Board 8 > another year of tabletop rankings and writeups

(+) Yeah! (+)

Celestia sounds like a lot of fun, but it's sold out like everywhere, womp womp

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ive had fun with celestia but there are some take-that-y parts of it i don't particularly like. there are other press-your-luck games that i dig more, but it certainly is a gorgeous production and a very good game to boot

five tribes is awesome, but super prone to causing AP. i like it a lot, but wouldn't choose it all the time, if that makes sense.

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41. When I Dream (2016)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, hidden roles, clue-giving, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 2 minutes per turn, 30 minutes per game
Experience: 5-10 games with 5-9 players (2018-2019)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each round, one player (the dreamer) puts on a blindfold and turns a timer. A stack of picture cards is in the center, with a hybrid image on it and a word. Each player is then secretly assigned either to help (fairy) or mislead (boogeyman) the dreamer in guessing the word. In turn order, each player says one word, and at any time the dreamer can guess the word, which gets sorted into the correct or incorrect pile. When the time runs out, points are awarded, and the blindfold is passed, and new roles assigned.

Design - When I Dream fits an unusual type of niche: one guesser, but lots of hidden traitors, and plenty of opportunity to try to discern who's on your team. I love the frantic pace of it; an entire circle of clues can happen in less than ten seconds (especially at lower player counts). Sometimes the guesser will guess after just one or two clues, while other times the guesser will wait until the entire circle has gone around.

Cleverly, the second image on the card gives the boogeymen a chance to present a untied front. For example, if you heard: "Raptor, Bed, Falcon, Fish, Atlanta, Metal," it would be pretty clear that the word was "hawk," because bed, fish, and metal don't make any sense. However, if the words were instead "Raptor, Rodent, Falcon, Cheese, Atlanta, Grey," then you'd have a more difficult decision as you tried to figure out whether it was "hawk" or "mouse." This actually forces hte cluegiver to figure out who to trust instead of just trying to form a single image and discarding the noise.

One of my favorite little details of When I Dream: the bed structure that holds the stack of cards. The blindfold itself is also pretty interesting - it looks innocuous (and brightly colored), but if you don't usually wear one to sleep, it's weirdly disorienting.

Experience - I discovered When I Dream at a meetup at a time when I hadn't discovered new and especially good party games in quite some time. It came as a very welcome surprise since I love clue-giving. Convinced a friend to get it, and it's appeared several times at our monthly game nights since. I've had dull rounds (when I couldn't figure anything out, or my guesser seemed to be disregarding me entirely), but never a dull game where nothing clicked at all. Reliable.

Future - Like I said, When I Dream is reliable. The one "problem" with it is that you can't really play it many times in one sitting; the deck of cards goes by very quickly. But given the time to breathe, it's highly engaging and fun as a party game.
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Naye745 posted...

ive had fun with celestia but there are some take-that-y parts of it i don't particularly like

yep, this is fair. some of the cards are really swingy and unpleasant
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i enjoyed when i dream but it felt like the novelty would wear off sooner than later. neat concept though

magic maze rules though. i think that one still holds up very well after a healthy number of plays

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40. Orleans (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Point salad, deck-building, point-to-point movement
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 75-105 minutes
Experience: 2 plays with 3, 4 players (2015, 2019)
Previous ranks: 48/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Set in medieval France, Orleans is a bag-building game played over eighteen rounds. Players pull a number of discs out of their bag. The discs represent various worker types that can be assigned to perform tasks on the player's board, but multiple workers are needed for each action. Actions can include moving a wagon around a board (to pick up goods for VP), getting more workers (which give bonuses), and a few other ways to gain VP.

Experience - Perhaps the most overrated game by experience on my list - I've only played Orleans twice, and those two plays were separated by over four years. The first play was one of my earlier heavy euros, and one of the ones I was learning and getting a good feel for. During my second play, four years later, I was no longer overwhelmed with all the options and was better able to see how to play the game.

Design - The most unique part about Orleans is the bag-building mechanic. It's pretty physically satisfying to shuffle your bag and pull out pieces and assign them onto the board. The actual mechanics of assignment are pretty cool too - every base action requires at least two workers to activate, and you have to decide whether to use your workers to activate "an action, any action" or to leave them out on your board until next round, when you've drawn the complementary pieces.

Part of what makes the game enjoyable is that, once you've grasped the decision space, there is a lot to do. I haven't played it enough to determine how "competitive" this gets, but mechanically it feels really good, because virtually everything you do benefits you in layered ways.

