Category: Tabletop Tuesday

I have been trying the deckbuilding game Ascension on Steam. Good sale, and it includes a bunch of expansions, so it seemed like a very inexpensive way to try the game. I have not tried all the expansions to see what design space the game has explored, but the first couple sets seem pretty shallow.

The natural comparison is between Ascension and Dominion. Ascension is a much more tactical game, based on its use of an offer row of cards rather than a fixed set of kingdom cards. In Dominion, 10 stacks of kingdom cards are available for purchase each game, in addition to six stacks of standard cards. In Ascension, 6 cards from the the entire deck are available for purchase each turn, in addition to three stacks of standard cards. In Ascension, potentially any card in the game could appear any turn, but you never know in advance which cards will be available to purchase on your turn.

This makes Ascension more tactical, Dominion more strategic. in Dominion, you should sketch a plan for the game before the first turn. In Ascension, you have no idea what options will exist three turns from now. In a four-player game, your options each round are effectively random; BoardGameGeek recommends it is a two-player game.

Ascension has fewer attacks than Dominion. The game has less interaction between players. Defeating some monsters affects opponents, but most interaction is indirect, through buying or banishing cards from the center row when you expect other players to want them.

Ascension’s dual currencies are a great response to Dominion’s victory points. In Dominion, victory point cards do nothing in the early game and are the only things that matter in the endgame. During the game, they are completely uninteresting, just dead cards. That is a catchup mechanic, as a player with lots of victory points has a deck clogged with dead cards, but that is not exactly exciting. Dominion more or less immediately set out to alleviate that with new cards: victory point cards that do other things or interact with other cards, ways to earn points without cards, and ways to remove cards from your deck but keep their points. Ascension addresses that problem from the beginning because the main use of its second currency is to buy honor points by defeating monsters. Honor points are tracked by tokens, not cards. This gives you the same need to balance cash- and point-generating cards across the game, but you are not penalized for early honor nor is the late game slowed under the weight of dead cards.

Ascension is much easier in terms of setup. Dominion starts with picking, laying out, and learning a set of cards. Lots of reading, lots of time. Ascension flips over six cards and goes. In the physical game, shuffling the single huge stack of cards must be troublesome, more so if you want to mix expansions. That is a huge stack of cards, and you are going to get unmixed lumps.

The computer version is nice in that it alleviates that problem and takes care of the bookkeeping. The Steam version is an unambitious port from mobile, not even bothering to eliminate “swipe” from text. Use of activated construct abilities is clunky, because those cards are held mostly off-screen. It takes four clicks to view, activate, and dismiss the construct. In person, you just say you are drawing a card, maybe tap the construct to show that it is used. But the computer always remembers passive abilities like construct income. Similarly, the game will give you a warning if you try to finish a turn without taking all possible options, which keeps you from forgetting to kill cultists. It also keeps giving you that warning every time you decide not to buy a low-value card or use an ability that would require banishing one of your cards.

It is not a bad game. It is quicker and easier than Dominion, and it works better with two players whereas Dominion works better with four. Maybe the later expansions shore up its weak points without taking away the simplicitly that makes it attractive to players who do not want to strategize the whole game before it starts.

: Zubon

New thing this year: more boardgames, particularly with my wife. After accumulating many games that I rarely get on the table because they require more people than I regularly have for local gaming, I have been paying attention to what I can play with two players.

This must be measured, because we must have metrics! And achievements! The 10×10 challenge is a straightforward idea: play 10 games 10 times each. We are going to do that together over the course of the year, so 2x10x10.

So far, we are at 2×10 (Lords of Waterdeep, Voyages of Marco Polo) + 1×5 (Hardback). That’s not bad for late February. Committing to spend time together is good.

: Zubon

Spirits of the Forest is the next game from ThunderGryph Games. As usual, it is being launched on Kickstarter, and I am promoing them as a Founder’s Club member. I just received their last game to ship, Tao Long, although I have not had a chance to get it on the table yet.

“Learn in five minutes” seems like a good tagline. This weekend, I played Gaia Project, which is good fun but commitment to learn, even already knowing Terra Mystica.

