July was quite the dry month for me in more ways than one. Part of that has to do with me moving from Ohio to the Arizona desert. The other part, well, let’s find out…

Crystal Palace

1 Play

Crystal Palace is a design that brings my love for Capstone Games in conflict with my distaste for soulless Euros.  Who emerges the winner in this epic duel, you ask?  Not me, that’s for sure.

I could delve into the intended theme of it all, but then I would just be looking up the description online and redressing it in the same paper-thin clothes that disintegrate the moment somebody opens their mouth to teach the game.  You want to know the theme of the game?  It’s worker-placement dice that cost money but generate you points and cards and resources and income and, lest we forget, more points.

Sure, the choose-your-value aspect of the worker-placement dice is what has fans raving and makes the game bearable for me.  That’s because the dice aren’t rolled (like Rajas for the Ganges) or upgraded (like Teotihuacan), rather, they are secretly arranged and revealed in a round-by-round auction.  The highest bidder gets the coveted worker-placement privilege of 1st player in turn order, plus their selected higher-value dice lead to more placement options during the round.  But you’ll pay for it dearly in money as income proves to be a literally slippery thing here.

Your worker placements can earn you cards into your tableau, but the purchase or activation of these cards costs resources of either money, gears, or light-bulbs.  Once a card’s bonus is triggered, it will grant you points, an immediate bonus, and occasionally a recurring bonus.  Other dice spaces allow you to move up tracks, claim tiles with more bonuses, earn resources, and so on.

If you read the previous paragraph and thought that sounded like 90% of modern Euros, therein lies my problem.  Every new game (but especially dry Euros) must answer the question: How do I stand out from the crowd?  Theme or art or a novel little twist in the formula isn’t going to cut it.  Especially when at the end of the day the gameplay is to just spend some stuff to collect some stuff and move up some tracks and earn points.  There are already SO MANY games that have perfected this formula.

We have interactive economic games like Brass, efficiency rondels like Great Western Trail, Uwe Rosenberg worker placement extravaganzas Agricola and A Feast for Odin, fancy component concepts like Tzolk’in, and so on.  I just don’t see the point in so many of these other heavy Euros that require so much investment from the players and reward that investment with a shriveled, recycled payoff.

Current Rating: 5.5/10

Nidavellir: Thingvellir

1 Play

This small expansion to Nidavellir, known as Thingvellir, does exactly what I was hoping it would do.  It brings more nuance to the auctions where the highest bidder has the option of selecting a card from the camp rather than claiming a card from the tavern.

The camp displays 5 cards at all times, and these cards are either valuable mercenaries or lucrative artifacts.  Mercenaries will be added to one of two colors at the end of an age, while artifacts grant useful abilities or a heaping of points with a caveat.

Our play with the expansion struck a nice balance between gunning for the camp cards and ignoring them for the tavern options.  It certainly provided more reasons for us to want to win auctions, even at times when we were ambivalent toward the tavern dwarves.

Thingvellir also adds some more hero cards, which are certainly a welcome feature, although some of the more fiddly heroes seem to have the tendency of being ignored due to their lack of convenient clarity.  I appreciate the designer’s desire to provide loads of variety, but I think the hero cards would’ve benefited from a little more streamlining.  This is especially true after I finish explaining the rules to newcomers whose eyes have glazed over after getting the firehose of hero abilities.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Juicy Fruits

1 Play

Juicy Fruits is the third game from publisher Deep Print Games and the debut title of the Capstone Family brand.  I had high expectations for this colorfully vibrant game considering their previous production collaboration, Renature, was a major 2020 hit for me.  We even got ourselves into the juicy, fruity mood by bringing delicious fruit creamsicles with us to the table.  We were set to immerse every one of our senses into this experience. All signs indicated that this would be a pleasant little game to enjoy with my wife, Camille, due to its inviting presentation, breezy gameplay, and puzzly challenge.

Straight out of the gates Juicy Fruits stumbled through a noticeably obnoxious setup.  The issue wasn’t the rulebook or the setup requirements on their own.  Rather, the problem that immediately annoyed me was the organization solution within the box.  Just like their previous publications, Deep Print proudly keeps the inside of their boxes completely free of plastic.  What this means is that they opt for a basic cardboard insert with cloth bags and wooden pieces rather than plastic inserts, bags, or components.  This setup feels like a nice touch, with their eco-friendly intentions certainly appreciated, and it even works fine for their other game in our collection, Renature.  

This same organization philosophy turns out to be an absolute mess in Juicy Fruits.  The game includes two large cloth bags, presumably for the wood pieces and cardboard tokens respectively.  I have no qualms with all the lovely fruit pieces being mixed into the same bag.  It did turn out to be a hassle digging through 100+ pieces of wood to find the similar colored player tokens, but even that is forgivable.  My true beef lies with the cardboard tokens.

There are 121 cardboard tokens in Juicy Fruits, to be exact.  These tokens are divided into roughly six categories, with some of those categories being further divided into different types or player colors.  Toss all of these tokens into the same big bag for storage, dump them out into one messy pile for setup, and you’ve effectively turned a 3-minute setup into a 15-minute setup… at least if one player is handling all of the preparations.  To add insult to injury, the cloth bags are actually needed during setup when you have to separate the 50 boat tokens into their two colors and put them back into their own bags in order to draw them back out and position on your player board.

Anyone who doesn’t want to deal with that kind of headache every time they break out Juicy Fruits will essentially have to track down 6 or 7 more bags (most likely made of plastic) because apparently we can’t have both an eco-friendly and user-friendly production. 

Organization complaints aside, I was still expecting an enjoyable experience once the game finally got rolling, as was Camille.  The rules are very straightforward: simply slide a collection token in a straight line across the empty spaces of your island board, earning one matching fruit piece for each space moved.  Fruit can be spent each turn on either fulfilling a boat order on your board or claiming a business tile from the central display.  Both options grant points, but they each have an interesting wrinkle.  

Fulfilling a boat order creates another space on your board, making your turns even more efficient as you have more room to slide tiles and earn extra fruit.  Claiming a unique business tile can be a lucrative option, either in scoring big points or granting another movement tile; the catch is that these businesses will clog up your island board spaces!  So obviously it is best to fulfill lots of boat orders first and rush for the businesses second, except business tiles will quickly dwindle as your opponents snatch them up, and each purchased business tile moves the countdown marker toward the end of the game!

For those who want to add an extra layer to the gameplay, you can flip the scoreboard to the Juice Factory side where extra fruit becomes less a waste and more an opportunity to nudge your player tokens up the track to score more points.

What you essentially have a is an order-fulfillment game where the chewy center is the efficient sequencing and sliding of tiles on your board for maximum fruit collection.  The only problem is that this chewy center lacks…. juiciness.  Despite the competing options I’ve explained of clearing boats versus gaining businesses, nobody in their right mind is going to gun for businesses in the early game.  So the obvious choice of each turn is to simply survey your boat orders and slide the collection tile that grants the most fruit in order to remove a boat.  Deciding the right sequence of sliding your tiles is usually obvious as well, and you can get by easily by planning a few turns ahead.

Once you are ready to start clogging your board with businesses, you’re simply going to opt for the tile that you can most easily afford using the collection opportunities that are currently available to you.  The Juice Factory variant of spending one or two fruit pieces to slide up the track does require some budgeting to ensure you save your fruit for your desired orders, but it mostly serves to water down any thematic flavor of the core experience.

Because I’m the one who has a much stronger preference for more dynamic, interactive games, I figured Camille would at least get some enjoyment out of our play of Juicy Fruits.  But I was surprised to find that she was just as disinterested as I was.  The core challenge just never came to life for us at any point during the game.

After trudging through Juicy Fruits, Crystal Palace, and CloudAge, I am saddened to see the end of a hot streak between Capstone Games and I.  Don’t get me wrong here, these are perfectly fine games, and they’ll surely hit the spot with the right crowd.  But they are a far-cry from the style of Capstone games that I’ve come to know and love.  

Pipeline, Bus, Watergate, Renature, Irish Gauge, The Estates, Stick ‘Em, Ride the Rails, Curious Cargo, and New York Zoo… these designs are my JAM.  All of them provide me with the tense, bitey, standout, gorgeous gameplay that have made me a huge Capstone fan.  I’m still confident that Iberian Gauge and Pipeline: Emerging Markets will be excellent, I have high hopes for Riftforce, Rorschach, and Imperial Steam, and I’m sure that Capstone has more great games up their sleeve.

Yet Juicy Fruits represents the expansion of Capstone into gaming lands where I can’t follow.  It puts an end to my blind purchasing streak of Capstone releases.  I’m both happy for their successful growth into wider markets, and saddened by the muddying of their style of play.  And I’ll stick to Whale Riders for my family-friendly, colorful, contract fulfillment fun, thank you very much.

Current Rating: 4/10

Mango Creamsicle Rating: 9.5/10

Cryo

1 Play

Cryo is a streamlined, modern Euro that’s hard to dislike.  Everything it does, it does extremely well.  The strategic paths are varied, the gameplay arc is tight, the pacing is just right, the decisions are crunchy, the interaction is bitey, the production is slick, and the rules are smooth.  Honestly, my only worry at this point is if this game can hold my interest and continue to engage me through plays two, three, four, and beyond. 

Since Cryo and Crystal Palace are both modern Euros that utilize worker placement gameplay to earn resources and compete for points, I suppose it might be interesting to investigate why I enjoyed my encounter with Cryo so much more than Crystal Palace.  A good first place to start would be the cards.  

