One of the Most Thematic Games Ever

This article is going to be more of a review of a game that I really, really like. It is a  game which I think is at the top of the pile for me not only because of the rules it uses as part of its experience, but mostly because of the wonderful, wonderful immersive theme that it brings to the table. This article is meant to be an attempt to get readers to understand the way that my mind works in relation to games and the way that I like to interact with rules and theme in order to bring me enjoyment. Now, I don't expect for everyone that reads it to completely agree with me: I would actually be shocked if everyone tended to agree with everything I say, but what I do hope to do is make you think about the subject of theme (which I already touched on before) in a slightly different way as you read about the two games that I will review in this article.

So, if the first thing you thought upon reading the title of the article was 'Vlaada', well, you might be surprised that this article will not review a single Vlaada game. Let me get something straight: overall I think that Vlaada's game are a wonderful fusion of rules and theme that is pretty unprecedented in most other games.

Dungeon Lords does in some way make you think like a dungeon keeper and every little rule has a particular thematic explanation to support it (although I have spoken to people that don't think it's enough like building a dungeon because it's not enough like D&D/Descent/etc: you can't please everyone).

Dungeon Petz feels like managing chaotic pets that might not do what you want them to do at any given time. Space Alert feels like you are in a rapidly disintegrating spaceship attacked from all sides. Galaxy Trucker feels like you are in a rapidly disintegrating spaceship attacked from all sides.

Through the Ages feels exactly like the games of Civilization that you play on the computer, even though the mechanisms are completely different and there isn't even a map. Bunny Bunny Moose Moose makes you feel like you are a complete idiot. All of them wonderful games (well, I don't know about the last one) and all of them perfectly suited to their theme. Unfortunately, I am not going to talk about any of those games, as appropriate as they might be.to this particular topic. If I mentioned any of those, the connection to theme would be too easy to explain. I want a challenge.

The game I want to review in this article is going to be Tigris & Euphrates. Merely by reading that, some readers might have punched their screen in disgust. 'A Reiner Knizia game being called thematic? You have gone too far Tekopo, TOO FAR!'. If you bear with me though, I hope to explain some of the thought processes that have me reached the conclusion that this is possibly one of the most thematic games available, although it hides it's thematic roots very well.

First of all, a brief explanation of the game for those that haven't had a chance to try what is rightly called Knizia's masterpiece. Tigris & Euphrates is a game based on Mesopotamia, the land of the two rivers: each player is in control of a dynasty within the region, with each player have 4 different kinds of leader (unlike most games, it is symbols that denote one player from the other rather than colours). Scoring is based on 4 different colours, with the winner being decided by who has the most in the colour that they have fewest points in (so, if your distribution is 4-5-6-6, your score would be 4). You gain points by having your leaders on the board and either expanding your own kingdoms or conquering other kingdoms: one novel feature of the game is that players don't exclusively own each kingdom, with shared ownership being possible as long as your leaders are a different colour from another player's. All expansion and conquest is done through the laying of tiles on the board. There are a few further features in the game (monuments, internal conflict as opposed to external conflicts, how combat works etc) but this small explanation has gone far enough, considering the aim was to give a brief overview of the game.

Reading the above, you might think that there isn't a lot of theme present: you play tiles on a board and (a bit like Acquire, if two kingdoms touch there is a conflict. How can laying down a tile possibly be compared to actually waging war or taking over a kingdom diplomatically? You might think that there is too much detach from playing the tiles and actually doing the actions that a ruler in those times would do. You might think that having to place leaders on the board and them taking up a space is way too abstract and gamey. And you would be right. If you look at Tigris & Euphrates at that level, the themacity of the game is not present, but the thing about Tigris & Euphrates is that it's not attempting to portray the world at such nitty-gritty level, but actually at a much higher, more simulation-like level. And it's at that level that the theme really starts to kick in and you appreciate the game as more than a simple Euro in which you want to get the highest score possible.

