Dave Reviews: The Art of Weaving

Azul

Let's make a quilt! Or a rug. Or... whatever. Tile wall! That's it.

Azul is a classic game, re-released two years ago, and it's still selling well. That's because it's good. Spoilers.

So, let's talk about how and why it works. You have a board with a five-by-five pattern you're trying to fill in the most cohesive possible way. There are five colors, represented once each per row and column (they show up as a diagonal pattern, it's quite nice). Each round, seven little platters are loaded with four tiles randomly chosen from the bag, each in one of the five colors. Players choose one platter, take all the tiles of one color from it, and put the rest in the center. A player may also take all the tiles of one color that have been placed in the center instead; the first one to do this takes the first player tile, which counts as a penalty tile at the end of the round.

Those tiles go on one of the horizontal lines to the left of the wall pattern. Those lines have one, two, three, four, or five empty spaces, going down. All tiles on a line must be of the same color. Take too many to fit the line where you want them to go? Extras go on the penalty row. Forced to take a color you can't place? Those tiles go on the penalty row. The first couple of penalties aren't major, but they escalate quickly, and you want to avoid them in any case.

When you fill one of those lines, at the end of the round one tile moves over to the matching spot on that row of the wall. If you've filled a spot, that color can't be readied for that row anymore. So, as the game progresses, your goal is to keep targeting colors you need, but only as many tiles as are required to fill a pattern line and get the color into that row.

However! You also want to get tiles on the wall next to each other. The first one you place scores you a point. Every one you place after that scores a point, plus one more for each adjacent tile on the wall (orthogonal only). This means you're gauging who needs what color, how many you need of each color, what colors will score you the most, how many tiles you need to put that color in the right place, and sometimes when you need to absorb a penalty to max out the scoring power of your wall.

It's one of those games with basic actions that are easy to understand, but which lead into a game that runs fairly deep on strategic level. It's also an example of good, professional game design. Quite a number of games give you a basic set of mechanics that lead to engaging play. Sometimes the mechanics are deceptively simple; Onitama gives you five pieces and a bunch of cards, and while the designers would have needed to spend plenty of time with the cards to make sure the game was balanced, overall it doesn't take much to create an excellent, quick strategy game.

Azul, on the other hand, is a game that is either the product of a tremendous amount of iteration, or amazing luck (and still an awful lot of iteration). Filling the five-by-five wall is simple enough, but why are the pattern lines designed in a one through five fashion? They could have all been the same length, for example, and within that idea they could have reasonably been anywhere from three to five lines long. Why are the penalties structured as they are? How come there are seven platters of tiles, rather than six or eight. or a number based on the players in the game? Why do players get to take tiles from the center of the table, rather than only from the platters? Why is scoring exactly one per tile, including adjacent ones? Why are the adjacency bonuses orthogonal only, not diagonal?

Designers who don't take enough time to playtest their games and figure out just the right balance points make mistakes on questions like these. Sometimes this happens because they need the game on the shelves and selling; sometimes, if they work for a larger company, they have bosses pressing them for a product; sometimes they just don't see the fault lines in their creations. Azul sidesteps the potential errors, and we wind up with something on the short list of players everywhere for "that game you should totally get". Maybe you already knew how good it was, but let's take a moment to respect how much time it takes to put a game on that level.

Score: 9/10. Nice and simple.

Dave Reviews: Broken AF Timelines

Bronze Age Boogie

Look at this cover.

There's a lady with a sword looking freaked out in front a lady with a fro and a dude with sideburns, each looking like they're in a fight. Then there's a wild old dude and a monkey. If the goal here was to create a cover with enough going on to make someone pick it up and say, "What the hell is this? I should find out," it worked. At least with me.

Here's what we're looking at, spoiler-free: The comic starts in the 1970s. Boogie, fros, sideburns, OK. That all makes sense. There's an open question as to what the fking Bronze Age has to do with it, but we'll get there, right? Right.

