18XX Games

This is not going to be more a review, but more of a general overview of this particular genre. First, some disclaimers: I don't find trains particularly interesting and I'm not a huge fan of economic games which rely on stock manipulation, yet 18XX has a draw for me that is unsurpassed by any other game out there, ever. One of the reasons why I like these game has been explained in a previous post that I made on this blog, the one about Visual Storylines or whatever the name de jour is for that particular part of boardgaming. I will try to explain the exact spots that seem to really hit my 'fun button' when I play 18XX and the reason that I got into these games in the first place. Some of the terms I will use in this post will not be understandable by someone that hasn't played the game, but even without knowing what they mean, I will attempt to explain the base concepts of the games so please don't think that you need to have played 18XX games in order to fully understand my reasonings.

My track record (GET IT?!) with train games has never been that great. I played Ticket to Ride and although I liked the game for what it was, it never really resonated with me like most of my favourite games have. When I picked up Tigris & Euphrates during My Eurogame Epiphany (since the first time I played it I was an ameritrashers and just couldn't understand why people liked it so much), it immediately hit me how ingenious, how charming, how absolutely wonderful the game was. On the other hand, I played Ticket to Ride a couple of times and although I could see the potential for strategical thinking, it was not the sort of game that made me jump out of my chair and exclaim its greatness to all that could hear. My second train game was Steam (or maybe Age of Steam): I pretty much detested this game completely. The entire game felt counter-intuitive, with the mechanism that hitting more towns and thus have a more inefficient route would get you more points. I also felt it had a large runaway leader problem that you could do nothing much about: if you were on the wrong side of the board at the start it was nearly impossible to catch up once behind (although you could rightly point out that this is an issue with 18XX games as well, especially the long ones, but I will speak about this particular point in more detail later). As well as that, the game felt somehow detached from the theme: it didn't feel like you were running a company somehow. In other words, the game soured me to further attempts to play train games and for a long while I was resistant about trying anything that involved trains.

My first contact with 18XX games was through the meetup I attend: there was also a sub-set of the group that every Tuesday, religiously, would play what appeared to me the same game again and again. I only became aware of the group since one of the people in it was interested in wargaming and since that was my primary interest at the time, I was always curious about why he would play the same boring train game again and again. I used to joke about him playing 18XX games as well and, remembering my attempts at playing Steam/AoS, I was reluctant to play it even when they offered to teach me. One day, wanting to try something new, I decided to give it a go and thus I played 1846 for the first game. I loved it! I don't know why, but I completely loved it. What fascinated most of all was the collaborative aspect of track building: instead of having your own track in 18XX there is a collaborative track that everyone can use (although some cities can be 'tokened out' in order to prevent other players from going through them). The end of the game was thus always a collaborative effort in which the individual decisions of all the players were put together in order to come to the end result. The decisions weren't even random: they all consisted of shared decisions making based on which companies you owned, their position on the board and the rational choice if to go for early cash or concentrate on more long-term enjoyment. It reminded me a lot of what I liked about wargames: the shared competition between two players in a wargame always shaped the board differently depending on their decisions and here it seemed to offer that particular part of wargames but more than 2 players involved. If anything was the definition of visual storylines, 18XX would be it.

Another aspect that interested me about the game was the interest in history that each 18XX game so obviously tried to explain. Yet again, this is one of the reasons why I play wargames: along with being interested in military history, it is interesting to think about the kind of decisions and mind-frame that the commanders at the time would have held, although even a fraction of this is present within a game. For 18XX games, the games allowed me to immerse myself in the world of the Robber Barons and both understand their mind-frame as well as the kind of possibilities that were present in those days. The game does a good job at showing the possible dangers of an unrestricted market and the goal of the game, to make as much money as possible, can be used to explain why someone would decide to run unsustainable companies. 18XXs in general are games in which you almost always want to get as much money as possible as quickly as possible and fund later purchases by starting EVEN more companies: it seems to slot into place and gives you a real sense of roleplaying one of the gilded age capitalists: you don't care about how well the company runs, the only thing that matters is your own personal treasury. The fact that you can own more than one company also helps to strengthen this feeling. Going back to the history bit, I also like the fact that all the companies in the game are based on real life train companies that actually existed. It feels better to be the owner of the New York Central with shares in the Baltimore & Ohio rather than owning Made-Up Company A and Made-Up Company B. The fact that the companies start in pre-located spaces also lends them with an air of uniqueness. Overall, although it doesn't always look like it, 18XX games drip with historical theme.

Another important aspect about 18XX games is that choices in these games matter and there's pretty much no randomness in the game at all (about the only random thing is the turn order). All choices in this game are like small little butterflies, creating hurricanes in the far distant future that might affect the game in surprising ways. These do not only affect what the board will eventually look like, but as well as the stock position of each individual company as well as how much cash/shares each individual player will have. I don't think I've seen a game yet in which singular choice within the game can have such far-reaching consequences.

Another important aspect about 18XX is the re-playability. This is present both within individual games and for the genre as a whole. In terms of individual games, for ones that don't have predominantly stronger companies, it is possible to attempt myriad combinations of major companies and privates: there's a great deal of experimentation possible if nobody is overly familiar in the game (once a game starts to become more familiar there is a level of groupthink involved in terms of strategy that can detract from the game). As well as that, there are hundreds of different versions of 18XX and the differences between each are sharp enough to lead to remarkably different playing experiences with each different game. Some center around having smaller minor companies and merging them together into a bigger company (1861, 1824 and 18EU), some of them are mostly concerned around stock manipulation (1830 comes to mind), others are more interested in making the player run only a few companies, but run them well (1846 especially but all partial capitalisation games in general). As well as that, 18XX games allow you to travel the world: there are 18XX games for a wide variety of countries and regions, each attempting to showcase some of the conditions that would have affected the development or railway companies within that particular region. If you know the general rules of 18XX it is usually easy to pick up another one, since the rule changes tend to be minute (although this does lead to the problem that once you have tried a large variety of them like I have, it is difficult to remember which specific rule is present within a particular game). This large variety of games means that people can have surprisingly different tastes when it comes to 18XX games: I prefer full capitalisation games in which many companies can be viable and with cities that are not overwhelmingly better than others (which is why I like, while one of the players I game with prefers partial capitalisation games in which some companies are overwhelmingly better than others: it's a microcosm of tastes within a niche genre of boardgaming.