Something I like about reputable tabletop game projects on Kickstarter is that they almost always have a downloadable PDF of the rules. I have absolutely gotten burned by paying full price for games without knowing whether I would like them, but I feel like that is my own fault in a world where I can download the rules and often a print and play version to try it out. If the rules are not linked with the game, they will be available on BoardGameGeek. Spirits of the Forest has the bonus that it (and all the other ThunderGryph games) is on Tabletopia, so I may try it out soon. I may try a lot of things on Tabletopia now that I am reminded of its existence.

: Zubon

Valletta is a deckbuilding game with elements of city-building, resource management, and worker placement. While the feel is different, the design space is somewhere between Dominion and Deus. My friends approvingly described it as doing nothing new but doing it well. I think Blizzard’s empire is founded on that principle.

In Valletta, you are helping to build the capital city of Malta. You accumulate resources to build buildings, which provide you new cards to play. New cards give you more resources, manipulate resources, or award victory points. Your goal is to combine buildings that synergize, build as well and quickly as possible, then end with the most victory points.

There are several high quality design decisions in this game.

1. Valletta has less complexity than it seems at first because of commonalities between buildings. The buildings are each in categories, so once you understand the categories, there is less mental weight to carry.
2. Valletta has a good balance of rewarding specialization and rewarding diversity. Mass resource accumulation is a good approach, but resource buildings produce the fewest victory points directly, and each resource synergizes only with itself (and you generally need all four). You might get better synergy from branching into resource manipulation or direct victory points, which may require different resources.
3. When the endgame is triggered, players reshuffle their decks and discard piles, then play through the whole thing once. That is a great mechanic for preventing the common situation where you got something cool but never get to use it because the game ends. You will always get to use every card at least once.
4. Valletta balances large and small decks by the same means. You can eliminate cards from your deck, producing efficient turns and letting you go through your deck more times. And then the endgame starts and you get fewer turns because you have fewer cards. The big, inefficient decks get to trundle on for extra turns at the end. Do you want more turns or better turns?
5. Gameplay is quick. Each turn is playing three cards, and each card is simple. The synergy is not more complex than counting.

This is not the best game that I have played recently, but it seems solid and consistent. A feature that different people will call a “pro” or “con” is that there is a substantial “turn zero”: all the cards are laid out at once, and you can spend a while staring at them all to understand your options this game. You might have 30 options, so being able to see a good strategy across them (and adapt when someone else sees the same one) is a skill to develop. It is the sort of thing I did not much like about Agricola, but it seems less overwhelmingly necessary here. You can play pretty well just fumbling through, so long as you have some strategy.

: Zubon

The game doubles as a promo for Maltese tourism, including an ad in the rulebook.

For nerds interested in splurging or fantasizing: BoardGamesTables.com is selling off the demo models they used at conventions this year, 10-20% off the list price. I am not in a place where I can justify a few thousand dollars for a gaming table, but someday, I dream, someday.

: Zubon

I played Terra Mystica for the first time this weekend. It was fun, a very dense game. It made me think of Settlers of Catan crossed with Seven Wonders, except that there is no uncontrolled randomness: no dice, no hidden cards, just player choices. The headlining feature is that it has 14 asymmetrical factions. Having read a bit online, most people agree that the factions are imbalanced. They just disagree on which factions are weak or strong.

There are some consistencies. Many people argue the factions are balanced enough, so it does not matter below competitive play (and there are balancing methods there, since you can start with more or fewer victory points). Most ratings have some overall similarities: Darklings and Mermaids are strong, Giants and Fakirs are weak. Then you start seeing radical differences in assessments, some of which are backed by data, and some of the data seems conflicting (which should diminish at larger sample sizes). Grabbing the first few examples I found on Google: are Cultists “worse than terrible” or the winningest faction? Or darklings were mid-tier those statistics but #1 in this larger pool of statistics. I see Alchemists ranked both in the top 4 and the bottom 4. Or this thread is a good example of divergent opinions being professed with or without support.

The answer I favor after a lot of reading is “it depends,” which has more nuance than you might think. Like Smash Up, some factions do better or worse with more or fewer opponents. Some do better or worse against particular other factions or combinations of factions. Some do better or worse on particular maps, or with particular bonuses in the game. Some are more straightforward while others require unusual strategies or expert play. Some factions will be better than others given your usual play environment. This is especially true if your usual play environment includes people who consistently pick the same faction or strategy and are particularly good/bad. I am convinced that most cries of imbalance in games can be traced back to who is the best player in your gaming group and their play preferences. That differs, so different players see radically different results on whether a game favors or penalizes combat, quick expansion, or a particular branch of the tech tree.

