February 2006 Archives

Despite all the interesting games lined up for a release this year (and there are plenty of good ones, particularly in Finnish), there's still one which is more than head and shoulders above the rest. Well, I'm not actually sure if it's a completely new one; I think it's more like an expansion. However, it's a major expansion, as it transforms the basic game to a whole new level - or that's what I'm hoping for.

The current deadline for release is June 9th, though it's possible that the release is postponed for a week or two. It might be published prematurely before that, but I hope that's not the case. It's a delicate project that really needs to be fully developed when it comes it. I'm anxious waiting for it to come out, you can bet I'm a nervous wreck when the deadline gets closer!

I don't know many details yet, there's little information available. I know the basic system should be solid and functional, but most of the details are bit hazy yet. I also know figuring out the system will take a long time; I expect to find new features after years of experience. It should be a really interesting experience, this one! Even my wife is very excited about it! She's been more actively following the development than I have, actually.

There's more information available at the Geek, check out the review!

Here's a review some of my readers have been waiting for: Havoc: The Hundred Years War. That's the Finnish review, here's my opinion in English:

I first played Havoc: The Hundred Years War at the Sunriver Games demo table in Essen 2005. It was on my list of games to check out and I enjoyed my first game a lot. Getting a review copy from the designer himself was was a nice bonus.

What's it all about?

At it's heart Havoc is a game of card drafting and fighting for rewards. Battles are fought with Poker hands, played few cards at the time. There's a bit of bluffing and some evaluation of what your opponents have. Players have to manage their resources to make it through the nine battles; throwing big hands around is a good way to get in trouble.

The closest relative to Havoc I can come up with is Taj Mahal. The destructive Poker bidding system where all bidders lose their cards whether they win or not is very similar, though Taj Mahal has more elements added on top of that. I enjoy the mechanic, both in Taj Mahal and Havoc.

Confusing details

Havoc isn't the easiest game. The Poker hands are of course familiar to most people, but as the game uses six suits and the hands can be up to six cards long, there are bunch of unorthodox hands which are a bit difficult to get. One of the game's better features, dogs of war, is also a bit confusing.

The dogs are multicoloured zeros, which can be used in regular hands, but which also have an extra function: they can be used to retrieve used cards from the battlefield. That's a nice thematic twist, which contributes to the game's tactics - too bad their description in the rules is somewhat complicated.

Interesting decisions

Despite these issues, I think Havoc is an interesting game. Deciding when to commit your resources into battle is interesting and the fighting mechanism works well. The game packs enough punch in the hour or so it takes to play and it works well with three or six. I haven't tried, but it's probably best with four or five. It says it can be played with just two, but I'm not rushing out to try it.

Considering it's the first game from Sunriver Games, I think it's a job well done. The rules could be smoother, but there's little to complain about component quality. I wouldn't classify Havoc as a great game, but it's a good game and I definitely want to play it more.

The olympic ice hockey final didn't affect the participants in the board game club yesterday, we had good attendance. I got to play everything I had planned to, which was nice.

While waiting for others to arrive, I played a round of Fjorde with Ilari. It was my first game, but it was a breeze to learn. It's a very simple game that's divided in two phases. First phase is simple tile-laying, where you try to match fields, mountains and sea on hexagonal tiles. You can also place farms on the tiles.

On the second phase, you lay down markers starting from your farms. There's some blocking involved, as you're competing with your opponent for the space. Turned out my farm placement and field blocking was better than Ilari's, as I won. Fjorde is a nice little game, which I'm happy to play but won't rush to buy.

There was six of us, but fortunately Havoc: The Hundred Years War takes six. I wanted to try the game, as I should really get it reviewed. Havoc turned out to be a pretty good six-player game, it's quite as fun as with three.

We fought through the nine battles pretty fast, our game took about 60 minutes. It was faster than I expected and definitely cleared my suspicions of the game being a bit too long. It isn't. Instead we had an interesting series of battles, where I unfortunately got left without good cards in the end. I had a good early game, but failed to do well in the end. Still, it was fun.