In Crystal Palace, you have the freedom to select your cards from the market, yet these felt more like point mongering resource sinks than anything exciting or unique.  Spend 5 bulbs and 2 gears for 12 points, plus another 4 points if you can acquire this other specific card, or 4 bulbs for 8 points and a bonus resource.  Yippee.  Meanwhile, Cryo has players blind drawing cards from a deck, and there are only 8 unique cards in the entire deck, so surely Crystal Palace possesses the more interesting deck, right?  WRONG.  Cryo gives every card so much more weight and meaning thanks to their multi-use properties.  A single card can provide a useful permanent upgrade, a unique end-game scoring objective, a vehicle for essential pod transportation, or valuable resources when scrapped, and you only get to use it for one of those options.

Another interesting comparison to make here would be in the sharp player interaction.  Being the good little worker placement games that they are, both designs feature limited spaces and potential action blocking.  Where they differ is in how open, visible, and direct this competition is.  While Crystal Palace is certainly the more nasty and punishing of the two games—a feature I typically embrace with my icy heart—this nastiness is far too frequently a coincidental side-effect of a player’s main intentions rather than a direct attack on their victim.  An opponent can place a higher value dice at a site and block my low-value dice out of the benefit, but they merely went there because they need that site’s benefit, not necessarily because I deserved it.  On the other hand, Cryo has its players competing for majorities in the subterranean caverns, bumping each other off the 1st or 2nd place points.  Or another way to reduce their scoring potential is to weaken them at the source, sabotaging their pods at the stasis chambers before they can even pick them up from the board.  And one of my favorite features of Cryo is that it lets the players control the pacing of the game which can end with an early drone recall or an intentional sabotage of a player’s final pods stuck in stasis.  This sounds meaner, but in practice it is far less punishing, as the loss in points or progress is very incremental.  Despite Cryo being the milder of the two games, it does a much better job at harnessing the tension and rewarding the conflict between competitors.

Crucially, the return on investment is much stronger in Cryo where the teach is streamlined, the game lasts a mere 60-90 minutes, and the experience arcs nicely from start to finish.  In Crystal Palace, you have to slog through the rules dump before spending 2+ hours on a looping point quest over 5 rounds of 7 phases each. 

Finally, I found there to be a stark contrast of freedom and purpose between the two games.  Crystal Palace feels a bit like clambering uphill on a slip-and-slide while Cryo offers the explorative flexibility of a splash pad.  The resources and locations of Crystal Palace don’t matter, and may never matter, until you need to earn a specific resource to meet a specific cost or until you find that no other site nets you more points.  Furthermore, you’re spending half your actions simply trying to keep your head above the suffocating income waters.  Economic tightness is certainly an admirable quality, but I’ve found this to be a much more satisfying feature in games like Brass, Pipeline, or Age of Steam where you eventually claw your way out of poverty and into prosperity.  Crystal Palace never offers the big payoff for all that struggling and simply leaves you wondering at the purpose of it all.

Conversely, Cryo lets its players decide whether they are going to scrape by on resources to gun for the early worms or invest in a dynamic engine of private actions, reliable salvage, and powerful upgrades.  Importantly, the five resources here don’t simply feel like different-colored hoops to jump through for points.  Every resource has a an essential, unique purpose: organics for rescuing your crew, tech for upgrades and vehicles, crystals for fuel, nanites for flexibility, and energy for transportation.  No action feels as though it is done in the service of blatant points, except for the competition for cavern majorities, but this feature is more an interesting tug-of-war rather than another bland bite of a point salad.

To put it simply, where Crystal Palace feels like cobbled, point-mongering complexity for complexity’s sake, Cryo offers much more game for players to savor beyond the mere efficiency puzzles at play… all this at half the time investment!  I’ll be the first to admit that Crystal Palace features the more innovative mechanisms.  But Cryo stands as proof for why the complete package matters much more than the fancy wrappings.

Current rating: 7.5/10

The Red Cathedral

1 Play

There’s something to be said for a slim box that packs a punch.  The Red Cathedral contains no wasted space and just the right size of functional, solid, and pretty components in its box.  

The decision space and complexity feel just right as well.  Players are aiming to help construct the Red Cathedral through three possible options each turn: 1) staking their claim on specific sections, 2) collecting the necessary resources, or 3) delivering resources to construct and decorate the building.  These options offer a nice mix of strategy and tactics—strategy on the Cathedral where staking your claim on construction cards and decorations can mean all the difference in endgame column majorities; tactics on the board where the rondel of ever changing dice present enticing opportunities of collections and combos.

Claiming construction cards early has its benefits, as you can block out opponents from heavily competing against you in big scoring columns.  Yet the downside is twofold: whenever an opponent completes a section above your unfinished card, you take a minor hit of negative points; also, claiming a card comes with a now-or-never option of paying for a workshop tile that will improve your resource engine for the rest of the game.  In the early stages of the game, money is tight and the construction claiming opportunities are plentiful, and as the game progresses onward these two things tend to flip-flop in their availability.  The constant tug-of-war between these two incentives is a nice touch, and the same can be said for decorating the finished sections of the cathedral.

If I save up for one purple and one green jewel and spend my entire turn decorating one card, I can score three massive prestige points while I improve my majority standing in that column.  Yet each card can only hold one decoration tile, and opponents can quickly and cheaply block me out of the big majority points by ignoring the jewels and throwing down multiple decoration tiles at once.

The resource collection rondel offers enough of a dynamic twist to the standard Euro formula to keep players on their toes.  Pick a die and move it a number of spaces equal to its current value, then collect the resource at that space equal to its current value, then re-roll all the dice in that space.  While that’s the core novelty, there are plenty of other interesting wrinkles to pad out the satisfaction including a beneficial influence card in the quadrant where your die stops, an engine building player board where you can gain unique benefits for moving specific dice colors, and the option of paying money to move your color die or the white die even further along the rondel.

It’s important to keep an eye on the shifting opportunities that each die presents, even if you were planning to spend your next action on the cathedral cards rather than the board, because otherwise you may miss out on a lucrative turn featuring a resource or point dump.  This strong tactical flavor to Red Cathedral is a double-edged sword, as it can also slow down the pace and frustrate certain gamers who don’t like rolling great opportunities for the next opponent’s turn.

While the package comes together nicely into an enjoyable, crunchy Euro, The Red Cathedral struggles to keep its pacing and length as compact as its production.  With a group of players who don’t think too hard or overanalyze the most optimal option on their turn, this one is likely to make for a fast and fun experience.  On the other hand, if even one player struggles to quickly process the frequently changing board state, the game will start to drag out and lose its luster.  Unlike other tactical games with longer downtimes, such as Pax Pamir, The Red Cathedral doesn’t quite merit the frequent hiccups on the flow of play.  This design does not put the spotlight on your opponents’ turns, so like many efficiency Euros, the downtime here acts as a pesky, disruptive advertisement break rather than engaging entertainment.

Finally, I’m not sure I see this one holding up with repeated plays.  The variety here between each play has a bit of a Taco Bell vibe, meaning the same ingredients are rearranged into an experience with a unique label that ultimately ends up tasting roughly the same.  I can’t say for sure, as I’ve only played this once, but I’ve played enough games of this style to have my suspicions.

Regardless, The Red Cathedral is unquestionably an above-average Euro, an enjoyable challenge to discover, and very likely to entertain newcomers despite its shortcomings. Plus, it comes with plenty of bags!

Current Rating: 6.5/10

We are now mere days away from the launch of the Criminal Capers Collection on August 10! You can head over to our pre-launch page and sign up to be notified by Kickstarter the moment it launches. And in the meantime, why not check out our How to Play and Play-through Videos for Soda Smugglers? These will really give you a feel for what game 1 in the Criminal Capers Collection plays like.

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post Candid Cardboard: 1st Impressions of Cryo, Juicy Fruits, The Red Cathedral, Nidavellir: Thingvellir, & Crystal Palace appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Welcome back to Tabletop Tastes: My favorite flavors in board games! This is a series where we spend each episode diving deep into an essential element of game design. For hobbyist gamers, this series will help you to explore your own tastes in the hobby and perhaps discover your next favorite game that fits those tastes. For game designers, this series will offer you more tools to add to your utility belt and metrics to measure your projects by. 

If you missed the previous episode, then go on and check out Tabletop Tastes #13: Purposefully Potent Meanness.

If board games are like a tall glass of ice water, then replayability is the thirst that keeps me coming back for more gulps.  Without that thirst, forcing yourself to drink more water (or replay a board game) can be tough to do.  It’s important for a game to introduce unique wrinkles, dynamics, or challenges to keep the experience refreshing.

Lack of replayability is one of the most common causes of death in my collection.  It’s like the heart disease of board gaming.  It can go easily undetected through the marketing, reviews, and initial plays all the way until play two or five or ten comes around, and suddenly the game just keels over dies right on the table.  Usually, the symptoms suddenly come on mid-game when you find yourself far less engaged than before, experiencing deja vu from previous plays.  Let’s explore some of the ways that games have succeeded and failed at fighting this disease.

One of my first board game conventions was at Origins in Columbus, Ohio.  During this convention, I had the chance to sit down and play a full game of Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done.  I was quickly swept up in the fancy production and novel mechanism of using a Mancala-style rondel to build up and execute actions.  This cyclical puzzle is combined with a more standard player-board engine builder that allows players to travel across the map and claim territories and bonuses with increasingly more powerful actions.  The novel experience was further enhanced by simple rules, brisk pacing, and a surprisingly succinct playtime.  From that one play, I was eager to enjoy Crusaders more, so I brought home my own copy.