And we do. It doesn't take long to shift almost 4,000 years in the past, where the young lady pictured (Brita) is at war alongside the tribe led by her father against some enormously powerful wizards who do a number on their forces. Along the way, we find out she's been plagued by visions of a strange woman, who we instantly recognize as the lady with the fro. Then [REDACTED], and the timelines come together, in a fashion.

At this point you're about halfway, maybe 60% of the way into the physical comic book. Then there's an ad, which generally signifies the end of the comic. But there has to be more, right? There is... a scene that takes place in the 1950s.

I realize that the serialized nature of comics can make a series difficult to start. You have a lot of groundwork to lay, and not a lot of space to do it in. Maybe the answer is super-sized first issues. Even a change as small as adding 20-25% more content, then charging $4.99 instead of $3.99, would be a huge step. Bronze Age Boogie might end up being wildly entertaining, but it's trying to do so much in so many different places in this first issue that I have no idea what story I'm theoretically about to follow.

I'll give it credit for serving up minimal background through character exposition. For the most part, we get into the comic and go. But we go all over the road (probably not unlike someone high on coke in a '75 Chevette). We might need a full volume of comics to appreciate what this gives us, but for now there's not enough material to have confidence this thing is going anywhere at all.

Score: Six tight fros out of ten.

Dave Reviews: The Zombie Promise That Doesn't Follow Through

AuZtralia

Australia with a 'Z'. Boy, that couldn't mean zombies or anything, could it?

Actually...

AuZtralia is a game with everything it shows on the front: blimps, old-timey gun trucks, soldiers, and the dusty hell that is the Outback. Does it look old-school? It should, because it takes place in late-19th century Australia. The 'Z' is, indeed, a reference to zombies, but they only play a bit role in this game, because it's really about Cthulhu!

Are you wondering what the hell is going on yet? Don't worry, everyone who opens this game not knowing what it is beforehand goes through the same thing. What you get here is a semi-cooperative strategy game between players working together to stop the hordes of Cthulhu from swarming through this overblown penal colony, and working to do it better than everyone else because when it comes to saving the world, you've gotta keep score.

Everyone starts by setting up a port along the coast. From there you spread into the Outback, mostly via railroads you build, ferrying troops to clear out nests of zombies, cultists, and otherworldly monsters, collecting resources to keep creating railroads and troops, and building farms to feed the citizens of this... fine land. Farms are important; there are three types, and there's a benefit to having at least one of each type, but each one requires different land to be built. Some of that land runs a little close to the nasty things, and eventually the nasty things wake up and start walking around.

What makes AuZtralia work is the time mechanic. Although you can be limited by a lack of resources, it's usually possible to collect what you need; the question is how much time it takes. Each action takes a set amount of time, and turn order is determined by who's furthest back on the time track (ie. who's used the least time so far in acting). Furthermore, time ties (which are common—nothing takes more than three time to do) are broken by whoever's token is on top of the stack, and you go on top of the stack if you get there last. So, spending three time to build that railroad you so desperately means another player might get three turns before your next one. Is that worth it? Quite possibly! But you need to make a decision about using a resource that everyone has in exactly equal quantities.

Cthulhu's forces are locked into the time mechanic as well. Whenever it's Cthulhu's turn, his token goes forward one time space, and on every other time space from the moment he starts (about halfway along) until the end of the game, he acts according to a pre-determined list of rules. At the start of the game, his forces start face down; his actions affect those which are face up, and those most frequently turn up because players investigate the spaces. If you don't remove any threat which is present, now Cthulhu's going to start running over you harder. You always have some semblance of control over what you do before he acts, but you can only do so much, even amongst all of you.

Then he eats your food! And your cattle. And your farmers.

If you stay on top of things and keep winning your battles—dice are involved, so this is never quite a given—the game can almost seem like a walkover. But it has the capacity to snowball out of control fast if you get the wrong event with the wrong monsters walking around at the wrong time. If there's something that might seem unsatisfying, it's if you end up playing a game and it feels too easy or too hard. There's some chance involved, but you have a lot of control over the outcome. For a game that used Z for Zombie messaging to get attention, then barely even followed through with the zombies, it's surprisingly good.

