Copycat

Friedmann Friese's Copycat was my favorite game coming out of BGG.con 2012, and I picked it up at our local game shop as soon as it came out. It's a very clean, elegant design with a lot of variety. The game premise, ostentatiously ripping off the mechanics associated with top-rated games and repurposing them into something new, was designed to appeal to me – I've always said it's not mechanics that matter, but how those mechanics are assembled, calibrated, weighted, and balanced to create an effect. Copycat presents us with nothing new mechanically, but the way the different pieces are blended is quite skillful. Unless you're an insider, you can easily miss all the cameos and inside jokes but still enjoy the game.

Sadly, like many Friese games, Copycat didn't quite make it. The obvious reason seems to be a simple one of game balance: the game's action cards that let you draw more cards seem too powerful, especially the Sauna with Colleagues and State Dinner. As long as each player gets a share of the available versions of them, it's not too bad, but if through luck, skill, or opponent's negligence one player manages to dominate this category, they will tediously roll to victory. It's not a complete deal-breaker, but Copycat isn't short and once you figure this out it's not great.

I think Copycat has a more fundamental problem though. At its heart are two mechanical bits: deck-building (from Dominion) and worker placement (from Agricola). Deck-building is something I tend to like, and many of my favorite recent games use the idea (Thunderstone, Ascension, Nightfall, Trains, Core Worlds), and I tend to enjoy even the more workmanlike games in the genre (Arctic Scavengers, the various Cryptozoic games, Dominion*). Worker placement, on the other hand, is one of my most-disliked mechanics and I can count only a handful of games over its entire 10+ year history that I find consistently entertaining: Pillars of the Earth, Lords of Waterdeep, Tribune, Agricola.

I think these two ideas are working at cross-purposes in Copycat. Deck-building games generally want to be short: early game decisions tend to weigh heavily, and as advantages quickly accrue you want to end the game before it gets tedious. Nobody's going to stage a late-game comeback off an inefficient deck built in the first half. By contrast, worker placement games tend to run long. There is a lot of downtime inherent in the system as choices have to be constantly re-evaluated and it's hard to plan ahead. Where worker placement games want to be incremental with lots of similar choices that evolve over time, deck builders want decisive choices which can play out relatively quickly. Worker placement games tend to need lots of open information to work. Deck-builders by their very physical nature hide a great deal. Worker placement games tend to be chess-like evaluation games, while deck-builders are games of probability and statistics.

It seems to me that Copycat gets caught in-between. It's a quick deck-builder bolted to a slow, contemplative worker-placement, so it ends up taking 90 minutes and being decided by the decisions made in the first half. It's a game that requires analytical look-ahead while hiding too much information.

So perhaps it's not surprising that the powerful strategy that breaks Copycat is the one that short-circuits the deck-building: you want to remove the statistical element by aiming to draw your entire deck every turn. Then you can play a pure worker placement game and not worry about the vagaries that make deck-building interesting.

Copycat may still find life for me as a 2-player game, which we've tried and enjoyed – the balance seems better and it's much harder for one player to get the run of the card-drawing cards. The problem with this is that the space for longer two-player games is pretty tough, and I'm not sure what Copycat adds that I'm not getting from Ascension, Ora et Labora, Agricola, Catan Card Game, and so on.

Still, I enjoyed the exploring the space of the game, and it's a clever idea. Fun while it lasted.

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* I realize putting the Spiel des Jahre-winning Dominion in the "workmanlike" category may seem a little unfair. You have to give Donald X. Vaccarino credit for coming up with a great idea that seems an obvious extension of the collectible card game concept only in retrospect. But just as the great mechanical ideas in We The People would have to wait for Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage before truly delivering on their promise, to me Dominion wasn't a complete package – it was "just" a very good pure game mechanic.

Göthe takes on The Virgin Queen

Despite having turned on Here I Stand after a handful of games, I picked up The Virgin Queen at GMT West last year – lured perhaps by the lower turn count, the more open game situation, the promise of more reasonable rules for playing with fewer players, and the memory that I did enjoy Here I Stand for a number of games before it became tedious.

What I find interesting about both games is that they seem to defy basic critical analysis as games for me. Göthe says that in a work of criticism, we should figure out what something is trying to do, whether it succeeded in doing it, and whether it was worth doing. That first question is where The Virgin Queen mystifies me. OK, we know that it's trying to portray the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. But that's too broad to be helpful. What is the game trying to say? And how, exactly, is it trying to say it?

It's clearly not going the abstract, high-level route favored by many successful thematic games: Beowulf, Settlers, Lord of the Rings, Pandemic, Modern Art, Sekigahara, Napoleon's Triumph, Rommel in the Desert, or perhaps Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, just to pick a few. These games try to focus on just one or at most a few really essential things about the topic (Bowen Simmons used the term quiddity) and use that as the cornerstone of the design. Clearly, limiting scope is a foreign concept to The Virgin Queen, and the many and varied subsystems (mini-games, almost) are given fairly equal design weight.

Another design option is to focus on the decision making of the historical parties and try to convey the forces that pressed on them. This is the method Mark Herman called out in the designer's notes for For the People, and while I don't think it was particularly successful there, a great example of a game system where it works is the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series (the most recent, in-print installment being Battle Above the Clouds). While Battle Above the Clouds' game systems are inherently abstract, with dice rolls controlling movement and initiative even though historical commanders knew quite well how far a division could march in a day, it masterfully conveys the confusion, uncertainty, and murk those commanders faced in a way that remains fun to play and recreates the historical press-your-luck decision making pressures. Another classic game in this mold is Up Front, and Labyrinth might be trying to go this route also. Clearly this is also not the approach The Virgin Queen is taking. The trade-offs made by players in The Virgin Queen are fundamentally arbitrary – Elizabeth I didn't have some spreadsheet in which she allocated some of her budget to Shakespeare, some of it to New World piracy, and some of it to whacking Catholics. She certainly never thought, "hey, if I can avoid getting married ever, I'll earn a bunch of VP!". I've never been able to get my head around how the cards in The Virgin Queen (or The Napoleonic Wars) are supposed to be driving authentic, or even interesting, decision-making pressures.

