Dave Reviews: UberLand

MegaLand

I was going to title this with 'Uber' and then whatever the German is for land, but it's just "land". So, we're off to a grand start.

MegaLand is, at its core, a press-your-luck game with mechanics that will be familiar to deck builder fans, even though there's no deck to build. It's also very easy to learn (maybe too easy). You play the role of what is, effectively, a video game character, starting with four health and needing to collect treasure by exploring places with loads of terrible monsters. Each monster will do one, two, or three damage to your character; the game is very explicit about how many of each card, including the ones that don't hurt you, is in the deck. In other words, each round is designed for you to count cards and determine what the best play is based on the odds.

After each draw, you decide if you want to stay in or take your treasures and run. If you leave, you get what you've collected; if you stay and get KO'd, you only get one (unless you buy effects that let you keep or take more). Part of the challenge is not just collecting more treasure, but collecting the right treasure. If you want to buy cards that give you points (technically coins, but you don't buy anything with them) and other abilities, you need sets of different treasure types; if you want to buy more health, you need sets of the same treasure type. The challenge in buying more expensive cards is thus amplified, since it gets harder and harder to collect treasures you don't already have, a challenge mitigated by the fact you can store one treasure on each card you've bought along the way. As with the monster deck, game is explicit about how many of each treasure is in the treasure deck—it's printed on each card—but the deck is sizable and makes card counting very difficult.

The abilities are varied but easy to understand. Some of them also require you to strategize in a certain way or have a certain read on your opponents. For example, one card lets you draw an extra treasure from the deck if you're KO'd. If you buy a few of those, it can be more valuable to risk a KO, or even push on when a KO is guaranteed, if you don't have a usable set of cards and drawing more might let you buy what you need. Another gives you bonus points if an opponent is KO'd, which is great if your opponents go for a self-KO strategy or simply take too many risks, but is a bit of a waste if they play safely.

On the downside, there are cards which give you guaranteed points every night (end of round). They instantly put the game on a timer, and if one person gets one ahead of everyone else, the other players are immediately playing catch-up the rest of the way. They're not a guaranteed win, but really, the timer aspect is the part that damages the fun. Most of the cards score points anyway. Why is it necessary to let people get freebies? When somebody has a lead, there's a certain enjoyable tension in wondering if they'll get those last few points they need to win, or if you might have a chance to catch up. The nightly point cards take that away. And, because of the treasure system, if three players each gather four treasures in the first round, it's quite possible only one of them will have the right treasures to buy a guaranteed point card.

It's really unfortunate, because the only other real criticism is that there was room for this game to have a few more cards and a few more good choices for what to buy. Right now, the game plays so fast, sharp people can do the math and either pull their character or press their luck in a couple of seconds. There's potential here to give players something that will make them slow down and think a bit, at least sometimes, about what they want to buy. That's not a game-breaking problem, though; all it does is reduce replayability. The timer cards may not be game-breaking, per se, but they put a major damper on the experience.

It's still not bad, still worth trying. If you're a fan, awesome. If you end up feeling similarly to what I've described, play again without the automatic point cards, see if you like it any better.

Score: $3.25 out of $5.00.

Dave Reviews: So Much Fucking Colonialism

Pax Pamir

I've lodged the odd complaint here and there about games which treat colonized nations of yore, and the people especially, as pieces in a board game when they were effectively treated the same way in real life during those periods of time. Pax Pamir puts players in the role of Afghans during the nineteenth century, deciding whether join a coalition with the British, the Russians, or to put their own people first.

To which I say: LOOK! LOOK! IT'S NOT THAT FUCKING HARD!

Pax Pamir is a tableau-building game that works with a pretty small tableau (you only keep three from turn to turn without cards that let you hold on to more). There's a central market of cards, most of which are people who will be part of your tableau, or court, and provide various benefits. Many of them are allied with one of the three factions at work in the country. You start the game allied to the faction of your choice; however, odds are this will change during play, because as soon as you hire someone from a different faction, you essentially declare loyalty to that group and discard everyone from your current faction.

This sounds like a punishing effect to be carefully weighed, and it can be if you've started to rely heavily on certain faction-specific cards, but there are a couple of fairly common reasons to do it. One is if it looks like you've blown through a lot of cards for your faction and it looks like you're going to see different factions for the most part from this point on. Because not all the cards are used every game, this is somewhat unlikely, but an experienced player can get a sense of when they probably won't see many more cards of a given faction unless the deck got stacked hard in their favor.

The second, and more important one, is the dominance mechanic. Each faction has a couple dozen small towers that can hit the board, either standing to represent allied tribes or laying down to act as bridges between provinces. Transport and military might are the keys to power; therefore, if any faction has managed to get at least four more of their pieces on the board than both of the other factions, that faction is dominant and allied players receive VPs.

OK, so you chase the dominant faction, right? Not necessarily. If you've allied with the British, and the Afghans are pulling ahead, you might be able to score better if you switch sides. However, if no side is ahead by four, then scoring is based on personal power, so it may be better to see if you can keep the British just close enough so that the Afghan-allied players can't get their dominance points. It's an intriguing blend of not just risk vs. reward, but which risk you need to take vs. which type of reward you're chasing.

