Dave Reviews: Giant Reptile Zen

The Tea Dragon Society

For some time, Renegade Games has been held up as an example of a company that consistently puts out quality products. I'm starting to wonder if it's more a matter of them very consistently putting out products, and some of them are quality.

The art on the box is exactly like the art in the game: fucking adorable. If you want a game you can hug because it's so KAWAII, this is definitely your thing.

For everyone else, it's Fisher-Price: My First Deckbuilder. Everyone gets a character and a starter deck (differences are aesthetic only). You don't have a hand of cards; all cards are face up in your 'hold'. However, you draw cards and add them to your hold, which is functionally the same as adding them to your hand in a more normal card game. It's like the entire point is to keep the information open so you can teach kids how to play, as if you couldn't figure out playing with hands on the table if the kid's problem was struggling with what to do without advice.

Cards can have up to four parts to them. Growth is effectively mana, the resource you use to buy cards. You can find growth in the upper left (that's what she said...?). The cost of a card is in the upper right. If there's an effect, that's in the lower middle. Points are at the bottom/middle. And some icons are also in the bottom middle, while others are on the pictures, which is confusing but not a huge deal.

Your entire turn is drawing a card and, if you want to, buying a card. This at least has the effect of keeping the game moving. Your hand is sitting in front of you (that's probably what she said), and you don't throw it out every turn, so you already know how much growth you're working with (she definitely said that) minus the card you draw next. The market and memory cards are all sitting there for you to peruse, so you're considering your next play on other people's turns, which don't take long, and the game stays fairly active.

Market cards get added to your deck by using sufficient growth (do you think she said that? I do) and putting it in your discard pile. Memory cards also get added to your deck, but tend to be worth more points, have different effects, and are related to specific seasons—the game is played in four rounds, representing the seasons, and once one memory card is left you move on to the next season. When one memory card remains in winter, the game's over. Count up your points.

It's... fine. There's not much here for adults to enjoy in terms of rich strategy. Anyone who comprehends deck builders will talk more about how cute the artwork is than the game. Bump it up in priority if you have kids in the mid-single digits to whom you'd like to teach very basic game ideas. Other than that, this isn't going to entertain most people for too many playthroughs.

Score: Two and a half dragons out of four (OH GOD THE HORROR)

Dave Reviews: Alexa's World Tour

When In Rome

If there's a potential issue with any trivia game, it's the possibility of seeing a question twice. The Internet is full of trivia. So running a trivia game through Amazon's Alexa service has to be perfect, right?

Quoth the Internet: LOL

When In Rome is, if nothing else, a clever little idea. Once computer/phone apps started becoming integrated with board games, it was only a matter of time until online services were used to expand the possibility even further. When In Rome lays a map of the world in front of you; you pick a city in which to start, then answer a trivia question about that city to make a friend. If you make a friend, the other player can't (two players or teams max), because apparently there are only twenty people in Alexa's world. You can normally only travel to a city connected to the one you're in, but having friends lets you chain moves together, because the world is a mosh pit and we're all just crowd surfing on it.

In every city, you have a choice between an easier, three-point question of a random category, or a harder, five-point question in a different category. All questions are about the city you're in. Between the points for answering questions correctly and for picking up special souvenirs that pop up from time to time for bonuses, you play through either nine rounds or when three souvenirs total are collected (the latter is much more likely). Highest score wins.

I'm not going to say you can't have fun playing When In Rome. It's possible. But that sentence alone should tell you where this review is going.

The tricky thing about a review is that I'm not sure if it's trying to do too much or not enough. That shouldn't generally be a point of confusion about anything. But this is a game where they hired twenty different voice actors to play the friends in each city and ask the questions related to that city. Considering this is the first real Alexa-based board game, nobody would have expected them to go so far in their efforts, so it was really an above-and-beyond decision. However, using voice actors dramatically limits the number of different questions that can be asked. This thing is connected to the Internet, but in the first two games I played, I got the same question both times I ended up in San Francisco. That's beyond unacceptable for a trivia game, and the way the voice acting is used isn't even that good (between the actors and Alexa, there's often too much of a gap between questions).

Worse yet—and that first problem is pretty bad—they put all this time into the aesthetics but couldn't even figure out a good way to make the souvenir system work. First, when a souvenir pops up, it's in a randomly generated location. Fine. These locations seem to always be relatively equidistant between the two players. That's reasonable; it would be pretty fucked up if one player could move one space to the souvenir city while the other had to move five, giving the first one several chances before their opponent had one. But the souvenir can pop IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROUND.

Here's how a round works: a challenge for both players is put forth. Sometimes they need to come the closest to a percentage-based statistic (ie. guess what percentage out of 100, closest wins); sometimes the players alternate answering different questions until one of them gets one right. The winner of the challenge makes the first move that round. If there's no souvenir and no reason to go any particular direction, then going first doesn't matter.

The only real advantage to going first is if it gets you to a city with a souvenir sooner. Therefore, giving a potential disadvantage to someone for winning the right to go first (you don't get a choice) is completely batshit. The fact they didn't realize this tells me we're talking about a bunch of programmers who never made a game and thought they could do something cool with Alexa. They apparently nailed it with a game called Beasts of Balance a couple years ago; the ball got dropped in every conceivable way here.

It shows. Play this game if someone else has it or you find it in a thrift shop for a buck, just so you can see the problems and dream about what could have been if they hired anybody who knew what the fuck they were doing with this, or even just some competent game testers. They're in London, they should have asked Shut Up and Sit Down to do it.

Score: Six dystopian dumpster fires out of twenty.