To a place where my cards don't suck...

Penny Arcade: Gamers vs. Evil is a deck-building game with only minor surprises. As usual for the genre, you start with a fixed deck. Every round you draw six cards  and, when it’s your turn you play as many of them as you like, usually all of them – a key difference to the one deck-builder that everyone knows and use them to buy new cards. Played cards, new cards and the cards remaining on your hand, if any, go to the discard pile. Then you draw fresh cards and wait for your next turn.

Your starting deck consists only of the two basic currency cards – Quarters, giving you one token each and Cardboard Tubes, doing the same with power. (The cardboard tubes make perfect sense if you’re familiar with the Penny Arcade comic. If you’re not, you’ll just have to trust me on that.) There are indeed two different currencies in the game which you use to purchase different cards: tokens buy you green Gamer Cards, with power you conquer red Evil Cards – the distinction doesn’t make a difference for the game, both kinds of card are added to your deck. The evil cards, in addition to their function when played, also count victory points in the end, but that’s the only difference. Your starting mix of Quarters and Cardboard Tubes depends on the character you play: Penny Arcade, Gamers vs. Evil  lets you have an avatar in the game.

Your character also give you a special ability that, unfortunately, makes some characters much easier to play than others. Tycho and Gabe, for instance, let you have +1 Power or +1 Token every turn – that’s a very powerful ability, and one that it’s easy to build a strategy around: concentrate on the type of card you have the bonus for. Other characters start with special cards in their deck that are more powerful than a simple +1, but also rely more on luck to have them together with other cards that make sense. Hardest to play and most easily brought down by the bad luck of the draw are Mr. Period and Kreazie. Both characters’ abilities are tuned for mixing gamer and evil cards. But as gamer cards mostly give you tokens again and evil cards give you more power, this approach often leads to a split hand – having some gamer and some evil cards – that makes it hard to buy the more expensive cards.

Epic Battle

The cards you add to your deck are, of course, at the heart of the game. Many cards simply add to your tokens and/or power when played.  Some have a straight-forward constant bonus, others change in value depending on other factors. The Pickle-Recognition Engine, for example, is worth +5 Tokens if the top card of your deck is green and only +1 otherwise. It pays you when it recognizes a pickle. Brilliant machine, I want one in my kitchen. Magic: The Gathering players all over the world are now rubbing their hands with glee, thinking something like “so lets make sure there is a green card on top”. All you guys can exit planning mode again, the only way to ensure that the top card is green is to only have green cards in your deck, there are very few chances for deck-manipulation. Even drawing additional cards, a staple ability in Dominion, is rare here. Admittedly, it’s also vastly more powerful because you can play all your cards. The only fairly common way to modify your deck is deleting cards, meaning you remove them from your deck never to be seen again. There is also a bunch of cards labelled as PvP Attacks (PvP means Player vs. Player and is commonly used in computer games) that do bad things to your opponents. Most attacks either force their victims to discard a card or to take a PAX Pox, a completely useless card worth -1 point. To protect yourself from such perils you can use PvP Defense cards that block an attack.  I enjoy the mental image of an army of Laser Squids and Giant Snakes, backed up by a cauldron of Evil Gumbo, nuking it out with my bodyguards: Baby Ninjas and Robot Cowboy Angels.

Those names are, by the way, the real deal. I couldn’t make those up. Penny Arcade readers will find them hilarious, but when playing with non-believers your mileage may vary. I’m sure everyone loves a Werewolf with a Top Hat, how could you not? The same goes for the Fairy Candymancer. Other cards are fun for fans only – who else would know the Witchalok? – or at least for people who share the comic’s surreal sense of humor. The Pickle-Recognition Engine. And then there’s the cards that may drive some people away by insulting their delicate sensibilities – not anyone I’d play with, fortunately, but it might happen. I’m looking at you, Scrotuum, the testicle-shaped alien, demon … whatever that thing is, just get it away from me! The cards are much more enjoyable for insiders, for sure, but they are all gorgeously illustrated in the comic’s typical style, something we certainly can agree is a good thing. Except Scrotuum.

Get Ready Player One

The last detail that sets Penny Arcade: Gamers vs. Evil apart from other deck-building games are the boss fights. Penny Arcade is still primarily concerned with computer games, and virtually every good computer game has boss fights. (Conversely, every computer game can be improved by adding boss fights: a boring football simulation, for instance, would immediately become awesome if you had to defeat the giant demonic cyborg goal keeper before you can score. But I digress.) Gamers vs. Evil has bosses to fight, and like every self-respecting boss they drop loot. Each side has one boss in every game: the Cardboard Tube Samurai or Jolly old Saint Nick for gamers, Satan or the even more evil Dark Tycho for evil. To attack a boss you need eight of the respective currency – the most expensive normal cards cost six – and win a boss loot that is added to your deck like every other card. After four loot cards are taken, the boss levels up and it now costs 10 to defeat him, after four more loot cards he levels up a second time. The level three boss needs 13 power or tokens to defeat, but besting him ends the game. Boss loot is, to say the least, powerful, often to the point that drawing a boss loot card to your hand will make it easy to buy another loot card. Especially the gamer loot cards are often guilty of this because they can produce a critical strike based on a die roll, doing something ludicrous like doubling all tokens and power you played this round. Being the first player to buy boss loot is a good first step to victory.

There is a lot of randomness in Penny Arcade: Gamers vs. Evil. Compared to other deck-building games, you’re much more dependent on luck, starting with your character card, going through the luck of your hand draw – okay, that’s in other games as well – and ending in the random effects of many cards based on die roll or the colour of a card draw. You also make less and easier decisions than you might be used to. The main decision is which cards to buy, no one will take that from you, but many turns you don’t have to decide which cards to play at all, you just put them all down and proclaim “With my army of testicles, I shall attack Satan and take his loot!” That’s an actual quote. I’m not saying there is no strategy at all in what you do with your cards, but it’s less than in other games from this genre. It’s not very thinky and it does have some balance issues, but Gamers vs Evil is still a boatload of fun, just don’t think too hard about it.

