Date played: March 1, 2020

Basic details: 2-5 players; 60-90 minutes

Gist of the game: Following 4 acts that vaguely correspond with the plot of the first Godfather movie (The Wedding, The Turk, Sonny’s Murder, and the Betrayal), characters compete for control over turfs in New York City in order to launder the most money by the end of the game. The game can be played with 2-5 players, though with fewer players some aspects of the game go unfulfilled (e.g., additional businesses in each turf, number of allies, number of public jobs). In order to successfully shake down “the front” and “the back” of businesses, each crime family dispatches family members and thugs across the city. In addition to sending these people out into the city, where they can secure money or illegal goods (guns, blood money, booze, or narcotics), you can also complete jobs (by spending illegal goods) and try to bribe officials (by outbidding other players). While the player with the most money at the end of the game wins, only money that has successfully been laundered (and socked away into an adorable metal hinge-top suitcase) counts toward your total — nothing left in your hand helps you at the end of the game.

Within each of the four acts, play occurs across five phases: opening new businesses (playing a randomized business in the next available turf), family business (playing the mini figurines — thugs for the back of a single business in a single turf, family members for the front of businesses in all adjacent turfs; completing jobs; playing allies that have been previously purchased), turf war (determining who controls each territory), bribery (a secret bid to buy an ally), tribute to the Don (reducing your hand size down to the specified size for that act), and entre’acte (removing all figures from board; advancing Don Corleone on the act track, receiving new figures transitioning into acts 2 and 4, replenishing public jobs and the upcoming act’s allies that will be available for purchase).

Color commentary: There was a lot to keep track of in this game. Each turf you control gets a marker in your family’s color, and technically when a member of an opposing family (family member, not thug) shakes down the front of those businesses, you are also supposed to reap those same benefits. For us, this time, that virtually never happened. It just got lost in the hustle and bustle of organized crime.

Since there are a whopping 18 photos accompanying this post, I think it goes without saying that we (cough cough, M) was especially enamored of the artwork. It being Godfather themed, and involving minifigures, were strong sales points when we purchased it last fall.

In a lot of ways, the premise of the game reminds me of Tammany Hall, in which you play a politician trying to shore up ethnic constituencies in New York City. As with Corleone’s Empire, with fewer than the maximum number of players, the way players interact with the board changes. Corleone’s Empire I think had more complications and moving pieces (literally, no minifigures in Tammany Hall), it can be played with only two players, as opposed to Tammany Hall, which has a 3 player minimum. Again, as a couple who are rarely able to muster a larger playing group, this has definite appeal (though Tammany Hall was my first real sophisticated board game when my sister gave it to me for Christmas a few years ago, so there is some sentimental attachment for me that Corleone’s Empire doesn’t have). Probably if we had a third player around, I would have tried to play them back to back to make direct comparisons instead of having to rely on my memory of playing Tammany like 4 years ago with friends in Lansing.

I would like to point out that I won, with $66, to M’s $57, though he did manage to launder way more than I thought he was going to based on what I was observing and tracking in his minifigure placement.

M’s thoughts: The randomization of businesses will allow for different dynamics over the course of multiple plays.

There are lots of strategies you could use if you played with more than two players. A big one here is the bidding process for allies, and having to calculate how much you should bid to win without massively overbidding. I overbid for one ally, not noticing that Petra only had two cards in hand, worth at most $10 (money comes in $1, $2, $3, and $5 denominations).

The dominant long-term strategy is to suitcase the highest denominations of money you have at every opportunity (and in Act 3, some allies let you suitcase more than one money card at a time, which helped  me a tremendous amount toward the end of Act 4). In the short- and medium-term, if you have to discard cards to get your hand size down during the tribute to the Don phase, don’t keep illegal good cards unless you have a definite, current job to use them for (I had several that ended up being dead weight for me). As there are end-of-game bonuses for being the player who completed the most jobs of each color, another long-term strategy would be to do jobs whenever you can, as they help reduce your hand size and don’t interfere with your being able to launder money.