Another way you can go is to be representational. The idea here is to present a playing field that is as rich a simulation as is possible or reasonable as constrained by the game's complexity targets, then throw out the historical personalities and let the players step into their place. Obviously, a key here is being able to blend sensible abstraction of key elements and knowing when simulation detail is useful in either producing interesting and evocative decisions or eliciting emotional response, but the idea of authentically portraying processes is key. Vance von Borries is a master of this sort of design, and Mark Simonitch's '4X games are great examples of games that both focus in on critical factors, abstracting the rest, while also having just the right amount of simulation detail. Other great examples to my mind include Europe and Asia Engulfed, EastFront and Downtown. This is an approach in which the key difficulty is knowing how much complexity is sensible, something about which reasonable people can disagree. Regardless, The Virgin Queen isn't doing this either. The idea that many of the game's manifold distinct and abstract subsystems – patronage, piracy, naval operations, religious conflict – are modeling historical processes is laughable.

The Virgin Queen, like Here I Stand, feels very similar to other "card-driven" GMT titles like Twilight Struggle, Paths of Glory, Barbarossa to Berlin, and The Napoleonic Wars. They are all resource management games where the resources being managed are abstract and not really in service of any thematic focus. The subject matter is just window dressing – sometimes rather nice window dressing, but still. These games just seem to be trying to present the players with constant tough decisions. As games, they are successful to the extent that they can do that. Paths of Glory: definitely, at least for a few games; Barbarossa to Berlin: yes, at least when the cardplay is viewed in conjunction with the more representational on-board tactical game; Twilight Struggle: for me, eh, not so much, although others find the decision-making more compelling; The Napoleonic Wars: no.

If this is the this way we're going to view the games, both Here I Stand and The Virgin Queen must ultimately be judged failures. They don't reliably present tough or even interesting choices once you understand the game's basic structure. And they don't deliver those choices in a timely manner.

I have more beefs than this with The Virgin Queen. The game is unstable and balance is suspect; the narrative tension is absent; it's overly complex and overly long; the design of the card deck doesn't produce useful suspense (unchanged from Here I Stand). I could enumerate and detail these and other mechanical problems. At the end of day, though, the game simply lacks a coherent thematic focus and so it lives and dies on its ability to rapidly present the players with tense decisions. Which for me, it doesn't do.

Is this sort of thing really worth doing, especially in the space of very long, very complex games? To me, not especially. For one, getting the balance right – delivering these constant, difficult decisions to the players – is technically challenging even in a short game and gets dramatically more difficult to the point of practical impossibility as you add length, rules, and scope. For another, this is a very well-mined field. Games that deliver tough choices without much thematic payload are a dime a dozen.

I'm aware that lots of people are rather fond of both games, and even think of them as highly thematic, so I have to ask myself: maybe there is something else going on? Obviously, they find something there that I don't, and it's pretty unlikely that they are just wrong. I think that The Virgin Queen and Here I Stand succeed for some players for exactly the same reasons that an entirely different set of players are drawn to Arkham Horror: the players bring the fun to the table themselves, and use the game only as a touchstone. The period of Martin Luther and Elizabeth I is endlessly fascinating and a lot of history geeks know a little to a lot about it, and The Virgin Queen serves up nerdtropes for the knowledgable player to riff on. It's a vehicle for players to share a historical experience, which is fine, but it's not really a game in the sense that I understand games. Even by these standards I think The Virgin Queen experience doesn't really work for the same reasons Arkham Horror doesn't really work – the historical tidbits it serves up are infrequent and structurally incoherent – but hey, if you want to have some Reformation-period fun and wear an Elizabeth I nametag, there isn't much else available.

Andean Abyss

Volko Ruhnke's Andean Abyss is the first game in GMT's new game series on counter-insurgency (COIN), with a game engine that could be described as a wargamicized El Grande (or perhaps El Grande meets Labyrinth). Four players fight over a Colombia ravaged by insurgency, drug lords, and paramilitaries as they try to further their own factional goals. The game takes place shortly after the events of Mark Bowden's excellent book Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw, when the Medellín drug cartels were clipped in the mid-90s. One player plays the Government, and is the driving force for the game as they try to extend their writ throughout the country. The others play the FARC revolutionaries oppose them, the AUC paramilitaries, and free agent Drug Cartels.

This might not immediately strike you as a promising subject on which to base a game. The conflict is a nasty one of assassination, kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking, and terrorism. It's still ongoing, and ideas about it are likely to be educated guesses mixed with speculation. However, counter-insurgency is a compelling general topic. The United States' most problematic foreign policy for the last half-century has been hip-deep in it, and so a game that is illustrative in even a small way could be important. Colombia, relatively unknown to the Americans that are the core market for wargames, could get less bogged down in ideology. From a purely game perspective, highly asymmetric games – where different players play with different objectives, or even different rules – are interesting and highly asymmetric games, like Ruhnke's previous game Labyrinth, are very unusual. For me personally, I'm always drawn to games that successfully tackle challenging themes. A game that could get you emotionally drawn in to the tragedy of Colombia's wars would be incredibly compelling.

The play of Andean Abyss is driven by a deck of event cards. Each card has an ordering for the icons for the four factions (Government, FARC, AUC, Cartels) across the top, which is the turn order for this card. Two cards will always be visible, this turn's and the next's. Each faction in turn has the opportunity to do something – take the event, run one or many operations – or pass. Only two factions can be active on each card, and whatever the first faction does generally forces the second faction into a more restrictive action (so if the first faction does an operation, the second faction will have a limited operation). Additionally, taking an action this turn forces a faction to sit out next turn, so a cycle tends to develop, with two pairs of factions alternating cards. However, being the first faction to act usually means significantly more flexibility than going second, so it's important to know when to pass because the turn order on the next card up is favorable and giving up an opportunity to act now will give you more freedom later.

Once you've decided to take an operation, your options are given by a faction-specific Chinese menu of thematically named actions: march, recruit, train, attack, assassinate, extort, airstrike, cultivate, terror, and so on. Each faction has troops (cubes for the government, cylinders for the insurgents/guerrillas) which fight for the control of areas, and bases (discs) which provide both the economic backing to fund operations and places to recruit. Control is described on two axes (population in an area can support the government or oppose it, while the area can be physically controlled by one of the factions), and there are different types of areas (regions, cities, lines of communication) with different economic and population-control implications. The Government has a lengthy process to go through of cycling in army, then police cubes in an abstraction of building up civic infrastructure while other factions try to keep their power bases and forces in being and remain flexible. While there is a significant amount of real nuance here, to me it felt like just a really complicated and asymmetric variant of El Grande. You need your cubes in the right place and in sufficient quantity to control areas. If they're out of position you need to move them. If you don't have enough pieces on the board, you need to get more out. If you're short money to fund actions, you need to get out more bases or do some extortion.

