Before I start into Here I Stand, let me note a caveat: these games are hard to judge early. The card-driven games feature such a fundamentally fun system, with flavorful and interesting historical events and tough choices almost by default, that it's apparently hard to design a game of this type that isn't fun for at least one play. As a result, with Sword of Rome and Triumph of Chaos I've had to almost immediately back off of initially rather positive appraisals, and The Napoleonic Wars (which pre-dates this blog) had a rather steep, downwards vector. I'd like to think I've learned something from all this ... but bear it in mind.
I liked Here I Stand a lot. A lot more than I expected.
The core system for Here I Stand borrows heavily from The Napoleonic Wars, and anyone familiar with that game should have a big head start on Here I Stand (which, quite honestly, will be very helpful given the game's complexity. More on this later). But while The Napoleonic Wars always had troubling elements, elements that ultimately sunk it for me, Here I Stand seems a lot more promising.
Some of Here I Stand's obvious improvements: it's not a zero-sum game. In The Napoleonic Wars, if you wanted to get ahead, this was almost always done by taking someone else down. In Here I Stand, players can build up their positions by exploring the New World, building Saint Peter's, or (if you're playing Henry VIII), rolling on the Pregnancy Chart, so the players always have stuff to do and ways to get ahead without outright conflict – which helps a lot in keeping players focussed and encouraged to do things. If the Protestants don't know what else to do, they can always translate the Bible, which will not only generate VPs but have a cascading effect that will force a reaction from the Pope. The better-balanced and more-diverse player positions of Here I Stand, combined with the more interesting and flavorful deck of action cards, leads to more opportunities for real deal-making instead of the "I don't like you" / "I attacked you because I was bored/wanted to see what would happen" diplomacy of The Napoleonic Wars. The abstraction of the activation values on the event cards makes a lot more sense in this game where the players generally play the role of absolute monarchs with limited reach and attention spans (especially Henry VIII), where in The Napoleonic Wars it was always unclear to me why generals in Spain were glued to their chairs while operations were taking place in Russia; so for me, the historical flavor of Here I Stand is much stronger. And the "buckets of dice" combat system seems to work better for me with the more modest numbers of dice being rolled here (6-12 generally, although the conflicts between the Ottomans and Hapsburgs can get large) rather than with the 15 or 20+ that is more typical in The Napoleonic Wars.
The other big win is the wonderful historical flavor on a facinating period. Both The Napoleonic Wars and Sword of Rome made a good attempt at giving us an asymmetrical game, but Here I Stand seems to take it to the next level and succeed. All the powers have different ways of getting victory points. They also have very different capabilities: the Ottomans have primarily military goals, while the Protestants and the Papacy fight a religious conflict that has its own dimension that intersects with the military only somewhat, at least for a while. The Hapsburgs have to manage a far-flung empire, and balance holding off the Ottomans with exploring and colonizing the New World. The English have some interest in everything – they play some role on the Protestant side the religious conflict (at least until Bloody Mary comes on the scene), have some exploration assets, and have a decent military – but mostly Henry VIII wants a male heir. The French have a strong military and some exploration options but no interest in the religious war. This diversity of goals and approaches – as opposed to just beating each other with sticks over dirt – seems to make for a much more textured, interesting game. This is balanced by the two fairly intractable conflicts – Protestants vs. the Papacy and Hapsburgs vs. Ottomans – which serve to reasonably constrain things and drive the game in a productive way.
The big question for me going in to Here I Stand was whether the complexity was going to be manageable; after all, all these good things I've enumerated come at a cost in complexity. The game has a 40 page rulebook. And the truth is, it's a complicated game, but it's not as out of hand as the page count would indicate. In our game, I was the only one who had read the rules (although several players had played The Napoleonic Wars), but we were up and running pretty comfortably in a couple turns. We did screw stuff up, but it wasn't critical stuff, and that is a minor accomplishment, all things considered. While this rulebook is a major improvement in clarity and precision over some recent GMT efforts, it's still probably overly verbose, erring in favor of over-specification and over-explanation in too many places. The naval interception/retreat rules are one area of opacity, but once you figure out what he's trying to say they become clearer. The reformation/counter-reformation rules say too many things too many times; but at least everything is there. Need I mention that had an index been supplied, that would have helped a lot? Especially since the hard part is some of the nation-specific special rules, in particular Henry VIII's chrome-laden wife progression. Here I Stands is definitely complex, but it appears my fears of overbearing complexity were unfounded. Even though I did find the game objectively slightly more complicated than The Napoleonic Wars, Here I Stand's better rulebook, more streamlined and consistent processes, more segmented complexity (most positions don't use large chunks of the rules), and high-quality player aids may in fact make it more playable. I find that now that I've played once, I feel pretty comfortable with the game. Ultimately, I consider that a good sign, even though I would never call Here I Stand anything other than a fairly complex game.
There are still questions surrounding Here I Stand: is the complexity really under control? As I play more, will rules problems surface, or will the play become natural? Can the game be explained to new players in 30 minutes or less and can they then play comfortably? And can a satisfying version of the game that can be played in 5 hours be found? While I was very pleased with how well the game played once we got going, that is an experience that will need to be replicated before I'll really be convinced that things are reasonable. The "full" game is unworkably long (at a guess, all 9 turns will take 10 hours for experienced players, 12-15 hours for new players), so outside of cons a more managable but still satisfying version will be required. Fortunately, I think trying to play all 9 turns would just make the game long, and the rules offers some good advice on playing balanced, shorter games. Having attempted the full game the first time out, I strongly recommend taking the advice provided in the playbook for your first game – play 4 turns to the highest VPs. I think this is a very sensible plan.
Bottom line: I think there is a lot to like in Here I Stand. There are certainly questions about complexity and play time that remain to be fully answered for me, but they appear tractable, the fundamentals seem very solid, and I am anxious to play the game again. I've been thinking about it constantly since I played, bouncing around thoughts and ideas, and that doesn't happen to me very often for individual games.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Thursday, March 9, 2006
Conquest of the Empire II, Friedrich, Twilight Struggle Update
Conquest of the Empire II is more or less the usual Risk-descended empire-building thing, which should be pretty familiar by now: build up your armies, beat on your neighbors, and whine a lot that you aren't winning. When this sort of game works for me, it tends to be because it does two things: it has very good thematic flavor, and it forces the players to take an active stance if they want to win (instead of just beating up whoever is winning at the time). The gold standard here for me is still Avalon Hill's Successors. It would be nice if that game were simpler, but still, the flavorful cards and armies, and the multifaceted victory conditions, make for a fun game with lots of action.
On the flavor front, Conquest of the Empire II is decidedly weird in a number of ways. Take army movement. One of our players was sitting in Greece, wanting to invade Egypt. Being a logical type, this involved looking up the amphibious assault rules and figuring them out. We realized, though, that it turned out to be a lot easier to go up the coast of the Adriatic, turn right at the Danube, follow the Black Sea through the Bosporus and Asia until you get to the mountains, hang a right down the Levant coast, and then cross the Nile into Egypt. Army movement in a turn is unlimited, you see. Once you've gotten there, however, the process of taking the place over becomes excruciating, with a turn spent forcing a battle, then a turn and $10 spent converting a control chip, another turn and another $10 spent on another chip, then another $10 and another turn (Egypt had a half-dozen control chips at this time)... it's a strange juxtaposition of the lightning-fast with the molasses-slow. And all the defender has to do to protect his control is kick in another lone infantry unit, which is not forced to attack you, but which you must spend a whole new action eliminating.
I must admit I was also a bit disappointed by the whole Alliance process, borrowed from Struggle of Empires. Each turn the players break themselves down into two alliances through a bidding process, and then can only attack the players in the other alliance. I was hoping that this would serve to help mix things up a bit, and force a little action. But in practice it doesn't, really. Combat in Conquest of the Empire is of the highly-attritional Risk style, where the number of losses you are going to inflict is fairly proportional to the number of guys you bring (which doesn't seem very appropriate to the time period in question). So it's the usual thing, two players beat on each other, they both take a lot of losses while realizing little upside (see above), and their neighbor comes in and cleans up the remainder. Nobody does anything because they're afraid of the ensuing casualties. In practice, the Alliance structure offers only minimal restraint on the bash-the-leader game, and no incentive for action whatsoever.
So, Conquest of the Empire II flunks the two critical tests for this sort of game, for me personally. There is stuff in here that is interesting – I like the action cards (although, as usual, they seem terribly unbalanced), I like the tax rules, I like the money pressure, and the plastic bits are pleasing. But for me, none of this stuff matters if the game can't get in the front door; in order to be worthwhile in this category, a game has to be at least as systemically sound as the chronically under-rated Risk, and in my opinion, Conquest of the Empire II is not.
After the disappointment with Conquest of the Empire, I decided to try to play Friedrich again. My experience this time was both better and worse than my previous play. The first two hours were great and highly enjoyable, even more than last time, even though I was playing Russia and not the obviously interesting Prussian position. Resources were tight, and everyone was under pressure, facing constant tough tactical decisions about when and where to strike (the use of the suits in the card deck is inspired), when to build up, and how to coordinate (for the Allies). If the game had ended somewhere in there, I could give the game 5 stars out of 5 without reserveration. But it didn't, and then the endgame dragged on ... and on ... and on. Well past its best-before date.
I think the issue here is not specifically that the game is too long, but the hugely-variable endgame event deck. Said deck has 18 cards. 12 of them are minor flavor-type events, ranging from "no effect" to fairly trivial benefits or annoyances for various players. The other 6 are huge, major, game-shaking events, which either knock entire nations out of the game, or seriously hammer them. The Prussian player is trying to hold on until these external political factors knock out enough of their opponents. The first game we played, we drew 9 minor cards without drawing a single major event (Prussia was crushed). Second time, we again drew about 9 cards before drawing a single major event; when we finally did, it was the one (of 6) that actually hammers Prussia (Prussia was again crushed). Neither game saw a single ally defect, so Prussia was still a long way from the goal line, and in both cases the ultimate result was fairly evident for several turns before the end.