I was eager to play my copy of Neuland, which had just arrived on Friday. Robert and Olli joined me for a ride on the brain rollercoaster. It got pretty ugly... I won, but with little satisfaction: it was obvious my experience with the game brought me the victory and nothing else.

Still, it was a pleasure to play. The decisions are tricky and manipulating the board to your advantage isn't simple. Robert thought the game was too confusing and didn't enjoy it much, I think, while Olli is probably easier to convince to try the game again.

That's hardly a surprise, though - Neuland is definitely a game where you don't know anything when you play it for the first time and maybe have a clue after you finish the first game. I don't expect many people to love it, but if it clicks, it should click pretty hard. I know I love the game.

Tigris & Euphrates is one of those classics I haven't played nearly enough recently. Robert and Olli gladly joined me for a refresher match. Robert dominated, thanks to two monuments (which I built, but he used).

Time for one more game: Die Sieben Siegel. Robert was willing to try the game again, after somewhat weak first impressions. As it was a three-player game, saboteur was a popular choice (I'll probably try the bidding variant next time I play). I sucked, while Robert and Olli had some competition for the first place.

I thought I had ran out of time at the Days of Wonder web games a long time ago, but it turned out I still have over a year or so. Woo-hoo. After all, I have had several of their games and they used to give out one year for each game and it's all been there... I've used like three years and still have a year (and a spare webcode I got from Ismo I can use if I need more).

It's been on little use, but I think I should play more Gang of Four there. I went in for two games today; lost one, did ok in other. The applet doesn't work perfectly on my Mac, but it works well enough. I should play it more.

The biggest problem with the applet is, by the way, the fact that you can't rearrange your cards. Gang of Four is a game where you very much would like to rearrange your hand in a more sensible way than just ranked order...

I got to take a look at the rules of Tempus, and it sure looks pretty good. My first impression is Vinci with just one civilization for each player, but that's a very brutal approximation.

The game is mostly about Lebensraum, building up your empire, one people token at the time. The citizens procreate and fill the land. When there's enough of them at one place, you swap them out for a city token and continue spreading your civilization elsewhere.

Players perform three to five actions each turn and their level of development affects the effectivity of these actions. There are always five actions to choose from: move, fight, have babies, have an idea, build a city.

The development track is interesting. Each turn is an era and at the end of an era, somebody is promoted to the next era and gets a bonus to something. Others will have to suffer from a very small technological disadvantage for a while, but everybody will catch up the leader next turn and then someone else might get the promotion.

What else... Combat is simple and luck-free. It's a simple comparison of token amount plus bonuses from cards. There's a bluffing element and an incentive to attack: a losing attacker loses just one token, while losing defender loses everything.

Sounds interesting and fairly simple. It should play pretty fast. Even though there's fighting, the game will move on. Someone will get promoted each turn, and when someone is promoted to the last era, the game ends. There's a fixed amount of turns, that is.

The victory points are a total of cities, occupied hexes and a bonus for reaching the last era. Here's my biggest doubt about the game: the last turn will probably be full of blatant beat-the-perceived-leader action. However, you can only attack your neighbours, so that should tone it down.

After reading the rules, I'm definitely interested to try the game when I can get it.

Last night I came up with a brilliant idea. Since curling is the second most popular sport in the Winter olympics in Finland (can't beat ice hockey), here's a game idea to take advantage of that: Curling Crokinole!

It's simple: Crokinole on a board shaped after a curling field. Players try to flick their disks in the house, with similar scoring as curling. Sure, you'll have to skip the brooms, but still - the strategies of curling would be there.

As curling is immensely popular in Finland right now thanks to the successful national team, the game would sell a lot! Just slap Markku Uusipaavalniemi on top of the box and that's it!

Marektoy releases for 2006 are now public. I'm personally fond of Cluzzle being published, as I've translated it and because it was picked from my suggestion. So Dominic, sending me a review copy was a good move. I'm glad it's out in Finnish, as it's definitely one of the better party games out there.

