Alan writes:

I hope everyone is having a great Christmas. But for some poor souls, the holiday season can be a time of bitterness and sadness. I'd like to take a moment to think about those less fortunate, those who are having a holiday that won't be filled with cheer and goodwill, but instead full of tears, regret, and frustration. I'm talking, of course, of those people who, with their family gathered around them, think it's a great idea to break out Monopoly.

But Monopoly is a classic that the whole family knows, you may well be thinking. But like Cliff Richard and the clap, just because something has been around for a long time and remained in circulation, it doesn't mean that it's any good. If a game generally has an obvious winner two hours in, but it takes another two hours to confirm it, something's wrong. All those stories of families falling out around the Monopoly board? Maybe it's not the family that's disfunctional. Maybe it's the game.

So my advice for the holiday season is to keep yourself warm by slinging that copy of Monopoly in the fire, and setting up a game that's quick to learn, has some interesting decisions, and won't cause violent recriminations and fistfights and banishments from the family home by the end. I recommend For Sale.

I've found that For Sale is quite easy to bring to the table. The property-buying-and-selling theme helps, as it's familiar and not going to put anyone off in the same way as a fantasy or sci-fi theme might. "It's like Monopoly, but quicker and better," you can say, even though the first part of that is a lie. It's not like Monopoly. It's fun.

Set up is simple. Each player gets a pile of coins, with which they will use in a series of auctions to buy a portfolio of properties (or hand of cards, if you prefer). These cards are valued between one (a cardboard box) and thirty (a space station). On each round, one card for each player is revealed, then in turn each player has the option of bidding higher than previously, or passing. If you pass, you pay half your current bid, or nothing if you haven't bid so far, and take the lowest-value card on display. If you win the auction, you pay your full bid. Then another auction round begins, starting with the winning player, until all the cards are gone.

With everyone now owning property, it's time to sell them off quick before the market tanks. A second deck of cards, this time representing sale values between nothing and £15K, is laid out one for each player, just as with the properties. Everyone selects a property card and places it face down, revealing it when everyone has done so. The highest value property gets the highest value cheque, the second-highest value property gets the second-highest value cheque, and so on. Soon your hand of properties will be replaced with a hand of cheques. Add these to anything left over from auctioning. Got the most money? Hooray! You won! Don't have the most money? Well, you didn't win, but with a game as short as this, you may be able to win the next one.

For Sale has a lot of interesting decisions you can make for its short play time, but never complicated enough to linger over. There's some randomness and luck, but not the frustrating kind, just enough to make the game different from play to play. Crucially, while some good decisions in the auction phase of the game can leave you in a strong position for the selling phase, a win is not guaranteed. Unlike choosing For Sale over Monopoly - then a win is almost certainly guaranteed.

For Sale at BoardGameGeek.

Loading mentions Retweet

Alan writes:

Alan: Aha, this is how the line of sight rules work.
Gillian: What's "line of sight?"

This short snippet shows the difference between Gillian and me. I may have picked up Memoir '44 without an exact idea of how it would work, but years of video games such as X-Com or Jagged Alliance 2 or tabletop games like Warhammer meant that I at least had an idea of concepts such as Line of Sight, or Hit Points, or Damage Modifiers. But even these basic terms were alien to Gillian - yet we were able to pick up and play Memoir '44 with almost no fuss. It's a wargame, in that there's tactics and strategy and dice rolling, but a pretty simple one.

The first thing anyone will notice about Memoir '44 is that once the game is set up, it looks fantastic. Other games may go for wooden blocks or cardboard chits, but Memoir '44 knows what it is. It's a game about recreating warfare, and chances are the last time you did that, you were wielding a stick and making the noise of a gun while charging across the playground. So you get a whole load of plastic soldiers and tanks to play with.

As you'd expect from the name, the game takes place around the D-Day Normandy landings of June 1944. Each of the 16 scenarios pits the Allies against the Axis forces. The board is double-sided, one side all green, and one with a beach, so while some battles take place inland, in some you'll be recreating the assault on the beaches. The board is divided into hexes, and there's an illustration on each scenario showing where hills, trees, bunkers and barbed wire should go- all thick cardboard hexes or plastic like the soldiers. Troop deployment is part of the set up - your forces are where they start are decided by the scenario.