I really want to like Friedrich; the early game generates quite considerable goodwill. But when the game goes long, I really don't think the endgame works – there are problems with the play-balance, problems retaining game tension, and mechanical problems (players accumulate huge piles of worthless cards late, as at least one suit is worthless to each Ally). Fortunately, I think the event deck just needs some Union Pacific-style deck-stacking to make the endgame more robust. My initial, simplistic thought is that when I play again, I'll suggest randomly removing 6 of the minor event cards from the deck before shuffling in the major events. Nobody that I've talked to has exactly been claiming that Prussia wins too often, so this should accelerate the game, making it more likley to see a decent number of interesting events and less likely to see Prussia on life support for too many turns.
Before we leave Friedrich entirely, another minor comment: it should be mentioned that this game is pretty worthless for competitive play. You really have to consider any "allied" victory as a basically a team win rather than individual victory; Prussia has all the control here, their play will almost always choose which of the allies wins if they aren't going to. I don't consider this a major problem, just something to bear in mind.
As for Twilight Struggle, it's interesting that my recent review brought out comments from both sides, some saying they were happy to see my positive review while others though I was being a bit negative. I told a few correspondants that if they were getting mixed messages, that seemed about right.
After playing again, I'm still on the fence, sort of. There is enough to like in the game. But there is a bit too much micro-management too – how easy is it to get really screwed because you forgot to fulfill the fairly arbitrary military ops requirement until it's too late? – and given the very large impact of luck on the game, the depth-to-time-investment ratio is not terrific. I like it, but as I've said about so many games, it's also not hard to wish it were better. Ultimately, like Wilderness War it's probably fun to play for a while but not a long-term keeper.
On the flavor front, Conquest of the Empire II is decidedly weird in a number of ways. Take army movement. One of our players was sitting in Greece, wanting to invade Egypt. Being a logical type, this involved looking up the amphibious assault rules and figuring them out. We realized, though, that it turned out to be a lot easier to go up the coast of the Adriatic, turn right at the Danube, follow the Black Sea through the Bosporus and Asia until you get to the mountains, hang a right down the Levant coast, and then cross the Nile into Egypt. Army movement in a turn is unlimited, you see. Once you've gotten there, however, the process of taking the place over becomes excruciating, with a turn spent forcing a battle, then a turn and $10 spent converting a control chip, another turn and another $10 spent on another chip, then another $10 and another turn (Egypt had a half-dozen control chips at this time)... it's a strange juxtaposition of the lightning-fast with the molasses-slow. And all the defender has to do to protect his control is kick in another lone infantry unit, which is not forced to attack you, but which you must spend a whole new action eliminating.
I must admit I was also a bit disappointed by the whole Alliance process, borrowed from Struggle of Empires. Each turn the players break themselves down into two alliances through a bidding process, and then can only attack the players in the other alliance. I was hoping that this would serve to help mix things up a bit, and force a little action. But in practice it doesn't, really. Combat in Conquest of the Empire is of the highly-attritional Risk style, where the number of losses you are going to inflict is fairly proportional to the number of guys you bring (which doesn't seem very appropriate to the time period in question). So it's the usual thing, two players beat on each other, they both take a lot of losses while realizing little upside (see above), and their neighbor comes in and cleans up the remainder. Nobody does anything because they're afraid of the ensuing casualties. In practice, the Alliance structure offers only minimal restraint on the bash-the-leader game, and no incentive for action whatsoever.
So, Conquest of the Empire II flunks the two critical tests for this sort of game, for me personally. There is stuff in here that is interesting – I like the action cards (although, as usual, they seem terribly unbalanced), I like the tax rules, I like the money pressure, and the plastic bits are pleasing. But for me, none of this stuff matters if the game can't get in the front door; in order to be worthwhile in this category, a game has to be at least as systemically sound as the chronically under-rated Risk, and in my opinion, Conquest of the Empire II is not.
After the disappointment with Conquest of the Empire, I decided to try to play Friedrich again. My experience this time was both better and worse than my previous play. The first two hours were great and highly enjoyable, even more than last time, even though I was playing Russia and not the obviously interesting Prussian position. Resources were tight, and everyone was under pressure, facing constant tough tactical decisions about when and where to strike (the use of the suits in the card deck is inspired), when to build up, and how to coordinate (for the Allies). If the game had ended somewhere in there, I could give the game 5 stars out of 5 without reserveration. But it didn't, and then the endgame dragged on ... and on ... and on. Well past its best-before date.
I think the issue here is not specifically that the game is too long, but the hugely-variable endgame event deck. Said deck has 18 cards. 12 of them are minor flavor-type events, ranging from "no effect" to fairly trivial benefits or annoyances for various players. The other 6 are huge, major, game-shaking events, which either knock entire nations out of the game, or seriously hammer them. The Prussian player is trying to hold on until these external political factors knock out enough of their opponents. The first game we played, we drew 9 minor cards without drawing a single major event (Prussia was crushed). Second time, we again drew about 9 cards before drawing a single major event; when we finally did, it was the one (of 6) that actually hammers Prussia (Prussia was again crushed). Neither game saw a single ally defect, so Prussia was still a long way from the goal line, and in both cases the ultimate result was fairly evident for several turns before the end.
I really want to like Friedrich; the early game generates quite considerable goodwill. But when the game goes long, I really don't think the endgame works – there are problems with the play-balance, problems retaining game tension, and mechanical problems (players accumulate huge piles of worthless cards late, as at least one suit is worthless to each Ally). Fortunately, I think the event deck just needs some Union Pacific-style deck-stacking to make the endgame more robust. My initial, simplistic thought is that when I play again, I'll suggest randomly removing 6 of the minor event cards from the deck before shuffling in the major events. Nobody that I've talked to has exactly been claiming that Prussia wins too often, so this should accelerate the game, making it more likley to see a decent number of interesting events and less likely to see Prussia on life support for too many turns.
Before we leave Friedrich entirely, another minor comment: it should be mentioned that this game is pretty worthless for competitive play. You really have to consider any "allied" victory as a basically a team win rather than individual victory; Prussia has all the control here, their play will almost always choose which of the allies wins if they aren't going to. I don't consider this a major problem, just something to bear in mind.
As for Twilight Struggle, it's interesting that my recent review brought out comments from both sides, some saying they were happy to see my positive review while others though I was being a bit negative. I told a few correspondants that if they were getting mixed messages, that seemed about right.
After playing again, I'm still on the fence, sort of. There is enough to like in the game. But there is a bit too much micro-management too – how easy is it to get really screwed because you forgot to fulfill the fairly arbitrary military ops requirement until it's too late? – and given the very large impact of luck on the game, the depth-to-time-investment ratio is not terrific. I like it, but as I've said about so many games, it's also not hard to wish it were better. Ultimately, like Wilderness War it's probably fun to play for a while but not a long-term keeper.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Euro Roundup
Beowulf: I have a reputation as a bit of a contrarian, something which I find a bit overblown. For the majority of games, the difference between me and the online "conventional wisdom" is usually just a matter of degrees (I think Puerto Rico is very good, for example, but nowhere near the second coming; I'm not a huge Princes of Florence fan, but I do think it's a good game; I think Caylus is good but nothing spectacular; and so on). There have been a few larger exceptions, notably Shadows over Camelot (which I didn't like much at all) and War of the Ring (which was at best OK), but I never felt like I was seriously out on a limb.
In the case of Beowulf, though, the yawning chasm between me (easily the best game of 2005 and one of the best games of the last 5 years) and BoardGameGeek (overall rank of 1042nd) is arresting, even if you factor in that other critics have had nice things to say about the game. Am I missing something here? Seriously, I do worry about this. There is this shadow in the back of my mind, like the next time I play, whatever it is that all those BoardGameGeek raters see will suddenly become apparent to me, and I'll have to retract all the nice things I said.
It hasn't happend yet, though, and it's comfortably past the 10-play mark. Every time I play it, it's a facinating and exciting game. Everyone I've played it with has liked it. Nobody I've played it with has out-and-out disliked it, which is saying something these days. Needless to say, there are no retractions in the works.
I'll just focus on one thing here, and that is the luck complaint. Setting aside the question of just how much luck there is for a moment, one of the neat things is that Beowulf seems to stay robust as a game in the face of bad luck. A legitimate complaint about Settlers is that if your numbers don't come up, you've got nothing to do because you've been cut off, all the good settlement numbers are gone, and the game just isn't fun. That's occasionally true (although rarer than you might think, given the amount of whining sometimes going on), and this is only palatable because the game is short. Anyway, this is a key bit of brilliance in Settlers; it would have been so easy to drag it out into a much bigger game.
In Beowulf, if you run into a buzz-saw of bad luck on the risks ... you get scratched a lot. However, you still have cards and choices and can more or less fully participate in the game. When it's done, if you came in second, you can say "hey, I did pretty well considering how badly I did on the risks" (I recommend saying it only to yourself, however). You're never out of it from a participation standpoint. That, and, like Settlers, the game is short at 45-60min.
Hacienda: I think I'm maybe 15 games in on Hacienda, and I find it's slowing down a bit. I still like it a lot, but I think it's time to break out that map generator to try to give the game a bit of variation. I'm not a huge fan of the basic, symmetric map other than for introductory purposes; too bad Hans im Glück couldn't have given us a slightly more interesting map instead. Given the dry theme and lack of large-scale variability, I think finding a few more good maps will be key in extending the game's life beyond the 20-play mark.
