comes on a partial board that you use to cover up part of the base game’s board - the result is a bit clumsy, so if anybody feels inclined to produce a single-piece board or mat that incorporates the expansion, I would be interested for sure.

This is a great game and a strong contender for one of the best to use when you want to introduce the concepts of worker placement to someone who’s just getting into gaming. They’ve even put out a kid-friendly version that might be a fun way to help kids learn multiplication and division. Pretty cool stuff all around.

8.5 out of 10.

- Sean

#thoughts #review #boardgames #Stone Age #Agricola #8.5 #Style is the Goal

[overly-critical-gamers]

Fauna 

Friedemann Friese is probably best known for Power Grid, a game about German efficiency and constantly trying to outmath your competitors. To me, Fauna feels like almost the opposite experience as a lighthearted family game where you’ll be betting on how little you and everyone else knows about animal trivia.

The game comes with a map of the planet, some cubes, and a box of large format cards. The cards are held in the box so that they conceal the information on the bottom half. A round works like this: players will look at the next card in the box (again, only seeing the top half of the card), which tells them the name of an animal, shows an illustration, then gives you some categories like # of areas, weight, length, height, or tail length. Players take turns putting down cubes guessing those values, passing when they don’t think they know any more or they run out of cubes. Correct guesses earn a player points; nearby guesses earn fewer points; incorrect guesses cost that player a cube (so they can’t make as many guesses in future turns). Everybody does get one of their lost cubes back at the end of each round though (and you can never go below three cubes), so it’s not like a player elimination mechanic. You do always have to place at least one cube in a round.

It’s simple but effective. You’ll see an illustration and everyone will look at that animal and think...”Uh, I guess it’s tail looks like it’s probably about six inches long?”, so somebody puts a cube there, then the next player puts their cube next to that cube to at least get adjacency points, then the following player puts their cube on the other side of the first cube...then once everything is revealed it turns out the first player was way off and all three players lose their cubes. So there’s an element of trying to gauge how confident someone is in their knowledge and whether or not you should follow their lead, much like Wits & Wagers. There are occasional rounds where nobody seems confident about anything, so everybody does their one cube requirement and quickly passes. The scoring for locations on the map scales based on how many locations that animal is in, so a common fish gives you few points for getting a correct guess while a rare bird gives many for guessing its one or two spots on the board.

There are a lot of cards in the game, so I don’t think replayability will be an issue unless you play this literally all the time. If it does get to the point where you somehow know everything, then pat yourself on the back for learning a bunch of animal statistics and then gift your copy to someone who’s just getting into games because it’s a great entry-level wagering game.

7 out of 10.

- Sean

#thoughts #review #boardgame #Fauna #Power Grid #Wits & Wagers #7

[overly-critical-gamers]

Granada 

If you’ve ever played Alhambra but wished the tiles were double-sided for some reason, then maybe this is the game for you?

#video #review #boardgame #Granada #Alhambra

[overly-critical-gamers]

The Downfall of Pompeii 

Can you escape from Pompeii before it is destroyed by the eruption of 79 AD!? I did not…

Before I get into the mechanics of the game, this is another of those places where my professional and hobby lives overlap. I’ve done field archaeology in Pompeii and couldn’t help but point out historical inaccuracies while we were playing. I’ll try not to dwell on those here, but I apologize if my Historian Rant mode engages along the way… I did, however, get to show people a bunch of cool photos from Pompeii while were playing and talk a lot about pyroclastic flow and other nerdy stuff.

The game actually begins in 62 AD after Pompeii has been struck by an earthquake. You “rebuild” the city in a sort of area control placement mechanic using cards to put one of your people pillars into the matching building on the map. If you draw an Omen card, you take another player’s token and toss it into the volcano as a kind of sacrifice. You can draw multiple Omens in a row, so you could have a turn where the city suffers massive depopulation in this placement phase.

Eventually, you’ll reach the card that triggers the next phase of the game, 79 AD. Vesuvius erupts. In the game, this is signified by lava raining down on the city (see above: historical inaccuracies and ranting). During this part of the game, players draw tiles from a bag to determine where the destruction has spread in the city, then move two of their tokens. Your token moves a number of squares on the board equal to the number of tokens that were in the space it originally left. So, if you have a token standing with two others, you move three spaces. This encourages bunching tokens up for large moves.