Volko Ruhnke is the designer of both Andean Abyss and Labyrinth, so it's not surprising that to the extent that both games succeed, they succeed in similar ways, and where they fail, the failings are similar also. Labyrinth may have struggled with politics, reality, and a wonky endgame, but it was remarkable for how well it allowed two very different player positions with different motivations and different tools to play the same game. Importantly, neither position or viewpoint was privileged over the other – both Jihadists and the US get the same level of thematic attention from the game. Ruhnke's older design Wilderness War tried to do something similar, but it's flaw (while, like Labyrinth, still being a game I enjoy) was that it privileged the British point of view somewhat over the French. The British concerns seemed to get more attention in gameplay detail and drove more of the action, while the French were essentially reactionary.

The factional viewpoints in Andean Abyss are somewhere in-between these two earlier games. The Government's position is thematically well-developed, with a detailed process for expanding their writ. The guerrilla factions – the FARC, AUC, and Cartels –  all feel pretty similar though. They all have a broadly similar range of actions available, although they are playing to quite different game-state goals. Those different goals though are were I believe Andean Abyss goes off the rails.

The first problem is the relatively straightforward nature of the AUC and Cartel victory conditions. While the Government has to go through an involved process of pacification, and the FARC is fighting a lonely and probably doomed war for control of population and regions, the AUC and Cartels need only get a fairly small number of bases on the board and (for the Cartels) accumulate a wad of cash. These relatively minor players – with few forces, no interest in controlling population, and more limited options – are compensated with easy VCs, to the point I've actually never seen anyone other than the Cartels or AUC win the game. Now, this is just my I experience and I don't actually believe it's the way it has to be, but it brings me to my main, crucial problem with Andean Abyss, which I could have written several paragraphs ago and saved us all a lot of trouble:

Andean Abyss is a game about counter-insurgency with no – none, zero, zilch – asymmetrical information. No hidden cards, no hidden units, no mysterious capabilities. Everything is on the table all the time. You know exactly how much force everyone has everywhere, you know the entirety of the options available to everyone, you know the results of any operations anyone might run. To the extent that there is randomness to the outcome of operations – which is almost none – everyone knows the probabilities. Everyone knows exactly how the the population thinks and exactly what to do to change their minds.

This seems highly questionable from a thematic point of view and gives little sense of the murky nature of these conflicts. Not only that, it has manifestly undesirable consequences for gameplay. Instead of making quick decisions about risk, players run several degrees of chess-like move and counter-move look-ahead, because that's how the game is clearly telling them to think, and it turns what should be a 2 or 3 hour game that would be pressing its luck to go 3 hours into a tedious marathon (my games have gone 5 hours even for the short game). Even worse though, everyone can see all the time exactly who is exactly how close to winning. So it just turns into the usual exercise of bashing whoever is in front.

I had some hopes that familiarity with the game would drive down the playing time. The menus of numerous different actions, apparently different for each faction (although less diverse than it first appears), is hugely daunting for new player to grapple with. Playing a 100% open information game where everyone has different actions available and trying to get some sense of the implications of what you're doing requires understanding a lot of things and constantly puzzling over options. Once you've learned this stuff, you could hope for a more streamlined experience. Unfortunately, there are two major obstacles. Firstly, few people really want to play again after the first 5+ hour slugfest. Secondly, the time you save in understanding the game is clawed back by the fact that now everybody knows everyone has to be on the lookout to block anyone who comes close to winning. So you add a lot of less than compelling scenario analysis and back-and-forth time back in.

Finally, like Labyrinth before it, Andean Abyss ducks too many hard questions and instead presents us with a crisp, clean, and sanitized design of cylinders, cubes, disks, and highly predictable outcomes that does little to convey the violence and capriciousness of the conflict. Perhaps an RPG would be a better format to explore the tragedy of Colombia, but Andean Abyss could have done more just by integrating more historical photos into the map and reference cards (the photos on the cards are too small and too far away to reliably make out), and using a more naturalistic approach to the visual design.

I really wanted to like Andean Abyss and wanted it to be a launchpad for a new and intriguing series of games. Flawed as they were, I am still fond of Labyrinth and Wilderness War. The game mechanics of Andean Abyss – the event cards that drive turn choices, the individualized faction action menus, the light economic model backing a positional game of discs and cubes – are promising. There is clearly a game that could have been built using them. Unfortunately, Andean Abyss is not it. Despite the undeniable level of thought and detail that has gone into it, what comes out at the end is just tedious, overlong, and overcomplicated in the same way as many other much less thoughtful king-of-the-hill type multiplayer wargames are. Unless future games address the core problem of 100% information symmetry, I don't hold out much hope the series will improve.

X-Wing Miniatures Game

No franchise is more beloved of gamers than Star Wars, and it's actually had a number of pretty good games. My personal favorite is The Queen's Gambit. The two Star Wars adaptations of Risk (Clone Wars and Original Trilogy) are still Risk but surprisingly good, and Clash of the Lightsabers is a nice fast 2-player game that melds euro-y mechanical tightness with a nice thematic detail. The West End and d20 Saga Star Wars RPGs are decent but to me nothing special, and there are still a lot of mediocre games trying to make a quick buck off the license along with the well-intentioned but misguided (Star Warriors), but overall I can't complain. Fantasy Flight has now thrown two new games into the ring (X-Wing and Star Wars: The Card Game), with one more (the official release of the Edge of the Empire RPG) coming soon.

X-Wing was hard for me to know what to make of initially. It's built on a very similar engine to Ares' Wings of Glory (which has mechanically similar, but quite different in feel, WWI and WWII versions). Players simultaneously plot their moves ahead of time, then reveal and execute turns, loops, and whatnot and then fire their weapons. There are enough clear similarities between the games, and my respect for FFG's in-house design team is low enough, that my initial impression was "OK, they just ripped off Wings of Glory" and to proceed to apply similar heuristics for tactics and strategy. Fortunately for gamers and unfortunately for my pilots, it is not. In fact, in terms of where the game is – where the real decisions lie, and what the game tensions are – X-Wing is very distinct from its parent game.