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Libellud / Asmodee

Seasons (photo by Asmodee)

Seasons (Régis Bonnessée) is due out in August, and it looks great. You take part in the legendary wizarding tournament of the kingdom of Xidit – no relation to any other Libellud game there – to become the new archmage of the realm. To get there, you use power cards that you chose in the beginning which interact with the seasons and with the actions determined by dice rolls. Some luck, a lot of strategy if the announcement is to be believed and awesome artwork. I’m sold.

Asmadi Games

Asmadi and Aaron Belmer are sending us to the Sanitarium. I admit that of all the subgenres of horror movies the trapped-in-an-old-sanitarium ones are among the most creepy to me, and that’s exactly the scenario Sanitarium places the players in. You find yourself in the sanitarium without any memories how you got there, you only know that you have to escape. You move through dark corridors and, well, even darker corridors. Some items help you cling to your dwindling sanity while hallucinations and shadows eat away at it. There’s even a creepy child in there somewhere. This might be the first game I know about that really, actually manages to be creepy.

Kuznia Gier

There will be at least two new releases at this year’s Essen fair. Maximum Security (Rafal Cywicki, Krzysztof Cywicki, Krzysztof Hanusz)is the first expansion to last year’s Alcatraz: The Scapegoat. We already knew that the expansion would allow you to play with five players, but there’ll be much more inside the box: new locations, new blackmail cards, and new mechanics like the Chief of Security, Sentence cards that give you special abilities and the Sucker. The Sucker is a bit of an odd one: he can’t complete tasks, but he also can’t be the scapegoat, I’m not sure at all how that will integrate into the game.

The second Essen release is an entirely new game by the same team of authors titled 1984: Animal Farm. I’m not sure how 1984 figures into the game’s plot, the driving theme is clearly Animal Farm. After the revolution of the farm animals against their human masters dies down, the fight against each other breaks out. Each one wants to be the only dictator, but no one can make that goal on their own. You’re thus forced into alliances with the other players while ultimately only fighting for yourself. This will be one of those games that you lose friends over.

White Goblin Games

Galactic Order Artwork (Illustration from Stronghold Games)

Stronghold Games

It’s like I keep saying, deck-building games are meant to be expanded. Core Worlds is no exception to this rule and we should see Galactic Orders some time this year still. I won’t sum up everything said about the new cards and new mechanics because game designer Andrew Parks does all that and grants us a look into the background of designing a deck-building game on top of that. Cards in Galactic Orders are actually designed to help less successful strategies to gain some ground on the popular winning moves. It’s a really good read.

 Alderac Entertainment

By now, I’d be really, really disappointed if there was no Smash Up preview, I’m enjoying them a lot. Lucky for me, disappointment was not on the calendar this week: the previews show us the supernatural powers of lesser and greater wizards. What they have over everyday muggles like you and me is speed: everything the wizards do lets you either take more actions or draw more cards to use in those actions. Let’s do the timewarp again!

Nightfall fans shouldn’t feel neglected either. The card previews for Dark Rages continue, not only putting cards on display but also telling the story why they are there and why they are awesome. Speaking of the story of Nightfall: here’s a post about the story going on in Dark Rages and the whole European arc of Nightfall.

 Fantasy Flight Games

The FFG news of the week may not give us a deep insight into how they make games, but they’ll nevertheless make some people happy: Talisman: The Blood Moon is now available and the same goes for the rules of Fortress America but not for the game yet. The Descent: Journeys in the Dark preview is more exciting and introduces us to the Healer archetype and its two classes.

Cryptozoic

The newest deck-building game by Cryptozoic will be 3012 (Charles Tyson), where it turns out the nut jobs who misinterpreted the Mayan calendar were right, after all: the apocalypse did happen in 2012. Now it’s 1.000 years later and humanity has changed. Evolved – or maybe devolved – into five different clans, what is left of us is struggling to survive deep in the Yucatán jungle. And as usual when people struggle, we struggle against each other. Champions of the clans find allies, gear and action cards in their quest to subdue the other clans. 3012 promises to bring more interaction to the genre, claiming that players will be involved in almost every turn.

Tasty Minstrel Games

Skyline is a dice game by David Short. The goal is to do what I do during every game involving more than two dice: build towers with them. Depending on your roll, the dice fit into different kinds of buildings, some with low risk and low profit, some with a better margin but less chance to complete them. The game will be very quick, lasting only about 15 minutes and, here’s the kicker, if the Kickstarter campaign for Ground Floor goes over $70.000 in the 12 days it has left backers will receive Skyline on top of their other perks.

Jactalea

Okiya is the newest work by Bruno Cathala, a light strategic game that picks up a popular recent game mechanic: your move determines your opponent’s possible moves. In the case of Okiya, placing one of your geishas in the imperial garden you remove a garden tile, your opponent then has to place his geisha with a tile that either shows the same plant or the same detail, giving him a choice of six tiles in the beginning of the game. Whoever manages to arrange his geishas in a square or a line this way, wins.

 This week featured photo was taken by Alastair Rae and shared with a CC-BY-SA license. It shows Saint George, one of the monolithic churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia. These incredible buildings are exactly what the words “monolithic” and “rock-hewn” say: churches that were not built but hewn out of the rock, the whole building is one piece of rock and still part of the mountain.

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The Nominees

Eselsbrücke

Eselsbrücke

Although this game by Stefan Dorra and Ralf zur Linde (published by Schmidt Spiele)would be completely okay to play in any foreign language, the title needs some explanation. Eselsbrücke literally relates to donkey’s bridge and is a common German word for a memory hook in the form of a short story or sentence, with a very interesting etymology according to German Wikipedia. Consequently, the game Eselsbrücke is about coming up with a short story to remember sets of mostly unrelated and sometimes hilariously unrelated words. Each player creates two stories to start with, then from the third story on the other players have to try and remember words from the earlier stories to score points. With each story having three or more words, that’s a lot of words flying around even with the minimum of three players.