Due to a series of unfortunate events, we drew a lot of tiles next to the amphitheatre and I lost the game pretty early in this phase as my little dudes were consumed by fiery death (being tossed into the volcano to feed the flames). Learn from my mistake, diversity is good, place your tokens with other people’s tokens to reduce their chance of death.

You take turns moving your token guys out of the city until all of them are dead or have escaped. Then, count up survivors to determine a winner. And, for fun, pick up the volcano and count how many dudes you lost to the flames.

We got our copy in a trade and it came with these little tea lights that the previous owner had purchased to light up the volcano, which I think is a really nice touch. I’d suggest going out and grabbing some of those, if you own it. You can see what I mean in the gif above. Overall, I think the gameplay is decent. I’d give it a 6 out of 10.

#gif #review #boardgames #the downfall of pompeii #6

[overly-critical-gamers]

Age of Steam 

Trains! Train games are an entire subset of board games that we don’t cover much here because, well, in general we’re not the target audience for this style of game. They tend to emphasize heavy economic strategy, longterm planning, and the kind of cutthroat, “make the most money and crush everyone else in the process” mentality that we often associate with distasteful games of the past like Monopoly. I’m not saying competitive games are bad, but I generally try to avoid playing a three hour game where you can most definitely lose thanks to poor choices made in the first couple turns, ESPECIALLY if that game also has player elimination.

Age of Steam is the first in a trilogy of train games by Martin Wallace that at one time were all in the top 100 board games and all feature variations on similar mechanics. Plenty of gamers out there have taken the time to explain the differences between the three, so my comments are definitely not going to reach the level of depth you might find elsewhere on the subject. My takeaway is that Age of Steam is the least attractive of the three, but has the most flexibility in terms of expansion maps simply because it’s been around the longest. If I had to recommend one of the three to somebody, I’d probably say Railways of the World would be my pick, as long as you find a later copy with better color contrast on the board.

Primarily what’s going on here is you’ll take out loans so that you’ll have the operating cash to lay down tracks and build a pick up and deliver train network, upgrading your trains along the way to improve efficiency and maximize profits. To me, this feels like doing taxes. You have all the information in front of you, lots of numbers to process, and once you get over the hump of dealing with the bulk of data on the table, it suddenly smooths out and just becomes a sort of automated operation. So the game has this extended setup as you fill the board with a bunch of cubes and city tiles, then there’s also this side board that shows you where each type of cube might end up eventually...and at that point before the first turn even begins, the optimal thing to do is to plan out literally every move for the rest of the game. Obviously you don’t have to plan ahead, but if one person takes the time to do this, then they will probably win the game. I chose not to make any plans because I don’t enjoy that kind of play, but the guy who owned the game spent I’m pretty sure about 45 minutes just looking at the board and not speaking to anyone because he was deciding what he was going to do for the next three hours. Thrilling. He did end up winning, but I landed a not-too-distant second, which I was satisfied with considering I made it my goal to just not go bankrupt during the game. One of the other players realized about halfway through that he had no chance of paying back his loans, so he heavily overborrowed and eliminated himself. The other barely squeaked by at the end of the game, spending all his turns trying to just stay in the black.

So I mean, that kind of game obviously appeals to somebody considering how highly ranked this series is. Top 100 though? Not a chance. The game is mechanically solid and rewards players who choose to invest themselves in it, but I absolutely don’t want to play it again. That steep curve at the start where everything is a struggle feels like a mental chore more than a leisure activity. Then if you did well it turns around and you’re suddenly making plenty of funds and it’s not exciting because there’s not enough of a challenge.

I was happy to have this experience for a frame of reference to compare against other games, so I give this a 5.5 out of 10. I think the majority of casual gamers will not want to put up with this kind of game, but this definitely caters to a niche that is perfectly happy with what this brings to the table. Good for them.

- Sean

#thoughts #review #boardgames #Age of Steam #Railways of the World #Steam #Monopoly #5.5

[overly-critical-gamers]

Die Pyramiden des Jaguar 

A two player German card game about...uh...the rules say something about explorers competing to build jaguar pyramids. So there you go.