Take gaining workers. Getting a different set of workers is a strategic move because it allows you to specialize in different actions. However, there are further, immediate benefits as well: taking the white farmers, for example, moves you up on the farmer track, and sometimes it'll let you take goods, which are inherently worth victory points. Being high up on the farmer track gives you a trickle of VP each turn, while being low on it means you might lose VP. Meanwhile, taking the knights lets you get pieces required for moving, plus it upgrades your ability to draw from your bag, which translate to more actions overall.

Speaking of movement - when you push your little guy around a map (either by land or by sea), you reach new cities. You can an immediate VP bonus if you pick up a good on that track, and then on a subsequent action you can build a building if the city is unoccupied. The reward of building a building is - you guessed it - more VP. The game isn't really played on the map, and mainly it adds time to the setup, but... it feels good and satisfying as an option.

And of course there's sending your workers away to the temple. This is the game's only controlled culling mechanism. Shockingly, it also can result in gaining VP.

Orleans's interaction is extremely indirect and usually not particularly cutthroat. The map can empty quickly if people run through it and seize all the open spaces, and there's some finesse in timing when you go to the temple. I lost my last game because player 1 went to the temple, which perfectly set up player 2 to go and gain a special bonus. That left me (player 3) unable to get as great of a bonus. Then there's competition over being first to certain spots, or being at the top of the farmer's track, or being first to grab the tableau.

But overall, the game can be very much fixated on your own board - not that it's necessarily a bad thing. Unlike, say, Agricola, Orleans is relaxed and feels more point-salad-y. Even if you're not super-experienced, you'll usually feel good after taking a move, even if it wasn't optimal. Contrast Agricola, where even if you took an optimal move, you still might feel like it wasn't enough, and someone else definitely is mad at you for taking that move.

Future - I definitely want to play more of Orleans. Time will tell if it's a little "too" balanced, i.e. moves are so similarly valuable that basically anyone playing at least a baseline level of competence will score very close together. Nonetheless, close finishes are fun, and gaining VP is fun, and drawing from a bag is fun. Until Orleans gives me a bad experience (or fades more from memory, as it has before), that's good for me.
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Naye745 posted...

i enjoyed when i dream but it felt like the novelty would wear off sooner than later. neat concept though

magic maze rules though. i think that one still holds up very well after a healthy number of plays

yeah, like i said, WID should not be overplayed in any given session (whereas many party games beg for more and more hands)

glad to hear about MM. i hope to find it increasing in the future, since i bought it!
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SeabassDebeste posted...

Genres: Point salad, deck-building, point-to-point movement
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5

I'm in

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honestly, based on what you've expressed as preferences, i think you'd LOVE orleans
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39. Dixit (2008)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, clue-giving, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 30 minutes
Experience: 5+ plays (2015-2018) with 5-6 players
Previous ranks: 43/100 (2016), 43/80 (2018)

Summary - Every player has a handful of cards with nice, surreal art on them (like an angry dragon in a kitchen). The storyteller ("active player") chooses one and places it face-down and says something about the card ("my current mood"). Each other player then submits a card face-down to be mixed together, and then everyone except the storyteller guesses which card was the storyteller's. Points are awarded to the storyteller if some (but not all) players guess correctly, while points are awarded to each player who guessed correctly or misled others to pick their card.

Design - Dixit is simple and has become a modern classic. The game's replayability, like Mysterium's, is in some ways limited by its beautiful art on its gigantic cards. However, Dixit is game-ier than Mysterium and more replayable with its pictures, because you can't establish the same meta of "this card means this." Dixit's core conceit is ingenious: you want to give an accurate clue, but not too accurate. This can result in some bizarrely vague clues that lead to "oops" moments when your metaphorical sentence gets undercut by multiple people who play much better literal interpretations. A sure thing when you guess can turn out to be dead wrong. The same card will never get the same clue with the same people, because everyone should know it at that point.

The tradeoff on connecting well and laughing is that sometimes you're kind of shut out from the benefits. My biggest frustration from Dixit probably comes on turns when I guess wrong and no one guesses my card. This can happen fairly often if you lack "good" cards and you guess wrong, but that can happen multiple turns in a row before you become the guesser again. It's not really anyone's fault and can be a bit sour-feeling.