We proceeded to play it only 3 more times over the course of a year, and despite the huge stretches of time between plays, I couldn’t quite find the refreshment I was looking for.  The problem was that every game felt like it played out in basically the same way.  Anything you do earns you points, and the map is too wide open for opponents to get in each other’s ways.  By the time I logged my fourth play, I was already tired of retreading the same path.

Another engine builder that is still going strong after even more plays is Roll for the Galaxy (and Race for the Galaxy).  This game is packed with a wide variety of paths and challenges thanks to the emerging planets and technologies that come from a huge draw pile.  This game also provides several core strategies you can select to build up a point generator.  Race & Roll for the Galaxy force their players to develop their strategies and adapt on the fly as cards come out or tiles emerge and dice are rolled.  You’re constantly weighing the relative value of your options against each other, deciding where to commit your resources and actions, and developing a unique tableau of benefits.  Thus, one play has never felt like another.

These refreshing sessions are what keep me coming back for more, while the lack of refreshment can quickly get a game booted from my collection.  Pendulum and Calico are two such games that quickly lost their luster for me, despite having strong starts.  Both games initially presented interesting and engaging challenges, the problem was that these challenges remained static from one play to the next.

Pendulum’s test is all about finding the most efficient route through the unchanging game board.  While unique player mats may start at different strategic locations, their optimal paths seem to always merge very early in the game to make for a samey experience.  Being a low interaction and low variance game, with enough practice the puzzle begins to feel solvable.  

Calico likewise had us quickly finding our strategic niche.  It doesn’t provide enough reasons for one to budge from an optimal strategy, and thus began to feel stale over time.  Plays one and two were fresh, interesting, and thinky.  Play three felt no different from the first two.  The problem is that I felt I had maximized my skill potential in this solitaire game, and any future plays will simply be retreading the same ground.

You’ll notice that all three games that lacked replayability at my table share a common thread: they provide minimal player interaction.  All three games see players living in their own little world, with heads down and brains steaming as they strive to calculate and execute the most efficient plays.  Rarely do you have a reason to care what other players are up to.  Opponents merely serve as occasional inconveniences to your own plans—bumps in in the unchanging road—rather than major factors that cause massive detours or major shifts in one’s strategy and tactics.

When the challenge boils down to player vs. game, the design carries all of the burden of keeping things interesting and fresh from one play to the next.  Without plenty of variable tricks up its sleeve or dynamic effects within mechanisms, it’s all too easy for a solitaire game to quickly feel solvable.

Speaking of solitaire solvability, I’ve seen one saucy game solve this problem far better any other… That game is My City.  Indeed, one of my Top Games of 2020, and my all-time favorite Polyomino Game.  THIS is how you do multiplayer solitaire.  Simultaneous play.  Evolving, legacy-style sessions.  Interesting new challenges layered on to each successive play.  Providing catch-up mechanisms for those who fall behind in the overall objective while ramping up the difficulty for those who pull ahead.  Not once during my TWENTY-FOUR plays did I think to myself, “Well, this is getting a little old.”  Let us, once again, take notes from the legendary Dr. Knizia’s work!  

Of course, I’ve found far more games solve the issue of replayability by simply baking the infinitely dynamic factor of player interaction into the core design.  Cutthroat and meaningful player interaction are the reasons why Caylus 1303 and Azul remain on my shelf while, the lack thereof is why Pendulum and Calico quickly left them.  I can introduce the former games to different people and instantly have a new challenge of adapting to their unique play style.  And with experienced players, I have to constantly up my game as we surf the meta of play from one session to the next.  As I mentioned in my tabletop tastes episode on salty player interaction: a game with high player interaction is a game with high replayability and balance built right into its core system.

One final interesting example to explore is between two games from the same designer, Andreas Steding.  These games are Gugong and Hansa Teutonica.

The interesting gift mechanism is where Gugong really shines.  In order to take an action at what is essentially a worker placement spot, one must exchange the card at that location with a higher value card in their hand.  The numbers go from 1-9, and a 9 can only be replaced with a 1.  

Players must decide the best order and location to play out these cards, and the limitations surrounding how and when you can play them are the beating heart of this clever worker placement game.  Gugong entices you with a constant stream of good reasons to exchange one gift for another…. the action locations, the card actions, the destiny dice, the cards available to claim, the cheap action opportunities, barring other players from an action, etc.  It’s an exquisite flow of sneaky cultural corruption across a well-balanced expanse of interesting options.

After hearing my enthusiasm for this concept, it may surprise you to also hear that I quickly got rid of Gugong from my collection.  My main issue with Gugong is that after three plays, it already started to feel samey to me.  By session three, I had dabbled in every strategy that the game offers and determined my personal optimal way to play the game.  While my approach to the game is tactical and fluid, I had no reason to change my approach.  This considerably dampened my interest in exploring the game further.

The second biggest issue is that several of the “worker placement” action spaces are considerably less interesting than others.  These different spaces are essentially multiple mini games globbed together into one larger worker placement game, but some of these mini games don’t compare favorably to others.  The travel action lacks tension and interaction (simply go forward or backward for your next bonus), the jade action lacks heart (pay cubes for some points), the intrigue action feels dull (move your marker up a tiebreaker track).  Basically, the ship action and wall action are more dynamic and engaging… making the others look flat in comparison.  Contrast this with something like A Feast for Odin, which has dozens more action spaces that are nearly all enticing and rewarding, and Gugong’s disguised issue becomes more apparent.

So if I want to have the most fun with Gugong, I’m stuck with my increasingly stale go-to strategy.  And then mixing it up with other strategies results in a less engaging affair.  When a game traps me between these two options, I’d much rather just pick a more replayable game like Mr. Steding’s Hansa Teutonica.

With Hansa Teutonica, strategic options are less like the mixed results buffet of Gugong and more like the opportunistic Hunger Games.  If many of my opponents are tangled up in the chaotic Cornucopia of upgrades, that may be the perfect time for me to stealthily snake my trade network across the board or lie in wait to pounce on their plans when their backs are turned.  Depending on the group dynamics, I can be a trading post point leech, a meddlesome route-infesting merchant, an all-powerful ability glutton, or a combination of those things.  Yet these options are not equally weighted; their effectiveness depends on how long players allow the game to go.  It’s much better to gun for the upgrades when you expect to have enough late-game turns for your meaty engine to pay off.  

With each new play of Hansa Teutonica, I find myself better able to read the game state and adapt accordingly.  Yet my regular gaming group improves their abilities as well, thus the punches and counter-punches are ever evolving.  Far more than Gugong, Hansa is a game whose depth increases with its players’ experience.  

The thrill of new challenges, the engagement of evolving narratives, the joy of unexpected discoveries….  These are the elements that keep a tabletop game refreshingly replayable.  Yet there are still plenty of games worth trying even when they have a very obvious and limited lifespan, especially when they are the best in their genre.

Tune in next time for Tabletop Tastes #15: Savage Spoilers.

More refreshingly replayable games:

• Highly variable setups/game states: Sidereal Confluence, Root, Pax Pamir (Second Edition), The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Sprawlopolis, Curious Cargo.
• Drastically different depending on your group: Chinatown, The Estates, Men at Work, Scape Goat, Wavelength, Cosmic Encounter.

What games are the most replayable in your collection?

Article written by Nick Murray. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

The post Tabletop Tastes #14: Refreshing Replayability appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Welcome back to Tabletop Tastes: My favorite flavors in board games! This is a series where we spend each episode diving deep into an essential element of game design. For hobbyist gamers, this series will help you to explore your own tastes in the hobby and perhaps discover your next favorite game that fits those tastes. For game designers, this series will offer you more tools to add to your utility belt and metrics to measure your projects by. 

If you missed the previous episode, then go on and check out Tabletop Tastes #12: A Balanced Diet.

Unpleasantly Surprised

Remember the glory days of your elementary school cafeteria?  Lunch periods spent eating unappetizing foods from questionable sources while longingly eyeing your friends’ lovingly homemade lunches?  At least that’s how I remember it.

One school lunch memory in particular always gives me a chuckle.  My friend was munching on potato chips out of a zip-lock bag from home.  He offered me the bag, and the chips appeared to be your average, everyday Lays.  I reached in, grabbed a couple, and popped them in my mouth with a crunch.  That’s when the unexpected blast of vinegar hit my unsuspecting taste buds.  In the next instant, I was spitting out the horrifying flavor, rinsing my mouth with water, and crying tears of fury at the cruel prank my friend had played on me.

Was it really a cruel prank?  No, but I had never tried a Salt & Vinegar potato chip, and vinegar can taste like a potent pranking flavor when it’s unexpected and unfamiliar.  Funnily enough, two decades later I often find myself opting for those tasty salt & vinegar chips over all the other options in the potato chip aisle.  These days, whenever I’m having myself a good sub sandwich, salt & vinegar chips just hit the spot!

While salt & vinegar chips have stayed the same, my preference for them dramatically transformed over the years.  The reasons for this boil down to expectation, purpose, and an acquired taste.  And just like that sneaky, bold vinegar flavor, one can quickly come to crave meanness in board games, especially when it is purposeful, potent, and expected.

It’s Not Easy Being Mean

So let’s explore these key elements of meanness a bit more.  Meanness in games is related but not limited to a mechanism known as “take that.”  Take that is defined by Board Game Geek as the following:

“Competitive maneuvers that directly attack an opponent’s progress toward victory, but do not directly eliminate any characters or components representing the opponent. Such mechanics include stealing, nullifying, or force-discarding of an opponents resources, actions, or abilities. A take-that maneuver often results in a dramatic change in the players’ position of power over a relatively short period of time.”