Vegas

Vegas

Rüdiger Dorn’s Vegas is probably the only alea game that could be nominated for Spiel des Jahres instead of Kennerspiel: it clocks in at a one on the alea scale of complexity. Vegas is a game involving lots of luck, some tactics and maybe basic probabilities, if you want to overthink things. Each round, you roll a handful of dice, pick one number and add all dice showing that number to the matching casino. When all players distributed all their dice, the casinos’ winnings are distributed: the player with most dice in a casino gets the most money and you can guess the rest. But in case of a tie, all players involved get nothing. A game playing this quickly should easily accommodate eight players as announced, and there will certainly be enough frustration to go around for everyone.

Kingdom Builder

Kingdom Builder

Out of this year’s nominees, Donald X. “Mr. Dominion” Vaccarino’s Kingdom Builder (Queen Games) is the most complex game and also the game that most people on the world wide tubes expected to see here. While, basically, you’re only placing many meeple-sized houses on the map there are a couple of things to keep things interesting: on any given turn, you may only built your meeple huts on one type of terrain, they (usually) have to connect to your existing houses, some spots earn you extra actions and, most important, the scoring rules change every game. One game, you want to build next to water, in as many lines as possible and next to mountains. Next game, having the most houses in one sector of the map, as many as you can on one line and connecting locations makes you win. The board also ends up differently each time, you have to play many games before you find the same conditions again.

The Jury Recommends

The jury recommends quite a lot more here than they do for the Kennerspiel, I’ll try to keep each entry short. But all games here are less complex as well, so they’ll take less space anyway.

Drecksau

The lightest game here, intended for ages six and up, Drecksau (Kosmos) is a game about getting your pigs dirty. That’s not a euphemism, that’s the actual goal of the game. Each player has three pigs, one mud card is enough to get them dirty. But rain cards wash all dirty pigs. Except if they are protected by a barn. But lightning destroys barns. Except when they have a lightning rod. Farmers clean one pig only – not usually your own – but pigs can be protected by a barn with a lock. The target audience will certainly enjoy theme and mechanics.

Indigo

Indigo (Ravensburger) is a very classic path-building games, but a really good-looking one at that. Each hexagonal tile shows three paths connecting two random sides. From these tiles you construct ways from the treasure chambers to your exit gates to win gems. With two players, building these paths quickly is all you have to do. With three or four players, however, exit gates are shared with another player who wins the same gems as you when you use that gate. Now chosing the right gate becomes a priority.

Kalimambo

Antonio Scrittore’s Kalimambo (Zoch)  is an example that some chaos can make great games. A group of explorers (the players) are following the fantasy creature Kali through the savannah and are themselves followed by Kali’s friend Mambo, the rhino. Players simultaneously choose cards to decide in what order they move to the front of the queue – only never past Kali, who plays with random cards. Stepping in elephant poo is obviously bad for you, and when Mambo starts charging – when the player right in front of him moves – being the last player in line is not fun either. A game about bluffing and schadenfreude.

Kulami (photo by Steffen Spiele)

Kulami

The first really abstract game on the list, Kulami by Steffen Spiele is intriguingly simple. The board is composed randomly from rectangular tiles  with two to six pits where you can place your colour’s marbles. At game’s end, each tile counts for the player with the marble majority. But when placing your marbles, it has to be on the same line (horizontally or vertically) as your opponent’s previous marble.

Miss Lupun und das Geheimnis der Zahlen

Another abstract game, Miss Lupun and the Secret of Numbers is a math-based tile-laying game. Each player has to fulfill their secret missions, be they to only have even numbers in one line, to not exceed a certain sum or simply to have the same value in two places on the board. You can guess how often your goals will be compatible with the other player’s goals …

Pictomania

Pictomania (Pegasus) by multi-talent Vlaada Chvatil – honestly, in which genre didn’t he create a great game yet? – is a drawing game. Unfortunately for me, it’s the kind where you actually need some drawing ability. Fortunately for me, however, no one can concentrate on their own drawing anyway because all players draw their picture at the same time, while everyone is also guessing what the other player’s drawing could be.

 Santa Cruz

We talked about Santa Cruz (Hans im Glück) in the news just a few weeks back. It’s the game where you explore the same island twice. You move from the coast towards the center, along rivers or roads and hope to profit from the other players’ scoring cards as much as from your own. That’s where the second exploration comes in: some of the scoring cards will still be in the game, and if you guess right which one you have a good chance to win.

Rapa Nui

A game from the neighbourhood of the meeple cave – author Klaus-Jürgen Wrede hails from our neck of the woods here in Germany – and another mention for Kosmos, who are quite well represented this year. Rapa Nui lets you build moai – that’s the giant stone statues on Easter Island, for the touristically challenged. You employ different tribe members – priests, lumberjacks and hunter-gatherers – to collect resources for you. Wood is used to build a moai, when that happens every player makes a sacrifice. The number of sacrifices of one kind determines the value your hand cards of that type have at the end of the game – only when you sacrifice them, they are not in your hand any more. From the nominees and recommendations for Spiel des Jahres this year, Rapa Nui is the most complex game and could just as well have ended up in Kennerspiel des Jahres.

That’s this years games. Which ones are you missing in the list? Which will win? Let us know, every right guess wins eternal bragging rights. And come back later this week when we look at the kid’s games, if you’re interested in those.

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We’re starting today with a look at the nominees and the jury’s recommendations for Kennerspiel des Jahres (Gamer’s Game of the Year) and will present the Spiel and Kinderspiel later this week. This award was only introduced last year to give the more complex games their own category, separated from the more family oriented Spiel des Jahres – a controversial move at the time, but by now it’s widely accepted as a Good Thing™.

Lets have a look, and then let us know who’s your favourite for the Pöppel. Or do you think there is an obvious choice missing here?

The Nominees

K2

K2

K2 is one of the oddities of all Spiel des Jahres awards: a game that was first released in 2010, but is nominated for the award this year. The explanation is, of course, very easy: the German edition was only released in 2012 by Heidelberger Spieleverlag, and the German edition is all that counts. Yes, we Germans are egocentric like that.