Also, you do not actually get to be Tom Hagen in the game, so that lifelong dream of mine remains unfulfilled.

Games played: The Scurvy Musketeers of the Spanish Main: A Swashbuckling B-Movie Card Game (2006); Grave Robbers III: Suburban Slashers from Sunnydale Street: A Sci-Fi/Horror B-Movie Card Game (2009)

Date played: February 29, 2020

Gist of the game: The premise of the game is to create a B-movie worth more points than your opponents’ by combining characters, a location, and props. There are also creatures, which you can use to attack your opponents’ movies. Special effects  cards can be used to stop the effect of cards or allow additional actions, etc. Characters are played on your own movie set, while locations can be played on anyone’s (and may be advantageous to do so, if you, for instance, find a location worth negative points in your hand). A character can have unlimited props, but only one prop can be added to each player per turn. Only one location can be played on each set, except for very special circumstances in which a specific location (e.g., Belowdecks) can be played with another specific location (e.g., Naval Frigate). You can play attacks with creatures. If the attack strength of the creature exceeds the total point value of the targeted movie set, the attack succeeds and the victor chooses an attacked character to discard.

Additionally, cards have a “title” word printed on them. At the beginning of the game, you draw the first 6 cards and use as many of those title words as possible to create the title of the movie each of you is constructing. At the end of the game, any cards you have with any of those title words is worth bonus points. The game ends when a player plays a “Roll the Credits” card or the last card from the draw pile is drawn. In either scenario, the player whose movie is worth the most cumulative points (from characters, props, locations, and title words) wins.

Color Commentary: Two personal notes here. First, with over 300 games, we’ve been facing severe decision paralysis when it comes to choosing a game, which is a partial explanation for the most recent dry spell. But we found a solution! We’re going to use a random number generator from now on, and we play the first game that we have enough players for (usually two, if we’re honest) and that we haven’t played before. This is also a clever way of dealing with expansions and interchangeable games, like these two. So if a particular game has an expansion or is interchangeable with another, we’ll probably play that second item, as well.

Second, we got a card shuffler, and M was drunk on power. Rarely has such glee been seen in this household, including coming off of extremely productive visits to the comic book store. However, both the Musketeers and the Suburbs have large decks, and for the first game (Musketeers), it’s possible we didn’t shuffle the deck enough. A dynamic we couldn’t help, though, is that there are only two Roll the Credits cards. For a game that can be played by up to 6 people, this has a real limiting effect on who can end the game and has the probable effect of making the game last longer than it might if there were more such cards.

The title cards are a kind of neat little feature. The title of our Musketeers movie was Dead Privateer Marquis Hawk in the Slasher Forest, and the title of our Suburban movie was Beyond the Haunted Legend of the Undead Ghost Spawn. Neither of us had any of the title words at the end of either game, so the title was technically moot, though I had been keeping track and some of words drifted in and out of my movie set.

The only strategy that really makes sense is attrition, especially because reducing your opponents’ point totals may be easier than increasing your own (if you keep drawing creatures but no characters, you won’t be able to increase your points, but you can certainly decrease someone else’s). At one point during the second game, neither of us had any cards in our movie set.

There are also sometimes incentives to attack your own movie set. If you win an attack, you can choose a character to discard. M had used a special character attribute to give me a character worth -4 points, taking the total point value of my set down to like, -2. So I attacked my own set, lost, but was able to jettison the Corporate Yes-Man. Ha! Take that, capitalism.

M’s thoughts: And I quote, “This is a good game that’s probably better with more than two players. But is it worth making friends to do so?” We left that question unanswered. Fortunately, he had other inspired thoughts as well.

In terms of a strategy of attrition, with more than two players it becomes more complicated because you have to manage the rise and fall of multiple opponents’ point totals. The strategy is similar to Guillotine’s [to eventually be the subject of a post here, since it’s an oldie but goodie in the Hendriquist household], in that I don’t think long-term strategies are possible. You need to do what’s best for you in the moment and hope you get lucky. I had initially been trying to save some better cards, but the only real choices regarding your opponents come in terms of choosing between creatures in a given moment, given that you can attack more than once in a turn).