Wings of War: Burning Drachens: For me personally, Wings of War is a game that has never quite managed to deliver on the potential I thought it had, although I am still fond of it. The dogfights in Famous Aces were cool but not endlessly replayable, then Watch Your Back! took forever to come out and didn't have great scenarios. But Burning Drachens is cool. Having that large, fixed target (the Balloon) and anti-aircraft guns adds a lot of interest to the maneuvering. And the scenarios seem somewhat better thought-out. You don't even need previous sets to play, although they'll help for bigger games.
Memoir '44: Eastern Front: My biggest (although not only) complaint about Memoir '44 was the egregiously unbalanced scenarios. You'd sit down to play Omaha Beach, and when it was done it felt like it was a waste of time given the virtually pre-ordained results. It has been a relief then to play four scenarios from the Eastern Front expansion and have them all be reasonably tense and closely-run. The game is still hugely random of course, so whether or not it is interesting can depend a lot on drawing somewhat reasonable cards, but still, the new expansion has revived my interest in the game. It's never going to be a great game for me, but it is one that I can enjoy in the right spot.
Rumis: I first played Rumis last year, and I thought it was OK, but nothing I'd be remotely inclined to play instead of Educational Insights' other, higher-profile game, Blokus. That time we played on one of the "giant blocks" map. Having now played it on a step-pyramid board, I have to say I liked the game a lot more. For those who haven't played, Rumis is sort of a 3d Tetris game, where you are dropping blocks onto the playing surface. Each time you play a block, you have to play it so that it touches one of your existing blocks along at least one face. The object is to have the largest number of visible faces (when looking down) at the end of the game.
When you're just filling in a giant 8-height square block, everything played in the first half of the game is just going to be paved over, so for me there was a sense of pointlessness to the early game, a jockying for late-game position that wasn't all that interesting. With the step-pyramid layout, though, where the first column is height 1, second height two, and so on, the game was much more consistantly interesting. With maximum-height scoring positions available almost all the time, you always had a tension between locking in points now and risking getting completely locked out of later rows if you don't have enough block faces to play against on later turns.
It's still not the sort of game I would buy (I don't own Blokus either, even though I do like it; I sometimes wonder what my favorite game I don't own is, and Blokus is certainly a candidate). But it was definitely more enjoyable that it had been on first inspection, and I would certainly play again.
Bolide is a new race game from Ghenos Games, an Italian company. The basic idea is pretty simple: each turn you move your car. After moving, you place your "inertia" marker ahead of you on the track by exactly however much your car moved. So if you moved ahead 4 spaces and changed lanes once to the right, your "inertia" marker will be 4 spaces ahead and one space to the right. Next turn, you can then move your car to anywhere within two spaces of your inertia.
While easy to state, this can be a bit confusing to play – but once grasped, it's really neat. No longer are you just taking a turn at or below the maximum speed rating, but you actually have to figure out how to get your momentum going in the right direction and manage your way through the entire turn as you get your inertia going in the new direction.
The core idea here is really, really clever. But there is a showstopper: the game is way, way, way too long. One lap took us 2 hours and change, and the game really is balanced for two laps. We decided that there was no way we were investing 4 hours in the game and called it after one. Even if you played with the timer and forced people to move quickly, I see no way to bring the game down to the 60 minutes or so that would be acceptable. The one idea here, regardless of how clever it is, just simply can't justify the game's length. For Bolide to have a shot, it would need to bring the play time way down, and ideally add a second idea.
In the case of Beowulf, though, the yawning chasm between me (easily the best game of 2005 and one of the best games of the last 5 years) and BoardGameGeek (overall rank of 1042nd) is arresting, even if you factor in that other critics have had nice things to say about the game. Am I missing something here? Seriously, I do worry about this. There is this shadow in the back of my mind, like the next time I play, whatever it is that all those BoardGameGeek raters see will suddenly become apparent to me, and I'll have to retract all the nice things I said.
It hasn't happend yet, though, and it's comfortably past the 10-play mark. Every time I play it, it's a facinating and exciting game. Everyone I've played it with has liked it. Nobody I've played it with has out-and-out disliked it, which is saying something these days. Needless to say, there are no retractions in the works.
I'll just focus on one thing here, and that is the luck complaint. Setting aside the question of just how much luck there is for a moment, one of the neat things is that Beowulf seems to stay robust as a game in the face of bad luck. A legitimate complaint about Settlers is that if your numbers don't come up, you've got nothing to do because you've been cut off, all the good settlement numbers are gone, and the game just isn't fun. That's occasionally true (although rarer than you might think, given the amount of whining sometimes going on), and this is only palatable because the game is short. Anyway, this is a key bit of brilliance in Settlers; it would have been so easy to drag it out into a much bigger game.
In Beowulf, if you run into a buzz-saw of bad luck on the risks ... you get scratched a lot. However, you still have cards and choices and can more or less fully participate in the game. When it's done, if you came in second, you can say "hey, I did pretty well considering how badly I did on the risks" (I recommend saying it only to yourself, however). You're never out of it from a participation standpoint. That, and, like Settlers, the game is short at 45-60min.
Hacienda: I think I'm maybe 15 games in on Hacienda, and I find it's slowing down a bit. I still like it a lot, but I think it's time to break out that map generator to try to give the game a bit of variation. I'm not a huge fan of the basic, symmetric map other than for introductory purposes; too bad Hans im Glück couldn't have given us a slightly more interesting map instead. Given the dry theme and lack of large-scale variability, I think finding a few more good maps will be key in extending the game's life beyond the 20-play mark.
Wings of War: Burning Drachens: For me personally, Wings of War is a game that has never quite managed to deliver on the potential I thought it had, although I am still fond of it. The dogfights in Famous Aces were cool but not endlessly replayable, then Watch Your Back! took forever to come out and didn't have great scenarios. But Burning Drachens is cool. Having that large, fixed target (the Balloon) and anti-aircraft guns adds a lot of interest to the maneuvering. And the scenarios seem somewhat better thought-out. You don't even need previous sets to play, although they'll help for bigger games.
Memoir '44: Eastern Front: My biggest (although not only) complaint about Memoir '44 was the egregiously unbalanced scenarios. You'd sit down to play Omaha Beach, and when it was done it felt like it was a waste of time given the virtually pre-ordained results. It has been a relief then to play four scenarios from the Eastern Front expansion and have them all be reasonably tense and closely-run. The game is still hugely random of course, so whether or not it is interesting can depend a lot on drawing somewhat reasonable cards, but still, the new expansion has revived my interest in the game. It's never going to be a great game for me, but it is one that I can enjoy in the right spot.
Rumis: I first played Rumis last year, and I thought it was OK, but nothing I'd be remotely inclined to play instead of Educational Insights' other, higher-profile game, Blokus. That time we played on one of the "giant blocks" map. Having now played it on a step-pyramid board, I have to say I liked the game a lot more. For those who haven't played, Rumis is sort of a 3d Tetris game, where you are dropping blocks onto the playing surface. Each time you play a block, you have to play it so that it touches one of your existing blocks along at least one face. The object is to have the largest number of visible faces (when looking down) at the end of the game.
When you're just filling in a giant 8-height square block, everything played in the first half of the game is just going to be paved over, so for me there was a sense of pointlessness to the early game, a jockying for late-game position that wasn't all that interesting. With the step-pyramid layout, though, where the first column is height 1, second height two, and so on, the game was much more consistantly interesting. With maximum-height scoring positions available almost all the time, you always had a tension between locking in points now and risking getting completely locked out of later rows if you don't have enough block faces to play against on later turns.
It's still not the sort of game I would buy (I don't own Blokus either, even though I do like it; I sometimes wonder what my favorite game I don't own is, and Blokus is certainly a candidate). But it was definitely more enjoyable that it had been on first inspection, and I would certainly play again.
Bolide is a new race game from Ghenos Games, an Italian company. The basic idea is pretty simple: each turn you move your car. After moving, you place your "inertia" marker ahead of you on the track by exactly however much your car moved. So if you moved ahead 4 spaces and changed lanes once to the right, your "inertia" marker will be 4 spaces ahead and one space to the right. Next turn, you can then move your car to anywhere within two spaces of your inertia.
While easy to state, this can be a bit confusing to play – but once grasped, it's really neat. No longer are you just taking a turn at or below the maximum speed rating, but you actually have to figure out how to get your momentum going in the right direction and manage your way through the entire turn as you get your inertia going in the new direction.
The core idea here is really, really clever. But there is a showstopper: the game is way, way, way too long. One lap took us 2 hours and change, and the game really is balanced for two laps. We decided that there was no way we were investing 4 hours in the game and called it after one. Even if you played with the timer and forced people to move quickly, I see no way to bring the game down to the 60 minutes or so that would be acceptable. The one idea here, regardless of how clever it is, just simply can't justify the game's length. For Bolide to have a shot, it would need to bring the play time way down, and ideally add a second idea.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame
I've been on what (for me, anyway) counts as a bit of a game binge with Age of Steam. I've recently played Age of Steam on the Scandinavia, Ireland, Germany, and new France maps. And I also had a chance to try out Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame.
Age of Steam has always been the ultimate "bubble game" for me. On the one hand, I like its money management elements – you are caught between needed big capital improvements and the debt required to finance them. On the other hand, the game lacks the polish we've come to expect from games these days. The sub-par graphics and rules are one element of this, but the main thing is the serious systemic imbalances: the fact that so many of the special actions are worthless or almost worthless in most circumstances; and the fact that the late-game bidding is so weird because money doesn't count for anything at game end (it isn't even a tie-breaker). And let's not forget the awkward victory conditions, which encourage all sorts of odd tile-laying so you can turn money you can't use into track you can't use – the track at least being worth points.
