Scout

2 Plays

Scout is an interesting mix of Bohnanza’s locked hand of cards and a ladder-climbing mechanism similar to Tichu.  The new version comes at us from publisher Oink Games who fittingly crams it into their classic tiny box with a colorful, minimalist makeover.  The only concession that seems to have been made here is the unusually thin/flimsy cards that were likely selected to ensure that everything could still fit in the box.

In Scout, you play as many rounds as there are players as you try to accumulate the most points by the game end.  Each round, the entire deck is dealt out, and immediately one of the most important decisions you will make is whether or not to flip your entire hand upside down.  The top of each card will feature a different number from the bottom of each card, with these numbers ranging from 1-10.  So the first thing you’ll have to evaluate is which orientation has the most potential.

Just like Bohnanza, you are not allowed to flip or reorder individual cards in your hand.  So once you commit to one of your two options, you’ll have to deal with what you’ve got.  The thing to look for is sets of the same number or runs of consecutive numbers that are either ascending or descending.  Sometimes you get unbelievably lucky with one or more sets of 3 or even 4 cards perfectly lined up together, other times you start a round with hot garbage, and this is undoubtedly the weakest link in Scout’s design.

Fortunately, there are a fair amount of clever plays you can make, regardless of the hand you are dealt.  And typically, consistent cleverness can really pay off over the course of multiple rounds.

While your first ever round or two might feel a little too rote, with some experience, some of the more subtle short-term tactics and long-term strategies start to reveal themselves.  On your turn, you may either Show or Scout.  Performing a show means that you must play a better set of cards than what is currently active from a previous player.  A set or run of two cards always beats a single card, three cards always beat two, and so on, while higher values beat out sets and runs of the same quantity.  You know, typical ladder card-play.

When you play a show, you claim the active set that you just one-upped and place it in your stash of points.  If the next player can’t beat your show, then they’ll instead have to Scout a card from your set, stealing one card from either end of the set and slotting it into their hand wherever and however they please.  Scouting is essential to improving your starting hand, yet it’s just as important as deciding when to play certain sets from your hand.  The nice thing about players scouting your own show is that you earn a point each time they take a card.  Better yet, if all of your opponents end up scouting from your show, this counts as consecutive passing which immediately triggers the end of the round.

Usually the round ends when one player empties their hand, but either way you always want to be the one who ends the round either with a grand finale of a circus show or with a show so good that nobody else can one-up it.  Either way, you’ll get zero negative points while everyone else takes 1 negative point for each card remaining in their hand.

The pacing and tempo of Scout is brilliant, because as the round progresses it becomes increasingly risky to save your best cards for a big play.  The round might end before you get the chance to play your big run of four cards, and now you have to swallow each one as a penalty point. On the other hand, if the opponents after you get down to only one or a few cards in their hand, then you can force them to scout by putting on a show which contains one more card than they can possibly play.

The final wrinkle that really makes Scout shine is the precious scout & show token that each player gets at the start of each round.  You get one shot to both scout and show in the same turn, yet even you save it for what feels like a special occasion, there is inevitably a later turn that makes you regret spending it so soon.  This token is often critical to turning the tide of a round in your favor.

Overall, I find that Scout makes for a solid addition to upper tier of Oink Games offerings.  I’ll slot this one alongside my favorites—Insider, Startups, Fake Artist, and Durian.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Imperial Steam

1 Play

As a Capstone train game that appears to be a hybrid between Brass Birmingham and Age of Steam, I was certainly intrigued by 2021’s Imperial Steam.  This one is a game that describes itself as a “highly strategic yet accessible economic and logistics game” of making “difficult decisions” amid “fierce competition”—at least that’s how the publisher puts it.

The problem with calling your game “accessible” is that this term kinda sets expectations for the entire experience.  Last time I checked, those expectations do not include a box crammed with 900 components that take 20-30 minutes to setup and a rulebook where the first 10 pages cover setup and the following 20 cover gameplay.  If this is what folks are calling “accessible” these days, then I’d like to nominate that word for public execution.

But alas, I’ve found joy in other designs that at first seem like board game vomit in a box… A Feast for Odin, Oath, Eclipse, and Coffee Traders all come to mind.  And speaking of joy, Brass and Age of Steam are currently in my top 10 games of all time, so surely their love child, Imperial Steam, is still destined for greatness, right?

