shannon_a | Entries tagged with game review

Race for the Galaxy is perhaps the game that I've played the most without ever reviewing it. So, despite the fact that this post is largely carrying coals to Newcastle, since everyone serious about German games has undoubtedly played Race for the Galaxy sometime in the last year+, I'm going to write about it.

I think of Race for the Galaxy as the middle game in the San Juan trilogy. These are role-selection card games where you build structures (buildings, developments, and/or planets, depending on the game) by paying for them with other cards from your hand. San Juan was the innovative originator of the genre while Glory to Rome was its much more complex second member.

Despite being the third release I call Race for the Galaxy the middle member because of its middle complexity. I also think that it's found the sweet spot, as San Juan can be a little simple and Glory to Rome a little complex.

I like the game system that you see in all of these games. They organically force tough decisions constantly because you have to throw out many cards that you might want to play in order to pay for other buildings. That also creates an interesting situation where you don't see many cards in many games, making the game feel like it has a lot more variability. Up to at least my 8th or 9th game of Race for the Galaxy I was still seeing cards that I'd never seen before.

Race for the Galaxy is particularly interesting because it's perhaps the shortest of these three games. The comparison to San Juan is arguable, but it's definitely speedier than the average game of Glory to Rome. Aaron Lawn thus talks about it as being a leading member of a brand new short but deep style of gaming. Having now played what he considers the second member of that style, Dominion, I'd tend to agree that these games are something different--a real step up from the fillers of yesteryear.

The other thing that really appeals to me about Race for the Galaxy is its theming. It's full of beautiful, evocative artwork. I goggled over it quite a bit on my first game, and still enjoy it when I play.

If I were rating Race for the Galaxy at RPGnet I'd give it top grades for Style and Substance. If I were rating it at BGG, I'd give it a "10".

We played Race for the Galaxy at my new-game/review group this Thursday, with the occasion being the release of its first supplement, The Gathering Storm.

The supplement was shamefully delayed. It took a year to produce this, despite the fact that it was planned when the original game was released, about a year ago. It was almost to the point where they would have killed Race for the Galaxy as a game system because of new games like Dominion passing it up in the game-mind-gestalt if it weren't put out, y'know, yesterday. I don't know if the author or Rio Grande was to blame, but it wasn't smart. In any case, it's finally out, and maybe we'll see the next supplement in 2010, by which time truly no one will care.

Despite my beef about the production schedule, The Gathering Storm is quite a good supplement. Perhaps not the best expansion ever, but it does some nice things.

The best thing is the inclusion of cards for a fifth player. With its simultaneous play, there isn't any reason that Race can't support at least five; I'm glad it now can.

The second best thing is the inclusion of new Victory Point tiles which give points to players who reach certain conditions first (such as the first player to discard cards or the first player to get out one of each color of production planet) or to players who have the most of something at the end of the game (such as the most military power or the most developments). It adds some badly needed interactivity to the game, and also gives you some new goals you can move toward.

There's also some new cards, and they're a nice addition, because they add yet more variability and color to the game.

Generally, a must-buy for any one who owns Race for the Galaxy, a suggestion I make without reservation.

I've now played Agricola three times, and since I don't currently plan to spend the time to write up a full review at RPGnet, I thought I'd put together a mini-review here.

In essence, Agricola is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink game that follows in the footsteps of the worker-placement/resource-management game that's become so popular in recent years with games like Caylus, Pillars of the Earth, Cuba, Stone Age, and several more.

Like the original role-selection/resource-management game, Puerto Rico, Agricola makes all choices exclusive: each work place is only available to one player. However, like the later worker-placement games, it gives players multiple chances to place workers, and thus there are a lot more options, many of which largely duplication functionality. Even more notably, the number of options gets bigger as the game goes on.

I call Agricola a kitchen sink game, because it goes far beyond its worker-placement roots. You'll have somewhere in excess of 25 work placement choices by the end of the game. Besides that, you have a hand of 14 cards which you can choose to play (using resources and/or worker-placement choices) to give you additional choices. You also have a personal game board filled with houses (with limit your worker numbers), fields (which allow you to get involved in a grain- and vegetable-creation engine), and barns and fenced areas (which allow you get involved in a livestock-creation engine).

There's a lot you can do, and ultimately all of it's somewhat needed for victory, since you win by having the most workers, the least unused space on your board, and the best combination of all the things you can grow on your farm.

I find the combination very intriguing. There are multiple paths to victory, with grain and livestock engines probably being the two most obvious, and those 14 cards you're dealt make each game quite different, since they'll help to guide your strategy.

The only thing I don't like about Agricola is the way that it's being distributed, with multiple premium items that you may or may not be able to get ahold of. Here in the US, you may or may not have received a copy of the game with nice wooden animals (rather than wooden cubes) for the livestock* and you may or may not have received the special "Z" deck of cards. Beyond that, there are at least one or two other premium decks of cards already available and there's special postcard which gives rules for seasonal play.

