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.

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.

Say Anything fine.

Details later.

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.

• 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.

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

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'.

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.

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.

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).

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?)

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.

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).