Well, with my first play of Imperial Steam, I learned a valuable lesson.  It’s not enough to simply combine certain aspects of two things you love and expect something just as good or better.  With this game, I was hoping for a banana split, but I feel like I was instead served a banana peel swimming in melted ice cream and sprinkled with peanut shells.

Imperial Steam tries to wink at Brass and Age of Steam fans (such as myself) with things like orange iron cubes, black coal cubs, railway route building, goods pickup and delivery, crushing economics, and more.  The problem is that everything I love most about those two Martin Wallace classics is entirely missing from this mirage of a design.

Gone are the dynamic shared incentives and highly interactive gameplay.  Absent are the clean rules and focused options.  These things are all replaced by a grating mess of mechanisms across a nauseating spread of boards and tokens and cards.  

Imperial Steam, like many of today’s heavy Euros, is a design that desperately tries to compensate for its glaring lack of emergent player interaction with a firehose of variability in the setup and mechanics in the rules.  If players are too busy trying to avoid drowning as this firehose sprays them in the face, then perhaps they’ll never notice that they are merely standing in a shallow wading pool of a tabletop playground.

For a production that offers so much across its icons, tracks, pieces, and actions, I have rarely felt so restricted in my possibilities.  Would you like to build some railroad track?  Sure thing!  But, actually, you can only build up to two tracks per round… and you’ll need to buy some more workers to be able to reach those spots… but you can only buy workers from these locations, not those ones… and once you have them, you’ll have to leave them alone for a round or two before they’ll actually be worth using… But in the meantime you can stock up on the resources you’ll need for the track!  But, you can only buy two resources this round because this tile arbitrarily says so, even though you’ll need three resources to build more track… and once you purchase them, you aren’t allowed to use those resources this round, you have to wait until next round… and although you own these resources, and you’ve literally placed them on your train car tiles, you can’t actually deliver these ones to a location, these ones are just for spending on more track.  You see, you need to send a worker out onto the board in order to make some cubes that you can actually transport.  It’s simple, really.

The theme and graphic design here offer little assistance in making any sense of what you are doing and why you are doing it.  It’s largely a senseless, soulless Euro parading around in a train game husk.  While the majority of my top 10 games are also categorized as fairly heavy, it’s needlessly complex designs like Imperial Steam that put me through an existential crisis…  What kind of gamer am I?  Do I even like board games?  Do you remember the taste of strawberries, Mr. Frodo?

Current Rating: 3/10

Keyflower

2 Plays

Keyflower has been around for nearly a decade now, and it still retains a solid ranking in the top 100 board games on BGG, so it does feel like I’m preaching to the choir with anything I have to say about this game.  But it wouldn’t be the first time I gave a choir-directed sermon… 

The biggest question that I find myself continually asking about new-to-me resource conversion Euros is this: What makes this game stand out among the thousands of other options?  Is this game truly exceptional, and if not, why would I keep and play it over the dozens of similar yet superior dry strategy games?

Keyflower, being a bone-dry worker placement auctioning engine builder about settling your village, is another such design that must face my burning question.  Fortunately, Keyflower is the first game I’ve tried in months that manages to come up with a decent answer.

This game stands out most by the interesting combination of bidding and and worker placement that takes place during each of its 4 rounds.  New tiles are displayed at the start of each round.  Then, it is open season for players to take turns either bidding for a tile by placing workers around the border or gaining a tile’s benefit by placing workers directly on top.  Once a certain tile has a color committed on or around it, then other players can only bid on or activate that tile with the same color for the rest of the round.  Your red, yellow, and blue workers are hidden behind your screen, so you only have a faint idea of what others can bid based on the new workers they earn from a boat at the end of each round.

I found this hybridization of auctioning and worker-placement in Keyflower to be quite the treat.  You can activate any tiles on the table—your own, the central market, or the tiles in other players’ villages—but the catch is that the owner (or new owner) of that tile will earn the workers on it at the end of the round.  You’re allowed to activate a tile that has already been activated, but it will cost you extra workers.  The decision space and considerations to make with each turn are broad and consequential.

While the rest of the game is rather generic in its ideas—earn, transport, and spend resources to upgrade your village tiles for points; compete to claim bonus scoring tiles; etc.—it doesn’t necessarily need to be anything more flashy and complicated.  The scoring objectives and secondary mechanisms are simply the oil that keeps this compelling core smooth and slick.  And even with us 3 newcomers, the game proved to be surprisingly fast-paced.