Also quite interesting is Tempus, the civilization game by Martin Wallace. It's been on my list of games to check out - well, now there's a Finnish edition to check out. Pretty cool.

Manila and Himalaya also get the Finnish treatment. Both are fine, if not excellent games.

For kids, there's the Geistertreppe sequel Geisterwäldchen (I'm really looking forward to that one), Kinder Spiel des Jahres winner Viva Topo! and the play-in-the-pitch-black Die Nacht der Magier.

Good times, indeed.

Here's Scotland Yard reviewed in Finnish.

I was two years old when Scotland Yard won it's Spiel des Jahres award in 1983. The game was one of my favourites when I was younger and since it's still around, over 20 years later, it must have something going for it.

Darker tones

I played it again recently, using a new edition from 2000 or so. The new edition looks nice, but for some reason they've changed all the bright colours to darker tones. That's what's in these days, I suppose. It still looks pretty good to me, I just love the London map - it's one of my favourite cities, after all. The map has always been one of the main attractions in the game for me.

The idea remains the same: one of the players is dreaded mister X, who tries to escape from the other players, who are detectives. Detectives try to capture mister X. To make things more difficult, mister X moves in secret. Other players only know which movement method mister X uses (taxi, bus or underground).

Now you see me, now you don't

Mister X must surface every now and then and it's those moments which give hope to the detectives. After they see mister X, deduction starts. Ok, he was there and used a bus, where can he be now? However, the tree of possible locations gets very bushy very quickly, so there's lots of guessing involved.

Catching mister X takes lots of thinking and most importantly teamwork. The detectives must work tightly together - so tight, that the game might actually be best as a two-player game of mister X versus one player commanding the full array of five detectives.

Good and bad

The biggest problem with Scotland Yard is the unbalance. Playing mister X is great fun, being a detective is less fun. This is particularly so when mister X surfaces somewhere across the board - you'll spend many turns just slowly moving closer and frankly, that's boring.

On the positive side, Scotland Yard is very easy game to play and teach. The concept is simple and rules are straightforward. There are few special cases to remember. It's just use the ticket and move, and that's it.

While I'm not in a rush to buy the game, I'll definitely play it if an opportunity presents itself. Had I a ten-year old child, I would be tempted to get the game to hook another generation of gamers to the joys of Scotland Yard.

We were visiting my mother at Jyväskylä this weekend and of course, I ended up playing some games. The most interesting game this weekend was Scotland Yard, the very first Spiel des Jahres game I've ever played. It was a big hit when I was younger and now my brother had bought it so of course we gave it a go.

It was still as good as it was almost twenty years ago. Well, maybe not that good, because it was the best of the best back then. Now it's just good. The mysterious mister X got away every time, but that's something practise should fix. Practise, or using more detectives: now we had three or four detectives after him.

I didn't get to be mister X, which was shame, as the game can be a bit boring if you're only a detective. The new edition had this strange, dark look. It's ok, but what's wrong with bright colours?

The boys begged me to play Duel Masters, which I did. It wasn't too shabby, actually. I won two out of three against an experienced opponent, so I either had a clearly better deck or the game is very lucky. Might be a bit of both.

Still, it's a decent game for what it tries to be, a simplified collectible card game. There's none of the depth of Magic, but some good ideas. For example, instead of using land cards to provide mana, every card can be used as a mana source - bit like in San Juan!

We also played few games of St. Petersburg - can't avoid that. The last game was the most interesting: it was a four-player game not won with aristocrats! It was, for some reason, very aristocrat-poor game, so I invested in buildings (I actually bought the Academy for full price and it was worth it) and won the game hands down. Everybody had just five or six aristocrats in the end. Interesting game.

Lewis Pulsipher's article The Essence of Euro-style Games was published in The Game Journal. It describes what makes Euro games, particularly in opposition to war games. I don't think the article is that great - there's little new in it - but it had one interesting point:

Euro games are very pacific. At PowWow04 Stephen Glenn stated (paraphrased) "if this were a Euro game, you would prevent someone from building up, rather than tear them down." Not surprisingly, this leads to a solitaire aspect (almost inevitable if you don't want to allow tearing down).