On your turn, what you do is dictated by your hand of Command Cards. On your turn, you play one of these cards, take the moves and attacks it allows, and then draw a card at the end of your turn. Most of these cards allow you to move units in one section of the battlefield, so you're always having to adjust your strategy to what your hand will allow. It's as much about managing your hand of cards as it is your troops.

Attacks are resolved by using dice; the more powerful he unit, the more dice you can use. Fr example, infantry use 2 dice when shooting at a unit two hexes away, while a tank unit uses three. Hits are decided by the symbols on the dice, so more fragile units have more chance of being hit. It's a neat system that gets rid of the need for lookup tables and calculations and other things that can make wargames quite daunting. Hit points are easily tracked, too - each hit removes a model, and when a unit runs out of models, it's destroyed. Each destroyed unit gives you a victory point, and depending on the scenario there may be victory points for taking a particular hex. Get the required points, usually between four and six, and you've won.

Memoir '44 is an easy game - perhaps too easy for some, as sometimes opportunities for tactics are low and luck can occasionally decide a game. It's very accessible, and is perfect for anyone with an interest in WWII, as the theme is strong and there's lots of historical detail in the rule book. With the mountain of expansions available, it does at times feel like a starter pack - though nowhere near as bad in that respect as the likes of Warhammer or Warhammer 40K.

And don't worry about the Line of Sight rules. They're simple.

Memoir '44 at BoardGameGeek.

Loading mentions Retweet

Alan writes:

Time for a big deal. It's time to talk about Dominion.

Why such a big deal? Well, so far the games I've written about are either getting on a bit, like Carcassonne, or a little bit under the radar, like Cold War. Dominion is still pretty 'hot'. It's still winning awards, including the prestigious Spiel des Jahres. It's getting a bit of hype outside of the usual places, with mentions in the likes of Wired and the usually video-game-centric Escapist. At my local gaming night, there can be a bit of debate over what games to play, and games come in and out of fashion, but there's usually always someone up for Dominion. There are already two expansions out, and there's talk that there will be seven in total. Dominion is a big deal (though there's more shuffling that dealing in the game itself).

Apparently, Dominion is a game about controlling land. I know this because I just looked at the rules, and it says so in the introduction. I've never felt like I'm claiming land when playing. The rules then go on to be a little bit more honest: "This is a game of building a deck". That's more like it. What you really feel like you're doing is creating, as you play, your own deck of cards that you will use to win the game. Despite the large box, Dominion is a card game - all that's inside that box is 500 cards. That's a lot of cards. Here's how it works:

First, pick which ten sets of cards you will play with, from the twenty-five in the box. Here's the suggested starting set of 10, plus the treasure cards and VP cards that are part of every game:

You start the game with a deck of ten cards - three 'Estates' and seven 'Coppers'. The Estates are victory point cards, utterly useless to you right until the moment the game ends - at which point the VP cards are the only cards of any worth.

The Coppers are more immediately useful. Take this starting deck of cards and shuffle them up. If you're not good at shuffling, don't worry - this game will give you lots of practice. Deal yourself five cards. This is your starting hand.

Each turn works in the same simple way. You have one action, and one buy. At the end of your turn, you then discard your hand into your personal discard pile, and deal yourself five new cards. If you don't have enough cards in your deck for a new hand, you take your discards pile, shuffle it up, and this becomes your deck. With your starting deck, there are no action cards, so it's buys only. With the three copper cards, you can buy anything costing 3 or less. Let's grab a Silver. This, along with the hand, is discarded. Play passes to the next person, and you deal five more cards.

Again, no actions, but four copper this time. That's enough to buy a Smithy, which allows you to draw three more cards. As before, your hand and the Smithy is discarded. Play passes on, and five more cards are dealt. Except your draw pile is now empty - all of your cards are now in your discard pile.

Not to worry - shuffle up that discard pile, and make a new draw pile. Deal five cards.

Hooray! An action card. Play the Smithy, draw three more cards.

Now you have three Copper and one Silver. For your buy, you can now buy anything worth 5 or less. Play continues until either the Provinces (the big value VP cards everyone wants) run out, or three other piles are gone. That's it. Simple.