Also, I won both games.

Date played: November 30, 2019

Gist of the game: In this cooperative game for 1-4 players, you essentially reenact the original Planet of the Apes movie, working your way through the most notable scenes. You’re in a race against fate, which marches steadily ahead through the progression of time. So fate is meta, across the different scenes. You also have to outpace the apes within each scene and reach the finish line before them to advance (ok, you can also eventually advance even if the apes finish first, but you suffer a number of nasty consequences if that’s the case). There are 8 total scenes to work through (3 minor, 4 major, and the final “The Discovery” scene. Each scene involves a number of adventures that you embark on to try to successfully resolve the scene.

Each character plays one aspect of Col. Taylor’s (i.e., Charlton Heston’s) personality: clever, commander, cynical, and defiant. Each facet comes with its own strengths. Players are “defeated” when they accumulate 5 damage tokens (at which point they can still play and contribute, but with more limited capability). When all characters are “defeated,” the players collectively lose and the game ends. Only by successfully completing all scenes, including The Discovery, can players win the game.

Color commentary: Ok. So the rule book was intimidating, and I feel like not everything was adequately explained. For instance, when trying to resolve adventures, you can discard particular card colors, but it’s not clear what doing so gets you. Casually reflecting on it hours later, I have a plausible explanation (discard a single card and use the symbol on that card, usually involving the re-rolling of a single die or adding a die you can use for any purpose), but is that correct? Hard to say. More than anything, it might have been helpful to have a dungeon master or similar manager-type whose task was to keep track of things like advancing the day token (because arriving back at sunrise always results in some unpleasantness, first through mandatory cards that are revealed and also possibly depending on what open adventures there are in the current scene) and helping keep track of each character’s special capabilities and the assistance available through the use of Special cards, etc. It was a lot to keep track of. We realized part way through Scene 4 (“The Hunt”) that we had been doing the sunrise token incorrectly. It’s not clear how much earlier we would have lost, but since we didn’t make it past Scene 4 and it was only the second major scene, I’d say having played correctly from the beginning probably wouldn’t have helped us.

This is the first cooperative game of this type that I’ve played, and losing was an incredibly anticlimactic way to end the game. It’s a strange letdown when everyone loses and an inanimate object wins. It’s also hard for me to envision a scenario in which it would be possible to win. The adventures involve dice accomplishments that are often much closer to 10/90 than 50/50 propositions and again, had we been playing correctly from the beginning, we would have lost even sooner. Perhaps it would be different with four players (or at least four characters, perhaps with each player responsible for more than one character) to absorb some damage more? M was defeated on damage tokens, but we lost in the end by me simultaneously being defeated and the Statue of Liberty standee crossing the finish line. Also, those damn, dirty apes always start ahead of you on the track during an adventure, providing another disadvantage. And to add additional insult to all those injuries, when the Taylor standee reaches particular rungs on the track, characters are dealt more damage and/or the ape and/or the Statue of Liberty standees advance further, too. I understand that the apes definitely had the advantage in the movie, but I want to know that if I played this game something shy of an infinite number of times we’d be likely to win at least once.

M wants me to stress how spectacular (his literal word choice) the artwork is. I’m doing so, but I also want to make clear that it could have been stick figure apes and we still would have purchased it, because M is bonkers about the original Planet of the Apes movie. Also, the game comes with plastic miniatures that serve no purpose other than to bring joy. Maybe they’re supposed to distract you from the game being actually impossible to win?

M’s thoughts: There’s an awful lot going on, to the point that I can’t even really envision a strategy. There’s probably something to managing your skill tokens and when to heal damage, but on the whole, my impression is that it is very complicated for a game that doesn’t really involve a ton of skill and is mostly reliant on luck. Also, I felt very conflicted about not being on the side of the apes. I saw the film as a young child and vowed that, if and when the time comes, I would betray humanity.