I do still sort of like Age of Steam, but I think with all the imbalances, it's now on a terminal downward slope for me after about 10 games. In the great German-style games, like El Grande, Settlers of Catan, or Puerto Rico the players have resources that they have to make tough choices about how to spend. Because many of the resource "sinks" in Age of Steam are so unbalanced, the choices are more about figuring out which options are viable at all. This just isn't all that entertaining, and misjudgments can have seriously debilitating effects. As a player of German-style games, I have come to trust the designer, in that if he or she puts something in the game, it is a viable choice. Such is not the case here, and it requires an attitude adjustment. Still, even with all this, I think Age of Steam is close to being pretty good. If the roles were re-developed, and the victory conditions re-thought, and the role of randomness reconsidered, some of these issues could be resolved, and the income vs. debt balance (the really good part of the game) could shine. As it is, though, it's just not there.
When Railroad Tycoon came out last year, I went over to BoardGameGeek and surfed people's comments and opinions, and read some online reviews. In general, I wasn't that optimistic, because most people seemed to think of it as a simplification of Age of Steam. At the end of the day, though, I was somewhat more impressed with Railroad Tycoon than I ended up being with Age of Steam.
The reason for this is simple: in Railroad Tycoon, the role selection is gone. Instead, you have three actions per turn to spend on a variety of ways of improving your corporate empire: building track, making deliveries, improving your trains, developing cities, and so on. This leads to consistently more interesting choices than you face in Age of Steam, where your options are a lot more constrained. Between the rich turn-to-turn choices (including a lot more ways to spend money) and the fact that Railroad Tycoon retains the interesting debt-or-development choices, I think it is the fundamentally superior game.
Railroad Tycoon still has some significant issues. It seems to have played a shell game with the imbalances of Age of Steam. It hasn't gotten rid of them, although it has moved them into areas where they do less damage. The game features a lot of special action cards. These can be of two types: cards with one-time or recurring powers available for draft, which you can take as one of your action choices; or cards which offer an income bonus to the first player able to fulfill their conditions (getting a 4-train, making a 3-length delivery, connecting Baltimore to Toledo, that sort of thing).
The first serious red flag are cards like the one that gives you a 20-income bonus for connecting New York to the West. After playing, I find it inconceivable that this could ever be done short of colossal debt that would be suicidal. The game is too short and the cost of making the Western connection too high. On further inspection, there are many cards in the deck that are too weak to even consider taking outside of very, very specialized circumstances.
Obviously, cards that are too weak aren't a critical problem. They aren't exactly desirable, but in this case you can ignore them and focus on the many other action choices. The more serious question is whether there are cards that are too strong. This, I am not sure of. There are a few cards (the first to make a 3-length delivery, the first to upgrade a train to level 4, and the first to deliver to certain cities) which offer potentially unbalancing payoffs when scored very early in the game. Normally, players are making one or two income points at a time until they've build out their network; these cards can give you easy 3-4 point income bumps, and getting one or two early can make a big difference to your chances.
So, I'm not generally enamored of the cards, and find it hard to believe that any effort at all was spent balancing them. But in general, I think they do a lot less damage than the unbalanced and constraining roles in Age of Steam, and I think by opening up the flow of the turn sequence to more player options, Railroad Tycoon presents a more interesting game. But like Age of Steam, this inability to get the balance right is what keeps game companies like Eagle, Warfrog, and Fantasy Flight from operating on the same level as the Germans.
Age of Steam has always been the ultimate "bubble game" for me. On the one hand, I like its money management elements – you are caught between needed big capital improvements and the debt required to finance them. On the other hand, the game lacks the polish we've come to expect from games these days. The sub-par graphics and rules are one element of this, but the main thing is the serious systemic imbalances: the fact that so many of the special actions are worthless or almost worthless in most circumstances; and the fact that the late-game bidding is so weird because money doesn't count for anything at game end (it isn't even a tie-breaker). And let's not forget the awkward victory conditions, which encourage all sorts of odd tile-laying so you can turn money you can't use into track you can't use – the track at least being worth points.
I do still sort of like Age of Steam, but I think with all the imbalances, it's now on a terminal downward slope for me after about 10 games. In the great German-style games, like El Grande, Settlers of Catan, or Puerto Rico the players have resources that they have to make tough choices about how to spend. Because many of the resource "sinks" in Age of Steam are so unbalanced, the choices are more about figuring out which options are viable at all. This just isn't all that entertaining, and misjudgments can have seriously debilitating effects. As a player of German-style games, I have come to trust the designer, in that if he or she puts something in the game, it is a viable choice. Such is not the case here, and it requires an attitude adjustment. Still, even with all this, I think Age of Steam is close to being pretty good. If the roles were re-developed, and the victory conditions re-thought, and the role of randomness reconsidered, some of these issues could be resolved, and the income vs. debt balance (the really good part of the game) could shine. As it is, though, it's just not there.
When Railroad Tycoon came out last year, I went over to BoardGameGeek and surfed people's comments and opinions, and read some online reviews. In general, I wasn't that optimistic, because most people seemed to think of it as a simplification of Age of Steam. At the end of the day, though, I was somewhat more impressed with Railroad Tycoon than I ended up being with Age of Steam.
The reason for this is simple: in Railroad Tycoon, the role selection is gone. Instead, you have three actions per turn to spend on a variety of ways of improving your corporate empire: building track, making deliveries, improving your trains, developing cities, and so on. This leads to consistently more interesting choices than you face in Age of Steam, where your options are a lot more constrained. Between the rich turn-to-turn choices (including a lot more ways to spend money) and the fact that Railroad Tycoon retains the interesting debt-or-development choices, I think it is the fundamentally superior game.
Railroad Tycoon still has some significant issues. It seems to have played a shell game with the imbalances of Age of Steam. It hasn't gotten rid of them, although it has moved them into areas where they do less damage. The game features a lot of special action cards. These can be of two types: cards with one-time or recurring powers available for draft, which you can take as one of your action choices; or cards which offer an income bonus to the first player able to fulfill their conditions (getting a 4-train, making a 3-length delivery, connecting Baltimore to Toledo, that sort of thing).
The first serious red flag are cards like the one that gives you a 20-income bonus for connecting New York to the West. After playing, I find it inconceivable that this could ever be done short of colossal debt that would be suicidal. The game is too short and the cost of making the Western connection too high. On further inspection, there are many cards in the deck that are too weak to even consider taking outside of very, very specialized circumstances.
Obviously, cards that are too weak aren't a critical problem. They aren't exactly desirable, but in this case you can ignore them and focus on the many other action choices. The more serious question is whether there are cards that are too strong. This, I am not sure of. There are a few cards (the first to make a 3-length delivery, the first to upgrade a train to level 4, and the first to deliver to certain cities) which offer potentially unbalancing payoffs when scored very early in the game. Normally, players are making one or two income points at a time until they've build out their network; these cards can give you easy 3-4 point income bumps, and getting one or two early can make a big difference to your chances.
So, I'm not generally enamored of the cards, and find it hard to believe that any effort at all was spent balancing them. But in general, I think they do a lot less damage than the unbalanced and constraining roles in Age of Steam, and I think by opening up the flow of the turn sequence to more player options, Railroad Tycoon presents a more interesting game. But like Age of Steam, this inability to get the balance right is what keeps game companies like Eagle, Warfrog, and Fantasy Flight from operating on the same level as the Germans.
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Downtown
I finally had the chance to play a couple games of Downtown: The Air War Over Hanoi, 1965 to 1972. You know what game it reminds me of? SPQR. Yeah, the game where you're commanding Roman legions.
That might require some explanation.
That might require some explanation.
From movies like Spartacus, you might think of a Legionnaire as a guy with a pilum and a gladius. But the Roman legion (before Marius, anyway) was – according to SPQR, at least – a fairly complex piece of machinery. You had the velites, hastati, principes, and triarii, each with their own assigned function. The whole thing was designed to be the ultimate process-driven military machine, so that your average senator, with no military knowledge or experience but with an inbred confidence and sense of superiority, could command it and get results.
Downtown is the same deal, sort of, except that it's 2000 years more complex. And maybe that bit about the senators. In the average scenario of the game, you have a target, randomly determined from a short list. If you're the US, you're given some planes, each flight of which has a different, highly-specific role: fighters with heat-seeking missiles to clear the sky (combat air patrol, or CAP), bombers with radar-seeking missiles to take out SAMs and radar-directed anti-aircraft guns (SEAD, suppression of enemy aircraft defenses – the military does like their acronyms), electronic warfare planes to defend against enemy radars, bombers with dumb and/or precision munitions for taking out the target, and planes with cameras to make sure you've done it. Your goal in the game is to wield this sometimes-bewildering array of planes and armaments bearing an alphabet soup of acronyms to best effect. If you're the NVA, your job is to take the SAMs, AAA, and fighters that HQ gives you to protect the targets on the US player's list.
Downtown, like SPQR, is a highly tactical game. You have to plot routes to the target that you think will minimize your exposure. You have to decide which air defenses are worth suppressing and which to ignore (or, if you're the NVA, when to fire and when to stay hidden). You need to decide when the fighters need to stick to the bombers and when to chase down MiGs. This is all pretty cool, and it plays much more easily than the 30-odd pages of rules would lead you to believe.
What you aren't doing, though, is a bunch of interesting stuff including selecting raid package makeups or loadouts, chosing targets for their strategic or operational value, managing your order of battle as planes and pilots are lost or damaged, or (as the NVA) balancing the need for AAA vs SAMs vs MiGs. You don't need to decide how many planes to commit to actually doing the bombing vs. how many to protect the bombers; even in the campaign games, the system tells you how to configure your raids. I completely understand why the designer went this way: it would have greatly increased the complexity and made ensuring reasonable game-balance monstrously difficult. I think it was smart to do it the way he did. Nonetheless, it's still hard not to wish for a little bit more resource-management type control over the game.