Except it's not really simple. What strategy will you go for? Buy up the cheap VP cards? Nice idea, but they'll clog up your deck, giving you frequent useless hands. Wait until you can afford the big VPs? Ah, but what if you wait too long? Maybe you should buy the card that attacks your opponents... or maybe you should buy a defensive card, in case they attack you... Every choice you make feels meaningful, as you know that you will get to use whatever you're buying in the future. There's an element of risk, too - should you play the card that gives you +2 Treasure, or should you play a card that allows you to draw the Gold that you know is in your draw deck?

Dominion is a game that can be played casually of an evening, but it's also the sort of game where you could create spreadsheets and graphs and figure out the best strategies. Good luck, though, if that's your thing - there are actually over three million possible games in this box - the number of ways you can choose 10 cards from the 25 possibilities is 3,268,760. It'll take you quite a few years to get through that many games.

And if you were to take the time to play over three million games, a couple of things about the game might eventually get to you. The cards are clear and functional, and most of the art is nice enough, but a couple are rather ugly. It may be a rather useful card, but I really don't like the orange-haired weirdo on the Festival card. The Militia look pretty unthreatening for a military force. The Bureaucrat card, on the other hand, has rather nice art despite it being a bit duller than a festival.

Also, you'll notice that each card has a black border. While this looks nice, it's apparently quite likely to fade quickly, not a great design choice. These are relative minor gripes, however - Dominion is easy to pick up, has loads of depth, and plays in a short enough time that you can have a few games in one sitting - even more so if you're playing with two, as there are less VP cards up for grabs. You can adjust the game with your choice of cards, too - if you want a relaxing game with little conflict, you can choose a set with little interaction. Conversely, you can choose a vicious set of cards and have everyone hate each other by the end of the game.

But they'll probably still want to play again.

Dominion on BoardGameGeek and Rio Grande Games.

Loading mentions Retweet

Alan writes...

I'm glad that I decided to put the words 'mostly' in the mission statement for this blog. It means that I can write about one of my favourite games, one that resembles a board game, but isn't - Chaos on the ZX Spectrum.

Screen shot may not be representative of Spectrum version

With video games - as with many culture artefacts, such as literature and film, but especially video games, due to the speedy development of technology - you often have to make allowances for the time it was made. So, for example, Mercenary doesn't stand up terribly well today, but in its time it was a marvel, and could well be regarded as the ancestor to go-anywhere-do-anything sandbox games. 3D Deathchase, on the other hand, is still exciting to play today even making no allowances for the technology. Go on, try it - it's available to play in your browser.

Similarly, Chaos stands the test of time, even if it lacks the instant arcade pleasure, and that's down to the gameplay, and the thing that seems to be at the heart of the best board games: simplicity hiding depth. And strangely, while designer Julian Gollop has created some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time - this, Rebelstar, and X-Com - he's disappeared from view instead of being lauded in the same way as the likes of Sid Meier and Will Wright. It's a pity. In fact, while the influence of Civilisation and Sim City are all over the place, it's much more difficult to detect the influence of Gollop's games. Now, turn-based strategy is associated with number-crunching PC wargames played by almost nobody. Luckily, I've found that board games are scratching the same itch that Chaos used to.

The beginning of an eight-player game

In its similarity to a board game, Chaos is definitely more American than Euro in style, with its direct conflict, quite a bit of luck, and theme leading the mechanics. This isn't terribly surprising - Chaos was published by Games Workshop back in 1985, and the idea from the game comes from Gollop's tinkering with GW's card game Warlock. Like the card game, Chaos is a game of battling wizards - between two and eight of them in a blank arena. None, some or all of these can be AI-controlled, meaning that this can be an 8-player game, a rare feat before online multiplayer. Each player has a selection of spells, each with a different casting chance. Some of these are direct attacks, some create creatures, some give your wizard wings, a shield, or other permanent effect, and others affect the landscape, creating trees, spreading fire and green gooey blobs that swallow all in their path. Casting a spell successfully can tip the world between 'law' and 'chaos', affecting the casting chances of most other spells. Each turn is divided into selecting a spell, casting that spell, then moving and attacking with your wizards and creatures. The last wizard standing wins.

