This game stinks.

Wait, come back. It’s actually a great game, and the components are wonderful. There’s just one problem. The leather dice cup that comes with the game smells a little unpleasant. It’s not unbearably obnoxious, just the sort of whiff that will make you stick your nose inquisitively into the cup, curse at the pong, then will lure you back for another sniff, just to check it was as bad as you thought.

It’s not enough to mark the game down – in fact, that a leather dice cup is included with the game is a definite thematic plus – but just something to be aware of in case you’re overly sensitive to such things. For the rest of us, we’ll enjoy the cup, as it’s quite satisfying to use, tipping the dice again and again. Yes, this is a game with lots of dice rolling – but worry not, it’s not a game of pure random chance. Unlike, presumably, the red-in-tooth-and-claw of actual Stone Age life.

Stone Age casts you as the leader of a small tribe of little wooden cavemen, and it’s your job to grow your tribe, keep them fed, gather resources, build huts, and score more points before the Bronze Age dawns. Each round, the new starting player will begin by placing one or more cavemen on one area of the board for a certain action. Play then passes clockwise, until all tribesmen are on the board. Then, again beginning with the starting player that round, all actions are resolved one player at a time. All players then pay out food, and the token representing the starting player – which we call Brian thanks to his resemblance to bellowing actor Brian Blessed  – passes clockwise. And so the game continues until one pile of huts have been bought, or almost all the civilisation cards are gone.

As you start with only five meeples in your tribe, it can be tough to decide where to place them. The most in-demand spaces are in the village, where you can work in the field and reduce the need to go hunting, or produce tools that help offset poor dice rolls, or spend two of your men (or presumably, one man and one woman – though who knows how modern they might have been in prehistoric times) and add one to your population at the ‘adoption hut’. Depending on how resistant to scandal you are, you may want to use a ruder name for this.

Outside of the village, you can gather resources, and this is where the dice-rolling comes into play. If you choose to gather food, wood, brick, stone or gold, you get one die for each tribesman you commit. There’s unlimited room to gather food, but space is tight everywhere else. Finally, you have civilisation cards and huts. Huts are simple, trading resources for points, while civilisation cards give you both an instant reward and points at the end. And it’s these cards that make the game deep, and are, to me, the game’s biggest drawback.

The cards have several different ways to score at the end of the game, such as points for huts, points for how many cavemen you have, how many tools, and so on. There’s also a set-collection aspect; some cards have symbols, the more you collect, the more points you’ll earn. It means that there are several different routes to victory, and you’re free to choose the path you think will win you the  game. Therein can lie the danger;  you can spend your time happily collecting resources and huts to find that your opponent, with their handful of cards, has gone on to beat you by 122 points. The problem is that this means the majority of points will be scored at the very end of the game, which can reduce the tension a little.

The good aspects of this game outweigh this relatively minor grumble, though. The game scales very well between two and four players with some minor rule adjustments. With the exception of dice cup odour, the components are brilliantly produced with lots of nice details. Gold is in the shape of the traditional gold bar, bricks are little oblongs,  wood comes in satisfying little planks that stack up nicely in your resources collection, and your meeples look like little hairy ruffians. The main board manages to be full of interesting art without being cluttered, and each player has a board to organise huts, cards, and resources. It’s a lovely thing to behold.

It still stinks, though.

Stone Age at BoardGameGeek

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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.

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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

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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

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