As a tactical game, I enjoyed Downtown. It manages to generate quite a bit of tension, as the NVA has lots of hidden resources, and there are lots of high-stakes situations as the bombers have to weather the anti-aircraft fire or the SAM radars lock on. You have a fair amount of flexibility in accomplishing your missions. It's also cool in that it is almost completely asymmetric, with each side having access to an almost completely different arsenal. But given the constraints, the highly specialized tools and doctrine that the players have to work within and the limited scope of each scenario, I'm uncertain at this point if Downtown really has enough player flexibility to get sufficient mileage out of those 30-odd pages of rules.
I think that where this game is going to score for most people is in the realm of generating a historical feel for the operations over North Vietnam. I think it's possible from playing the game to get a real sense of how the battles were fought and how tactics evolved. The game gives the US player a sense of the risk and uncertainty of these missions, and the NVA player a feel for fighting a war in which they can't go toe-to-toe with the Americans.
I rather enjoyed playing Downtown, but judged purely as a game I admit some uncertainties as to its medium-term replayability. Looking at the whole package, though, I was pretty happy with it.
Downtown is the same deal, sort of, except that it's 2000 years more complex. And maybe that bit about the senators. In the average scenario of the game, you have a target, randomly determined from a short list. If you're the US, you're given some planes, each flight of which has a different, highly-specific role: fighters with heat-seeking missiles to clear the sky (combat air patrol, or CAP), bombers with radar-seeking missiles to take out SAMs and radar-directed anti-aircraft guns (SEAD, suppression of enemy aircraft defenses – the military does like their acronyms), electronic warfare planes to defend against enemy radars, bombers with dumb and/or precision munitions for taking out the target, and planes with cameras to make sure you've done it. Your goal in the game is to wield this sometimes-bewildering array of planes and armaments bearing an alphabet soup of acronyms to best effect. If you're the NVA, your job is to take the SAMs, AAA, and fighters that HQ gives you to protect the targets on the US player's list.
Downtown, like SPQR, is a highly tactical game. You have to plot routes to the target that you think will minimize your exposure. You have to decide which air defenses are worth suppressing and which to ignore (or, if you're the NVA, when to fire and when to stay hidden). You need to decide when the fighters need to stick to the bombers and when to chase down MiGs. This is all pretty cool, and it plays much more easily than the 30-odd pages of rules would lead you to believe.
What you aren't doing, though, is a bunch of interesting stuff including selecting raid package makeups or loadouts, chosing targets for their strategic or operational value, managing your order of battle as planes and pilots are lost or damaged, or (as the NVA) balancing the need for AAA vs SAMs vs MiGs. You don't need to decide how many planes to commit to actually doing the bombing vs. how many to protect the bombers; even in the campaign games, the system tells you how to configure your raids. I completely understand why the designer went this way: it would have greatly increased the complexity and made ensuring reasonable game-balance monstrously difficult. I think it was smart to do it the way he did. Nonetheless, it's still hard not to wish for a little bit more resource-management type control over the game.
As a tactical game, I enjoyed Downtown. It manages to generate quite a bit of tension, as the NVA has lots of hidden resources, and there are lots of high-stakes situations as the bombers have to weather the anti-aircraft fire or the SAM radars lock on. You have a fair amount of flexibility in accomplishing your missions. It's also cool in that it is almost completely asymmetric, with each side having access to an almost completely different arsenal. But given the constraints, the highly specialized tools and doctrine that the players have to work within and the limited scope of each scenario, I'm uncertain at this point if Downtown really has enough player flexibility to get sufficient mileage out of those 30-odd pages of rules.
I think that where this game is going to score for most people is in the realm of generating a historical feel for the operations over North Vietnam. I think it's possible from playing the game to get a real sense of how the battles were fought and how tactics evolved. The game gives the US player a sense of the risk and uncertainty of these missions, and the NVA player a feel for fighting a war in which they can't go toe-to-toe with the Americans.
I rather enjoyed playing Downtown, but judged purely as a game I admit some uncertainties as to its medium-term replayability. Looking at the whole package, though, I was pretty happy with it.
Mark H. Walker's Lock 'n Load Band of Heroes
I was a fan of Mark Walker's previous Lock 'n Load game, Mark H. Walker's Lock 'n Load Forgotten Heroes: Vietnam, so I ultimately bought Band of Heroes, although I vacillated a bit. The price point was higher than I would have liked (especially given the component quality), and I'm a bit tired of hearing about the U.S. Paratroopers these days, sort of like I'm tired of hearing about how smart they are over at Google. I mean, I'm sure the Paras were brave and skilled, but weren't there some other units in the U.S. Army we could talk about sometime? Like maybe some of the units that weren't all-volunteer who fought with distinction in the Bulge or Huertgen Forest? Or maybe we could, just for yuks, acknowledge the contribution of British and Canadian forces on D-Day? I mean, all Saving Private Ryan had to say about the British and Canadians keeping the powerful and murderous SS armored divisions away from the Americans was Ted Danson calling Montgomery overrated.
With that rant out of the way, on to the game.
Although I have enjoyed playing Band of Heroes, as I've played the system more I've become a bit less enamored of it than I was of the previous game in the system, Forgotten Heroes: Vietnam. On the one hand, I do like a lot about the game system: I like the simple, chart-light combat resolution system, I like how it uses small back-and-forth impulses instead of regimented turns, and I like the spotting rules, whereby it's actually kind of hard to find stuff. I like that the scenarios play quickly.
But let's drill down a bit on one specific design challenge for interactive tactical games: how to solve the "human wave" problem.
The problem is this: units in defensive positions can fire on units that are rushing them, or trying to infiltrate their way through the front lines to victory locations. The general heuristic with these games is that units get to fire once, so the defender has to make choices about which encroaching units to shoot at. The problem with the everyone-shoots-once rule is that an attacker, who has a player's-eye-view of the board, can see which units have fired and which haven't, and once the defenders have exhausted their fire, he can run around the board with wild (and rather unrealistic) abandon.
This was a bit of a problem in Avalon Hill's 1977 classic Squad Leader. For those who remember that game, John Hill tried to solve the problem with defensive fire rules that ended up being totally unworkable in practice: the attacker had to move all his units, and as he did so the defender could mark "defensive fire opportunities", which he could then choose to take after everyone had moved; so he could theoretically ask the attacker to unwind every single move he had made to take the perfect defensive fire shots. This was clearly a bit out of hand; nobody I know played this way, they just took their shots as they came up – but this, obviously, lead to the above issue.
When Squad Leader became ASL, Avalon Hill took these problems by the horns and came up with solutions that are, in my opinion, brilliant, and the best elements of ASL (which is why most of them have made it into the Starter Kits). The rules for residual fire, rate of fire, fire lanes, and subsequent defensive fires made it very hard to predict how much defensive fire could be laid down, gave the option to the defender to put down more fire by taking chances with the equipment or with unit morale, and were overall far more realistic portrayals of how machine-guns could influence the battlefield – and all was achieved at a very low cost in terms of real complexity. It was still about drawing out the defenders' fire, but it was no longer such a stark, black-and-white situation, and this particular combination of making some elements more abstract (like machine-gun rates of fire) and some elements more concrete to reflect how the weapons were really used (fire lanes, residual fire), is a perfect mix.
Back to Band of Heroes ... compared to the ASL Starter Kits, I think this issue of how defensive fire is handled is the biggest gap in the Lock 'n Load games, both in terms of simulation and of making an interesting game. Because Lock 'n Load has gone back to a "one unit, one shot" model, it has become very much about drawing out all the defending units' fire capabilities, and then doing whatever you want with the rest of your guys. This is compounded a bit by the problem that attackers can force close combat at any time, which makes it much harder for defenders to pass up opportunities to fire on nearby units, and therefore easier to nail down the defenders.
In some scenarios, the effects of this will be worse than others, obviously. This issue hardly ever bugged me in Forgotten Heroes, but perhaps the higher unit morales and tougher terrain (stone buildings instead of bamboo huts), combined with longer sighting ranges and shorter unit fire ranges in Band of Heroes made it more obvious.
I'm not sure what all this means. I like Lock 'n Load. But at the end of the day, it is a bit "retro", a throwback to the days of Squad Leader and Panzerblitz. That definitely has a certain appeal, and I like that a design goal was to keep it simple and playable, which is a huge win – the ASL Starter Kits do appear to me to be a bit more complicated. But at least in its WWII incarnation, I think Lock 'n Load could have benefitted significantly from a bit more work on how to handle this particular issue.
With that rant out of the way, on to the game.
Although I have enjoyed playing Band of Heroes, as I've played the system more I've become a bit less enamored of it than I was of the previous game in the system, Forgotten Heroes: Vietnam. On the one hand, I do like a lot about the game system: I like the simple, chart-light combat resolution system, I like how it uses small back-and-forth impulses instead of regimented turns, and I like the spotting rules, whereby it's actually kind of hard to find stuff. I like that the scenarios play quickly.
But let's drill down a bit on one specific design challenge for interactive tactical games: how to solve the "human wave" problem.
The problem is this: units in defensive positions can fire on units that are rushing them, or trying to infiltrate their way through the front lines to victory locations. The general heuristic with these games is that units get to fire once, so the defender has to make choices about which encroaching units to shoot at. The problem with the everyone-shoots-once rule is that an attacker, who has a player's-eye-view of the board, can see which units have fired and which haven't, and once the defenders have exhausted their fire, he can run around the board with wild (and rather unrealistic) abandon.