This would be compelling on its own, but Chaos adds in something really special - a splash of bluffing and psychology. Cast a creature spell, anything from a giant rat to an ogre or hydra or one of the powerful dragons, and you have the option of making it an illusion. Illusory creatures act in the same way as their real counterparts, except for two things - the spell will have a 100% chance of casting, but the creature can be immediately taken out with a 'disbelieve' spell. If there are eight wizards on the board, and suddenly a powerful creature is cast, difficult choices must be made - do you check it with a disbelieve spell? What if it's real and you're suddenly vulnerable because you didn't counter it a different way? Should you leave one of your opponents to check it? What if they don't? Can you use this huge distraction to your advantage?

Mid-game. Eek! A dragon.

These sorts of decisions are what Chaos is all about. It's not without its flaws, as sometimes luck can frustrate you with a bad spell selection and a streak of failed spells. But as a game only lasts between five and 25 minutes, it's not as if bad luck will cripple you for a long time, and multiple plays will let you avenge your unlucky loss. There are many games from the 80s I remember with fondness, but would never seek them out now except to wallow in nostalgia. Chaos is not one of them. Almost a quarter of a century old, it's still simply fun to play.

To play Chaos, you can go to ZXSpectrum.net and select the game from the right, under 1985. 

Loading mentions Retweet

Creative commons licenced photo by Squonk11

Thanks to Niteowl for bringing this to my attention. Anyone can now comment on the posts here - there's no need to register with Posterous.

You should register with Posterous, though. It's great.

Loading mentions Retweet

Alan writes...

One thing that has surprised me since board games lured me in is the choice of themes. Growing up with Fighting Fantasy books and Games Workshop, I was used to two themes - fighting in the future, and fighting in a sort of medieval fantasy past. Orcs with axes, or Orcs with laser guns. That's not to say that they're without merit, of course; in particular, the maniacal religiosity of the Space Marines in Warhammer 40K is a particularly great unexpected touch that adds a lot to the game. But within gaming, I was expecting a world of sci-fi and fantasy, with perhaps the occasional historical battle. Of course, I was wrong. So far on this blog we've had intrepid explorers and medieval French towns. Time for some warfare. Except - again a pleasant surprise - we're not shooting at each other. Like the real cold war, it's a game of influence, bluff, and pushing your luck.

Cold War: CIA vs KGB is a Fantasy Flight game, and I've noticed that this seems to mean a quality product, certainly in terms of the components. Some may find that there are pieces here that are unnecessary and too flashy. There's a 'balance token', for instance, that's assigned to the player who is losing; that player gets to choose who goes first when taking cards. The balance token is a green poker chip with a shiny pair of scales pictured. It could be replaced with a rule that simply says: "The player with the least amount of points, or the player who lost the last round if it's a tie, chooses who will play first." But I like my little green token. As I like the rest of the components. All of the cards have evocative photos and are of a high quality, the larger agent cards look like mini personnel files, and there is a 'domination token', or shiny poker chip, for both sides. The game could have been done more cheaply, but I'm glad they've gone that extra mile. It looks and feels fantastic. I mean, look at this:

Quality, all over. Apart from one place. The rulebook.

The rulebook isn't awful. I mean, all of the rules are in there and it has examples and isn't riddled with typos or anything, but something's gone wrong when you're dividing a game into six phases and it's still confusing. There are at least three rulebook replacements as downloadable files on BoardGameGeek - that's not a good sign that the included rules are doing a good job. I'm not entirely sure of the problem, but I suspect that it's over-explained. There are also little unnecessary rules about shuffling - one player shuffles then the other cuts. Frankly, if you can't trust your opponent not to fiddle with the deck, get another opponent.

The game plays like a sort of 'advanced blackjack'. First, an objective is revealed - this is usually a country, but can be an event. It'll be worth some victory points, and has a 'stability value'. Players take turns drawing 'groups', eg police, artists, radio stations, in order to get as close as they can to this stability without going over. But each card belongs to a faction - military, economic, political, or media - that has a one-off special effect, such as stealing a group, or forcing your opponent to discard one. You win the 'influence struggle', you place your domination token. That's right, the victory points aren't yours yet. Each player then reveals his 'Agent X', one of six characters who may affect the outcome of the round. If the loser has the Master Spy, he takes the points. So if your opponent looks like they're trying to lose, watch out. Unless they're trying to make you think that. Or maybe they're trying to make you think that they're trying to think that. And so on.

