The Tao of Gaming

I got in two games of Endeavour yesterday. It's ... fast. It's hard to dislike a fast game, especially one that gleefully steals from titles I like.

I'd lustily hate Endeavour if my first game took two hours, like some reviewers claim. But we played a 3 player game in about an hour (with rules), and then a five player game in less than 1.5 hours.

At the time I didn't particularly love it. The good:

• It's fast,

• You have some long term strategy,

• Quite distinct feel, based on # of players

• Not many false choices (that I saw).

The bad: Endeavour doesn't differ enough from other Euros to excite me.

Although I was still thinking about it this morning; that's something. I suspect that there isn't enough variability. I mean, you only have fifteen buildings, and only seven builds (turns), not as many as in Puerto Rico, and not as fluid. Endeavour will need to be deeper than my initial impression of it, I think. Worth playing a few times.

Got to try this last night.

Short, ameritrashy, chaotic. Compelling? I'm not sure. I'd play it again though.

The best thing to be said about CitOW? It respects innovation, without slavishly following it. Chaos knows that the days when we'd set up an N-hour slugathon are gone (at least for us middle-aged folk), so it clocks in at two hours. They could be slightly brisker, but two hours works better than "Two, maybe six."

There are multiple ways to win and including an "Everyone losses" rule means that kingmaking situations can be avoided (... and yes, I shifted to "Everyone must lose" with 20 minutes to go).

Lots of decks of cards? Check.

Theme? Check check. Khorne (the blood god) slaughters, Nurgle (pestilence) destroys large crowds, Tzeentch (change/chaos) can rearrange the board, Slaneesh (hedonism) is a bit of an odd duck, actually. But enough theme to keep me happy.

Multiple ways to win? Check and mate. Of all the games that I'm reminded of, Liberte keeps coming back. You can win by VP, but you can forgo victory points and win by "dial advancement" and each god advances via a different mechanism. Two completely different ways to win, that intersect in odd ways.

Given four unique player positions, multiple victory conditions, an agricola style event deck that only sees 7 cards out of fifty or so each game, even if Chaos turns out to be mediocre, I'd easily get five plays out of it. And while I'm not sure I'd call it great, "Perfectly acceptable" seems fine.

Shadow Hunters good.

Say Anything fine.

Details later.

After years of hearing and hype, I bought the reprint, a nicely made, elegant dancing bear.

I'm not sure what Arabian Nights is, but a game? Pshaw.

Now, I'm willing to concede the point that the decisions you make do affect your strategy ... in particular, if you study the book (or just play it often enough), you'll know that you should Bribe a Wicked Jailer (unless you have the Piety skill), Attack a Friendly Jailer, don't drink from a Ghostly River unless you have the mystic doodad, etc etc. But as someone who is going to play this a few times (maybe), there's so much randomness that "good" decisions seem to payout just as well as "bad" decisions (like grovelling in front of the "All powerful" djinn instead of attacking it).

While I'm perfectly happy to study other titles, studying TotAN strikes me the way that practicing golf struck the Scots who founded the sport ... cheating. So I'm left with an experience where my decisions are disconnected from my outcomes.

What really struck this home is your first decision is to allocate your victory conditions .... do you want to go for 10/10 (story and destiny points), 12/8, 20/0 or what? Once you've made that decision ... do any of the stories ever offer you a choice of what to get? No. And you tend to get points roughly equally, picking anything lopsided seems like a sucker bet, given a binomial distribution.

(Even worse, the game liberally takes away psuedo-decisions making. Maybe it's just bad luck, but we had several players ensorcelled, so they couldn't control movement, or insane, so they couldn't pick their reaction posture. Not that these choices really matter, but its the polite thing to do).

But I'll give you one thing ... that bear dances. The mechanisms work. And your character can get wounded, diseased, crippled, exiled, imprisoned, turned into a beast and defeat the obscenely rich, treasure laden king of thieves. It's an enjoyable experience, even if its not quite a game.

I remember one article by Costikyan, where he mentioned that games require expectations. If I pick a card, I don't expect to get the E of Battleship. If my 'card' could be literally anything, I have no way of making decisions. (I thought this was in "I have no words and I must design" but I couldn't find it...).

Do I recommend Arabian Nights? Eh. It's amusing enough, I guess. We played with five, which is too many. This is definitely a fixed fun experience. And there are few things (be it games, movies, etc) that get better when you add an empty half-hour, so taking it away can't hurt.

As a cross between a board game, rpg, and choose your own adventure story, Arabian Nights kinda manages to pull things off. But remember, you stand amazed the bear can dance at all....

Update: Aha, found it! (Apparently it wasn't in the updated version...)

The interface must provide the player with relevant information. And he must have enough information to be able to make a sensible decision.

That isn't to say a player must know everything; hiding information can be very useful. It's quite reasonable to say, "you don't know just how strong your units are until they enter combat," but in this case, the player must have some idea of the range of possibilities. It's reasonable to say, "you don't know what card you'll get if you draw to an inside straight," but only if the player has some idea what the odds are. If I might draw the Queen of Hearts and might draw Death and might draw the Battleship Potemkin, I have absolutely no basis on which to make a decision.

Masters of Venice ...

• The economic engine works perfectly well
• That being said, it's gamey. (Prices goes up when you buy or sell at the Mercato? Shops raise how much they'll pay after they just bought some goods? And shops pay twice what the asking price down at the docks?)
• You really do need the cheat sheet.
• I like this, and suspect it will suffer from the standard Caylus/Puerto Rico/Indonesia/etc flaw in that a new player will just get crushed by an experienced player. That's the sign of a good game that will be hard pressed to reach 20 plays.
• Masters of Venice also suffers from the "Struggle of Nations" problem where your first turn presents you with a tough option (in this case an auction) before you have an idea of what anything is worth. As compared to a game like Puerto Rico, where your choices expand during the game.

Tenative thumbs up.