Score: Nine shattered fnarglflaghns out of twelve.

Dave Reviews: There's An App For Your House of Horrors

Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition

Holy hell, how have I not reviewed this yet? Have I reviewed this? I feel like I must have, but I can't find it anywhere on the blog.

Fuck it, let's go!

Mansions of Madness is a Fantasy Flight Cthulhu game, which means it's going to take your character's insides and throw them all over the floor. (Also, "Cthulhu" doesn't trigger the blog spell-checker. Awesome.) This one does it a little differently than your Horrors, Arkham and Eldritch alike. Mansions of Madness puts you in a very specific location, for a very specific reason, and you need to figure out what's going on and what to do about it before whatever's lurking drags you into a shadow or attic or under the sea.

The concept isn't substantially different from the original Mansions of Madness. The difference now is that there's an app you can put on a tablet or laptop (or phone, but the screen's too small) that guides you through the game. You're responsible for tracking where the characters go and making sure you follow the core rules, but when something goes bump or you want to investigate that creaky dresser in the corner, the app tells you what comes next. It takes one of the worst parts of all these games—the administration—and puts most of it on the computer. All you're responsible for, really, is not cheating.

And holy hell, you will probably be tempted to cheat, because it damn sure seems like the game is. Even the first mission, at a mere two-Elder Sign difficulty, doesn't offer much room for error. I've played it multiple times, taking a backseat in later games so the new players can make the choices, and it's hard to see how a group can win without knowing what's coming. Other players have made similar statements. It's not that we're against hard games—I mean, right now I'm playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and I haven't quit even though I can't go any farther until I beat one of four bosses blocking various paths—but we have difficulty envisioning a winning strategy for a mission nobody knows that doesn't involve stumbling across the right clue or item.

Which sounds like a crap game, right? Except... gods, it's fun. It's really fun. You get your asses kicked and it's usually fun. Your friend gets turned into an acolyte of the Black Goat and stabs you to death to win while everyone else loses, it's ludicrous and fun. You win, you go out and buy a lottery ticket. And it's fun. The app's music and sound effects are simple but set the atmosphere well, waiting for the app to throw another challenge at you makes it feel like the bad guys are truly out of your control, and for as hard as they are, the scenarios are well-designed. You might say, at some point, "How the hell was I supposed to know that?" But the connections generally make sense once you know what they all are. It's just tough when you're desperately trying to survive and you're missing the plus sign that makes two and two equal four.

The basic FF Cthulhu stuff is all here—the same characters, oodles of tokens, and cards beyond the counting capacity of most small children and some adolescents. You only have eight characters to choose from; it's enough to play the game, but for those of us who have been able to pick just the right character rather than one of the two who are strong or smart or whatever, it feels a little light. If you have the first edition of the game, though, you can bring those characters over to this one. (Yeah, we choose characters. Fuck random drawing, this game's hard enough as it is.)

More unfortunate is that the base game only comes with four missions, and teases you with fifteen more available if you pick up various expansions. For a $100 game, that's kind of shitty. I don't begrudge the company their expansions, but at least start the players out with enough to make it feel like a full experience. Seven or eight would have been more reasonable—say, the ones that use the base game's tile set but are sold on Steam for $4.99 a pop.

As for the difficulty, people house rule various things to make the game more playable. My suggestion is this, as a minimum variant: Allow anyone who takes a move action to move two spaces, even if they take another action in the middle. Only moving one space because the thing you need is next to you, even though you want to keep going (or move right back), is too common. You don't know what you're going to see when you enter a room, and without that flexibility, your action economy often tanks, leaving you needing more turns than you have to get the job done.

It's weird to be able to spell out this many flaws this clearly and still deeply enjoy a game, but that's the deal here. It's so good. Between the price, the need for expansions, and the difficulty, it may not be for everyone, but this is pretty much what FF Cthulhu is, and they did a great job.

Score: Seven writing tentacles out of eight on the octopus face (I punched one).