The one thing that breaks the theme a bit is that when one faction is dominant, all the pieces come off the board and players effectively start rebuilding with their current courts and allegiances. This is clearly necessary for game design—without it, early dominance would just turn into a snowball with everyone racing to join the winning side—but it's a little weird given the game's context. The rulebook says they come off because the region settles into an uneasy peace. I mean... whatever explanation you want to give, I guess. It feels like whichever side is dominant would start painting the other towers their color.

But that doesn't particularly matter for the gameplay itself. This is a game that's quite deep without being confusing (though you might forget some rules at first, like the connection between your tribes and your cards—if you lose all of one, you throw out all of the other). Setups are almost always fragile, but breaking them takes work on the part of your opponents, so you can usually defend yourself if you don't have greater priorities. And knowing what to prioritize takes experience, so your first game is probably going to feel ugly, even if everyone's new and you win. There's a good chance that, after one game, you'll feel a little 'meh' about it, or like you're missing something. But if you're even a little intrigued by how it plays, it's worth having another go, because there's a lot of play here.

One last soapbox moment: Though I've griped about games where you play as a colonizing force, it's possible there's some context in this game that is also problematic or could have been handled better. Some people might not like the fact this game is about European powers trying to meddle with a yet another nation, regardless of the role the player takes. But I think it's important to acknowledge the difference.

We tend to reward media that portrays people who defend their homes because there's something relatable at a very core level in that situation. We also often elevate conquering heroes, but nearly always in the context that they've fought for their nations, or gods, or some other higher purpose. A game where players act as the colonizers feels weird because, although colonization was done in the name of God and country, we now understand it to have been thoroughly fucked up. We understand that there was never any glory in it, nothing worth exemplifying. Playing as the people of the nation in question, even in a scenario where it's often wisest to work with the foreigners, at least puts you in the position of someone trying to make the best of a fucked-up situation in their home country.

I'm sure I'm in a minority, possibly a small minority, of gamers who legitimately enjoy a game more on that basis. But I am, and I get to pass out the scores, so bonus points to this one.

Score: Twenty-one out of twenty-four dominance towers (they're not goddamned cylinders, they're square).

Dave Reviews: Smol Bird Lyfe

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.

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

• 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.

Dave Reviews: Suburban Hell

Welcome to Your Perfect Home

If there's a nightmare scenario in life, it's living in a community where every house is exactly the same, all of you have to follow rules about keeping your home "clean" and your lawn "tidy", and you swear that every one of your neighbors have a not-insignificant amount of Stepford blood in them.

Selling those houses, though... that's a win.

Welcome to Your Perfect Home puts you in the role of a real estate developer with three long blocks of houses to fill—one of ten houses, one of eleven, and one of twelve. A fat stack of cards is split into three piles, each with an action on one side and a number on the other (with a small icon of the action on the flip side of the card in one corner). Each round, one card is flipped action side up, so each pile has a number and an action visible. Players choose one of these combos, put the number on one of the houses, and choose whether or not to use the action.

The goal is to fill all the blocks with numbers going in ascending order, while also pulling in enough points through putting pools in yards, investing in neighborhoods of certain sizes, and meeting other various goals to outscore everyone else. The game ends when somebody has a number on every house, or when someone marks off three stop signs (three instances of not being able to develop a house on a turn with any of the available numbers). It's a roll-and-write game, although with cards rather than dice. Apart from fences, which you use to create smaller neighborhoods within each block, you mark off a spot for each action you take, which (potentially) earns you more points by the end of the game.

The first time I played this, I put together a flawless game. I mathed out how many numbers I would have available to fill in the number of spaces that would be left if I put number X on house Y, and did not waste a single turn. The game ended when all my houses were full, and all three of my opponents had one empty. Given that real estate bonuses for the blocks you have completed only count if all the houses on the block are full, that's a nice edge to have.

I lost. Not by a couple of points, but by twelve (112-100). And that's why I think this is a pretty good game.

Here's the reason: when I saw I played a flawless game, it means I did not make any errors in figuring out what numbers to place where, and when. I strategized towards making sure all my houses were tagged, which is the end goal, and it worked perfectly. Yet I obviously did not play a perfect game, because I got noticeably beaten.

The nature of the card draw means you're always playing the odds. There are enough cards in each deck that you can't really card count effectively (if you can, you will be godly at this and you don't need any strategy tips). But you have to take into account how many points you're likely to score with each move. If you put a palm tree up in six houses across all three blocks, you'll get twelve points. But if you fill them up on one block, the same number of palm trees will earn you more in sum because of the finishing bonus. You'll probably have reason to take real estate bonuses before you've started forming your blocks, so do you choose a number and let that guide how you build? Will you build towards bonuses? Can you see what bonuses your opponents are going for, and can you beat them to the punch?

There's probably some perfect strategy to the game that's most likely to win as long as you get the cards you need. That last part is the key, though. Unless that strategy is the best under any circumstances, and you'll only lose if you're desperately unlucky—and, while unlikely, this is possible—you'll need to know how to adjust. That's where you get gameplay rather than rote memorization, and that's what makes a game good.

Score: Twenty-eight filled houses out of thirty-three (good profits).