Apparently Take it Easy smooth talked Carcassonne into having a few drinks and now, several years later, we have Cities. Cute kid.

Pegasus won't change your opinion of Battlestar Galactica. If you have BSG, nothing here changes it. If you like BSG, you can pick and choose your way to a good expansion.

Our group likes BSG, so the expansion is getting constant play. Here's my thoughts (which are echoed to some extent by the entire group).

The Cylon Leader doesn't work. The leader has some special rules, but basically draws a special agenda to determine their victory conditions. There's a deck to use with four or six players where the leader is normally sympathetic to the humans, but needs them to win with some condition dangerously close to losing. So in the old game you'd have 1 or 2 cylons (for 4/6) plus the sympathizer (which would force you to sacrifice resources or get another cylon), and now you have 1 or 2 cylons + someone who wants you to sacrifice a few resources. Pretty clever.

The problem is that the deck has a few cards (33%), where the leader just wants to win with the cylons. In that case, you get the extra cylon right from the beginning.

The five player game (which normally has two cylons) has the same problem in reverse. You just play with 1 cylon + 1 leader, and if the leader is aligned with the humans (33% of the time), then the game balance is out of wack. We've stopped playing with the leader in the five player game (which works just fine with two cylons). Since we never really cared for the sympathizer, we're still experimenting with the 4/6 player game. I think the game could be fixed by fixing the deck of agendas, and we've got a thread discussing it.

The other issue is that even when the cylon is on the "right" team, they don't always have the ability to control their victory condition. For example, one "hostile" cylon only wins if Galactica is relatively undamaged. So if Galactica takes hits, he can go and try to repair it, but since he's been hostile the entire game, the humans are likely to execute him ASAP. (Or, if they've studied the agenda deck, they may just let him repair everything, then brig him). But the point is that the leader can be on the winning team and then have his victory conditions fail through no real fault.

So, what works about the expansion?

It doesn't add any time to the game. That's a huge (and welcome) surprise. The first few games are longer just because of learning the new rules, but despite adding an entire new Endgame phase ("New Caprica"), the designers trimmed a bit out of the earlier game to compensate. (Normally we had four jumps + final jump, now we have 3 jumps + New Caprica (one jump) + leaving jump. Roughly equal). There's a bit more setup time, but you can do the New Caprica setup during downtime in the game.

It gives unrevealed cylons a bit room to maneuver. By adding a few new card types to each deck, people who draw two cards in a deck have the odds of drawing the most common card drop a bit, probably from 75-80% of the time to 50-60%. Since I personally feel the game shines most interesting when the loyalties are unknown, I like this.

But I still have several nits to pick:

• People should never be happy to be executed. On the New Caprica deck, several crisis execute the current player (if failed). But often the best course of action is to deliberately fail this ... the current player looses their hand (and 1 morale), but this is often balanced by getting a better once/game ability (if you haven't used yours) or even just better than spending the cards to win the skill check.
• The sleeper phase is too short. This means that you can turn cylon and then not get a turn before the humans are at New Caprica. Since cylon actions are restricted on New Caprica (in particular, no ability to play Super Crisis on New Caprica), being a late cylon can be frustrating. This flaw happened in the base game, but it's much more common. [I've proposed moving the sleeper phase up a bit, which would also push the balance towards the cylons]
• The New Caprica rules/deck needs more tension. Once you get to New Caprica, the humans are usually able to keep their lead (if they have it).

Let me explain New Caprica. Once you arrive (after jumping 7+ distance), then everyone goes to New Caprica (including Cylons ... that half season was basically a thinly veiled critique of the US occupation of Iraq). All of the remaining civilian ships are stacked up and "at risk." The crisis deck is switched out for the New Caprica crisis deck. Humans can take actions to "prepare" the civilian ships, attack the cylons, etc. Galactica (and Pegasus and the standard Cylon actions) are gone for one jump. When they jump back, the humans can take actions to launch the prepared ships and move back to Galactica. The admiral can order the fleet to leave at any time, which ends the game, but you have to suffer the losses for any ships left behind (and morale for any players left behind).

When Galactica arrives again, the Cylons arrive with basestars and raiders as well, so this final phase should be tense ... but humanity can often tell within a ship or two how many can be left behind. Still, its often more tense than the final jump in the base game.

The issue is that the cylon 'threats' are diminished on New Caprica. The cylons can move the "Occupation Authority", and every four moves destroy a civilian ship. But, humanity can usually afford to give up a ship or two. (Worse yet, since the destroyed ship would have been left behind anyway, you reduce uncertainty as to how many you can safely leave behind!)

You don't switch back to the standard deck when Galactica (and the cylon fleet) re-appear, which means that if humanity gets the first turn they can nuke the base-stars (via an Executive Order) and then be safe from any more base-stars appearing via cards. There are also some minor issues with the way that phase is set up and the automatic move of cylon raiders that are distasteful (a cylon who gets the first action can't order the raiders to converge on the spot where the prepared civilian ships will appear when they leave the surface of New Caprica).

So while we've had a few tense games on New Caprica (including one where humanity desperately tried to avoid advancing the fleet returns timer, failed, but then the cylons failed to destroy Galactica on their turns), typically humanity has won any game where they've entered New Caprica with any reasonable margin of error. (For our group, that means that all dials are around 2 or higher).

The balance is pretty even in our games, I think it's roughly 50/50 in the games I've played, and not far off that for the group as a whole. So I'm OK with tinkering with the balance to make it slightly harder for humanity to win if it increases tension. (If your group has the cylons winning all the time, you'd probably want to adjust this somewhat).

There are a couple of ideas I've thought about (and some of them have been kicked around) to make New Caprica more interseting:

1. Give the cylons the ability to play their super-crisis. One or two of them wouldn't make sense (like the Massive Assault or fleet maneuvers), but allow the rest. This also solves the "Sleeper doesn't get a turn before N.C.") issue.
2. Any ships destroyed by the occupation authority are taken from the prepared ships (not the unprepared) and are not revealed until the end of the game.
3. If any human is executed by a crisis on New Caprica, the cylons get to pick their returning character.
4. If the New Caprica crisis card doesn't activate the occupation authority (and only about 1/3rd of the cards do), then roll a die and activate it on a 1-2. Perhaps only on a '1'.