K2, designed by Adam Kaluza, is a mountain-climbing game – actually, K2 is a lot like the venerable Can’t Stop if you took out most of the luck, turned the strategy up, added bad weather and had only one top field to reach. So it’s not really like Can’t Stop at all, except that you are climbing upwards in both games. In K2 each player controls a team of two mountaineers ascending the titular mountain. You play cards each round to move up or down the mountain, but also to control your acclimatization because the weather will kill you if you’re not prepared. Changing weather and other players blocking your way do the rest to keep you from the top.

Targi

Targi

The theme for this years nominee seems to be “areas this meeple wouldn’t want to live in”. After a 8600m mountain we now go to the Sahara desert. Targi is a two-player game created by Andreas Steiger and published by Kosmos. To lead your Tuareg tribe to fame and fortune, you use a clever card selection mechanic where you place three of your tribesman around the card display and then take the cards where a row and a column thus controlled intersect. Each card either gives you goods to pay for tribe cards, or they are tribe cards paid for with goods and then placed in your personal display. Tribe cards are worth victory points, but they also grant other advantages and to make things harder may award extra points if you collect the right symbols in your display. The jury should also consider a special award for the most impressive eyes on the box cover.

Village

Village

The theme of places-I-wouldn’t-want-to-live-in doesn’t quite continue with Inka & Markus Brand’s Village. Sure I’m a happy small-city-meeple, but I did grow up in a village that was disturbingly similar to the village in the game – including the level of technology. But we’re not here because of my biography – Village, published by eggertspiele and Pegasus Spiele, lets you write history on a small scale. The village chronicles, to be exact. Members of your family may learn a craft, work on the farm, sell goods on the market or even join the village council or the clergy. Or they may just travel to see the world. Each path of life lets you produce something and/or earn victory points. But doing something with your life costs time, and time is a finite resource for everyone: sooner or later, your family members will have to step aside for the younger generation to take over. Of the three nominees, Village is the most complex – lets see if the jury considers that a good thing.

The Jury Recommends

Ora et Labora

Pray and work – I don’t think that’s a winning strategy here. I’m honestly surprised that Ora et Labora is not on the nominee list, I was certain to see this title by Uwe Rosenberg there. As the abbot of a medieval monastery, you’re trying to build a production chain that will ultimately create books, relics and other things medieval monasteries created to gain victory points in the Vatican and let their abbot become pope one day. That is how it worked, right? Players place buildings for production on their own game board and send their three workers around to use those buildings and produce. But you’re not playing in complete isolation from each other. For a small fee, you can send workers to use other player’s buildings.

Friday

I said everything I wanted to say about Friedemann Friese’s solo game already in the review. I would repeat it here, but I’ve run out of thematic jokes, and repeating jokes just isn’t done.

Hawaii

Finally, a game that goes into the complete opposite direction of the trend: it’s about a place where I definitely would want to live. Wales. No, wait. Hawaii. I always mix these two. But the thing about buying tikis makes a lot more sense now. Your goal is to build the most beautiful village in all of Hawaii in order to impress the King. You walk around the lush forests of the island, buying houses and tikis and the occasional canoe or surfboard to go to one of the smaller islands. Everything you buy goes to your village where it scores points later. Everything in Greg Daigle’s Hawaii is very variable, the island is set up differently every time, the prices for things are different each round, you won’t be able to find a strategy that always works here.

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Our review copy of Farmerama was generously supplied by Ravensburger, thanks a lot!

The Farmer opened the door to the barn very carefully. The four most dangerous farm animals that ever lived were safely tied up inside – so he hoped, at least – but being unable to physically harm him did not render them harmless. “Evening, Farmer”. The voice of Horsibal Lecter was smooth, silky, even under the thick mask. “I heard your daughter wants to take riding lessons. I’d love to give her … riding lessons. And have some Chianti with her afterwards.” “Ahahaha, have Chianti with her, good one Horsibal”, giggled Ramdom Earle manically. The Farmer ignored them and pushed the feed cart inside. He’d heard worse from them.

I better come out right away here: I  have never played the browser game Farmerama until I received the board game in the mail. And even then not much. So I can’t say much about the similarities between the boardgame and the browser game except what everyone suspects anyway: not many. Of course, the theme is the same, but mechanics just don’t translate well between the two media. No surprise there.

Lets just cut to the chase: Farmerama is worth checking out. Now we can all stop wondering about the if and focus on the what and the why instead. What do you do in Farmerama and why would you want to do it? Obviously, what you do is work on your farm. Every player has their own farm, with some fields to grow crops on and four animeeple that you feed to earn victory points. Your farm is split into seven segments by irrigation channels, all spreading out from the big wheel in the center of your farm board. Each segment has two pens for your livestock and a different number of fields for your crops.

Farming 101: Sowing

Each round, players simultaneously and secretly choose one of five possible actions they will execute later in the round. The actions fall into two groups. For sow, harvest and water the other players’ actions are important. When feeding your livestock and visiting the seed shop what the other players do doesn’t matter. Why do other players matter for sowing, harvesting and watering? Because, when more than one player picks the same of these actions, one of them receives a bonus but all of them get a less impressive result from the action itself. The bonus comes in the form of an ornament for your flower garden – I’m taking a wild guess here and say this concept comes directly from the browser game. Ornaments include strawberry-shaped strawberry booths, foam cannons and vampire hamsters with their little coffin. They are actually quite creepy, and that’s not just the vampires … . Those ornaments would be pretty pointless if they were just, you know, ornamental, so each of them also carries a reward with it: most let you take some bonus crops or water, but some are worth victory points. When playing with the advanced rules, they might also let you take a bonus action right away. However, only one player can have the ornament. In the basic game, the player with the least ornaments in his flower garden wins, in case of ties the most visible scarecrows decide and if it’s still a tie the player with the least food in his barn gets it. In the advanced game, the first two conditions are swapped and it’s quite usual to see a farm with crops growing everywhere except around the scarecrows. Scarecrops.