Another aspect of 18XX games is that they are highly adversarial: the games are well known for having more experienced players ruthlessly drive less experienced players bankrupt. There is a wide variety of ways in which you can screw over the development of other players but thankfully, most of these are avoidable: it is certainly true that a mistake that you do in one game will not be repeated in the next (unless you just can't learn from your mistakes). The level of nastiness in this game is so high that you really have to play the game with people that are not going to take it too seriously (which thankfully I was able to). This level of direct confrontation is yet again reminiscent of wargames for me, although there are collaborative elements as well, as sometimes working together can be more beneficial for both parties involved rather than continually screwing each other further.

Of course, all games come with their faults: for a start, 18XX games can suffer from a very pronounced 'rich get richer' situation, which is entirely intentional. The only way to make money is to buy shares in yours or other people's companies and  the only way to buy the is to have money: this is one of the reasons why getting as much money as possible as early as possible is so important in many of these games. This however does mean that some games can have a runaway leader or create situations in which some players still have to play the game even though they don't have the remotest chance to win. Kingmaking can also occur, although some 18XX games suffer from this much more than others. Other issues with the games is that often, due to the niche market present for these games, many of the games are not professionaly printed: although this isn't an issue for me, many can be put off by the ugly, colour-clashing visuals of the game. As well as that, it is very hard to get into your hands any copy of any game (although some, like 1830, are easier than others). It took me about a year to get lucky enough to find a copy of 1870 on e-bay, so finding a good quality version of the game can be hard.

The game itself can be too dry for some people and the fact that it's often easier to use a spreadsheet to calculate the end scores can also scare people away. The final rounds of a game of 18XX also tend to be repetitive as people run their routes (which by this stage are unlikely to change) again and again until the bank breaks (which signals the end of the game in many 18XX games). It is clear that some people will be driven away from 18XX games for these reasons alone, along with the length of many of these games as well as the brain-burn that occurs when playing any of them. Going bankrupt can also be highly demoralizing as you lose everything that you worked for, although thankfully most 18XX games immediately end if even one person has gone bankrupt.

Overall, if you have the chance, I would strongly suggest that you give 18XX games a chance: some of the most unlikeliest people have now become permanent members of our little 18XX group and we are always looking for anyone else interested in playing. Unfortunately, the only game of 18XX that you are likely to find is 1830 and due to the fact that 1830 was one of the first few 18XX games that were released, I find it has a few issues that make it difficult to play, especially for a group in which everyone is a newbie. Better starting games include 18AL/18GA, 18MEX, 1889 or 1846, since they all have more restricted trackbuilding or mechanism which help newbies through their first game (18AL especially so). Unfortunately, it can take years to order/find a copy of those games, even second hand.

I can't really give a score for the genre as a whole, since all of the games within it are so diverse (and some I actively dislike). To wrap up though, I think starting to play 18XX did manage to radically change my perception of train games and euros as a whole: it reminded me that along with euro-like characteristics, I also crave the direct confrontation and communal maps which are present within wargames and as such, 18XX are the perfect combination of characteristics. I hope that at least some of my enthusiasm for these games has transferred over to you, since I would like nothing more than see this tiny niche-within-a-niche interest grow, as unlikely as it might be. It would be a shame to see this genre of games die out and I hope that the future will, along with an expansion within boardgames as a whole, also see an expansion within 18XX as well, although professional publishing seems unlikely due to how badly the reprintings of 1830 et al went for Mayfair. Still, one can hope.

Munchkin

This is less of a review and more of a public service announcement: Munchkin is a bad game. One scowling King Philip, This is the actual score this time, none of that switch and bait that I did for the Arkham Horror review. I do mean it, check the score at the end if you don't believe me. This IS the Cliff's Notes version of the review. How much more can I say about it? Oh, okay, I guess I actually need to put some kind of argument behind my thinking and why I consider this one of the possible worst, casual, light games out there. Now, you might think that I might be spitting out words like 'casual' and 'light' like I was invoking the name of the killer of my father in one of those classic spaghetti western's, but in fact I don't actual hold negative connotations with those words, objectively. Subjectively, I usually don't play light games but that's more of a personal choice rather than a dictum, and even then I break my own rules when something light, fun, quick and amazing comes out to the table, of which foremost in recent memory Love Letter comes to the fore. I will actually use Love Letter as an example of a 'fun' (yeah yeah yeah, sue me) game done right and will use it throughout the review as a means of comparison, although I will dot the forthcoming paragraphs with other examples of stuff that I play that I consider light.

I don't usually have a problem with length. As you might have spotted before, I tend to write review that stray to the other side of long. I have played games that have spanned entire days and I did not get bored, with the monster 18C2C coming to mind, due to its 11 hour span involving a game about fucking trains. So yeah, length of game is never an issue for me and it's very rare that I get bored. About the only moderately complex game that I ever got bored of was Ora & Labora and I still, to this day, can't quite put down why I got so bored. In light games, though, length infuriates the hell out of me. Cosmic Encounter turns me kind of angry due the unnecessary length that it had and Munchkin is pretty much one of the worst offenders of the lot. I have had situations in which I was able to complete a game of Twilight Struggle before the table next to me finished playing their game of Munchkin, and this was a TS game that went to turn 10. It is that bad and it is an issue. Length can be an issue in relatively light games because if there is little depth to a game, the game can and will drag on if it continues going after a certain amount of time: this is especially true in games in which there is a high element of luck, because people that get screwed at the start will still have to play until the end even if they have little chance of winning. This is even MORE true in games in which luck at the start enables you to become better and better, amplifying the issue and making the people that fall behind even less likely to win. Unfortunately, it is this latter category that Munchkin falls squarely into. Shorter games don't fall into this trap, even if they are highly random: if the game is quick, the board resets and everyone is on even footing again. Spending 5 minutes with no chance of winning is immeasurably better than spending half an hour or even a whole hour with little chance of winning.

As an extreme example, Lover Letter is a game in which (in the original printing of the rules), you can lose a round in your very first turn, and there's nothing you can do about it. You would think that this would make the game entirely shit, but the fact is that you'll laugh about your misfortune and then just wait the 2 to 5 minutes or so until the next round starts. Imagine having this occur, but instead of being out of the round, you have to keep playing and a round can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour: this is Munchkin, this is why Munchkin is bad and it's why length is such an important factor when attempting to analyse highly random games or even light games as a whole.