The last part may be better done by careful examination of the New Caprica deck and just picking out a few cards that are almost always pro-human and removing them. (For that matter, there are a few super-crisis cards that are almost entirely worthless, pulling them would also adjust the balance).

Despite all this writing, I'm happy with the expansion, and our group likes it. I think one copy has been played ~25 times in not-quite two weeks. It's tough to have every game be tense, with so much variability, but if you just don't play with the cylon leaders you'll get the most bang for the buck. (Since 1/3rd of their games switch the number of cylons by a full character from where the game is balanced). We may just re-do all the agendas, but that would take some work.

Update: I put a poll on BGG regarding game balance. We'll see what other groups think)

Update: To answer the first two comments -- yes, we randomly pick humans. But I don't know if that affects executions much. We've executed to bring Zarek in twice (I think), but we sometimes start with Zarek now (as Dennis points out). Also, executing to get rid of Boomer or another pilot to bring in someone who draws executive orders is probably going to be roughly equal.

One item that should be pointed out is that (unlike some groups), when our players are human in the early game we're often a little bit greedy, since human wins aren't rare. If we were self-less, the humans would probably win a bit more. Obviously our group (which has 5+ player with 25 or more plays) has a pretty good idea of what the humans have to do to win.

Since the Pegstivus group broke up around 5pm, I ended up trying the new "Limited Card Game." So I wrote up a quick review of Warhammer:Invasion at the Geek.

Short form -- OK, not great. I'd play it again, but I'm not going to buy it. If it gets a card base built up perhaps I'll change my mind, but I doubt it.

I got a chance to play Wallace's latest last night. (I was just nervous about buying it unseen...)

Despite having read Larry's review, little information had stuck. Hearing the rules didn't help, but there's actually a fairly simple system --

The board shows a track of car types ... each space has a factory cost and indicates whether the model is a luxury car, cheap car, or standard. A space will have a factory (or not) and some number of cars (zero up, although it's rare for a space to end up with double digits). At the end of the turn, there will be some demand revealed for each type (luxury, cheap, standard) of car, and you'll start from the most advanced space, take a car and place it in the demand box of the appropriate type, and then go to the next space. Once you get to the end of the track, you loop back. Some spaces will have marketing tokens, which mean they sell 2 (or more) cars instead of one, each time they hit.

Unsold cars don't earn any money (of course), but also generate a "Loss" cube for the owner, which represents unexpected costs. That's actually a nice little mechanism ... if you sell what you produce, you are assumed to cover routine costs.

After selling, then each factory generates a bit of loss, depending on how old it is. (The best factory of each type produces no loss, other factories produce 1 loss for each better factory of that class). Loss cubes inflict a cost at the end of each turn.

Once you know that, the rest of the game is pretty easy. Apart from book-keeping, you have 3 rounds of actions, and the basic actions are:

• Open a factory (which takes money and possibly R&D points)
• Close a factory (to recoup most of the investment, and also get to discard some loss cubes)
• Produce cars
• Get some R&D
• Place some distributors (which provide another way to sell cars).

The rest of the game is similar to lots of Wallace — each player picks a special privilege (like an Age of Steam Role) which also determines player order, you have some loans, and the economy is fairly ruthless. No care-bear profits for you. You start with $2000 and may be worth $4 or $5 thousand at the end of the game. In fact, the basic business mechanism reminds me of train-rusting from 18xx. You build a factory, use it to earn a bit of profit, and then dump it and build another.

Automobile almost feels like a black-and-white caricature of a Wallace game. It's a minimalist distillation. You build infrastructure, compete to fulfill demand, and suffer from realistic cost issues. It's a Noh play (compared to Wallace's normal Kabuki, or an Ameritrashy Opera). The gameplay wears a mask, you bring the enjoyment (or not) by appreciating the details. Which is not to say that the mechanics are minimal, there are plenty of interlocking subsystems.

You have 12 actions (4 turns, 3 actions each) and need four "Produce cars" actions, roughly that many "Open factories" action. Varying too much from that is a quick route to bankruptcy. There are a few ways to get bonus actions (and producing cars gives you a range of options, as does building factories), but this is a tightly constrained game. There's nothing as free-form as Age of Steam's tile laying, for example.

You win or lose in the details. Do you produce 5 cars or 7 cars? Build a luxury factory or produce more sedans? When (not if) do you close your first factory? Do you select Ford (with his free factory expansion), Howard (who can sell ice to Esikimos, and plenty of cars), or Chrysler (who can keep costs down)? You win or lose on the small variations.

I'm looking forward to playing a few more times. It may be that the static setup leads to formulaic play. But I appreciate the system of business development and decay.

(Update: I just realized I never updated my thoughts about Brass, but I much prefer Automobile. It's a model of clarity, by comparison).

I'm not in the cult of Werewolf ... but if a game took 10 minutes? I just got to try Looney Labs' Are you the Traitor?. The game went over like a lead balloon; but I liked what I saw.

RUtT combines Werewolf with a favorite of mine, Kutschfahrt. The great gimmick (in both cases) is that an accusation ends it. Neither game can drag on. If the accuser is correct his side wins. In RUtT's case, you win or lose that round, and each winner gets a treasure card.

But the core is the round. You get dealt one of four roles:

• Keyholder (Good)
• Guard (Good)
• Traitor (Evil)
• Wizard (who knows?)

The wizard(s) reveal, the others keep their roles secret. Each wizard gets a "Good" or "Evil" card.

Once the roles are revealed, the round continues until one player points to another and yells "stop!" (or whatever).

