Dave Reviews: Competitive Hanabi

Fireworks

Remember, fireworks are scary for pets! Keep your doors and windows well shut and locked so they don't run away.

Fireworks is a game about—wait for it—building the most aesthetically pleasing set of fireworks. It's Japanese, which should explain why it's called Fireworks and not "Glowy Sky Booms" or "Sparkly Wonder Stars" or "Boom Goes the Glittery Dynamite". You take tiles with multiple partial fireworks on them and play them to set up certain artistic combinations (big fireworks, kaleidoscopes, saturns, and small flowers), along with special extra-artsy tiles, to score points and win the game. It's about as simple a concept as you can find.

But the game gets complicated by a few aspects. One is the types of fireworks. You start with the core of two big fireworks. The game suggests these start with at least two spaces between them, and it's a good idea; if they're any closer, you won't have space to pop off all the extra fireworks you need around them to finish them. Because the board has twenty-five spaces on it, and the big fireworks will fill seven when completed, it does an effective job of making you think about where you're going to put everything.

Furthermore, although the kaleidoscopes and saturns are each made from putting two firework halves together, you have to pay attention; some have tails and some don't, which are used for kaleidoscopes and saturns, respectively. The two also score differently—kaleidoscopes are better if you have different colors on each side, while saturns are better if they match. (Given the number of colors, this generally makes kaleidoscopes easier to finish.)

However, balancing out the difficulty in putting good fireworks together is the fact you can rearrange your board every time you place new tiles. You're not just mashing in each piece the best you can, having to plan for any number of possibilities (which would be impossible). If you can find a way to use your tiles more effectively, you can move them to take advantage of that. But it's harder than it sounds. Envisioning the best way to move twenty-plus tiles around at the end of the game is very hard, at least at first.

So, they give you a basic concept, complicate how you work with that concept to make it harder, introduce another aspect to make it easier, but then add a challenge to that aspect. On top of that, you don't just roll a die to decide how many tiles you take; you dump that die out of a fireworks tube from a couple feet over the board, only choosing from the tiles that are face up, which is awesome. And if you don't flip any, you roll again with an action card, which usually makes you do some contortions with a friend to get the die out of the tube (and the friend gets to take tiles as well). It's a mix of small party game, visual acuity tester, and strategic thinking.

Sounds great! And it is good. The problem is... that I can't tell you what the problem is. It doesn't feel like they're trying to do too many things, because each aspect of the game is pretty cool. It may be that the mix of things don't necessarily create something more than the sum of its parts. But for whatever reason, we finish playing, shrug, and say, "Yeah, that was pretty good." And we're not dying to play again.

The issues with Fireworks are small, and what you like or dislike may easily not be what I like or dislike. It just doesn't quite get over that hump of being a game that entrances you.

Score: Nineteen useful fireworks tiles out of twenty-five.

Dave Reviews: Ball Science

Dr. Eureka

If all science were this easy, we'd have no reason to know who Neil DeGrasse Tyson is.

Dr. Eureka is a manual dexterity game designed to keep kids entertained, if the box art wasn't enough of a clue. The BGG community is wise in this case; the game is listed as being for ages eight and up, but the community vote is for age five and up, and they're probably right. If you like watching small children fumble objects all over the floor so you can feel more accomplished in life, they're definitely right.

You start with three test tubes, each holding three balls of a single color—red, purple, or green. A card is flipped over with a way of sorting the balls in the test tubes. There may be any number of balls in a given tube (up to the five they can hold); some cards have an empty tube on them. Your job is to figure out the most effective way to move the balls from tube to tube until they match the pattern on the card. The catch is that you have to tip one tube into another to move the balls. You can't move them with your hands. And if you drop a ball, you're out of the round. First person to complete the pattern wins the round, takes the card, and the first to five cards wins.

That's the whole game. Is it fun? Yeah. It's not going to amuse adults for more than a couple playthroughs against each other. Kids might get a kick out of it if they're at a level of coordination where this is a challenge, but a doable challenge. (Actually, by that standard, a lot of adults might like it too.) It's something you want to find for cheap and stick on a shelf if you know you have to deal with kids that like to constantly do things with their hands.