I do find it rather odd and slightly amusing that the creators have leaned so heavily into this “Key” branding of their games.  There appears to be about 9 games in this Key series with roughly that many expansions to some of those games.  From my amateur perspective, they all appear to be a tangled mess of roughly the same art style and theme with roughly the same ideas where I’m better off sticking to the cream of the crop (Keyflower) and ignoring the rest.  I fully realize that this is a barbaric oversimplification of this series, and I’m sure that it has a solid following of fans, but I can’t help but feel that the branding does more harm than good regarding attraction and approachability for the uninitiated.  

But alas, there I go again, letting the cold-blooded businessman within me get lost on an irrelevant tangent.  What’s most important here is that Keyflower remains a compelling offering in this over-crowded genre.  Perhaps the one feature of this game that has aged the worst is its dense rulebook, and even that is mitigated by a Watch It Played rules explanation video from the legendary, jovial (and 8 years younger) Rodney Smith.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Ankh: Gods of Egypt

2 Plays

Believe it or not, Ankh is the first game by legendary designer Eric M. Lang that I have ever played.  Based on the look and style of his games, I never would have predicted Ankh to be a streamlined, non-random, pure strategy game, but that’s exactly what it is!

The three pillars of Ankh are the following:

1. A buttery smooth action selection board
2. An event track that sets the game’s tempo
3. Battling for control of areas with your God, warriors, and guardians

On your turn, you can choose up to two different actions on the board, and they must be executed in descending order.  These actions are to move figures three spaces each, summon a figure to the game board, gain followers (the economy of the game), or spend followers to unlock an ankh power.  This action board is the spinning gears behind the posturing and positioning that players will take as they strive to earn the most points at each upcoming conflict event.

Any time a player selects an action, they’ll move the action marker down its row until it hits the last space of the track.  This space immediately ends your turn (meaning you may not get a second action), but it also triggers the next event, and everybody wants to trigger those juicy events for themselves.  Most events allow players to gain control of a monument, and monuments are central to how you score points.  But the two other possible events include splitting an area in two by drawing new boundaries with camels, or triggering a conflict.

Conflict is beautifully simple and wonderfully tense in Ankh.  Battles are resolved one region at a time.  Players add up their figures in that region to determine a base power, apply any unlocked ankh abilities, and secretly select a single card from their hand to hopefully sway the battle in their favor.  All players start with the same hand of cards that will be spent and recycled throughout the game.  While this mechanism is a shameless rehash of another Egyptian area control game (Kemet), it’s a system that never fails to provide tense decisions.  The conflict cards of Ankh even provide more opportunities for bluffing and point-mongering beyond the contest for a region victory.

You can score points simply by having your figures on the right spaces and in the right regions, even if you lose every battle, yet dominating regions also comes with its own batch of scoring opportunities.  Players will be scrambling up the point track in a quest to not only win, but also to avoid merging with another god or even suffer a late-game elimination.

The controversial merge mechanic of Ankh happens roughly two-thirds through the game and sees the last and second-to-last place players melting into a single faction that shares resources, actions, and objectives.  Some folks see this as one player essentially getting eliminated from the game because they lose all their figures and monuments from the board.  To me, it functions more like a late mechanical pivot where two players begin to play a cooperative game with significant advantages to help them make a come-back.

While each of the merged players becomes limited to one action per turn, this actually allows them more strategic flexibility for their faction.  They also have access to both players’ god powers, guardians, and followers.  Where this merge event is as guaranteed as the rising of the sun (no pun intended), and the game state is perfectly readable and non-random, it becomes important to anticipate, plan for, and even embrace the merge.  I’ve been anxious to take a test drive in team-merger myself, but I’ve found myself instead taking the early lead and putting a massive target on my back while my opponents merged with each other in both of our plays.

For a game where all information is open and readable, the victories in Ankh can certainly sneak up on you.  Thanks to various ankh abilities, cards, and dividing regions, scoring points has a snowball effect throughout the game where one player can suddenly hit the top of the point track to claim the instant win.  Our second play of the game with four players saw everyone ganging up on me, the runaway leader, while overlooking the second-place faction.  Through crafty upgrades and cardplay, she flew under the radar long enough to quickly shoot up the point track and snatch victory from my grasp, even while the merged players were making a significant comeback of their own.

