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It's been a while since I talked about games here. Despite what I said before about spending all my free time hacking, I've somehow managed to play a bunch of new-to-me games in the last month. So here are some of my thoughts (in chronological order):
Um Krone und Kragen will be released in English as To Crown a King, but it's colloquially known as Yahtzee: The Gathering. You roll dice to acquire cards that give you special powers that let you modify or augment your die rolls. It's not really that much like Magic, though: there's no collectability or deck-building, you don't draw cards randomly, and the card abilities are all very simple and don't really interact with each other. You do tap the cards by rotating them 90 degrees, though, so I guess Tom Lehmann made some deal with Richard Garfield over patent royalties (I've heard that they're friends). Anyway, is the game any good? It's not bad, but it does kind of just boil down to rolling lots of dice. There's almost zero interaction, but just enough that you can't take your turns simultaneously, so the downtime can be pretty bad with more than 3 or 4 players. But I think the decisions are not as obvious as they might appear at first, and there's probably a decent amount of depth to the game.
Fib Fab is a new card game from Kidult, the makers of Dice Run, Coyote, and Polterdice. This game nicely demonstrates the difference between bluffing and lying. In Liar's Dice (aka Perudo, Bluff, Call My Bluff, Twijfel), with which this game is often compared, your bet is a guess about some information in the game based on a subset of information that only you know. Your bet indirectly implies a statement about your hidden information, e.g. if you have the first bet and you bet on eight 3s, you're somewhat implying that you have some 3s under your cup. If you don't actually have 3s, this is a bluff. But there might actually be eight 3s! You're just making a guess, which might be a deliberately bad guess, but it's not a declaration of fact that you know with certainty is right or wrong. In Fib Fab, however, you have three hidden cards, you state their exact values, and the next player decides whether you're lying or telling the truth. If he thinks you're telling the truth, you give them to him, he replaces one card with a random one, and then he has to make a statement to the next player. The only restriction (and thus the only source of information, which is the same for everyone) is that the values he states must outrank the previous statement (e.g. 9-5-3 outranks 9-4-4). So basically it's entirely about lying and detecting lies, which is just about my least favorite game skill (except for maybe singing or charades). Which is also why I hate Werewolf, but at least Fib Fab is over pretty quickly.
Warrior Knights is a redevelopment (by Bruno Faidutti and others) of an '80s game from Games Workshop. I had fond but vague memories of playing this in high school, so I was glad to get a chance to play this. It's about what I remembered: a fairly simple multi-player wargame with some resource management and an interesting mechanism of voting on new game rules (a la Nomic). The voting part was much less of a factor than I had remembered; I pretty much ignored it completely and won the game fairly decisively. The main innovation is yet another twist on the programmed actions mechanic of Wallenstein or Game of Thrones: everyone simultaneously chooses six actions at the beginning of each round, but you put two in each of three piles, each of which is shuffled and executed in order. So you can semi-order your own actions, but the player order for each round of actions is random (and hidden). Also, some of your action cards come back to you immediately, but some go into one of three different piles and stay there until the pile fills up (which also triggers some other event, like the council where voting happens). This basically prevents you from doing the same actions over and over, but without something as restrictive as the rondel in Antike or the shared actions of Puerto Rico or Age of Mythology. The combat mechanism is also new; I think the original game just used die-rolling, but this has sort of a draw-poker-ish mechanism where each side draws some number of cards, discards some number of cards, and then they are simultaneously revealed to see how much damage is dealt or deflected (with the size and power of your army determining each of those "some number"s). Overall it still felt a bit random, but there was more than enough strategy to chew on, and it compares favorably to other "Euro-style" multi-player wargames like Wallenstein or Game of Thrones. But I doubt I'll play it much because I'm rarely in the mood for something that long (4+ hours).
Thurn und Taxis has been getting the Spiel des Jahres buzz. I thought it was okay, but I had kind of an "is that all there is?" feeling at the end. It has a similar feel to Ticket to Ride—do I pick up more cards to extend my route, or do I play the cards I have now to claim some points?—but there aren't any blocking constraints on the board, you just get fewer points if you're not the first to claim a particular region. The scoring is incremental—there aren't really any huge swings of fortune. I thought I was way in last place, but I ended up almost winning (lost on the tiebreaker, which I think is just seating order). I haven't played any of the other SdJ nominees, but I wouldn't be terribly upset if this won—at least it would mean an expansion, and I think this game definitely could use one to spice it up.