This was a bit of a problem in Avalon Hill's 1977 classic Squad Leader. For those who remember that game, John Hill tried to solve the problem with defensive fire rules that ended up being totally unworkable in practice: the attacker had to move all his units, and as he did so the defender could mark "defensive fire opportunities", which he could then choose to take after everyone had moved; so he could theoretically ask the attacker to unwind every single move he had made to take the perfect defensive fire shots. This was clearly a bit out of hand; nobody I know played this way, they just took their shots as they came up – but this, obviously, lead to the above issue.
When Squad Leader became ASL, Avalon Hill took these problems by the horns and came up with solutions that are, in my opinion, brilliant, and the best elements of ASL (which is why most of them have made it into the Starter Kits). The rules for residual fire, rate of fire, fire lanes, and subsequent defensive fires made it very hard to predict how much defensive fire could be laid down, gave the option to the defender to put down more fire by taking chances with the equipment or with unit morale, and were overall far more realistic portrayals of how machine-guns could influence the battlefield – and all was achieved at a very low cost in terms of real complexity. It was still about drawing out the defenders' fire, but it was no longer such a stark, black-and-white situation, and this particular combination of making some elements more abstract (like machine-gun rates of fire) and some elements more concrete to reflect how the weapons were really used (fire lanes, residual fire), is a perfect mix.
Back to Band of Heroes ... compared to the ASL Starter Kits, I think this issue of how defensive fire is handled is the biggest gap in the Lock 'n Load games, both in terms of simulation and of making an interesting game. Because Lock 'n Load has gone back to a "one unit, one shot" model, it has become very much about drawing out all the defending units' fire capabilities, and then doing whatever you want with the rest of your guys. This is compounded a bit by the problem that attackers can force close combat at any time, which makes it much harder for defenders to pass up opportunities to fire on nearby units, and therefore easier to nail down the defenders.
In some scenarios, the effects of this will be worse than others, obviously. This issue hardly ever bugged me in Forgotten Heroes, but perhaps the higher unit morales and tougher terrain (stone buildings instead of bamboo huts), combined with longer sighting ranges and shorter unit fire ranges in Band of Heroes made it more obvious.
I'm not sure what all this means. I like Lock 'n Load. But at the end of the day, it is a bit "retro", a throwback to the days of Squad Leader and Panzerblitz. That definitely has a certain appeal, and I like that a design goal was to keep it simple and playable, which is a huge win – the ASL Starter Kits do appear to me to be a bit more complicated. But at least in its WWII incarnation, I think Lock 'n Load could have benefitted significantly from a bit more work on how to handle this particular issue.
Friday, December 30, 2005
2005 in Review
2005 in Review
German-style games
(2012 republishing note: lots of broken links here. If you're reading this in, say, late 2012 and the links are still broken, email me)
In my mind, I know this. 2005 was not just a good year, in fact, but in terms of sheer quantity of top-tier games, it was perhaps the best on record if you like good, engaging, social games. I have long considered 2000 to be the last great year for German-style games, and looking back on my 2000 in Review article, 2005 significantly exceeds it in quantity of first-class releases. Perhaps Knizia's 2005 genre-buster, Beowulf, is not quite the ground breaking game that Knizia's 2000 genre-buster, Lord of the Rings, was; but it's close enough.
Why the doubt in my heart, then? I think because there was not a single real "find" in 2005. The long list of top games was produced almost exclusively by the usual suspects: Knizia, Teuber, Kramer, Tresham, alea, Hans im Glück, and Kosmos. In every past year, significant contributions are made to my list by other designers and publishers. Maybe it's an interesting but niche game like Andrea Meyer's Mall World or Schwartzarbeit, Heinrich Glumpler's Feurio!, or Gunter Cornett's Flaschenteufel; a game published by a major label, but from a designer with a thin track record, like Wilko Manz's Fifth Avenue; or good games from but less-reliable or less-prolific publishers like Days of Wonder, Doris & Frank, or Amigo. Not so for 2005 (Reef Encounter, being a reprint, doesn't really count).
Now, obviously not everything on my list of good games is from the standard big names. I've divided things up between "top" and "good" games this year, the distinction being primarily that I expect to be playing "top" games at least occasionally a year from now, while the "good" games are fun for a bit but ultimately disposable. There are obviously quite a few games in the "good" category from unexpected sources, but nothing in the top list. The part of me that is a game critic lives for the unusual find, and so the absence of anything in this category is a bit of a blow.
But, if you're not a self-appointed game critic, this was a great year. Well, for boardgames, anyway.
Top Games
10 - Candamir: Candamir is the type of game that falls through the cracks when making these lists, if for no other reason than timing. It came out in Germany in ’04 and the US in mid-’05. Interestingly, this is one of the few games that has gotten a facelift before being published here. The original was no great shakes, but Mayfair made some critical improvements … read more about it here.9 - E&T: The Cardgame: This is probably the most faithful card game version of a board game ever. While it's liable to be almost incoherent to those who have not played the board game, for fans of the original it provides a satisfying condensed package. In my experience, it's better with 4 than with 3. A couple pieces that include the E&T Cardgame are here and here.
8 - Reef Encounter: This was actually one of the better games from last year, but the prohibitive price kept me from making my main list. Now that it's generally available with the reprint from Z-Man games, this is one to check out if you're a fan of placement games or meatier euros like Tigris and Euphrates or Goa. Not on par with those classics, but Reef Encounter easily exceeds Richard Breese's other recent efforts, Keythedral and Keytown.
7 - Revolution: The Dutch Revolt 1568-1648: Classic Francis Tresham, Phalanx finally hits a home run. This is a big game which takes 4-6 hours to play, but it finally gives us a fairly big, free-form, empire-building/conflict game that doesn't degenerate into a whine-fest, but is still dynamic enough to be interesting. More here and here.
6 - Louis XIV: Rudiger Dorn is becoming a reliable name in medium-to-high-end German-style games. I first became aware of him with the terrific Traders of Genoa, and then he went on to do Goa, Jambo, and now this DSP-winning game. A planning game similar to Caylus, Louis XIV is shorter, simpler, more interactive, more fluid, has reasonable theming, and is overall much cleaner, all of which work for me. A piece on the Nürnburg games, which includes Louis XIV, can be found here.
5 - Palazzo - This is another wonderful Knizia bidding game. He sometimes takes flak for doing "yet another auction game," but the fact of the matter is that the auction game is an extremely broad category, and yet one that no other designer has mastered. For me, Knizia never ceases to amaze by being able to put out games of this type that are consistently new and different. One of the neat things about Palazzo is the pacing, with a low-pressure start lulling you into a false sense of security before you are crushed by an increasingly high-pressure endgame. Joe Gola had a nice piece on Palazzo that I wish I had written.
4 - Tower of Babel - Palazzo and Tower of Babel are both auction games, but as a pair they demonstrate just how broad a term "auction game" is. Tower of Babel blends auction, area control, and resource management elements in a brilliant, seamless, low-complexity package. In case you haven't read it already, the piece on Louis XIV had some details on Tower of Babel also.
3 - Elasund: The First City - I definitely liked Candamir, and even kind of liked Anno 1503, but with Elasund Klaus Teuber has produced another top-tier game to stand alongside Settlers and Starfarers. I have a piece on this gamehere.
2 - Hacienda - Hacienda reminds me of so many other good games. It seems to blends flavors from Through the Desert, Get the Goods, and Saint Petersburg, just to pick a few. In the hands of a lesser designer than Kramer it could feel like a collection of spare parts, but in his hands it becomes a new, coherent whole with a flavor and appeal all its own. Although I expected good things from Kramer and Hans im Glück, this was tempered by the fact that I was not a huge fan of the whole Tikal/Torres line of his games, and as such the fact that Hacienda is so good and so elegant was a pleasant surprise. This has already gotten a ton of play and I expect it to continue to do so for quite some time. Here is a piece on this game.
1 - Beowulf - The Legend - I have an in-depth review here (along with a little bit of reader feedback). Knizia just keeps getting better, which – given his long and distinguished history – is amazing. Beowulf is impressive not just for being a great game, but for being a legitimate artistic interpretation of the epic poem.
The Good
Lighter Games: There were a few good games that, while probably of marginal interest to the hobbyist gamer, might nonetheless be of interest as games for playing with the family: Stefan Dorra's beautiful but awkwardly-themedAmazonas (think of it as a railroad game rather than a game of slaughtering rare plant and animal species) and Michael Rieneck's Around the World in 80 Days. Ark, from the always-reliable Doris & Frank, is a nice, light card game with a flavorful theme, and Doris' wonderful artwork is always best-served by their own games. Dragonriders is a race game from Jean du Poel and Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, and while there are some issues including a wretched rule book, the simple play, well-designed tracks, and good tension make it a game I quite enjoy. Usually I am not nearly as enamored of Knizia's small-box games as I am of his big games, but the King Arthur Card Game was an exception – not a great game, but fun filler and appropriately short. I liked Kablamo! as a truly odd game, in the vein of Munchkin or Bang! but actually fun, but I can certainly respect that it will not be for everyone.Medium-weight Games: Sunriver Games came on the scene with Havoc: The Hundred Years War, a card game of drafting good poker hands, which is probably too expensive and definitely too long, but nonetheless represents a good start for them; I'll be keeping an eye on their future releases. Phalanx continues in its attempt to do German-style games with Mesopotamia, a game which is ultimately probably too simple but still is a solid, short civilization-building game without the usual problems. Wings of War: Burning Drachens finally rounds out the Wings of War package with some very nice altitude rules and air-to-ground scenarios. It's no longer quite the simple, elegant game that originally won me over, but the variety of types of engagements is much-needed. Although it's an older game, I discovered WildWords (company site) this year which is a neat redevelopment of Scrabble that may appeal to casual fans of that game.
Higher-end Games: Francis Tresham's 1829 Mainline finally came out, and while I had some reservations, overall I enjoyed playing it. Friedrich is a nice German-style wargame, a bit long and maybe a bit slow, but simple, clever, and tactically interesting, providing a lot of gaming bang for the complexity, by the standards of wargamey stuff anyway.