While I resent her stealing my thunder, I’m even more grateful that she and her husband own Ankh—kickstarter goodies and all—so I don’t have to.  No matter how you slice it, Ankh is a costly game to dive into.  The retail version comes in at a whopping $100 MSRP, and that one doesn’t even come with plastic monuments and tokens that make the game board much more readable.  The Kickstarter all-in pledge provided a glorious amount of plastic, expansions, and content, but it also costed folks who pledged for it two limbs and a whole bookshelf.

I’m lucky to be the moochy friend who shows up and sits down to a table already set up after somebody else painstakingly wheelbarrowed all the boxes into one room and fetched a hundred components from a thousand locations.  So perhaps my pampered experience should be taken with a grain of salt.  I’ve been known to condemn plenty of other games to exile simply for how bloated they are (see Gloomhaven: JotL, Catacombs, Sleeping Gods, Pandemic Legacy, etc.).  But I can’t deny that Ankh is one of my favorite surprises of the past year.

Current Rating: 8.5/10

Rialto

1 Play

Rialto is one of many Stefan Feld designs that sit in the shadows of his most popular work (The Castles of Burgundy, Trajan, Bora Bora, Bruges, etc.).  Despite this, I found Rialto to be a stand-out game for a few reasons:

1. It’s more poignantly interactive with area majorities and auctions galore.
2. It can be played with up to 5 people where many other Felds cannot.
3. It is being reimplemented this year by Queen Games as New York City.

In Rialto, players are drafting cards into their hand to put toward auctions for various benefits, bonuses, and of course points.  The central focus of the game is to place your council members into six districts of Venice to score area majority points.  Everything else ties back to the area competition and/or auctions.

This design actually reminds me a bit of the classic Knizia Euro, Taj Mahal.  In both games, each round takes place in a new district where players commit cards from their hands and hope to bid the most.  Yet where Taj Mahal is a tense game of chicken, Rialto is more focused on efficient drafting and engine building.  That’s not to say that Rialto isn’t tense.  

In Rialto, it’s always beneficial to bid cards from your hand, but the winner of each auction gets a significant bonus.  One auction has players scrambling for the favor of turn order and tiebreakers, another provides tantalizing building abilities, but those building abilities are only useful if you are also bidding for money, yet none of those things will win you the game if you aren’t also bidding to influence the game board of contested districts.

I found that all six types of auctions were alluring at one point or another during the six rounds of the game.  The key to success is to know which ones are most important (and most easily winnable) during which rounds.  It helps to observe which cards other players draft so you can plan and execute your bids accordingly.

Despite being an increasingly jaded gamer—especially toward generic looking Euros such as this one—I found Rialto to be a surprisingly enjoyable experience.  Time will tell if next year’s New York City will improve upon this formula… it seems to be a more streamlined and balanced design at first glance.  But it also tosses out the fifth player option and a whole handful of core mechanisms from Rialto; so it could be one step forward, two steps back just as easily as it could be a fully realized design.

Current Rating: 7/10

MicroMacro: Crime City

10 Plays

MicroMacro is what happens when Where’s Waldo meets homicide detective.  In other words, it’s a blast.

I remember when MicroMacro was first announced.  I was actually put off by the concept initially.  I didn’t love the sound of hunching over a massive colorless map with tiny drawings that required players to crowd together for excess squinting.  While my first impression wasn’t too far off from what you actually do in this game, I underestimated how fun it could be.

After hearing great things about MicroMacro from other gamers, I decided it was worth trying together with my wife, Camille.  Rather than spread the map out on our table, we decided to get extra fancy and hang it on our wall.  The game does come with a cheap little magnifying glass, but we haven’t needed it at all.

The thing that makes this game map special is that it is not just a still image of a single point in time.  Rather, it’s tangled spaghetti of timelines where each individual noodle tracks the movement and actions of a unique character throughout their day.  So if you spot a woman with a pointy nose and small handbag who is walking down the street, then you might look further down the street in the direction she is headed and spot her boarding a bus, or you can look in the direction she came from and see her lounging on her porch earlier in the day.