BoardGameGeek.com

Take that mechanisms get an understandably bad rap from many hobbyist gamers.  Playing a pointlessly mean game is like drinking a tall glass of vinegar… there is simply no context or reason to have such potency.  One glass of vinegar game that comes to mind is Cover Your Assets or its younger sibling, Cover Your Kingdoms.  The crux of the game is this:

Players are collecting sets of cards into their personal public stashes by playing sets directly from their hands.  But here’s the thing… On my turn, I can take that nice set of cards on top of your stash unless you get lucky and have more of those cards in your hand to block my attempt (and thereby absorb my attack card and your defense card into your stash).  Suppose I’m victorious at snatching away your set, now gloating over my newest prized possessions; well the victory is short lived, because soon somebody else is going to take that same set of cards from me unless I get lucky and nobody else has that card type right now.  So I’m hoping to cover up that set with more and more layers of different sets.  Ultimately, we’ll just mindlessly draw and steal points back and forth, typically with some players losing every set they ever play, until Lady Luck randomly gives someone the biggest pile and the game finally ends.

Cover Your Assets shamelessly wallows in its own mean mud, yet its mud-slinging gameplay feels like throwing mud just for the sake of throwing mud.  The novelty of thievery quickly grows old and agitating.  It blatantly abuses the potency of maliciousness and sours the flavor for everyone.  Cover Your Assets is merely the tip of the iceberg of lazy, mass market designs that have plagued game shelves and web pages across major retail chains.  The truth is that the proper implementation of vinegary meanness into a design dish requires great skill and effort.

Cranky Bus Drivers

Bus, the classic network building game from the legendary Splotter Spellen that was recently refreshed by Capstone Games, is a textbook example of how to properly use potent meanness in a board game.  The game is deeply entrenched in player interaction and cutthroat strategy, with not a speck of luck to be found anywhere within its box.  Each round consists of a worker placement phase followed by an action resolution phase.  Participants seek to expand their own bus routes in a quest to transport passengers.  Points come sparingly and are only earned by moving a passenger to their desired destination.

Thus far, nothing about this design sounds particularly mean, but the meanness stems from the restrictions of the gameplay.  When there are only three passengers along your route and one of them is already at their desired destination, things get interesting as you realize that the remaining two passengers are up for grabs between you and any opponents whose routes reach those same meeples.  Your crafty plans can quickly crumble as opponents plot to snatch those bus riders away.  When you find yourself in a round where competitors are set up to score big and leave you in the dust, your best bet might be to stop time.  

That’s right, Bus has a single worker placement space that gives a player the decision to stop time.  While your opponents gleefully set themselves up for a huge turn of delivering passengers to work, you can sneak out the back door into another dimension and cause those same passengers to want to stay at home for another round.  Suddenly, all of the actions your opponents took to set themselves up to rake in the points will be for naught.  The key rule that keeps this especially nasty action from being overly abused is that by stopping time, you take a time stone worth negative 1 point and march the game one step closer to a premature ending where the space-time continuum implodes.  In a game where 10 points is a common final score, losing even a single point to a time stone makes one hesitate to mess with their friends unless absolutely necessary.

So while Cover Your Assets hides its shallow brutally within the shadows of Lady Luck, letting her spring out and blindside victims, Bus lays its meanness all out in the open and gives it substance.  The game board of Bus is completely readable as player’s intentions are manifest by the placement of their workers.  This element of expectation is another key aspect of properly placed brutality.

All or Nothing

The unexpected feeling of having your precious valuables stomped to pieces or ripped from your grasp is much like the sensation of biting into a potato chip and tasting an unwelcome blast of vinegar.  Games that contain such unpleasantries include Citadels and Catan.  In Citadels, players are seeking money to build buildings for points, and this is aided by charactes cards that are secretly drafted each round.  Two of the eight characters are particularly meddlesome, namely the Assassin and Thief.  The Assassin sees its selector naming another character of the 7 possible options, and if any player happened to select that character then they lose their entire turn.  The Thief follows a similar structure, except it steals away a random player’s gold rather than their turn.

The skip-a-turn effect of the Assassin harkens back to household names including Uno and Phase 10.  Despite it’s common use, this is perhaps the absolute worst form of take-that ever conceived.  It’s a mechanism that shoots itself in the foot by actively restricting participants from actually playing the game.  At least with cards games like Uno and Phase 10, the turns typically go fast enough to quickly get to your next unskipped turn.  Citadels, on the other hand, is much more punishing thanks to a longer downtime.

The Thief character is also unimaginatively brutal.  When someone sabotages your plans, you often never expect it or see it coming (unless you are clearly in the lead), so there is no bracing yourself for impact.  And after you’ve been ground down to dust and rubble, there is no major opportunity to gain sweet revenge or make an epic comeback.  What results is a higher occurrence of wasted turns, which is one of the quickest ways to disengage players.  This is also a problem we touched on previously with Catan, which is amplified by the dreaded robber which freezes production in an area and likewise involves thievery of cards.

While Citadels and Catan both contain ill-informed meanness, Tournament at Avalon is an even crueler game, but it harnesses its cruelty to delightful effect.  I reviewed this trick-taking game last year and touched upon how players spend each trick beating on one person like a piñata that spills out increasingly insane vengeance upon its attackers until one piñata finally splits in two. 

The beauty of being the victim in Tournament at Avalon is that rather than stripping the fun away with skipped turns or stolen resources, those who take the biggest hits receive the best weapons for the following rounds.  The players in last place are blessed with Godsend cards to help them enact revenge while clawing their way back to the lead.  Furthermore, the design gives way for competitors to make clever and defensive plays against would-be attackers.  If I lead with a low value card, I understand the risk I am taking in that my opponents may be able to pile on higher value cards and force me to claim a trick of nasty hits.

The Fun of Playing with Fire

Take that mechanisms don’t feel so carelessly tacked on when the punishment is the result of strategic conflict or pushing one’s luck too far.  One of the all-time classic worker placement games, Caylus (more recently reimplemented as Caylus 1303), understands the fun of taking big risks among nasty opponents.  This design features a winding path of ever growing worker placement actions that are built by players throughout the game.  

While the expanding tail end of this path has the best possible actions, placing your workers on these spots is always the most risky.  That dirty, rotten scoundrel known as the Provost starts each round near the tail end, and players have the option to invest in moving him forward or backward along the trail.  Wherever he stops at the end of the round is the cutoff for eligible actions, meaning that any spots where you placed your workers that are outside of the limit of the Provost become a waste!  Wise players will jump at the more valuable tail-end actions when they are prepared to hold off the Provost or when they see opponents are also invested in tail-end spaces.

While positive player interaction is a great way to keep participants engaged, it can’t quite replicate the tension, drama, and range of emotions that come with negative player interaction.  The key is that potent meanness, much like vinegar, works best when it is purposeful and expected.  Tossing a whopping dollop of cruelty onto the occasional card or lazily serving it up in a tall glass of meaningless mechanisms will merely continue to repel players from the better games that exemplify its virtues.

Speaking of tall glasses, nothing quite hits the spot quite like a refreshing beverage to a parched throat.

Continue on to Tabletop Tastes #14: Refreshing Replayability

More scrumptiously nasty games:

• For players with Icy Hearts: The Estates, Tammany Hall, Lords of Vegas, Bristol 1350, Stick ‘Em, Watergate, Age of Steam
• Cute games that Bite: Azul, Renature, Love Letter, Arboretum, Root

What are your favorite mean games?

Article written by Nick Murray. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

The post Tabletop Tastes #13: Purposefully Potent Meanness appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Welcome back to Tabletop Tastes: My favorite flavors in board games! This is a series where we spend each episode diving deep into an essential element of game design. For hobbyist gamers, this series will help you to explore your own tastes in the hobby and perhaps discover your next favorite game that fits those tastes. For game designers, this series will offer you more tools to add to your utility belt and metrics to measure your projects by.

If you missed the previous episode, then go on and check out Tabletop Tastes #11: Filling Turns.

Shameless Pride and Questionable Diets

Have you ever been unreasonably proud of an accomplishment that you should instead be ashamed of?  

For me, these pitifully proud accomplishments would include things like breaking 150 hours of playtime on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, eating some form of ice cream every day for a week straight, and being only 6 minutes late to work.

Another shameless accomplishment that I remember fondly occurred during my years in Junior High School.  It was seemingly a day just like any other until I found myself snacking on s’mores ice cream late in the evening and realized something truly magical had happened that day: I had consumed FOUR different kinds of s’mores flavored products in a single day.  Kelloggs s’mores cereal for breakfast, a s’mores Chewy granola bar for a snack, a s’mores Pop Tart after school, and s’mores ice cream for dessert.  Now before you go judging 14-year-old Nick, you need to understand that s’mores cereal contains ELEVEN vitamins and minerals.  I’m sure that completely changes how this all looks to you…

So while I got away with such a sweet treat feat back in my glory days, one can presume that this diet would quickly wreck an average human’s health and energy, even after only a few days.  I still love me a good s’mores flavored treat, but I try to keep a more balanced diet from one day to the next.  It’s amazing how different your body can feel when eating constant junk food compared to fresh, hearty, healthy food.

Cooperative Design – A Balancing Act

Balance is likewise important in board games, where an experience can quickly feel wrecked by a lack thereof.  Last episode, we talked about how Pandemic provides filling turns while another Pandemic-like game, Flash Point, struggles to satiate.  Well, Pandemic is again a great example to explore within the context of balance, particularly when compared with its younger sibling, Forbidden Desert.