Munchkin creates even more problems with its 'fuck-the-leader' endgame coupled with massive games of chicken every single round. Since players can play cards to prevent others from outright winning, but since you want other people to use their cards and not use yours, you end up with a single combat taking far too long. Creating a mechanism in which one player HAS to play something to stop someone from winning but playing the card that does this puts you at a disadvantage does not lead to a time-friendly game. This is, unless, you take the asshole route where you flip over the door, shout '1-2-3-I WIN' and take loot/levels before your stunned opponents can do anything. This certainly speeds up the game but labels you instantly as an asshole, probably one of the few actual decisions with impact that you will have in the game.This length problem segues neatly with another issue with the game: the winner of the game is usually the one that manages to gain level 10 before everyone has used their 'fuck you over' cards, which you usually want to hoard since they are so crucial to the end game. This leads to a situation in which the mid-game doesn't even really matter and you could be the most spruced out character that ever existed but because you tried to gain level 10 when everyone still had their cards, the wimpy guy after you with just a crappy sword wins instead. I find it weird that the winner is not usually decided by who has the most stuff (which, in some ways, is the definition of a Munchkin), but instead by random luck of being the player after the best one.

Munchkin, for a light game, is also prone to a lot of rule misinterpretation and having to go back and check the rules can kill social interaction while someone has to check how power X interacts with power Y. As well as that, the game rules earnestly encourage cheating, something that can never end well. Due to the aforementioned length, the way that the end-game is setup and the rules-lawyering that can occur, the social interaction that occurs while the game is being played edges towards 'almost starting a fist-fight' more often than not. Take the social interaction within Love Letter: it's targeted to specific people and essentially can knock a person out of a round entirely, but due to the aforementioned shortness of the game the game is almost designed for casual banter and the jokey insults that you want to create while playing a light game. Kings of Tokyo is another good example, with situations in which people go 'Come on you coward, keep some of those claws instead of healing!'. Munchkin is too reliant on this banter in order to work and due to the way that the game is structured and the length of the game (and therefore the level of emotional involvement within the game, since there's more emotional strain at becoming second in hour-long games as compared to short games) leads to interaction which stops being friendly and can start being actively adversarial.

Munchkin, as touched on earlier, shares many of the issues that are also present within Talisman, in that due to random luck of the draw you could win pretty much at the start and if you don't, it's going to be a difficult road ahead. Since whatever you are facing is entirely random, you are just as likely to fight a level 2 monsters as some unbeatable high level monsters when you are level 1. The only realistic way to prevent this would have been to have tiered decks with the player either being able to choose or being forced to use a particular tier when they kick down a door: this of course, would have meant that the design of the game would have at least a little bit of thought behind it.

Another point against Munchkin is that it is a fundamentally exclusionary game. In order to get the humour you have to be immersed and understand the entire background and the tropes associated with fantasy dungeoneering. For someone that started in RPGs and progressed to board games this wasn't an issue with me: I understood all the jokes and found some of them even funny, but imagine that you introduce the game to someone that has no experience of RPGs: they either won't understand the joke or they might just see most of them as weak puns (which most of them are). The game is targeted almost exclusively for nerds and thanks to the fact that board gaming is becoming more and more mainstream, games like Munchkin are just going to make people unable to fit and can even potentially drive them away.

So, are there any positives about Munchkin at all? First of all, I'm going to cut the 'beer and pretzel' argument before it can even be formed: yes, games, even bad ones, can be played just to have fun while drinking with friends, no, this doesn't make the game good, no, I'm not saying that you absolutely can't have fun with Munchkin, yes, we can rank games by listing them using objective criteria and no, I don't usually accept those sorts of propositions but I might think about it if you send me a picture. With all of those questions over and done with, there is one element of Munchkin that I do find compelling, which also ties in with one of the problems listed before: some of the cards that you can play to make a monster harder are kind of funny and can lead to funny situation in which you say stuff like 'I'm facing a dragon! But now he's a big dragon! Now he's an elderly big dragon! Now he's an elderly big dragon with spikes!". I don't know how, but Munchkin might be a better game if it had focused on that, although 'fixing Munchkin' must rank high up there in terms of difficult, probably comparable to 'proving unified field theory'.

Overall, Munchkin does so much stuff wrong that I almost wonder how I ended up where I am today, considering that when I originally started playing board games I had loads of Munchkin boxes and I remember having fun with the game. That's why, within the SA board game thread, we often tell people that while fun can be had with Munchkin, there's so much better stuff out there. Some people do take offense, but more often than not we do get people that say 'Wow you guys were right'. It's not even about being elitist, it's more about broadening the horizons of people and even if someone tries better game and then comes back and says 'well I still find Munchkin enjoyable', more power to them, it's no one's job to say that other people's tastes in games are somehow 'wrong'. Still, Munchkin gets ZERO (nah, I'm joking, the scale only goes 1 to 5), ONE angry scowling King Philip out of five.

Talisman

This particular review is going to be more of an attempt to show how the development of games has positively affected the views of people that actually play games and how nostalgia can be a powerful force when it comes to trying to determine what is good and what is not. I think there are powerful memories associated with this particular game and it actually becomes quite a contentious issue in terms of trying to talk with people about how we can objectively assess the worth of a game. It becomes difficult to fight the perceptions of people when, after telling them that you think the game is bad/has bad rules, they simply respond with "well I had fun, doesn't that invalidate your argument?". Well, in a way, it does, because of the aforementioned cemented perspective, but that still doesn't stand to scrutiny. Still, there shouldn't be a reason to comment negatively on the choices someone makes in order to have fun: we aren't trying to be the Fun Police and shaming people into playing games that we think are somehow, in our mind's eye, objectively better. The argument almost always comes down to this crux: if you find something fun and repeating that activity is fun to you, then there's no reason why people should suggest that you play something else just because in the wider community that game is not considered to be good.

On the other hand, I think there is an element of trying to inform people about the alternatives: if they are aware of what are so-termed 'superior' alternatives and still choose to play the so-termed 'inferior' game, more power to them. But if being informed makes them at least try what was suggested and they like it better, I think this can be a positive force within the community. There's almost nothing lost by following this route and much to gain, although it can occur that the sensibilities of some people that are overly attached to their games (or even to the definition of good/bad) can be hurt by aggressively campaigning for better games.