I was able to appreciate this level after I ran one of my Tigris and Euphrates game on a forum. By the end of the game, I had collected all of the updates, turn by turn, each showing the two actions that each player had chosen on each of their turns. For fun, I decided to turn all those pictures into an animated GIF in order to see the progression of the board. What I saw astounded me. The board developed in an almost organic way, each tile-placement almost like a shared decision by the players. You could see kingdoms grow, collide, collapse and then be reformed. Once mighty kingdoms would leave a few lonely tiles on the board (I've forgotten to mention that tiles can be removed from the board if you lose a fight), remnants of a once mighty civilisation that was now no more, lying in the dust Ozymandias-style. Even those remnants would eventually be scooped up by the next big empire. Large empires that had made too many monuments would be greedily attacked by their neighbours and quickly taken apart. Small kingdoms that hadn't had space or time to expand would be attacked by their larger neighbours, only for those neighbours to be destroyed from within either by internal strife or disasters (a type of tile that a player can play in order to create a dead-zone that doesn't count as any tile). Singularly, each placement of the tiles did not seem to drive the narrative necessary in order to have a thematic game, but taken in aggregate all the tile placements by all the players created a shared narrative that seemed to capture the essence of the era much more powerfully than many wargames I have played.

Upon noticing the above, the level of detail present in the game in order to adhere to theme seemed to increase, in my eyes: farms (as represented by blue tiles) can only be placed on river tiles, representing the need for flood-waters to fertilise the soil. The setting up of trade links from one place to another is also represented through the use of treasures. Internal strife is based mostly on religion (a powerful force during those times) while external strife is fought with the relevant colour/theme, be it religious power, farmyards, markets or even armies. It doesn't take long to realise that the placing of each tile doesn't always represent the placing of actual buildings/structures, but also the spread of influence from your kingdom.

Apart from this high-level theme, there is also a very compelling game underneath: a game about being cut-throat, striking when you are strong and trying to shore up your defences when you are weak. The interaction between players is cut-throat, with anyone attempting too much to keep to themselves likely to be beset from all sides if they aren't careful defending their kingdoms. The shared kingdoms can also make it difficult to expand your kingdom without also helping other people. The fact that you are scored on your lowest points in one of the four categories means that you can't just concentrate on a single strategy to win: you have to be flexible. The overall package of the rules really works to give a fulfilling, tactical experience.

In terms of negatives, the game is very much a Euro, much like most, if not all, Reiner Knizia's games. As much as I attempt to show that it has a wonderful sense of theme above, die-hard ameritrash players might find it difficult to find the theme within this game as I described it (although largely this is one of the reasons why I decided to write this review). When I say to people that I think that Tigris & Euphrates is thematic, many times they think I am joking, even when I attempt to explain the thought processes behind this analysis. The main issue is that Tigris is not traditionally thematic: it doesn't match with our commonly held assumptions of how a thematic game should feel and look: it looks like a Euro game with it's different colored cubes and tiles. Other issues present within the game is that, for a Euro, luck can play slightly too much of an element: it is perfectly possible to end up without any tiles in a colour you require and although you can re-draw as an action, if you fail to re-draw what you want, you are still in the same place but now missing an action. The game can also snowball if the players aren't careful, but usually aggressive play can prevent this. If players aren't aggressive enough, though, the game can end up being about who gets the luckiest with the tiles but hopefully as players get more confident they should quickly realise that sometimes it's best to be aggressive.

As I mentioned earlier, I don't really expect everyone to agree with my analysis of the game above and I would actually be interested in hearing anyone that disagrees with the points above. I hope, though, that this piece does showcase slightly better the way that my mind works and some of the reasons why I would give Tigris & Euphrates a very well deserved 5 angry scowling King Philips out of 5.

Randomness

And by that, I don't mind Monkey Cheese kind of stuff, just in order to clarify things from the get go. Now, a lot of people might have realised that randomness is not something I particularly enjoy within a game, but I don't think that statement is actually correct: randomness can be an important, even crucial element within games and without it many games that I play and enjoy today would not be anywhere near as enjoyable as they are. The crucial element is that randomness needs to be managed through the proper construction of rules in order to allow it to supplement the game rather than completely supplant every aspect of the game. It's a difficult balance to find and there are many, many games out there that instead of working out this balance just replace every mechanical resolution within the game with randomness since they are unable (or unwilling) to find alternatives. One example that nowadays I find almost inexcusable is the use of X+ to hit systems (i.e. systems in which you need to roll a certain number or above in order to perform an action/hit a monster/etc). We have been using such combat resolutions systems for a very long time now and superficially they are a very easy way to work out combat resolution. Unfortunately, the modularity of this  system is also it's downfall: although it can be used in a variety of different games, games that have this system will largely feel homogenous as well as being mechanically unexciting. To me, it's the hallmark of a designer that had a great idea for his game, mostly in terms of the setting, but didn't really have the knowledge or experience to develop a resolution mechanism unique to his system.