• The keyholder wants to give the key to the good wizard. She ends the round by pointing to a wizard and yelling stop. If the wizard is good, the good team wins, otherwise, evil wins.
• An Evil wizard wins by point to the keyholder. Anyone else, and evil fails.
• Guards win by capturing one of the traitors. (Presumably if they attack the evil wizard directly, they get smashed).
• Traitors aren't allowed to make accusations.

But here's the catch, and why our game didn't go over so well. In the 4 player game, you have one of each role. But when you get more players, then you get some additional information. Every non-wizard knows who the keyholder is (the wizards close their eyes). And all the traitors know each other.

So traitors want to tell the evil wizard who the keyholder is. But if they just come out and say it, the guard will nab them and they lose. Either wizard wins if the keyholder points to them, but they can both claim to be good, but if evil figures out the keyholder, he can win.

My group didn't like it, but partially that's because you have to figure the rules out ... quickly. In fact, I 'won' one round because everyone was pausing, and I realized that another player had enough time to figure out a reasonable-odds gamble but hadn't acted, so he was probably the traitor (who can't accuse). Sadly I misremembered the rule on who I should I accuse. Still, it was like one of those math puzzles where, on the 38th night all the wives murder their husbands. (If you don't know, don't ask).

In fact, my chief concern is that each round will be too fast. The keyholder can make a 50/50 accusation at any time. Guards can usually get the same odds on someone as a traitor (since they'll know the wizards, and keyholder, if the game is large enough). Perhaps their should be a slight penalty for the false accusation (beyond not being on the winning team).

The other concern is that each member of the winning team gets a treasure, which are worth 0-5 points. 10 points wins. That's pretty random for such a clever game (and there are a few treasures that let you steal other treasures, except for those that block it). In the one hand, that's easy to remove, but it also means that you will sometimes sway between palatable accusations, because you may set things up so that if you are wrong, the leader will be on the losing side.

I've added "Play RUtT with 6 or more" to my gaming To-Do list. And I don't particularly care for Werewolf. If you like it, I imagine RUtT a must try.

Update: There may be a rule I'm forgetting, like "Good wizards also win by capturing the traitors" ... we only played 2-3 rounds and I didn't get every role down pat.

(Two new games in two days...its almost like I'm a gamer).

Basically scrabble with symbols. Clever, but I prefer Scrabble with words. Still, a nice change of pace and worth trying a few times.

The plus side is that this can be played with children (My youngest can read, but certainly can't build words from a random handful of letters).

I finally played it and it's an evolutionary upgrade to Vinci. Simpler base rules; I don't mind hidden VPs (in theory we could track them, but nobody does), no problem with fixed # of turns, although perhaps 1-2 more turns might be nice. Nicely compressed.

But my instinct proclaims that smoothing the hard edges made Small World ... not worse exactly, but flighty. Superfluous. Neutered. Is it really better to have everyone pounding on the perceived leader, rather than the actual leader? Halving cost to skip over a civilization makes diving deep for a good combo easier, not a gut wrenching choice. With scores so close, did my plan matter, or did I roll slightly better/worse later on? (Early luck tends to be corrected by the group, assuming they judge the leaderboard accurately).

On one hand, Small World feels like a denser Vinci. But I feel a disconnect between playing well and winning. [One other player commented that all the games our group has played have typically had 2-3 points between each player, and our game was 89-87-85-83]. This is just a gut feeling, but one that I never felt with Vinci.

I like the reduced gametime, but wonder if it's at the cost of gameplay. In some sense, that's silly, since the games are nearly identical. But with only 9 turns you have the first turn and last turn (both somewhat odd in that you can't hit other players effectively) and 1-2 declining turns, you really only have 5-6 'full' turns. Imagine chess as all opening and endgame, but with the same rules. Again, I'm overstating it ...

I can't explain this yet. I didn't dislike Small World, but ...

I played Warriors of God tonight, and enjoyed it. I'm just going to give my initial thoughts, but there's an excellent review of the mechanisms by Tom Hancock. Come back when you are done.

OK, some thoughts:

• Dead easy rules. There's some complexity in how the sequence of play, a few typos (that aren't obvious at all and deal with the counter manifest), some ambiguity (the 'flypaper rule'), but I explained the core quickly after having only read the rules.
• Elegant action rounds -- You either move 1-3 leaders from A to B (the limits being shown by the border). You can't move away from an engagement unless you leave an equal number of leaders behind. (A control marker counts as a leader), or you can remove control (if you outnumber on leaders) or you can pass.
• Simple combat -- You get one die per troop (and leader) capped at the leader's battle rating. The leader with the higher bravery gets to add the difference to each die, and sixes hit. Some complexity (particularly archers), but not bad.
• The initiative mechanism works nicely. One player gets the first and last move (and one extra), the other player gets to pick one of two neutral leaders first, and sweep up leaderless troops in neutral areas first. Both sides have advantages.
• Tough decisions -- The simple rules give options. In our game, we had people moving in extra troops to battle to switch out a key stack (necessary because of flypaper rule), careful manuevering to avoid making a nincompoop the leader in an important battle. Deciding to take a siege (risking everything on a single die) vs. standing and fighting. Which leader to take? Ransom a troop, or hope he dies in jail?

But let me turn to a criticism voiced by Chris Farrell:

In general, the game doesn't make you pick up the die unless you're rolling for something really important. Sieges ... are resolved on a single die roll ... The initiative die roll will dictate whether the turn has 3 or 8 impulses ... And you can only gain control of provinces at all on a 1:2 or 1:3 die roll.

This last thing actually is really the only thing that sort of bugged me about the game. Controlling provinces is the key both to winning, and to forming some sort of territorial coherency for your kingdom and therefore managing troop mustering and getting some sense of strategy beyond raw opportunism, and the difficulty of gaining control of provinces is kind of odd. You can only roll once per turn, which represents ten years, so it's possible to send a leader milling around somewhere for 30 or 40 years (assuming he lives) and never actually be able to control the region. For me personally, this was almost a die roll too far.