Quite frankly, fuck those people, especially if they come to a discussion forum and mysteriously find that people disagree with them and thus are subsequently  outraged by this. There's a saying about heat and kitchens and it fits equally well in regards to forums and discussion: if you can't stand discussions, why are you in a forum in the first place?

Anyway, going back to Talisman itself, in a sentence, the game is bad. Really bad. It manages to incorporate some of the very worst elements of 80s boardgaming design and the game really shows its age. For those not familiar with the game, the basis of it is that you are an adventurer walking around a realm divided into different concentric zones and you move up and down it fighting monsters, getting items and growing in power. Eventually, you are powerful enough to defeat the bigger, stronger creatures nearer the center of the board and thus you travel to that zone (after completing a random quest) in order to gain the crown of command and use it to kill the other players. In actuality, very few players will be able to experience even a fraction of accomplishments listed above. 

The problems start at the character selection/randomization stage. Each character within the game has different special abilities, power and crafting. Unfortunately, it becomes readily apparent that some are widely overpowered while others are distinctively underpowered, which gives a distinct advantage to the player that picks/is lucky enough to get the good characters.

Movement across the board is done by rolling a dice, destroying all possible attempts at a cohesive strategy by forcing you to make one of two choices when running around the board. There might be a magic item that some other hero decided not to take but unless you roll the correct number, you aren't going to get it. Combat is a simple matter of dice roll + stat, with an all or nothing result, which more often than not leads to situation in which you just can't improve your character since you keep facing the stronger enemies rather than falling over items like other heroes seem to be doing.The end game is, as you might have guessed, another dice-fest, with the holder of the crown just rolling dice until the other players die. This is a game in which the game gets more boring once you get in the lead, surely a piece of genius design intended to keep the fun level constant both among people losing and winning.

One argument that you'll often hear in favour of Talisman is that you are meant to view it as a progression, a storyline of the increasing power of your hero. Unfortunately, the game actively prevents certain people from achieving this goal and acts more like an adversarial DM that, not wanting you to have even a modicum of choice, decides where your character moves for you. The location are also fairly boring: some of the regions have extra rules but it feels almost too mechanical: A better storyline is created even in relatively terrible games of Arkham Horror, because at least the locations within the game feel distinct and each had different challenges and in the end, at least gives you some choice on how to perform your turn, something that is completely lacking with Talisman.

To wrap it up, since I think I have expended more words that I would ever want to while talking about Talisman, the game is bad. It is, although I almost not dare say it, objectively bad. There are so many mechanisms within the game which seem almost destined to make the game reach an state in which a large proportion of the people playing it will not have as good a time as others, but selective memory always seem to center around remembering the good times, when you fought a dragon rather than not being able to beat anything at all. The only reason to play this would be just to bring back the old nostalgia from those times, but if you want to be a hero in a fantasy setting there is so much out there nowadays that it seems weird that people still fall back on this particular game.

Unfortunately, I can only give 1 angry scowling Philip since this game should have remained in whatever weird board-gaming museum it came from.

Android

This is going to be hard review for me to do: this is mostly because I will find it very, very hard to create unbiased, objective views of this game without dipping into my deep, everlasting hate that I have for this game. This game has a multitude of factors that make it frustrating, annoying and badly made, but even viewed through this negative filter, it is going to be hard for me to truly put to words what it is about Android that has made me rate it so low on BGG or why I can't stand to see even other people play the game. The reasons for this are various and compound and they reflect some of the recent changes that I've had happen to me in relation to my own tastes and choice of games. So, in the first part, I will attempt to set the scene and explain the reasons why I hate the game, while in the second I will do my usual ranty analysis of the game, followed by at least a brief attempt at objectivity.

If you have read the Arkham Horror review, you might have found out that it was one of my first true boardgames, without counting stuff like Taboo, Risk or Monopoly. This was about the time when the new version of Arkham Horror had first come out, when I had recently started playing board games thanks to my University's large Roleplaying/Tabletop/Board Gaming society. Up until that point my contact with board games had been moderate to none, since usually my main hobbies had been either tabletop wargames like Warhams. I had dabbled into some roleplaying as well, but mostly as a vehicle for creative writing and thus usually only took part in rules-light freeform forum roleplaying, rather than playing anything with a strictly codified set of rules such as D&D.

From this base, I entered the world of boardgaming. I remember being euphoric about playing Arkham Horror and enjoying the game so much that I bought the Dunwich expansion even though I didn't have the base game, so that me and the people I lived with could try it out. I also remember playing Tigris & Euphrates for the first time, a game which I would rate as being in my top 3 nowadays, but which at the time I found frustrating and not having enough theme. I remember even liking Talisman, although even to me some of the faults of the game were readily apparent. Even though I hadn't heard about the terms at the time, it was clear that by any definition, I was a fan of Ameritrash games. Now, I'm not going to frame the rest of this little randezvous with history as an epiphany, where I suddenly saw the light and decided that Eurogames were the one true path, as much as it appeared that way for me. This is, of course, a personal journey that I went through and that I think everyone should or has gone through on their way to finding the sort of games that they like. Everyone's final destination is different, though, and I even know people that have taken the reverse journey, starting with Euros and then gravitating the other way as their tastes change (Acolyte, I'm looking at you).

Anyway, my board game playing went on a small hiatus for a couple of years after I left University, only to come back with a vengeance once I started working in a bigger city. This was about a year and a half ago and this was probably the time the most dramatic change happened in my gaming tastes. Unfortunately, I still remembered the days when I loved stuff like Arkham Horror, so I had a half year or so in which I would still play Ameritrash games even though I was starting to dislike them more and more by the week. It was during this time that I bought Android and this game became the moment when I truly realised that my taste in games had changed completely in just a few short years.

I love Bladerunner: I can't get enough of the film. I have seen the film again and again and I even remember playing the videogame of it, which sometimes I attempt to track down so that I can play it again. The entire feel of the film really resonated with me when I was a teenager. I've always loved reading about future dystopias and the grim setting of Bladerunner fit the bill almost completely. To me, Android seemed like the perfect theme. I bought the game for what I thought was a relatively good price and tried to find people to play it in my meetup group: I finally gave it a go one Sunday afternoon, when we had about 3 hours before the pub would be closing down for the day. I thought it would be enough time to teach and play it. I thought wrong.