Departing a little bit from my rant against X+ to hit systems, let's first of all understood why randomness is included within games in the first place. Randomness, for example, affects drastically the replay-ability of games. If we think of a single board game session as an exercise in which we have a defined start state and end at a end state that is decided by the events throughout the game, it is clear that if a game always ends at an end state very similar from session to session, the replayability will be low. If one particular strategy is overwhelmingly more powerful to the extent that the player that does that strategy will always win, then it is likely that players will soon stop playing the game since it has simply become an attempt to reach that premium strategy and nothing else. There are some badly designed euro games that fall precisely within this trap. It is clear, then, that in order to be successful a game requires a way in order to make it possible to reach diverse end states, all of which are possible to achieve while playing the game. The two main ways to diversify the end state have usually an element of either of the following (there are possibly more elements but these seem to be the most prevalent to me):

The first element is the unpredictability of the actions of other players. This element is usually strongest in games that have little randomness, like for example worker placement games like Caylus or Agricola. Political manipulation games also feature this element strongly, although the unpredictability can be sometimes manipulated by cutting a deal that is mutually beneficial to both players (of recent games that I've played, Tammany Hall features this element). Unpredictability can be used as a replacement for randomness, especially within games in which there is an antagonistic selection of resources/worker spaces/etc.

The other element is of course randomness. Randomness helps to diversify the end state of games in several ways, with the most important being the inability to be sure if you can fulfill an action or not (where I define stuff like hitting a monster for damage as also being an action). Unlike the former element, where you might be unable to perform a desired action due to the actions of others, with this element you are unable to perform actions due to random chance of not being able to perform them. Every roll of the dice or draw of the card branches the path towards the possible end state, because if you don't deal with the monster THIS turn you will need to plan to deal with him the next!

It is important to note that in order to make a game truly re-playable and enjoyable through many, many games, a mixture of the two elements above is important and to lean too much towards one side can actually be detrimental (although not all of the times). A game which entirely relies on the first element might find it's re-play value curtailed after a group that has been playing it develops too much of a meta. I define meta here as an almost group-think element that can be constructed within groups after repeated plays in which the group accepts (correctly or incorrectly, it does not actually matter which) that there is only a particular way to play the game. Some of the strongest examples of this I've found within 18XX games, games are almost devoid of randomness entirely except for the starting order and thus rely on player unpredictability in order to remain interesting in subsequent plays. There are many 18XX games in which my group has developed an Accepted Method of Winning, usually to the detriment of our playing experience, since the sessions spent playing that particular version of 18XX homogenize into one, with the only memorable games being the ones in which a new strategy manages to break the meta.

On the other hand, games can stray too far into using randomness as a crutch in order to boost the re-play value of a game. If a game is too random, players can feel like choices within the game become meaningless since even playing the game at the peak of your abilities can lead you to be last. It's at this point that an important distinction needs to be made: is the game being played PURELY for the experience (as all games are meant to impart a certain experience to the player) or are they being played in order to test the strategy//intelligence/skill of the player?

Let's note that neither of the objectives outlined above are necessarily wrong or bad. Board games don't necessarily need to provide a challenge or be tactically interesting in order to fulfill their purpose as entertainment (although for some that will be an important aspect of playing games, as it is usually for me). What is important is that the designer of the game has internalized this choice and thus bases his design decisions on what he wants the game to achieve. I've seen plenty of games on, for example, Kickstarter which purport to be tactical, strategical, skillful and then when you actually look at the rules for the game in question, it's almost entirely luck based. It's the divergence from the purported objectives of the design and the actual outcomes of the mechanistic rules of a game that can cause a game to ultimately feel unrewarding.
On the other hand, I usually find that games that are up-front about being experience generators are more successful in their design. Tales of the Arabian Nights is not the greatest of games but I find that it hits its intended function perfectly: although the game features a win condition, it is a second thought compared to the experience and stories generated by the game (and which is why I was shocked when someone suggested skipping the text when I played the last game of this, it seemed so counter-intuitive to the objectives of the game). This is also one of the reasons why a simple house rule to Arkham Horror (having someone else read cards to you) can make the game much more of an experience simulator. It is important to note, however, that in the end all games are intended to provide experiences of some sort: what is important to note is if there are other aspects to the game apart from the experience by itself.