#boardgames #review #video #Die Pyramiden des Jaguar

[overly-critical-gamers]

Vinhos 

We take a look at the Z-Man edition of this generally well-respected game about producing wine in Portugal and bribing officials with said wine for favors.

#review #video #Vinhos

[overly-critical-gamers]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Pizza Power Game 

Turtle Power! Pizza! Plastic seesaws! This game has all of these things.

#review #video #Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #Pizza Power Game

[overly-critical-gamers]

The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 

If you wanted a board game with Wilford Brimley miniature in it, this is pretty much your go-to option. Check out this social deduction game based on the film from the ‘80s.

#review #video #The Thing #Infection at Outpost 31 #Wilford Brimley

[overly-critical-gamers]

Granada 

It’s like Alhambra, but not. We’re making a video for this, so that will get uploaded in the future and we’ll make our comparisons then.

#boardgames #Granada #Alhambra

[overly-critical-gamers]

Bermuda Triangle 

Oh yeah. This game is pretty much everything you’d expect it to be based on just looking at the box. We shot a video for this one, so keep an eye out for that in the future.

#boardgames #Bermuda Triangle

[overly-critical-gamers]

Weiß Schwarz

One day I was at a local game night and this guy wanted to play this Japanese CCG he’d brought with him. Normally I’d frown upon learning a two player CCG in that kind of environment, but everyone else was taking off and I was willing to give it a shot.

Pronounced something like “vice shivarce”, it means “White Black”. Thrilling. You’ll also note I mentioned it’s a Japanese game despite it having a German name. The cards for any given set are split between two teams and I was told that the White side typically includes “cute” characters while the Black side has “cool” characters. This is a strange thematic setup for your CCG when such games are typically singular in subject matter and focus on a particular IP; Weiß Schwarz is built around being able to integrate cards from various anime (and occasionally video game) series, allowing you to pair up your favorite characters from Persona, Disgaea, Monogatari, and Sword Art Online (as long as you don’t mix the cool and cute characters up). There are actually...a lot of different series available for this system if you go check out the English fan translation site: http://www.heartofthecards.com.

I’m not sure I’d do a great job of explaining how the game works. You’re having a cute vs cool duel with another player to see which is the more ultimate force: cuteness or coolness. Both players start at level zero and the goal of the game is to make the other player hit level four and lose. When a player takes damage, they add cards to their clock and every seven cards in the clock make you level up. When you level up, you can play stronger cards, but you’re closer to being eliminated. You play characters into a field in front of you, three in a front row and two in back; cards in the front will attack the other player and/or their characters while cards in the back support front cards. There’s a lot going on in terms of managing the position of your characters, the cards in your hand, the cards you put into your clock, but the basic flow of the game is draw cards, play cards, maybe discard cards to boost stuff, etc.

I think this game is about as complicated as any text-heavy card game and any new player will be a bit overwhelmed by it all, not knowing what things combo well together until they’ve seen a good chunk of their deck. Realistically though, I played some Magic: The Gathering when I was a teen and I don’t think this is any more complicated than that. If you’re into the idea of an anime crossover card game and really want to invest yourself into the system, it plays fluidly and feels solid enough. The collectible aspect of the game is probably going to eat a huge hole in your wallet if you’re not careful, but fan translated cards are available for home printing if you just want to build a few decks for casual play. I didn’t feel compelled to delve deeper into this game, but CCG/TCG/LCGs aren’t typically my thing.

5.5 out of 10.

- Sean

#thoughts #review #boardgames #Weiß Schwarz #Magic: The Gathering #Persona #Disgaea #Monogatari #Sword Art Online #5.5

[overly-critical-gamers]

Catan Histories: Merchants of Europe 

When I first started acquiring games, I remember generally being interested in grabbing things in the Catan universe because I had played the original game early on and thought it was reasonably solid, so I figured others in the franchise might follow suit and be worth checking out. Fast forward four years where we’ve built up a large collection of games and find ourselves often asking what a particular game brings to the table that makes it worthy of our attention. As time goes on, I’m finding fewer reasons to hold on to anything Catan-related.

