Wingspan
It's a bird party! And I am super late to it!
Wingspan is a game about birds, birds, and more birds. Birds in the forest, birds on the plains, and birds near the water. Birds that are smol, and birds that eat the birds that are smol. Feed your birds, play your birds, and watch your birds barely survive in the wild, because "take flight" is both too cliche and too positive for what nature does to things living in it.
It's simple to play. You have a hand of bird cards and a pile of food. Feed the birds and play their cards. Except... do you have the right food? What kind of nests do the birds make? Can some of your birds help other birds with the same nests? Do your birds want to eat other birds? Can your birds find more food for your other birds to eat? Do your birds do something right now and then just sit there like lazy buggers, or do they keep working as long as you pay attention to their habitat? How many eggs can they take care of? Who wants to eat the eggs? Should you—
AAAAHHHHH
The pieces of the game make sense. They're not hard to learn or use. Making them work together, though, takes some knowledge of what cards you might see, how much food you might need, and so on, and that makes it a trip for first-timers to learn. If everyone's new, it works out fine. If some people are and some aren't, the noobs better learn quickly. There is time to suss out a strategy, thankfully, so you aren't stuck finishing out a game that you've started to understand but need a second play to make that understanding work for you. But the learning curve exists.
The actions don't take much explaining. You can play a bird to any of the areas in which it can live, if you have the food. If you can't or don't want to play a bird, you can use an action in a given habitat. Taking an action in the forest gives you food. The plains give you eggs, and the water gives you cards. The more birds you have in the habitat, the more of each of those things you have access to with a single action. Playing towards your specific goal(s)—you start with one and can get more during the game—and the competitive goals for each round (ie. have eggs on the most different birds when the round ends) is important for winning, but if you can find a point combo that doesn't require those things, it could still be enough. Understanding the game, and not the "meta" strategies or the few things that will actually work amongst knowledgeable players, is how you do well, which is excellent.
Really, it's so good. It's hard for a game to make someone (ie. me) go from grouchy and lost to realizing what's possible to almost winning in a single playthrough, but this one did. It's very smoothly designed, with a lot of detail about the birds that technically weren't needed but make the game more engaging for their presence. I usually always want to play something new, but I won't mind a second go at this one.
Score: Seven hungry owls out of eight.
Saturday, July 6, 2019
Friday, July 5, 2019
Dave Reviews: The Fairest Robbery
Escape Plan
A handful of high-end thieves try to escape the city with remarkably equivalent piles of money! News at 11!
Escape Plan is a game about, yes, trying to escape a city where the local cops have called in their SWAT teams and the FBI in an attempt to finally take you down. You've set up stashes across the city, and you need to collect as many as possible before the ways out of town are closed off. Mislead the cops to get a free run at your money, push them into the paths of your fellow thieves, and make it out with the most cash! Woo!
There are a few ways to collect your money. Most of the options involve going to the businesses and safehouses where you've put the largest collections of cash and throwing them in your car. Everyone gets a card with a different setup at the start of the game, meaning everyone has different businesses to target if they want to get the largest stashes. Other businesses have ready cash on hand for you; you might only get a few thousand dollars, but you can spend it on items or assistants to help you on your escape quest.
Why you can't just open the briefcases full of cash and spend some of that money goes unexplained.
You also get bonus money for hiring contacts, because... reasons? You can have up to five people on your side, and the bonus goes up to 100k if you fill all the slots. There are stash slots on your player board, which can be used for items that help you fight the cops or lockers from the convenience store that have extra money in them. And those lockers are full of money too, but they have different requirements to get into them—you need almost nothing but a key to open the easiest ones, while you need a bunch of contacts and a certain level of notoriety to open the hardest.
There are other aspects to the game, such as getting wounded and losing money if you're hurt at the end of the game, but those are sidebars to the main point: This game might be too balanced.
The cards each player gets at the start of the game have sums of cash available, from 100k down to 50k, by tens, and three locations where they can get spendable cash. Collecting contacts earns the same money. All the assets you unlock are worth the same money. The lockers, in fact, are extremely weird—why should your contacts and notoriety determine whether you can unlock a different safebox? Shouldn't that be based on the fact you need a different key?—and there's only a 20k difference between the highest level locker and the lowest, but because everything is so equal, that 20k can mean winning or losing.
