Battle Line

This two player card game is a competition to see who can win the most “flags” in this war.  You start out with a row of 9 flags, and players take turn laying down cards on their side of the table.  The cards range from 1-10 each in 6 different colors.  Once three cards have been laid by each player on one flag, that flag is complete and you see who won.  The best combination of cards you can get is a straight (8,9,10) all of the same color.  Then three cards of the same number but different colors, a straight of different colors, and so on.  Whoever has the better set of cards claims the flag.  You can also claim a flag on your turn if you can prove the other person can’t possibly win it no matter what cards they play because of what is already out on the table.    The game is over once one player has claimed 5 flags, or if they claim three flags that are next to each other.

What makes the game a little more interesting is the tactics cards.  These can be played on a turn instead of a regular card and have special effects, such as being a wild card or requiring a flag to have 4 cards on each side. 

2 players.  Approximately 30 minutes.  Easy-Medium learning curve.

Becky says:
It’s nice to have some good two player games for when our friends and family aren’t around and it’s just Jason and me.  Previously the only two player game that I had which I really enjoyed was Lost Cities.  Battle Line has a similar feel to Lost Cities but it’s a bit more complex, which I like.  It’s by the same designer, Reiner Knizia, who I’m a really big fan of.  I didn’t think much about designers/companies before, but now that I have experience playing  a wide variety of games I am starting to notice that I favor some designers over others.

There is a bit of luck involved here, but it’s really a lot about the strategy.  If you have several 9’s or 10’s, do you lay them down for the three of a kind?  Or do you try to build up for the more powerful straight first?  The game can also turn very quickly.  You might start out with some good cards, but if you don’t play them right you’ll probably lose.  Another common mistake I’ve noticed is that you don’t want to commit yourself to one thing on one flag, so you spread out all of your cards on different flags.  Then, if you get something that doesn’t fit with what you’ve already played, you have nothing left to do with it.

I think the most complicated part of the game is flag claiming.  It’s up to you to figure out when you can claim a flag, which means you have to be aware of everything and watching like a hawk.  This makes the game more challenging, but in a way it’s frustrating too.  Since you have to watch everything and contemplate every move carefully, it can drag the game out – especially when it’s not your turn, it’s easy to get bored.  I am also too honest of a person sometimes.  I feel badly if I see that my opponent can claim a flag but they haven’t realized it.  Sometimes I tell them.  Maybe I am too honest for this game, but I rationalize it by saying, “It’s the first time they’ve played” or “the second time they’ve played.”  How many plays do they get until I stop feeling badly?  I’m sure there’s a cut-off somewhere, but this game is still too new for us to be there yet.  But that is more of my own personal flaw then the game’s!

Overall I really enjoy this as a two player option.  Although it can feel long depending on who you’re playing with, it actually doesn’t last that long and it involves some really good, complicated strategy, which many two player games seem to lack.  I give it an 8 out 10.

Jason says:

I am finding it difficult to rate Battle Line because I don’t categorize two-player games the same way I categorize group games.  For one, I don’t like two-player games as much.  For another, I like to think of group games as sort of special events; I would call up a group of friends to come play games like Carcassonne, Bang!, and Dominion, but I wouldn’t call up a friend to visit just to play Battle Line, or Lost Cities, or Balloon Cup, et cetera.  Maybe it’s just a mental block that I need to eventually get over, some hidden prejudice against two-player games.

It’s a good game with good gameplay.  I suspect that, much like Chess, there are good opening moves and there are bad opening moves, and these are things that a player just has to experience (or maybe read about) to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t.  As the game goes on, it becomes a lot clearer how the pieces have fallen, and it really comes down to seeing whether or not your early-game preparations will see you through to the end (with a little bit of luck drawing the cards).

The game is lots of strategy, but it is also some luck (the kind of luck that is still strategy because you can still pick the “more likely” lucky outcome).  I like that.  I also feel like this game is the spiritual relation to another game, Lost Cities.  It plays the same sort of way that Lost Cities does, with each player playing unique cards on their sides and sometimes being forced to play cards they don’t like.  Except Battle Line takes a longer time getting there and just seems generally harder to comprehend.

So I’ll suggest this: I am not fond of games that have a high level of “obfuscation.”  By that, I mean that if I’d rather read War and Peace or read Ulysses than read the rulebook, that’s bad.  If the rules are about as intuitive to my experiences as quantum physics is to the Classical Model, that’s bad.  If I liken the game to Rube Goldberg machines, that’s bad.