For some reason, this got me thinking about the Sorites paradox. If you have a game decided by rolling a tough roll (a '1' on a d6), that's bad. But if you need to roll well, but throw lots of dice, that's ok. How many dice is lots?

Well, if it were only area control rolls, then not many. But you have siege rolls, death rolls, initiative rolls. (Combat itself uses reasonable number of dice each round, so we'll skip those). And you have up to 12 turns. In our game, we had ~6-8 leaders on the board most turns, plus a few area control rolls and a siege or two. So 2 (Initiative) + 14 (leader death) + 1 siege roll + 3 area rolls. Twenty important single die rolls a turn. Now, some of these are really coin flips, but still.

Some are more important, but the game clearly can hinge on some combination of rolls.

In our game, I invaded England with a brilliant leader (I forget who, a 4/3 Two Star leader) and enough troops to outlast the english. (I was rolling 4 dice hitting on 4-6). Since it was hopeless, the English accepted a siege. On a 3-6, I kill everyone and capture the leaders, on a 1-2, I have to disperse (and lose my troops because I don't have enough space to go). I make the siege.

But more good luck is needed to cement the victory ... on the next turn I have to take Brittany with my king (a coin flip) and not have any of my leaders die in England (which would free up troops that can be snapped up by new english leaders ...). So I had a rather lucky combo, each roll relatively likely (except the coin flip for Brittany), but combined a fairly lucky combination. Other combinations would also have won quickly, but I'm not sure I could enumerate them.

Early on, I was consistently failing to acquire territory via rolls (which Chris mentions), but my leaders didn't die young (or worse, get captured in their dottage and then unexpectedly survive, costing a VP or two). So for the first 5 turns (until the Siege of England), the game ran almost even.

So, coming back around -- how many big rolls is enough?

I have no idea, but I suspect Warriors of God has enough to claim a heap. But WoG deals with managing risk. Your leaders will die out. You'll lose troops. If you have 20 rolls where 1/6th of time bad things happen. you and your opponent should each get one bad thing a turn (and one more will bounce between you). If they only happen to you, you'll lose. But since it's a two player game you can concede if it gets out of hand.

I think I'll get a few more games out of it; it's enjoyable, and seems good.

It may actually be great. Too early to tell.

The Killers ask the (insufferably twee, but catchy) question -- "Are we human, or are we dancer?"

In Masquerade, the answer is "Dancer." The players are battling for the world, but with a dancing motif. I picked this up at a deep discount after being intrigued by a few reviews. Unlike most of my reviews (or initial thoughts), I'm going to dive into the rules.

Masquerade uses only cards, and for a game with only 72 of them, types abound:

• Dancers -- The players representative in the battle for earth. Each has a combat power (2-4) and a special ability.
• Order cards -- These determine player order (1-5) and each has a special ability (apart from #1)
• Stage -- These are locations dancers go to (in order to take actions). Each location can only have 1 or two dancers, and provides a different action.
• Mask -- These cards track your dancer's lives (0-2), and provide a secret "Bonus VP" condition at the end of the game if unrevealed. You can reveal them for a huge combat bonus (once).
• Emblems -- A card that provides 1 VP at the end of the game. These are vaguely "Longest Road" in settlers.
• Spells -- Dancers use magic, of course. Spell cards mainly provide combat bonuses, extra lives, a bit of 'take that,' and a few special things. Spells have a cost from 0-3, which is how many other spell cards you have to discard. Dancers normally have a hand limit of five spells, and never draw above their limit.
• Guardian/Treasure -- One side shows a beasty that has a combat power and a special ability. If you defeat the Guardian, you flip it over to get a treasure worth 0-2 VPs and (wait for it) a special ability.
• Events -- Each quite different, of course.

A turn:

1. In (last turns) player order, players choose their order for the rest of the turn. (You can't keep the same number you had).
2. Players dispatch their dancers to the stage and resolve the stage and any special abilities that apply (usually orders and dancers).
3. Players can cast spells
4. Players issue challenges.
5. An event may occur.

The core of the game is the challenge. Players may challenge each other (mainly by going to the "Arena", but through other ways). The attacker can play any spells he likes to boost his power, then the defender. If tied, nothing happens. Otherwise the loser drops one life and the winner draws one spell card and can then convert a spell card to a VP (removing it from the game). Some treasures and emblems move to the winner, which may shift another VP.

A dancer whose life is at 0 may not initiate challenges, and has a base power of zero (instead of whatever is printed on the card).

The tower lets you challenge the guardian. The guardian gets the top card of the spell deck as a strength bonus, so you know approximately what you'll get. If you beat the guardian, you get a spell card and the treasure. No converting spell to VPs.

So, lets look at the stages (# of dancers):

• The Arena (2) -- +1 Power, and you may challenge another dancer (during the challenge stage).
• The Chapel (1) -- During the event phase, pick an event and resolve it. [The chapel closes the turn after an event].
• The Circle (2) -- If you are above 0 life, lose one and draw two spell cards.
• The Library (2) -- Draw one spell card.
• The Fountain (2) -- Gain Two life, and immunity from being challenged (unless you happen to be in the lead).
• The Tower (1) -- You must challenge a guardian.

That's pretty much it (barring special abilities and spells). The game ends when either the event or guardian deck runs out, or the spell deck has been reshuffled a number of times equal to the number of players. Score it up.

[Fair warning, these comments are from reading the rules, and running through a game solo. I haven't played yet.] My first comment on the game: The rules don't cover but 1/4 of the game. Like Struggle of Empires (among others), you have a ton of options that require knowing a bunch of special abilities. I think the first game will be brutal. Imagine picking your dancer during setup. Big decision, and basically blind. (It may be better for first time players to just get them randomly). Players may also be need to examine the spell deck. Most spells are repeated several times, so it's useful to know that +1 power spells are free, +2 power costs 1 card, +4 power costs two cards, "Auto-win" costs 3 cards. There are cards to force a discard from an opponent, place a card as VP, steal a specific emblem, gain life, and fish a spell from the discard pile. The events can switch dancers, cause a massive wave of challenges, dole out some spell cards, let a player buy a treasure, etc etc. If you dislike chrome, avoid this.

