Games for a family of three (or four)

A co-worker recently asked me for recommendations for boardgames that she and her family might play together.  They have a 17-year-old son.  They need something that is perhaps more than just a "gateway" game, but not by much.  They play Settlers of Catan, but that seems to be about as complicated as they want to get.  They like Apples to Apples, Taboo, and Catch Phrase, but those games are more suited to a larger group.

East India Company playtest

While on vacation, I arm-twisted my family into playtesting my work-in-progress "East India Company" again.  I'm not proud of it, but it was necessary, and it was fruitful.

In this round, I incorporated a number of notes from our previous playtest.  I drastically - and successfully - simplified the process for declaring dividends for bonus points.  Also, since the previous game ended just when it seemed to get going, I lengthened the game from a minimum of 11 to a minimum of 15 turns.  I made this adjustment despite my general concern about the overall playtime.  

Ethics in gaming: Reflections on the WBC seminar

[While on vacation in North Carolina, in anticipation of going to the World Boardgaming Championships in Pennsylvania in a few weeks, I scheduled a re-post of one of my most popular articles, a reflection on the "Ethics in Gaming" seminar from the 2011 WBC convention.  Originally appeared 15 August 2011]

Last week at the World Boardgaming Championships, Joel Tamburo led a fascinating seminar on ethics in gaming.  I had no idea what to expect and was pleasantly surprised at the directions that the conversation took.  Right away, the group explored the question of whether it is ethically acceptable to lie in the course of a game.  The immediate example that came up is Diplomacy, a game only half-facetiously blamed for ruining good friendships.  A consensus emerged that there is an understanding that in a game like Diplomacy, lying is an expected part of negotiation.  Although success requires alliances, winning sooner or later requires betrayal.  So as long as it is understood among players that lying is - or can be - part of the game, then that becomes part of the game's acceptable code of ethics.

Tumbling through Troyes

[I'm on vacation, so I scheduled this post on my early impressions of Troyes to publish while I'm away.]

I put Troyes (designers Sebastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, and Alain Orban; artist Alexandre Roche; publisher Z-man Games) on my Christmas wish list based largely on Ender Wiggins' description as "perhaps the best medium-weight game for Euro gamers that emerged in 2010."  So far I've only had three sessions, all of them two-player with my wife.  We only got through one or two rounds the first time, and I don't think we finished the second time either, but one recent evening we got all the way to the end, despite ourselves.

I can see the appeal of this game to the Euro crowd.  Players are dealing in dice in three colors, influence points, deniers (money), meeples, and victory points.  Actions involve frequent exchanges among the different elements - spending influence to modify dice, using dice to obtain influence, using dice to acquire money, spending money to obtain dice, spending influence to obtain meeples, spending money to move meeples to take actions ... The astute reader will have caught on by now that Troyes is steeped in the Euro practice of resource optimization among disparate parameters.  As a dice placement game, Troyes adds dice luck to the mix.

The activity cards in three categories - clerical, military, and civil - provide the primary engines for converting dice (the workforce) into money, points, influence, or even modifications to other dice, with varying degrees of efficiency.  We are still new to the game and trying to grasp the activity card symbols relative to their actual functions; as it is, we refer to the Appendix page every time a new card is turned up to be sure we understand how it works.

My orange meeples executing my strong military strategy - three in the castle plus the Diplomat and Troubadour

One source of confusion to us early on is the pricing for purchasing dice from other players or from the neutral district to use in your own activity.  The important thing to remember before buying any dice is that for any given action, a player may opt to use one, two, or three dice.

• If one die will be used, the price of buying a die is two deniers.  
• If two dice will be used in the action, the price for each die purchased will be four deniers.  Note that purchased dice may be combined with a player's own dice to complete an action.
  So for example, if I want to use two dice to conduct an action - one of my own, and one that I purchase from a neutral district - then I have to pay four deniers for the die that I purchase.  (That one die would only have cost two deniers if it was the only die that I used in my action, but the fact that I am using it as part of an action involving two dice means that the price for the purchased die is four deniers.)
  If I want to purchase two dice to perform an action, the price of each die is four deniers, and so the total cost is eight deniers.
• If three dice will be used in the action, the price for each die purchased is six deniers.
  If I'm only buying one die and combining it with two of my own to complete a three-die action, then the cost of the die that I buy is six deniers.
  If I'm using one of my own dice and buying two more, the price of each is six deniers, and so the total cost to me is 12 deniers.
  If I'm buying three dice to use in a three-die action, then the total cost is 18 deniers.