Why is this game a Quantum Rube Goldberg Machine with an instruction manual written by James Joyce?  Okay, that’s a gross exaggeration.  But even though it’s a good game, there are games out there that do more for me, and do it better.  Lost Cities plays the same sort of way but is far less confusing, goes faster, and is still skillful.  If I wanted a hyper-strategic game that makes even my brilliant brain itch, I’d go with Chess.  Lastly, if I wanted to make pretty matches of cards, I’d play Rummy.

For now, I’ll give two-player games a different rating system, until I can come to terms with two-player games and (n>2)-player games in the same space.  Battle Line gets a B grade from me.  I guess now is the appropriate time to say this: I’ve never once earned a victory in this game.  I did technically win once, but it’s because the other player was distracted.  And I failed to clarify a fairly pivotal rule before it became pertinent.  And it was a pity-rematch anyway.

Meme Monday - Monopoly Jokes

Jason is not a fan of Monopoly.  I have a feeling he would agree with this graph to an extent.  Though I don't think he would ever reach "WOOO LET'S DO THIS"

Surprising Stories about Popular Board Games

While clicking around mindlessly on the internet, I stumbled upon this very interesting board game related article:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18995_5-classic-board-games-with-disturbing-origin-stories.html

Apparently, many of the popular games that children enjoy weren't so innocent when they were first created.  Some of the items I'd heard bits and pieces about before, such as Monopoly being based off of another game and Clue originating during the era of the Nazis.  I think I was most shocked to learn that the game of Life originally had a square for "suicide"!

What did you think about this article?  Did you know any of it already?  What was most surprising or interesting to you?

Where do you get your games?

Let's face it.  Most of the board games we play aren't items that you see on the shelves of most stores.  Sure, you might go into Toys 'R Us or any number of stores and find Monopoly, Yahtzee, Life, and Candyland.  But what if you want to acquire more games like Bang! or Pandemic?  Where do you go for those?  This is a question that was posed to me recently, and I thought it would be something good to discuss on the blog.

The simple answer to this question is: Amazon.com.  Almost all of the games that we've played or bought are available on Amazon.  Sometimes it's directly through them (which means free prime shipping!), and sometimes they're listed on Amazon through other sellers.  Amazon usually seems to have the best prices as well.

If, however, you're looking for another place to get games, there are other options out there.  Barnes and Noble has a games section, and usually has one area of "strategy" games where you'll find Settlers of Catan, Risk, and others.  Last time we were there we saw Escape from Atlantis, a game that I didn't buy because I thought I could get it cheaper on Amazon (turns out it's not there - for some reason it is not really available many places right now!).  I posted earlier that Target started carrying a small selection of strategy games.  Another great place to look is independent shops.  We've discovered a few that are dedicated almost solely to games.  Although they are usually retail price (no discounts), it is nice to be helping out small businesses, especially since some of them also host gaming events and other activities.  There are also plenty of websites out there besides Amazon that sell games.

I don't know where all of our games come from since we tend to get a lot of them as gifts.  It seems that if someone doesn't know what to get us for a birthday or Christmas they usually go with a board game - and that's just fine with us!

What about you?  Do you buy most of your games from Amazon like we do?  Or are there other places you know of to get board games?

Bang! Gold Rush

For the original Bang! rules and review, go here.  Gold Rush is the most recent in a line of many expansions for Bang!.  There are two major differences in the game: the gold nuggets and equipment deck, and the shadow variant.  First, the equipment deck.  This is a new deck of cards that you can purchase while you play.  Some of the cards you use immediately when you buy them, others are cards that are put in front of you.  They can cost anywhere between 1 and 5 gold nuggets.  Three cards are face up and available for purchase at a time.  The way you earn gold nuggets is by attacking other players.  Every time you cause someone else to lose a life point, whether it’s from a bang! card, Indians, duel, or whatever, you gain a gold nugget.  You can also trade in beer cards to gain gold nuggets.If you want to destroy a permanent equipment card in front of another player, you can’t use any regular cards like cat balou – you must pay gold nuggets equal to the item plus one.  There are several new characters added to the game that have powers that have to go with gold nuggets and equipment cards.