Gillian: Now, I will warn you, bluffing is involved. Bluffing, of course, being a fancy word for 'bare-faced lying'. You don't know your partner's hand, and you don't know whether they are trying to win or deliberately lose. And to begin with, neither do they know this of you, but if you're rubbish at bluffing, they soon will. Nothing like the joy of winning a round only to find out that, with a turn of your partner's agent card, the points have been snatched away from you like the star prize on a gameshow.

Gillian was a terrible bluffer, at least in our first game. "Hmm, I think I'll pass, I don't want to risk civil disorder," she said, unconvincingly. Civil disorder is similar to 'going bust' - go over the stability number, and you lose the round, and your Agent X. I didn't believe her for a second, and sure enough, she had played the Master Spy. In subsequent games, however, her bluffing is much improved.

In short, then, an excellent game that can be used to teach your loved ones to effectively cheat and lie, with a great backdrop of paranoia and tension.

Cold War: CIA vs KGB at BoardGameGeek

Loading mentions Retweet

Gillian writes...

It's no surprise that the IMDB of the boardgaming world is called Board Game Geek. The double meaning encapsulates two defining aspects to the hobby - that getting seriously into games involves dedication, passion and obsession, and that to the wider world, board gaming has the coolness cachet of Derek Jameson.

Derek Jameson shown top middle.

Telling workmates, friends and strangers that you are 'into boardgames' will provoke one of two reactions - they tell you that they really liked Connect Four as a child and then swiftly ask you what your views are on that local sports team, or they start reflexively thinking 'MONTY PYTHON DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS BUFFY ARGH ARGH BACK AWAY BACK AWAY' and tease you about it. I work in a pretty trendy industry and so telling people I was going to a 'games night' didn't seem that out of the ordinary - in the land of discussions on celebrity surgery, foodieness and tales of Ibizan exploits, I already seem a bit geeky. I spend lunchtimes sewing or reading about obscure things on Metafilter. I collect Asian fashion dolls, even if I always say it's for photography purposes. I've been binging on outsider music for the past few months and laugh in the face of anyone who tells me that 'you won't have heard of the music I like.' (Alan accuses me of being willfully obscure - to which I counter that the last mp3 I downloaded was by Passion Pit.) I read New Stitches on the bus instead of Cosmo or Closer. I am the go-to girl for the odd questions that come up during the course of work, because I like to stuff my brain with knowledge.

Yet, that's geekiness according to the mainstream. I spent a lot of my university years hanging out with proper, bona-fide geeks - people who tucked their T-shirt into jeans and made jokes about programming languages - as they were far better company than people woarghing on about how much they'd drunk and took the night before. Now, when you walk with the geeks it can be a shock to realise that you are merely a simulcrum of nerdiness. Your glasses are the kind of 'geek glasses' that only hipsters wear - real geeks wear the ones with a bar across the top like my dad's. You listen to artistes other than Queen and Meatloaf. You can't get on with fantasy fiction, and hear every line of The Life of Brian before you see a single frame. None of this, however, matters because the characteristic of geeks everywhere is that they are genuinely passionate about something, and there's very little more attractive or charismatic than that. 'Ironically' pretending to like things? Detachment? Don't waste my time, it's a short life.

The image of boardgaming remains offputtingly geeky to some. Alan and I have been trying to get friends interested in playing so that we can try out games which involve more than two players, but even in a world where local pubs have Monopoly on the counter and Scrabble has taken over Facebook, people are not keen. So trying out new games for us means going to a local gaming night. I was a bit sceptical of this at first - would it be fun? Would it be full of people who take games too seriously, making it no fun at all for beginners? Should I worry about the Magic: The Gathering poster? Will it be reminiscent of a social event in rural Saudi Arabia - no alcohol, no modern music, no women, lots of beards and a pervading smell of camels? As it happened, it was no different from spending the evening down the pub. I made Alan promise me there would be no Python-quoting, and thankfully, this happened prior to my arrival (I don't mind what Pythoneers do in the privacy of their own homes as long as they don't flaunt their lifestyle). It was great fun. We played new games, tried many out that we wouldn't normally have, and got to know people.