But the ornament was only supposed to be a bonus. It may make Mrs. Farmer happy to have it in her flower garden, but we’re here to run a farm. So lets take those actions now. If you picked sow, harvest or water you now take that action a certain number of times as indicated by the big wheel in the center of the table. For each of these actions the wheel shows two numbers, one that you use if you chose the action alone, another, lower number that you use if more players are doing the same. Since we all have our own farms, it’s not immediately obvious why we can work less when more players perform the same action, but after thinking long and hard about it, we found out why. Ok, we really came up with it at two in the morning after too much coffee: all players share the farm machines, so when you know that someone else wants to use the combine harvester you return it early. So it may not make a lot of sense thematically, but it’s an interesting choice in the game: you want to figure out what the other players will do either way, but then you have to decide whether you go with them for the bonus, or go against them for getting some actual work done.

The Scarecrops

After a lot of pre-explanation, taking the actions is very simple and none is more simply than watering: you take the given amount of water tokens from the general supply and put it in your barn (the personal supply). When you sow, you take a crop token  from your barn and place them on a field, then place another one from the general supply on top. Your crops are growing. However, now the wheel on your farmland comes into play: four segments of the wheel show a type of crop, and those can only be sowed in that segment – all your carrots have to go to the carrot segment, dito for hay, oats and corn. That really wouldn’t work out in the long run, we all know that having the same fruit growing in a field over and over depletes the soil of nutrients. To avoid that, you can always pay one water token to advance the wheel by one position, even in the middle of taking your actions. Someone has been taking crop rotation too literally. The three remaining segments on the wheel are the harvest segments. When you pick the harvest action, you do your work here by emptying a number of fields into your barn.

When visiting the seed shop, you take one token of each type you don’t currently have in your barn – including water, don’t forget the water seeds – and then do one sowing action. At first glance, this seems to be there just so you can’t remove yourself from the game by running out of things to sow. But after you just emptied your barn by sowing the fields or feeding the animals, getting four crops for one action is not so bad at all.

Now he was heading for the real danger of the barn. Passing Vlad Tepig the blood-sucking sow – who was innocent as a lamb compared to the others here – was the heavy metal door to the high security pen of the most dangerous inmate: Moo Baker. He could already hear her. Yelling. Screaming. Kicking the pen walls. Last year she had gored his predecessor while he was feeding her. Straight through the steel door, her horns had gone. The holes where still there as a warning, to him and his eventual successor.

Our Little Psycho Farm

And, finally, the last action you might choose deals with the livestock. The dangerous, psychotic livestock. The farm animals of mass murder. In case it wasn’t obvious, the animals are not really mass murderers. In fact, they are intended to be cute. They are not badly drawn, either, quite the opposite is true for them and the rest of the game. It’s just … their eyes, their horrible, horrible eyes. I actually created an account on Farmerama the browser game just to see if they had the same eyes there. I’m happy to report that none do. Animals there are at almost creepy but still cute in the eye-size spectrum. The animals in the board game are just a hair’s breadth away from psychotic killer on hallucinogenics. I actually made little sunglasses stickers to put on them so they wouldn’t keep looking at me. Where was I? Oh yeah, the animals need feeding. Each animal has its preferred food – either two or three pieces of two different flavours – that you return to the supply to feed that animal. Freshly fed, the animal then goes from the barn to one of the pens in the fields. Again, the wheel shows you where that animal must go. Now, when the feel keeps turning we arrive at the point where you earn points. The last of the three harvest segments on the wheel also sends the animals back to the barn after a long and productive day producing wool or milk, finding truffles or giving riding lessons. Yes, truffles and riding lessons, no animals are harmed in Farmerama. When they return to the stable you advance their marker on your point counter and they are ready to go again.

The game ends when the pile of ornaments runs out and the player with the most points wins. The main point source are the animals, but often the difference lies in the ornaments with points and the remaining crops, which also count.  Now to come back to the why you’d want to play. Farmerama is not an Agricola or Ora et Labora and is unlikely to replace either in popularity. But Farmerama doesn’t try to be either – it’s not a retheming of popular mechanics to fit the browser game, it’s a game in its own right. It is lighter than either of those as well, but that was the declared goal: a goal that works as a family game but is not so light to bore the geek gamers. I’m not actually sure how well it plays as a family game – the rules are easy enough to grasp in a few minutes, but there are some intricacies to scoring high that are not obvious in the first game or two. Your mileage may vary. As a geek gamer, however, I was anything but bored. The way to a high score is not at all obvious – and I’m not sure if I found it yet – and it’s fun to experiment how to go higher. My current advice would be not to try for a steady engine that always has some things in the field, some things  in the barn and some animals to be fed. Instead, try to plant everything, then harvest everything, then feed all the animals. At least for me, that’s working.

Feeding Time

What Farmerama still has to prove to me is staying power – we’re enjoying it at the moment, but it’s a very low interaction game and I’m worried that it might get boring after you figured out the best way to score.  But since every game does run differently – there is some interaction and some randomness from the ornament rewards – it will likely stay fresh for a while. Now many of you just have to wait for an edition in their language: the Ravensburger edition is multilingual in German, Dutch, French and Italian, we don’t know if, when and from where an English edition might come. But since the only text is in the rulebook, you can import and find a rules translation online without linguistic worries.

P.S.: I’m putting this here for the people coming in through Google trying to find out what the bonus ornament for the advanced game does that you can’t figure out: it allows you to put a third crop token on top of three piles already in your field. You’re welcome.

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If you were following the news stream from Alderac Entertainment this week, you might have gotten the feeling your computer was getting hiccups. The first Smash Up (Paul Peterson) preview was all 01110111 01110010 01101001 01110100 01110100 01100101 01101110 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101111 01101110 01101100 01111001 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01111010 01100101 01110010 01101111 01100101 01110011 but then the fans were all 01110111 01110100 01100110 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 and so the second one was in plain English again. If you hadn’t guessed, the subject of the previews was the Robot faction. I’m looking forward to playing Robot Pirates already. (If you need some help with the first preview on account of not being a robot, have a look here.)

Some people are still not into binary and robots – I can’t think why – but the nice people of Alderac Entertainment do things for those minorities as well. I kid, of course, I’d never consider Nightfall players a minority. Dark Rages, the next expansion, is coming soon and also showing off some preview cards. There are many new regular cards, of course, but there is also something completely new in Dark Rages: avatars. Your avatar – and you only get to have one of them – is the general of your army of monsters and/or hunters and a stand-in for you personally. The avatar can not be destroyed – the days of generals standing in the front lines are long over, after all – and grants a bonus to all members of the two factions he supports.