The first thing that strikes you as you open the box is the sheer number of components. There's a component for everything, there's different decks for every single character, there's a huge board with chits for clues, conspiracy components, everything. Just unpacking everything takes a geological age, a feat that takes even longer than Dungeon Lords, which itself has a truly bewildering number of different components. Even once that was done, it took about 45 minutes to even just explain how to play the game: the game itself is quite simple, you move, you do an action, but there appear to be so many exceptions that I always going back to the rulebook to find out how this work, or how this card worked in conjunction of that card: it felt that i was reading the rulebook more than I was playing the game.

Half-way through we noticed that there was no where near enough time to finish the game at the pace we were going, so the little vestiges of theme that for some people make the game went by the window. No time to read the cards aloud anymore, nobody knew what was happening to their own or other people's character and the game boiled down to doing repetitive, mechanical actions in a bid to speed up. We were still no where near winning, so we called time at some indeterminate point and totaled up our scores: someone won, although we weren't sure how. I said I would be trying it again later, with more time to spare, but I never took it out of the closet again. I eventually traded it for Incredible Contraption, a game which I have yet to even play.

Now, you might be saying, quite rightly, that I didn't give the game a chance, that if I had the time to play it properly, I might have seen it for what it was. As true as this might be, what was clear to me at the time was that I didn't care much anymore about board games attempting to bring storytelling aspects to games and Android was largely the catalyst for this change. The rushed game of it that I had allowed me to see the game behind the mask and this allowed me to see that I had bought a game on the strength of the theme alone and I was committed never to commit this same mistake again.

The problem with Android is that the it's difficult to work out what was the actual focus of the design of the game: the central elements of the game, the murder mystery, is an afterthought, a vehicle for the personal development and storyline of the characters within the game: this is central part of the game. The mechanisms of the murder mystery are the most boring part of the game, involving the character just picking up tokens as they appear around the board, like picking up clue tokens within Arkham Horror but instead of them being future resources, they are the end-all and be-all of the entire mystery. Granted, it is possible to use the clues for other things, for example the so-called Conspiracy Puzzle, but even this feels detached from the game: you don't feel like you are piecing a conspiracy as much as you are just connecting stuff up in order to get you more points. Lastly, the entire murder mystery falls flat on its face when you realise that the act of investigating it feels more like you are framing people than actually discovering who the murderer is.

Although I make comparisons to Arkham Horror, but the game itself functions in a fundamentally different way: while Arkham has the characters be largely faceless apart from being themed as being certain people, the adventures that they will go within Arkham are colourful and filled with twists, as each of the locations that a character can find himself in can have different, unexpected challenges. Android, on the other hand, attempts to make the characters colourful through the use of branching paths, but does this at the expense of making the world and the adventures that the characters go through essentially faceless. Most of the locations within the game matter little, with the only thing mattering being if the location is dark or light. The story of the characters themselves is told both through the aforementioned branching story cards and dark/light cards: these are meant to represent good/bad events that happen on your character and are played depending on if you are in dark/light areas, but largely these cards don't feel like events but more as pure, mechanical bonuses/penalties. Even the branching story paths feel disconnected to your actions: sometimes the choice of path is completely out of your control and into the control of other players, which I guess can be said to fit the fact that you can't completely control your own life but it doesn't make for the most exciting of tactical choices. In the end, it does not feel like your action are weaving storylines of any sort, like they do in `Arkham Horror, but that the story that your character goes through is accidental to the actions that are happening on the board. It's this disconnect with the theme which is the most jarring part about Android and this, coupled with the frankly boring actions that you can do in the game (move here, pick up tokens, move there, pick up tokens etc etc) mean that by any metric, even one that purely attempts to analyse Ameritrash games by their own metric, the game is an utter failure.

There are a few saving graces, although they are few and do not outshine the shadow of bad design outlined above. First of all, just in terms of aesthetics, the game excels. This is a game in which to mark the different ranges of vehicles, there are different sized calipers. Everything else has beautiful art, including the big board showing New Angeles, the beanstalk and the lunar colonies. This is an additional shame, because such beautiful art deserves good, integrated theme/rules to back it up. As well as that, it is possible to enjoy the game as an attempt to progress the journeys of self-discovery which are the main theme of many of the characters within the game. At this point, however, it almost begs the question of why not simply play a Roleplaying game and attempt to answer those questions in a much freer, deeper and more meaningful manner, especially when Transhumanity has been done so well by RPGs such as Eclipse Phase.

In the end, there's no way I can honestly recommend this game. The main frustration I have with it is that it promises more than it delivers and feels distinctively like a broken dream, one that seemed good at the outset but on further reflection just turns out to be a false hope. Android, to me, feels like a well of possibility badly misused, a hodge-podge of rules that was more concerned with outside appearances instead of attempting to give a gameplay experience that fitted with  the theme presented. As such, Android only gets 1 angry scowling King Philip out of 5 due to the way that it crushed my young dreams of replaying Bladerunner.

Dungeon Petz/Dungeon Lords

This will be a double barreled review that, along with expressing my views and opinions on the two games, will also attempt to compare them to each other in order to show some similarities in designs, along with some theory in terms of how strategy games can work at different levels depending on what kind of mechanisms are central to the game. I have been playing these two games a heck of a lot recently and I through the course of the review I will try to answer one question that seems to be omnipresent whenever I ask someone if they are interested in playing the games: Which one should I play first/Which one is easier for beginners?

First of all, a little bit of history: Dungeon Lords came out first, followed by Dungeon Petz and finally by Dungeon Lords: Festival Season (which I will also touch upon). All of these games were designed by who I pretty much consider to be the Boardgaming Jesus, Vlaada Chvatil, designer of other hits such as Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker and one of my all-time favourites, Through the Ages. Both Dungeon Lords/Petz have art from the same artist, David Cochard, which most agree has done a wonderful job at giving both games a real sense of character. Both game are, at their core, worker placement games, but both games provide a unique twist on this basic formula.

Dungeon Lords has the players choose their actions all at the same time and then revealing them in turn order one by one, with only three spaces per action, which means in a four player, someone can get locked out of doing their selected action. On the other hand, Dungeon Petz has the players secretly dividing their imps/gold into groups, with the larger groups going first, although the actual placement of actions is pretty similar to the bog-standard "one worker per space" methods of most other worker placement games.

