Silk Road, Leonardo Da Vinci, Buccaneer/Seeräuber

Silk Road: This is a new game from the always unpredictable Z-Man, designed by Ted Cheatam and Bruno Faidutti. A friend, when describing the game, said that "I know what a Bruno game feels like, and this doesn't feel like that, so it must be mostly Ted's game". With which I would generally agree.


Players take the roles of traders, using money to buy and sell goods at places along the Silk Road. What opportunities are available for the taking are distributed by the game's cornerstone idea. When we arrive at, say, Tyre, there will be (N-1) – where N is the number of players – actions available, which can include buying, selling, or trading specific goods, or taking some small special actions. We do once around bidding to see who gets first choice. The winner takes his pick, then - and this is the different bit - chooses who gets to go second from amongst the remaining players. The second player then takes his choice, passing along the next action to a player of his choice, and so on, until only one player who hasn't taken an action is left. That person gets no action, but gets to preside over the next round of bidding: he bids last, and gets the option to either collect the high bid, or pay the high bidder his bid for the right to go first. Since running the auction generally doesn't outweigh the penalty of not getting to take an action, the last player is generally, although not always, screwed.


This whole thing is one of those game mechanics that sounds clever on paper, and is sort of interesting while you are grappling with it for the first time, but ultimately I really don't think it quite works at a rather fundamental level. Everything in the game is hidden, so with so much hidden state involved in the decision of who to pass an action to and who to hose by not giving an action, most players are just guessing. Which would be OK, but getting knocked down in the order, or not getting a choice at all, can be a big deal, and in the middle game, when people are cash-poor, the compensation of running the auction for turn order is just not helping a lot.


So, it's interesting in spots, but overall not really my sort of game, and not one I'm likely to play again. Ultimately, though, I think my biggest beef with Silk Road is the price. Silk Road is $50 retail, which quite frankly is insane. I think as a $25-$30 retail small- or medium-box filler, it might be justifiable. The conversion engine, the process of moving goods and money and whatnot around, works pretty well, even if it isn't exactly mind-blowing. The auction is a little dodgy in spots but is also unusual and different. But fifty bucks for this? Given what else is out there, that just seems nuts.


Leonardo Da Vinci: After last year's Essen, I have tried to completely detach myself from the internet "buzz". Caylus, Antike, and Siena were all games that were getting great "buzz", and all of them, for me anyway, turned out to be varying levels of awful, while games getting little to no "buzz" (Beowulf, Elasund, Hacienda) were big winners.


So I approached Leonardo Da Vinci, a game apparently getting good internet "buzz" made by a company that produced one of my all-time most-hated games (BANG!), with a healthy degree of skepticism.


And hey, what do you know, it didn't suck! Players are inventors in an Italian city of some kind (Florence, perhaps?), trying to churn out inventions. The city elders want a fancy crossbow? You're on it. You'll need to round up raw materials (some wood and some rope, in this case), workers, a lab for the workers to work in, and perhaps a robotic assistant or two (Yes, really. These actually turn out to be better workers than the humans). You acquire these goods in a sort of vaguely Aladdin's Dragons-esque way, placing your workers in various areas of town, with the players who commit more effort to each activity getting better prices, while the less industrious get gouged. Of course, workers gathering materials aren't actually working on inventions. What results is a game with lots of interesting choices, almost all of which seem real (unlike some of those nasty, fake choices in Caylus) and well-balanced. And, critically, it plays in a reasonable amount of time and without excessive downtime; in this way it even scores over the classic Princes of Florence. I'm pretty certain Leonardo Da Vinci is nowhere near as well-honed a design as that classic, but it has definitely corrected that one flaw.


The theme of Leonardo Da Vinci for me has an interesting meta-relationship to the feel of the game itself. The players in the game aren't really playing the role of inventors, having interesting proprietary ideas and working out their inspiration in secrecy. No, the players are really producing made-to-order "inventions". The game tells you what to invent and how to invent it; you go off and do it. A better theme might have been war production in America in WWII: "We need a tank that'll be reliable, fast, and that will be suitable for mass production. Why don't you get on that, and sign us up for 50,000 of them. And don't go over budget." By the same token, the game itself does not feel like it was designed from any true inspiration, any interesting core idea. It's like the designer perhaps enjoyed the game systems in Princes of Florence and Aladdin's Dragons, and decided to make a new game by piecing together the bits he liked from those games and adding some money management and removing the uncertainty.


So what does this mean, if anything? Possibly not much. Certainly not that Leonardo Da Vinci is a bad game. It just means it lacks that hook, the coherence of vision or creative spark of the top-tier games that really pulls you in. To say it another way, it lacks theme integration. It's a collection of fun mechanisms that are streamlined, well-presented, and engaging to play, and I liked it, and I'll play again; but most likely, this is ultimately just another in a long list of disposable euros.


Buccaneer is a game that fell between the cracks this year because a) it's rated as an "8 and up" game, b) it's from Queen, and c) it was nominated for the Spiel des Jahre. All of these things have become negative indicators for me, to various degrees. But, after reading up on the game a bit, I decided to give it a try.


And really liked it.


Players are Pirate captains, trying to take over and loot merchant ships (how did this ever become one of the acceptable, family-friendly game themes?). To do this, you form crews. Everyone has 5 pirates, rated 2-5 plus a "wild" pirate that I'm not going to go into detail on, where their value indicates their pay. On your turn, you can have one of your pirates "take over" another player's crew (not your own!) by putting your piece on top of the stack. Or, if you are leading a large enough stack, you can take over a ship.


When a ship is taken over, it provides a payoff in ducats, which goes to the captain (the piece on top). The captain then has to pay off everyone else in the crew, giving them money equal to their value (which might mean going into the player's reserves, if he hired an excessive crew, perhaps by accident – you can't look at stacks once formed). If there are then any choice goodies aboard the target ship – rum, say, or a nice candelabra – the captain gets first pick, while the "mate" (the second piece in the stack) gets the leftovers, if any.