Once I solo'ed a few turns, the rules solidified in my head, and even some basic ideas. You want to stock up on spells (or life) and then challenge a guardian (or player) or grab the events. I think the player order cards are pretty well done.

1. Leading -- No special power
2. Rumbling -- +1 Combat Power
3. Guarding -- You may not challenge or be challenged (unless in the lead)
4. Meditating -- Draw a spell
5. Watching -- Gain a life.

So going first to grab a key spot comes at a steep price. It's worth going late to get the extra spell/life. Sometimes you want "Guarding" so you can draw two spells (dropping your life to zero) in safety. I suspect you'll sometimes see the first two cards swap hands, but it doesn't seem like a big deal. Going last lets you take riskier plays (like making a risky arena/tower play, since if you run out of life nobody can follow up with a hit before you run to the fountain next turn).

Another nice point -- the game moves inexorably towards completion. There are only 7 guardians (and 6 events). If all the players are holding a hand of spells and have captured a few as VPs, the deck can shuffle fairly quickly, so the game won't drag.

Still, some worries -- Are the dancers balanced? A few seem weak. Are the masks balanced? No idea (but the nice point is that a mask that has no real hope of earning a 2VP bonus will just be used to win a challenge, which is worth a VP. But once you've spent it...). But I'm mainly worried about chrome overwhelming new players.

(Hopefully this will help alleviate that). I'll let you know more after I play.

No, not the TV show...

A local plucked Jericho off the discount table and we gave it a go this week. I think it's a pretty reasonable game, although the world isn't in desperate need of another filler little card game. That being said, Jericho contains several clever ideas.

On your turn you play a card. The walls are the five suits (each suit having cards valued 1,3,4,5 or 7). There are also 2s, which are wild. You can either:

1. Play a card onto a wall
2. Play a trumpet (possibly onto a wall)
3. Play a card into the supply Playing a card onto a wall simply adds it to the value. When each of the three scoring cards shows up, all the cards in the supply are flipped up and sorted by color. Whoever has the highest total value in each wall gets all matching cards in the supply (at one point per).

   The trick is trumpets. When you play a trumpet you name a color, and the highest single value of that color falls down. (If multiple values tie, they all fall down, although we think that each player can only lose a single card). If you happen to have a wall of that color, you can add the trumpet to it. However, trumpets can't stand by themselves (and are never affected by trumpets), so if your only wall card gets knocked over, the 2s fall away. Any card knocked over goes into the supply and increases the value for the scoring.

   Walls fall often in Jericho.

   Jericho seems deep, for a 15 minute game. You often don't want to play a big card out, since it can shield the next highest cards from trumpets, but sometimes you do it anyway. A long running battle in one color makes the winner score well, so sometimes you just pluck down a huge card and pray that the scoring will show up. After each scoring card all players toss one card to reseed the supply, so your hand size dwindles slowly.

   Overall, a reasonable filler.

Pick and Pack is another two person complete information abstract. I played it anyway. It has a clever idea, both players control a claw to grab apples. from a grid. One player gets to move it horizontally, the other vertically. Besides taking the item on the grid where you land, you can take one of two special action abilities tied to that row/column.

Another cromulent abstract that seems playable. If you like that kind of thing.

I played two games of Mr. Jack last night, which means I've knocked off another of BGG's Top 100.

Anyway, it's certainly a respectable little deduction/misdirection game. I'm not sure if it's the cream of the crop, but it's unique. And fast. Fast counts for a lot.

On the other hand, both games were strongly influenced by the order of the draw. When I was detective I quickly narrowed it down to two people ... The Yellow (guy) who controls the lights) and one other. But twice the yellow person moved at the end of the round under Jack's control, so there was no possible way to force Jack to reveal which character was the killer. I did win, but only because the last round turn order forced the killer to move prior to my characters.

Still, I don't mind luck in a 20 minute game. I think this falls into the "nice change of pace" category, and certainly worth trying. Does it have staying power? I don't know, and doubt I'll play enough to find out.

Update: As usual, I didn't really mention mechanics. I'm sure one of these reviews mentions them, but I haven't read any of them...

Got my copy of Le Havre this week and got a (3 player) game in today. Overall I like it, but it's too early to differentiate "Good" from something better. It depends on how many paths there are to scoring. I can't argue against efficiency games. I did like how most of my actions felt like there were several reasonable choices. Perhaps I'm not evaluating correctly, but in Agricola it felt like most plays had an obvious best one (even in my first few games). So, generally upbeat.

I played a ton of BSG today, which shows:

• I still obsess as well as the younger me
• I enjoy the game (warts and all)
• I'm not the only one
• I really should watch Season 4.

Thoughts in no particular order:

• A revealed cylon is stronger than an unrevealed cylon, but providing human players certainty is a downside. Patience usually leads to a critical time to twist the knife. (The downside is that some crisis will reveal you).
• The three player game is brutal with an early cylon. [Our proposed variant is to start off with everyone as human, deal the initial cards after the first jump, and proceed normally].
• Despite refining our human strategy, the cylons keep a significant edge. We've started upping resources in a 6 player game.
• Be wary of giving the next player two actions.
• I get dealt cylon off the deal an obscene amount of the time.
• The storytelling aspect trumps mechanical flaws.

It may be that BSG is a flash in the pan; but what a flash.

And the last cylon is revealed by Fortress:AT (humor, no spoiler. I hope).

Having now played two more games, I'll expand on my thoughts.

Once you know what you are doing, humanity can win. The balance favors the cylons, but not outrageously so. On the downside, that's due to random variability. We had a five player game with no cylons until the midpoint where the cylons won, and a 6 player game with an early cylon that the humans won easily. The main difference appeared to be due to the crisis deck. In the second game, 3 players were constantly scouting/peeking to make sure that the horrible cards got bypassed, leaving only the routinely bad cards.