Score: Six Science Guys out of nine.

Dave Reviews: Numbers, Used Poorly

The Mind

Can you read your friends' minds?!

No. Stop trying. And if you do want to try, find another way.

This is what you do in The Mind: Everyone has a hand of cards equal to the level of the game. One person plays a card. Then another. Do that until everyone's hands are empty. The goal is to play the cards, numbered 1 through 99, in numerical order while hardcore pokerfacing everybody at the table. You cannot speak, you cannot make expressions that potentially give away any information about your hand, nothing. (Of course, that's necessary, since clues would make this game idiotically simple.)

Your group starts with a certain number of lives and throwing stars. As you pass through the levels, more of these become available. Lives are lost if someone plays a card and another player has a lower card in hand; throwing stars are used to allow everyone to discard one card from their hands. Run out of lives, you lose. Get to the end with any lives left, you win.

If you're familiar with The Game, this is extremely similar, just with slight tweaks to make it more engaging. Its main advantage over The Game is this: The Game requires you to go through the whole deck, which means a bad shuffle can make it extremely difficult to finish. The Mind never has you deal out more than about one-third of the deck, so while you certainly can end up with a bunch of cards with similar values spread among the players, it's less of a problem.

Problem is, they're just tweaks, and it's not much more engaging. The instructions have a bit that say "Don't read until you've finished a game", at which point they say this is a game about timing—the longer you wait to play a card, the farther away from the current card you probably are, so the players need to get a sense for how long each other will wait before playing a card X number away from the current one. They're not lying; that's what this game is, to the point that's basically all this game is.

This is the kind of game that might have value with kids who need to learn teamwork, especially if you need them to shut the fuck up for five minutes. And there will always be people who enjoy this specific brand of mental cooperation. But as a game, it's just.. not much of one.

Score: Six beers—the number it would probably take for me to enjoy this.

Dave Reviews: Old McDonald Had A Spear

Lords of Xidit

The fantasy land of Xidit cries out for a champion, a leader that will save it from the terrible monsters which traverse the realm! Someone noble, someone grand of vision, someone who will conscript farmers to the cause before actual trained warriors!

In Lords of Xidit, you play the role of an army commander who is identical to all other commanders except for how sweet they look (fuck yeah, ninja lady). It's a programming game in the vein of Robo Rally; you select six actions, your commander does each of them in turn, and if someone ninjas in to take whatever you wanted to get, well, fuck off. At least you can't drop into a bottomless pit.

The possible actions are few, but they're enough. Each location has three roads leading away from it: blue, red, and black. If you choose one of those roads as your action, you travel that road from whatever location you're in, whether you want to anymore or not. You can conscript the lowest-level unit type available in the location, assuming it's a city; once all the possible conscripts are gone, this action does nothing. You can also do battle with a monster in a location. Or pass the move, if you think a delay will get you what you want.

Each monster requires a specific set of unit types to defeat it. You cannot use higher-level unit types in place of whatever's necessary. Beating monsters earns you two of three possible rewards: lyre points, towers, or gold. There's a different balance of these rewards on each monster, such that most of them have a pretty obvious 'two best' rewards, but in some cases you can't choose those (most likely because someone has a tower built in that location, forcing you to take the other two rewards). One curious mechanic is that tiles have a monster on one side and a city in the other, which means when a city runs out of conscripts, it flips into the monster pile, to be drawn when you run low on monsters, and so on forever. (There are titans you can fight in any location, with any set of troops, if no monsters are available to be drawn.)

That's all of the mechanics. Your goal is to score the most points in... well... it changes. And it's not exactly the most points.

The win condition is intriguing but takes a bit of getting used to. There are three ways of scoring, based on the aforementioned monster-smash rewards: lyre points (gained from having the most lyre tokens in a territory), the most levels of towers (height is irrelevant; nine one-story towers is better than two four-stories), and straight cash. These scoring methods are chosen randomly at the start of the game into the first, second, and third scoring slots.