Date played: November 28, 2019

Gist of the game: You’re a monster trying to gain and maintain dominance over Tokyo. Battle with other monsters to maintain your position. The first player to accumulate 20 victory points wins. Fight and gain victory points by rolling 6 dice. Players also receive 1 victory point for taking Tokyo and 2 points for each turn you begin in Tokyo. The catch is that you can’t use dice rolls to undo combat damage in the city, so it may become necessary to cede the city to your attacker. In 2-4 player games, only one player will ever occupy Tokyo, but another city location becomes available for 5-6 player games. Combat damage affects players where you are not (i.e., if you are in Tokyo, you deal combat damage to monsters outside Tokyo and vice versa).

On your turn, roll 6 dice with up to 2 re-rolls. Resolve the dice to gain victory points (triples only), gain energy, deal combat damage, or heal. You can also purchase cards, using energy tokens, that offer specific rewards (either temporary or permanent).

Color commentary: M claimed after we sat stupefied following the first game at how easily we grasped the mechanics that he thought this was a children’s game. To quote my notes, “I’m not as convinced, though maybe.” But indeed, the box indicates the game is for ages 8+ and it won Golden Geek Awards for Best Children’s Game and Best Family Game. That said, the easy mechanics don’t diminish game play, and make it a breezier play than a lot of other games. It also has considerable replay. 6 monsters come included in the original game, but you have more than a dozen options once all the expansions are taken into consideration. Moreover, the expansions include “Evolution” cards, which add additional dynamics that keep the game feeling fresh and unique. However, except for an initial selection from 2 Evolution cards at the beginning of the game, the dice didn’t present any other opportunities to add to my evolutionary bounty. The same was generally true for the regular cards available to purchase with energy tokens. I was also too focused on trying to smote M or rack up victory points of my own to focus on acquiring energy tokens as currency.

Probably my biggest complaint about the game is that the original packaging doesn’t take into consideration at all the additional monster standees, monster boards, and cards that the expansions offer, so can’t handle even a small expansion. I’ve ordered inserts from The Broken Token that seem like they’ll better manage the surfeit of accouterments. I’m hopeful, because looking at the box is giving me a little bit of anxiety, and I’m hesitant to crack open King of New York until I know its expansions can be managed.

M started getting a little cranky about the fickle nature of lady luck in the last game, which was essentially a battle of attrition. There were repeated changes in possession of Tokyo, and M clawed his way back from the brink of defeat several times (also refusing to acknowledge that he was also getting lucky dice, though from a defensive, rather than offensive, perspective). Also, we played this game probably more times before writing the blog post than any other, rampaging our way through probably half a dozen games over the course of Thanksgiving day and Black Friday. We even broke out some of the expansions, which we feel a compulsion to collect even before playing the game. I’m excited to work more with the evolution cards, which are really where the monsters become differentiable from one other, since otherwise they’re essentially featureless figures that add nothing to the game besides something neat to look at. Without the evolution cards, we could just as easily play with Hello Kitty and Homer Simpson figurines.

M’s thoughts: Top of the line graphics. There’s lots of advantage to going first, as there are considerable benefits from being the first to take Tokyo. Maybe it’s different with more than 2 players, and especially 5-6 players, when the 2nd Tokyo location becomes operable. The cards available for purchase seem to be of minimal use (P here: he said this moments before purchasing one that gave him the 3 victory points needed to win). It might be interesting to play the game over a series of rounds and retain your energy points across rounds, thus making it more likely that you would (be able to) purchase cards.

Date played: November 10, 2019

Gist of the game: Using separate cards for head, torso, arms, and legs, construct a robot. You score points per body part, and, contingent on assembling a complete robot (in which you can use junk, which has no independent points, but counts for completion), bonuses for having 3 or more parts of the same color. Cards are dealt into an “assembly line,” with one row of 7 cards per player that everyone can pull from (e.g., a 2-player game has two rows, 14 cards total, but both players take full advantage of all available cards). One row starts face-up and subsequent rows get revealed as they replace cards that have been taken. If you’re feeling especially bold, you can also take a card sight unseen.

Color commentary: M, hot shot of the board game convention world, won this game at the 2018 Lexicon board game convention. Did I, who backed Lexicon on Kickstarter, paid for our tickets, and was the sole reason we knew about convention in the first place, win anything? No, I did not. But it’s fine. Really.