The inability to tear down what others have built also leads to a game that continuously moves forward! I think that's a lot more important. If players have a goal of building stuff and other players can keep on tearing it down, there's a chance the game will never end. If the only thing you can do is to slow the other players down and prevent them from building, the game system never goes back - only its speed of advancement is slowed.

If you like San Juan and have a Mac, go get Jim's San Juan (zip packet, almost five megs). It's a very good computer version of the card game. The user interface is very smooth and easy to use.

The AI is fairly good, but not superb. I've only lost once to any of the three AI players included. An inexperienced player should get fairly stiff opposition for a while, though. What's most interesting, the AI players are basically text files listing a bunch of parameters: how the player should value the buildings in different stages of the game and so on. Modifying the AI players or creating new is very simple.

I spent about five minutes meddling with the parameters and tested for few rounds to create an AI player that kind of matches my playing style. It proved quite effective: when it finally worked the way I wanted, it kicked my butt. I've yet to beat it.

Of course, this leads to an obvious idea: any takers for a San Juan AI tournament?

As an interesting side note, the creator of the program, Jim Getzen, seems to value producing a lot more than I do. It's written in some of the assumptions his program has. For example, AI players move from stage one to stage two and three based on production. You can change the limit, but it's always about production: when I have established this much production, I'll move on.

Which is funny (and caused my AI player originally to get stuck in stage one), because I have no problems finishing the game (and being victorious) with just the one indigo plant I got in the beginning. Had I done the program, the production capacity wouldn't have such a big importance.

Well, that's something you can work around and I think there's enough variables to allow for a fairly diverse group of AI players, but of course more would always be better. Not that I have any suggestions, though. It isn't always that easy to transfer unstructured knowledge in your head to a formal shape for others to use, particularly if we're talking about a computer program, which needs a lot more guidance and instruction than a fellow human being.

Anyway, if you have a Mac and you like San Juan, there's no reason not to try Jim's San Juan.

I've been playing in BrettSpielWelt. It's fun, particularly as I had to skip a game session yesterday because I had surprise surgery (tonsillectomy and uvulectomy; I've been waiting the operation for, like, nine months and then they book me with a week's warning).

Today's highlight was a team game of Einfach Genial, first one for me. It was also the first Genial game in BSW I've been able to win. Thanks to Markku for helping me! It was a tight match; I first thought we were winning, then saw our lead disappear and then we managed to salvage it in the end. Excellent game, and I expect to play the team game whenever I have four players up for a game of Genial.

I have already eight games of Genial this year and expect a lot more, since it seems to be a very popular game with the Finnish folks in BSW. It's very easy in general to find someone to play Genial, thus it's always a good game to start with.

I also played another two-player game of Verflixxt and while I enjoy the game - I think it's a pretty good for what it is - it's definitely not a hot two-player game. I'll probably avoid two-player games from now on. It's on my to-review list, I think I've played it enough.

San Juan remains a BSW staple. It plays fast, it works well with two, three or four and I'm pretty good at it (my victory rate is about 40%). I'm actually thinking about raising its rating to ten, it's such a good game.

Actually, I just noticed there's a Mac OS X version available at the Geek. Now that's something I need to check out! Expect a report later on!

I tried Gulo Gulo with Johanna recently. It's a children's game from Wolfgang Kramer and collaborators. The idea is simple: players advance on a path, trying to reach the end. What makes Gulo Gulo stand out is the method of movement.

Players move by picking small wooden eggs from a bowl! If you want to move to a blue tile, you must pick a blue egg from the bowl. There's a catch, though: there's an alarm and if you trip it, you're going back! The alarm is a long stick with a small egg on it's head. It's very top-heavy and thus likely to fall if too many supporting eggs are picked up.