Forbidden Desert has a combination of a fun theme and simple rules that plants itself firmly in the family-friendly, gateway game category.  It brings out the theme well as players thirstily, blindly, & desperately search the desert in a scramble to assemble a rescue machine before time runs out.

With this Forbidden series, the designer, Matt Leacock, shamelessly recycles the mechanisms of his legendary classic, Pandemic, to morph the system into a different theme.  Of course many cooperative designers do (and rightly should) take inspiration from Pandemic, so you can’t blame Mr. Leacock for doing this very thing.

The issue with Forbidden Desert is that it copies Pandemic’s recipe but leaves out one critical ingredient: difficulty balance.  In Pandemic, the game gets increasingly harder as time passes because more infection cards are drawn per turn.  This is mitigated by the cycling infection cards being predictable and by players being able to get stronger and increase their turn efficiency: they place buildings, eradicate diseases, and increase the cards in their hands.  Meanwhile, in Forbidden Desert, more “bad” cards per turn are drawn as the game progress, but players are not able to proportionally mitigate these problems.

Every experience that I’ve had playing Forbidden Desert follows the same course of multiplying piles of sand tokens that increasingly bog down each player’s turn effectiveness until they are finally put out of their misery in crushing defeat. With Forbidden Desert, what you end up with is a poor Pandemic copy-cat that much more frequently spirals out of control because of luck of the draw.  In Pandemic, you can usually blame yourselves for losing the game.  In Forbidden Desert, you’re usually blaming the game for losing the game; and more often than not, you’re losing the game.

Balance for Blandness

I’m perfectly fine with punishing games and challenging experiences, but Forbidden Desert just feels broken and unbalanced when compared to the superior Pandemic.  Yet there is something to be said for having too much balance in a diet—devoid of indulgent entrees or divine desserts—or too much fairness in a game.  Cole Werhle explains this issue best in his GDC talk about Kingmaking, his Ludology podcast interview about fairness, and his Dicebreaker interview about prioritizing “good” over “fun” in game design.  

In short, games that are devoid of “unfair” moments are games that frequently lack memorable, dramatic, and interesting experiences.  Cole explains further: 

“So a lot of event decks, the more you play, the more they are in development, they get milder and milder and milder. Because what they’re doing is they’re optimizing for fun and they’re optimizing against ‘feel bad’ moments.

“From my own design aesthetic, both of those things are horrible things to optimize for. Whenever I am working at Leder, we have friends in or people are visiting or working on games, if ever people start talking about ‘fun’ or ‘feel bad’, I’m like, ‘No, you can’t use those words.’ Because we’re not trying to make the game fun. We’re trying to make the game good. So ‘fun’ to me is this word that doesn’t really mean anything. Games have this massive emotional range – why would you want to make the game just about the giggles?  You could do that too but, when you’re optimizing for it, you’re going to remove a lot of the character of the project.”

Dicebreaker interview with Cole Werhle

The Merits of External Balance

So how do games keep healthy balance in harmony with dynamic character?  Cole’s most famous design, Root, is a great place to look.  This woodland war between deeply asymmetric creatures is an emotional roller coaster packed to the brim with overpowered maneuvers and unfair situations.  Despite this frequently unstable game state, the design allows for players to keep runaway leaders in check or boost lagging losers upward by forming enemies and forging alliances.  Root puts its own balance into the hands of the players and allows them to dictate the scales of favor.  The beauty of a highly interactive game is that internal balance (within the design and rules) can move to the back seat and let external balance (player influence and interaction) do the driving.

One game that I’ve found to severely lack and desperately need external balance is Tapestry.  During our first few plays with it, we had a blast igniting its many combotastic chain-reactions that result from the endless combinations of asymmetric Civilizations, unique tapestry cards, diverse technology cards, and varied advancement tracks.  Yet the cracks began to show as these combos proved to be highly variable in their effectiveness and all too dependent upon luck-of-the-draw.  Furthermore, the design teases players with the idea of interaction on the large central map of the board yet sucks the bones of the area control mechanism dry until it feels like a crumbling afterthought.  

Imagine what a truly dynamic map could do to mend this seemingly broken design… A map where wars and alliances matter and lucky runaway combos can be kept in check by crafty adversaries.  The thought of what might have been saddens me for a game that has so much going for it.  I ultimately found that the more I consumed Tapestry, the more it made me feel sick to my stomach and long for more substantial games.  Much like an all s’mores diet, it fails to provide the proper balance of nutrients that my hobbyist cravings demand.

Of course, something as potent as a sugar infused s’mores feast can hit the spot when properly timed and expected.

Tune in next time for Tabletop Tastes Episode 13: Purposefully Potent Meanness.

Other great games that contain balanced diets:

• Balanced strategy games: 7 Wonders, 7 Wonders Duel, Concordia, Brass: Birmingham, Beyond the Sun, Babylonia.
• Balanced cooperative games: The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Horrified, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, The Mind, Sprawlopolis.
• Games with heavy external balance: Pax Pamir (Second Edition), Inis, Tammany Hall, Cosmic Encounter, Lords of Vegas.

What games have you found to be finely balanced? Share with us in the comments below!

Article written by Nick Murray. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

The post Tabletop Tastes #12: A Balanced Diet appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Welcome back to Tabletop Tastes: My favorite flavors in board games! This is a series where we spend each episode diving deep into an essential element of game design. For hobbyist gamers, this series will help you to explore your own tastes in the hobby and perhaps discover your next favorite game that fits those tastes. For game designers, this series will offer you more tools to add to your utility belt and metrics to measure your projects by. If you missed the previous episode, then go on and check out Tabletop Tastes #10: A Dynamic Arc.

Columbus, Ohio is a fantastic city for foodies.  Back when our family first moved there, we were constantly venturing out to interesting, unique, and popular local eateries.  We slowly discovered an entire collection of favorite restaurants that kept us returning for the four years we were around.  That doesn’t mean that every spot we tried was a hit…

I remember a couple hipster restaurants in particular that provided interesting cuisines but forgot that they were supposed to feed us!  We would order a standard item on their menu, pay the full price of a meal, and then receive a pitiful snack.  There are few worse feelings in this world than that of paying for a full meal and walking away still hungry.  Unsurprisingly, we never returned to these restaurants.

Just as important as a menu with filling meals is a board game with filling turns.  It’s one thing to leave players hungry for another session at the conclusion of a game.  It’s something entirely different to leave players unsatisfied from one turn to the next.  I recently touched upon the topic of fresh downtime and shared examples of Pax Pamir and Root as games that typically come with a lot of downtime but merit that long wait through satisfying turns and engaging downtime dynamics.  These games are comparable to waiting in a long line at a popular restaurant, but the wait is all worth it when you’re finally seated at the table having a King’s feast.

One game that recently struggled to provide me a similar turn feast between stretches of hungry downtime was Dune: Imperium.  From the creators of the smash-hit deck builder, Clank, Dune: Imperium blends together both deck builder and worker placement mechanisms in exciting new ways.  The brilliance of the game is how it often pits the rewards of deck building against the rewards of worker placement.  It may cost me a valuable card to place a worker into a matching, powerful space.  But if I don’t spend that card to place a worker, I can instead use it to acquire an even better card or other advantages at the end of the round.

Unfortunately, Dune: Imperium demands a level of downtime that I feel it doesn’t merit, at least at 4 players.  These dual layered mechanisms give participants twice as much to analyze, and it gets even slower when somebody claims the spot that another’s entire plan was built upon.  And even when my entire plan wasn’t blasted to smithereens, I often found myself waiting ages for play to go around the table only for me to do something as minuscule as place a worker and gain 1 water token.  When I already know this pitiful action is my best move at the end of my previous turn, that only makes the wait worse.

At least with Dune, I can see myself enjoying the game much more at a lower player count or with fast, experienced players where the downtime hunger is minimized.  I’m not sure I can say the same thing for Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

Flash Point is another off-brand Pandemic that paints a nice thematic picture but ultimately fails to justify its existence among the competition for me.  I get that this was one of the earlier Pandemic clones, but the formula is so overdone at this point that many cooperatives in this genre struggle to age well, including Flash Point.  My experience with this firefighting game revealed a messier design where players are much more likely to encounter useless turns.

A turn in Pandemic earns you extra cards into your hand as a bare minimum; furthermore, it allows you to improve the efficiency of your turns by building research centers, or you can prepare and plan ahead by trading cards or removing infection cubes.  Meanwhile, Flash Point tries to compensate for wasted turns by letting players carry over up to 4 unused actions, but that brings little comfort when you wait for play to go all the way around the table only for it to finally get back to you as you realize that the most useful thing to do is skip your turn.  Often, there is little space for strategic actions when the negative events are completely random (unlike Pandemic which is strategically predictable).

Furthermore, we played Flash Point at 6 players and that is the WORST idea the publisher ever had for this game.  Does the game work at 6 players?  Yes.  Does it work well?  Not at all.  If you want the game to be more difficult to win, then sure, have at the 6 player option.  But it’s a hollow challenge bump because everyone’s impact on game is reduced relative to the objectives.  This is where you get even more frequently useless turns that are even more punishing due to the increased downtime.  There is often no point in setting yourself up for your next turn as the game state is going to completely change by the time your next turn crawls around.

What’s the maximum player count on Pandemic?  FOUR.  It’s because the team behind Pandemic realized that any count higher than four made their game worse in every possible way.  Flash Point had the entire cheat sheet to work off of and yet it completely missed the memo.