Going back to ways in which randomness manifests itself, it might have been apparent from previous posts that I have made that I have a strong interest in wargames. Usually a strong interest in Euros seems to preclude an interest in wargames since the latter are so random and in most cases you might be right. My common way to answer this dichotomy is to point out that wargames are essentially games in which the aim is to always stack the odds within your favour: this can be done by ensuring that your attacks are likely to succeed while forcing your opponent to make though decisions that might potentially backfire if they go wrong. Although this is true in most games, within wargames this aspect tends to be more organic due to the number of individual units in question and the range of actions that each of these units can take. Being a wargame, however, is not enough: the system behind the wargame is also important. As much as I like games like Here I Stand, I absolutely detest the combat resolution present within the game, which is just a simple X+ to hit with very, very limited modifiers. Although stacking the odds in this system is important, the outcome can be wildly unpredictable that it almost becomes meaningless. Better systems usually involve Combat Resolution Tables, which in Paths of Glory, for example, attempt to reduce all possible factors within combat to a single dice-roll. You may ask how this changes probabilities in comparison to multiple dice rolls, but since the result of the dice is not binary (hit or miss) and instead a table is needed to look up the result of the dice roll , it is possible to have a much more finite control over the probabilities within your game. A smaller range of possible values will make your game less luck-based: differences in the ranges between small and large formations might make it more or less possible for a small formation to beat a large one: a CRT system allows a developer a much better control of how much the designer wants to make the uncertainty in dice rolls a part of his game.

It's this control over probabilities that I find lacking in most systems that use X+ to hit: there's no way to be able to manipulate the probabilities of dice to your advantage. If the ways are small and insignificant then largely the player's actual actions are going to have a very small impact on the game, with the result instead being decided by how lucky/unlucky a player is.

Although largely I have talked only about dice randomness, it is also important to speak briefly about card randomness. I usually prefer the use of cards over the use of dice in determining randomness: one of my preferred ways involves the need to shuffle decks or not, an element used to great effect by deck building games especially. A great example of this that I'm very familiar with is Card Driven Strategy games: there are many different designs within this genre of wargames but usually the ones that I find more fulfilling are the ones in which several reshuffles of the deck are necessary, which brings in elements of deck management to the game as you want to get enemy events out of the deck in order to stack the deck in your favour. On the other hand, decks that do not get reshuffled tend to be more random in terms of what cards affect the game: a great example of this is For the People, an otherwise excellent CDG that slightly suffers from the fact that you only cycle through the even deck once. Another example of card randomness is when cards are used as random events: I have already gone through this in my review of Yedo when comparing the game to Dungeon Lords. Both games use random events but a measure of forewarning in Dungeon Lords allows the player to have a chance to change his plans, something that in my opinion ultimately enhances the gaming experience.

One important positive aspect of randomness is that it can level the playing field:: it allows inexperienced players to play with experienced players at a level field that ensure that the game remains competitive throughout. I think this is an important aspect of randomness but I find that the length of the game can be equally important: if a game lasts too long and is too random, no matter how level the playing field is, it's gonna be unrewarding even for newbies, especially if early luck snowballs into ultimately winning the game. I find that shorter games do not tend to have as much of a problem with needing to limit too much randomness because the game is over quickly enough to prevent people from dwelling too long about having lost due to random luck.

To end an article that has been going on for far, far too long, I think randomness is an important aspect of game design, but it does need to be tempered in order to prevent it being the only memorable thing about the  mechanics of your game. It is still helpful to point out, however, that like in all things, a degree of balance is important: take, for example, Agricola. It's possible to say that the success of this design is partially due to the occupation/minor improvement cards, which can add some variety to the game and can even change the dynamic of a session completely depending on which decks are chosen. Randomness, unlike what some of the more die-hard euro fans suggest, is not something that needs to be removed: it's something that needs to be managed.

Yedo: Or, the Allure of Confirmation Bias and the Dangers of First Play

I played Yedo recently and I had a pretty bad time, even though I earnestly said at the end of the game that I had liked it. First of all, it is important to note something: it is very easy to categorize games in terms of how well we play them in our very first outing. I have fallen into a tendency to be much more favourable of games in which I won in my first outing as opposed to being beaten badly, but in recent years I have attempted to reach a more objective viewpoint on this matter. I am starting to actually view games in which I do badly more favourably, since it means that they have more strategic depth than it is at first apparent to me and therefore would eventually be much more fulfilling. The problem seemed to be, however, that my first experience of Yedo was not only mired by the fact that I had played badly and hadn't understood the strategy of the game, but also because a terrible string of unavoidable bad luck had pretty much put me out of the running in the mid-game and only a subsequent string of good luck managed to keep me in the running at all. My trained instinct, however, was not to blame the game but my own mismanagement of the resources I had available to me: the game was, after all, a worker placement game and therefore, from my own prior experience with the genre, I was conditioned to think that any troubles that I had throughout the game was of my own making. After all, there are plenty of situations in Dungeon Lords in which a random event seems to be aimed specifically at screwing your own personal strategy (since I usually go for a monster heavy strategy, the random event in this day is Monster Strike, which is an extra mini-payday).