For starters, combat in X-Wing is quite lethal. An off-the-rack TIE fighter can absorb 3 points of damage before exploding in a cinematic fireball. An X-Wing with its 3 attack dice can do that outright one time in 8 – the 8-sided attack dice have hits on half the faces. If your attacker is focussed, the odds increase to almost 50%. If he's Wedge, or locked-on, or a Marksman, or at point-blank range, or all of the above, the odds – which you really need to be told about – keep on increasing. Now, the TIE Fighter is going to get some weaker evasion dice, and he may be spending effort on dodging. Nonetheless, the X-Wing in this confrontation will only need to land one or two blows to take out its target. In Wings of Glory, inflicting the 18 damage points required to take down an Me-109 is likely going to take three or more point-blank shots from a Spitfire.

Where Wings of Glory spends all its attention to detail on hardware differences – the different turning or speed or weapon capabilities of different aircraft – X-Wing is much more focussed on pilot capabilities. The differences in speed and maneuverability between an X-Wing and a TIE Fighter, while not zero, are pretty small compared to the differences between Luke Skywalker and a generic Red Squadron Pilot. The single most crucial performance asymmetry of real ariel warfare that is at the core of the design in both Wings of Glory games – turning radius – varies only slightly across all fighters in X-Wing. The TIE fighter may be slightly faster than the X-Wing, but at a given velocity everyone turns in the same circles, with a few differences on the edges (A-Wings and TIE Fighters have a slower minimum speed so can execute somewhat tighter circles, while Y-Wing pilots take stress for some tight turns).*,** Putting Wedge Antllies in the cockpit, on the other hand, dramatically increases the ship's lethality. 

Lastly, scenarios in X-Wing don't give you an order of battle, instead they give you points (usually 100) with which to buy your forces. The number of available options for spending these points is large, assuming you've invested in a modestly-sized collection. Pilots for your fighters are the big cost, but pilots can also be given special skills (marksmanship, determination), fighters can have additional weaponry added (proton torpedoes, ion cannons, various missiles), and there are more specialized upgrades (R2 units for your X-Wings, and Slave I or the Millennium Falcon can be tricked out with half-a-dozen different options). If like me your perspective is Wings of Glory, you might think "Aha! At last, a point-buy system for getting reasonably balanced match-ups!". But that's not what this is about.

Because of the game's lethality, X-Wing is about big battles. Where in Wings of Glory you would be content with the complexity of controlling 1 or 2 planes, in X-Wing you'll want 3 or 4 or more fighters to stay interested. In Wings of Glory, you'll be primarily concerned about how to maneuver your one or two planes to improve your positional advantage on the one or two enemy planes in your vicinity. In X-Wing, you'll be concerned about how to use your entire squadron such that pilot special abilities and synergies are maximized and any special weaponry you've bought is employed to its best effect. And, crucially, you'll want to spend your 100 points such that your squadron is both tactically coherent and as potent as you can make it.

At the end of the day, X-Wing is a deck-building game with a detailed combat resolution system. I think you will enjoy this in direct proportion to how much you enjoy tricking out your squadron and seeing how it fares in battle. The tactical game is pretty good, but a little random and not, in isolation, enough to be engaging for more than a few plays. But combine it with the fairly rich squadron purchasing system, and now you've got something. You've invested the pre-game energy in your pilots and ships and (probably) developed both a more nuanced tactical view of how it should be employed that may only play out over a few games, as well as something of an emotional attachment to your pilots.

Does all this hew to the feel of Star Wars? Yes-ish, with the caveat that like most classic books and movies, Star Wars speaks in different ways to different viewers. The emphasis on people more than machines is clearly right, although more pictures of people on the card design would have been a no-brainer (and restoring some of the female pilots cut from Return of the Jedi would have been awesome). For me personally though, X-Wing buys into one thing that has always bugged me about Star Wars material not written by George Lucas: it assumes that all the people we see on screen are more competent than everyone who doesn't get name-checked. I always thought the classic stories focussed on Luke and Han and Leia because they were interesting, not because they were the biggest bad-asses in the entire universe. Games, books, and comics frequently assign superpowers that are just not in evidence in the movies, where the humanity and relative ordinariness of the characters is such an important element. In fairness, X-Wing is far from the worst offender here, but it still bugs me a bit that Wedge Antilles has a table presence that vastly exceeds any other Red Squadron pilot. I always thought he was some guy who happened to be Luke's wingman. Both excellent pilots, but really, does the Rebel Alliance have nobody else? These personal feelings aside, X-Wing does do a good job of evoking the feel of the scenes in the movies. Action is fast and furious, combat is capricious unless you've heavily invested in an über-pilot, and the miniatures really are fantastic – very attractive and very faithful to the original models, but durable enough to stand up to the stress of play (the design of the stands themselves isn't that great, but Litko makes a nice replacement if and when something breaks). 

So, generally pretty appealing, but a couple obstacles remain. Firstly is the lack of decent support for multiplayer. 100 point squadrons are borderline OK, with players each taking control of 2-4 ships. Due to the lethality of combat though, someone is bound to have a ship or two knocked out early and face waning interest. It's not bad, but out of the box X-Wing is really optimized for two players and you'll have to make do. Multiplayer really wants specialized scenarios with multiple squadrons on a side, with players buying their own (smaller) forces, possibly with different tasking. This is slightly unfortunate given the possibilities and given how good Wings of Glory is for 4 or more players. (As an aside, when playing multiplayer do not neglect the very important rule that you cannot show your maneuver dials to your allies).

Secondly, do not mistake the point values assigned to various upgrades as a reasonable approximations of their worth. Squadron building requires thought. You can't throw together 100 points of stuff and and figure it'll do OK any more than you can throw together 60 vaguely appropriate Magic cards and expect that deck to perform. There are good and bad buys in the mix, and you can build both very potent and very underpowered ships and squadrons. This is fine – part of the game even – but something casual players who enjoy Wings of Glory may find frustrating. While you won't go too far wrong fielding X-Wings, an off-the-rack Y-Wing is pretty pricey for what you get in most cases, and as such is a specialty ship. Add an Ion Cannon to it and it's a huge hole in your budget unless it's filling an important tactical need. For the Imperials, their fragile TIE fighters require attention to synergizing pilot abilities to be competitive – but a large, finely-tunend Imperial squadron can be a beast.

