Saturday, September 29, 2018

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.

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