Most games in the franchise follow the same mechanics of setting up some kind of stake in various resources to acquire those resources when they randomly get produced and then using those resources to expand your empire (and sometimes you’re encouraged to trade sheep with somebody). If you’ve played The Settlers of Catan, then Merchants of Europe will feel familiar but not quite the same. The first big change is the board instead of modular tiles - I think in general this automatically means that Catan will have more replayability, but some of the resource numbers are randomized so it might not necessarily be the case. The next big change is the objective - this isn’t a race to get a number of victory points but instead you have to build all your trading posts so you can deliver all your goods to other players’ trading posts to win...and you need to build merchants to build trading posts...and build caravans to deliver the goods...and roads for the caravans to travel on.

So it’s a lot of gathering the resources you need for one thing to do the next thing and starting that process over again and again. Ideally you get your trading posts set up at the locations where you’ll be able to regularly acquire the resources you want, but you’re at the mercy of random chance as well as competition with the other players for space. You can expand west to get away from the other players for better freedom in resource selection, but then you need to build roads back to their trading posts to deliver your goods later on. At least there’s this thing where you get gold whenever you don’t acquire a resource on a turn and two gold can be exchanged for a single resource, so if the dice are terrible to you over and over, you aren’t at a complete loss. Another potentially obnoxious thing that can happen is that as players expand to the west, they can pull resource number tokens off of older hexes if the pool of number tokens for that resource has been exhausted. This means that you may suddenly find yourself unable to produce what you need because someone took your token away and you either need to build on a strategy of codependency, building your trading posts adjacent to everyone else’s to minimize risk of players wanting to sabotage your plans...or you need to anticipate that your production will get hampered this way and constantly expand at the cost of resources.

I would not recommend this game to anyone. It felt slower and more predictable than Catan and didn’t seem to encourage any kind of bold strategics - it basically punishes you if you stray too far from the pack and asks you to kindly wait for others to catch up to you. You need to use other players’ roads at some point to get your caravans where they want to go, but you have to pay other players for the privilege to use their roads...and this often leads to a lot of players just generally looking for ways around paying those tolls or offering to pay one player over another by encouraging them to build roads in similar locations. Some of these elements are present in standard Catan for sure, but this game seemed to amplify the spite factor for some reason...and the result is that everyone walks away unhappy.

It is playable and I’m sure somebody out there probably would like this game, but I can’t think of anyone I know who would, so I’m going to give it a 4 out of 10 for being functional but dry and unsatisfying.

- Sean

#thoughts #review #boardgames #The Settlers of Catan #Catan Histories #Merchants of Europe #Catan #4

[overly-critical-gamers]

The Dutch Golden Age 

This is an odd one that hails from that early wave of clearance games I bought when I was interested in playing pretty much whatever I could get my hands on. We tried to play a two player game (even though it explicitly states it needs at least three) and were baffled by it, put it back on the shelf and ignored it for years. The side of the box has that long edge with the stern colonist glaring at you, so it was impossible to forget about - it’s just hard to convince three or four people to play a game about The Dutch Golden Age.

So I pulled this back out in an effort to test it and clear up some space if it proved to be lacking. Instead, it felt like a reasonably solid game. The goal is to pull together 33 points (yes, you read that correctly), which can be done in a variety of ways. The board is made up of color-coded regions and a corresponding guild track - you jockey for position on the track and place men in the regions in order to take actions associated with those regions.

Yellow lets you draw from the investment deck - you’ll get a random card with a value of one, two, or three and at any time you can trade sets of those (so a single one, two twos, or three threes) for 5, 12, or 20 guilders (coins). This can be a frustrating gamble because you pay three coins to take the action of drawing a card, so you could potentially sink 9 coins without getting any returns if you have poor luck in the draw.

Brown lets you commission Rembrandt to make paintings worth points. I’m mostly convinced this action is terrible because you can only commit one coin to a painting at a time and I think there are just more efficient ways to earn points.

Blue lets you buy colony cards - this is a set collection thing where you need three different types of cards to trade in so you can establish a colony. Having a colony allows you to deal in spices, which is the orange deck. The orange cards are better versions of the yellow cards.

Grey gives you culture cards, which are an assortment of things worth flat points, dice cards that let you determine a die roll one time, a claim card for a specific province that gives you income whenever the king pawn lands on that space, and a mix of the other types of cards.

Green allows you to create more men on the board and you want to get three men in a region to place an influence marker in that area so you can take any of the special actions mentioned above.