Thirdly of course is cost. As usual, Fantasy Flight has shipped a core set that is playable only in a technical sense, and is a teaser more then a satisfying game. You're going to need more ships for this to work – my feeling is at least a second core set and a few of the Wave 1 expansion blisters. With big-box games now routinely weighing in at $60 or more it's actually not too bad comparatively and you do get nicely detailed and painted ships, but it can add up. For me, the online prices were palatable, full retail not so much. Fortunately, you're also going to need multiple invested players, so there is no reason you can't pool ships in a regular gaming group.

I quite enjoyed X-Wing, although it took me a little bit to get there. As a long-time Wings of Glory player, the similarities between the games are deceptive and it took some effort to appreciate a rather different game. As an older gamer, it's filling a tricky niche though. It needs multiple players who have bought in enough to have forces available and be willing to spend the up-front time tuning their squadrons. It's not a ton of time, but it is some. It's best as a two-player game until we get some scenarios optimized for multiplayer. It's in the same general niche as Wings of Glory, but it lacks that game's accessibility and easy tactical richness. Having said all that, though, X-Wing is definitely not Wings of Glory, and it brings a very different, richly varied, and exciting experience. And honestly, who doesn't want to fly around authentic, nicely-painted X-Wing miniatures?

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* Because the TIE Fighter has the Barrel Roll action available, it can technically turn in a noticeably tighter radius than other ships. Unfortunately, since doing this costs the pilot his action, this comes at the expense of evading or focusing – actions crucial to keeping his fragile ship alive. So it's helpful, especially if it means dodging out of someone's firing arc at the last minute, but not a general-purpose ability. See also the following correction.

** Correction: This sentence originally stated everyone's turn radius is the same. This is not quite true. Everyone uses the same movement templates at any given speed, but not everyone can use the shortest/tightest-radius template. The ability of TIEs and A-Wings to do very tight turns is not insignificant, but it's rather different from (say) knowing that your Spitfire can out-turn opponents at any speed, and its just not as important to the X-Wing design in my opinion. For a look how the different fighters move, check out this file on BGG. Some of the distinctions seem nonsensical (why is a speed 2 sharp turn an easy maneuver for an A-Wing, while a speed 3 is not? Why can the A-Wing and TIE Interceptor do an Immelman – sorry, Koiogran – at speeds 3 and 5 but not 4?).  Who knows. But the system does work, and provides some maneuver differentiation without going crazy.

Ginkgopolis

After a bit of a drought, the last 6 months have been great for the "artful euro". I've played quite a few that have kept me coming back for more: Escape, Qin, Il Vecchio, SewerPirats, Nieuw Amsterdam,  Mutant Meeples, Copycat, Panic on Wall Street (née Masters of Commerce). One of the most pleasantly surprising has been Ginkgopolis.

Ginkgopolis is one of those interesting, multifaceted games that while it's not terribly complex it defies easy pigeonholing. The conceit is that we're eco-friendly urban planners building a city by laying tiles onto a square grid, and we can build either outwards (urbanizing by adding tiles to the edge) or upwards (adding new floors on top of existing tiles). Where you can play is driven by your hand of 4 cards, drawn from a deck which contains all the visible buildings in the city plus 12 border spots for urbanization. Each turn players secretly and simultaneously play a face-down card and optionally a tile, which fully specifies their action for the turn, and then resolve in turn order. Each action gains you resources: more tiles to play, victory points, building ownership markers, or cards to add to your tableau which may provide bonuses to future actions or endgame points. 

There are multiple strong tensions which affect every decision you make in the game, which is what gives Ginkgopolis its immediate pull. One familiar one is the tension between building an engine, scoring points, or gaining needed resources. Whenever you Build a Floor – play a card for an existing build to put a new tile on top of it – you get to take the card you played and add it to your tableau. The card can give you bonus resources when you take one of the three categories of action in the future (Urbanization, Build a Floor, Exploitation) or endgame points, depending on the card's rank – low ranks provide powers, high ranks provide conditional victory points. The game system then makes it harder to grab those high-valued cards, because it costs points to build lower ranked floor tiles on top of a higher ranked one. The cards and tiles rank 1-20, so if you have the card for one of the starting buildings ranked 1-3 in hand you can play it along with any tile ranked 4-20 to add a floor, taking the 3 card for your tableau (it lets you draw an extra tile draw any time you add a new floor to a building). Say you play the 15 tile; the card for the 15 building will then be fished out of the reserves and added to the deck on the next cycle.

If you subsequently see the 15 card, if you want to add a floor on top of it and snag the 15 card for your tableau (it gives you 3 points at the end of the game for every building you own of height 3 or higher), you'll need to play a higher-value tile to do it without penalty. You can play something lower, but then you'll need to pay victory points for the difference, which can be painful in a game where victory points are relatively tight.

This leads to another of the game's key tensions: when do you play the powerful, high-ranking tiles? If you have a 20 tile you can use it to add a floor to anything without penalty, so you want to use it to grab a cool, high-valued card. But opportunities are made available by the random flow of cards and tiles, so are hard to predict. As the ranks go down (what about an 18? a 16?), it becomes trickier. You need to get something, you can't sit on tiles or any other kinds of resources forever without using them, and the perfect play is elusive.

For those big tiles, the ideal play may not necessarily involve snagging a good end-of-game scoring card. There are also big points at stake for controlling districts, groups of adjacent like-colored buildings. Getting high-valued tiles onto the board may be valuable for creating or joining up districts, or making them more painful to break up (because they are harder to build over).

While the Building a Floor move is the flashiest and most novel mechanic in the game, the other actions are just as important. Urbanization involves playing a letter card which matches an outside point on the city along with a tile, and it expands the playing field. While it doesn't allow you to add power cards to your tableau, it does score you resources (tiles, points, or ownership markers) to fuel your continuing growth, which Building a Floor does not by default. Exploitation allows you to play a card alone for some resources. All the actions can be buffed by cards in your tableau. In a recent game, one player built an Exploitation engine which turned what is superficially seems like the weakest action (it's really not, because unlike the other actions it doesn't require a tile to power) into such a strong victory point generator he could use it to clobber us. Crucially, Exploitation allows you to bury high-valued cards when you can't economically grab them because you don't have a good tile. After your turn is over, you're going to pass the rest of your hand to the left, meaning they get a good crack at any cool cards you didn't use.