So, this map is essentially a stalker’s cocaine.  But more accurately, it’s a playground for investigators.  Many horrors can be found littered across this deceptively playful map of illustrations including fresh corpses, vengeful killers, poison shops, and dangerous jealousies.  While Where’s Waldo is unquestionably a kid-friendly activity, MicroMacro dives right into the deep end of adult themes ripe with murder and seasoned with infidelity, sabotage, thievery, and more.

But such is the life of a criminal investigation game.  Those who have dabbled in other games of this genre such as Chronicles of Crime, Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, or Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective will feel right at home here.  I’ve tried some of these including Chronicles of Crime in the past, yet MicroMacro instantly and easily becomes my favorite of the bunch for one simple reason: It’s all fun and no fuss.

In MicroMacro, there is no fiddling with antisocial phone apps and endless QR codes, there is no mandatory recitation of exhausting paragraphs of poorly written dialogue that require you to read between the lines, and there is no heaping of components that players must dig through to setup and play the game.  This one only requires a few case cards, a map, and your natural detective sensibilities.

Each case begins with a new crime: “Mr. Cabbage was found shot in the back alley behind the pharmacy!”  And a starting prompt: “Find the scene of the crime!”  From there, you can continue to follow the prompt cards as you complete one after another.  Once you find the crime scene, the next card will say something like: “What was Mr. Cabbage doing before he was shot?”  As you scan the perimeter of the pharmacy, you may spot Mr. Cabbage across the street buying himself a tasty sausage at the sausage stand (yes, the game does have a sausage stand, and yes, the game is made by Germans).

Each prompt card will point you in the direction of where to look next on the front while confirming the answer to the prompt on the back.  For each case, you are supposed to hand all the cards to one player who spoils the answer for themself after the group makes their guess and either confirms the correct answer or tells everyone else to try again.  This system works well, as the back of each card only offers a minor spoiler for the current plot thread that you are following, and the lead detective can still participate in each step until the group settles on their answer.

But I didn’t spend my childhood watching hours of Psych and Monk—training in the ways of a detective—just to have prompt cards hold my hand through criminal investigations.  Nay, I’ve been preparing my whole life to take on the advanced mode of MicroMacro: Crime City.  You see, in the advanced mode, the prompt cards are cast aside and ignored.  For each session, you simply look at the first card to discover your next case, and then you get to work combing over the map for clues.  This is where things get really fun.

What starts out as the scene of a rabbit-man crushed beneath a piano quickly unravels into full-blown investigation:  Who was this rabbit-man victim?  Where did he live?  What were his hobbies?  Who came in contact with him on the day of his death?  Where did the piano come from?  Was this a coincidental accident, or something more sinister? (Spoiler: It’s never a coincidence.  This is Crime City we’re talking about, after all.).

Formulating these questions and uncovering the answers—completely unaided by prompts—is where MicroMacro is at its best, especially as a two-player game.  With two players, you can put your heads together, bounce ideas off each other, and bask in dramatic discoveries.  The box says MicroMacro plays up to four, but you’ll spend most of your time scanning one small section of the map, meaning that the third and fourth person will likely be crowded out and too far away to see the area of interest.  Personally, I find it to be an engaging cooperative game that is perfect for couples.

Current Rating: 8.5/10

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, including the upcoming Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney. 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 Scout, Imperial Steam, Ankh: Gods of Egypt, MicroMacro: Crime City, Keyflower, and Rialto. appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Let’s talk about the games that are leaving or entering my collection, and why!  For “surge” games, I’ll stick with titles that are not recent releases as I already cover those in my monthly New Release 1st Impressions series.

PURGE:

PARKS & Tokaido

These games have quite a bit in common.  Both PARKS and Tokaido are gorgeous looking games about traveling or vacationing through scenic environments.  Both contain the chill mechanism of stopping along a one-way track to collect items or trigger effects.  Jumping far ahead guarantee’s that you’ll hit your desired spot, but you’ll be skipping lots of other good options along the way and leaving them open for your opponents.  

It’s rather unnecessary to possess both PARKS and Tokaido in one collection, yet here I am keeping neither.  While I can’t deny the appeal of their aesthetics and settings, I also can’t deny the weakness of their game-night appeal.  Neither game has made it to our table in over a year.

Perhaps what kills them for me is that their time-to-payoff ratio is a little lopsided for my tastes.  We have some comparably simple and chill card games that cram more fun into their shorter playtimes than either PARKS or Tokaido.  I’d say they’re both solid picks as family games, but we own plenty of other family games that I would play many times over before reaching for these.