While in many other worker placement games the action selection is largely the entirety of the game, both Dungeon Lords/Petz make you collect resources/choose actions in order to help you perform damage limitation/prevention within a seperate second phase: in Lords this is the end-of-year combat rounds, while for Petz it is the assigning and fulfilling of needs for the aforementioned pets.

These tend to be largely solitary phases, in which you worry about your Dungeon/Pet Shop and don't worry too much about the actions the other people are doing: this is not to say that the games can be played Solitaire, especially for Dungeon Lords, which is a cut-throat affair, especially within the action selection stage since you can REALLY screw other people if they don't plan correctly. Everyone knows that a large part of the fun of worker placement games is the fun in screwing over other people (something that Caylus has managed to distill down to a fine art) and this aspect is actively encouraged within both games.

Concluding my brief explanation of the basics of the games, how do the games ACTUALLY work when analysing them at a higher level? In order to do this analysis, it will be necessary to take a look at the games in isolation. First of all, Dungeon Lords.

Dungeon Lords attempts to mix several different aspects of gaming genres/rulesets: although the use of worker placement is obviously one of the larger influences on the game, the selection of orders is more akin to role-selection games such as Puerto Rico or Race for the Galaxy, although it mixes elements of both since roles can be both chosen by several players while at the same time only providing limited numbers of slots.

This allows a player to experience an agony of choice (which in extreme cases can cause analysis paralysis) since not only does the player need to work out what immediate/long term needs he has, but he has to track what the other players need as well. Further adding to the complexity of choice, the order in which the actions are chosen also has importance, since all actions are more beneficial if you land on the third spot rather than the first.

This choice is somewhat alleviated by the fact that a player has two action cards 'locked out' each round, but even this mechanism is used to add further complexity, since only the first action chosen will return to your hand, with the other two being locked out next round. It is indeed quite masterful how Vlaada has managed to make the choice of 3 actions out of 6 have such far-reaching implications both in terms of your game and the game that the other players are experiencing. One thing that newbies have often told me when playing the game for the first time is that it's relatively easy to play, but agonizingly hard to actually figure out what to do.

As well as the worker placement/role selection rulesets noted above, Dungeon Lords also features elements of puzzle solving in the form of the combat round, in which it is up to players to work out what the best way to defeat the heroes is. The puzzles are created organically through the course of the game in terms of the choices that you make in regards to monsters/traps/dungeon layout/rooms and the type of heroes that attack your Dungeon. In order to keep things from descending into a straight mathematical puzzle there is one random element that is in place to keep you on your toes in the form of different spells and different levels of damage that the heroes simply get for wandering around the dungeon (called fatigue in game).

One last feature of Dungeon Lords which is worth mentioning is the possibility of death spirals: much like Agricola, certain events can happen that force you to lose resources or lose points/monsters. This can catch out people that aren't prepared for them quite substantially and can cause newbies to pretty much lose if they aren't careful about how they manage their scant resources.

At first glance, such a multitude of different type of concepts would make you think that the game is a mess, an untidy pastiche with little to tie the different mechanisms together (Android, I'm looking at you), but you'd be wrong: they all seem to work seamlessly together. The role selection/worker placement aspects work well together and the way that they are a mere prelude for the puzzle elements later works in often unexpected, wonderful ways.

Dungeon Petz, in some estimation, has much more the flavour of the classic worker placement games, although as mentioned earlier, the group selection allows a much better control of the game's turn order, so people that are last in the turn order don't necessarily get screwed out of something they absolutely need, although  it will likely cost them the ability of selecting other actions they need if they splash heavily on just a couple of large groups.

The group selection also has elements of group-think: I was certainly surprised at the difference in group selection within my regular gaming group and the Play-By-Post game I made of Dungeon Petz. The other part of Dungeon Petz is more crisis management rather than anything else and is hard to describe in terms of other mechanisms since I haven't seen anything much like it in any other game.

The types of needs you play on a pet both determine what they will need (food, pooping, playing etc) and thus the resources that you need to use in order to keep your pet happy, but as well as that, they determine how much your pet is worth and how many points you can get out of that pet. Since you always know what's coming up in the next few rounds, there is an element of control in terms of what pet you get/what cards you play, but there is a strong element of random chance within Petz that is present in order to emulate the simple unpredictability of a pet. People that like the almost deterministic aspects of Lords can be put off by the higher level of random chance that can occur within Petz.

Referring back to my first paragraph, I mentioned that I would explain how different strategy games can work at different levels and this ties in with the fact that I am much, MUCH better at Petz than I am at Lords. This is due to the fact that Lords rewards long-term planning: both in terms of what monters you get, what rooms you get, the heroes you face, the traps you buy etc. Petz, on the other hand, rewards making snap decisions based on the situation at hand, and it is certainly easier for me to do the latter rather than the former.

I tend to make snap decisions which usually are good on the short term but can suffer in the long term and largely this means that I am able to deal with the emergencies that occur within Petz much more easily than the ones within Lords: this is largely because within Lords it is difficult to dig yourself out of a hole that you placed yourself in, with the aforementioned death spirals being possible, while within Petz, although you might lose points, there will never be a situation in which you can lose what you worked for entirely.

In terms of pure psychology, it is clear that the two games attempt to make your brain think and work in different ways, which is why I enjoy both equally: they provide different challenges. As well as that, they both manage to add limited random elements that don't feel as unfair as the profession/minor improvements cards that are present within Agricola, thus increasing the replay-ability of the games.

Responding to the initial answer within this review, it is impossible to truly say which one should be played first since they both utilise their mechanism in such structurally different ways, but at a push, Dungeon Petz would have to be chosen first, simply due to the fact that it punishes slightly less for screwing up, although largely both games can give severe blows (to the ego) if you don't plan your turns properly.

If asked about my own subjective view of the two games and which one I prefer, I couldn't honestly answer at this stage anymore. I used to love Petz because it was the first one I bought and because it felt easier for me to play, but since I have started playing Lords more often, I couldn't decide anymore. They both feature cute, endearing art, boards which look seamless art yet are completely functional, solid rules that reward both elements of strategy and tactics, indirect conflict that can really impact other players and remarkably different gaming experiences contained within a single game.

I couldn't recommend either of them enough. The theme of the games is also strongly tied to the rules of the
game, with both games having flavourful rules that still affect the game by a very large degree. As well as that, the expansion for Dungeon Lords, which basically adds more of everything works well with the game, adding both new features which don't just feel tacked on to the main game.The expansion does, however, make a difficult game into a even MORE difficult games, with some of your decisions having even more of an impact.