The other major change is the shadow variant.  This effectively allows players to continue playing, even when they’ve been eliminated.  If you’ve been killed, at the start of your turn you draw two cards that you can attempt to use.  You don’t get any life points back and you also don’t get to live.  You use what cards you can and discard the rest.  You can, however, hold on to your gold nuggets that you’ve earned, which allows you to buy immediate use equipment cards.  Once your turn is over you go back to being dead.  If the renegade is killed, he joins the team of whoever has the most people dead (outlaws or team sheriff).  You can choose to play Gold Rush with both new elements of the game, just the equipment cards, or just the shadow variant.

4-7 players.  An expansion to Bang!  Easy learning curve if you’re familiar with the original game.

Becky says:
First, the equipment cards and gold nuggets.  They are a lot of fun and add an interesting element to the game.  Everyone we’ve played with seems to really like this addition.  Most of the cards are fairly straight forward – use as an extra bang or an extra cat balou, or put it in front of you and you can now hold up to 8 cards in your hand.  These are neat.  There are also ones that seem a little too good and pretty much give you the power of another character.  For instance, there is a card that makes it so that cards with a diamond do not affect you – that’s Apache Kid’s power, and a 3 life point one at that.  However, the “really good” ones are not too many of them, and there are many of the other cards, so you may not even see these at all every time you play.  One thing I noticed about the gold nuggets – people get greedy for them, and they speed up the game considerably.  You see something that you like out on the equipment deck, so you shoot whoever’s next to you to get nuggets, not really caring who they are.  This can mess with the strategy a little bit and makes the game a bit more… blood-thirsty.

Now, the shadow variant.  What I love about this is that it means you’re never completely out of the game.  You still get to keep playing, which was a bit of a flaw before.  We would have people die in the beginning or middle of the game and still have it go on for 45 minutes, while they had to sit there and do nothing (or more likely, text someone or play Words with Friends).  I know some people feel it makes the game longer but I don’t think it does very much, because the shadow turns are so brief.  And when you combine it with the gold nugget stuff it evens out.  We have noticed a trend when we play with the Shadow variant though, and that is that it seems to help the sheriff’s side way more than the outlaws.  I haven’t quite put my finger on why that is, but most times the sheriff wins when we play shadow variant – it seems like a bit of an issue for a balanced game.

Finally, the new characters.  For the most part I think they are very good.  Most of them deal with the new gold nuggets and equipment cards, such as Raddie Snake, whose power is that he can choose to exchange a gold nugget (up to 2 times per turn) to draw an extra card.  However, there is at least one character that seems pretty unbalanced and too powerful.  That’s Don Bell – his power is that at the end of his turn, he “draws!” and if it’s a heart or a diamond, he takes another turn.  Effectively it means that every turn he has a 50% chance of getting another turn right away.  And he starts the game with 4 life points.  If he had 3 I could maybe be okay with his awesome power, but 4 is too much.  Too powerful characters either dominate the game or get killed right away.  Our Don Bell got killed right away because his power was too good and no one wanted to see it used.  They all ganged up on him just to get him out of the game, which is really no fun either.  Also, other older characters might not be as good in Gold Rush – we discovered that “Big Spencer” became a “Big Target” when people wanted gold nuggets because he almost always has to take the hit.  Poor Big Spencer got killed right away, and people gained a lot of gold nuggets.

Overall I really like the gold nuggets and the equipment deck.  They speed up the game, which has always been an issue with us.  I also do like the shadow variant because I hate being killed and not getting to play anymore, but I can understand why some people don’t like it.  I give this expansion an 8.5 out of 10.

Jason says:

Dodge City pushes the game further along the asymptote toward perfection, High Noon/Fistful breathes further life into it, and Wild West Show sorta-kinda goes overboard a bit.  Gold Rush puts in a good effort, but for me, not good enough.

I commend Gold Rush for trying to fix the dead-players-out issue.  Unfortunately, the fix is a problem in itself.  In theory, gold nuggets are a good addition that fit into the genre; I like the fact that it is an extra incentive for shooting people.  I do not like the fact that it adds a whole separate class of cards that don’t really mesh with the rest of the game and that are supremely powerful.  When a card like the Calumet or the Boots comes up, there is no reason not to go for them.  Worse yet, those cards are duplicates of powers already assigned to characters, making those characters less unique.  There is something sacred to me about powers.  They are things that make a player feel like they have a personal edge… but not anymore.  I will no longer pick Apache Kid if I know I can just grab a Calumet.