Experience - Even I'm a little puzzled why I have Dixit ranked this high. That said, like When I Dream, you can have bad hands but the overall play of a game of Dixit is usually pretty solid. Dixit is a bit more crowd-dependent than other games; you can learn a bit about how people's brains work, but if those brains aren't interesting to you, you'll probably prefer to explore your good friends' minds instead.

Future - I don't have a ton of desire to play Dixit, but won't really say no. It's best with a larger number of players, which we don't hit that often, and those players don't usually bring Dixit.
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Yeah Dixit is good stuff. A lot of the art is really neat.

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They had Dixit and like every expansion (seriously, it was like 10 boxes) for sale at Value Village for like $3, and I stacked them up in my cart and wandered off like 10 feet away to look at some more stuff, and came back and they were gone.

I didn't see anyone take it, but I'm guessing someone else noticed how good of a deal it was. The art is gorgeous and I'm still disappointed.

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ChaosTonyV4 posted...

They had Dixit and like every expansion (seriously, it was like 10 boxes) for sale at Value Village for like $3, and I stacked them up in my cart and wandered off like 10 feet away to look at some more stuff, and came back and they were gone.

I didn't see anyone take it, but I'm guessing someone else noticed how good of a deal it was. The art is gorgeous and I'm still disappointed.

Oh man, sorry to hear. That's a great deal.

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dixit is fine. i feel like if i played it when it was new and not already somewhat pass i would feel a little differently, but mostly i just felt like games that have more "game" like mysterium basically trumped it
the art, of course, is lovely and exceptional

i like orleans a lot though i've never gone down the rabbit hole with it. maybe it's because it's 2-3 hours long? played the first expansion co-op module once and it was awesome. i've heard the 2nd expansion is great. but yeah...still just have the base game and i'm cool with that. i worry that with a play group you'd develop 1-2 main strategies surrounding a couple of the base buildings and that's kind of a bummer.
also played its "sequel", altiplano, which had alpacas and inherent starting variety and i think i liked it less for some reason.


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38. BANG! The Dice Game (2013)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, hidden identity, dice-rolling, player combat
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20-30 minutes
Experience: 5+ plays (2015-2019) with 6-8 players
Previous ranks: 39/100 (2016), 35/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is assigned both a character with powers and a role which determines their allegiance: a sheriff (who is revealed), outlaws (who want to kill the sheriff), deputies (who support the sheriff), and a renegade (who wants to be the last man standing). On your turn, you roll and reroll a bunch of dice up to three times. The results generally let you shoot at your immediate neighbors or people one removed from immediate neighbors, or recover health. Oddly, you can also roll arrows, which will hurt you eventually.

Design - BTDG is a dice reimplementation of BANG!, a card game which has some interesting ideas: hidden identities, but the game isn't solely about deducing who is who, but rather about killing your enemies. The problem with BANG! is that it was slow as hell. Dodge cards and healing cards, along with lose-turn cards, basically ensure high variance with a high chance of being eliminated early and watching along.

While BTDG doesn't prevent you from being eliminated early, it has some nice controls on the playtime. Beer is available to heal you or anyone else (ahh, the wild west theming!), but you're twice as likely to roll bullets, and you can also roll arrows instead. As a result, the game is chaotic and violent with how it removes your health. (Amusingly, you can technically be forced to shoot a teammate). One of my personal favorite part about BTDG is how you can effectively be a dead man walking when you roll a bunch of arrows, but until someone rolls the final arrows to cause that HP to be drained, you're actually okay.

Playing BTDG falls just short of thrills. In particular, there is one notably superior hidden-identity-kill-the-opposing-team game. And a big part of that is that the "hidden identity" part of the game is relatively low. In all my games, the outlaws shoot the sheriff and then the deputies make themselves obvious by targeting outlaws themselves. The renegade should fight for Team Sheriff's behalf, but in my experience, the renegade has pretty much always died before getting down to the final few in a dramatic standoff.

Being a dice game, BTDG's outcomes are random. That's fine. It's the dramatic arc that you always want to see but are not guaranteed to get.

Experience - Back in 2015 when every group seemed big, BTDG hit the table a few times. It's not a perfect game, but it filled gaps very nicely. It's a game that has grown in my estimation since then for its compact playtime and nice way of assigning people to teams - always fun to give you an investment in the outcome even if you're eliminated. Along with Magic Maze, BTDG was on sale for under $10 at Barnes and Noble in December. I snagged it and have only gotten it to the table once and found the same high-floor experience I wanted.