Niagara was des Spiel des letztes Jahres, and I was a little surprised at how fiddly the movement rules were—the restrictions on when you could pick up or drop off gems seemed like needless complications—and the ability to steal gems from each other seemed a bit nasty for a family game. And it kind of dragged out at the end as we all started to play defense instead of offense. Still, a decent game, if a bit dull, but maybe the expansions spice it up too (they just announced a second one).
Hacienda is the latest solo design effort from Wolfgang Kramer, somewhat of a rarity (he often works with a partner, Kiesling or Ulrich). It also has the pick-up-or-place feel of Ticket to Ride (I wonder if these things are coincidence or not?) but with a more multivariate scoring formula. The board play was more along the lines of Through the Desert, a Go-like placement game where you have to juggle between several different goals of connection and blocking. I definitely realized some things I did wrong afterward (like, don't sit on lots of money at the mid-game scoring, cash some of it in for hacienda or water-hole points). I think this is the new game I'd most like to play again, though I wasn't quite enamored with it enough to want to buy it.
Tower of Babel is an area-majority game from Reiner Knizia, also somewhat of a rarity for him. I thought this was also an auction game, but it's not really unless you squint. On your turn, you choose a token on the board, which determines which area will be built on, which suit of cards can be used to build (one of four), and how many cards are needed to build (three to six). Then everyone chooses some number of cards of that suit to offer you and simultanously reveals them. You then select some, all, or none of the players so that their bids (plus cards from your hand) add up to the needed number, and every card involved becomes a token in that area for the owner of the card. However, every card that was offered but not selected earns a victory point for its owner, plus they get to keep the card for future offers! This means that basically everyone gets something every turn (unless you have no cards of the suit, which can really suck), and you have to calculate how much each player will get before deciding what to offer or which offers to select. This is a pretty nifty mechanism, but also can be kind of a brain burner. And at its core it's still mainly an area-majority game, which is not my favorite because of the way it can drastically see-saw when majorities get overtaken. But it didn't overstay its welcome, and I wouldn't mind playing it again.
Dancing Dice is another vaguely Yahtzee-ish dice game, but it avoids the downtime issues of Um Krone und Kragen by having everyone roll simultaneously. But it lacks the feeling of steady growth and development—instead you're just doing the same thing every round, over and over until you drop from exhaustion (the theme is a dance marathon). Plus, because of the simultaneous rolling, you have no idea whether your roll is good or bad until everyone reveals their results, so there's kind of a double-guess aspect: Do you put your better dance first or second? Or do you just go for two mediocre dances rather than making one good and one bad? It was still somewhat entertaining, but I'm not sure there's a whole lot of anything there.
Zwergen Ziehen is a cute little two-player game about gnomes playing tug-of-war. I enjoyed it a lot more than the other tug-of-war game, Heave Ho, although I don't remember much about that one at all. This has some nice dilemmas about whether to add a new gnome to your side or to pull hard with the gnomes you already have; it's mostly about timing, with some planning elements as well, since you have to play all the cards in your hand before you get to draw a new hand (or you can dump your current hand and redraw, but this won't increase your hand size). There's also a Balloon-Cup-ish feeling of wanting to concede a losing battle so you can start the next battle with a tempo advantage. This was a nice find—I was just looking for games to throw in with an order to make the shipping cost worthwhile, which is always kind of a gamble, but it worked out.
Don was another game in that shipment, although I mostly knew what I was getting because I had sort of played it once a long time ago online using some program that some guy was working on to make multiplayer card games without enforcing any rules. (It was called Virtual Game Club, and was sort of a forerunner of Thoth and Vassal, but it was in Visual Basic and kind of creaky, and the guy vanished from the face of the net so it died off pretty quick.) Anyway, it's a pure auction game with a clever twist: the cards being auctioned are numbered 0-9, and each winning bid is paid to the player who has the card that matches the last digit of the bid amount. So if you own a 5 card, you'll get paid every time someone bids 5 or 15 or 25. (If someone else has a 5, you'll split the bid with them, unless you have more 5s than them.) A further twist is that you are forbidden to bid an amount corresponding to a card you already have, so the more different numbers you have, the more constrained your bidding is. And since having the most money at the end is worth bonus points, near the end you also have to be careful about who'll be getting your bid. This can also lead to some fragility, though—if someone isn't careful about this, or about who's getting which color cards (you're trying to collect sets of the same color), it can swing the game to one player or another almost at random. But I think this is forgivable in a simple 20-minute filler.