There are, however, issues with the games: first of all, the sheer number of components means that it usually takes a long time for both of them to setup. The number of different tokens/pieces/boards is truly staggering and rivals the best efforts by Fantasy Flight Games. As well as that, although both games are solid in terms of rules, it is necessary to have an up-front understanding of them in order to really know how to play: within Lords, it is necessary to explain how the combat works in order for someone to figure out what he needs to be doing within the previous turns. Within Petz, assigning/fulfilling needs of pets is likewise important. It can feel overwhelming to have to learn so many rules up front: I personally prefer to play full games of something from the get-go, although I know that other groups simplify combat rules the first year in order to further ease in newbies to both games. As well as that, and this is one of the constant criticisms I have of Vlaada, the rules for the game are fun to read but aren't easy to use as reference, although the rules in this case aren't as bad as Through the Ages, which has appalling levels of incomprehensibility so far unmatched by any other Vlaada game.These faults, however, are very minor for me and largely don't detract from the gameplay of either game, although it is likely that newbies which don't have anyone to teach them the game might struggle the first couple of times they attempt to play the game.

In the end, it is difficult for me to express just how much fun I have playing these two games. They provide me with the necessary complexity, the strong theme tied to good, solid rules, the visual narrative and the the antagonism/interaction between players that I need in order to like a game and play it over and over again. For these reasons and many of the ones I have outlined above, I give both games 4.5 angry scowling King Philips, with Dungeon Lords reaching 5 if the expansion is included.

Why I Play: Visual Storylines

In this series of blogs, I will explain why I play what I play. This might not be a big, incisive piece that tries to explain the theory beneath board games and how their concepts interact with each other, but an important part of this blog is that it's primarily to feed my own personal ego so today, it's me time and on me time we talk about the concepts of gaming that personally appeal to me. In other words, I will talk about some fundamental concepts of why games are fun for me (I'm allowed to use the word, this is a personal opinion!).

In order to explain what I mean by 'visual storylines', first of all let's consider the sort of games I like. Some of my favourite games include: Tigris & Euphrates, Dungeon Petz, Dungeon Lords, Brass, any sort of 18XX games, Napoleon's Triumph, Agricola, Factory Fun, Pursuit of Glory and many others. One of the initial observations that can be made is that they are all relatively on the heavy side, many of them are either economic games or worker placement games that use resource, some of them are Wargames and there are couple of games that can be considered tile placement games. Although complexity and length of the game does tie them all together, there is another factor which isn't as abstract as complexity that ties all the above choices together: 'visual storylines' or 'progressive story telling' (there's probably a better word out there invented by someone smarter than me but I don't know it, answers in the comments!).

What I mean by that is that all of the games above, by way of your actions in the game, allow you to weave a  story through the game by the medium of the actions that you yourself take. The above can be said to be true of any board games out there, but many of them have very simple way to track what you have been doing in the game, either through a VP count, or how your deck is shaping up in a deck-building game. Unfortunately, these aren't very visual ways to show progress: what I want to see when I play a game is a factory being built up, machine by machine within Factory Fun, or watch my pet shop/dungeon grow in Dungeon Petz/Lords, or watch the ebb and flow of the front lines in a game like Napoleon's Triumph, Pursuit of Glory or No Retreat! I want to see kingdoms be built up and then collapse in a game of Tigris and Euphrates, their remnants scattered across the landscape only for the next kingdom to swallow them up.

Some people might be surprised at the last choice, but Tigris and Euphrates, even though at first is might appear like just another one of Reiner's abstract games, sticks to its theme in remarkable ways, allowing you to really create a storyline about the actions of your dynasty. Conquering kingdoms from the inside, either through diplomacy, commerce or outright war is all done seamlessly and once the dust settles, external conflicts leave one kingdom victorious while the other one has splintered, fallen apart from external and internal pressure.

This is what really inspires me to play: the start of the game is like an empty canvas that is constantly evolving and it's a wonderful thing to compare the start of the board with the end position, each little step containing its own storyline. Although not one of my favourite games, Agricola also does this particularly well, making it possible for you to see your farm gain size and evolve as the game progresses: there's a real feeling of satisfaction for me to see the end product and remembering how little I had started with.

This is largely the reason why I play 18XX. Generally, trains don't interest me all that much and pure financial/stock trading games are pretty low in the list of games I'll play, but 18XX really nails that aspect of visual storytelling. It's why I used to take snapshots of every game I played, because I liked to see how the networks compared to other sessions: each a canvas of tiny choices multiplied together to create completely different routes, no matter the fact that the starting position was the same. The end board just ends up being a collective diagram of all the minute decisions made by all the players within the game and there is something wonderful about how the cities in the game develop, how economic incentives shape the network.

This is why Napoleon's Triumph is my favourite game: the battle within it and the front lines are ever-changing, one side collapsing while the other stands firm and this is all intuitive from simply looking at the board: everything you need to know is right there, no numbers to count up or tables to look at in order to see if this particular area is better defensively than another.

There are other reasons why I play games, but this is the big one. It took me a while to realise how important this aspect of board games was to me, but once I found out about it, the kind of games that I would buy changed dramatically and for the better. Although it's the complexity that initially draws me in, it's this aspect that actually keeps me playing a game over and over again, without getting bored of it. It's why I need a mixture of both theme and rules in my games: too abstract and I can't envision the building up of the board as a cohesive storyline: too theme-based and I end up being told what happens (as happens in Arkham Horror) instead of building it myself. Balance, as in many things, is all important.

The Eternal War: Rules vs Theme

Except for the article on Napoleon's Triumph, most of my articles are created as a reaction to something that someone posts on the Something Awful board game thread, which has pretty much become my home since I feel that I can talk about board games there without some of the idiocy that I've come to expect out of rest of the internet as a whole. Most of my readers are going to come from Something Awful but for anyone that has found this blog somehow and is not aware of how the Something Awful forums operate, they have both a paywall and a moderation policy strict enough to keep most of the idiots that seem to infest the other places that seem to discuss nerdy interests on the internet. There have been long discussions on the thread recently on what constitutes a thematic game, but in this article I want to primarily express my own views on the subject and how the boundaries can be and should be blurred.