Future - I don't play in mid-larger groups too often, but I feel pretty well-equipped for them now with BTDG! I have something of a vested interest in getting it to the table, even though I kind of see its value as being a low-usage type of game.
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I've played BTDG probably 20 times and I've never once won. I still love it, though.

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I really hate dice games, so Bang doesn't do much for me. Also it sucks to be eliminated early.

Though I love how the first game I played of it ended with the last players, the Sheriff and an Outlaw, dying simultaneously in a blaze of glory.

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original bang was fun for a bit but got played out. I've heard good things about the dice version but I've never had a chance to try it

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I usually loathe any games with dice, but I enjoy BTDG and like it quite a bit more than the original.

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there's a lot of good modern euros with dice, I think the randomness in a game with lots of mitigation and worthwhile decision making helps keep a game from feeling stale and solvable

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Naye745 posted...

original bang was fun for a bit but got played out. I've heard good things about the dice version but I've never had a chance to try it

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The Mana Sword posted...

I usually loathe any games with dice, but I enjoy BTDG and like it quite a bit more than the original.

What is it about dice you dont like? RNG?

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Yeah, mostly. I like my games with as little RNG as possible after setup.

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36. Glory to Rome (2005)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tableau-building, multi-use cards, role selection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 45-75 minutes
Experience: 8+ plays (2015-2018) with 2-5 players
Previous ranks: 83/100 (2016), 27/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a hand of multi-use cards: they can be played for their action, as buildings in your tableau, or as materials to construct your buildings. The game works with a role selection mechanism. A leader plays a card for its action, and others may use cards to follow that same action. There are myriad different buildings, but they all fall under the six types of actions: engine-building for action selection, erecting buildings, gathering materials, and banking materials.

Experience - My first two plays of Glory to Rome were relatively early on, with five players, one of whom was very slow and kind of airheaded while playing. The games lasted well over an hour, which... they shouldn't.

I had little interest in playing GtR again until my friends decided to print their own copy of the out-of-print game. Given that everyone else was requesting a copy, a bit of FOMO got me in. I wound up bringing the game to meetups and other game nights and started developing a much greater appreciation for it. Once it's played with players who know what they're doing and are committed to playing relatively quickly, you can knock out two games in the time of another middleweight euro.

Design - Glory to Rome is a mess to explain, and its player mat is hilariously messy before you know the rules. But once you get it, it's clean to conceptualize the flow: cards only become buildings if you draw them; wasted "pool" cards go into material slots; materials become used for buildings or the vault. It's an elegant system that requires nearly nothing except the massive deck of cards, player mats that only serve to organize your cards, and the foundation cards.

Decision-making is always tough in a games where cards are both the tableau items and the resources used to build those items. Only one in every three or four or cards in your hand, or even less than that, will ever actually go under construction. The rest will be used to take actions or fill those orders. There's other stuff to decide - which role you want, or what cards you can afford to throw into the pool to get snatched up by others' Laborers - but for the most part, you only have to understand the six suits and not the 50+ different cards. This eventually speeds up play a lot.

One of the pleasures in Glory to Rome, like in so many tableau-builders, is watching your engine spiral out of control. The buildings you construct give you powers like increasing your hand size or using different building materials in the future, while adding clientele increases your capacity to take actions both as a leader and as a follower. As the game goes on, you'll be more and more likely to follow each action. The pool of materials will also grow and shrink with time, providing a nice flow of materials from wasted-in-hand to stashed-in-buildings-or-vaults.

Future - Lacking a real box for Glory to Rome is probably one of its biggest hindrances in getting my attention - well, that and requiring three-to-five players to make it good. Two-player didn't work out well. I think I'll have to make a concerted effort to get this to the table again, because it's worth it.
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did you skip 37?

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Colegreen_c12 posted...

did you skip 37?

i most certainly did, thanks for the catch

37 next...!
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The Mana Sword posted...

Yeah, mostly. I like my games with as little RNG as possible after setup.

does this extend to games like grand austria hotel, too? the dice roll there happens each round but is a form of setup. and then there are card games too, of course...
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37. Power Grid (2004)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Economic, route-building, bidding
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-150 minutes
Experience: 3 plays (2015, 2016, 2019) with 5-6 players: Germany, China, India
Previous ranks: 35/100 (2016), 34/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs an energy company, delivering power to multiple cities, with a goal of maximizing the number of cities which you can supply with power. Each round of the game is split into three phases: auctions for power plant technology (which determines which resources are required to power the cities and how many cities you can power), expanding the power network (which is more expensive depending on the route it takes relative to your own network), buying resources (which become more expensive as they grow scarcer), and finally, consuming those resources to power your cities and gain money.