Speaking of classics that struggle to be filling, Catan deserves a mention here.  Most of us have played Catan and can recall the painful rounds where Lady Luck leaves you high and dry and the dice rolls earn you nothing useful.  So when it finally comes back to your turn, you have almost nothing to show for all that downtime and nothing you can accomplish that round.  Fortunately, in the 25 years since its release, many games have shown us a better way than Catan’s inconsistent methods.

Concordia is my favorite Catan-killer.  Both games see players utilizing routes and building little wooden settlements onto a map.  In both cases, these settlements will earn players more resources from the map to help them build, expand, and compete for victory.  They are both rather easy to teach, yet Concordia contains much more depth to enjoy and explore.  Best of all, I can always expect a filling turn from Concordia.  This design rips control of the resource production from Lady Luck’s grasp and gives it to the players.  When an opponent decides to trigger production in the green region, that will also trigger production for you if you’ve built settlements there.  And whenever the quick, slick turns come back around to you, there is always an interesting and useful action to choose from your hand of cards.

Like a big, hearty meal that sends you home with a belly full of food and an armful of leftovers, the best games ensure that each player enjoys filling turns.  Of course, filling turns are better than empty stomachs, but the things you consume won’t don’t you much good if they aren’t part of a balanced diet.

Tune in next time for Tabletop Tastes #12: A Balanced Diet

More great designs that serve filling turns:

Critical Turns: Brass: Birmingham, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Age of Steam, Babylonia, El Grande, Undaunted, Bus.

Combotastic Turns: Curious Cargo, Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade, Blitzkrieg, That’s Pretty Clever, Five Tribes, Wingspan.

What are your favorite games with filling turns?

Article written by Nick Murray. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

The post Tabletop Tastes #11: Filling Turns appeared first on Bitewing Games.

All this talk of bananas and ice cream, yet not even a mention of banana splits?  How is this even possible?  Find out in this episode of Tabletop Tastes #10: the importance of A Dynamic Arc in board games.

Arc of the Ingestion

I have a confession to make: I can’t finish bananas.  Even though I enjoy peeling back a ripe one and diving in to those initial bites, I almost always hit a wall.  At some point I look down at those last few bites and my body suddenly tells me, “Please make it stop.”  I completely lose my appetite for the fruit and reluctantly end up tossing the remains in the trash.

Is this true for anybody else?  Am I crazy here?  How can something start out so enjoyable and prematurely end so unappetizing?  My theory is that it must be related to that mushy, potassium-induced sameyness that comes with each bite.  That’s right, I think each bite of a banana is too samey.  

Let’s contrast this repetitive banana with a nice, dynamic pint of ice cream.  Imagine with me a classic pint of Ben & Jerry’s.  Or perhaps the incomparable Jeni’s, my personal favorite brand of ice cream.  Either way, do you recall how the experience starts out?

First, you pry off the lid.  Second, you scrape the thin layer of ice cream from the top of the lid for a small, supple appetizer.  Third, you dive into the pint itself.  Having just taken the ice cream out of the freezer, you chip away at the rock hard surface for even the tiniest morsels of that frozen goodness.  It’s nearly too cold to even taste, but you don’t care, and you simply can’t be bothered with waiting for it to warm up.

But of course, over time the ice cream begins to soften up as you clutch the pint in your cold, hungry fingers.  The bites become bigger, softer, and more flavorful.  Soon, you’re taste buds are reading at maximum saturation as the temperature hits that beautifully sweet spot.

What’s this?  You’re nearing the bottom of the pint?  And the edges of the ice cream are melty and liquidized, yet dripping with deliciousness.  But you can’t allow the pint to get too melty!  No, time is of the essence, and this ice cream is ripe for the finishing.  What once was a slow, melodic waltz become a frenzying race to consume every last bite before it becomes too much of a drink.  Downward you go!  Digging, scraping, and slurping until finally… it is finished.  You’ve just completed a delectably satisfying arc of the pint.

Do you now see the difference between the banana and the pint of ice cream?  One is excruciatingly unchanging in its consumption, presenting nothing new or exciting or compelling to bring you back for another bite.  The other is dynamically satisfying in its consumptive journey, ramping up slowly, reaching a peak of perfection, then urging you beyond your stomach’s limitations in a downhill rush to the finish.

Arc of the Play

In this sense, the best board games are also like pints of ice cream, containing a dynamic and engaging arc.  Meanwhile, the games that are like bananas usually get the big boot from my collection.

One big banana game that I played in 2019 was Dead Man’s Cabal.  While it had interesting decisions and an eye-catching production, the biggest knock against our experience with it was simply how samey every round felt.  The central goal is to pick up and place out skulls that line up and meet the requirements of a point card.  There are of course other actions you can take and secondary points you can pursue, but nothing felt evolving.  We couldn’t get ourselves to play another game after our first go, as the cycle of using skulls to get point cards grew stale within a single play.

One of the masters of dynamic arcs is Reiner Knizia.  Typically, his games start out wide open.  “Place a tile anywhere, there are loads of good options!”  “Play any card from your hand, it’s hard to choose wrong!”  Yet as the tiles or cards start going out, you begin to see long-term strategies and short-term opportunities emerging for each player.  Like the curling liquid of the melting ice cream against the walls of the pint container, things start to get even more deliciously interesting.  Tile chains gather momentum, card types gain purpose, and decisions grow in importance.  Players never have enough actions that they desperately wish they could take on their turns, and they must clench their butt cheeks between turns as they pray that no opponent swoops in and snatches away the next golden opportunity.  In this sense, Reiner is like the Ben & Jerry’s of the board game industry.  His pints of play are consistently satisfying and evolvingly interesting from start to finish.

Another banana I recently discovered was Raiders of the North Sea.  While the game has a novel mechanism of placing a worker and picking up a worker to take your actions, this loop grew old for me over its 80 minutes of play.  Over the course of the game, players see themselves reaching more expensive action spaces and thereby raking in more points and resources.  But a ramp up in cost, points, and resources is like a bump in a sidewalk… hardly noticeable to the average cyclist who is looking for a thrill.  These superficial changes do little to differentiate the rounds of play.

Contrast this viking placement game to another one, A Feast for Odin.  Uwe Rosenberg’s sprawling viking Euro starts players off with something like negative 60 points on their personal boards that they must cover up over the course of the game.  The opening round starts off slow and methodical, with players earning a small handful of tiny tiles to help them cover up the first of many spaces on their boards.  Ironically, early game is often the best time to acquire another player board with even more negative points that must be covered.  

As the rounds march onward, players gain more vikings to spend on stronger and more numerous action spaces.  Animals, income, and bonuses have a snowball effect that helps players to accelerate their economy.  When the final round nears, the game becomes a race to cover every negative point that you’ve neglected the entire game as you greedily pursued the many other dangling carrots.  This arc that starts with precarious investments and baby step turns, snowballs into huge gains of tiles and profitable tile arrangements, and concludes with a race to maximize points and cover nasty spaces is an arc that keeps this relatively solitaire game dynamic and interesting throughout.

Designed with the Arc in Mind

From a design perspective, lack of a dynamic arc is one of the most consistent problems I’ve seen in some of my prototypes and other designers’ prototypes.  It can be easy to get lost in the minor problems, suggestions, and improvements amid a playtesting session.  But smooth gameplay and novel mechanisms can only carry a design so far.  I recently found myself offering up a bunch of random ideas after a playtesting another person’s design.  But toward the end of the discussion, I took a step back from my minor complaints and suddenly realized that they were all part of a bigger problem: a missing game arc.  If the designer could stay focused on giving the game a satisfying arc, then the obvious changes and best ideas would likely fall into place.

Perhaps the most visible form of a gameplay arc is an engine builder.  If players can feel their actions and choices are gaining momentum and value, then their engagement with game tends to grow in parallel to this progress.  Yet, like the countless flavors of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, there are plenty of other ways to give a game a dynamic arc:

• A race where the stakes ramp up as the finish line nears
• An evolving game board or player area where a network sprawls outward or the opportunities narrow inward
• The formation of shaky alliances to bring down the dominant leader
• The development of bitter rivals in competition for dwindling resources
• The unfolding of secrets and uncovering of information in a game of deduction
• Containing multiple acts in a single game

The possibilities go on yet the pattern for success is the same.  If the turns or rounds all feel roughly the same, then you have yourself a boring banana.  Good luck pitting that against a dynamic pint of ice cream.  Of course, if I’m hungry enough and the bland samey food is quite filling, then you might catch me eating it anyway.

Continue on to Tabletop Tastes #11: Filling Turns

More killer games with a dynamic arc:

Satisfying Engine Builders: Roll for the Galaxy, Race for the Galaxy, Viticulture, Great Western Trail, Sidereal Confluence, Concordia, Dice Forge, Taverns of Tiefenthal

Evolving Game Board: Crokinole, Carcassonne, Tigris & Euphrates, Babylonia, Through the Desert, Brass: Birmingham, Age of Steam, Lords of Vegas, Ethnos, Bus, Condottiere, Blitzkrieg!,

Raising Stakes: Inis, Downforce, Camel Up, Pandemic, Undaunted: Normandy, New York Zoo. Scape Goat, The Quest for El Dorado, Men at Work, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, The Estates, Last Bastion

Multi-Act Games: Blue Lagoon, For Sale, Mysterium, Insider, A Fake Artist Goes to New York

Evolving Player Areas: Patchwork, My City, Curious Cargo, Wingspan, Isle of Skye, Azul, Sagrada, Castles of Burgundy

Unfolding Secrets & Uncovering Information: The Search for Planet X, Bristol 1350, Cryptid, Loot of Lima, Treasure Island, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

Forming of Alliances and Rivalries: Root, Pax Pamir (Second Edition), Cosmic Encounter, Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy, The King is Dead

What are your favorite games with a dynamic arc?

