He who will not Risk

"He who will not risk cannot win." -- John Paul Jones

1980 reprint of the
1959 classic (but lengthy) Risk

My son (15) and his friend and I played Risk (designer Rob Daviau, publisher Hasbro) Sunday afternoon.  I should note that I was never a big fan of the original Risk (designer Albert Lamorisse [director of the French short film The Red Balloon], publisher Parker Brothers), largely because it simply took too long to play.  It didn't really seem to be much of a strategy game, either, at least not at the age I was playing.  A lot of pushing and shoving, taking territory only to have it taken back. Worst, if it was a multi-player session, it became a player-elimination game, which as anyone who has followed my blog knows is a fundamental flaw in any multi-player game outside of a tournament.

2008 Revised (and much more
enjoyable) Edition of Risk

My opinion of the new Risk, however, is quite the opposite.  With the introduction of objectives and the change in the way cards are traded in for armies, players have some real decisions to make, and that's something I appreciate in a game.  Particularly nice is being able to identify a winner in a reasonable amount of time, rather than requiring world domination simply to end the game.  Generally speaking, a winner emerges long before any single player is really close to elimination.  I think I most appreciate the fact that the facelift addressed only the weaknesses of the game and retained many recognizable, likable elements, right down to the combat mechanism - which is an imperfect attrition system but still an interesting tactical problem at times.

In our three-player game, my capital was in Greenland, my son's in Australia, and his friend's in Argentina.  My son easily took over Australia and moved quickly into southern Asia.  In so doing he completed the "Control 18 territories" objective.  His friend took over South America and a substantial chunk of North America.  I sought my first objective by taking over all of Europe, and succeeded only on my last dice roll.  So I was in a pretty vulnerable position even after my end-of-turn redeployment, and feared that my son's Asian army would roll into Russia.

My son smelled blood in Asia, however, and ignored me in favor of trying to take over the continent.  His friend started the game with a strong holding in Japan, however, and would not fall, so my son's Asian campaign stalled.  His friend sought to finish taking over North America, but he, too, could not complete the task.  As a result, my European position remained unperturbed, which made my next decision rather straightforward - to take over Africa.  Europe gave me five additional armies, and I started everything in central Africa, whence came the great tide.  Once I'd conquered Africa, I agonized over whether to jump the Atlantic and attack Brazil to break up the South American stronghold - but that position wouldn't have been as strong (given the way I left my armies) as it was to attack the Middle East and shore up the defense of my eastern border.  At the end of my turn, I'd taken over my second continent and thus completed my second objective ("Control two continents").

My son and his friend discussed the fact that I held everything from South Africa to Greenland and ought to be squeezed from both sides.  It certainly would have made sense at that point in the game - after only two turns, when I held two objectives of three needed to win - to gang up on me and take apart my continental holdings.  Strangely, however, the desire to control Asia still consumed my son, and after re-taking the Middle East, he turned away from European Russia and instead attacked his friend's holdings, east across the steppes.  His friend then nearly took over North America at that point, but I held my ground in Greenland.  At that point, my continental holdings still remained intact, and I started my third turn with 16 armies and seven cities.  The next step was obvious.  I attacked Brazil to obtain my eighth city and third objective, to win the game.

So I won in three turns, largely I think because my son and his friend allowed their own agendas (occupation of Asia and North America, respectively) to distract them from stopping me from winning.  Nevertheless, I came away convinced more than ever that this re-vamping of Risk has breathed new life into an old classic and made it a fun game to play, far more fun that the original ever was.

Sacked in Citadels

A couple of weeks ago, our good friends Sheila and Keith invited us and our friend Jeff over for dinner and games.  The five of us played Citadels (designer Bruno Faidutti, publisher Fantasy Flight Games), which turned out to be terrific fun.  As it happened, Sheila had an extra copy, so we went home with Citadels as a kind of door prize.  Later we learned that she and Keith had been playing two-player and really enjoying it, so we tried it ourselves this evening.

Citadels has become my favorite game of all - even over 7 Wonders.  The brilliance of the game is in the role selection and sequential role resolution.  When the five of us played, we all seemed to value the Architect most of all for the two free cards he'd offer - until someone would always select the Assassin and kill the Architect.  That seemed to be de riguer in our session that night.  So then people would shy away from the Architect unless they had some reason to believe that they wouldn't be assassinated.  There was a lot of second-guessing, and at one point I had a particularly lucky turn when I selected the thief with the expectation that Sheila (who had six gold pieces) would select the Magician for his card-exchange ability (because she kept complaining about her cards).  My bet paid off, and Sheila was set back more than a turn in building construction when I took her stack of money away.  (If looks could kill .... :-) )

So, fast forward to this evening:  Kathy and I decided to try the two-player variant ourselves, in which each player ends up with two roles.  The brilliance of the two-player game is that you can usually narrow down your opponent's likely roles to two out of four possibilities.  There is often a kind of, "you expect me to take the merchant, so I should take the bishop, except that you know I know you expect me to take the merchant, so you think I'll take the bishop, so I should take the merchant..."  