An aspect of Troyes that I've really come to appreciate even in the few games that I've played is the great potential for replayability.  In any given game, there are nine actions available by the third round - three clerical, three military, and three civil.  But the first, second, and third actions in each category can be very different from one game to the next, so the combinations of options (and the interplay among the options) make for many different possible decision spaces.  Unlike Agricola, in which you can anticipate the same 14 action spaces to come out in roughly the same sequence every game, Troyes offers the numerous possibilities of multiple combinations.  That random configuration makes for a game requiring fluid strategy and flexible approach to make the most of available options.

So while my wife has developed something of a dislike for dice-placement games (another being Roma), I'm hoping to get an opportunity to explore Troyes further and understand how it comes together.

What to pack for a vacation

[While on vacation in North Carolina, I scheduled this re-post of my vacation boardgaming selections from last summer.  Originally appeared 29 July 2011]

We recently went on a vacation in the West Virginia mountains for some white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and a zip line canopy tour.  (ACE Adventures, if you're interested.)  In the absence of internet and video games, we anticipated the need for some quality family downtime in the cabin.  So of course that means boardgames!

Last time we went, three years ago, we brought Uno and Guillotine, both of which were successful choices.  This time we wanted more options without having to bring the entire game closet.  So we put together a packing list of games that most of us like.  Everybody got to pick at least one game.  We wanted to have at least three options each for two, three, four, or five players.  At least three of the games had to be accessible to the youngest of us (ten years old).  We were mindful of space limitations, but we didn't necessarily cramp our style if there was something we really wanted to bring.  Here's the list we came up with:

• Chicago Cribbage
• Incan Gold
• Citadels (note - this link plays music)
• Ace of Aces
• Catch Phrase
• Martian Fluxx
• Travel Scrabble
• Trains Planes and Automobiles
• Empyrean Inc
• Forbidden Island
• Car-Go Othello
• Pirateer
• Uno H2O Splash

This turned out to be a great list for several reasons, not the least of which is nearly all the games fit in a small tote bag.  (At one point I had 7 Wonders on the list, but the box is a bit bulky, and we already had plenty of options.)  The nice thing about this selection of games is that it has variety, nobody has to play if they don't want to, but we can always find options for any subset of the five of us.

So what did we actually play?  Well, Car-Go Othello got a lot of action during the six-hour drive to West Virginia.  The brilliance in the design of this game is that there are no separate parts.  The board (a six-by-six simplification of the eight-by-eight original Othello) has an integrated rotating piece for each space on the board.  Each space can be rotated to show a green blank, a white piece, or a black piece.  The game can be passed back and forth without risk of something falling on the floor of the car and getting lost under the seat (as happened with Travel Scrabble).

Whirlpool randomizer from
Uno H2O Splash

In the hot tub at our cabin, Uno H2O Splash got a lot of action.  Here is another clever production idea to solve the problem of a challenge game-playing venue.  The cards are clear plastic, printed in such a way that one side shows only the card face, the other only the card back.  The game plays like the familiar Uno with a water-themed twist:  Certain cards have a "splash" icon that, when played, require the next player to take a spin on the "whirlpool," a device rather like a small "Magic 8-ball" with an eight-sided die inside to yield a random outcome that the player must perform.

Sample page from Ace of Aces

Another brilliant game design that got some action was the old classic World War I dogfight game Ace of Aces.  This game requires neither board nor cards but is played with just a pair of books through which players flip from one cockpit view to another as they try to outmaneuver one another and get into firing position to inflict damage on each other's aircraft.  While I was in the Navy, I played this game many times with my chief engineer because it was so well suited to the tight confines of a submarine wardroom.  My sons each successfully chased me out of the skies, but in both cases I was able to escape with my badly damaged plane before being shot down.

We did play a few conventional games during our down-time in the cabin.  Incan Gold played out to an exciting finish, when our ten-year-old left the ruins with the artifact and the lead on the final mission, forcing the rest of us to play out the round until scared away by monsters and leaving him with the win.  Our Pirateer session saw a crazy round in which every player touched the treasure at least once before our ten-year-old stole the treasure on a perfect snake-eyes die roll and brought it home to his harbor just a few turns later.  My wife beat my 18-year-old son and me in Black Jack (using cards from Chicago Cribbage and money from Incan Gold) when she kept betting all her money to get out of the game but kept winning hand after hand.  My wife just destroyed me in a two-player session of Citadels, which is nevertheless still my favorite game right now.

And, oh yes, we were in the mountains of West Virginia, so we did plenty of white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and zip-line canopy touring during the gaps between boardgames.

Six days until I go to World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Run roughshod in Robber Knights

Kathy's winning wine
over my losing beer

Thursday's cocktail hour saw my wife and me break out last month's impulse buy from FunAgain Games, Robber Knights (designer Rüdiger Dorn [website in German], artist Michael Menzel [website in German], publisher Queen Games). We like this game as a quick encounter with not a lot of set-up time but plenty of thought and tactical play.  The game requires a certain balance of resources vs. scoring opportunities.  It often poses the conundrum between seizing more points that are vulnerable to stealing and taking fewer points that are protected.  