Article written by Nick Murray. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

The post Tabletop Tastes #10: A Dynamic Arc appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Digitálna éra priniesla nespočetné možnosti zábavy priamo do našich domovov. Jednou z najpopulárnejších foriem sú interaktívne online platformy, kde hráči môžu skúmať rôzne hry a využívať špeciálne ponuky. Tieto prostredia kombinujú zábavu, súťaživosť a možnosť okamžitých odmien, čím oslovujú široké spektrum používateľov.

Platformy, ktoré ponúkajú bezpečné a prehľadné rozhranie, sú kľúčové pre pozitívny zážitok. https://www.slovakiaplay.sk/online-casino-paysafecard/ poskytujú hráčom transparentné podmienky a jednoduché možnosti platby, čo je základom dôveryhodného prostredia.

Pohľad odborníka
Podľa odborníka na digitálnu zábavu, Martina Kováča, je dôležité, aby si hráči vyberali platformy, ktoré kombinujú bezpečnosť, intuitívne ovládanie a rôznorodosť hier. “Efektívne využívanie týchto platforiem si vyžaduje vedomý prístup, ktorý minimalizuje riziká a maximalizuje zábavu,” hovorí Kováč.

Štatistiky a trendy
Nedávne prieskumy ukazujú, že viac ako 70% používateľov trávi pri online hrách 3–5 hodín týždenne. Rovnako až 60% hráčov preferuje platformy, ktoré ponúkajú flexibilné platobné možnosti a bonusové odmeny. Tieto čísla ukazujú, že dôvera a pohodlie sú pre používateľov kľúčové faktory pri výbere platformy.

Kľúčové kritériá pri výbere platformy

1. Bezpečnosť a licencie: Overené platformy s regulovaným prostredím minimalizujú riziko podvodov.
2. Prehľadnosť a jednoduchosť: Intuitívne rozhranie zvyšuje komfort a umožňuje lepšie sústredenie sa na zábavu.
3. Rozmanitosť hier: Široká ponuka hier uspokojí rôzne záujmy používateľov.
4. Bonusy a odmeny: Spravodlivé a transparentné odmeny motivujú hráčov a zvyšujú ich spokojnosť.

Tieto faktory pomáhajú používateľom vybrať si platformu, ktorá najlepšie zodpovedá ich potrebám a očakávaniam.

Typy hier a interaktívnych aktivít

• Hry s okamžitou výhrou: Ponúkajú rýchle odmeny a jednoduché pravidlá.
• Súťažné turnaje: Umožňujú porovnávanie zručností s inými hráčmi.
• Odmeny za vernosť: Platformy motivujú pravidelnú aktivitu prostredníctvom bodov a exkluzívnych ponúk.
• Tematické akcie: Sezónne alebo špeciálne udalosti pridávajú novú dynamiku a zvyšujú zábavu.

Správnym kombinovaním týchto možností môžu používatelia maximalizovať svoj zážitok a získať najviac z každého zapojenia.

Výhody používania renomovaných platforiem

• Jednoduché porovnanie dostupných ponúk a odmien.
• Prístup k detailným analýzam a trendom.
• Zvýšená efektivita pri rozhodovaní a zapojení.
• Bezpečné a regulované prostredie znižuje riziko problémov.

Používanie profesionálnych platforiem umožňuje účastníkom sústrediť sa na zábavu a zároveň optimalizovať svoje rozhodnutia.

Odporúčania odborníkov

1. Vyberajte platformy s jasnými a transparentnými pravidlami.
2. Venujte pozornosť licencovaným a overeným zdrojom.
3. Kombinujte rôzne typy hier a aktivít pre maximálny zážitok.
4. Sledujte nové trendy a aktualizácie, aby ste využili najnovšie ponuky.

Implementácia týchto odporúčaní zabezpečí, že každý používateľ dosiahne spokojnosť a zábavu s minimálnym rizikom.

Záver
Digitálna zábava prináša možnosti, ktoré sú flexibilné, zaujímavé a odmeňujúce. slovakiaplay.sk/online-casino-paysafecard/ poskytuje používateľom profesionálne prostredie, ktoré kombinuje bezpečnosť, prehľadnosť a rozmanitosť aktivít.

Vďaka platformám, ktoré poskytujú odborné porovnania a detailné analýzy, môžu používatelia optimalizovať svoje rozhodnutia a zažiť zábavu na najvyššej úrovni. Transparentné podmienky, flexibilné platobné možnosti a rôznorodosť hier sú kľúčom k pozitívnemu zážitku a dlhodobej spokojnosti.

Správnym využitím dostupných nástrojov a odborných odporúčaní môže každý používateľ zvýšiť efektivitu svojich rozhodnutí a dosiahnuť lepšie výsledky pri digitálnej zábave. V konečnom dôsledku tieto platformy transformujú spôsob, akým ľudia pristupujú k online zábave, čím zvyšujú jej hodnotu a kvalitu.

The post Moderné možnosti zábavy online: komplexný pohľad na digitálne hry appeared first on Bitewing Games.

It’s funny how just a little bit of time can turn fresh bread to stale, ripe berries into rotten, and a good egg salad to bad.  We’ve all tried to eat something that has lost its freshness, and the difference is usually too strong to ignore.

Likewise, a little too much downtime between your turns in a board game, or worse yet, useless downtime between turns, can make a game quickly feel stale.

Dominion is typically a game with minimal downtime… until it isn’t.  Add in enough players or increasingly combotastic decks and suddenly you might be waiting forever for others to draw and play their entire deck every time it is their turn.  This was my experience last time I played Dominion, and it made a new deck builder, Fort, all the more refreshing when I got the chance to try it.  

I’ve recently talked about how Dominion hasn’t aged well as more and more deck builders hit the market.  One of my least favorite parts about it is how I can play an entire game and never need to pay attention to anyone else’s turns.  It usually doesn’t matter to me what other players are doing on their turns, so when it’s a long wait between my own turns, the fun starts to get a little stale.

Fort solves this problem by giving players the opportunity to follow their opponents’ actions.  You must constantly decide whether to use a card from your hand to ride the coattails of other players or save it for your own turn.  This gives me even more to consider as I end my turn and draw my next hand, as I’m thinking about plan A and plan B options depending on what carrots my opponents dangle.

Potion Explosion reveals a similar downtime problem to Dominion, where all time between your turns is woefully meaningless and painfully slow.  Usually the best ingredient to pick is claimed by the current player, so planning out your choice beforehand is pointless.  Every turn starts with a brand new marble-rack state where the active player must analyze the new options while everyone else waits and stares into the void.

Jaipur is also a set collection drafting game with much less exciting components than potion tiles and sliding marbles on a rack.  Yet I’m always laser-focused on those spice points and fabric tiles and camel cards when my opponent is deciding what to take or play.  It helps that the turns in this 2-player game are so snappy.  But more than that, every turn that my opponent takes feels like they are reaching into my box of prized treasures and stealing them right out from under my nose.  Jaipur strikes a tense balance between risks and incentives, strategies and tactics, highs and lows, and it all hinges on what I choose to leave out for my opponent based on what I think they will do.  This is why Potion Explosion was booted from my collection while Jaipur holds a space within my shrine of stellar card games.

The worst kind of downtime is when it has minimal payoff.  I can play a game of Root or Pax Pamir where the downtime is fairly high, yet I treasure that time to be able to survey the game state and search for my best path forward.  I also respect the time my opponents take to make a move when the stakes are high and poor decisions can be ultra punishing.  But when a light, breezy game like Santa Monica waltzes onto my table and eats up seemingly just as much downtime, I begin to get impatient. 

In this cozy beach crafting game, the analysis-to-payoff ratio is far too high for me to excuse its sluggish pace.  Once again, you have a game where I couldn’t care less about what is going on with my opponents’ play areas, and the turns aren’t fast or remarkable enough to disguise the void of downtime.

I’ve found that the best way to combat downtime in a low interaction, low complexity game is either zippy turns or simultaneous play.  Games like 7 Wonders and Sushi Go have stayed popular for so long partially because everyone takes their turns at the same time.  Pick a card, play it, pass your hand, repeat!  Meanwhile, Reiner Knizia’s classic designs have staying power because the turns are quick and simple but they pack a punch. It’s a beautiful tempo for a game when you just want to get to the fun.

The best board games in the industry find ways to freshen or minimize their downtime. The most obvious ways to accomplish this include simultaneous play or zippy turns. Other designs, like the above mentioned Pax Pamir and Root, disguise their downtime by making the game captivating throughout or giving players plenty to think about in-between their turns.

Another way to freshen downtime is by embracing it! This can happen when other players’ turns are fun to spectate or strategically useful. Who doesn’t enjoy watching an opponent take on an interesting dexterity challenge? Likewise, witnessing a competitor’s turn as they give away juicy information in a deduction game can be highly rewarding.

Ultimately, nobody prefers to eat stale bread, rotten berries, and bad egg salads.  Similarly, gamers don’t want play games with stale, sluggish downtimes. But I suppose that exceptions can be made if the design brings balance to the universe with a clean setup and teardown.