That simple dexterity mechanic makes Gulo Gulo work. The game is simple, yet fun to play. I don't have any personal experience, but I guess small kids with their small, nimble fingers are very good in this game, while adults with their bigger, clumsier fingers might have trouble. I'm definitely keeping this game in my collection in case I have a five-year old gamer in the house.

Iain asked me about other multiplayer games that work with two (other than Caylus, that is). Well, here's a small list:

First of all there are few games with modular boards that scale really well. Samurai is the king of scalable games, as it works really well with two, three or four. Some might actually prefer it with two, since that removes some issues with seating order.

Attika is another one. With different amount of players it's a different game, and I happen to like the two-player game a lot. Antiquity is a similar case, and here two-player game helps to cut the game length, too.

Some games don't have modular boards, but adjust the size of play area. Two Knizia titles come to mind: Einfach Genial and Through the Desert. Both work with the full range of players and are quite good with just two. I think I prefer Einfach Genial with two, actually.

Finally games with no modularity or adjusting play area: Africa is fun with two, especially with two experienced players it's really a big filler that plays really fast. There's a bit of setup time, but it's worth it. I tend to play it with Tommy every now and then if it's just two of us, though I think Genial is taking over this niche.

Of my darling optimization games, Industrial Waste and St. Petersburg are quite good with two, particularly Industrial Waste - it works fabulously with any number.

Manu was picking up his games for the German order and had time for a game, so we played Caylus, since he's getting it in the order and hadn't played it yet. It was just the two of us, but as we all know, Caylus is a particularly excellent two-player game.

The game was superb! In the end, Manu won 139-136, mere three-point margin. I had blasted past him on the score track when I built my castle for 25 points, but he caught up with me and went past me. His final round was brilliant, bringing in over 30 points (two monuments, three favours).

Some curiosities in this match: neither mason or architect were built, yet we built a bunch of stone buildings and a total of six monuments (all basic buildings were replaced by shiny blue monuments, it looked quite fabulous). We both maxed out on building favour track, of course. That was kind of funny. We also spent lots of efforts in the castle to reap in the points.

The game was close, but I wonder if Manu hadn't made some of his beginner mistakes - most notably not taking advantage of castle favours. On many turns he built two slots like I did, after me, thus skipping the favour. Still he squeezed a victory! Well, I always have an excuse if I lose to Manu in building games - he's an architect, after all...

I was left wondering what happens if one player runs out of houses. I don't think that can happen with more players, but with two it's certainly a possibility. We skipped it this time by not placing houses on the monuments (where they are unnecessary after all), but I wonder if there's a rule about it. The rulebook doesn't say anything. I'd say the houses shouldn't be limited.

Caylus is pretty high on my list of multiplayer games that work really well with just two players. The game is different, but very, very good.

My BSW session today was very classical, one could say. I played San Juan (and well this time, too), St. Petersburg (pretty close game, even though I thought otherwise in the beginning) and Puerto Rico (two games I didn't win, quite a few stupid moves from me). Could it be more typical?

I also played two games of Einfach Genial, both were two-player games. I quite like it. The BSW implementation is pretty good, too, after I figured out it takes Apple-click to rotate the tiles (plain right click just drops it). My opponent was clearly superior, he beat me twice. Both were horrible losses, I just watched how the colours I needed were enclosed somewhere where I can't reach them. That was painful. It's a very good game, indeed.

I popped in BrettSpielWelt to play few games. San Juan didn't go too well for me: everybody else had Prefectures and Quarrys, I didn't get any... It was an obvious loss, and I don't think I did that many mistakes, either. Well, the cards giveth and the cards taketh away, that's what you get.

Caylus, in the other hand, went much better. I lost it, sure, but it wasn't a big margin. It was a two-player game and my opponent played well, collecting lots of resources. I made few stupid moves and had some user interface fumbles, nothing major, so it was her skill that won the game.

Anyway, after this one game I think the BSW Caylus interface is pretty slick. It's quite good, actually. The game is sweet, as usual, and I think it works quite well with two. It won't make my two-player game top ten, but still, it's probably better than you'd expect, really.