Kathy's winning Citadel
at the base of her wineglass

 In our case, I think I was too willing to build small buildings with the intent to jump to an early lead and get control of triggering the end of the game.  My building efforts stalled out, however, and Kathy ended up building her seventh and eighth buildings in one turn.  That undermined my selection of the Warlord, who had planned to burn down her Church (but could not do so once she had eight buildings).  She ended up beating me both in building points and in building the eighth building first.  Final score - Kathy 36, Paul 31.

I really, really like this game.  I am surprised it has not caught on at PrezCon nor at the World Boardgaming Championships.  Maybe I should do something about that.

Poor Man's Resistance

I stumbled upon a review of The Resistance and immediately thought two things:
(1) this game of hidden identity and "social deduction" should beat Are You a Werewolf? hands down (no small feat, since I'm a huge Werewolf fan) and
(2) this game can be played easily with a small subset of a normal deck of cards.

The game is designed for five to ten players.  Players secretly determine their identities as rebels (attempting to conduct missions) or spies (attempting to sabotage the rebels' efforts) as follows:  From a normal deck of cards, select a number of face cards equal to the number of players such that a third of the cards (rounded up) are red face cards and the remainder are black face cards.  Shuffle the selected face cards and deal them face down, one to each player.  Each player looks at his or her face card to determine whether he or she is a rebel (black) or spy (red).  These secret identity cards remain face down in front of the players for the remainder of the game.

One player is randomly selected as the leader.  Players shield their eyes so that no one can see any of the others.  The leader announces, "spies reveal," and the spies (only) open their eyes and look to see who their fellow spies are.  The leader announces, "spies hide," and the spies close their eyes.  The leader announces "everyone open," and all players open their eyes and begin the game.  By this procedure, all spies should know who all the spies are (and therefore who all the rebels are), whereas each rebel knows only his own identity.  Unlike Werewolf, this is the only occasion in the game when it will be necessary for players to cover their eyes.

The remainder of the game consists of a series of missions.  For each mission, the leader assigns several players to participate in the mission.  The number of people that the leader assigns depends on both the number of players in the game and the mission number to be executed; it varies from two to three players (in the first attempted mission) to three to five players (in the fifth attempted mission) and can be discerned in the table appearing in an image of the gameboard posted on boardgamegeek.

Once the mission team has been selected, players vote openly whether to approve or disapprove the selected mission team.  [Edited for correctness.  In my original post, I mistakenly indicated that the vote to approve or disapprove the mission team was done by secret ballot. - PDO]

If the mission team has been disapproved, the mission is aborted, the role of leader rotates one player to the left, and play resumes as above with the new leader assigning a new mission team to be voted on again by all the players.  (Note that the aborted mission does not "count" as an attempted mission, so the number of players on the mission team does not change.)  If five consecutive missions are aborted, then the game is over, and the spies win.

If the mission team has been approved, then the mission team members (only) each get one red non-face card and one black non-face card.  From these two cards, each mission team member secretly selects a card to execute (black) or sabotage (red) the mission.  Each mission team member turns in his vote face-down to the leader, who shuffles the votes and then turns them face up to determine whether the mission succeeds (all black) or fails (at least one red).  There is an exception to the requirements for a successful mission:  In games of at least seven players, on the fourth mission only, at least two sabotage (red) votes are required to cause a mission to fail.

If this was the third successful mission, then the game is over, and the rebels win.  If this was the third failed mission, then the game is over, and the spies win.  Otherwise, the role of leader rotates one player to the left, and play resumes as above with the new leader assigning a new mission team to be voted on by all the players.

The brilliance of this game relative to Werewolf is that it requires no referee (i.e. everybody gets to play) and - most important to me - does not eliminate players over the course of the game.  Also nice is that it is only necessary for players to cover their eyes once at the beginning of the game to allow spies to identify one another (unlike Werewolf, which requires players to close their eyes in every round).

The reviews I have read and seen are quite exciting, and I look forward to trying this game out with a decent-sized group.