So, if you're unsure whether boardgaming is for you, then I recommend finding your nearest specialist store and seeing if they have gaming events. The high cost of games can also be off-putting for beginners, but a games night will give you chance to try some out and work out whether they are worth the investment - and with two cinema tickets costing as much as a game in some parts of the country, your investment can work out as a lot of fun for your money. Just don't be afraid of walking with the geeks.

Loading mentions Retweet

Alan writes...

I had a couple of false starts when it came to getting into gaming. All the talk of 'gateway games' isn't for nothing - pick the wrong game and you'll be put off. I blundered into Static Games in Glasgow a few years back and stumbled back out with MidEvil. There were a few attempts to play it, but it just didn't seem fun at all. Despite the nice theme and components, it felt cheap and random lacked any tension or meaningful strategy. It sat unloved on my shelf.

Flash forward to a few months ago, and I read this article in Wired:

Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. Designed with busy parents in mind, German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.

Now this was intriguing. I headed to my local game shop, where I expressed an interest in Catan.

"Who will you be playing with?" asked the owner. "Probably mostly just me and my girlfriend," I answered. I left with Carcassonne. It was a canny move by the proprietor. Carcassonne was cheaper than Settlers of Catan, but he's extracted quite a bit of money from me since, and will no doubt continue to do so. Carcassonne drew us in, and has retained its magic - and I suspect it will be a long time before we're bored with it. It should have a place in every home, gamers or not, as much as the television, or the PC, or the kettle. I have a vision of a wonderful future, where pubs have a spillage-proof Carcassonne set alongside the pool table and dartboard, where kids play as much Carcassonne as video games, where it's the social lubricant it should be. It'll never happen. The world is missing out.

It should be clear now: I like Carcassonne. I'm almost delirious with glee at having discovered it, and this is without playing a single expansion (barring The River expansion that comes with the base game). I suppose I better explain why.

There's something in the components that's reminiscent of the old toys my generation never really had or was interested in, those wooden toys only seen in sentimental Christmas films. Those chunky little wooden people (or meeple as they're known) are very satisfying to handle and place on the board. Apparently it's good form when playing Go to place your piece with a confident click, and the similarly the sturdy stick-figure meeple allow you to make moves you are unsure about with apparent confidence. The wooden tiles are thick and will likely last quite some time. So that's it. Some little wooden men, some thick tiles, a scoring track. The games we grew up with had so many more pieces - Monopoly with its paper money, houses and hotels; The Game of Life with those fiddly plastic pegs and cars, even Chess with its confusing bishops and pawns (well, my set was confusing, anyway) - and nowhere near as much game. We were robbed, frankly. There's a simplicity here that's wondrous to behold.

The game itself is very easy to learn. Choose a tile. Place the tile where you want, as long as its allowed. Then, if you want, place one of your counters on that tile. If your piece is on a completed city, road, or cloister, you get it back and score points. Place a 'farmer' in a field and you lose that piece for the rest of the game, so you have to decide if you want to grab a nice looking field early and lose out on possible points elsewhere. No meeples left? Tough. You'll have to complete something before placing anything else, so while it's tempting to get all of your followers out there scoring points for you, there's always the possibility that a better opportunity may present itself with no opportunity to grab it. It's especially gutting when you have a nice cloister and nothing to place on it. That's nine points you'll never see, you think, as you glumly place the empty monastery down.

Like any great game, there's simplicity hiding depth. Once you have the main principles, you have options - do you block your opponents, or concentrate on scoring some points? Should you make this city bigger, or make sure you complete it before the end of the game for full points? What colour should I pick? (Green is out, obviously, as Gillian always picks green.) The game even adapts to your mood. If you're in a punchy mood, you can play aggressively and really annoy your opponent, trash-talking and building up the resentment that can throw your opponent into a right mood. But if it's late at night and you're just looking to relax, you can keep to your side of the board. There's a real satisfaction in putting the tiles together to create a map alone, even without the game, a sort of lazy creativity.

