corollary: Board Games

More Capsule Reviews of Board Games

For super-reduced reviews of games from our Monday Games Night, see Alban’s page.

Alhambra

Another so-called “gateway game”, perfect for introducing non-gamers to the hobby. It’s certainly pretty light, with simple mechanics, including an appealing tile-laying aspect. One is definitely at the mercy of a shuffled deck of money cards, and if playing with too many players (more than 3 or 4), it really does become impossible to plan because the revealed set of tiles that one purchases will change too much between one turn and the next. Not currently something I’d call to play myself, but I don’t actively dislike it.

Citadels

This game features a distinctive central mechanic, where each round sees you select a rôle from a set of cards, and then pass the remaining set onto your left for your neighbours to draw from. The psychology of judging what to take given what you expect others to take, and what you expect your predecessors to have taken, makes for a memorable game. I’ve mostly enjoyed my games of this, but it can drag something rotten if the card selections take too long. The rôle draws are done to build up a collection of victory-point-bearing city cards. These city cards are displayed face up on the table in front of you.

It’s possible to be badly victimised, though in a random way (people with the appropriate rôles pick their victims not by player identity, but by rôle, and so they can’t be sure who they will be harming). I don’t mind this much, but others have found this annoyingly frustrating.

Container

An economic simulation that I find very appealing. I’ve played it a few times, and always found it enjoyable, even if my strategic thinking has been completely superficial. For the moment, I’ve just been happy to sit back and think, Yes, there’s definitely an economic web happening here. The better player would then also figure out how to exploit that web in a reasonably long-term way. The flow of money, and the control given to the players make this a better economic game than Acquire, even if the turn-to-turn activity is pretty prosaic (production of wooden “containers”, the setting of prices, and occasional auctions).

Dominion

An extremely famous recent game, one that introduced the notion of “deck-building”. I’ve only played four times to date, but have enjoyed each experience so far. It’s pretty dry in terms of theme, but the mechanic is an appealing one to get one’s head around.

Some Games Played Last Year

Here are some board games I played last year, mostly on Monday nights. The associated comments are miniature reviews, if you like, but reviews derived from only a small number of plays in most cases.

7 Wonders

A “builder”, where the thing being built is a rather abstract representation of a civilisation. You can focus on resources, or science, or the military or just awesome buildings. It has minimal random elements, but can still feel rather random in the way it develops, thanks to the fact that people are playing simultaneously from hands of cards that are whittled away. This central mechanic of playing cards from hands that are shared around the table is definitely cool. The multiple routes to victory work well. I don’t really feel in control when playing though, and that feeling of detachment is not ideal.

Acquire

An oldy but a goody. A cute representation of capitalist investment in corporations, where the only objective is to own big companies, and to be the beneficiary of mergers that you and other players bring about. It has just enough fidelity to what I imagine the real world might feel like to be fun, but it’s clearly silly in a number of ways. Has been fun each time I’ve played it (have managed it perhaps 3 times in total). It’s definitely too slow to finish, and there is too much luck in the draw of tiles. It hasn’t happened to me, but it’s easy to see how the game might end up leaving you with very little to do each turn. This is due to the way money only flows in big bursts, and rather selectively. A better simulation might see money flow to and between players more evenly and more frequently.

Bohnanza

A fun, very social game where people are constantly talking and interacting with each other to hatch deals. I’ve played this one quite a bit, and I think it’s always been well-received when people first play it. The art on the cards is comically appealing, conveying the game’s essential light tone very well. I don’t know that one’s wheeling and dealing can ever be in the service of a long-term strategy. Instead, it’s all very short-termist (very tactical if you like). One’s skills are deployed to make the best of the current situation, and that’s definitely fun (if you like the wheeling and dealing), but I’ve never felt that I’ve been pursuing any larger vision.

Chicago Express

Another economic game, featuring joint (multi-player) investments in companies. It plays quite quickly, and has a very nice physical realisation (lots of cute wooden train bits that get deployed across an appealing map of north-eastern USA). I bought this mostly on the strength of the gushing comments on the BGG site (linked above), and I think I can see the same things in the game that the gushers wax lyrical about. There’s also a fine version of the game available for iOS devices (called Wabash Cannonball there). Unfortunately, people I’ve exposed this to have mostly been pretty unexcited about it. Some didn’t like the nastiness of buying into a company and then messing it up; another didn’t like the primacy of the auction mechanic (how shares are acquired), still another didn’t like having to share “their” successful company with another investor, even if that second investor was happy just to receive the dividends and keep the company successful.

More in this vein next time. Of the four above, CE has definitely been least successful. Unfortunately, of these four, it’d probably be my first choice. If I wasn’t allowed to play it though, I’d then go for 7 Wonders: it plays very quickly, still feels new to me, and may yet reveal hidden depths.

Why Board Games?

To even make this post, and have it properly tagged, I had to edit my list of “blog categories”. It already included computer games, but not board games. I don’t know why I was so narrow-minded when I started the blog (what was wrong with just gaming?), but I’ve definitely come back ’round to an interest and appreciation in board games.

As a young child, I was taught classic games like draughts (checkers in the US), chess and various card games. None of these made a particularly big impression at the time. I subsequently played chess at secondary school a bit, but was put off by not being particularly good, and disliking opening theory. Incidentally, I’m certainly willing to consider card games as if they were board games; the BoardGameGeek website has a similar attitude.

I guess the first game to make a big impression on me was Monopoly, which I played as a child with my cousins. I was sufficiently interested in it at the time that I even borrowed and appreciated Brady’s The Monopoly Book from the library.

As a teenager I also came to learn and play quite a bit of Go and Bridge. Go doesn’t have Monopoly’s social nature, but it’s clearly an amazing game: elegant, deep and sufficiently well-regarded to support professional players and an extensive literature. These factors made it the apple of my eye for quite a while. Bridge was a bit more social, but it suffers from the problem that the best ways to play (teams or duplicate) require at least 8 people and 2–3 hours. (Bridge also has the problem that it may be in terminal decline; see David Owen in The New Yorker.)

With the exception of Monopoly, all of the games mentioned are theme-less and abstract. The board games I’ve been playing more recently are social and much better themed. But that will have to wait for Part II.