More potential flaws — There are significant turn order effects. Often a cylons best bet is to play naturally, then let loose on the turn just prior to theirs. If your Right Hand Opponent draws an ugly crisis, just drop your hand to ensure that humanity fails, then reveal as a cylon on your turn. But if your LHO draws that crisis, dumping your hand reveals you, and you get sent to the brig. If the cylons sit back-to-back, then they can coordinate their ships much better. If this is true, then you are again at the mercy of the deal. That's forgivable in a shorter game.

Both games peaked a bit early — the ending was clear a few turns before it happened. We probably spent 4.5 hours on two games (one of which included ~15 minutes of rules), which wasn't bad but could be better. I think having an agreement to let teams concede will probably help. The humans could have conceded in the first game, and the cylons in the last and shaved a few player turns.

[I'm pro-concession in general in two player/team games, but it's a touchy issue.]

The other issue is that the balance probably changes based on # of players. 5 players have 60% of the 2nd half turns pro-human. 6 Player games are 50% or 66%, depending on how the sympathizer turns out. So it's in the humans interest to throw a bit to make sure that the sympathizer is pro-human. Still early to claim balance issues, but the niggling doubt is there that this is a 2 hour game to resolve a random shuffle of some cards...

My overall impression is still favorable, though.

Update: I agree with Alexfrog's comments below. I don't have enough experience yet; but he adds more data points. It bugs me that revealed cylons can add skill cards, too. That's just not thematic. (Perhaps a revealed sympathizer could add skill cards, to balance not being able to direct the fleet). I'd go so far as to say that once all cylons are revealed, the destiny deck goes away (or the cards flip face up, perhaps).

As for balance, I still like the sleeper phase, but I think that you should ensure that both cylons aren't in the opening. Or perhaps cylons can't take their "Reveal" action until after the sleeper phase. Just to reduce variability.

My game length suggestion is that revealed cylons taking the caprica action don't get to skip the jump drive step, but do skip the activate ships step. They get to pick two, so they'll still usually not have to deal with advancing the jump drive, but the game won't completely stall. Cylons activating their fleet don't cause the jump to cycle. Alternately, you could make all cylon turns roll a die for the jump drive. Maybe 1-3, jump advances.

I started a BGG thread on variants.

You know what movie needs a BSG-style game? The Thing (or Who Goes There, for purists). You start with one thing, then he can infect others and if they get a majority, they win. How to do this without it become a pure werewolf thing is left as an exercise for the designer.

Given the gaming demographic, I probably don’t neeed to explain Battlestar Galactica (BSG) the series to explain BSG the game. But just to be safe

A technological-advanced, spacefaring humanity created a robot servitor race. And we all know that never ends well. The Cylons (robots) rebelled. War raged until (A generation ago) a peace was signed and the Cylons left. During their exodus, the Cylons designed biological models that look (and act) human; infiltrated humanity, and launched a devastating sneak attack, killing almost everyone. One spaceship (the Battlestar Galactica) is making a run for a mythical safe place and leads a fleet of the last remnants of humanity. Of course, some Cylons are part of the crew.

So BSG deserves a semi-cooperative game. I don’t remember any traitors in Le Morte de Arthur, but BSG has scads. Incidentally, I was quite into the series until they decided to take 16 months or so off, which gave me time to cool down. I haven’t been watching this year. (The writers have been willing to take risks and I appreciate that, I just don’t think many of them worked, and the end of season 3 was fairly appalling. If you want to discuss the series in the comments, feel free, but no spoilers please).

Battlestar Galactica uses the same basic structure as Shadows over Camelot, but evolves the system nicely. You have a character and special powers, a hand of cards, a card that labels you human or Cylon. You take a good action and a bad action. The details vary; the core remains. The loyal humans have plenty of ways to lose – run out of food, fuel, population or morale and game over. The Cylons can get boarders and take over Galactica, or destroy it by bombardment. If you make enough jumps you’ll eventually find Kobol and win.

Like all FFG games, BSG looks great and has a zillion decks of cards (8-ish). Five decks are the skill cards and form the ‘good actions.’ Each card has a value from 1-5 (mainly lower) and an action or ability. Each character’s skill set and draws five cards a turn, but usually split among 3-4 decks. So the fighter pilots draw “piloting” cards and a few others, the chief mainly draws engineering, the president draws political cards, etc. But each character draws from multiple stacks.

The bad action is a deck of cards. Some pick a player (the admiral, the president, or the current player) and force them to choose between two bad options. Some just have a bunch of Cylon ships show up. The rest present a crisis. Here’s clever idea number one. A crisis card presents a set of skills (such as, say, piloting and tactics). Players throw cards (in order) face down into a kitty. The right cards add their value (piloting and tactics in our example), the rest subtract. Everyone can see who throws how many cards into the pool. Then the destiny deck (made up initially of two random cards from each type) tosses two cards in. Those get shuffled up, then revealed and totaled. If you beat the challenge, great! If not, bad things happen.

This mechanism has lots of room for gaming. As a cylon, you can throw in a bad card. Of course, if the destiny deck throws two bad cards in (which happens reasonably often), everyone knows a cylon is lurking. But suppose you go last and throw in three cards (and everyone else put in one) and only one is bad. Now if there’s “One bad card” you start braying about who it could have been. Or you can throw in a bad card only when the player to your right throws in cards, and throw in great cards when that person sits out. In short, you can manipulate the evidence. Are traitor cards often in the “Politics” suit? Well, that probably means a politician is the traitor, not the guy who doesn’t get politics cards. You can also (potentially) track the destiny deck by making some assumptions. And then you get to the “But I know you know” interactions.