Abstracts: Deflexion (company site) is a gimmick game, but the gimmick works, and casual gamers have a hard time resisting a game with a laser. The GIPF-series has been steadily losing some steam; this may be a somewhat unfair judgment since the first few games (GIPF, TAMSK, ZERTZ) were so utterly brilliant that anything that came after was bound to slow down a bit, but nonetheless PÜNCT seems the least inspired and most derivative of the lot. It's still a pretty clever game, however, and fans of the series will enjoy the new entry I think.
The Caylus Phenomenon: Unless you’ve been living in a cave, or perhaps just don’t follow online discussion groups, you probably are aware that a little game called Caylus was published this year. It was greeted with extreme enthusiasm by the online crowd, with BoardgameGeek ratings catapulting it into the all-time 2nd highest-rated game slot, surging past such hall-of-fame games as Settlers of Catan, El Grande, Tigris and Euphrates, Carcassonne, and so on. I’ve played it a half-dozen times now, and it neither makes my list as a good game nor as a bad game. This little bit of insanity will pass.
The Not-So-Good. OK, the Lousy.
In addition to the many excellent games, 2005 seemed to have more than its share of real clunkers. In some cases, the whole enterprise just seemed ill-advised. But more usually, the culprit was predictable: inadequate or non-existent development work. It seems to me that many amateur game designers have a vision of what they want a game to look like, and are unwilling to surrender any creative control to a developer. These designers usually get another label: "unpublished" or "self-published". If I could identify a trend in bad games in 2005, it would be that of some publishers joining the bandwagon by putting their faith in a designer and ignoring the need for a sound development process (I'm looking at you, Fantasy Flight), to the detriment of their customers.Some of the bad games we got this year included Antike, a game that probably shouldn't even have been green-lighted without at least one working interesting idea. Australia and Il Principe weren't terrible games, but they weren't that good either, and these are case studies in why German games get a bad reputation for themeing; the themes here are such awful paste-up jobs that it's actually kind of embarrassing. Caravans of Ahldarahd was the first game from BlindLuck studios, and while the ideas were very good and had promise, the development was non-existent and the game flat-out didn't work. Indonesia was Splotter taking another run at the whole Roads & Boats thing, but this is another game that someone should probably have done a sanity check on somewhere in the middle of the process, realizing that this wasn't going to work out as well as hoped. I'm not sure Siena is actually awful, but the evidence is fairly compelling that it is, and it certainly has both the worst rule book and worst graphic design of the year. SuDoku - Das Brettspiel was Knizia when he's not really trying, mechanical, unimaginative, and uninteresting, although – amusingly – the theme works rather well. And Doom: The Boardgame was an excellent core design utterly savaged by totally inadequate development, with scenarios that are ludicrously unbalanced, a game that is thoroughly unplayable with 4 players, and a playing time that exceeds the interesting content by at least a factor of two. This is particularly unfortunate because I am certain that there is a good game in there. But the game Fantasy Flight shipped is certainly not it.
This brings us in the last to Shadows over Camelot (and here's an update where I wonder if that review was too generous) which is certainly not the worst game of the year but for me was absolutely the most disappointing. I'm a huge Lord of the Rings Boardgame fan, and was hoping for something that was at least within shouting distance of that classic. It might have been unreasonable to expect something as good, but still, Lord of the Rings blazed a trail that nobody has yet followed. Shadows over Camelot is ultimately too uninteresting, too long, too tedious, too complex, far too dependant on luck for its tension, and much too detached from its putative theme. A shame, because if the designers had learned the lessons of Lord of the Rings, the potential was there; the developer certainly should have realized that this was going in the wrong direction well before it reached its final state.
Major Chokes
This category is reserved for the games that should be good, but aren't. They are so close you can taste them. They have good ideas and very interesting elements, but ultimately are killed by problems that really should have been pretty obvious to the publisher, and should have been either fixed or resulted in the game remaining unpublished. I offer them up only for illustrative purposes.Fantasy Flight is a permanent resident of these parts, and their Arkham Horror is a more painful case study than usual, just because it is so close. So much is done well in this game, but too many balances are clearly out of whack. The game is much too easy on the players, largely because no effort was made to scale properly with the number of players – a huge and consistent problem with their games. And the gameplay is just not dense enough, with too much tedious mucking around with lost or wasted turns and running around Arkham.
Parthenon: Rise of the Agean is another painful miss, with lots of good stuff but ultimately too many balances are too severely out of whack.
Viktory was a clever attempt to circumvent some of the problems with Risk and bring in some modern design elements, but ultimately it couldn't solve the one problem that Risk did manage to tackle and is a classic because of it: the need for the game to end at some point.
Near-Misses
Fiese Freunde Fette Feten had a very clever theme with wonderful art, but just didn't provide enough actual gameplay. Likewise Nexus Ops got a lot of things right on the analytical side of the game design but fails to provide a soul, that one interesting twist that gets you to power through the downtime to play a second time. Ticket to Ride: Europe should have fixed some of my problems with the original, but it lost the original's elegance and the increased luck element is not going to appeal to the more serious gamers whom the greater complexity would seem to indicate the game is aimed at.Some Expansions
Memoir '44 got three nice expansions, adding the Soviets, more terrain, and a bunch of special rules for use in scenarios. This is mostly good stuff, although some is questionable (like the Big Guns). Blue Moon continued adding more variety to this fascinating game, and this being Knizia and all, the quality seems to be staying high, although none of the new decks are as interestingly different as the Khind or Flit were. The bewildering array of Age of Steammaps continues to proliferate, and while I like the design philosophy of making each new map a different game with the addition of a small number of dramatic special rules, I wish someone would publish a spreadsheet telling me which maps work with which numbers of players and what playing styles. Playing the new France map with 3 players was the first fundamentally unsatisfying game of Age of Steam I've played in a while. Power Grid added maps for Italy and France, which was nice because it got the base game on the table again and I enjoyed it. The game is ultimately too unstable to be a classic, but good enough to deserve occasional play, and as such the new maps are well-timed.Major Games I Missed
Some of the major releases I didn't play included Eagle's Conquest of the Empire and Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame; I am reliably informed that these might not suck, but since Eagle's record is pretty bad at this point I haven't yet been tempted. I might yet get sucked into Railroad Tycoon, but my reading of the tea leaves of online commentary doesn't inspire great hope, and besides, I'm pretty happy with Age of Steam. After reading the rules, Twilight Imperium: 3rd Edition was a no-brainer to skip (and by the way, if anyone from Fantasy Flight is reading, that was a class act, the thoroghly backhanded compliment to George Lucas in the dedication. Here’s a tip: it's best to err in favor of respect when you're a niche game designer and he's created one of the great epic stories of all time). I'm pretty Carcassonne’d out at this point (and was never a huge fan), so I passed on Carcassonne: The Discovery, especially given the whole FunAgain exclusive thing. Freya's Folly is a small-press game I passed on while I was at Essen, but regretted afterwards, especially given the abysmal quality of the other small-press games I played; Don Bone's previous Sunda to Sahul was solid, so I'll give it a try when it becomes available in the US.Roleplaying Games
The amount of time I spend playing RPGs isn't that great, but this is the year I finally moved from D&D to Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved, a choice I am very pleased with ... then what happens, but Malhavoc hits me with Monte Cook Presents Iron Heroes, another great-looking d20-based system. I want to experience more of Arcana Evolved, so I'm not going to be switching anytime soon, but I've already sucked a large chunk of stuff from Iron Heroes into my Arcana Evolved game, including Skill Groups, the more-generous and less-variable hit die, and zones. Also, my AE game has benefited from importing a bit of the Iron Heroes style. If I make it to the summer game cons next year, I'll have my eyes open for Iron Heroes games.Although it’s actually from 2004, I bought Wizards of the Coast’s Eberron sourcebook this year in the hopes of finding a setting for D&D which might be more robust than the implied one. What I found was something that appeared even more unbalanced (i.e., prone to munchkinism) than core D&D, which is saying something. It’s easy to say “well, just play with non-munchkins”, but even reasonable players can make reasonable choices that end up creating, through no fault of their own, characters that are grossly under- or over-powered, which is just not good. I know it’s an RPG, but these things still are important. This is why I am now a loyal Malhavoc customer. They may not be quite there yet, but at least they’re trying.
Another game technically from 2004, Hollywood Lives finally became generally available in the US this year, and it was a lot of fun.
Wargames
As regular readers of my blog will know, for some reason my wargaming time has been thin this year, especially for new titles. I don't know how much this had to do with getting slammed by Empire of the Sun early, or maybe just an unappealing crop of games; but for whatever reason, I haven't been keeping up as much with the new releases, although quite a few older games (EastFront, Rommel in the Desert, Stonewall in the Valley, Kasserine, Europe Engulfed) got good play.The Good
The ASL Starter Kit #2 finally got us some heavy equipment, and along with that a game with a little more variety than the Starter Kit #1. I'm still not entirely sold on this whole Starter Kit concept – it's more ASL Lite than a completely compelling game on its own merits, and it could really use more maps – but the WWII tactical game niche is surprisingly thin on good games, and the starter kits are cheap. Bonaparte at Marengo (more) made a good splash as a nice, low-complexity wargame; it has lots of neat elements and a unique feel. It ultimately was just a bit too ungainly and play was a bit too stereotyped for it to stay on the table that long, but I look forward to the next game in the series.The Very Good
Lock 'n Load: Band of Heroes: despite a graphic design that ranges from the satisfactory (the counters) down to the unacceptable (the maps and cards), and the more than occasionally tiresome "attitude", this is a system that is tried and true by now, a good game with interaction and tension and a fair amount of replay value, and it finally gives us a good alternative to the immense ASL or the long-gone Squad Leader.Battle of Five Armies did for Warmaster what Lord of the Rings did for Warhammer. The rule book has issues in the second half (some of them pretty serious), but the game plays quickly and gives the players frequent, real, meaningful choices and the battles can take decisive turns based on those choices. For me this sort of linear warfare is never going to be quite as compelling as the skirmish-level Lord of the Rings game, but on the other hand I enjoyed this much more than any other ancients or Napoleonics system I’ve played. And, as usual, Games Workshop's figures are very nice. The non-trivial drawback is the lack of different scenarios.