I don't think that the collectible mentality has any place in regular board games, and this sort of premium giveaway is even worse, because it quickly becomes almost impossible to get older giveaways. That's not a way to respect your players, especially ones who come in later.

Nonetheless, it's a great game. At RPGnet, I've give it a 5/5 and on BGG I'd be stuck between a 9 and a 10.

* I've now played the game with both the "animeeples" and the cubes, and in the game that we played with the cubes, people regularly reached for the animal cubes when they meant to grab regular resources like grain, reeds, etc. Thus, if you didn't get the premium animeeple giveaway, you've got a game that's more difficult to play, which is even less nice to customers than the concept of premium giveaways on its own.

Thursday we played two games of FFG's new release Tribune. It's a worker placement game set in Ancient Rome where you're trying to collect victory points from a variable menu of possibilities, and get there faster than your opponents.

The Good: I like worker placement games, as they tend to offer a lot of variety of tactics, and this one is no exception. However rather than the bone-standard choice of selecting different actions you instead select a variety of means to purchase cards: through purchases, through blind flips, through auctions, and through purchases from sets. There's then a second level of play where you use those cards to form sets and take over various factions, which give you components you need to declare victory.

The worker-placement system is, as usual, threaded, which means that things go quickly. I'm always a tiny bit leery when games go 5 players and up, but this one played well without notable downtime except in infrequent cases.

It was over fast, it was fun, and I know we're not the only group to play a second game immediately after the first.

The Bad: I have some minor complaints about the iconography of the board (which was good, not great) and the fiddliness of constantly handing things back and forth.

However my biggest complaint is in the victory conditions. The game could end quickly, often by surprise, which is never a very good thing in my viewpoint. It also felt like it was too early: there were just 3 turns in the first game (which means that we got 12 worker placements each) and 4 turns in the second game (which means we got 16).

I might have been OK with this, because it is a fast game, but the suddenness of things made it seem overly abrupt. Mike B. suddenly announced he'd won in the first game, catching us all by surprise (though he correctly noted that he mentioned every time he'd earned a victory condition, we just weren't payng attention). In the second game we counted our scores each round, to try and keep things in better balance, but given that I jumped from 1 victory condition to 4 victory conditions on the fourth turn (winning) that didn't help a lot.

Overall, I would have preferred using this fun system in a slightly deeper game--and that's rare for me to say that I prefer a long game to a short one. However, measuring what they decided to do rather than what I wanted, I will say it's quite a nice release. On the RPGnet scale I'd give it a 4 (out of 5) for Style, losing points only for the fact that some things aren't iconified which should be, and 4 (out of 5) for Substance, losing points due to the abruptness of the game's ending.

Which makes it a good game. I'd definitely keep a copy if I had it, and I'd be tempted to buy it if I didn't have mountains of games that are already at least this good.

I've fallen off my Wallace-a-Thon in the last month, but when a shiny new copy of Tinners' Trail showed up in my mailbox on Tuesday, I was happy to dive right back in.

I was at first leery of Tinners' Trail because it's the first of Martin Wallace's new TreeFrog games, which are supposed to be lighter and simpler. Generally I've found that his super-light games like La Strada and Toledo are OK, but not as enthralling as his deeper stuff. I was afraid this would be more of the same.

I'm happy to be proven wrong. My interest in Tinners' Trail first perked up when I head the setting: mining in Cornwall. I always really appreciate the authenticity of Wallace's deeper games, and this one looked like it would fit in right next to Brass.

Beyond that, I've now played the game twice, and I'm happy to see that it's got the serious gameplay of one of his heavier games, and still comes out at 60-90 minutes. There's not as much depth, but it's a compromise that I think falls on the right side of things.

Overall it's a pretty pure economic game. You build mines, you develop them, and you mine. The object is to manage your money and your turns more effectively than the other players. Wallace is pretty serious about his economic simulations, as witnessed in games like Age of Steam and Brass, and this hits that straight on. It doesn't have some of the other Wallace specialties, such as alternate victory conditions, nor does it feature any warfare (although warfare among the mines of Cornwall certainly sounds like a fun game), though one presumes that this is all part of the fact that it's intended to be a more accessible game.

I need to write a review of this one, as Mr. Wallace was kind enough to send it to me. I think it's going to rate a "4" out of "5" at RPGnet: well above average (and exceeding my hopes for the TreeFrog line).

Edit: The benefit of the TreeFrog line is that Wallace is now planning to put out 3+ games a year, rather than one. The next is called After the Flood and it's due in just a month. It looks terrific:
http://www.warfroggames.com/After%20the%20Flood.html