Scoring for each of these is straightforward—count the appropriate item. How they apply to winning, however, is pretty different from most games. For the first scoring metric, being first does not matter; you only need to be in the top three. (In a three player game, an NPC gains points in each metric slowly as the game progresses so there's someone to eliminate in the first round.) For the second metric, you need to be in the top two. Having the highest score only matters with regards to the final metric, and you only need to beat the other person who has made it that far.

Since gold is hidden, and lyre points in the center are as well (they go into a strongbox), each game plays different in part around how readily available information is on the first two metrics. A game that counts towers first, where all info is open, plays differently than one where gold is first and everyone's just taking their best guess.

So, there are two main aspects to the game outside of the theme that will determine if you like it: the programming gameplay and the shifting win conditions. Programming requires some forethought, but if everyone is experienced, the "I know what you know, but you know that I know what you know" shenanigans can run deep. If you're into that, it's great. Likewise, some people are more comfortable going into a game knowing what their goal will be, and even those who are fine with a shifting win condition may struggle with some setups (ie. gold -> lyres -> towers) while excelling with others (towers -> gold -> lyres). It's a real challenge to be good at the game no matter the set of win conditions.

Short version: Lords of Xidit a game that's hard to broadly recommend, as there are a lot of speed bumps any given player may not like, but it's very good for the people who would enjoy the game that it is.

Score: 8/10 (clever scoring past deadline is hard)

Dave Reviews: Something Something Fuck Disney

Villainous

Oh god. Disney IP at work. This can't possibly be good.

Right?

Villainous is a game where up to six players take on the roles of some of Disney's most nefarious villains: Maleficent, Jafar, Captain Hook, The Queen of Hearts, Ursula, or Prince John (animal version). Each player has a board with four sections full of actions they can take on their turns, a deck of cards, and a second deck of Fate cards to throw them off track, but that's largely where the similarities between the characters end.

In keeping with the small but growing trend towards asymmetrical gaming, Villainous offers a different win condition for each character, a different deck of cards with different items and abilities, different Fate cards (which reflect that character's nemeses—Captain Hook has all the children from Peter Pan, for example)—and different sets of actions on each of their four board sections. In fact, not all characters have access to all four sections on their boards at the start of the game, or at any point—Ursula constantly has one end of the board or the other locked off.

Each turn, the player takes their very well-made pawn and moves it to a board section other than the one they were just on (think Scythe). They then perform all the actions on that section. This can be partially thwarted by their enemies; one action is to play a Fate card off someone else's deck, which can be used to cover the top two actions on one section of that player's board. These heroes can't be defeated unless the player puts minions on, or moves them to, the same space with power equal to or greater than the hero's. Items can be attached to minions to make them stronger, but the same goes for the heroes. It's a take-that mechanic without the rage inducement; rarely does a player not have any board options without all of the actions on it available unless they're winning handily and everyone is coming after them, in which case, hey, be a better villain.

For a deck-based game, the balance between when people reach their win conditions is pretty remarkable. This isn't to say that everyone gets there at about the same time, but rather that everyone has a win condition other players can see coming. Whoever's closest to winning can get slowed down, but not to a degree that effectively stops them from being able to win unless they get dogpiled hard (which is itself just a strategy that hands the game to someone else). It could have been successful with any theme; the game is strong.

But beyond that, Villainous has more flavor than atomic wings. All the minions, heroes, items, abilities, and everything else associated with each villain is spot on. The game even allows for some seriously messed up situations; for example, Jafar can hypnotize Aladdin and make him kill Jasmine. If you don't think that's great—not the domestic violence aspect, but the sheer evil in the act of making it happen and the fact you can get so dark—this game might not appeal to you as much as others.

It's a really good game, though. Play it. You want to be bad. You do. You doooooo.

Score: Five non-pedophile villains out of six (Captain Hook is a mega-creep).