Another nice improvement over Shadows -- the characters are distinct. Not only does each character draw different cards, they have three special abilities. One “use every turn,” a “once a game” and a drawback. Gaius Baltar (the semi-traitorous scientist in the show) gets to pick one card freely after seeing what the current crisis is and can, once a game, simply look at someone’s loyalty cards. But he gets an additional loyalty card which means a) he’s more likely to be a cylon and b) nobody really trusts him even when he’s human. Clever. The game comes with 10 characters, so plenty of variety. Also, each cylon gets a different special ability and an “Oh My God Horrible” crisis (once they reveal). The cylons also get to make meaningful decisions (once revealed).

The best element comes from the games flow. The game revolves around “jumps.” Players have their turns, but the game flows around jumps. You wait for the jump drive to cycle (and that’s up to the cards). A jump cleans the field. All the players and cards stay the same, but all the dangers get left behind. This means that the game ratchets up the tension (and danger). A bad random event or two, then a basestar appears -- Raiders launch and start menacing the fleet (You have to protect the rest of the fleet or lose resources). Boarders approach. Another basestar pops up, the entire fleet is at risk and Galactica is getting pummeled. Everything looks lost, but a jump saves the day! A few turns to regroup, repair, refill hands. After all, there’s only a few bad events. Also, jumping is not entirely random. You can jump early (risking population as ships get left behind)

The game piles on crisis after another, then has the “Whew, made it!” jump. A player’s turn should be fast. Draw a few cards, move to a location, take an action, flip a crisis card. (Resolving the crisis card takes a while). Roughly half of the crisis cards move the jump engine along, and it takes five steps to auto-jump, so you’ll get a jump roughly every 10 turns. The players can move this along by risking early jumps, but a jump happens often. This means that each turn is usually important. The bad things on crisis cards usually involve a decision or debate. You aren’t drawing a card and just mechnically resolving it (moving Excalibur, adding a figure). You which bad thing happens, or ‘vote’. (You do just resolve the enemy ship stuff). Fewer decisions, but more important.

My big beef with Camelot is lack of tension. You get situations where failing a quest wins the game, or a bad start crushes you, or you are on the grail track so you play a grail card. BSG starts with a dire situations – a basestar, raiders, ships in danger. Our game threatened a near loss before the first jump, but then, relative quiet. You make that first jump, all is forgiven. The cylon fleet doesn’t automatically follow you.

More tension: once you’ve covered a certain distance, you deal out another set of loyalty cards. There are two cylon cards (with 5+ players). They may go the same person. They may not. There may have been nobody disloyal until the halfway point, but there’s definitely a traitor now. A previously loyal person may be a traitor. That ratchets up the tension, but you only have a few jumps left to win…

Whatever flaws I may discover, Corey Konieczka has done a terrific job in making a tense game. (Incidentally, I find all the BSG trappings fit nicely. Having watched the show for the first few seasons, none of the details seemed wrong). I thoroughly enjoyed the first play and may have bought a copy right then, except it wasn’t available. In calmer hindsight, I doubt I’ll need one. You can read the session report on SABG.

That being said – flaws. Two cylons on the opening deal (which could happen in a 5+ player game) makes this phenomenally difficult for the humans. Cylons can choose to reveal at any particular moment (and become quite powerful). We didn’t play with six (which also adds a ‘sympathizer’ card which switches a loyalty), but I’m not sure how well this game scales between 3-6. Given that each human has a different skill set, the loss of a human (or two) can be quite crippling just from a card flow perspective. In our game, when I flipped sides, the number of potential “repair” cards being drawn each turn was cut in half. If both cylons have the same skills, humanity has a problem. In short, the difficulty varies randomly.

I’d like to see it go to 7. That’s a tough number to deal with, and I think that semi-cooperative games should handle it. It would probably lessen the difficulty.

Also, the game took over two hours. The time flew by, but this is a longer game. Also, if players start dawdling on their turn, this could easily change to a painfully long game. Not a problem so far.

Perhaps we missed something, but I felt that sniffing out a Cylon should provide the humans with more of a bonus. It does provide a bonus in that if you throw them into the brig the cylon can’t use their “Super reveal” power, but can either just sit there or reveal themselves and escape. We may have a rule wrong, or just missed something.

Continuing to hammer the play balance point – Revealed Cylons get 4 options on their turn, and some are incredibly powerful. Cylons also keep tossing a (single) card into the challenge once revealed, which seems wrong. You shouldn’t be a saboteur and an enemy general at the same time.

I wish that resources (morale, food, population, fuel) had more differentiation. They could be labeled A-B-C-D, for the most part. A minor complaint in a game with so much theme.

There’s lots of chrome, which I like, but it means your first few games may include surprises and caught off guard. “Chief, let me see your loyalty cards!” “What?!?” “Gaius Baltar can, once per game, just look at someone’s loyalty cards.” “Ohhh-Kay.” (passes cards) “He’s a cylon.” Mostly surprises are a good thing, but hyper-planners dislike that sort of thing. One big example, after each jump the admiral picks two cards from the destination deck and reveals one. This shows how much closer we’ve got to Kobol (mainly 1 step, but up to 3) and what we find. If you don’t know this deck, you’ll be hard pressed to make an informed decision if the admiral is screwing you. (In fact, I decided he wasn’t when he was my fellow cylon). The president gets to draw cards from a Quorum deck. “Quorum” implied voting, but judging from the few cards played it involves martial law type powers.

A few fiddly questions popped up that may have been in the rules, but we just resolved them and move on. A few of the (hundreds) of cards weren’t clear. Nothing major.

Component quality is good, as you’d expect from FFG.

I’ll need a few more plays to confirm this, but my opinion right now? BSG takes semi-cooperative games to the next level. Well done.

Update – After I wrote this I perused some of the reviews on BGG. Several people stated BSG was too long and lacked tension. I suppose I could have gotten lucky. I can’t imagine how you can play for 1.5 hours at any speed with nothing happening. The rules also allow for tuning if a group finds the game too hard (or too easy). It may be that the people who played with random gaming groups didn't have fun, whereas those who played with fun groups had fun.