I therefore filed Yedo, after that first play, in the mental category of "bad experience due to own mistake, try again while avoiding previous issues". This particular category is one in which I'm not completely sold on the game since the experience was so bad the first time around (I put Agricola in a similar category because of a single dickhead that I played the game with), but that I had to at least give another go since I was sure that the experience was not representative of a standard playthrough of the game.

So, what exactly happened in this first experience that soured me to the game? Well, for a start, let's describe how Yedo plays (for anyone not interested in my 'theory of board gaming reviews' crap, THE REVIEW STARTS HERE). Yedo is a pretty simple worker placement with a separate auction mechanism at the start of each round. The main way to get points within the game is through the use of missions, which are very reminiscent of Lords of Waterdeep although, unlike LoW, the resources you build up in order to accomplish these missions are almost never used up. Instead, in order to accomplish the missions, you are required to have certain weapons (of which there are 8, with you only able to have 4 at the same time), or have Geisha's (which give you additional points but apart from that do nothing else), or use up a blessing or have workers on specific spaces on the board. Missions give you points based on their difficulty (more difficult missions require more resources/workers) and also have bonus objectives that give you even more points/money. The other type of scoring in the game is based on bonus cards that give you points based on having the most of a particular resource.

The auction at the start of each round allows each player to bid on getting a certain type of resource: although some of the resources can be gained in the worker placement part of the game, most items in the auction have a 'draw 3, keep 1' mechanism. After everyone has taken something in the auction, the worker placement part of the game begins, which is fairly standard, each space having only a limited amount of slots. Workers can be placed either to complete missions or do a specific task within the space and usually a space has more than one option available. The placing of workers is done by a changeable turn order (think Caylus), where everyone places all of their workers and then each player resolves one in turn. Additional difficulty is created by the presence of a watchman, who goes around the board capturing any workers present within the area he's currently patrolling: his movement can be affected by several intrigue cards which are also very reminiscent of LoW in terms of how punishing they can be.

Comparisons to LoW present within the game are obvious and it is useful to compare the two games in terms of how they stack up against each other. In terms of theme, I think Yedo has LoW pretty much beat: each mission has an accompanying flavour text which helps the player understand what the mission actually entails: instead of collecting cubes that are meant to be adventurers and somehow mysteriously losing them once the quest is completed, the buying of Geishas, weapons and having your workers in specific places feels more natural and usually the things that you need fit the nature of your mission. LoW does the latter as well, with specific missions requiring specific adventurers but since the adventurers just feel like random Euro resources (white cubes, red cubes, whatever), you never really feel like you are getting into the spirit of the game. 

So, what did I actually stumble against in my first play of Yedo? Well, I got into a situation in which I couldn't get one of the weapons necessary to complete most of my missions and since all the weapons of that type had gone in the discard pile, I would have to wait before I could get what I needed (or get lucky and find the intrigue card that allowed you to look through the weapon discard, but that didn't happen). I had one mission I could complete, but it required two workers to be in two different places. Turn 1, I placed my worker on one of the spaces that I needed, securing the one that everyone had seemed to use more often first, only to get shut out of the second place, meaning that it was impossible for me to complete the mission. No one had ever played on that particular space prior to that round so not knowing the game very well, I didn't prioritize  that space: the other players that had blocked me out hadn't done so intentionally, but had just happened to need that space for one of their own missions during that round. I chalked it up to not knowing the game very well and since I didn't have the money that was part of the reward for completing the mission, I sacrificed a couple of victory points in order to get enough money (going broke in Yedo is very, very crippling). 

The second turn came about and I was set to complete the mission when unexpectedly someone played a card that made the watchman go the other way, preventing me from placing workers in one of the spaces I needed without him getting captured. The player in question hadn't played this card in order to screw me over directly, but simply because he needed to do his objectives which otherwise he would be prevented from doing. Another turn in which I was forced to spend VPs for money and in which additionally I lost one of my workers.