Now, as you might have guessed, I am a huge fan of Caylus: it's a cut-throat game in which it is possible to have several different strategies to victory and the rules work in a beautifully way, feeding off each other that allows a lot of choice while still creating an element of uncertainty. On the other hand, Caylus is truly one of the better examples of rules over theme, since the theme itself is as bare-bones as possible without reaching the heights of <insert any Reiner Knizia game here>. In the end, you are just exchanging blocks to put other blocks down, although there are elements of feeling like you are building a town as you construct more buildings going down the road and eventually replace existing buildings with residential buildings and eventually replace those with larger buildings: in that at least, the game can feel organic. What I have heard though is that the game itself doesn't feel much like building a castle because you are placing little houses to represent the castle instead of building the castle itself, and comparisons between Caylus and Pillars of the Earth are made. What I find interesting about these comments and what brings us nicely to my first point, is the difference between theme as substance and theme as style. It would be very easy to replace the little house-tokens in Caylus with sections of walls or whatever that you join together to make a model of a castle: by some of the arguments made before, this would suddenly make Caylus much more thematic, because instead of using tokens as an abstraction of building a castle, you are building an actual castle. This might be an exaggeration of the argument, but this is certainly within the field of Theme as Style, in which the look of the game and the extra effort made in order to make certain parts of the game more tactile make the game more thematic even if the rules themselves remain the same.

What exactly do I mean by Theme as Style? If I was to use an example, many of the Fantasy Flight Games would be within this field. Many of their games are considered thematic due to the amount of art assets poured into the game in order to conform to the theme and the various miniatures that the company produces for its games can certainly add to the impact that the game has in a thematic sense. If you replaced the miniatures in Descent with tokens it certainly would have have the same impact. This can indirectly lead to certain popular themes automatically making a game thematic just on the pure popularity of that particular theme: there is certainly a large number of games that rely on being in Space, or having Zombies, or being Fantasy in order to be considered thematic, while on the other hand games that deal with a medieval town are usually not considered to fall within the category of 'thematic'.

In of itself, Theme as Style is essentially harmless, since the production of games with an heavy emphasis on the art assets and with certain popular themes is not going to impact the rest of the hobby and if people like that sort of thing, more power to them. What I do find troubling, though, is the polarization that Theme as Style seems to cause within the hobby. The boundaries created by the terms Ameritrash and Eurogame (irrespective of their historical connotations of where those games were actually produced) seems to stunt the ability of people to acknowledge that not ALL games that feature Zombie need to be badly ruled dice-a-thons, while on the other hand games that involve medieval towns do not necessarily have a paint-by-numbers theme that can be easily replaced by something else. It seems to suggest that theme or rules are two sides of a coin and that it is impossible to both have theme and rules at the same time, which is patently untrue.

To bring a few examples, let's first of all consider Agricola. Agricola is well known as being pretty heavily in the Eurogame camp. I have argued in the past, though, that it is the prime example of how even the most Euro of games can be extremely thematic. Within Agricola, you do feel like you are truly creating your own little farm, from humble beginnings to being able to feed an entire family. Now, you might argue that it has elements which mean that it is not thematic. One of the most used examples in this respect is why actions slots are taken up, so if you plow a field, your neighbor can't. These can either a) be explained through abstraction (you are in a village, there's only one ox to plow and if you use it, someone else can't use it) or b) say "So what?". Even thematic games, even Arkham Horror, have rules that in context of the game itself don't make thematic sense (why don't I get killed by the monsters? Why, when I get lost in time and space, I end up at the correct time/place again? Why are GOOs so goddamn puny and weak?), yet no one would argue that the game itself is thematic. What Agricola does best is to make you FEEL like you are running that family of farmers, with needing to scrape every resource, find any source of food and constantly having to worry and plan in order to not starve: there's a real sense of both urgency and dread that you might not have enough food by the next harvest. So, at least to me, the reason why Arkham Horror is considered thematic and Agricola isn't is due to personal preferences of theme: Arkham Horror is thematic purely because it is based on a cool theme about alien monsters that you have to fight.

My example about Agricola above neatly segues into an explanation of Theme as Substance. What I mean by this kind of theme is theme in which the actions that you do within the game can directly translate into the actions that the people/groups you control within the game would do within the game. As Broken Loose defined in the thread (although I disagree somewhat with the level of connectedness within Arkham Horror), if you are feeling the same feelings that the people you control are feeling, then the game is doing a good job at connecting theme with the rules. Although I agree with Broken Loose in many of his points and I generally prefer Rules as Substance over Rules as Style, I still think they are both equally important in order to create a game that truly exploits the use of Theme as a whole, rather than only in parts. Hence, even if some games that are stripped of their art assets would evoke the same feelings as compared to ones in which the art assets evoke the entirety of the theme, it is important to have both work together or otherwise it will always feel like you are pushing blocks around instead of appreciating the theme of the game.

I think a principal example of how to combine the two aspects of Theme well is any of Vlaada Chvatil's games, or even Napoleon's Triumph. The former games are truly evocative of how you can combine art assets and good rules in order to create games that truly are innovative. Take Dungeon Lords or Dungeon Petz: they both have beautiful art assets in which ease of use is sometimes neglected in favour of beautiful looking boards, but both games have robust rules that have very thematic flavours attached to them. One example is that in Dungeon Lords, Priests don't heal unless the hero party fought with monsters that turn: this is given a humorous explanation within the manual that the priests have been contracted to 'provide healing after a battle', hence no battle, no healing. This rule, when analysed, is clearly present as a sort of balance to the game, but the thematic explanation of it does add to the game (much as if a thematic explanation had been given about the Agricola only-one-worker-per-action rule). Similarly, although Napoleon's Triumph rules are very solid, it is clear that some of the design decisions of the game were done for purely thematic reasons in order to make the game visually similar to Kriegspiel/old battle maps.

In conclusion, I think the whole argument of Eurogames vs Ameritrash is completely overblown and that in recent years, it has been shown to be a complete misapprehension of what the spectra of games available actually are. Rules and theme are not by any means mutually exclusive, and the real argument needs to start in analysing games in terms of how they approach the subject of theme instead of simply arguing about the theme they might have/have not. In the future I think it will be important to judge a game more by how it connects to its theme through Theme by Substance rather than the superficial analysis of Theme by Style that seems to be prevalent now.