Tune in next time for Tabletop Tastes #9: Clean Setup/Teardown

More great games with fresh downtime:

Simultaneous Play: Quacks of Quedlinburg, Taverns of Tiefenthal, Chinatown, Magic Maze, Captain Sonar, KLASK, Sidereal Confluence, Don’t Get Got, My City, Welcome To, Railroad Ink, Super Skill Pinball, QE, Race for the Galaxy, Just One, On Tour

Fun to Spectate: Crokinole, Men at Work, Junk Art, Skull

Useful Opponent Turns: Cryptid, Treasure Island, Downforce, Loot of Lima, That’s Pretty Clever, Bristol 1350, Spyfall, Scape Goat

Zippy Turns: Blue Lagoon, Azul, Blitzkrieg!, Bus, Ethnos, Irish Gauge, The Quest for El Dorado, Love Letter, Tournament at Avalon

Captivating Play: Camel Up, For Sale, Modern Art, Wavelength, Condottiere, The Crew, The Mind, The Estates, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, High Society, Isle of Skye, The King’s Dilemma, Mysterium, Ra

Thinky Downtime: Age of Steam, Brass Birmingham, Great Western Trail, Pipeline, Tigris & Euphrates, The King is Dead, Samurai, Inis, A Feast for Odin

What are your favorite games with a fresh downtime?

Article written by Nick Murray. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

The post Tabletop Tastes #8: Fresh Downtime appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Have you ever seen Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated masterpiece, Fantastic Mr. Fox?  What senses come to mind as you remember it? I’m betting that your brain is painting a scene of rich oranges, intricate landscapes, and detailed animals.  Perhaps your ears are gliding along to the tune of Alexandre Desplat’s stylized soundtrack. This is a movie that is not only enjoyable to watch, but it’s also a delight to see and hear.  Whenever I reencounter these unique sensations, they never fail to evoke the emotions and memories that the story provides.  Furthermore, these sensations always create a sense of longing within me… Longing to be there, to be a part of that whimsical world of mischievous wildlife.

I get the same feelings in the world of Cuphead.  This lovingly crafted video game packs so much personality and character into its art direction and soundtrack that I’m naturally drawn to it… despite its relentless efforts to break my will and destroy my soul with its mercilessly punishing challenges.  Only the creative genius within Cuphead can cause me to adore someone like Grim Matchstick the Dragon with all my heart and despise him with my whole soul at the same time.

I seriously doubt that Fantastic Mr. Fox would be one of my all time favorite movies and Cuphead would be one of my all time favorite video games if they didn’t have such evocative art.  Perhaps the same could be said of some of my favorite board games…

I don’t know how Leder Games did it, but they managed to create the most hypnotic box art of my whole library in their stunning game, Root.  For a long time, Root has been one of the few boxes on my bookshelf with its front side entirely on display. It’s not the most efficient way to store a game, but this one demands to be visually basked in, and who am eye to deneye it?!?  Whenever I sit in our living room in quiet reflection, I’ll often accidentally catch my eyes wandering in leisurely circles around its four cheeky critters as I soak in the gorgeous colors and charming details.  I’m naturally drawn to its cutthroat experience by the entire package of evocative art.

The same can be said for my absolute favorite game, Inis.  The thoughtful color scheme and standout art style serve as a perfect seasoning to the delicious gameplay.  Even something as simple as the card backs just hit the sweet spot for me.

Scythe is another rather amusing example in our household.  My wife does not enjoy playing Scythe.  She can’t stand the ploddingly complex strategery.  I eventually gave up on convincing her to play it, as I knew she just wouldn’t enjoy herself.  So you can imagine my absolute shock when one day she requested that we order prints of Scythe’s gorgeous art to hang on our walls.  Despite her negative feelings towards the game, she couldn’t resist the pull of the art.

I submit that evocative art is one of the most powerful tools that a board game publisher can possibly use.  Just think of how much effort it takes to muster your desire to play a good game that is gorgeous compared to a good game that is ugly.  What makes me hungry to play an unattractive game like El Grande, Castles of Burgundy, or Puerto Rico? I have to stretch and strain my arms of memory as I struggle to grasp at slippery ideas such as clever mechanisms and interesting strategies.  Contrast this with Scythe or Inis or Root: I simply have to look at a box on my shelf, or a painting on my wall, or a picture online, and I’m already salivating at the idea of playing them again. Evocative art not only enhances the experience, but it sweetens and strengthens the memories too.

Over the last seven blog posts, we’ve explored my absolute favorite flavors in board games:  spicy objective tension, salty player interaction, savory thoughtful production, crunchy meaningful decisions, juicy theme-inspired mechanisms, crisp elegance, and sweet evocative art.  Glob them all together, and perhaps you’ll understand the reasoning behind my top 50 games or my most anticipated new-to-me games.  Yet, I’m sure that there are even more hidden essential ingredients to be found across an array of games that cause my gaming taste buds to dance with delight.  

Thus concludes my series, Tabletop Tastes: My favorite flavors in board games. Thanks for following along! Of course, I’m bound to acquire some more tastes as time passes. So perhaps we’ll have to continue the series some day… UPDATE: It’s your lucky day! The series continues with Episode 8: Fresh Downtime.

LOOKING FOR MORE SWEET GAMES WITH EVOCATIVE ART? WHY NOT INDULGE IN ONE OF THESE:

• Clean, Minimalist Art: Insider, Startups, Onitama
• Functional Art: Mysterium, Dixit, Codenames: Pictures
• Charming Art: Railroad Ink, Takenoko, Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig
• Jaw-Dropping Art: PARKS, Wingspan, Tokaido
• Theme-Inducing Art: Welcome To, Brass: Birmingham, Dinosaur Island
• Bold Box Art: Oceans, Azul, Modern Art

What are your favorite flavors in board games?

The post Tabletop Tastes #7: Sweet Evocative Art appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Elegance is a word that we gamers love to toss around like a baseball at the park.  Perhaps we are guilty of overusing this word and stretching it to fit all shapes and sizes (myself included).  Yet, it’s hard to argue with the appeal of an elegant game. But what is elegance, anyway?  What does it look like?  How does it feel?

If I had to really put my finger on it, I would say that…. gazelles are elegant.  Hot air balloons are elegant. Humpback whales are elegant. Banana splits are elegant.  Why? Well, they have majestic, balanced, brilliant, smooth dignity about them. That’s elegance, right?

So how are board games elegant?  To me, an elegant board game has simple gameplay with intricate ramifications.  They’re a tidy wardrobe on the outside and a world of Narnia on the inside. They’re a puddle from above and Atlantis from below.  They minimize the bookkeeping and maximize the strategizing. They contain low complexity rules with high complexity consequences. Let’s talk about some examples…

Dr. Reiner Knizia is extremely skilled at crafting this kind of thing.  One of his newer designs, The Quest for El Dorado, is a game that combines deck building with racing across a map.  This combination alone should theoretically result in a mess of rules, yet he somehow managed to cram almost everything you need to know about the rules onto tiny player boards.  I can hand a newcomer one of these player boards and teach them the rules in the blink of an eye.  Before we know it, we’ll all be scrambling across the wilderness seeking the fastest path to El Dorado in a tense and engaging game with so many hidden complexities tucked away behind a streamlined experience.

Dr. Knizia was accomplishing this same style of elegance decades earlier with games like his famous masterpiece, Tigris & Euphrates.  This game, once again, contains almost everything you need to know on the back of each player shield.  Your options boil down to 4 simple actions: place a tile, position a leader, replace tiles from your hand, place a catastrophe tile.  Where things get wild is that the simple act of placing a tile or leader can bring about massive wars, dramatic revolts, huge payoffs, strategic divides, lucrative monuments, and much more.  Thanks to the simplicity of the actions, players are racking their brains through an interactive high-stakes puzzle rather than untangling their minds or autopiloting their pieces through a cascade of menial chores and unintuitive steps.

One can’t speak of elegant board games without mentioning the magnificent Concordia.  This medium-weight Euro with a wealth of strategic juiciness amounts to only FOUR PAGES of rules.  The management, depth, and balance found within the cards is a masterclass in board game design. Whenever I find myself playing a clumsy, complicated, or unintuitive Euro, I always come away from that game wondering why I didn’t just play Concordia instead.

One great Euro that I eventually burned out on was Teotihuacan: City of Gods, due to its excessive bookkeeping and tangle of turn steps.  People (myself included) constantly forget to move a token up a temple track, move a token up the avenue of the dead track, move a token up the pyramid track, upgrade a die, pay a cocoa, shift the eclipse marker, etc., etc., etc., and the fiddliness is a noticeable dampener on the fun.  It feels as though I always spend more time running the game than playing it.  By the time we’ve scored the final points and determined the winner, my brain is so exhausted that the last thing I want to do is put the thousands of tokens back into the dozens of bags.  I prefer much more thinking, strategizing, and planning than bookkeeping, and Teotihuacan struggles to provide this for me.

An elegant board game is, to me, a combination of streamlined rules, intuitive graphic design, simple gameplay, and complex ramifications.  Blend me a smoothie of these crisp fruits of elegance and I’ll slurp it right up! Yet nothing may taste sweeter than a game with evocative art…

Tune in next week for Tabletop Tastes #7: Sweet Evocative Art

LOOKING FOR MORE CRISP GAMES WITH ELEGANT DESIGNS? TRY REFRESHING YOURSELF WITH ONE OF THESE:

• Elegant Fillers: Love Letter, For Sale, Startups
• Elegant Euros: El Grande, Isle of Skye, Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done
• Elegant 2-Players: Hanamikoji, Jaipur, The Fox in the Forest
• Elegant Abstracts: Azul, Sagrada, Onitama
• Elegant Classics: Modern Art, Carcassonne, Dominion
• Elegant Recent Releases: Cryptid, Wingspan, Wavelength

What games do you find to be crisp and elegant?

The post Tabletop Tastes #6: Crisp Elegance appeared first on Bitewing Games.