Buccaneer is basically a twisted auction game. If someone has a big enough crew to take over a ship, you have to either let him do it, or effectively agree to pay more for the right to the plunder by taking over the ownership of the crew. But what really makes the game fly is that there is also a fair dose of interesting tactical decisions: when to let someone else board a ship in the hopes that it will open up better options for you, when to be happy with being second mate because you'll get a goodie you are interested in, and when to use your cheap pirates and when to use your expensive pirates. The inability to inspect stacks also adds a good, non-threatening memory element that really cuts down on the analysis opportunities.


I thought Buccaneer was a great little filler game, on par with Dorra's previous For Sale, and I was really happy I gave it a try.

Canal Mania

Canal Mania is a new game from the reliable, if somewhat less-than-prolific, Ragnar Brothers. Thinking about that for a second, one might reasonably ask: what exactly do they reliably deliver? Well, games ... like the ones they make.


As such, Canal Mania is a bit of a departure for them, because I can tell you right here that Canal Mania is basically a favorable combination of mechanisms from Age of Steam and Ticket to Ride, with a lot of the problems and rough edges of those two previous games smoothed over.


To write any more than that about the specific game-play of Canal Mania is really to go past the point of diminishing returns (and if you play the game you'll know what I mean), but because I'm expected to write a little bit more than that on the details of the game in this business, I'll keep going. Canal Mania presents you with a board with different-colored cities on it, and those cities have good cubes. You score points by delivering these goods cubes over your canals; the rule is, any delivery route can be as long as you want, but it can never contain two cities of the same color (all good cubes are generic). Like in Age of Steam, you can use other players' canals, and when you do, they get part of the payoff. Building between cities is controlled by drafted cards, a la Ticket to Ride, although with a different mix of restrictions. You can draft contract cards, and these contracts (analogous to Ticket to Ride's tickets) specify which two cities you may connect and the maximum number of tiles you may use to do it. You then lay those tiles by drafting locks, stretches, aqueducts, and tunnel cards, which you can then parley into actual bits of canal.


As I say, it's striking the degree to which Canal Mania can be easily and simply described as a cross between the better halves of Ticket to Ride and Age of Steam. Where Canal Mania scores over its two antecedents is in the smoothness of play. Canal Mania glides along, without many frustrating bumps or detours. Compare to the unevenness of the tickets in Ticket to Ride or the auctions in Age of Steam, both of which feel inelegant. Canal Mania constrains you with the contracts – unlike Steam or Ticket, you can't just build anywhere – but the constraints seem less painful overall. You still almost always get to draft tickets from a set on offer, and unlike in Ticket to Ride, most lots seem to include something useful. Also, the contracts are set up to circumvent the arbitrariness that both Age of Steam and Ticket to Ride can sometimes have. In Ticket to Ride, sometimes you're hosed because you and the player on your right really need the same route, but he just happened to see all the cards he needed first. In Canal Mania, the real competition is over delivering goods cubes, not over routes. When you get a contract, that route is yours, it's just a question of how to trade off speed vs. efficiency in getting it built. Speed, because maybe you want to deliver that generic good in Liverpool before anyone else gets there; efficiency, because at the end of the game the person who has built the most routes gets points.


So, Canal Mania rolls along pretty well; it's a friendlier game than either Steam or Ticket, while still managing to be a serious game without the sharp edges.


At least, until you get to the endgame. While I was generally pleased with Canal Mania, the endgame troubled me. Once a player crosses a certain point threshold, or a certain number of routes get built, you enter the endgame during which all that happens is that all the remaining goods on the board get delivered. As in Age of Steam, you will sometimes have to use other players' connections, and thus give them some points, in order to deliver a goods cube yourself. In Age of Steam, because your network is usually pretty coherent, it's rare that this is more than a small handful of points. In Canal Mania, though, due to the unpredictable flow of contracts, it seems much more likely that your "network" is really just going to be a collection of canals in various places. So as the endgame approaches, you will almost always have to give other players money to make a delivery.


The effects of this are predictable: endless calculation about who is "really" ahead based on their score plus their apparent deliveries remaining, multiple calculations of whether it's better to give 3 pounds to player A or player B, situations in which a player gets to pick who wins, and (maybe) whining by the aggrieved. It's potentially not pretty, both in terms of the unreasonable level of calculation required to play well and in terms of possible hurt feelings.


Honestly, I don't have any idea of how you would do the endgame to Canal Mania better. It all seems part and parcel of what makes the earlier game successful, and so I don't mind it that much. By the standards of games with kingmaking problems, it's certainly not in the same league as the notorious Kill Dr. Lucky or multi-player Attika; but the problem does exist, and some people will be turned off by it. Likewise, Shannon Applecline complains about games that force you to do too much math, and Canal Mania has some trouble with this. I would think Canal Mania actually has a potentially more severe problem than Santiago, a poster child for this sort of thing for me, although it depends on how the game pans out (Santiago has calculation problems by default; Canal Mania might not).


The other downside is the game length and downtime. Canal Mania is in the neighborhood of 2 hours, and given a system that is less interactive than Steam and turns that are definitely longer than in Ticket, length and downtime seem just slightly on the wrong side of where things should be.


So what does all this mean? Do I recommend Canal Mania? As a US buyer, I'm on the fence (it's expensive here). I think Canal Mania very nicely fills a niche between Ticket and Steam. I think that the game has smoothed over the unevenness in both of those games, as well as put the theming on more solid foundations. But at the end of the day, it is still a game that has a few issues (the two significant ones being the endgame calculation and the game length) and is fairly derivative, and is going to set you back no less than $50 (US). Which makes it a tough sell. We played on a loaner copy from a friend, and my ultimate decision was that it was not a buy. But it's certainly worth playing on someone else's copy.