Design - There are two inaccessible elements to Power Grid. First is the arithmetic. Unfortunately, there's no way around it: you'll spend yourself down to your last few dollars in Power Grid fairly often, and with a bidding mechanism as free as Power Grid's is, that will often be a good business decision to math it out. Secondly, it is fiddly. It literally has a phase known as the "bureaucracy" phase where resource replenishment happens, and there are special rules about how to refill the power plants for offer, and special rules again for "Step 2" and "Step 3."

It's all in the service of a good game. The three main decision-making phases to Power Grid play extremely differently, but all three of them are centered around good ol' cash. (Power Grid's rubber-band effect essentially also is centered around being an economic discount; getting later pickings mainly just means paying a premium for what you wnat/need.)

The first two phases individually are also fun even in isolation: Auctions are pretty much fun by default. An individual auction in Power Grid is quite vanilla, but the way the cascading auctions matters is really interesting: you can buy a maximum of one power plant and each player gets a chance to get a power plant. Together, that means if you buy the first offer, then the remaining players will each get to contend with fewer opponents. Going first in the turn order is arguably the most punishing here, as you may get stuck having to pass if you dislike the initial offer, and you're guaranteed to get locked out of good plant bids later if you can't persuade someone else to buy your first offer.

Then there's building networks. I love the way the board grows in pretty much any route-building game. It has this great visual appeal. As space becomes more contentious, expansion becomes more difficult/costly. I like that unlike in Catan, you can't be completely boxed in (though you can be de facto boxed, when it's too expensive to go anywhere - but even this is temporary). While it's not as dramatic as blowing an army off the map, it can be fun to surprise someone by occuping a city close to them by going through their city. Building multiple routes in a single turn is very satisfying and feels like a worthy reward for generating or saving all that money.

People complain about and laud Power Grid's rubber-band mechanism, which is based on how many cities you have already entered. I think it's generally clever, even if it overcorrects by a bit - it tends to keep people holding a similar number of cities. You might be tempted to turtle and keep the best turn order for a while, and there are times when this is a valid strategy... but being an economic game, your revenues will grow more when you power more cities, and the whole point of keeping to a few cities would be to consolidate wealth... so you can expand. My skill level isn't high, but the incentives seem fair to me.

Experience - Perhaps key to my enjoyment and admiration of Power Grid (and also the reason I've played it so few times): I've never had to handle bureaucracy myself. Understanding it doesn't seem to be key to enjoying the game, which further has me wary of its fiddliness. Anyway, despite that multiple friends own it, and that I quite admire it, I've only played it three times, and a different version each time. I haven't performed particularly well, but Power Grid's blend of significant interaction (on the map and in auctions and competing for resources and map-space) and solitary puzzle (how should I value this plant, and when/where should I expand?) has made it satisfying each time.

Future - Power Grid is a tough one to get to the table, precisely because of its daunting bureaucracy and fiddlier rules. (Each special version of it also has special rules, like China's command economy.) Given that PG also can't handle two players, it's a tough sell to enter my collection. But I am optimistic and would like to get it to the table this year.
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power grid's a little heavier than i like, but for an economic game it stands the test of time as one of the greatest of the lot. also i think it's neat that it actually plays BETTER with 4-6 players, as most euros are better at their lower counts.

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yup! i think that's a testament to power grid's interactivity compared to other euros, and the satisfaction in having a full used map.
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Also, I want to clarify my last post. I don't dislike dice rolling (I actually really enjoy it), and I think randomness is important in games to keep people on their toes and make things fresh, but I HATE games where your entire turn is decided by what you roll on the dice. Even if it uses Yatzhee-style re-rolling it's still really annoying (and I think Yatzhee is much better about it, since you can decide what you do with your roll, instead of the roll deciding what you can do).

It just plains sucks to have a turn where, if you need to attack, you don't roll enough attack. Maybe you roll a bunch of healing instead, but you're at max health anyway, so you basically waste your entire turn. I never like that feeling. I just don't like games that are based all around your dice rolls, or where your entire turn is frequently wasted by dice rolls. For example, there are a lot of games that to include RPG-style mechanics, but want to simplify things by not having an accuracy stat or to-hit system. So whether EVERY attack will hit is decided by the same dice rolls, often with rates as low as a two or three out of six chance, which is awful if you need to attack every turn. I feel dice rolling is fine to add unpredictability, but if it's the sole deciding factor on whether or not you actually do something on your turn then I'm not going to think highly of the game.