I should add that the original game comes with a small expansion set of cards that provide the leader with some additional "powers" to make the game more interesting, so there's motivation for buying the game regardless.

Release of the eagerly awaited Trains Planes and Automobiles

Well, it sneaked into the marketplace with little fanfare, but Worthington Games released my game Trains Planes and Automobiles under their new Blue Square label at Origins Game Fair last weekend.  It is not yet available from them online as they work out their marketing strategy.  More to follow.

Busted by blue bacillus

Kathy and I tried a two-player session of Pandemic on Tuesday afternoon.  This was, I think, our fourth or fifth game, and we're definitely still getting the hang of strategy in keeping the diseases under control.  Our first two games were two- and four-player Introductory games, which we won easily enough.  I think we won our first two-player Normal game as well.  We started to think the game was a little too easy - until we lost our first three-player Normal game a few weeks ago.

Blue outbreaks overwhelm our feeble
efforts to control the disease.

Well, our suspicions that this game really isn't as easy as it looks were confirmed.  In our latest effort, Kathy's Dispatcher and my Scientist were foiled despite our early discoveries of cures of the red and yellow diseases.  While we scrambled through southwestern Asia and Europe to treat the black and blue diseases, consecutive outbreaks in Toronto and Chicago consumed the entire supply of blue cubes and ended the game in defeat for the Centers of Disease Control (CDC).

Pandemic really is a fun game, and the nice thing is that our kids will sometimes join us as well.  I think this will become something of a family favorite.

Latest on the Eagerly Awaited Game

My publisher tells me that they are awaiting delivery of the mapboards, the last component to assemble my Eagerly Awaited Game.  I haven't heard a peep about marketing other than the intent to release the game at the Origins Game Fair if they get the boards in time.  They don't want to kick off the website until they know they're ready to deliver, so we'll see what the actual release date is.  Once it's out, I intend to make sure everybody knows about it!

Two-player Wonders

My wife and I have finally got the hang of the two-player rules for 7 Wonders, currently my favorite game to play.  We played a session this afternoon, right around the time we made the transition from iced tea and iced coffee to wine and beer.

Kathy had the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus ('B' side), and I had the Statue of Zeus ('A' side).  Interestingly, Kathy spent nearly all six turns in the first age acquiring different resource-producing structures, largely because the Mausoleum demands a lot of variety to build the three stages.  I started early with a military strategy, which worked for the first age, but Kathy responded with two military cards in the second age, and stayed ahead of me thereafter.

Kathy's impressive array of
blue civil structures at the foot
of her wine glass

My fallback was going to be the blue civil buildings, but she raced ahead of me in those as well, in large part because she had such a variety of resource production as well as the benefit at each stage of her wonder of getting a free building out of the discard pile.  She was very aggressive about building blue civil high-point buildings - and keeping them out of my hands - as well as completing a set of three green technologies.  With all of that, she completely overcame the Mausoleum 'B' side's disadvantage of low point potential and beat me 58 points to 51.

Chicago Cribbage - a new appreciation

Kathy and I had an occasion that required a portable game yesterday, so she brought several options, and I settled on Chicago Cribbage, which I reviewed here once before.  In our previous games, we'd explored each of the Chicago cards in isolation as to optimum opportunities for play and the poker aspect of reading one's opponent's face to consider whether it's time to play a "gotcha" card like "Reverse Counting" or "Trade Hands."

In yesterday's session, another tactical consideration emerged - the use of Chicago cards as response actions.  Two combinations came up in yesterday's game.  First, we realized that the negative effects of a "Reverse Counting" card can be mitigated by playing "No Fifteens" when one's own hand would otherwise score heavily in fifteen-point combinations.  Now the order of play is important.  We'd already realized that a "Reverse Counting" is most effective when played on the dealer, who will count negative for both his hand and the crib.  But since the dealer's opportunity to play a Chicago card comes after his opponent's, he has the opportunity to respond with a "No Fifteens."  

Second, we'd already recognized that an advantageous situation in which to play "No Fifteens" is when one holds a hand that scores well but has no fifteens.  So a logical response by the dealer to "No Fifteens" is to play "Trade Hands," so as to take advantage of the opponent's well-prepared hand and otherwise-well-played "No Fifteens."  

Now that these counter-moves are evident, they become considerations for the non-dealer as to whether to play a Chicago card for which the dealer still holds the counter-card.  Similarly, that means that the counter-cards might be held in reserve rather than played aggressively.  

I'm finding that this conceptually simple variant on classic cribbage has layers of depth that I hadn't originally appreciated.