Which is not to say that there cannot be imbalances. Maybe one degenerate approach is particularly strong, or it is easier to excel with a certain strategy, or a configuration that favors X is more common. One of the fun rankings is those links is about how resilient the faction is: some are situationally powerful but often weak, while another might be a consistent B across most options. Of course, given that Terra Mystica is a game with all information available at the start, reading the board and knowing which faction to pick (and factoring in others’ picks) is an expert-level skill. See also players who refuse to think about team composition in League of Legends or switching to counters in Overwatch.

This can also poison data-driven rankings. The strongest faction could easily come out ranked mid-tier because everyone knows it is the strongest faction, so the weaker players flock to it as a handicap, and they still lose. Meanwhile, expert players both know their situational strategies and recognize those situations, so some of the weaker factions can rack up wins punching above their weight. When someone makes a weak pick, you rarely know if they are too bad to know better or too good for you to see their reasoning.

: Zubon

Battle Sheep is an abstract game of territorial control themed around sheep. The visuals and theme are cute and light. The play is surprisingly cutthroat.

The entirety of the rules fit on an index card, so this is an elegant game getting a lot of distance out of very simple mechanics. A full game with four players takes about ten minutes, so your investment is low. It is simple enough to teach anyone but has surprising strength for serious gamers.

The whole game is assembling a pasture (so it is not identical every game), starting with a stack of sheep on the edge, and dividing a stack each turn. When you move sheep, they carry on in that direction until they hit something (an edge or another sheep). Your goal is to occupy the most space in the pasture, preferably herded together. That’s it. That’s the whole game.

How does this give rise to interesting decisions? The main one is how many sheep to take or leave each time you split. You want to box in your opponents while avoiding being boxed in yourself. You can project a lot of power all at once, but that also means most of your sheep are headed right next to an opponent who could be countering you. Project too little power, and opposing sheep will just walk around you.

The game is quick, simple, competitive, cute, and strategic. The components are high quality. I have never heard anyone describe this as a “must play,” but I stumbled on it and found that it beat my expectations. The next game up that night was the much more highly rated Istanbul, and I found myself thinking, “but is all this added complexity worth it?” Battle Sheep does a lot with very little.

: Zubon

Munchkin Shakespeare is Munchkin with lots of Shakespeare references. If you like either or both of those two things, this is for you.

When I think of Steve Jackson Games, I think of Ogre, GURPS, and Illuminati. I think of hardcore gamer games with niche appeal. And then they published Munchkin, which apparently pays for everything else they do. If you are not familiar with Munchkin: it is a casual, humorous card game, distilling fantasy RPGs down to “kick open the door, kill the monster, loot the room, stab your friends in the back.” It is light, but it is entertaining. There are now several dozen versions, some of which have more than a dozen expansions. They cross all genres and frequently cross over with other games. This is SJGames’s equivalent of Monopoly (except that Monopoly is kind of horrible).

Munchkin Shakespeare had a successful Kickstarter, so much so that they made a deluxe edition. The deluxe Munchkin games come with decorate bits that add fluff but no crunch, primarily a board. People seem willing to pay more for bigger boxes and a board than for decks of cards you could store in a sandwich baggie. The board is genuinely useful for tracking levels. (If you ever want a safe Kickstarter campaign, Steve Jackson Games is good for that. Unlike folks making their first game, they have been doing this for almost 40 years. They deliver what they say they will, on time, even stretch goals extend the project. These are professionals.)

Our friends liked Munchkin Shakespeare over the (few) other sets they have seen. It has the usual mechanics, refined and clarified over the course of a decade. The humor is good, with lots of bonuses for literature majors. It is entirely appropriate to pause the game for a soliloquy. You might fight Two Bees, or the more dangerous Not Two Bees. You might wield the Slings and Arrows of outrageous fortune. And those are just the first Hamlet jokes that come to mind. Many of the jokes are obvious or explained, others are left as Genius Bonuses.

It’s fun.

: Zubon

What I have often found dissatisfying about the tabletop games Pandemic and Agricola is that the endgame starts now. If you do not start with the end in mind, you will do badly.