Republic of Rome

The last year or so I've been trying to get more classic games back on the table. These older games are never going to be regulars, but they're fun to play again: Dune, Civilization, Gangsters, Britannia ... and now one of my most highly regarded old games, #11 on my all-time favorite list, Republic of Rome.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the game, Republic of Rome is in my opinion the classic political game, and not just that, but in an whole different league from the others. Players take the roles of factions in the Roman Senate and cope with the issues of various Republican periods: the many wars in the timeframe of the 1st and 2nd Punic Wars, the growth of the empire and the internal discord of the era of the Gracchi brothers, and then the full-blooded internecine struggles of Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey. You marshal cash, influence, and popularity to compete politically for the offices of the Consuls (who run the Senate and fight the wars), Censor (who prosecutes Senators for Corruption, the appearance thereof, or hairstyle), Governors (good for some personal graft), Pontifex Maximus (a mixed blessing), as well as a few other various and sundry items. The players must also manage the affairs of state to cope with wars, drought, popular unrest, revolution, the Cataline Conspiracy, death, and taxes. Most things are run in a democratic process of voting, although the players elected to office will retain important controls over what is debated and how the voting proceeds. The thing that makes Republic of Rome so unique and compelling is that it is a truly cooperative-competitive game. The players have to deal with the random external threats, Knizia's Lord of the Rings style, or Rome will fall. But there can be only one winner, and you can win in a variety of ways which involve amassing influence or overthrowing the Senate with your personal army.

The big complaint about Republic of Rome has always been the complexity; to be more specific, the difficulty of learning to play the game (like several Avalon Hill games of this time period, it's far, far easier to be taught the game than to learn it from the rulebook). Interestingly, with the more recent onslaught of German games, I have become somewhatless sympathetic to this complaint than I used to be. I think the reason is just that the complexity of Republic of Rome is both a) not terribly burdensome compared to modern multi-player wargames like Here I Stand or The Napoleonic Wars, and b) all good. No, it is not an easy game to learn or play. But while there is a lot in Republic of Rome, and a lot of it could on first inspection be dismissed as chrome, almost everything in the game is interconnected and serves a purpose. Try to touch something, and in general it's clear that something else is going to break. The core resources of the game (money, influence, and popularity for the players, money and unrest for the state) are used in many divergent but interconnected ways. Take popularity, for example, in some sense the most limited of the basic resources: it is used to protect yourself from prosecution, to make the yearly "state of the union" address to keep the people quiet, as protection from Assassination, and can be spent to do some price-gouging on a grain concession during a drought. Popularity can be won by winning wars, sponsoring public games, and sponsoring farm bills in the Senate. But on the other hand, nothing is simple: money and influence are intertwined in all these things. Games covert personal cash into popularity, winning wars requires the cash and votes to get elected in the first place, farm bills are free to the players but cost the state money (sometimes a lot of money) while keeping unrest down ... and so on. The network of connections is very dense.

I think this interconnectedness is what makes the game so successful at what it does. Like so many wonderfully thematic games, when you drill down on the details, a lot of things are badly off: the Consuls didn't really wield power in anything like the way they do here, the Censor is an abstraction that bears little relation to any historical office, and the rules for the Dictator are a fudge. The lawmaking powers of the Tribal Assembly, such a critical focus of conflict in the period of the Gracchi brothers, are totally ignored. A conflict similar to the 1st Civil War (Marius vs. Sulla) will never happen, while one of the more common victory conditions in practice – becoming Consul for Life – is grossly ahistorical outside of the Late Republic. And the rapidly shifting alliances of a 5 or 6 player game simply doesn't reflect the factional politics of the Roman Senate, which never had more than 2-3 major competing factions.

But despite being so far off on so many of the details, I don't think anyone would seriously argue that Republic of Rome has anything but terrific, evocative historical theming that gives a real sense of Roman Republican politics. In part this is because the game has, where necessary, ignored history and done what is required for the game itself to work, and a deep, interesting, working game will do far more to immerse the players in the game-world than any slavish devotion to historical accuracy.

To bring this back to the issue of complexity, I'm not convinced that Republic of Rome would even function at all with a lower complexity level. Republic of Rome is unique because it combines both cooperative and competitive elements: the survival of the state and the desire of one faction to come out on top. The immersion of the players in the game-world is in my opinion a good chunk of what allows these elements to exist in uneasy balance. A much more abstract game like Terra (or even the competitive play option for Lord of the Rings) is too easy for gamers to heartlessly mini-max. But by enabling the players to become emotionally invested in the game, Republic of Rome makes it work.

So how was it, ultimately, playing Republic of Rome again? I've played it three times in the last 6 months, after a break of about 7 years.

For a game I still regard quite highly, it's not as easy a question to answer as one might hope. As a game design, I still hugely respect it and consider it one of the most unique and compelling games ever made. But there are also a few pointy edges to the game mechanisms that bug me more than they used to. I think the main area that bugs me today that I considered just "part of the game" in the past are the Persuasion rules, where players can steal each others' Senators, Illuminati-style. It's a minor part of the game because the amount of influence required to successfully Persuade anyone is huge, and they are easy to defend against, but when Persuasion becomes relevant it's ridiculously high-stakes and rather chaotic. I'd rather a fairer and less arbitrary way of making sure each faction gets repopulated as Senators die off.*

Also, I don't think the Middle and Late Republic scenarios work as they should, as I think they have too much potential for serious pacing issues, as I talk about in this BoardGameGeek thread. And the Late Republic, despite the appeal of the most household names (Caesar, Cicero, Pompey), is much too long; the Early Republic is playable in 4-6 hours, while the Late Republic can take 10-12. The Early Republic is a very fun game in and of itself, but it's definitely not endlessly replayable, and the game does need those later two scenarios to work properly.

This is all comparatively minor stuff. The creakiness of the Persuasion situation doesn't have a profound impact on the game. And there is a lot of play value in the Early Republic. But still.