Finally, Giganten. I picked this up like 6 months ago (or more) but hadn't managed to convince anyone to play it until this weekend. It's a "big box" game of oil exploration and economics, with lots of plastic bits: everyone gets a truck, a train, and a handful of oil rigs, and there's a big pile of stackable square units of crude oil. There are several interlocking mechanisms: you have to balance between moving your truck to find the best drilling sites, moving your train to give you a wider range to reduce your transport costs, or collecting licenses to spend in the three auctions each round for the rights to sell to one of the oil companies, each of which has a different price that fluctuates up or down each round (and can sometimes be manipulated, at the cost of movement points and licenses). I think the trick is to be able to time your oil rig building so that you're producing a large volume of oil right when you have the most licenses so you can secure the best price and make a big cash-out—except I think the way Amy won in our game was to keep steady with a good number of middling sales instead of going for the one big score. The final scores were surprisingly close, though, so we were all regretting certain mistakes we each made that could have swung the game our way. I enjoyed it, though not as much as McMulti (the other big oil business game)—Giganten is shorter (though still a good 2 hours) and has much more player interaction, and is perhaps less random, but I still love the supply-and-demand market mechanism in McMulti (and it still wins out for sheer volume of plastic bits).
Um Krone und Kragen will be released in English as To Crown a King, but it's colloquially known as Yahtzee: The Gathering. You roll dice to acquire cards that give you special powers that let you modify or augment your die rolls. It's not really that much like Magic, though: there's no collectability or deck-building, you don't draw cards randomly, and the card abilities are all very simple and don't really interact with each other. You do tap the cards by rotating them 90 degrees, though, so I guess Tom Lehmann made some deal with Richard Garfield over patent royalties (I've heard that they're friends). Anyway, is the game any good? It's not bad, but it does kind of just boil down to rolling lots of dice. There's almost zero interaction, but just enough that you can't take your turns simultaneously, so the downtime can be pretty bad with more than 3 or 4 players. But I think the decisions are not as obvious as they might appear at first, and there's probably a decent amount of depth to the game.
Fib Fab is a new card game from Kidult, the makers of Dice Run, Coyote, and Polterdice. This game nicely demonstrates the difference between bluffing and lying. In Liar's Dice (aka Perudo, Bluff, Call My Bluff, Twijfel), with which this game is often compared, your bet is a guess about some information in the game based on a subset of information that only you know. Your bet indirectly implies a statement about your hidden information, e.g. if you have the first bet and you bet on eight 3s, you're somewhat implying that you have some 3s under your cup. If you don't actually have 3s, this is a bluff. But there might actually be eight 3s! You're just making a guess, which might be a deliberately bad guess, but it's not a declaration of fact that you know with certainty is right or wrong. In Fib Fab, however, you have three hidden cards, you state their exact values, and the next player decides whether you're lying or telling the truth. If he thinks you're telling the truth, you give them to him, he replaces one card with a random one, and then he has to make a statement to the next player. The only restriction (and thus the only source of information, which is the same for everyone) is that the values he states must outrank the previous statement (e.g. 9-5-3 outranks 9-4-4). So basically it's entirely about lying and detecting lies, which is just about my least favorite game skill (except for maybe singing or charades). Which is also why I hate Werewolf, but at least Fib Fab is over pretty quickly.