Difficult but engaging balance involves giving players different ways to maneuver through the game while ending up at around the same spot. Simplistic balance is having them all do basically the same thing and just making the rewards for everything about the same. Escape Plan has the latter.
This type of game can work, but it relies more heavily on the mechanics matching the theme, and unfortunately that breaks down too. If you escape, why does being notorious cost you money? Why does being hurt cost you money? Why do these thieves, who are familiar enough with the businesses and safehouses in the city to invest in them and hide their money there, not know where all the places are until the third day?
It's a set of mechanics that's basically fine, with a rewards system that works well enough, but it's hard to see how this differs from game to game outside of people getting screwed by their two best stashes not becoming available until the last round and being placed where they can only get one or the other, or possibly neither, before they have to run for the hills. Players who are equally good at the game should finish relatively close in score, so you're less likely to have blowout games, and that's a positive. But it would be nice to see a theme that really worked with the mechanics in play.
Score: Five collected stashes out of nine.
A handful of high-end thieves try to escape the city with remarkably equivalent piles of money! News at 11!
Escape Plan is a game about, yes, trying to escape a city where the local cops have called in their SWAT teams and the FBI in an attempt to finally take you down. You've set up stashes across the city, and you need to collect as many as possible before the ways out of town are closed off. Mislead the cops to get a free run at your money, push them into the paths of your fellow thieves, and make it out with the most cash! Woo!
There are a few ways to collect your money. Most of the options involve going to the businesses and safehouses where you've put the largest collections of cash and throwing them in your car. Everyone gets a card with a different setup at the start of the game, meaning everyone has different businesses to target if they want to get the largest stashes. Other businesses have ready cash on hand for you; you might only get a few thousand dollars, but you can spend it on items or assistants to help you on your escape quest.
Why you can't just open the briefcases full of cash and spend some of that money goes unexplained.
You also get bonus money for hiring contacts, because... reasons? You can have up to five people on your side, and the bonus goes up to 100k if you fill all the slots. There are stash slots on your player board, which can be used for items that help you fight the cops or lockers from the convenience store that have extra money in them. And those lockers are full of money too, but they have different requirements to get into them—you need almost nothing but a key to open the easiest ones, while you need a bunch of contacts and a certain level of notoriety to open the hardest.
There are other aspects to the game, such as getting wounded and losing money if you're hurt at the end of the game, but those are sidebars to the main point: This game might be too balanced.
The cards each player gets at the start of the game have sums of cash available, from 100k down to 50k, by tens, and three locations where they can get spendable cash. Collecting contacts earns the same money. All the assets you unlock are worth the same money. The lockers, in fact, are extremely weird—why should your contacts and notoriety determine whether you can unlock a different safebox? Shouldn't that be based on the fact you need a different key?—and there's only a 20k difference between the highest level locker and the lowest, but because everything is so equal, that 20k can mean winning or losing.
Difficult but engaging balance involves giving players different ways to maneuver through the game while ending up at around the same spot. Simplistic balance is having them all do basically the same thing and just making the rewards for everything about the same. Escape Plan has the latter.
This type of game can work, but it relies more heavily on the mechanics matching the theme, and unfortunately that breaks down too. If you escape, why does being notorious cost you money? Why does being hurt cost you money? Why do these thieves, who are familiar enough with the businesses and safehouses in the city to invest in them and hide their money there, not know where all the places are until the third day?
It's a set of mechanics that's basically fine, with a rewards system that works well enough, but it's hard to see how this differs from game to game outside of people getting screwed by their two best stashes not becoming available until the last round and being placed where they can only get one or the other, or possibly neither, before they have to run for the hills. Players who are equally good at the game should finish relatively close in score, so you're less likely to have blowout games, and that's a positive. But it would be nice to see a theme that really worked with the mechanics in play.
Score: Five collected stashes out of nine.