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35. Viticulture (2013)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Worker placement, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-90 minutes
Experience: 6-7 plays of Essential Edition over 6-7 sessions with 2, 4, 5 players (2019) incl 3 plays with Tuscany: EE
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs a winery. Via worker placement, grapes are planted, then harvested, aged, and made into wine. Structures need to be built to accommodate the wine or to grow grapes, and playable cards are drawn each round. Worker placement takes place across seasons; everyone must pass within a season before the first player of the year begins the next season. Turn order is determined via a form of bidding; you get to choose where in the turn order you want to play, and the lower in the turn order it is, the richer the bonus you get for choosing it. The game is played to a fixed number of VP.

Design - Among worker placement games, Viticulture is for the most part surprisingly forgiving. You don't need to feed your workers; you can build your own board to mamke it more resilient in the absence of other stuff to do; you've got visitor cards which can replicate a lot of the actions but more efficiently; and when all is lost, you've still got one bigger worker who lets you take an already blocked action.

That allows Viticulture to be pleasant, which is suitable for a game that's about making wine. It has excellent components, with a lovely agricultural big board for worker placement and a functional player mat for your own brewing process. The decision to use glass stones to indicate both grapes and wines is excellent, and they've got a bit of weight that makes them somewhat resilient to jolts. And mostly, it feels really good to make wine: Double-plant! Massive harvests! Fulfill big orders! Extra victory points on certain action spots! Watch that money come rolling in and watch those VP explode in the final rounds!

And it's a good thing the game feels good, because it compensates for Viticulture's lack of tightness in design - it doesn't have the leeway to be tight in actions or resources. There are myriad design decisions that feel like they could have been just tightened up a little bit.

Take money for example. Money is very useful at the beginning of the game, because it allows you to gain more workers and upgrade your structures to get your engine going. The flow of cash is tight-ish at first, though you can get an infusion by selling your fields. As you start selling wines, however, your income rises. Sell a few wines and suddenly you've got yourself a nice stream of money coming in each turn! The economy works! Except... if you sell a few wines, the game is ending that turn, or the next turn. the 20 VP threshold comes up relatively quickly, and fulfilling even a single wine order is the largest source of VP. As your cashflow increases later in the game, the utility of that money decreases: while Tuscany adds a better trade spot, there's nothing particularly useful to buy with money for the most part, once your engine is set.

Then there are the cards themselves, which feel... odd. Some clearly weren't desgined with scaling in mind, like the ones that have you collect either two coins or 1 VP from each opponent (obviously OP in a high-player-count-game, while being a weird sort of 1 VP move in a smaller game), and then of course the sequencing matters (a "plant vines" card is worthless in the late-game).

The game does provide non-wine strategies to winning as well. While this isn't a full-on criticism - the game definitely benefits a good wine-engine over anything else - VP seem available from odd sources. It's purely supplemental to wine-making, but you can get VP for actions like giving tours, selling your fields, going sixth in the turn order... which make it feel like a game about scurrying around the margins at times. These points can of course add up.

While the seasons give Viticulture a lot of its most distinct flavor, they actually prove a bit of an issue in the 2p game, in my opinion - and that's the seasons and turn order system. You lose the fun element of bonuses when you play with two, and there is only one spot for each action, making it more possible to be blocked - but Viticulture, as we examined above, isn't designed for this type of tightness in actions when it's so loose and unpolished in other areas. I love that there are different seasons, and I love the unique way to approaching the turn order track.

What I don't love is that turn order is so drastically important: because of the seasonal structure, the first player goes first in each season. There's only one space on the board to sell your wine in the final year. The final year, by the way, will very often have two or more players who have the ability to exceed the VP threshold. But with blocking, this could easiy mean that the final round is decided by turn order. I like jockeying for position, but this seems like not a great look for the game.

Experience - I tried out Viticulture at Origins 2019 and thought it was decent, one of the three-to-five best games I played that weekend. Gaming pal #1 was a fan, too, but it wasn't super-high on my radar until a meetup pal listed it together with its expansion (which I had yet to try) for $30. My bigger complaints only emerged later, the issues with turn-order and blocking, in the two-player game. While I'm not thrilled with it, though, it stays clean and enjoyable at counts above two, and even at two it's a little less punishing with automa rules added in, which opens up the space.