 Cryptozoic

Staying on card game and expansions for a moment longer, Snack Attack the first expansion to Food Fight is now available. The forces of breakfast, lunch and dinner receive reinforcements from the snack troops. Salsa Bandido and the Green Beret Granola Bar are only the beginning …

Lookout Games

Sometimes, just sometimes, living in Germany and speaking German has its advantages. For instance, around here we can already buy the new edition of Rüdiger Dorn’s Goa, a game that many people are anxiously waiting for. But don’t spend your money on German classes just yet, the English version from Z-Man Games is due out this month as well, and the money and time saved on learning a new language can be spent on games.

Minion Games

After the Manhattan Project with its rather destructive theme, the newly announced Minion Game Tahiti literally brings you back into more peaceful waters. With your wa’a, the traditional boat of the area, you travel across the calm waters of the South Pacific in search for food to bring home to your family. But the more you load, the slower your wa’a will be, so sometimes less is more. And the tikis might have some say about your success as well. But first, you have some say about if and how Tahiti will be made because it’s now on Kickstarter.

Portal Publishing

The website of Ignacy Trzewiczek’s Convoy has been updated this week and now shows some of the cards for both factions. The texts are still Polish only, so unless you speak the language you won’t find out exactly what they do, but the number of different symbols on the cards makes it pretty clear that Convoy will have some complexity to it.

Fantasy Flight Games

Something old, something new, something borrowed and both boxes show a lot of blue – I’m not talking about a wedding but about FFG’s preview posts of the week.

Netrunner

Something old is Descent: Journeys in the Dark about which we have been seeing previews for the last few weeks already. This week is still special because it goes into an aspect of the game that all players of dungeon crawling games must have waited for: the combat system.

Something new and something borrowed refer to the same game: Netrunner. While the game itself is not new, it’s definitely news that Fantasy Flight Games will be releasing a new edition of it. And it’s borrowed from Richard Garfield who, for some time in the 90s, was as famous for being this game’s creator as he is for Magic: The Gathering. Like that one, Netrunner was originally a collectible card game, but interestingly with an asymmetric structure: in a dark and not-so-distant future, one player takes the role of a giant corporation set for world domination while the other is the  freelance hacker who opposes them. Or maybe he’s just after their money, you never know. This new edition will not be a CCG any more but a Living Card Game. That’s at least slightly better for your credit rating – you still get a new expansion to buy every other month, but at least you get all the cards with one purchase and don’t have to go fish for them.

Tokaido

Funforge

For Essen 2012, Funforge will present us with a new Antoine Bauza game: Tokaido. Tokaido is a bit of a tourist game, you’re travelling along the famous East Sea Road of Japan with the declared goal to have the best food, see the most beautiful landscapes and collecting the finest items. You’re doing touristy things and the game looks to be very peaceful – you can’t run your opponents of the road – but is still intended as a strategic game. It is also outstandingly beautiful, even for a French game, and they have set a very high standard. (via BGG News)

Asmodee

Brett Gilbert’s Divinare, the fortune-telling world championship game, is almost upon us. But you probably knew that already. Asmodee is currently holding a release contest, but I guess that’s not news to you. If it was news to you, then maybe you just shouldn’t take part in the contest, your third eye is in need of contacts. And if your powers of divination are strong enough to enter the contest, then you already know whether you won or not. Wait, what?

 WizKids

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This week marks the beginning of another new series of photos for our news posts: World Heritage Sites. The first photo shows a reconstruction of the pile dwellings that existed all around the Alps in the Stone and Brone Age times. This reconstruction can be found in Unteruhldingen, Germany. It was photographed by Flickr user Longfellowelizabeth and shared with a CC-BY-SA license. Thank you, this is an amazing photo.

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Our copy of Strike Dice has kindly been supplied by the publisher, Mage Company. Thanks a lot.

How did I get here?

Flavour text is not the only thing the manual doesn’t give you: in our version of it, an idea how to play the game is also on that list. I don’t want to bash the manual much, there is an updated version of it now that  you can play the game from. But with ours, I was glad the authors are nice guys and were happy to help us along.With their help, we learned how to play and it goes like this: each player has eight pawndice – some people may be familiar with them as a d4 – and the goal in each triangulation – vulgo: rounds – is to have as many of them on the board as possible. The easiest way to play Strike Dice is in two players, so that’s what we’ll stick with for now. The first player rolls one pawndice on his first roll and places it on the board. After that, every turn consists of rolling two dice and placing them. When you have no dice on the board then you have to place it on one of the red compass points – the cardinal directions, coincidentally called tribases – because you can only enter the board there. Subsequent dice enter the board through any of the red tribases you’re holding and move from there to another one of either colour. The movement point your pawndie has are given by the sum of the numbers on the bottom of the dice, making higher numbers slower thanks to the properties of the common d4. A simple yet effective mechanic to meet that goal.

Counting where you can actually go with that is less simple as you’re counting a bunch of triangles, some of which touch at the sides while others only touch at the points, yet still only cost one point of movement. The new manual has a diagram that explains this, but we were not so lucky. Either way, it’s needlessly complicated, the truth about movement is much simpler. You may only end your move on another tribase, not on any of the other triangles in between, and you may only start your move on a red tribase that you already occupy with a pawndie. Strictly speaking, you never move at all, you just add more dice to the board. Anyway, starting from a red tribase, rolling a four means you can only go to the two adjacent dark tribases – not a big issue because fours may never be on red ones, anyway. Twos and threes can go there as well, but also to the two red tribases at right angles to your start base. And only ones can go to the dark tribases beyond those, meaning anywhere but the opposite red base. Trust me, this way is easier than counting.

Luck!