Dave Reviews: Fun Greek Dice
Corinth
Corinth is a roll-and-write game about ancient-world trading with people who look friendlier and much, much cleaner than their probable real-world counterparts. Yay washing!
Corinth's twist on the roll-and-write style of game is this: Each turn, the active player rolls the dice and puts them on a board of goods. There's a set method to this; the player does not choose where the dice go. Instead, all dice of the highest number rolled go into the gold section at the top, and all dice of the lowest number rolled go into goats, at the bottom. The rest of the dice are likewise sorted by number rolled and placed in ascending order in each of the four goods districts. Each player, starting with the active one, picks a set and marks off a number of goods equal to the number of dice in that section.
This has a couple of effects that go against gamer (or math) reflexes.
Corinth is a roll-and-write game about ancient-world trading with people who look friendlier and much, much cleaner than their probable real-world counterparts. Yay washing!
Corinth's twist on the roll-and-write style of game is this: Each turn, the active player rolls the dice and puts them on a board of goods. There's a set method to this; the player does not choose where the dice go. Instead, all dice of the highest number rolled go into the gold section at the top, and all dice of the lowest number rolled go into goats, at the bottom. The rest of the dice are likewise sorted by number rolled and placed in ascending order in each of the four goods districts. Each player, starting with the active one, picks a set and marks off a number of goods equal to the number of dice in that section.
This has a couple of effects that go against gamer (or math) reflexes.
- Although goats get the lowest dice and gold the highest, goats are not inherently less valuable, because you can as easily have fewer goats available during the course of the game than gold. It's just a matter of how many dice end up in those sections each turn.
- It takes substantially fewer items to collect all the sets of goods in the higher districts, but it's easy to underestimate how few shots you'll get at them. To have any dice available in the highest district, all six numbers must be rolled on the nine dice (though up to three extra dice can be unlocked, which increases the odds a bit). This means that not only will it be fairly unusual to hit the highest district, there will rarely be more than two dice available, and if it's not your turn it's quite likely someone else will grab them first.
It creates, not a whole new road of thought, but more of an off-ramp on to a highway that leans a little bit away from strategy as we tend to think of it. You roll dice for the whole game, decide what to do with those dice, and the value of the dice never matter. It's not complicated—once you understand that aspect, the game becomes much clearer—but it requires something different from the player, and that's pretty cool.
As for the game itself, it plays in a pretty straightforward fashion. You get your goods, or spend your gold and goats on buildings, or move your steward around to get you bonuses. Each section has its own way to score; you also get bonus points if you're the first to fill all the goods slots in a district, and the game is otherwise balanced enough that someone who locks up multiple bonuses stands a very good chance of winning. In four-player games, it forces people to decide if they're all going to race for the easier districts or take a shot at picking up the more difficult ones and hope they finish their bonuses by the end of the game.
It's a clever little game with good artwork and a requirement to think, if not totally outside the box, then over the open flap.
Score: Seven out of nine fresh new rugs.
Dave Reviews: A Moderate Failure of Balance
Village Pillage
Welcome to rock-paper-scissors-CROSSBOW!
Village Pillage is an addition to the growing collection of games that is marketed as being for a wide array of possible player counts, but doesn't play equally well over all of them. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Village Pillage is a light, medieval-themed game running on "advanced" rock-paper-scissors mechanics. Everyone starts out with one each of the four categories of cards: Farmer, Wall, Raider, Merchant. Each class is identified by its color (green, blue, red, and yellow, respectively). You'll get more cards as the game progresses, but each connects to one of those four colors. Each card has different effects depending on what the opponent plays against it; most cards have some kind of effect against all four card types, but some (e.g. Raiders) don't. If the Raider is played against the Farmer or Merchant, for example, she steals four turnips (money) from the opponent, which is very powerful; however, against a Wall or another Raider, she gets nothing, which is the risk.