This round, I think I lost sight of the resource-conservation aspect of the game, as I grabbed every big-point play I could make.  Early on, my blue knights thoroughly dominated the board, and though I knew some of the points were destined to be stolen, I thought that I'd sufficiently saturated the board that I could protect a substantial number of acquisitions and maintain a lead until the end of the game.  

But by the middle game, Kathy had taken over a significant portion of my holdings.  Although we were at one point fairly even in number of remaining tiles and knights, she had taken a lead and locked in quite a few positions that left me little opportunity for cherry-picking any points away.  Again I burned up tiles and knights in the late game, so that by the end, I had only two knights and two tiles (a city and a forest castle - which meant that I'd be unable to score the city).  Kathy meanwhile place a city tile with three sides open so that she'd be confident that she could reclaim it if I tried to steal it from her.

Close observation reveals the number of my blue knights covered by my wife's green for the score

The bottom line was a strong win for my wife, 34-22, thanks to taking full advantage of my impulsiveness and her making judicious use of resources to dominate the board.  

Relaxing 24/7

In my last post, I described the tactile appeal of games that use bakelite-style tiles for game pieces.  I mentioned 24/7: The Game (designer Carey Grayson, publisher Sunriver Games) as an example of games of physical quality in that caliber.  The reminder prompted me to propose that my lovely wife and I play 24/7 at our cocktail hour this afternoon.

Close-up of 24/7: The Game showing the physical tile quality - in particular, my run of five tiles 
('2' through '6' in sequence) that Kathy subsequently used in her own "24-in-7" bonus score

A Christmas present for Kathy, 24/7 featured in another photo in my 6 January post.

Unlike For The Win, a new game that Kathy and I just started to explore on Wednesday, we have considerable experience in the tactics of 24/7, and this afternoon's game saw both of us in true competitive form.  My wife racked up 140 points in "sums of seven," as well as a 60-point "24-in-7" bonus (completing a row of seven tiles that add up to 24).  Those two categories alone constituted over a third of her total score.  But I managed multiple runs of three and four sequences and even one run of five consecutive tiles.  I eked out a win by the ridiculously narrow score of 600 to 590.  

Losing "For The Win"

Kathy (black) wins second game
of For The Win.  Can I blame it
on the martini?

I recently received my copy of For The Win (designer Michael Eskue, artist Eric J. Carter, publisher Tasty Minstrel) from its Kickstarter campaign.  I was intrigued by early reviews that compared it to Hive!, which I enjoy but which my wife dislikes.  Something about FTW struck me as different - a lighter theme, a more approachable mechanic, not sure what - different enough, at least, to kick in and see what Michael E. had put together.

I hadn't bothered with the pre-release print-and-play version because, to me, the appeal of FTW as it was for Hive! is the physical domino-quality tileset.  Yes, the gameplay is important, but as with 24/7 and Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War, there's a tactile gratification to handling the bakelite-style game pieces.  And FTW does not disappoint.  In fact, somehow I had the mistaken impression that the tiles would be significantly smaller.  I had envisioned something like 7/8-inch (22mm) squares, but they are in fact 1 1/4 - inch (31mm) square, a very comfortably sized playing piece.  

Bakelite-quality square tiles make for a gratifying tactile experience.

We played our first two rounds of FTW at our customary cocktail hour this afternoon.   We found the game to be easy to understand but tricky to strategize, as I suppose any good two-player abstract game should be.  It is also a rather quick play.  I think it took Kathy less than 45 minutes to learn the game and beat me twice at it.  Now, to be fair, the first game we were taking a rather ad hoc approach just to get the feel of the game and the mechanics of the rules.  It was in the second game that we each buckled down and tried to exercise some real tactics.  (And, yes, she won that game, too.)

As it happens, Kathy and I misinterpreted (that is, I misread the rule and misled my wife) the behavior of the monkey's banana.  We assumed that the monkey's banana action renders all tiles adjacent to the monkey face down (inactive), regardless of original state.  Instead, a closer reading of the rules shows that "tiles that were face up are now face down and vice versa [emphasis added]."  So now I see the monkey in a whole new light.  The monkey can be used to activate multiple friendly pieces in a single action.  <Bwa-ha-ha-HAH>  I make no claim that this rule misinterpretation was in any way a factor in my losing the game twice in a row.  I just wanted to point that out.  

All kidding aside, we really like FTW as a two-player abstract short game with simple rules, no luck, and considerable potential for depth.  I'm reluctant to call it a "filler" only because we don't know just how tactically challenging it might prove.  I have to say, I'm very pleased with this Kickstarter discovery.