Board Game Review Part 2 - Sci-Fi and Horror

Yesterday I covered Eurogames, full of indirect competition and family-friendly subject matters. So today I tackle a trio of sci-fi and horror games, complete with rampant infighting and backstabbing!

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Betrayal was published by Avalon Hill (now owned by Wizards of the Coast) several years ago, and I consider myself lucky to have played it. This is because it's been out of print for a while and now routinely sells for $150-200 online. Fortunately, a second edition is planned to be released his October, which should be much more attainable.

The game begins with the players exploring the house, flipping over new room tiles each time they enter an unexplored area. They move around finding various eerie items, events, and omens until eventually the "Haunt" occurs, moving the game into its second phase. When the Haunt takes place, one of the characters turns traitor and any one of 50 scenarios occur, including horror classics like zombie attacks, werewolves, zombies, or even the house itself coming to life. Often the traitor and other players receive different information about the situation, and they rarely know eachother's victory conditions.

Betrayal is practically proof that if you have an awesome enough concept, you can throw everything else out the window. Many of the scenarios are wildly imbalanced or luck-dependent, the rules can be frustratingly ambiguous, and the finite number of options may limit playability, but the game is just too damn awesome for any of that to matter very much.

My other gripe about the game is the packaging - it came with literally hundreds of little cardboard tokens indicating various items, opponents, and hazards. It was ridiculously excessive and largely unnecessary - it could have just come with three colors of tokens and specified what each was for various scenarios. Hopefully the new edition will reduce extraneous cardboard and improve the wording of the rules.

Verdict: If' you're looking for an in-depth strategy game to test your mettle, look elsewhere. If you're looking for an absolutely awesome casual game to play with a bunch of friends late at night, check this out next October.

RoboRally

Also by Avalon Hill, RoboRally is a game Richard Garfield pitched to Wizards of the Coast back in 1993. They turned it down for being too expensive to produce, instead opting to try out some idea of his called Magic. It worked out pretty well for them, so years later they had more than enough cash to make RoboRally.

The game mechanics are fairly simple. The players are racing towards a series of flags, and the first person's robot to touch them all in order wins. Each round, you program your robot with a series of five actions they will take over the course of the next five turns. Then, you watch as they happen to get pushed a square to the left by another player's robot, and continue following your now-deadly orders as they drive over conveyor-belts, industrial lazers, and gaping pit traps. As you take damage, you have increasingly limited movement options to program your hapless robot.

The game doesn't have a lot of deep strategy, but it can be surprisingly difficult and convoluted to maneuver around simple obstacles with limited commands. The wacky dark humor and simple gameplay make RoboRally a very good game for parties, families, and other casual circles.

My biggest complaint about the basic game is that the robot upgrades (things like "Mini-Howitzer" and "Breaks") are one of the more fun and versatile aspects of the game, but are very difficult to acquire in-game. We were very happy playing with the house rule that each robot starts the game with one free upgrade chosen at random.

Verdict: If you're looking for a fun and easy strategy game to play with friends and family, RoboRally is a great option. It's more checkers than chess, though, and not a game for competitive players.

Battlestar Gallactica: The Board Game

I don't normally pay too much attention to tie-in games, but this one seemed thematically appropriate as involves both insane robots and betraying your so-called friends. The game is published by Fantasy Flight Games and is based on the 2003 Battlestar Gallactica tv series.

The game centers around the human side facing various challenges while trying to maintain four gauges - Fuel, Food, Morale, and Population. If any of these fall below zero, they lose the game. Meanwhile, the cylon players try to subvert and sabotage the humans.

The game's most impressive aspect is how well it captures the feel of the series. The humans have to deal with so many different ways to lose, and argue about strategies and acceptable losses even when they actually are on the same side. And then there's the brilliant mechanic where half the loyalty cards are dealt out initially, and then half are dealt out later in the game, meaning that you often don't know how many traitors (if any) are actually among you, and players can turn out to be cylons without initially realizing it.

The sacrifice for this is that the game seems like it would be pretty impenetrable to people unfamiliar with the tv show. The mechanics could be understood, but they wouldn't feel very resonant without the background to understand them. The game also suffers somewhat from overcomplication, with dozens of different mechanics competing for time and attention.

Verdict: A great game for fans of the series which really manages to capture the feel. Other people should probably stick to more other political games.

I'll take a break from reviews for now, but feel free to contact me with your angry rebuttals and fervent disagreements.

Board Game Review Part 1 - Eurogames!

Contemporary board games are not my area of expertise, but I've gotten a lot more familiar with them over the past year. I will share my opinions on several of the games I've played as a relative newcomer to the genre. Today I will be covering several "Eurogames,"

a genre defined by resource-management, indirect competition, and non-elimination gameplay.

Settlers of Catan

Settlers of Catan is a staple of modern board games. It has sold more than 15 million copies and has dozens of spin-offs including expansions, a dice game, and videogames. It has come to define the Eurogame genre in America.

The core game involves players placing cities at the corners of randomized hexes, each of which provides a specific resource with a fixed chance of production each turn. As the game progresses, players use these resources to purchase more roads, settlements, and cities in order to harvest more resources.