I think one of the reasons people have found Ginkgopolis appealing is the remarkable elegance with which the game systems blend. For a game with 60 tiles (1-20 in three suits), 60 matching cards, 12 border tiles and cards, and three different actions types (Urbanization, Exploitation, and Building a floor), there is a lot going on here and there is real design elegance. While it will be baffling for a turn or two because it is basically abstract, once it clicks it really clicks. Players will ask rules questions ("what happens if I add a floor to a building that has already had a floor added this cycle?" "what happens if I have a card I can't play?") and I usually tell them to think about it for a second, and it becomes clear that these tricky situations simply can't occur – my preferred way for handling them. Everything in the game seems to work the way it does because that's the way it needs to work.

Thematically, Ginkgopolis is nominally about building cities in harmony with nature in a post-resource-exhaustion future, but it's mostly theme through nice art. This is not a terrible way to go, has worked before, and I think it works here. The nod to the unusual and distinctive ginkgo tree, a living fossil, is a nice touch and is effectively used in the art design. It's not a lot – the tensions in the game don't particularly make me think of urban planning – but you can't have everything all the time. It's because of this relative thematic abstractness that I wasn't sure how well Ginkgopolis would go over with my friends. It's been a pleasant surprise how well everyone has liked it, even those normally skeptical of lightly-themed abstracts.

While I think Ginkopolis doesn't quite fall into the same general box as the true classic eurogames (El Grande, Modern Art, Settlers) because of this relative abstractness combined with not immediately intuitive mechanics, this is still an old-school meaty euro in all the best senses of all those words. Streamlined systems, crisp gameplay, lots of tension, chaotic enough to provide replayability and ever-changing problems, and an elegance of design all point towards this have real staying power amongst hobbyist gamers.

The One Ring RPG

I threw in the towel on D&D (3, 3.5 and 4, plus Pathfinder) a couple years ago and switched my roleplaying energies to Gumshoe, a decision I'm quite happy with. But, as is usual with these things, I didn't bring along all the friends I game with. For players who like the tactical combat, detailed character building, and the die-rolling of D&D or Pathfinder, Gumshoe is not going to be in their wheelhouse.

The One Ring RPG, from Cubicle 7

So I'm always on the lookout for somewhere we can meet in the middle. A game, probably a fantasy game, that has interesting combat with plenty of die-rolling but doesn't get bogged down in minutia and can be enjoyed more in the quick-playing, systems-light style. Something that has plenty of skills and feat-like-things, but that still taps into the more improvisational RPG aesthetic. The One Ring looked perfect.

Not that I came to that conclusion right away though. I picked it up after it got some buzz from GenCon 2011 despite the fact that Tolkien roleplaying games in general have a rather sorry history, mainly because of my Tolkien fandom and because it was through Sophisticated Games, which has a good track record with licensed products. Unfortunately, The One Ring's two core books are incoherent: rules presented in almost random order, topics split between sections and between both books and fully explained nowhere, paragraphs that give up their meaning only after intense textual analysis – it's really terrible. After doing my initial read I shelved it feeling like it was making the right noises, but having little idea what the game was trying to do. It was only once I picked it up again six months later and plowed through it on a mission that I figured out what the game was about.

It's a nice blend of ideas. The skill check system is straightforward: you roll against target numbers with a single d12 Fate die, plus one regular d6 for each rank you have in the skill. There are a few nuances built in to the custom dice: the d6s have a Tengwar rune for an exceptional success on the 6, and the 1-3 faces are shaded and count for zero if you are weary. The big variance on the Fate die makes it possible for more or less anyone to succeed (albeit rarely) at many things, but it takes skill to get the exceptional successes that trigger bonuses. The probability curve is rather nice and gives you real flexibility as the GM with target numbers; there are big differences between how characters with various ranks in skills will feel about targets of 10, 12, 14, or 16. The rules for Weariness, zeroing out your d6 rolls of 1 through 3, are very clean but impactful, and make tasks a lot harder but don't make impossible anything you could accomplish when well-rested.

This solid skill check system then works quite well in combat, which is abstract but has good texture. Each combat round you choose how closely you are going to engage, which affects both how easy it will be for you to hit the enemy as well as how easily they hit you. Each range bracket has a special action associated with it (intimidate, rally, protect, aim), and there are other standard combat options (called shots, accepting knockback) which provide some choices and are thematic. Additionally, it's nice to see attention to workable rules for disengaging and fleeing from combat, a common occurrence in the books. Also nice is that enemies have a Hate rating which both powers their special abilities and is a proxy for morale, giving the GM an explicit cue for when the bad guys break and run away themselves. Still, despite the solid mechanical support here, combat is still pretty abstract and nowhere near as tactically detailed as many would probably like. Gumshoe has always relied on the players to be a little more imaginative than just saying "I shoot him. I'll spend 2 shooting points. I hit. I do 6 points of damage". You don't need involved narration for every combat roll, but it's in the hands of the players to bring the action to life. The One Ring gives players much more support than Gumshoe does in terms of structure to hang some narration on, but it will still get repetitive and feel flat unless players can engage with it and flesh it out through colorful description.

This is all good and well-designed, but where does the players' real narrative authority kick in? Characters in The One Ring have Traits (which can be Specialties, which are like backgrounds, or Distinctive Features, which are more like personality traits), which serve some of the same game functions as FATE's Aspects or Gumshoe's investigative skills. They are little bits of description that if you can integrate in to what you're trying to accomplish with a skill, you get a significant bonus – sometimes an auto-success, sometimes an extra experience point. There is no token economy backing this up as in FATE – you can earn the bonus as often as you can do it – and neither is as integral to the system as Trail of Cthulhu's Drives which have a hard link to a character's Sanity. It's more akin to the Technothriller Monologue and similar cherries in Night's Black Agents. Give a little narration that invokes your trait and pleases the GM and the other players, and you get a bonus. My only complaint is that I think a number of The One Ring's pre-packaged Traits can be problematic. Some of them are just hard to work into adventuring sorts of actions without straining something (Fishing?). Others, while perhaps thematic, are problematic from a game perspective as they can feed bad group dynamics (Secretive, Suspicious, or Wilful will be grabbed immediately by your player who enjoys hosing the party or abusing the gaming social contract).