SURGE:

The Knizia Flood: Ingenious, Yellow & Yangtze, Quo Vadis

As we prepare to publish our own Reiner Knizia designs, I’ve become increasingly keen on exploring the highlights of his portfolio.  I struggle to resist a good sale or interesting new release from the German designer who continues to entertain my gaming group.  Stay tuned for my thoughts on some of his newer releases, but in the meantime let’s talk about Ingenious, Yellow & Yangtze, and Quo Vadis.

Ingenious is touted on the box as “The Ultimate Family Strategy Game,” and for once I actually agree with a generic marketing description! Abstract games typically aren’t my go-to game style, but Ingenious really hits the spot.  This one takes the scoring mechanism of Tigris & Euphrates—where your final score is your color with the least points—and simplifies it down to placing hexagonal dominos and scoring matching colors. The elegant gameplay, layered depth, and breezy turns here shouldn’t come as any surprise to Knizia fans. Nobody makes a better tile-laying game than Reiner, and Ingenious is one of the many feathers in that ridiculously legendary cap.

Yellow & Yangtze has officially arrived at my doorstep (along with Whale Riders and Whale Riders: The Card Game).  And just in the nick of time, apparently, as this one is being dropped by the publisher this year.  With it’s spiritual sibling, Tigris & Euphrates, being my current #3 game of All Time, and Reiner’s other recent reiterations (Babylonia and Blue Lagoon) also being in my top 50, you could astutely predict that I’m thrilled to give Y&Y a try…  Thrilled enough, in fact, to already have my hand on my wallet holster for when the Yellow & Yangtze plastic and bamboo GeekUp tiles go on sale. 

Meanwhile, we’ve enjoyed a couple plays of Quo Vadis, a pure negotiation game from Dr. Knizia that originally released in the 90’s, yet I was able to track down a used copy for cheap.  Players progress their politician pieces on the board through a sequential network of committees. On your turn, you are usually requesting support from other players in your current committee to vote you through to the next committee, and often you have to sweeten the deal for others to get the votes you need. Points are awarded for voting others through and moving your pieces along certain paths, but your points are only valid if one of your politicians makes it to the final Senate position. A game this dry has no right to be so enjoyable, but here we are.  Quo Vadis is pure, simple, quick, tense negotiation in a smart, Knizian style.  I’m interested in exploring this one further to witness the possibilities.  Yet I don’t think I like the “special tokens” variant that Mayfair threw into the box.  They seem to detract from the tension of having to rely on others to progress forward.

PURGE:

Roll & Writes: Railroad Ink, Welcome To, On Tour

It was fun while it lasted, roll & writes!  Yet as I described in my recent impressions of Railroad Ink Challenge, I’m living the law of diminishing returns within this genre of games.  I used to believe that it was so cool how you could play these games with as many people as you had pads and writing utensils.  Although in practice, I’ve noticed that these tend to be the quietest and least interactive games you could possibly play at a party.  Low-interaction games such as roll & writes tend to take the wind out of the sails of interpersonal engagement, and I find these to be hollow forms of entertainment in group gatherings.

Most often, I’ve enjoyed these games in 2-player settings with my wife.  Yet we now own dozens of killer 2-player games that simply increase the opportunity cost of playing another roll & write.  But I haven’t shunned the genre entirely!  We’re still holding onto Super Skill Pinball, which does roll & writes better than the rest, in my opinion.  And for some reason, I haven’t quite convinced myself to get rid of That’s Pretty Clever…

SURGE:

Train Games: Age of Steam Maps, Stephenson’s Rocket Expansion, & Chicago Express

How many train games does one gamer need?!?  Ten, apparently.  Plus a bunch more maps for good measure.  I know what you’re thinking: I’ve already mentioned that I’m getting rid of Railroad Ink!  But don’t worry, I’ve preordered Iberian Gauge, so balance will soon be restored to the railroad collection universe.  I’m not so much obsessed with trains as I am obsessed with highly interactive games—and games with sprawling railroads and shared incentives lend themselves well to this dynamic.