Warrior Knights is a redevelopment (by Bruno Faidutti and others) of an '80s game from Games Workshop. I had fond but vague memories of playing this in high school, so I was glad to get a chance to play this. It's about what I remembered: a fairly simple multi-player wargame with some resource management and an interesting mechanism of voting on new game rules (a la Nomic). The voting part was much less of a factor than I had remembered; I pretty much ignored it completely and won the game fairly decisively. The main innovation is yet another twist on the programmed actions mechanic of Wallenstein or Game of Thrones: everyone simultaneously chooses six actions at the beginning of each round, but you put two in each of three piles, each of which is shuffled and executed in order. So you can semi-order your own actions, but the player order for each round of actions is random (and hidden). Also, some of your action cards come back to you immediately, but some go into one of three different piles and stay there until the pile fills up (which also triggers some other event, like the council where voting happens). This basically prevents you from doing the same actions over and over, but without something as restrictive as the rondel in Antike or the shared actions of Puerto Rico or Age of Mythology. The combat mechanism is also new; I think the original game just used die-rolling, but this has sort of a draw-poker-ish mechanism where each side draws some number of cards, discards some number of cards, and then they are simultaneously revealed to see how much damage is dealt or deflected (with the size and power of your army determining each of those "some number"s). Overall it still felt a bit random, but there was more than enough strategy to chew on, and it compares favorably to other "Euro-style" multi-player wargames like Wallenstein or Game of Thrones. But I doubt I'll play it much because I'm rarely in the mood for something that long (4+ hours).
Thurn und Taxis has been getting the Spiel des Jahres buzz. I thought it was okay, but I had kind of an "is that all there is?" feeling at the end. It has a similar feel to Ticket to Ride—do I pick up more cards to extend my route, or do I play the cards I have now to claim some points?—but there aren't any blocking constraints on the board, you just get fewer points if you're not the first to claim a particular region. The scoring is incremental—there aren't really any huge swings of fortune. I thought I was way in last place, but I ended up almost winning (lost on the tiebreaker, which I think is just seating order). I haven't played any of the other SdJ nominees, but I wouldn't be terribly upset if this won—at least it would mean an expansion, and I think this game definitely could use one to spice it up.
Niagara was des Spiel des letztes Jahres, and I was a little surprised at how fiddly the movement rules were—the restrictions on when you could pick up or drop off gems seemed like needless complications—and the ability to steal gems from each other seemed a bit nasty for a family game. And it kind of dragged out at the end as we all started to play defense instead of offense. Still, a decent game, if a bit dull, but maybe the expansions spice it up too (they just announced a second one).
Hacienda is the latest solo design effort from Wolfgang Kramer, somewhat of a rarity (he often works with a partner, Kiesling or Ulrich). It also has the pick-up-or-place feel of Ticket to Ride (I wonder if these things are coincidence or not?) but with a more multivariate scoring formula. The board play was more along the lines of Through the Desert, a Go-like placement game where you have to juggle between several different goals of connection and blocking. I definitely realized some things I did wrong afterward (like, don't sit on lots of money at the mid-game scoring, cash some of it in for hacienda or water-hole points). I think this is the new game I'd most like to play again, though I wasn't quite enamored with it enough to want to buy it.
Tower of Babel is an area-majority game from Reiner Knizia, also somewhat of a rarity for him. I thought this was also an auction game, but it's not really unless you squint. On your turn, you choose a token on the board, which determines which area will be built on, which suit of cards can be used to build (one of four), and how many cards are needed to build (three to six). Then everyone chooses some number of cards of that suit to offer you and simultanously reveals them. You then select some, all, or none of the players so that their bids (plus cards from your hand) add up to the needed number, and every card involved becomes a token in that area for the owner of the card. However, every card that was offered but not selected earns a victory point for its owner, plus they get to keep the card for future offers! This means that basically everyone gets something every turn (unless you have no cards of the suit, which can really suck), and you have to calculate how much each player will get before deciding what to offer or which offers to select. This is a pretty nifty mechanism, but also can be kind of a brain burner. And at its core it's still mainly an area-majority game, which is not my favorite because of the way it can drastically see-saw when majorities get overtaken. But it didn't overstay its welcome, and I wouldn't mind playing it again.
Dancing Dice is another vaguely Yahtzee-ish dice game, but it avoids the downtime issues of Um Krone und Kragen by having everyone roll simultaneously. But it lacks the feeling of steady growth and development—instead you're just doing the same thing every round, over and over until you drop from exhaustion (the theme is a dance marathon). Plus, because of the simultaneous rolling, you have no idea whether your roll is good or bad until everyone reveals their results, so there's kind of a double-guess aspect: Do you put your better dance first or second? Or do you just go for two mediocre dances rather than making one good and one bad? It was still somewhat entertaining, but I'm not sure there's a whole lot of anything there.