This is a super fast game, about 5-10 minutes, depending on how carefully you want to consider all your options each turn. Strategy is light. In general, take the highest-value body parts you can, and the same color when possible. Like a few of our games, we suspect this is actually meant for children, but we were drawn to it by the fun artwork.

M’s thoughts on strategy: Strategy? The strategy is to try to get the same-color-combination bonuses, or to thwart your opponent from getting them. Overall, the artwork was fun, but the game in general seems to be lacking in entertainment value and wasn’t as much fun as I remembered it being. (Petra here: HA! Hoist with your own petard!)

Date played: November 10, 2019

Gist of the game: You’re an explorer, creating routes along 5 different expeditions: tundra (white), underwater (blue), desert (yellow), jungle (green), and volcano (red). You can bet on the success of your expedition by playing wager cards, which makes your triumphs more profitable, but your failures more catastrophic. Any expedition you start incurs a cost of 20 points, so the cards you play (numbered 2-10 and played sequentially) need to at least cover the cost of the expedition. On a turn, you play a card or discard a card, and then draw a card, either from an expedition’s discard pile or the draw pile. The game is played over three rounds, but you could easily play more or fewer depending on your time availability and inclination. Each round takes about 10 minutes, so a full game is about 30 minutes.

Color commentary: This game is an oldie but nearly-forgotten goody; it’s one of the first game M and I played, back in our Lansing days, when all we had for a playing platform was our bed (I mean, we had a table, but it was a one-bedroom apartment and it was serving other purposes). The wager cards certainly create an interesting dynamic, and make possible the rare scenario in gaming where you can win with a negative number of points. The rules don’t expressly forbid this, so we play with deck checks: information about the number of remaining cards in the draw pile that’s made available to everyone. And by everyone I mean both players, as it is a 2-person only game. Deck checks help you make informed decisions about when you should start dumping cards you already have versus holding out for a lower-value card to build from. Also, as M would probably point out, it helps to adequately explain how scoring works before the game starts, as the scoring process ((sum of expedition points – 20 points for expedition costs) * wager multiplier)=total points) materially affects your strategy and when to settle for a few high-value cards versus trying to build as complete a series of cards as possible with the possibility of a 20-point bonus if you accumulate 8 cards on any expedition (this bonus is added after the initial calculation explained above). The artwork is cool, and the game is enjoyable, but you could also play a slightly modified version with a regular deck of cards (you could use face cards as ascending wagers, and then only have 4 expeditions instead of 5). I think there’s also a more board-intensive version of this game, but it costs more and it came out after we had this version. It seems weird to have more than one version of the same game if the Simpsons or Hello Kitty are not involved, so we’ve just stuck with this one.

M’s thoughts on strategy: (after insisting I take his strategy dictation): One key element of this game is trying to keep an air of mystery about what you have in your hand, as it could affect your opponent’s strategy. If they don’t know you have cards they want, they may go on fruitless expeditions, wasting turns and playing cards they might have otherwise not wished to play. (Petra here: if you don’t know your opponent has the 4, 5, and 6 cards for an expedition and you have 3, 7, 9, and 10, you may waste precious turns hoping for 4, 5, and 6.) So the game is largely the tension between not wanting to run out of turns to play your necessary cards and trying not to play them too early, both because you might eventually get lower-value cards that could help you and because you don’t want to tip your hand to your opponent.

Date played: October 20, 2019

Gist of the game: You’re a scientist on an underwater research station. Your data-gathering bots have stopped working, and you need to reactivate the bots while continuing your other work. The game is played over 6 rounds, with one turn/round. You take two actions per turn. You roll 6 dice, set aside 2, roll the remaining 4, set aside 2, and then roll the final two dice.  Using combinations of “research” dice (bot, submarine, lab) and “condition” dice (color, number), you take various actions. You also need to accumulate at least two octopods per turn lest you face a 2-point penalty. Each turn, your opponent also gets to take an action using the available dice. There are intermediate scoring rounds after every two turns, with a final scoring round after the sixth turn, including bonuses for the most crystals and fully built labs.  The player with the most points wins.