Each turn, players play two cards, one against each neighbor. Then they'll generally collect some turnips, based on the abilities of their cards. The goal is to buy three relics, which cost 8, 9, and 10 turnips (less in a smaller game). Some abilities let you put turnips in a personal bank so they can't be stolen, but even that maxes out at five, so the more turnips you have vulnerable, the more dangerous thieves are. And red cards act near the end of the action order, so if your green or blue cards brought in a bunch of turnips, they can be stolen the very same turn. This makes raiders a threat from the start, and gauging when your opponents will use them is a big part of succeeding in the game.
After each round, players reset their hands and have all their cards to choose from, with a few exceptions that keep a card out for one round. Players can add to their options, generally through Merchant-class cards, for minimal or sometimes no cost. In theory, this could function somewhat like a deck-builder, where you construct a turnip engine that gets you all kinds of cold, red cash, but in reality the game ends too quickly. That's fine; it's light, it's supposed to be short, you get it over with and it's all good.
The issue is when the game grows to larger player sizes. I understand that offering a six-player expansion is a great sales tactics, but it borks the game. The reason is that someone is going to get a lead, and the number of players impacts how things play out after that happens.
Welcome to rock-paper-scissors-CROSSBOW!
Village Pillage is an addition to the growing collection of games that is marketed as being for a wide array of possible player counts, but doesn't play equally well over all of them. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Village Pillage is a light, medieval-themed game running on "advanced" rock-paper-scissors mechanics. Everyone starts out with one each of the four categories of cards: Farmer, Wall, Raider, Merchant. Each class is identified by its color (green, blue, red, and yellow, respectively). You'll get more cards as the game progresses, but each connects to one of those four colors. Each card has different effects depending on what the opponent plays against it; most cards have some kind of effect against all four card types, but some (e.g. Raiders) don't. If the Raider is played against the Farmer or Merchant, for example, she steals four turnips (money) from the opponent, which is very powerful; however, against a Wall or another Raider, she gets nothing, which is the risk.
Each turn, players play two cards, one against each neighbor. Then they'll generally collect some turnips, based on the abilities of their cards. The goal is to buy three relics, which cost 8, 9, and 10 turnips (less in a smaller game). Some abilities let you put turnips in a personal bank so they can't be stolen, but even that maxes out at five, so the more turnips you have vulnerable, the more dangerous thieves are. And red cards act near the end of the action order, so if your green or blue cards brought in a bunch of turnips, they can be stolen the very same turn. This makes raiders a threat from the start, and gauging when your opponents will use them is a big part of succeeding in the game.
After each round, players reset their hands and have all their cards to choose from, with a few exceptions that keep a card out for one round. Players can add to their options, generally through Merchant-class cards, for minimal or sometimes no cost. In theory, this could function somewhat like a deck-builder, where you construct a turnip engine that gets you all kinds of cold, red cash, but in reality the game ends too quickly. That's fine; it's light, it's supposed to be short, you get it over with and it's all good.
The issue is when the game grows to larger player sizes. I understand that offering a six-player expansion is a great sales tactics, but it borks the game. The reason is that someone is going to get a lead, and the number of players impacts how things play out after that happens.
- With two or three players, everyone interacts with everyone else every round. If someone gets ahead, the other(s) can pick cards directly against that person with an eye towards reducing their lead.
- With four players, there's only one player each person doesn't impact. You might end up with an awkward situation where two people across from each other pop off and the two in the middle are stuck trying to stop them both while also catching up, which can suck. However, if one person gets a lead, two people can try to stop them, and they only have to watch one other player who might try to take advantage of that.
- With five and six players, if someone gets ahead, only two people can stop them, and there are multiple others who can safely build (or steal) their way to the top if the initial leader is thwarted.
In all cases, if the initial leader doesn't get stopped—and because the game is so short, there is a point where they can play pretty safely and have little chance of losing—they're going to run away with the win. But in larger games, unless the turnip levels stay fairly balanced (which is harder with more people), someone's going to end up in a situation where they need to stop the leader while not being able to impact the rest of the table enough to catch up themselves.
It's light, it's fun, just don't play it with more than four people unless you're a group that doesn't care much at all about who wins at games. (Is that a thing? I don't understand this thing.)
Score: Seven moldering turnips out of ten.
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