In practice, while Traits are simple, work, and I like them, nonetheless they didn't exert much pull on the imaginations of my fellow-players. Perhaps the off-the-shelf ones were too vague and not generally useful enough, or the benefits of using them are not as crisp and clear as FATE's Fate points. I suspect a combination. If you have a group that likes and has some experience with these sorts of player narrative hooks I'm sure it'll be fine, but I suspect for groups trying to make the switch form D&D, GURPS, or Call of Cthulhu there might not be enough direction here.

More practical and useful I think are a few conventions and pointers for GMs. One key bit is that skill checks are resolved in a somewhat non-traditional way: first, as a player state what you are trying to accomplish; second, roll the dice; and finally, narrate your character's actions and the outcome, maybe with the help of the GM. This is a simple thing but makes for a much more satisfactory narrative, especially for social skills. How often have you framed, say, a Diplomacy check by narrating a suave approach and a persuasive argument only to fumble the die roll? It becomes hard to climb down at that point and narrate an interesting and plausible failure. This is a good habit to get into with any game I think, but The One Ring's easy skill check details for extraordinary successes and fumbles supports it especially well. It also allows the characters more narrative control over both how they succeed and how they fail, which can be fun. Watch out though for the players who are too possessive and have a hard time narrating failure for their characters, instead trying to twist a failed die roll into an uncomplicated narrative success, but I suspect we can agree not to blame the system for that.

Beyond these core ideas, The One Ring provides a lot of mechanical support for adventuring in Tolkien's world. There is a nice journeying sub-game for long trips which folds into the weariness system and provides a good way to hook in "random" encounters along the way when players blow rolls. Hope gives a way for characters to boost rolls, but spend too much Hope and you may gain a Shadow-Weaknesses, a Trait that works more to your disadvantage. The mix of wounds, weariness, and loss of hope inflicted by combat is much more thematic and interesting than just tracking hit points. The advancement system is point-buy, but the way experience points are awarded is quite clever – you get them for skill checks, but you can't rack them up for using a single strong skill, you need to use a range of skills of different types. While the game is definitely what I'd consider lightweight, there is some detail to it. Unfortunately, I have to come back to the wretched books which make the game seem far more complicated than it really is. The first time we played, we were frequently flipping pages (and thrashing with the useless index) to find simple concepts. I ended up having to read both books cover to cover a third time, taking notes, to build up a reference card with a summary of all the systems just to make the game playable. It was only one page front and back in a large-ish font – this is a simple game with a truly terrible ruleset.

The last thing to talk about is the inherent difficulty associated with gaming in the worlds of J R R Tolkien. I think The One Ring has done a good job in hewing to the feel of the books, and I think focusing on the period and style of The Hobbit more than The Lord of the Rings is the right choice. The Hobbit makes more fertile ground for lighter, fun, action-adventure games, while The Lord of the Rings is complicated by its truly epic scale and the fact that anything you might do is vastly less important than whatever the Fellowship is up to. Still, even focusing on The Hobbit, the problem is that like the Cthulhu Mythos every reader finds something different in Tolkien and decades of bad knock-offs have polluted the environment, so it can be hard for everyone to be on the same page style-wise. How many battles do the heroes of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings actually initiate? None as far as I can remember – they're all defensive engagements, or running battles with the heroes trying to escape. But a million D&D set-pieces where dwarves and elves and men take the battle to the bad guys (and loot their stuff) makes balancing expectations complicated. I really enjoy reading the parts of the Ashen Stars and Night's Black Agents rules where Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite talk quite specifically about how stories are structured in their game worlds, what the themes are and how to keep the characters moving. Something along these lines for The One Ring would have been hugely helpful, as the modules provided in the rulebook and the Tales from Wilderland sourcebook are mediocre. Tolkien is not about escorting hapless two-bit merchants through Mirkwood for a flat fee. Perhaps an equivalent of the Cthulhu Mythos' "purist" vs. "pulp" would be helpful here.

Bottom line for me: as a person intrigued by game systems and how they tweak players and enable different play styles, I liked The One Ring a lot and it overcame my inherent skepticism about the gameability of Tolkien. The dice system is terrific, the combat system is light-ish but thematic and interesting and with some subtlety, and the game is faithful to the books. Unfortunately the supports for the good game mechanics are not very good. The books are atrociously put together. The adventures are at best OK. The vital Traits are a mixed bag. There is little help for the GM in terms of the nitty-gritty of designing adventures, and crucially little practical guidance on the complicated questions of style and how to game Tolkien in a way that's fun. As good as the game system is, and as I much as I hope The One Ring can find a niche in my roleplaying rotation, these practical obstacles are significant and I fear I need to keep looking for something reliable to fill the gap between D&D and Gumshoe. Maybe 13th Age will fill the bill.

Pax Porfiriana

Sierra Madre has continued on its recent roll for me. I was torn on Origins: How We Became Human, and didn't really like anything before that, but I have enjoyed High Frontier, Bios: Megafauna, and Pax Porfiriana a great deal, all for similar reasons but all in their own quite distinct ways.

What all the games share is a deeply-researched setting. You have always had to approach Sierra Madre Games with a somewhat different aesthetic sense than other games. You can't go into it thinking primarily about game mechanisms, or how you can work the interacting game systems, or even how you are going to use the game systems to win. You need to think first about figuring out what the game is trying to say: in the case of Pax Porfiriana, it's covering and commenting on the chaotic period before the Mexican Revolution in 1910. This is not to say that the game systems are unimportant, or that you should not be trying to win. It's just to say that you will grasp the game more fundamentally and appreciate it more if you think of it as being about a power struggle between four factions in an unstable Mexico on the brink of dramatic change, change that you are trying to navigate your way through, rather than as a collection of game mechanics that you are trying to extract the most points from. As you play and come to grips with the game, the more gamerly elements will fall into place, but at the end of the day it's going to be the game's deep engagement with its subject that sells it – so build your relationship with it starting there.