Color commentary: While a considerable amount of strategy probably lies in the way you use labs, M was the only one who used them, and only in one of the games we played. There’s a lot to keep track of, and balancing setting aside guaranteed actions (one role and one condition) per roll versus the most auspicious-seeming dice of any variety is challenging. There are also bonuses in case you roll a glut of octopods, which is kind of fun, since aside from preventing a penalty, they don’t really earn you any affirmative points. I’ve played this game once with my mom and now once with M. I always set aside discrete actions when I roll, and then decide which two options out of the three available seems best. It’s a fairly quick game, especially once you get the hang of how the different combinations of dice work out, which can take a few turns. Having your opponent be able to take an action during your turn is also an interesting dynamic, as they may have different priorities than you (I mean, obviously they want the most points, too, but may have a different strategy for getting there), which can have longer-term implications as the game goes on.

M’s thoughts on strategy: It’s mid November. I know why we didn’t post this on October 20, because we couldn’t upload photos to Word Press, but honestly. I remember we played. What more do you want from me?

Date Played: October 12, 2019

Gist of the Game: Gain the most pastureland. The game begins with all 16 of your sheep in one stack on the perimeter of the pasture. On each turn, divide a stack of your sheep into smaller piles and move them as far as they can go in a straight line, usually until they reach another stack of sheep or the edge of the board. The player whose sheep inhabit the most hexes when no more sheep can move wins.

Color Commentary: As you can see from the pictures, M was a little over-enamored with his red sheep. As he points out in his defense, the artwork is pretty neat. The placement of the pasture tiles and the size of the piles to leave behind adds a fair amount of strategy to the game. Indeed, the simplicity of the mechanics belies the challenge in doing well. Variation in pasture configuration helps increase replay potential considerably. I won two rounds (including the last pasture, in the lower right-hand photo), M won one. In both our cases, an early miscalculation was difficult to recover from adequately later, making a loss inevitable. (After reading this over, M insists it was a late miscalculation that caused him to lose the last game, with the bonkers pasture). The tile-laying aspect was a nice bonus for me, and in a sense the pasture does become a puzzle, with the goal of spreading your sheep as widely as possible before they get boxed in.

M’s Thoughts on Strategy: This game has some interesting strategy issues, but I’m not quite certain how to exploit them. I like the game. I feel like maybe there’s some strategy hack that will make the game simple if your opponent isn’t playing with the same strategy, like tic-tac-toe, but I’m not sure.

Date played: October 12, 2019

Gist of the Game: Make a stained glass window by combining dice colors and face values. Dice are rolled and players take turns selecting. In a two-player game, dice are chosen using the following player order: 1-2-2-1, so that later players are not completely disadvantaged. No two dice of the same color or value can be placed next to one another (but can be placed diagonally). Play proceeds over 10 rounds. Players try to complete a pattern provided on pattern cards (with a range of difficulty levels). There are “public objectives” that all players can achieve over the course of the game and “private objectives” that are unique to each player. There are also tools that can be utilized by spending favor tokens (players receive a number of tokens commensurate with the difficulty of the pattern they are trying to complete) (we never utilized these in our two playthroughs, so don’t have much to say about how they work). The player with the most victory points (public objective points + private objective points + favor tokens – empty tiles). A one-player variant exists.

Color Commentary: Ok. Now, I love me some tile-laying games, and this is basically tile-laying plus puzzles, so I’m all on board, but the premise (making a stained glass window) is kind of hokey. And I think Azul has a similar premise. How many stained glass games does the world need? Now, if they were stained glass bears, maybe I’d be singing a different tune. But regular, run-of-the-mill stained glass windows? Booooring. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed this game. We played it incorrectly the first time and didn’t “roll” the dice, so we gave ourselves free reign over which point values we wanted. I exploited the public objectives like whoa in the first round, which centered on combinations of dice values (5+6) and (3+4). Then we realized we weren’t supposed to do that, and the game became considerably more challenging. It can be hard to balance the public and private objectives plus the placement restrictions. M struggled with this dynamic, but improved over the course of play.