Your dice can occupy the same tribases as your opponent’s without interfering with each other, regardless which number they show – the so-called power of the dice. Violence breaks out only between opposing dice on opposite tribases. Thematically, I can see the point in these: when you hold the power of Evil, I don’t usually defeat you by being more Evil than you. Being more  Good than you are Evil, that’s the ticket. Playing the game, this rule means you’ll be looking around for a bit before you figure out where your dice can go. In terms of gameplay, I don’t see where the difference is between this approach and letting dice on the same tribase fight, that would be easier to keep an overview. What happens between dice on opposite tribases? The weaker one has to leave and returns to its owner. In case of a tie, both may stay. You are not allowed to place a die in a position where it would immediately be defeated. If you don’t have any other options, or cannot place the die you rolled for other reasons, then that die is excluded from the current triangulation. That’s how a winner is decided as well, when all dice are either on the board or excluded, then the player with fewer excluded dice wins the round and gains one tricard. You may be spotting a pattern here, tricards are triangular cards. Each belongs to one tribase and has a special effect that you can use once on each subsequent triangulation, provided you occupy that tribase. The effects vary widely in usefulness and thematicality. Intellect, for instance, grants you a sort of mind control: you may decide where to place the opponent’s next die. Somewhat thematic, but much less useful than it sounds. Speed, on the other hand, lets you roll all your dice and place them at once. Quite thematic and sometimes useful. You keep triangulating until all tricards have been awarded, then whoever holds more wins the game.

Strike Dice in two players is not a bad game, but it is, at least to me, bland and too long for what it does: rolling dice and placing them on triangles, then taking them back when the other player rolls higher, just to receive a card and then do the same again. Does get old after two rounds. Furthermore, there is less strategy involved then I thought at first – we figured out quickly that the higher roller wins, there’s nothing you can do about that. And if both players roll the same, the game will end in a tie, not in a triumph of superior planning.

Good Neighbours

In three players, not much changes about the game except that you may drive off two opponents’ pawndice at once, when you roll well enough. In four players, the experience is more of a double-edged sword. The way to play in four players is as two teams of two. Powers are now only compared and dice removed when two dice from one team stand opposite two dice of the other team. As long as one dice is missing, nothing happens. This does open the doors for more interesting strategy: do you place your low die next to your partners low die in order to see them defeated and get them back to be rerolled? Or do you put a higher die there hoping you can hold the base? Unfortunately, this also makes the game last even longer.

Strike Dice wanted to tell a story, but unfortunately didn’t. Strike Dice also wanted to be a strategic dice game, you may want to form your own opinion on that. Strike Dice is a game with interesting ideas – using dice to occupy bases, making them move faster the weaker they are, do all that with only triangles – but it feels to much like the game was just made to fit those ideas, with too little thought given to how it would play and how it would keep players interested.

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The scenario previews for Small World Realms just keep getting better: the latest one, A Dig Too Far, lets you follow in the footsteps of the dwarves of Middle Earth. You remember, the ones that dug too deep and unearthed the Balrog. I’m not sure if there are Balrogs here, but why you might discover is not much better. If only the riches weren’t so tempting…

Realms is now also available for preorder. I hope that doesn’t mean there won’t be more previews. Before you get all excited and preorder, remember that you need at least one of the base games Small World or Small World Underground for this.

The Forking Path

The Doom That Came To Atlantic City – I got interested in this just from the great title. Afterwards, it only took the words “Great Old Ones” and “Keith Baker, designer of Gloom” to get me hooked. The story is quickly told: a whole bunch of Great Old Ones just happen to wake up at the same time and all congregate on Atlantic City where they all try to open gates to their home planes as quickly as they can. Going by the photos on the Kickstarter pager, The Doom has something of a reverse Monopoly – the board looks similar at the moment, but you tear down houses instead of building them. But don’t worry, it doesn’t seem to be any sort of Monopoly clone: Monopoly never had cultists to sacrifice, alternative victory conditions, Great Old Ones or Great Old Meeple sculpted by Paul Komoda.

Pandasaurus Games

Tammany Hall

Another Kickstarter project, Pandasaurus is looking for your support to bring back Doug Eckhart’s Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall has been unavailable for some time, which has made a lot of people unhappy: it’s one of the most sought-after recent games, and only 500 had previously been produced. You compete with the other players for the mayor’s office, an office you can only achieve by pondering to the various groups of immigrants that can bring you the necessary votes.

Fantasy Flight Games

Not only one but two news items about Donald X. Vaccarino’s Infiltration this week. The preview post has everything about items to help or hinder you and also brings some great examples how a turn really plays out. After looking at that, you’re ready to check the rules.

The current series of Descent: Journeys in the Dark previews also continues: the focus this week is on character classes and archetypes, how they are related and which role they play in the game.

Not everything from Fantasy Flight is looking at projects we already knew, however. Here’s a completely new one for you: King of Ashes is an expansion to Cadwallon: City of Thieves. King of Ashes lets you explore the shadowy corners of the city deeper than ever before, and they hold all new opportunities for you, including ways into the legendary catacombs under the city.

Richelieu

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Another new project is coming from the Goblins: Richelieu by Olivier Lamontagne. Any game with the French cardinal’s name as the title can only be about court intrigue, of course, and Richelieu is just that. Players send out their agents to take part in intrigues for and against the cardinal – or maybe both, there’s no need to be picky – and gain prestige from their successes. But the cardinal is jealous, and if there is one thing he cannot have then it’s a more accomplished schemer than himself: any player who passes Richelieu on the prestige track loses his hard-earned renown immediately. Do you already feel that rush of helping an opponent succeed in his machinations, just to push him past the cardinal and into oblivion? Because I do.

Alderac Entertainment

Alderac is really getting into the whole preview business. Great for me, game previews are the easiest thing to write about for the news. After last week’s look at pirates in Smash Up, this week we’re interested in their worst enemies. The Ninjas. Unfortunately, ninjas speak Japanese and Smash Up is proud to be a very, very realistic game. Yeah, you guessed it, both previews are in Japanese. At least the cards are readable without more language education than I received, and so we know two things about ninjas at this point: they are masters of disguise and camouflage and they excel at killing.