At the end of the day, though, I don't think these reflect the real reason that Republic of Rome has lost some of its sharpness for me personally, even though I still enjoyed playing it. I think the real reasons are probably two-fold, and more meta-reasons than any real issue with the game itself.

Firstly is the much more troubling state of the real American politics. With things as bitter, divisive, and negative as they are today, it's harder to get excited about what is probably the greatest political game ever made.

Secondly, and I'm not sure how closely this is related to the first item, I seem to have lost my killer instinct for this sort of game. This point might be a little more subtle than it first appears. One of the reasons that I was originally drawn to Republic of Rome, and the reason that I've rated it highly over the years, is that while it's true that it is a highly-competitive political game, it's still a constructive one with more similarities to the win-win deal-making of Traders of Genoa than the free-form hoseage of I'm the Boss. The deals you make with the other players are overwhelmingly about angling to gain offices or otherwise build up your own position rather than taking down your opponents. There is certainly scope for screwing Senators – the most blatant is through Prosecution, which is the only really overtly hostile element of the game, but you can also send them off to war with insufficient force in the hopes they'll be killed or banish them to a long Governership in the provinces – but this sort of overt personal confrontation is a lesser part of the game. The vast majority of the time, you're setting yourself up rather than specifically taking your opponents down.

I guess what I'm saying here is that from the game perspective (i.e., leaving aside the historical interest, which is considerable), I was drawn to Republic of Rome because it was a political game that lacked the overt nastiness of Diplomacy. But the game can still be a bit nasty. While what I say above about being constructive is literally true, it's also true that the benefits of office are considerable and somebody has to get frozen out, and the dynamics of the game can sometimes be seen as personal and can be frustrating. It's no Diplomacy; it's not even I'm the Boss or Intrige (I do love Intrige, but only because it's so brazenly ostentatious about its nastiness that it's hard to take it too seriously). But the nastiness is there, off in the corner smirking, and I don't like it when he looks at me. This is a hard point to make without overstating it, but as I've gotten older, I find I don't have the stomach for some of these things like I used to.

So I've lowered my BoardGameGeek rating on Republic of Rome. From a 10 to a 9. I still consider it a unique, wonderful, classic game, which I will still enjoy playing and will likely continue to break out every few years for a long time hence. The historical flavor is terrific, and the game succeeds at transporting you to a world that is immersive and interesting and compelling, as well as being a remarkably good game. But, it couldn't quite live up to the "all-time classic" label it had in my mind. And I really wish the later scenarios worked better.

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* This may strike some players familiar with Republic of Rome as odd. After all, at the beginning of each turn, you play "death bingo". You pick a number out of a cup. The player who controls the Senator that matches that number then howls in agony. Geez, how much more random and arbitrary do you get then that? But even random death has its role in the game, forcing you not to invest too heavily in one Senator, and putting at least a theoretical cap on how long a hugely popular or influential Senator can make trouble. Persuasion attempts do not appear to ultimately serve such a useful purpose.

Thurn & Taxis, Palazzo, To Crown a King, Curse of the Dark Pharaoh

Thurn & Taxis has fallen into the niche for me that I expect Ticket to Ride falls into for other gamers: it's short, it's very easy to teach the rules and for players to grok, and it's not frustrating. When you lose, it's often as much about card distribution as tactical errors, so once you've gotten your head wrapped around that, it's pretty non-threatening (and I should say, this is not necessarily a bad thing). It's a nice compromise game, everyone seems to enjoy it at least a bit, you never have to worry seriously about the rules, and there are definitely tactics and trade-offs to play which makes it an engaging game.

I think where Thurn & Taxis scores for me over Ticket to Ride is in the sense of overall game balance. I realized last time I played Ticket to Ride: Europe that each ticket had a scoring value that was simply equal to the number of trains you needed to play to complete it. So a ticket that required two six-lengthed segments and a ticket that required six two-lengthed tunnel segments would score exactly the same endgame points - 12. Obviously, the route with two six-length segments is vastly preferable; it requires many fewer turns to play, playing the routes themselves scores substantially more points, and is at less risk of being cut off. Accumulating two lots of 6 cards of a given type is somewhat more difficult than acquiring 6 lots of 2, but not nearly more difficult enough to cover the spread. Ultimately, the total number of cards required to complete a route is almost the least-useful indicator of the difficulty of building it. This significant imbalance in the worth of the ticket cards is what leads me to the greatest irritation with Ticket to Ride.

Thurn & Taxis has a fair amount of luck as well, but it doesn't feel so debilitating to me. In Ticket to Ride, if you get a lousy draw of tickets you know you're hosed in a pre-determined sort of way. In Thurn & Taxis, all the points are on the table, everyone has the same options, and it just feels a lot less constricting to me, and so more fun.

All of this doesn't add up to anything that exactly takes my breath away, however. It's familiar, it's comfortable, its fun, but it's also still a very moment-to-moment game, a game of taking advantage of opportunities which present themselves while trying to do a touch of short-term planning, albeit short-term planning that could be immediately invalidated by the flow of the cards. The contrast with Blue Moon City in this respect is sharp. I think the reason I find Blue Moon City to be the far more engaging game is because the world of Blue Moon seems more tractable. It's still a short, straightforward game, but with Blue Moon City I get a much greater sense of trying to bend the game to my will rather than just sitting around waiting for the Pilsen or Lodz card to show up. I feel like I have a large range of options, and I'm trying to figure out what's best, as opposed to what works at all. Clearly, this is not an absolute thing; sometimes Blue Moon's cards can be constraining as well, when you just really can't build that brick that you desperately need because you don't have that color, or any white, or any green, or a pair of brown - but in general, Blue Moon City gives a much greater sense of interacting with the world and with the other players, instead of just making judgments about the immediate tactical situation the game presents you with.