Future - Well, I own it, so I want it played more! I still have a special workers module I have yet to try out from the Tuscany expansion. It's not going to become a top-ten type of game, but as a pleasant middleweight euro with gentle WP, it's doing its job.
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not a lot of wine fans here
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I'm a wine fan!

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It's funny that a couple of you guys consider Power Grid to be too heavy and too much bureaucracy to play very often. Among my friends, it's one of the games we play most often because it's simple, easy to teach and turns go quickly. Power Grid is definitely one of my all time favorites.

While I don't like wine, I do love Viticulture. It is competitive while somehow still feeling relaxing. James Stegmeier really is a great designer and a nice guy. I have played Viticulture and Euphoria with him and different Gen cons over the year and had a great time with each.

I have never played Glory to Rome, but have always wanted to. I do enjoy the designer's follow up game - Innovation. For anyone who has played both, any thoughts on which game is more enjoyable?

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i always thought i'd be interested in glory to rome, but i didn't really like innovation after giving it a few tries. given the difficulty in finding gtr nowadays, i haven't been interested in trying to track it down lol

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34. Scythe (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Resource management, dudes on a map, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 75-105 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 4-5 sessions (2016-2018) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 25/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player commands workers and mechs on a pastoral, steampunk 1920s hybrid, in charge of a nation with variable player powers. On each turn you take a top- and/or bottom-row action on your player mat. The top actions let you move on the map, generating resources, and bolstering your strength. The resources you get let you take the bottom-row actions, which boost your action efficiency, piggyback neighbors' actions, deploy mechs, and build structures. You get stars for going all the way up on any track, winning battles, and achieving objectives on cards, and you get victory points for stars, territories controlled, structures, coins, and leftover resources.

Design - There's no single thing at which Scythe excels, other than production value. The art is beautiful, the meeples and resources are solid and clear, and (best of all) the player mat is double-layered, with amazing indentations for the various pieces of wood which sit on it.

I enjoy moving around the map in Scythe all right - it's bit of an ancillary thing to do, but eventually you can pick fights and go to the factory and so on and so forth. But that player-board is really the lifeblood of Scythe, and it functions largely solitarily. You can't take the same action twice in a row in general, but you can chain together moves. Figuring out how to spread out (or consolidate!) your dudes so you can max out each production item, so you can maximize your efficiency to take the right top-row actions to get the most possible bottom-row benefits feels so good. Produce oil and food on turn 1, then spend oil on turn 1 to upgrade your enlist feature... then turn 2, move but enlist, and your movement and enlist features are both upgraded to move more pieces and enlist at cheaper cost, respectively. IT FEELS GOOD.

You can actually accomplish all six stars without ever fighting by building a fast-spreading engine with your personal board, and honestly, that's probably the part of Scythe that feels the best. The map, again, is very pretty. You probably do want to get some encounter cards. But other than dope art, the theme is comically thin, and the only real reason you're getting those encounter cards is so you can get resources and improve your engine. Same deal with the factory; you get area control points at the factory and you get to spread out, but in reality it's all about the dope action you can take, which feeds even more efficiency.

There's nothing really wrong with a solitaire efficiency game. And there's nothing wrong with incredibly nice components. These . That said, Scythe is hilariously overproduced for what the gameplay is - it looks like an epic wargame, and in fact it's a solitary euro where at the end, you might have a conflict or two to spread out and hope your guys stay spread out.

Experience - My first play of Scythe was long and miserable as everyone was trying to learn the game and I was boxed in, but since then, I've had several nice experiences, especially once the second-row actions were cleanly integrated into people's strategies. Again, it feels weirdly dissonant to be staring at your player board the whole game instead of the gorgeous map, but it works for what it is.

Future - I'm not exactly craving Scythe, but just remembering its smoothness and table presence makes me happy about hte prospect of it coming back to the table.
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aww yea Scythe

only played it once but definitely trying to play it again soon

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I have Scythe on Steam but have yet to truly dig in

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And there's my #1 down. Lame pick but it's popular for a reason!

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scythe is fine, it's not my type of game but it's certainly good

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scythe is a very demanding game

i think it has the least intuitive control scheme out of any board game i've played. when i have any new or fairly casual players, this one needs to stay in the box because they're going to be frustrated and walloped.

i imagine it's pretty good if you have a group that regularly improves at it

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I played Scythe once and hated basically everything about it
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cyko posted...