M’s Thoughts on Strategy: There were a lot of things to keep track of, which I found difficult. This was so overwhelming that without a few more playthroughs to fully get the hang of it, I couldn’t devote any attention to counterstrategies, although there is plenty of room for them, where you poach dice that your opponent needs (or, at a minimum, could use).

 

Date Played: October 12, 2019

Gist of the Game: Populate a forest with woodland creatures. Use woodland creatures and the assistance of “Predators” to protect your forest from hordes of tree-thirsty lumberjacks. To win, be the last player with at least one animal remaining. Use bears to form “bearicades” that prevent the lumberjacks from harming your forest (but usually don’t cause the lumberjacks to be discarded). Lumberjacks may have special features that make them more or less challenging to discard. You must draw a lumberjack at the start of each turn, and that lumberjack will force the drawing of 1-5 additional lumberjacks. There are two phases of play: “Day,” in which lumberjacks are fought, and “Night,” in which predators prowl and ready themselves to protect the forest during the next Day phase. The lumberjack pile refreshes if cycled through, so that there is always a ready supply of lumberjacks. The predator pile does not refresh, so if you manage to survive long enough for all the predator cards to be drawn, you don’t shuffle the predator discard pile back in, and your forest is probably not long for this world. Neither rounds we played lasted nearly this long.

Color Commentary: This weekend was the CinCityCon board game convention in Cincinnati, and we went to avail ourselves of the extensive game library. We also bought giant plush D20s, but that’s a story for a different blog. As with many games we play and enjoy, we were initially drawn to Bearicades because of the art. We’re simple folk. It doesn’t take much to draw us in. A bear or two will usually do, and having the entire game premised on bears is a good way to get in our good graces.

In the first game, M was quickly overrun by lumberjacks. Don’t feel especially sorry for him. He managed to recover and was utterly savage. What’s more, this is the first game I can remember playing that he’s won on the first playthrough. Not only that, he won both of the rounds we played. To me, this suggests some kind of flaw in the game mechanics. I’ve come to consider my 24-hour advantage sacrosanct.

Some predators have the feature of being able to send batches of lumberjacks that are present in your forest to another player’s forest. This basically created a war of attrition, resulting in a game board that looked like this near the end (I am on the receiving end of the pack of lumberjacks):

Now, you have at most four animals in your forest, and can only have up to 6 bearicades in play. As you can see, I have two bearicades, and they are already occupied. Even sacrificing all of my animals (which means I lose the game anyway), that still leaves 9 lumberjacks that I can’t cope with. Both rounds ended up in situations like this. Likewise, the lumberjacks that make you draw an additional card when they enter your forest can cause a rapid escalation. Let’s say you have one of those. You have to draw an additional lumberjack. You send them to your opponent’s forest. Because the “draw one” lumberjack has been moved to their forest, they now have to draw an additional lumberjack. They’re able to send all the lumberjacks back over, which means you have to draw another lumberjack because of the “draw one” jack, etc. Anarchy!

M’s Thoughts on Strategy: Having to assign at least one lumberjack to each forest makes it so you’re putting more pressure on the other players than on yourself to deal with lumberjacks. The onus never has to be on the active player, at least not at first. This may lead to interesting strategy issues with more than one other player. Contributing to the war of attrition premise, a key part of the game is sensing when your opponent is weak and capitalizing on this, knowing that if you misjudged you’ve possibly used a lot of resources and made yourself more vulnerable for your opponent’s turn. Without an expansion pack of some kind to add variation to the predators, replayability may be limited. Both games followed exactly the same pattern in about the same amount of time without much in-game variation in dynamics, which may make it tiresome fairly quickly. The fact that we could already envision this outcome after just two playthroughs doesn’t bode well for the long-term. This game was a lot of fun, so much so that I lobbied unsuccessfully to play it for the entirety of the 6 hours we were at the convention. I was unsuccessful in those efforts, but you can’t say I didn’t try.