The achievement of the most recent 3 Sierra Madre games (High Frontier, Bios: Megafauna, and Pax Profiriana) is that they've been able to mesh this subject engagement with clean, playable game systems. Previous games – American Megafauna and Lords of the Sierra Madre – took their themes too literally, cramming in representative game systems that turned out to be too many trees, not enough forest. Certainly High Frontier and the subsequent games require rather more player commitment and buy-in than a typical game to be worth the effort, but none are particularly more mechanically daunting than an average high-end euro. I found Pax Porfiriana to be much cleaner-playing and accessible than the complicated and thematically tortured Trajan, the thematic but mechanically clunky Dungeon Lords or Space Alert, or Fantasy Flight's straightforward but badly explained Android: Netrunner or Merchant of Venus, just to pick a few.

(As an aside, Origins: How We Became Human, the first of Sierra Madre's "modern" games, is an odd case. I love the idea behind the game and the systems are clean-playing and evocative. But many details of the game balance seems suspect – Acculturation is a major offender – in ways that make it not fun to play. I'm still in search of a set of tweaks that will let that game deliver on its potential. They must be pretty close at hand somewhere. Fortunately the later games seem to have gotten past this).

I think of the period covered by the game as a prequel to the great ideological wars of the 20th Century, the Spanish and Russian Civil Wars. Unlike those conflicts, which were full-on wars, Pax Porfiriana is more of a power vacuum. Ruled by a weakening Porfirio Díaz, Mexico is ready to be pushed in one of four ways.

The key to understanding Pax Porfiriana the first time out, something the rules dramatically fail to explain unless you read the historical background, is the relationship between these four competing factions: the Mexican Federal government of Díaz; the United States; the Mexican local governors, which the game views as akin to modern warlords; and the communist/anarchist rebels. Each faction is keyed by color, and is strongly linked to a "regime" (in the game, the current dominant political environment) and a type of prestige. So, for example, U.S. troops, enterprises, and politicians are blue and tend to fare well in the U.S. Intervention regime, in which the dominant political force is the U.S. actively meddling in Mexican affairs. They are likewise linked to the "Outrage" prestige, in which the U.S. is getting progressively more fed up with the anarchy on its border. Should Díaz be given a shove while the regime is U.S. Intervention, the competition to be Díaz' successor will be decided by Outrage, with a faction that has generated enough becoming governor as the U.S. annexes Mexico. On the flip side, the Communist revolutionaries are red and linked to the Anarchy regime and the Revolution prestige. Anarchy is hard on big businesses (mines and banks) but allows troop cards to move more freely. If Díaz weakens during anarchy and one player has managed to get a big enough share of the revolutionaries and their Revolution prestige points, they can take over after the elections. Díaz will have an opportunity to topple four times during the game, each of which can be under a different regime and so can be affected by different forces.

The relationships between factions, prestige, regimes, and victory are the core of the game and if you can grasp them in the context of the historical event, you will be most of the way to understanding the game. The White local warlords are the easiest: white troop and personality cards will have the Command prestige points directly on them and will themselves enable regime changes to the white Martial Law. Other factions, though, are more complicated: blue U.S. troop cards will change regime to U.S. Intervention, but the Outrage then required for victory will need to be engineered by Mexican elements. Loyalty is required to become Díaz' hand-picked successor should the regime remain in Pax Porfiriana, which can come from a variety of sources including businesses and politicians.

The rest of the game is pretty straight-ahead. Every turn you get actions to draft and play cards. You'll need to build up enterprises (banks, mines, plantations, gun stores) to generate cash. You'll want to recruit troops to protect those enterprises, extort your enemies, and provide political leverage (playing troop card frequently triggers a regime change). While you're doing that, you'll manage a wide variety of other special events, personalities, and institutions driven by action cards. There will be unrest to put down and factional strife. People will be thrown in jail. Lawsuits are filed, enterprises nationalized. The amount of historical detail here is amazing, but it is all built on top of a very clean-playing card game.

I like Pax Porfiriana for a lot of reasons. The main ones are the same reasons I like Republic of Rome: it presents a chaotic period in a chaotic way, with players struggling to navigate an unpredictable political landscape. Unlike Republic of Rome, it does it with very few actual rules and streamlined gameplay, accomplishing everything Lords of the Sierra Madre did with a fraction of the footprint. With a variety of paths to victory – Loyalty, Revolution, Outrage, and Command – players have flexibility in choosing different thematic paths. It manages to be chaotic without relying on the traditional and unsatisfying crutch of "take that" card play; events tend to mix things up more than simply hammer one player or another. The game rewards a nice balance of planning for the future and rank opportunism.

I think Pax succeeds for me because of this balance and nuance. The game comes with 210-ish cards representing enterprises, troops, personalities, and historical events (all of which are unique). In an average game you'll see maybe 60-80 of them. So each game presents only a slice of the whole environment, and will have a different texture as you have shortages or surpluses of troops or enterprises and some subset of the powerful, game-changing cards show up. On the other hand, its enough cards and a large enough percentage of the total for the game to retain thematic cohesion and present the players with calculated rather than arbitrary risk. Players are not going to be hosed for lack of opportunity – you should not have trouble building up your income and power base to be a player in the game (both of which could be problems in both Bios: Megafauna and Origins). A game which didn't generate enough enterprises or troops or cards of one faction to be interesting is certainly a remote possibility, but it's very remote and worth tolerating.

Especially in light of the game's duration, which is only about 2 hours when played correctly (the first time I played, I misunderstood a rule and we ended up inadvertently playing the Iron Hand variant which can be much longer with more players – 4 hours – and is not recommended). It's enough time to generate action, for players and factions to rise and fall and for the fate of Mexico to be decided, but it's also short enough to leave you wanting more.

So check it out. At only $35 direct from Sierra Madre, there is a lot of game in the compact box.

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I'll close with some advice for teaching the game, if you're the one who gets to do that. It's my traditional advice: don't over-focus on mechanisms. Pax Porfiriana is complicated not because the game mechanisms are complicated; they are not. It's the relationships between the cards and the regimes – how the elements in the game are arranged – combined with the large number of options available to the players. So explain the factions, explain a little bit of the history. Because Pax Porfiriana has this different aesthetic, I think having an understanding of what the game is trying to say gives the players more useful context for understanding how to play it than simply running the sequence of play and explaining the individual actions.