Roads to Leningrad is Vance von Borries’ new game, picking up where Kasserine left off. After playing a frustrating run of ultimately disappointing new wargames throughout the year, coming back to this right at the end was a refreshing experience. Von Borries’ games are always well-designed and thoroughly-developed, and he has an eye for situations that make good, playable, interesting games. The two battles here are slightly obscure but very well-chosen: 1941 Soviet attacks and counterattacks against an overextended German spearhead, and the great Kasserine system is nicely tweaked to include chit pulls, making the game more interactive, more dynamic, and reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of the two sides at this time. He also understands the need for playable and interesting smaller scenarios to go with the big campaign games.
The Not-So-Good
Worthington Games' Clash for a Continent failed to follow up on their success with Victoria Cross, giving us a game almost completely devoid of interest.Remember when I talked in the German-style games section above about games that someone should have asked "you know, do you really think this is a good idea?" well before publication? Lightning: War on Terror is one of those games.
The poster child for all the games that misfired this year though is Empire of the Sun; you can read my review-like piece. The rules are already up to something like revision 1.4 (I played version 1.1, I think – which came out like days after the game was published), and at this point they contain a lot of red ink, which is never a good sign. Now, Empire of the Sun is not train-wreck bad like Go Tell the Spartans was; it’s more immensely frustrating bad like Shadows over Camelot, although there is certainly an element of train wreckage too. The players aids are riddled with errors, the rules are confusing, the War in Europe track doesn’t work, the victory conditions are dumb, air rules are sometimes bizarre, the interceptions strangely all-or-nothing … it’s easy to point the finger at the designer for this turgid effort, but that GMT would actually agree to publish Empire of the Sun in this state is bewildering, and they have once again discouraged me from ever using their P500 system again. To his credit, Mark Herman has continued to work with the game’s fans to make something reasonable out of it. But the omens are ill. There is only a certain degree to which games can be fixed after their release.
The Awful
Most excruciating gaming experience of the year: 7 Ages. That is all.Near-Misses
Triumph of Chaos is a really fun game that is burdened with rules that are at least 15 pages too long. This could have been a long-term keeper if there had been a developer that had been able to take a machete to the thicket of chrome. Grand Illusion was a B-level game that could have been an A-level game if only it had been a bit shorter, or played a bit more quickly, or had a bit more tension. Instead, a slight excess of rules combined with a horrible rule book and a lack of player aids took it down to a C. A Call to Arms is Mongoose's Babylon 5 space combat game, which scored by being simple and playable, but then had a problem with a very unwieldy shot resolution system for some weapons systems, and several scenarios that were almost laughably broken. Mongoose has kept chipping away at the problems, though, and recent revisions of the rules have improved things significantly ... but it's still not where it needs to be.Games I Missed
Given my less-than-positive experience with The Napoleonic Wars, I passed on Wellington. Some friends have liked it though, so I may yet give it a chance. GMT's release schedule this year was surprisingly short on games I was interested in actually playing, and beyond The Burning Blue, I'm not sure 2006 will be much of an improvement. Perhaps Twilight Struggle or Unhappy King Charles will work out. In fact, the release schedules for all of my favorite wargame companies (Columbia, GMT, MMP, OSG, maybe Clash of Arms) were a bit thin this year.Unplayed
Three games that are actually quite promising remain unplayed in my collection: GMT's Carthage, Columbia's Crusader Rex, and MMP's Fire in the Sky. All three could be long-term keepers. I hope to play Crusader Rex and Fire in the Sky sometime in the near future.2004 in Retrospect
Just for interest’s sake, and to add some accountability to this process, I thought I might take a brief look back at my picks for the last couple years and see how well they've held up.My top 5 picks from 2004 included San Juan, Goa, Einfach Genial, and Blue Moon; all have held up well and gotten a fair amount of play this year. Einfach Genial (now Ingenious) in particular has done well as it can be played and enjoyed by gamers of many types. San Juan has tapered off in terms of play time in the second half of 2005, but probably remains my most-played game published in 2004. The only one of my top 5 that hasn't done well in terms of actual play time was Fifth Avenue, but part of the problem there has been the bad reputation that has been so hard to shake. I would still play it most days; more on this later.
Games I whacked included Saint Petersburg, Oltremare, and War of the Ring. Saint Petersburg has vanished entirely from my play groups. War of the Ring was played a bit through the first months of 2005 but not since. I still plan to pick up the expansion when it becomes available, but it remains a game that, like Memoir '44, is both interesting and frustrating; but at least Memoir '44 is short.
Some picks that seem a bit questionable in retrospect include Ticket to Ride, Maharaja, Razzia!, Sword of Rome, and Victoria Cross. None of these games have had much (or any) play in 2005. I probably over-rated Ticket to Ride in sympathy with the wide acclaim it got; I think it's a decent game, but for me personally, perhaps not overly noteworthy. The comparative weakness of Ticket to Ride: Europe may have dragged down the original too, though. Maharaja is a bit chaotic, and I always liked it better than any of my friends; I think maybe my friends were right. Razzia! just doesn't hold up that well when compared to Ra, and Ra is now back in print. Folks who have followed my blog are probably also aware of my eventual disillusionment with Sword of Rome. Victoria Cross is an interesting game, but probably didn't deserve to be rated as highly as it was, certainly not in front of Gettysburg, which has gotten a bit of play this year.
Top wargame picks were Europe Engulfed and Rommel in the Desert. EE hung on to get a lot of play this year, but the length and commitment required has been slowly running it down. Still, a two-year run with a lot of play is very good; every wargame convention I went to saw me playing EE in that time frame. I remain very fond of the game, but see its play time continuing to diminish. Rommel in the Desert is an all-time classic that continues to get play, and given that it was a reprint it was a no-brainer pick (an argument for not generally including reprints, I guess; but things are often blurry). Ardennes '44 also got a few plays this year, and remains a game I like a lot, although not one I'm ever going to play frequently.
Two games that I liked and still like, but never seemed to get momentum, were Fifth Avenue and Shadow of the Emperor. Despite the fact that they haven't gotten much long-term play, I'm still comfortable with how I rated them.
I flagged Candamir and Downtown as promising games I didn't get a chance to play. Candamir's potential did eventually pan out, although the route was meandering, and it makes this year’s list. I've recently gotten a chance to experiment with Downtown, and was quite taken with it; this is another game I hope to play more soon.
Somewhat embarrassingly, there were a couple very good games that I missed entirely: Jambo, Wings of War and Colossal Arena. Wings of War got dragged down a bit because of the huge delay between the release of the basic set and its critical companion Watch Your Back!; and then while Watch Your Back! promised to open up a lot more interesting mission-type situations, the game suffered from recurring problem of (do I even need to mention it at this point?) rather obviously unbalanced scenarios that clearly nobody spent any time thinking about. So Wings of War hasn't gotten a lot of play, but I remain a fan, and I like the new Burning Drachens set.
2003 in Retrospect
The only German-style games to have staying power from 2003's list year were, thankfully, my top picks – Domain and Amun-Re. Both have had some play time this year. The others have more or less disappeared, with the exception possibly of Feurio and Flaschenteufel. Some I would actively resist ever playing again (like Attika), while some (Schwartzarbeit, Eiszeit/Mammoth Hunters) I remain fond of and still have a spot in my collection, but just don't see the light of day.Basically nothing from the wargame list is still being played. Liberty hit the table once this year, but the play-balance questions hang over it like a cloud. The overpowering Diplomacy cards killed Age of Napoleon. Monty's Gamble was fun, and I still own my copy, but the replayability wasn't as strong as hoped and it was probably a touch too complicated given the short game length and constrained nature of the battle. But, it did get a fair amount of play and I remain a fan. Korea: The Forgotten War has been a casualty of my lack of time and the inherent difficulties involved in huge games; although I also remain an OCS fan, for practical reasons Ardennes '44 is more the sort of game I play now.
The two survivors are Lock 'n Load and, of course, Shadow and Flame. Gotta love those Goblin Shamans. Both of these should obviously have been rated higher.
Of the RPGs, Arcana Unearthed finally hit the table this year in its new, Arcana Evolved edition. With RPGs, I'm never exactly sure how much to credit to the system and how much to the group playing it, but AE has been a success and after years of off-again, on-again frustration with D&D, I'm extremely happy with it. AE and AU both have tie-in books of short stories (Children of the Rune and The Dragon's Return) which I read this year and which were both overall really surprisingly good.
I was hard on D&D 3.5, but in retrospect perhaps I was not hard enough. D&D 3.5 was an improvement over 3.0, but was it worth the $75 to upgrade all you books? D&D still needs some significant bodywork, and it needs it soon; the effort Wizards spent on 3.5 could have been much more usefully directed either towards D&D 4.0 or a new product line.
So, that’s it. 2005 is done, and at least for the German-style games, 2006 will have a hard time matching it; I expect to be playing many of these games for a long time. The wargame side of the slate was weak, but I still managed to play one outstanding game (Roads to Leningrad), and with several promising games unplayed and with Shifting Sands and The Burning Blue coming up early in 2006, I’ll have things to keep me busy for a while yet.
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