I'm actually not as strident a critic of the Spiel des Jahre as you might think, given that I have a general (but far from absolute) preference for more substantial games. There have been a few anomalous picks in recent years that leave you scratching your head, including Niagra and Torres, but in general I think they do a pretty good job. Recent choices that gamers have disliked but I was comfortable with were Mississippi Queen and Via Paletti, and while I'm not enamored of Carcassonne or Alhambra, those choices made some sense. And the advantage of being the Spiel des Jahre is that you have a 20+ year history and a track record of good choices to fall back on. But this year's choice of the extremely well-executed by not exactly inspiring Thurn and Taxis over the much more imaginative Blue Moon City pains me. In past years, you could always fall back on "well, they're going for the family niche, so what do you expect", but this year Blue Moon City and Thurn and Taxis are so close together in so many ways (game length, complexity, general accessibility) except that Blue Moon City is so much more interesting, the choice is particularly aggravating. Personally, I find this year's selection virtually indefensible. This is not to say that Thurn und Taxis is a bad game; far from it. It's rather good. It's just that Blue Moon City is a genuinely remarkable game.

Palazzo: This game has been coming out more of late, I think in large part due to the fact that it's good with 3 or 4 and it's reasonably short, and it's really been growing on me. Of course I've always thought it was good, but when it was new I was more drawn to the somewhat more unusual Tower of Babel, which came out at about the same time. While I like Tower of Babel quite a bit, I think Palazzo will ultimately be the game with more staying power.

I think the reason Palazzo has done so well is that it's found a good spot in terms of randomness. Buildings come out quickly, and the game provides a pretty good range of tactical challenges and evaluation problems, but the phasing of the deck means that the overall flow and pacing of the game remains familiar. The game never breaks down because stuff came out in a wacky order, a la the Power Plants in Power Grid. Certainly one of the reasons Knizia is such a great designer is because he can reliably and expertly perform this balancing act: enough randomness to provide variability and replayability, but not so much that the game loses coherence.

Um Krone und Kragen: While I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about this game, I wanted to mention it because it's become a virtual staple of the gaming diet around here. It's short, it's simple, it's fun, and it has that addictive quality of "just one more game". There is a little awkwardness at first as you get a feel for the cards, but once you get past the initial hurdle (and it'll only take one game, probably), it plays very smoothly.

Arkham Horror: Curse of the Dark Pharaoh: Ah, what to say on this most conflicted of games, Arkham Horror. For now, let me just bemoan the proliferation of house rules. Now, I know Arkham Horror is like a house rules vacuum, sucking ideas into itself - especially since out of the box, the game didn't seem to work at all outside of a sweet spot of maybe 3 or 4 players. But now you've got some people playing house rules, some people playing with the official errata, and things get confusing. Normally house rules don't bug me, because I can think about them and understand what's going on and fairly judge whether it's a reasonable idea or not. But Arkham Horror is a big, complex game which I don't own, so when I sit down to play, I can't fairly judge whether the house rule being proposed is sensible. And then when the game is over, and if that particular instance had serious problems, it's a hard call to figure out if the house rule was the culprit, or if the game just sucks.

I am reasonably certain that Arkham Horror does not suck, at least. I want to like it a lot more than I actually can though - once again I got to spend the first 45 minutes of the game being able to accomplish precisely nothing because I got cursed, and any game where you reliably lose turns feels about 20 years behind the power curve. But there is a lot of good stuff in here too. Although Mike Siggins complained about it, I think the cooperative game does work, and a team of investigators that pools their assets, pays attention to their fellow team-members activities, and works together troubleshooting problems will do a lot better than investigators who just do their own thing. A lot of the flavor is respectable, if not top-tier, and while the game is probably ultimately more random than flavorful, it is still flavorful. The errata seems to have taken care of the scaling problems, although the fix is pretty blunt and I would still really not recommend the game for more than 5 players.

If you're going to play the Curse of the Dark Pharaoh expansion, it seems like the way to go would be to use it in the "visiting exhibit" format where you use primarily the new expansion cards, which seems like it would give the ambiance a more focussed feel, which would be welcome. We played the "permanent exhibit" format where you just mix everything together, and that seemed to dilute everything unreasonably.

Last thing ... I've seen the question, "so what has ancient Egypt got to do with Lovecraft?" A fair question. First off, ancient Egyptian themes sell games, apparently. However, Lovecraft also wrote a short story for Weird Tales magazine called "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs". It was originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, who is the narrator of the story. Houdini was of course not his given name; before he legally changed his name to Harry Houdini, he was Ehrich Weiss ... a name which shows up several times in the Curse of the Dark Pharaoh expansion, including as an Ally of the players. This was all rather nicely done, I felt.

Britannia, Fury of Dracula

Britannia is one of those classics from the 80s that is still popular today in some circles, but which I am inclined to label a "cult" classic. It wasn't bad for its day, but how well could it hold up in 2006? It's pretty long, pretty repetitive, and play tends to be stereotyped – or such was my recollection. But with Fantasy Flight doing a remake, and with my interest in British history, I was good for a game (one of the nice things about reprints is that it gets interesting older games onto the table when they probably would not be played otherwise, at all).

The good news on Britannia is that it actually does a lot right. In my recent posts I've been ranting about the various underlying problems with these free-form multi-player wargames (compound interest, turtling, pick-on-the-leader) that modern games like Twilight Imperium or Antike don't even seem to acknowledge the existence of, let alone try to solve. These games have to try to find some sort of balance point: free-form enough so that players feel they have some control, yet not so free-form that everyone just always guns for the leader and the winner is decided on the last turn.