Zwergen Ziehen is a cute little two-player game about gnomes playing tug-of-war. I enjoyed it a lot more than the other tug-of-war game, Heave Ho, although I don't remember much about that one at all. This has some nice dilemmas about whether to add a new gnome to your side or to pull hard with the gnomes you already have; it's mostly about timing, with some planning elements as well, since you have to play all the cards in your hand before you get to draw a new hand (or you can dump your current hand and redraw, but this won't increase your hand size). There's also a Balloon-Cup-ish feeling of wanting to concede a losing battle so you can start the next battle with a tempo advantage. This was a nice find—I was just looking for games to throw in with an order to make the shipping cost worthwhile, which is always kind of a gamble, but it worked out.
Don was another game in that shipment, although I mostly knew what I was getting because I had sort of played it once a long time ago online using some program that some guy was working on to make multiplayer card games without enforcing any rules. (It was called Virtual Game Club, and was sort of a forerunner of Thoth and Vassal, but it was in Visual Basic and kind of creaky, and the guy vanished from the face of the net so it died off pretty quick.) Anyway, it's a pure auction game with a clever twist: the cards being auctioned are numbered 0-9, and each winning bid is paid to the player who has the card that matches the last digit of the bid amount. So if you own a 5 card, you'll get paid every time someone bids 5 or 15 or 25. (If someone else has a 5, you'll split the bid with them, unless you have more 5s than them.) A further twist is that you are forbidden to bid an amount corresponding to a card you already have, so the more different numbers you have, the more constrained your bidding is. And since having the most money at the end is worth bonus points, near the end you also have to be careful about who'll be getting your bid. This can also lead to some fragility, though—if someone isn't careful about this, or about who's getting which color cards (you're trying to collect sets of the same color), it can swing the game to one player or another almost at random. But I think this is forgivable in a simple 20-minute filler.
Finally, Giganten. I picked this up like 6 months ago (or more) but hadn't managed to convince anyone to play it until this weekend. It's a "big box" game of oil exploration and economics, with lots of plastic bits: everyone gets a truck, a train, and a handful of oil rigs, and there's a big pile of stackable square units of crude oil. There are several interlocking mechanisms: you have to balance between moving your truck to find the best drilling sites, moving your train to give you a wider range to reduce your transport costs, or collecting licenses to spend in the three auctions each round for the rights to sell to one of the oil companies, each of which has a different price that fluctuates up or down each round (and can sometimes be manipulated, at the cost of movement points and licenses). I think the trick is to be able to time your oil rig building so that you're producing a large volume of oil right when you have the most licenses so you can secure the best price and make a big cash-out—except I think the way Amy won in our game was to keep steady with a good number of middling sales instead of going for the one big score. The final scores were surprisingly close, though, so we were all regretting certain mistakes we each made that could have swung the game our way. I enjoyed it, though not as much as McMulti (the other big oil business game)—Giganten is shorter (though still a good 2 hours) and has much more player interaction, and is perhaps less random, but I still love the supply-and-demand market mechanism in McMulti (and it still wins out for sheer volume of plastic bits).
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McMulti r00ls.
From:
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I don't think there's much guessing-- there's no simultaneous selection or anything. So it's possible that you did have a rule wrong.
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I have the old Warrior Knights, and would like to try the new one. Does the new one have the Fate Deck? These are random events, taken one per turn, that had way too big an effect. How does Siege combat work in the new version? In the old version, each turn that the Siege continues you have an incresed chance to win the battle, but if a random event lowers your army size to be too small to beseige, you have to start fresh. From what little I know about medieval siege warfare, this is pretty thematic.
I've never tried Don, and played Giganten only once, but would like to play both of them again.
I have Dancing Dice, and it went over well at Lake Shore farms, but that's a weekend where people spend about 85% of their time dancing, 10% playing games, and 5% sleeping, so the game is very thematic. Without the incredibly appropriate venue, I wouldn't expect it to be popular.
You didn't mention Elasund, which you introduced me to. After 4 playings, it may be shaping up to be my favorite Settlers game.
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I got Elasund in February, and haven't played it in over a month, so it doesn't feel as new to me as the games I mentioned.