In short, I recommend this game wholeheartedly. It's a fantastic two-player game, and can accommodate more if you're looking to indoctrinate friends. Get it if you don't already. Dig it out again if you do. Or play the online version, which trades ease of scoring for tactility. That's not a trade I recommend long-term.

Carcassonne at BoardGameGeek

Loading mentions Retweet

Gillian writes...

I've always thought of Alan as a man who would be suited to the salons and gentleman's clubs of Victorian England - he is at odds with the Youth of Today, particularly those in slatted sunglasses, and has customised his iPod to resemble some form of steampunk mechanical orchestra. In this crazy costume-drama-cum-Adventures-Of-Willie-Fogg fantasy, he strides from the cold and smoke-filled north to the oak-timbered premises of a society of visionary scientists and thinkers, checks his stovepipe hat and snuff tin at the door, and fulminates hirsutedly about scripture, temperance, a good whiskey and lands left to discover. So it was with some interest that I eyed the box of Lost Cities in his bag during a train journey to the coast.

Lost Cities allows the player to choose from one, or more,  of five possible expeditions - Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples, underwater kingdoms, the wastes of the Poles, or what I initially presumed to be Mars until I realised that while the Victorians gave us photogravure and excellent moustaches, they didn't really have any grasp on intergalactic travel. Perhaps it's Vesuvius. Anyway, you have your five territories to go and explore, and it's you and your opponent's job to select wisely which ones to explore. From there on, it's essentially a card game - the hand of cards dealt gives you a selection to choose from, you start laying the cards corresponding to each area, which ideally would be the full set numbered from two to ten, but as there is no restrictions on how many or which territories to choose, your opponent may well get in there first with the best cards, or even withold the plum numbers in an effort to lower your score.

Now, my experience of poker is based on watching gambling advertisements and knowing someone who loved gambling to the point of betting on virtual horse-racing - I have never tried to play myself, and as I'm about as good as hiding my reactions as a two-week old Jack Russell, I doubt I'd be much good. Lost Cities, though, awoke the competitive streak in me pretty quickly. As some of the game involves racing to place your cards (which must be placed in order, so you can't start with the high scores first and then collect the rest over) before the deck runs dry, you need to watch your opponent, particularly if you and they are both fighting over the same territory. What also spices the game up are investment cards - these represent multiplication of the final score, but can only be placed before any numbered cards, so just like the stock market or a box of Beanie Babies, you have no idea how much of an investment something will be until you make your choice and see what happens.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Once your deck runs out and the round is over, it's time to score - and as each expedition gets twenty points knocked off the score to represent the risks involved, investment cards can be a real burden. Less than twenty points worth of cards, and you end up with a minus score. A minus score which then, thanks to investment cards, will get multiplied. If I learned anything in GCSE Maths it was how to get frustrated easily, and when I saw what I thought were wise investments result in a score of -60 in my first round, I realised that it paid to both weigh up the risks and watch your opponent's actions carefully.

Alan: On the odd occasion that I've played darts, there's something that I find more frustrating than trying to hit the right bit of the board. I stand there with 89 to get, my dart in treble 17, and my tongue poking out of the side of my mouth as I try to figure out what I have left. It's a bit like that at the end Lost Cities. Your opponent's score, and indeed your score, are hidden information to those of us without fast arithmetic skills. There's a bit of tension as you add up your scores and it's close - but there's also a bit of annoyance if there's a wide disparity.

You could, if you wanted, strip back this game to just the numbers and miss out the theme entirely. It barely matters that you're a moustachioed explorer, but it's nice and unusual nonetheless.

The best thing about Lost Cities so far is that one of us often says "again?" at the end of that round. You know a game will only take ten minutes or so.  

So. It's a nice, quick game - you can play one round, or as many as you like in the style of the sore loser's 'best of three' - and the cards and very small board means it's portable enough to play on a train. You will need a pen and paper to score up, and possibly also the knowledge that multiplying minus numbers is A Bad Thing if you want to up your chances of winning. Me? I was hoping that, against everything dimly remembered from hot afternoons drawing pictures of robots in the back of my maths exercise book, that the x sign would quickly start cancelling itself out.

Lost Cities at BoardGameGeek

Loading mentions Retweet