The third turn I was prevented YET AGAIN from completing the mission by a random event card that closed one of the areas I needed: I do not know if there was a way to view upcoming events (answers in the comments please), but it meant that I had yet another turn in which I lost VPs in order to get enough money to do anything in the next round.

At the time, I chalked all of the above to a mixture of bad luck, not knowing the game and playing badly and I kind of forgot about it until one evening in which I got into an interesting discussion with one of the people I play regularly with. I had told him my experiences with Yedo and when I got around with outlining the above, he confirmed to me (where you wondering what that part of the title was about?) that my experiences of the game weren't singular to me and that he actually thought were failings of the game. Rethinking it in my own mind, I couldn't help but agree with him. Although partially it was my fault for getting into the situation above, there were several issues that I might have not picked up if my first experience hadn't been so disastrous. For example, one of the issues with the game seemed to be that one of the critical parts of the game, the worker placement, was largely luck driven due to the lack of information that players have concerning the likely placement of workers by other players. It's impossible to know what spaces each player needs to complete his missions: in most standard worker placement games, it is at least possible to ascertain roughly what a player would be going for, but in Yedo this information is completely lacking, making it impossible for someone to judge if they should prioritise one space over another when attempting to complete a mission: spaces that were hardly used in the early stages of the game might become required depending on what missions the players have. This lack of knowledge has impact in all aspects of the game: it's impossible to know what weapons someone will need or what annexes (think buildings) someone requires. It is also nearly impossible to know what kind of action/intrigue cards someone has, or even what bonus cards he has. There's a fundamental lack of information from which to make informed decisions throughout the game. In this aspect, the game is even worse than Lords of Waterdeep, since in the latter game, since you choose from an open choice of quests, people more or less have a knowledge of what you are going for. As well as that, since you don't need workers in specific places in order to complete quests, the ways of countering someone are obvious, since you just need to prevent them from getting resources.

Although in both games you can get screwed by other players, within LoW the interaction is more often direct than indirect. It often occurs within Yedo that you get screwed not because of someone directly wanting to hinder you, but to hinder you in indirect ways through the following of their own objectives. 

My opinion of Yedo had thus changed, but largely it had been an opinion that I originally had formed but had been afraid to express: after all, the game had been lauded by many people, many of whom I respected in terms of their opinions towards board games. My own mental training had also prevented me from making that snap judgement and it was only the confirmation of my negative experiences that had finally allowed me to express my negative views of the game. Like all things in life, there can be a degree of peer pressure in evaluating games and due to my own nature, if my opinion of something is radically different from the norm, I usually think that it's an issue with my own opinions rather than the opinions of others.

So what are my ultimate thoughts about Yedo. It's difficult to say: I think this truly is a game I have very mixed opinions about: there is a lot to praise about the game but after some analysis, I can't avoid but see the obvious weaknesses of the design. I was willing to try it again after I had played it the first time but the situation now is that I honestly don't know if I would be willing to play it again: the possibility that I might experience the same issues as the first time (and the confirmation that others had experienced the same issues  and they weren't strictly speaking an exception) meant that I now feel reluctant about wasting time in a game from which I might only get to experience negative situations. I think there is enjoyment to be found and if you tend towards the more thematic part of the board gaming spectrum, there is the potential for a lot of replay-ability  even considering the (apparent to me) weakness of the design.. I thought originally that Yedo would be like LoW but with tighter, more euro rules, but it is apparent that it actually goes the other way and this, although not a good thing for my own tastes, might be just the right fit for ameritrash (if you'll excuse the use of the word) players.

Think about it: the game has a fairly well implemented theme while attempting to produce euro-like worker placement elements: for someone that enjoys worker placement games but doesn't necessarily like euros, this would seem like a unique, almost perfect fit. It does what Lord of Waterdeep attempted to do and although like LoW it tries to disguise its thematic roots, it provides a stronger theme without just copying most of its rules roots wholesale from other Euros. 

It is therefore not possible for me to either recommend Yedo or not, because that recommendation is so strongly based on the personal tastes of the player. If, like me, you prefer games in which you have enough information to make informed choices, this game won't be for you. My own rating for this game would be 2.5 scowling King Philips at most, but that score is meaningless: the people to which this game is aimed at will score it higher and rightly so. There is only one true recommendation that I can make: try the game for yourself and only then decide if you agree or disagree with me.

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.