A player gets one special action per turn, but they can choose to auction that action’s privilege off for income. This is interesting because the player that wins the auction then gets to take that action without paying any additional costs, so it’s possible you could get a great deal on something that would normally cost more OR you might have to pay extra for an action you really need, especially if others know you need that action.

There’s also the guild track where you pay an amount to get into that colored guild to have the privilege to take the action, but other players can pay more to overtake your guild position (whereas influence markers are permanent and limited to one player per region). So there’s a timing aspect to when to invest in the guilds.

The other thing that happens at the start of every turn is the king pawn is moved on this track around the board. The spaces correspond to the regions and everyone who has a pawn in those regions gets one coin per pawn and two coins per influence marker. So it’s a semi-random means of gaining free cash (you can see where the king MIGHT end up next so it’s not totally devoid of strategy) - a nice way of infusing extra dollars into the system. There are also a couple spaces on the track that give everybody coins.

You get points for your pawns, influence markers, windmill and governor cards, completed Rembrandts, and for every 10 guilders.

This is one of those games where there’s enough going on that you have to feel your way around to develop a plan. You might go hard after a color of region early only to find it was not all that useful, especially if it’s one of the ones that doesn’t get as much bidding value. I think the key is to getting placement in colonies as soon as you can since that’s worth both points as well as the privilege to buy spice cards for high returns in cash. The mechanic of auctioning off your valuable actions is unique as far as I know and it works well. I expect the game is best suited for four to make full use of the auction dynamics, but we could only convince one person to try it with us. That’s definitely a problem with the game is its uninspiring theme. Sure, there are Dutch things on the cards and all, but it could really be about anything. It’s enjoyable, probably a bit above average, but perhaps not all that memorable. This probably would have blown people away in the ‘90s, but in a modern market it struggles to maintain relevance.

6 out of 10.

- Sean

#thoughts #review #boardgame #The Dutch Golden Age #6

[overly-critical-gamers]

Vinci 

Rob: When you were playing Small World, have you ever wished it was set in Europe, with a historical theme, and none of that fantasy nonsense!? Neither have I. But, Vinci is the origin of those great mechanics you know and love.

For those who haven’t played either game, you take two tiles at the start of the game that give you powers and a number of army pieces to use each turn. The board begins the game populated with some weakened tribes that you are moving in to conquer. Each region is color coded and correspond to scoring powers on the tiles that make up your civilization.

You conquer from the edge of the board inward, using two armies plus one for each token on the region you are conquering. You place your tokens on the board, marking your conquests for the turn and potentially roll a die for the last region, if you didn’t have enough tokens for it. Once you’re finished, you can move your armies within your conquered regions to build up defenses wherever you want. You score points for each region you control plus any bonuses from your powers.

Eventually, you run out of tokens and put your civilization into decline, so that you can take two new tiles and start over. You keep scoring points for the territory your old civilization held, as long as you still have tokens there. But, you can’t move and attack with those tokens anymore. You could even go conquer your old civilization, if you felt like it benefited your new civilization.

If that sounds like Small World to you, it’s because they’re the same game. The only difference is the theme, the production quality, and a couple of odd rules. Small World is just a better, cleaned up, fantasy version of Vinci. 

If you’re considering buying this one, just go buy Small World, unless you are horribly offended by elves and pixies fighting for fantasy land, rather than unnamed tribes in Europe. That said, the gameplay is almost exactly the same. The art and quality leave something to be desired in Vinci, but it’s still a solid game.I’d give it a 6.5 out of 10.

Sean: Yeah, there are a few differences here, but nothing that would justify anyone owning both games. Vinci gives you a big pool of abilities to select two from whereas Small World has races with inherent powers and attributes that can be applied to races, meaning that in the latter there are some combinations that aren’t possible to attain because you have to go with a race and an attribute (so the ability provided from being humans could never be attached to being dwarves). Vinci goes until somebody hits a set number of points instead of lasting a set number of rounds. Vinci only has the one board while Small World has different boards for the different player counts. And Small World has that die you roll whenever attacking that gives you a random chance of additional reinforcements. I think once you factor in production quality and expansion content, Small World blows Vinci out of the water...but there is some consideration to be had for the fact that Small World is as refined as it is because Vinci came first.

#reviews #board games #small world #vinci #6.5