Britannia hasn't found a perfect spot, but overall it has done a rather good job. The different and fairly specific scoring conditions for the many different nations (each player will control 4 or 5 throughout the game) means that the players have tactical problems to solve, but they aren't given free rein to wail on whoever they want to. An honest player is going to have a hard time justifying randomly picking on people, since it will generally be very detrimental to their chances. On the other hand, somebody else is almost always going to be occupying the terrain you want to hold, so there is always incentive for action. Very few nations (maybe the Welsh and Caledonians) are going to be able to sit on their hands and rack up points; everyone is always going to be impelled to act if they want to win. There are going to be times when you have a few options about where to get your points, and it will come down to who you think is winning, and that is reasonable and expected, but in general the game feels constructive – you are pursuing your own fairly specific goals instead of just taking down your opponents. I think later games that have developed or borrowed from Britannia, from Vinci to History of the World to 7 Ages, have missed the point of the original. In Britannia, the scripted arrival and departure of nations, and their specific scoring conditions, serve to give the game a sense of balance and direction.

The downside, of course, is that you can feel railroaded. Players in Britannia have fairly few strategic options. The Danes aren't deciding whether the south or north of England looks more promising; their tactical objectives are etched in stone. You are, for the most part, just going with the flow and solving tactical problems. That would be fine – the tactical problems are modestly engaging – but Britannia's ultimate problem is, of course, the length. Our game took a bit over 6 hours, and it felt like that was about how long the game is realistically going to take under anything but the best of circumstances – we made good progress and didn't dawdle. At 6 hours, Britannia is easily 2 hours too long. If we had been done at the four hour mark, I would have been happy – the game is flavorful, and the ebb and flow of the empires make for a game with some interesting variability. The Roman period has a very different flavor from the Saxon period and the Norman endgame. But it's just not quite enough, in my opinion. Given the choice, I'd take Revolution: The Dutch Revolt, 5-player classic Civilization, or Dune any day; they are similar-length, comparable-complexity games, but in those cases the game-play itself – the range of activities and tactical problems – is much richer and more interesting, so those games seem to be less repetitive, to maintain more interest right to the end.

On balance, I did enjoy Britannia – I think there is a lot of stuff to like in there, the game has its own unique historical flavor, and you could do a lot worse with even many modern games of this sort. If it had been a four hour playing time, I'd be ready to play again sometime soon. But it wasn't, and it didn't seem likely to ever get there given infrequent play. So unless one of my friends suddenly becomes a huge fan, I'll probably play it again in a year or two, and I'll enjoy it again then for the history and for the flavor, but it's not something that's ever going to hit the table with anything approaching regularity.

Last comment: in general, I like the new Fantasy Flight production. The counter illustrations perhaps err a bit too much towards artistry and so are a bit murky at times, but the overall effect is nice. My only complaint is the yellow board. What's the deal with that? Green would have been a better choice. I can only assume that nobody of Anglo-Irish extraction was involved in that decision-making process.

Sorry, no clever segue this time ...

Since I last wrote about Fury of Dracula, I've played it like 4 more times. One game went 4+ hours, and that was too long; the game had gotten pretty tedious by the end. But the other games have weighed in at 2.5 to 3.5 hours, and that's quite comfortable. Dracula has been hammered once, and won in a walk once, and the other two were very close. The Hunters can afford a few mistakes; Dracula cannot. Even one apparently minor screw-up can have dire consequences.

So, to update my previous advice for Dracula:

• I previously said that you should avoid attacking. I will now temper that advice. You want to be very careful, yes; but there are definitely situations when it's worthwhile, at least at night: when you can maul an individual hunter, or where you can use your Escape (Bat) to break out of an encircling ring. Just try not to bite anyone who is too early in the turn order. If the Hunters can Hypnotise Godalming, the rest of them can gang up on you before you get a chance to move.
• Once the hunters are hot on your trail, it's frighteningly difficult to shake them. About the only way to throw them off is to go to sea. So use sea movement, but use it sparingly. If you're at sea for too long, it becomes more apparent where you are going to eventually land, generally, and it costs you more blood. Also, being at sea has an unfortunate consequence: it can dramatically lengthen the game, since time stops and the hunters can't catch you until you land. Since this is time when you are doing nothing, but the hunters are gearing up, it is to be avoided. And try to make sure that your departure is late in the day. You'll be very vulnerable when you first debark, so if you've got a few turns of night to make a break for it, that'll help a lot.
• In general, the game seems to progress through an early stage of them looking for you, through to a hot pursuit. If you can mature a New Vampire in the early game and then make a clean escape from their first round of pursuit, you should be in an excellent position to win.
• Avoid the peripheries of the board. Eastern Europe is cool, but it can be badly constrained by Heavenly Hosts and Hallowed Ground. If the Hunters catch you there, England is a deathtrap. Wherever you go, it's about keeping your options open. Don't voluntarily limit your options (by, say, going to Ireland) unless you really think it'll throw the Hunters. I've found that starting in a peripheral location the Hunters haven't adequately covered (Eastern Europe, Italy, England) and laying down a New Vampire, then working towards the middle of the board is a good way to go. But it all depends on what the Hunters do.
• The right encounter chits make all the difference. With that in mind, use Dark Call earlier rather than later if you've got a lousy hand (don't forget it can be used during the day). And if you have breathing space, don't neglect the Feed card either. It's one less location in your trail, and an extra blood or two will come in handy.

Fury of Dracula has held up quite well to a bunch of play in a short time, and I think it'll turn out to be a long-term keeper. It's a touch too long to be a regular, and I can see it getting a bit samey if you played every week, but definitely a winner when you're looking for a change of pace.

War of the Ring: Battles of the Third Age, Times Square

Unlike most people I suspect, what ultimately enabled me to pull the trigger on buying the new War of the Ring expansion was not to get at the new bits for the main War of the Ring game, but the new "operational" game they included using many of the same bits as the core game. Sure, I'm glad to have the upgrades for the core game, but since I wasn't a huge War of the Ring fan I figured the maximum upside for me was modest: it would get War of the Ring onto the table for a few more plays. If there was any way the expansion was going to justify its non-trivial price tag for me, it was with the operational game.