Catan's biggest strength is the game's strategic depth despite simple rules - there are a wide variety of valid routes to victory and many economic and tactical mechanics going on at any given time. It is a popular tournament game for competetive players, but is still very accessible for families and casual gamers.

My biggest problem with Catan is the luck factor. Not that it exists, as almost all strategy games involve a large component of luck, but the way it feels. For most games, part of the strategy is figuring out what to do when you're down on your luck. In Catan, you can't do anything when the dice don't go your way. The game is completely out of your control and becomes frustrating and disappointing. There are many games where you can lose to bad luck, but in few does is it feel as unfun as Catan. Added to this is the fact that making comebacks is extremely difficult in economy based games, meaning that a run of bad luck early can leave you boxed in and undeveloped. The game's supporters seem somewhat aware of this, as the Wikipedia page laughably touts, "players who are behind can strive towards goals that are within their reach."

Verdict: Settlers of Catan is a very well-designed game, and can be enjoyed by casual players who don't mind its harsh nature and tournament players who appreciate that harshness. However, if you're a gamer like me who enjoys casual competition with friends, Catan is not your best choice.

Carcassonne

Carcassonne is the top-selling franchise for Rio Grande Games, an American company who were founded with the specific goal of developing European style board games. It is a very simple game with a large number of available expansions.

Each turn, a player flips over a landscape tile and uses it to expand the board, then play place a marker to indicate that they are collecting points from one aspect of that tile. For example, a tile might have a segment of road passing by the corner of a city, in which case the player could place a knight in the city, a bandit on the road, or a farmer on the grass. They would eventually receive points based on the number of tiles eventually comprising the completed road, city, or field.

Carcassonne is fun and easy to learn, but doesn't have a whole lot of depth. Most of the strategic decisions are fairly simple and the interaction with opponents is fairly minimal. It is also one of the few games I have played which I like better as a two-player game than with three or more players. Multiple players can often cooperate to "share" very large territories, leaving the other players who were unable to get in on the territory extremely far behind.

Verdict: I've enjoyed playing Carcassonne casually and occasionally, but there isn't a lot of meat on those bones. A good game for playing with acquaintances and parents, but probably not the right choice for playing with avid gamers.

Dominion

Also published by Rio Grande Games, Dominion is a much more complicated game than Carcassonne. There are a number of stand-alone versions available, which can be played on their own or mixed with the basic set.

As the game progresses, each player continually improves their deck by purchasing new cards, which in turn help them purchase even better cards the next time the go through the deck. Eventually, players begin purchasing "Victory" cards, which contribute to final score but do nothing when drawn. At the end of the game, the number and value of each player's Victory cards determine the winner.

Dominion is the best self-contained tabletop game I've played in a long time. I love deckbuilding for games like Magic, so I love the fact that Dominion has deckbuilding as a fundamental part of gameplay. The gameplay is both fast-paced and strategy intensive, with specific options changing each game.

My biggest complaint about the game is a seeming prevalence of "griefer" cards - effects that seem designed more to annoy or upset your opponents than provide actual strategic advantage. Most of the groups I've played with avoid certain cards that have proven particularly annoying.

Verdict: Dominion will almost certainly be the next game I purchase - I love pretty much everything about it. That said, the game is somewhat complicated and highly strategic, so I don't feel that it would be the best choice for playing with children or non-gamers.

Tomorrow in Part 2 - I review RoboRally, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and more!

Flavor and Board Games

Anyone can design a fair game. I'll make one now: "We each roll a normal, six-sided die and whoever rolls the highest wins. In the event of a tie, we reroll." The challenge of game design is not to make balanced games, but to make fun ones.

Fun is extremely complicated, though. You've got to incorporate challenge, satisfaction, progress, unpredictability, and dozens of other variables which various people can respond to very differently. One of the factors that people often forget, however, is "flavor" - the aesthetic choices of name and identity that give reason to a game's mechanics.

Mechanically, Go strikes me as a much better game than Chess. Chess isrepetitive and quickly becomes more about memorizing move sequences than original strategizing, whereas Go is organic and plays out very differently each time. Go has more strategic depth and more big-picture creativity in its gameplay. Yet Chess fascinated me for years (including a solid amount of tournament play) and Go never managed to maintain my interest long enough to fully learn the rules.

I eventually figured out that it was the iconography of chess that made the difference: The mere fact that the pieces were identified as soldiers, knights, and royalty makes the game more interesting. You can bemoan that someone has killed your queen, or grin as you slowly force their king into a corner. The flavor may be cursory, but it gives you an emotional identification with the game that Go lacks. I've heard vague explanations of supply lines and armies, but Go never felt like anything other than stones on a board.

A lot of very poorly designed board games have become classics solely on the basis of their flavor. Clue is a silly little game of guess-and-check, but throw in a murder with a variety of suspects and weapons and you've got an interesting narrative. Monopoly is so flawed that no one plays by the official rules (does anyone actually bid for property?) but has stuck in our cultural consciousness because it's about buying property and paying rent. And Risk is an agonizing game that brutally punishes any attempt at action, but it's about taking over the world!

I don't think any of these games would have caught on if they were just about collecting unlabeled "points" or generic "spaces." Something worth thinking about.

Edit: By complete coincidence, I appear to have criticized Monopoly on its 75th Anniversary. Happy Birthday!