It's funny that a couple of you guys consider Power Grid to be too heavy and too much bureaucracy to play very often. Among my friends, it's one of the games we play most often because it's simple, easy to teach and turns go quickly. Power Grid is definitely one of my all time favorites.

While I don't like wine, I do love Viticulture. It is competitive while somehow still feeling relaxing. James Stegmeier really is a great designer and a nice guy. I have played Viticulture and Euphoria with him and different Gen cons over the year and had a great time with each.

I have never played Glory to Rome, but have always wanted to. I do enjoy the designer's follow up game - Innovation. For anyone who has played both, any thoughts on which game is more enjoyable?

well, innovation ranked quite low on this list, and if you look at GTR, it also ranked very low the first few times i played it! i'm very interested in playing innovation more to see if it will rise, though i'm a little unsure about adding a big question mark with a skill curve to my collection. GTR doesn't have a "take that" mechanic like innovation does and it's better at 3+ than at 2.

NBIceman posted...

And there's my #1 down. Lame pick but it's popular for a reason!

what else ranks highly for you?

banananor posted...

scythe is a very demanding game

i think it has the least intuitive control scheme out of any board game i've played. when i have any new or fairly casual players, this one needs to stay in the box because they're going to be frustrated and walloped.

i imagine it's pretty good if you have a group that regularly improves at it. i've played it maybe 5 times and i still don't think i have a deeper sense of what i'm doing and why i win or lose compared to the other players' engines

fair - in the times i've played it, i've concentrated so much on my own efficiency that i haven't concerned myself too much with others'. deciding the order in which to upgrade/enlist has been my big question mark usually, or how fast to rush the factory. i wouldn't call it particularly demanding though, among middleweight euros

th3l3fty posted...

I played Scythe once and hated basically everything about it

what specifically? i had a negative first experience too, but admittedly some of that was being really bad at it.
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33. Villagers (2019)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Card-drafting, tableau-building, set collection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-40 minutes
Experience: 5-8 plays over 4-6 sessions (2019-2020)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is attempting to populate their village with villager cards, which come in several different suits. The game is split between a drafting phase, during which each player takes turns drafting one villager from the market, and a building phase, during which each player chooses up to their build limit of cards in hand to play. Villagers are free to build except the ones that pay other villagers (if present in anyone's village), and the cases where you have to discard a card to create a base villager. Some villagers require predecessors (like evolving Pokemon). There are two scoring phases; some villagers score both times and others only at the end.

Design - The great appeal of Villagers is that despite having a market of cards that you freely can draft, it plays very fast. The analysis paralysis is greatly reduced because cards themselves are simple: it's easy to recognize which suit they are (they're delineated by color), and most of them simply provide victory points, engine-building symbols, or a chain. There are some exceptions where you'll have to read more - you can benefit from having some when someone builds a specific other villager; the red ones are action cards that don't go in your tableau; and some Solitary cards can reward you with synergies - but overall, these actually either guide your strategy or fit neatly into it.

The biggest flaw I've noticed is the building choke. Without a good knowledge of what suits to mine (as you can draw facedown cards knowing only their suits), you can be shut out of getting extra builds for your villagers. These build symbols are vital, since no matter how many villagers you draft, you can only add to your board in accordance with the build symbols. This can result in perhaps the worst part of an engine-builder: when losing means you get to do less - your build phases will be shorter than everyone else's build phases if you can add fewer villagers.

Experience - Villagers isn't a super-remarkable design. It gets here largely on the back of becoming a go-to in the last half-year or so, after a friend got it on Kickstarter. Some setup aside that I've never had to participate in, it's a high-floor, low-ceiling type of experience that always has a few exciting turns - looking for that big chain to complete the Jeweler, or hitting a dramatic Solitary card, or even just finding a way to pay yourself multiple times. On the flip-side are the times hwen someone gets locked out of building more than two villagers for the first few rounds (in a game that can have only five or six rounds), but that's the nature of the beast.

Future - At the moment, Villagers appears to be one of the short euros du jour. I don't see it as being spectacular, but it's so seamlessly pleasant that I have no reason to object. While I don't particularly thirst to play it, it's become an easy answer for "what should we play" when we've got less than an hour and aren't ready to turn to the higher-energy, less-strategic games just yet.
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That sounds pretty fun.

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not enough space left on this bookshelf gonna need another one for 32 more board games

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This is a worthy topic to get to 500

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Glenn_and_Toad posted...

This is a worthy topic to get to 500

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And so it shall be

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