But Alderac has much more in store for game enthusiasts: the rules for the first two games in the Tempest setting are online. Courtier, as the name suggests, plays at Court where you compete for the Queen’s favour so she might accept your petitions. You need the right combination of courtiers to talk to here before she’ll consider your petition, and the courtier’s favour goes to the player with the most agents sucking up to them. All courtiers also belong to a coterie, a part of the court and area of the board, and in a second layer of majority considerations having the most agents in a coterie lets you use a special ability to further your goals.

Mercante is, at least for the most part, more honest. Rich merchant families all try to make profit by buying goods in the harbor, selling them in the market and fulfilling contracts for extra money. But the economic game is only mostly honest, you also have the option to steal from opponents whose security is too lax.

Mage Company

After so much intrigue, how about a lighter game? Wrong Chemistry (Yiannis Altanis) fits the bill. From a set of hexagonal tiles and black and white wood tokens you have to build the elements from your cards, while all the other players are trying the same with the same pieces. The elements you want to create are mostly fictional and all wrong – although I could to with a bit of extramovium per day, that would be very right for me. Wrong Chemistry is now on Kickstarter.

Trench

Runadrake

There was a long silence about Rui Alípio Monteiro’s Trench, but it’s still alive and moving: you can now preorder it at a new price. Trench is an extremely nice looking abstract game for two players  where the titular trench in the middle of the board plays an important role.

Ares Games

The name Leo Colovini usually gets boardgamers to sit up and listen – his name is on the box of Inkognito and other games of the same caliber. Now the same name will be on the box of Aztlán, a game about up to four Aztec tribes fighting for territory in the mystic land of Aztlán. Each tribe’s strength differs from phase to phase and you can’t be sure how powerful your enemies are. Bluffing is, obviously, a core mechanic here.

 Ape Game

This card game has been around various conventions for years now, at least according to Ape Games. I didn’t have the pleasure of trying it yet. But it’s finally becoming a real product: Kill The Overlord. The title is a bit misleading, though: the Overlord is mostly the person doing the killing, not the one being killed. He sends out his executioner to kill another player, but the executioner is easily distracted and misguided: everyone sends her from one player to the next, hoping they won’t be the one with no useable cards left when she knocks on their door. The game sounds light yet very fun, and the art is beautiful, too.

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Our review copy was kindly supplied by Coerceo Company. Thanks a lot!

You may have heard of Coerceo already – just last week it won an award that is almost as prestigious as the Spiel des Jahres: the Mensa Select award 2012, awarded by the American Mensa high IQ society. That tells you something about Coerceo right there: if you were looking for a light dice game to play while watching TV, you’re in the wrong review. But I have good news as well: if you’re one of those people who took weeks to understand how Castling works in Chess – like yours truly – that’s absolutely no reason to be afraid of Coerceo. There is only one type of game piece, only one kind of movement and all the rules can be explained in five minutes. Don’t believe me? Then start your stopwatch  now and read on.

Worth a thousand words

Your move is very simple: you move one of your pieces to another field of the same colour that has one corner in common with the current field – thus, you can never get to a triangle of the other colour. For me, it’s easiest to think of it as turning the pyramid around one of its corners, ignoring enemy pieces and the edge of the board. If, after that move, you have an enemy piece completely surrounded, either between three of your pieces or between two of your pieces and the edge of the board, that piece is captured and removed – hence the name Coerceo, latin for “I surround”. If you move yourself into a surrounded position, however, you are not captured, which just goes to show that no one will bother you if you just act like you own the place. Check your stopwatch, we’re halfway there.

Still missing is the part where the board changes shape. When you move the last pyramid from one of the board tiles, and that tile only touches three or fewer other tiles, you may remove the tile and keep it. (The at most three tiles also have to be adjacent to each other, that’s just to prevent you from splitting the board). Any enemy pieces that are now surrounded by the new edge and two of your pyramids are immediately captured. Any board tiles that are empty and can now be removed according to the rules also go to you. When you have two conquered tiles you may, instead of your normal move, discard them and remove any enemy piece from the board. If that results in the removal of a tile, that tile is removed from the game immediately, it doesn’t go to either player. The game ends when a player’s last piece is captured, or, with the tournament rules, when one player captures the sixth or twelfth enemy piece. Stop your stopwatch, we’re done. That’s all the rules to play Coerceo. And I even had time left for background information and witty banter. Not bad, huh?

You can't run. Hiding is not looking good, either.

Now you know how to play Coerceo, but you might still be uncertain about the why. After all, the rules are so simple, there can’t be much depth in it, right? Wrong. The rules for Coerceo may be very straightforward, but playing the game certainly isn’t. You have to plan ahead to avoid being captured at every corner, maybe not as far as in Chess but at least for a few turns. And only moving one field per turn may sound like the game moves slowly – at least that’s what I thought when reading the rules – but the distributed setup can make you retreat into a trap faster than you think. And where Chess, Checkers and almost every other game that lets you capture enemy pieces give you more space the longer the game lasts, Coerceo keeps shrinking the board and restricts your movement more towards the end, not less.

The hardest thing to get used to, however, is the threat of suddenly disappearing board tiles – I still lose many pieces because they get trapped between two enemy pyramids and the new edge of the board. It’s a situation that other games don’t train you to watch out for. Making things a bit easier is the option to remove opposing pieces by discarding board tiles. Some may think that this move is too powerful – especially when they’re the victim of it – but this power makes removing board tiles very attractive and another important thing to watch out for. When your choice is to let your opponent capture one of your pieces or let him remove another tile from the board, the choice is not at all obvious. Besides that, the power to remove enemy pyramids anywhere on the board also speeds up the game and reduces the chance of ties. They still happen, but not as often.

Coerceo is a very satisfying game to play. You can’t really play a purely defensive strategy as there is no way to block your opponents movement, so there is always something happening on the board, the game always moves forward. And although there are only eight possible opening moves – all the rest are the same eight mirrored or turned – the disintegrating board puts you in new situations every time you play. Playing Coerceo is definitely hard work for your brain, you’ll notice that after playing a whole evening. The Mensa Select award is thus well deserved, and for everyone interested in abstract strategy games Coerceo is a hot recommendation.

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The photo of a leopard moth was taken by Flickr user normanack and shared with a CC-BY license. Thanks a lot!

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