First, let me say that anyone out there who was hoping that Nexus might have learned from the many graphic design foul-ups in War of the Ring (indistinguishable sculpts, ridiculously tiny font sizes, indistinct icons) will be disappointed. The design here is every bit as breathtaking in its blithe disregard for functionality or reason. Icons are tinier, less illuminating, and even more indistinguishable. For reasons that defy all logic recruitment counters specific to good guys and bad guys are all the same color. Relevant terrain on the board is still indistinct. The rulebook manages to make a game of just modest complexity almost completely incoherent. It all really is an amazing sight to behold, especially since the actual look of the board and many of the illustrations is so well-done. All that can be said is that the board itself is much more useable than War of the Ring's, with spaces that are large enough for the units that will occupy them.

Anyway, enough with that already, how does the game play?

With possibly one big honking exception*, I rather like the core system of the Battles of the Third age game. In the main, the game plays very similarly to the core War of the Ring game (and for that reason if no other I think fans of the base game will find something to like here): you roll dice to see what actions are available to you (move, muster, draw cards, attack, etc.), combat involves rolling up to 5 dice with leader re-rolls, you've got some flavor provided by various dual-use event cards, you've got characters, armies, and so on. A number of complexities of the full game (Diplomacy, mainly) are gone, replaced by some more tactical concerns: the different types of units now have different flavors (finally!), damage in battle is more nuanced and can be repaired through rallying before units are actually lost, and the Shadow Player can select his "attitude", from build-up (which allows recruitment and slows the pace of the "fate" clock which times the game) to a neutral position through all-out-offensive (which enables more troop movement but accelerates the clock).

Sounds interesting, right? Sure! Unfortunately, in actual play, this mix of stuff turns out to be bewildering, because there is almost no way for you to get any intuitive sense of what you should be doing. Should I be building up? Attacking right away? Trying to mix recruitment and offense? Who is going to be more effective, the Isengarders, Dunlendings, or Mordor Orcs? What is going on here, exactly? So much of the landscape of the game is hidden by the decks of event and action cards, the mix in the muster chits, and the expected mix of die rolls and fate tile draws, that it's impossible to formulate a reasonable approach to the game without knowing the exact mix of cards and having a detailed knowledge of complex probabilities.

As a result, our games saw the Shadow Player soundly thrashed. These were not just garden-variety beatings, but total stuffings. Not just once, but back-to-back. Imagine ending a game of Settlers of Catan with 3 points, and that showing would feel more emotionally satisfying than what the Shadow Player has gone through in our games. The problem with a beating that bad is that it often leaves you with no comprehension of what has gone wrong, and that was the case here.

In the end, War of the Ring: Battles of the Third Age felt like a lot of American-style games: while there are lot of different options presented to the player, there is really only one way to play the game.** You need to figure out what that one way to play it is. Then it boils down to who can execute the pat strategies the most efficiently. The War of the Ring base game had similar issues, but it seemed less extreme: if you pursued some avenue other than what the game designer intended (or what the game design demanded) you would lose, but it at least it wouldn't be the humiliating experience we have here.

As a result, this is one of the most incomprehensible and opaque games I've played in some time. I don't think it's exactly a bad game – I find many of the individual elements interesting in and of themselves, and many of the tactical decisions have some tension when viewed in isolation – but when taken as a whole the game is simply far too confusing for what you're likely to get out of it. For what should be a fun roll-the-dice and mix-it-up game with obviously limited replayability, I don't want to have to spend my first 3 games (at 3 hours or so each) just figuring out what the heck is going on. To me, it's just not that interesting.

Now, War of the Ring: Battles of the Third Age may be incomprehensible and opaque, but designing such a game is child's play when you're willing to use 24+ pages of rules not written in the designer's first language, a hundred cards, and one metric ton of plastic. Designing an incomprehensible and opaque game with one page of rules, a small board, and a simple deck of cards with no text is the work of a true master.

I admit to having no idea of what's going on, game-wise, with Reiner Knizia's Times Square. The basic idea is that you have various figures on the board: Sue and her two Bodyguards, Hal, and Deb. The pieces all have a matching suit of cards which move them in different ways and with different restrictions and have various effects on the other pieces. You're trying to get them into your (sort of sleazy-looking) bar. You play through the deck twice, some stuff happens, and the game ends.

I can only imagine it's Reiner's further experiments in theories of game theme, as demonstrated dramatically by Beowulf. These characters actually have slightly more descriptive names, and they sort of behave in appropriate ways: Sauced, er, Saucy Sue staggers back and forth between the two bars, always surrounded by her bodyguards; Dancin' Deb flits back and forth and allows the player who's bar she is closest to to influence the motions of all the other pieces; and Handsome Hal moves in a more leisurely manner, and can attract other individual pieces to him. It all sort of makes sense in a thematic way that is sort of interesting, if still a little bit too abstract to be actually engaging.

The underlying game-play itself though is very strange, and I have yet to determine if there is any tension, any resource management, or any tactics. I've played about half-a-dozen times and I am suspicious that there is not – you just play whatever cards you've got and pick up some new ones. But, I say to myself, this is Reiner Knizia, not Michael Schacht. There must be something there. It's rated as a "12 and up" game, for heaven's sake!

As I say, bewildering.

---

* So what is that exception anyway? I've come to the conclusion that the real weak link in War of the Ring (and, by extension, the Battles of the Third Age expansion) is the action dice system itself. It is a fairly clever in concept, and I usually like dice, but when viewed in a holistic way I think they are ineffective here. They serve to constrain rather than enable. You have some idea of a strategy you want to pursue, but tactically you are too straightjacketed by what you end up rolling. Combinations of dice don't suddenly open up interesting options that weren't available before, although many combinations will prevent you from doing what you want. If they enabled uncertainty or excitement or an ability to bluff, that might be something – but they don't, all dice rolls are open and can be seen by both players, so your opponent knows exactly when you have a lousy roll and how to hammer you for it. The Fellowship knows how dangerous it is to move, and can calculate the odds exactly, which seems very, very wrong.