Age of Steam and Stephenson’s Rocket both made my top 50 games of all time.  I couldn’t resist the opportunity to acquire more maps from them.  In both cases, these expansion maps mix up the feel of the core gameplay and help to keep players from getting too comfortable.  I already shared my most recent experience with Eastern US map of Stephenson’s Rocket from our recent board game marathon, and even more recently I had the chance to try the German map of Age of Steam.

I’d say the German map is a safe board for relative newcomers to stray from the starting map.  Some interesting wrinkles include hex spaces that contain specific, expensive prices for building track on them.  The high price tag spots general stick to the edges of the map and block off foreign terminals that can receive specific colors of cubes.  Additionally, the Engineer action is completely different—it now cuts the price of one of your track builds in half rather than increasing your building limit from three to four tiles.  The German map was an interesting change to what we’ve been playing up to this point, and I’m eager to explore the many other maps of Age of Steam.

Finally, Chicago Express is a cube rails style game from 2007 that shares much in common with the likes of Irish Gauge.  Each player takes their turn by selecting an action—auctioning a share of one railroad company, expanding the rail system of a company they own shares in, or developing one of the boards hexes.  For those of you who are familiar with Irish Gauge, this sounds eerily similar, right?  Well the key differences are that money spent on shares for a railroad company goes into that company pool, and those funds are used to expand the rail system.  No money in your company means no opportunity for expansion.  Additionally, these three action options are represented by meters on the board, and whenever a player takes a chosen action, they move the dial up on that action meter until it reaches its highest space.  At that point, nobody else can take that type of action, and once two meters are full, this triggers a dividend phase and a reset of the meters.

I had a great time with my first play of Chicago Express, so when I saw a local Facebooker post their copy for sale at a reasonable price, I just had to bite.

PURGE:

Letting go of Classics: Catan, Dixit, Clank, Sushi Go, & Deep Sea Adventure

Although it was now several years ago, my most recent play of Catan was the fastest ever.  We had invited our friend over for dinner and a game night.  After choosing our settlement and road starting positions and getting into the initial turns, our friend suddenly stood up, ran to our restroom, and puked everywhere.  And that was the end of Catan night.

Since then, I’ve found many more games to love, and Old Faithful Catan never really called to me.  I’ve only recently come to terms with the idea of booting it from my collection.  Part of me thinks it would be neat to keep it around for my kids to show them the game that took the world by storm.  But at the end of the day, I’ve got PLENTY of other accessible games I’d rather teach and play with them.

Dixit is an interesting one.  This is a likeable, colorful game that thankfully renders Apples to Apples obsolete.  Instead of one judge randomly determining their favorite card of the round, players are cleverly incentivized to deceive opponents while deducing and voting for the correct card.  Meanwhile the storyteller of the round must avoid giving a clue that is too hard or too easy.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone who hates this game, yet it feels like Dixit has been overshadowed by newer titles.  Mysterium uses these same types of visual cards, but also allows for collaboration, discussion, and debates.  Mysterium also raises the stakes with an all-win or all-lose premise.

Decrypto has the same interesting balance of giving clues that are neither too easy nor too hard, but it ratchets up the tension with 3 clues per round that become an increasingly thinner tightrope to walk with each successive round.

Wavelength has the same freedom of giving any kind of clue (a word, a sentence, a sound, etc.) but follows it up with a much more interesting discussion and dramatic reveal.

The above mentioned games also do a better job at discouraging inside joke clues compared to Dixit, which is probably one of its greatest weaknesses.  After taking a break from Dixit for several years and finally giving it another go, I can see why this one has been collecting dust on my shelf.  The predator has become the prey; the Apples-gobbling Dixit is now the obsolete game thanks to Mysterium, Decrypto, Wavelength, and many more.

Sushi Go always felt a little more bland than its colorful art style implied, and it never really clicked with me when I felt that 7 Wonders or 7 Wonders Duel did the same thing better.

On the other hand, we got a kick out of Clank from our first few plays of it.  The push-your-luck concept of deciding how deep to venture into the dungeon for greater treasures at the risk of succumbing to the dragon was highly amusing.  The problem is that we never made it past those first few plays.  I think the messy rulebook and setup were partially to blame.  The other thing that hurt Clank was us owning another deck-building board movement hybrid, The Quest for El Dorado, which has received many more plays thanks to its cleaner, tighter, and smarter design.  Despite my fond memories of our plays of Clank, I realized it was time to say goodbye when I noticed our last play was nearly two years ago.