A usual plan in games as in stories is to have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. In games, that often means a bit of feeling out the game and exploring the space, seeing how the variability came out in this game, with some balance between rewarding exploration and early specialization. I feel like Pandemic and Agricola are games that require almost immediate pursuit of long range plans to be effective, otherwise you get behind necessary curves and realize you needed to be planning ahead several turns ago, in a game with not that many turns per player. Commenters: care to recommend other games that do this well or badly?

In a competitive game, accelerating the endgame can be a strong strategy, although it can be taken to absurdity. Most games that allow an early rush to the finish have an easy counter to it, so there is the standard rock-paper-scissors of early rush, balanced defense, and immediately building for the late game. Is calling for “no rush” games still a thing, for people who want paper to be the only option? I remember Blizzard discussing that in Starcraft balance, explicitly considering an early rush a legitimate and risky strategy, so no they were not nerfing scissors. (Pandemic is cooperative and Agricola has a fixed length, so perhaps this paragraph is just digression before the topic comes up in comments.)

I tend to be a strong strategy gamer, and there are certainly times that I like being reward for immediately being goal-oriented, but I do like a bit of wiggle room for exploration and unfocused fun, and it feels like a nasty surprise on the other players who were not starting their endgame plan on turn two. It feels a lot like games that give you lots of options, but on the highest difficulties only one or two of them are really viable. In a competitive game like Agricola, you can just play with people who are also content with somewhat lower scores and we all play in that league. In a cooperative game like Pandemic, we all lose if someone is not on the ball, so it leans towards the degenerate problem of one player effectively making the decisions for everyone.

: Zubon

I played Cultists of Cthulhu, which is in the vein of Betrayal at House on the Hill or Arkham Horror. If you clicked the link, you know I was not a fan of Betrayal, but I kind of wanted to be (I am told the second edition is better). I was hoping that Cultists would be a better version of Betrayal. I did not enjoy it much.

Like Arkham Horror, Cultists is a much longer game than Betrayal, about two hours. Like Betrayal, it has multiple scenarios, although far fewer and with the traitor role known (to the traitor) in advance. There is more strategy and gameplay than Betrayal’s interactive story, but there can also be a lot of randomness. Like the first edition of Betrayal, the first edition of Cultists has unclear rules with ambiguities and misprintings. It does not have a lot of rules, but enough to make your first game(s?) clunky rather than elegant.

We just did not have a lot of fun, which is about as big and simple an indict as I can give a game. The game felt cumbersome, slow, and little under our control, even for a first playthrough. In retrospect, some of that was a rules misunderstanding. The rules as written are susceptible to that and could use a bit more editing. With only five scenarios in the game, they could have playtested a bit more to check for obvious edge cases.

What were our big negatives?

• There were apparently no monsters in our scenario, and it was unclear what was supposed to happen with the one tentacle that spawned; we walked around it without it ever touching anyone.
• The stars mechanic became completely irrelevant after the cultist was revealed.
• The cultist found her experience completely unsatisfying because her reveal just gave her a cool gun. Which blew up on the first roll, slightly damaging her and not damaging any of the heroes.
• Two unlikely dice rolls swung the game.
• One of our players was colorblind. The cards use red, green, and blue icons to indicate what is going on. Ouch. Even for those of us not colorblind, the shades of blue and green could be mistaken for each other in low lighting.
• Our scenario had a misprint. Instead of the Elder Sign, it showed “G” (“good”). Small thing, but again, there are only five scenario cards to proofread. There were also ambiguities in the scenario, as the rules say a scenario ability can only be used (successfully) once, but ours required using it three times. So is it only that one that could be used three times?
• Characters can die and get stuck watching. Did I mention that a game can run two hours? The cultist’s goal is to kill the academics, so we should expect at least one academic to be sitting out at least a third of the game, with more players having nothing to do as the game progresses.

We liked the atmospherics, the variety of characters to choose from, the several options you had each turn, and the feeling that you had some control over your destiny. We had a good time accusing each other of being cultists. We were amused when thematic elements came together, like the fellow who drew a shotgun and trenchcoat.

Maybe it would play better on a second playthrough. But I played with random people at a board game party, so unless I take to playing this with a regular group, it is usually going to be someone’s first time on a multi-hour game. I cannot say that I can recommend the game at this point. I welcome others’ experiences in the comments.

: Pietro