In a large part because of this core system, both War of the Ring and Battles of the Third Age end up feeling to me like you're wrestling with the game system, not with your opponent, which for me is not a good thing.

** For the record, the way to win as Saruman in the Rohan scenario appears to be the hyper-aggressive one. Use the "buildup" attitude for one turn, maybe two if you want to push things, then go all-out. locking into the "attack" attitude and never shifting. Any other approach appears to be dead on arrival, as we discovered.

*** Sorry for stealing your gimmick, Joe.

Tempus, Fury of Dracula

Tempus: For me personally, Martin Wallace's games seem to fall into two categories: games that basically work, and games that don't. Interestingly, I actually think that some of the games that don't represent some of his best work, in that the interesting and unusual gameplay overcomes the obvious problems: Age of Steam would be a prime example, as would Der Weisse Lotus and Empires of the Ancient World. On the other hand, his games that seem more polished, from a systems perspective, have usually completely failed to engage me: La Strada for example is a perfectly well-executed, but rather boring, game.

Tempus falls into the latter camp. It works, there is no equivalent of the dysfunctional draft in Liberté or the weird endgame of Age of Steam or the unbalanced scoring in Empires of the Ancient World or the defective endgame of Tyros. Everything is in order here; there are no pointy edges to Tempus, no game systems that are seriously out-of-kilter, and all that's good.

But on the other hand, there is also an almost complete lack of any tension, any interesting decisions, or any theme to drive the game. You push pieces around, not as much of what you're doing matters as you might expect, and at the end of the game you score. The game has action cards, which usually drive a game's theme, but here they are totally banal, with each game action having a matching set of action cards which basically give you a minor +1 enhancement – they could be deleted and it would cost the game almost nothing. They contain no surprises, no theme, no excitement, no impetus to plan or organize. Plus, of course, this is fundamentally a multi-player king-of-the-hill wargame, and as I've ranted time and time again, it really hasn't successfully solved the problems inherent in the genre (more). Because all players get a fixed number of actions, the "compound interest" thing isn't too bad, but since the only scoring you do is at the end, everyone has the opportunity to pick the winner on the last turn.

Before that last turn, though, the game is rather damped, with little real skill being applicable to the proceedings, so that even though the pace tends to be glacial (not because the game is long, but because so little is happening at any one time) the outcome will usually be decided by a) who got the better setup area, b) who people choose to attack, and c) the usual egregious last-turn free-for-all. It makes me cast my mind back to Nexus Ops. Nexus Ops wasn't a great game, but the nicely-done mission and event cards gave the game some drive, some focus, and some momentum. Tempus does play with less downtime than Nexus Ops, but on the other hand, since so much of what you do in Tempus is either obvious or doesn't really matter that much, it's a legitimate question as to whether that's an advantage.

Recall I did say that Tempus basically works, so that's something. That would have been enough for me 10 years ago, I suppose. Today, though, this joins Il Principe as a "blender" game: some game bits were thrown together in a perfunctory manner and pureed. What you end up with is a flavorless paste. It'll work if it's all you have, but it's not satisfying.

Now, I know they're fundamentally different games, but the stark contrast between the imaginative and flavorful Fury of Dracula and the generic and boring Tempus was impressive. Both games are fairly incremental (each turn is a comparatively small chunk of activity) and have a fair amount of process (once you've made some tactical choice, you have to go through a few steps to actually do it), but Fury of Dracula has, from a gameplay standpoint, two major advantages.

Firstly, the real choices you make in Fury of Dracula are more frequent, pay off quickly, and matter a lot more. Deciding where to run and how to use the limited special actions (Wolf Form, Hide, Feed) for Dracula, and how to manage your dragnet for the Hunters, really drives the development of the game, something that is entirely absent from Tempus. In Fury, the game goes through interesting and distinct phases (locate, concentrate, isolate, eliminate) based on the choices of all the players, while Tempus just wanders around a bit, and then you find out who won.

Secondly, like Tempus, Fury of Dracula has action cards. Unlike Tempus, Fury of Dracula's action cards are interesting. Instead of just being incidental modifiers to things you're already doing anyway, Fury's powerful cards open up new options, new directions, and fundamentally alter the flow of the game in interesting ways; but the power level of the cards seems consistent enough, and the players retain sufficient options and control, that it doesn't feel arbitrary.

I rather liked Fury of Dracula. It's not an every-week kind of a game, or even an every-month game, but it is a lot of fun in a lot of the same ways that Lord of the Rings + Suaron is, with reversed roles (the cooperative good guys are the hunters, the single bad guy is the hunted). It's clearly a game with a fair amount of luck, which Dracula has to cope with moreso than the Hunters – random rumors of his presence spreading at the wrong time can clearly spell doom for him – but the luck gives the game flavor and variety and interest, and is far from overbearing.

I'll end with just one tip for Dracula, since reports that have reached me have been of Dracula having a hard time in this game. Look, I know the games has Fury next to your name in the title. I know you've got cool combat cards you're dying to try out. I know that several of the hunters sound like wusses (how old is Van Helsing anyway?). But you should never, ever voluntarily engage them in combat personally. Even at night. Even if one looks isolated and vulnerable. Remember, for the hunters, nailing down your position is most of the battle. Slowing down even for a moment to fight them is the sort of thing that can come back to haunt you. Also remember, combat is just a competitive d6 roll, so no matter how cool your combat cards sound, you can still go down to bad dice. Now, a lot can happen in a game of Fury of Dracula, so I won't dispute that in the right set of circumstances, you might go for it. But I think you'd want to really, really know what you're doing and be absolutely convinced it's right. Instead, just send one of your minions after them.