Funnily enough, Deep Sea Adventure contains the exact same concept as Clank of venturing deeper for greater rewards but at a much higher risk of not making it back to the surface.  Of course, being an Oink game, it strips away everything else that Clank offers except for that core concept.  Yet after thoroughly enjoying other all-time greats from publisher Oink including Insider, Startups, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, and Durian, I just didn’t feel that Deep Sea Adventure reached the same heights of memorable, engaging fun. 

SURGE:

Picking up some Classics: Agricola, Bohnanza, Keyflower

Meanwhile, I’ve acquired a few new-to-me classics thanks to some irresistible deals.  Agricola is one such game that we finally got around to playing after spending a few months on our shelf in shrink-wrap.  As expected, this is a rock-solid Euro.  It certainly contains less rules than designer Uwe Rosenberg’s A Feast for Odin, but it’s also a less forgiving game.  It’s such a tight game of meager earnings that my wife found it to be more stressful than enjoyable, so hopefully I’ll find someone else to continue to play it with.  For me, the thing that puts Agricola above the thousands of other worker placement games that have been published since is the meaningful variety of the cards and impactful tightness of the board.

Speaking of Uwe classics, I also picked up a copy of Bohnanza that has yet to hit our table.  It’s a simple negotiation game with wacky beans that I have a vague memory of playing and enjoying one time several years ago.  Unfortunately, our intended plays of family-weight games has been a little bit backed up for the past year between anti-social COVID protocols and moving around for work.

And while we’re on the topic of classic games, the much-loved Keyflower landed a spot in my collection at last.  It took a wide breadth of critical acclaim and a gut-purchase Deal of the Day to get me to do it, but I’m excited to see what this unique worker placement game has to offer.

PURGE:

Saying goodbye to old friends: Dice Throne, Dragon Castle, Aerion

I can offer some comfort to my wife, Camille, in the fact that in the past few months I’ve sold and traded away more games than I’ve acquired.  So we’ll bookend this post with a final batch of purged games, specifically some old friends that we’ve enjoyed over the past several years.  Aerion was the first primarily solo board game that I ever purchased, and it was fun to see how a simple, challenging puzzle can hit the spot when I’m in the mood to sit at my kitchen table alone.  This is a solid dice game of managing probabilities and mitigating risks to assemble your flying machines before resources are depleted.  I didn’t quite explore all of the expansions and variants in this box, but I never had a bad session of Aerion.  With Under Falling Skies recently entering the fray, I simply found Aerion to be the less interesting of the two and an unnecessary possession for how infrequently I play solo games.

Dragon Castle hit our collection back when we were surfing the wave of abstract drafting games including Azul and Sagrada.  While its a solid offering in its own right, complete with chunky Mahjong tiles and an attractive presentation,  it is another game that never made it past our initial plays over two years ago.  The only reason it’s survived in our collection until now is because I wanted to give it one last play to be sure I was ok with dumping it.  But when I have an entire two years to make that happen and my reluctance keeps me from spending even one more hour with it, I finally had to accept that it doesn’t belong on my shelf.  Ultimately, Azul is the best of the bunch, so I’m ok with discarding the rest.

I’ve spoken much about Dice Throne recently after colliding with the recent expansion, Dice Throne Adventures.  In some ways, Adventures was perhaps a spoiler for the entire Dice Throne series for me.  Yet it was also one of the few Kickstarter campaigns I lost my hype for between pledging and receiving the rewards due to my changing tastes.  Revisiting the system’s latest offerings merely confirmed my fears that Dice Throne was no longer for me.  But that’s ok! 

The good news is that board games typically keep a great resell value, and when one doesn’t satisfy, there’s always another one around the corner ready to entertain its participants.  I’m happy to see my departing games find a new home and excited to see what adventures await in my recent acquisitions.

What games are you purging from or surging into your collection? Share with us in the comments below!

Article written by Nick Murray. And speaking of adding new games to one’s collection, keep an eye out for his first published design, Social Grooming, which will debut in a Kickstarter bundle alongside two games from critically acclaimed designer, Reiner Knizia! Don’t miss out on this killer filler bundle coming in 2021! Subscribe to the Bitewing Games monthly newsletter to stay in touch.

The post Purge & Surge: Games Recently Leaving or Entering My Collection, and Why appeared first on Bitewing Games.