Next are the extra rules to fit the expansion in with the rest of the deck.  First, you can discard beers without regaining life to instead take a gold nugget; bad, it doesn’t make sense.  Second, black-border cards cannot be discarded by Cat Balou; bad, too powerful.  Third, you can force other players to discard black cards by paying the price of that card + 1.  Why would a living player ever do that!?  Just buy your own black-bordered cards if you have enough money!  Only a ghost would force discards, since they could never hang on to black-border cards themselves.  What a boring way for a ghost to spend its hard-earned nuggets.

That brings me to the Shadow Variant, inherently flawed because it requires the gold nugget part to play well.  I think it is a bit too powerful, since it’s almost the Ghost Town card from High Noon, permanently (making that card a moot point also).  As an added minus, it ruins more cards, like characters Pedro Ramirez and Kit Carlson who can manipulate the draws of the next player, but not if a ghost throws off all of that planning.  Silliest yet, the Renegade is no longer a Renegade when he dies, and is instead a swing-vote for the losing team.  It’s all very unsatisfying to me.

My last thought is the characters, which are, to varying degrees, over-powered.  In particular, Don Bell, who gets to play an extra turn on aDraw! of hearts or diamonds.  Arguably better than Black Jack in every way.  This is just another example of a card that I think directly suffers because of this expansion.

So you might be thinking, “Wow, you just panned that game like a prospector in a gold rush!  Can you do better?” to which I would say, “Good pun!  And yes, yes I can.” The market part is a completely separate deck of cards that don’t really fit into the rest of the game.  Instead, why not make a market out of cards from the deck, all costing four nuggets?  As for the Shadow variant, instead of interrupting the flow of the living players’ cards, maybe allow dead players to take one of just a few indirect actions, or maybe have a separate deck for them to play off of (I know there is a website called the Bang! blog which has an unofficial expansion that does this).

So what does it come down to?  I will give Gold Rush a 5.75/10, which mathematically comes out to a 5.75/10.  For all of the panning I did, I would have given it a much lower rating, but I do respect that Gold Rush speeds up the game and allows dead players to play.  I wouldn’t personally include Gold Rush in a game of Bang!, but our house rules say that the designated Sheriff gets to determine the expansions we play with, and if that sheriff says Gold Rush, I won’t say no.

Meme Monday - lolCats

Dominion

This is a deck-building card game in which players attempt to earn enough points to be the others.  Everyone starts with a basic hand of 7 copper coins and 3 estate cards (worth one point each).  Each turn you play off of your own individual deck.  The turn begins by drawing five cards.  You then have an action phase, in which you can play action cards.  Then there is the buy phase, which allows you to purchase new cards to add to your deck – these might be action cards, money cards, or victory point cards.  Finally, you end your turn by discarding all cards played and any that still remain in your hand into your own personal discard pile.  You immediately draw 5 new cards from your deck to prepare for your next turn.  When you run out of cards your deck gets reshuffled.  The game continues in this manner until either all of the province cards are gone (victory point cards worth 8 points) or when any other three stacks of cards have been exhausted.

2-4 players.  Multiple expansions and other stand-old versions available.  Approximately 30 minutes.  Easy-medium learning curve.

Becky says:

One nice thing about this game is that the basic rules are simple enough.  The variety of different action cards can make it seem a little overwhelming, but once you accept that you’re just going to have to take some time to read the cards and get to know them, the game can go pretty quickly.  One thing that I really like is how the playing experience can be different every time, depending on what cards you use.  There are pre-set arrangements that they recommend, but you can also just randomly select which cards will be played with for each game.

One thing that is both a pro and a con is that it can be very difficult to figure out what strategy you want to use, and that can change depending on which cards are used.  Many people I play with build up these amazing chains of action cards, going through almost their whole deck in one turn.  Somehow I just can’t get that strategy to work for me.  I find that if I’m buying action cards it means I can’t upgrade my coins, and if I have mostly action cards I don’t have enough coins to buy what I want anyway.  It’s a delicate balance that you have to find. 

I also love how fast paced the game is.  It’s not like Citadels, where I feel like we wait forever for everyone to make their selections, or even Bang!, where a turn can drag out for far too long.  I know Jason will complain that this game doesn’t move quickly enough for him, which frankly I don’t understand.  I find that half the time, by the time that I have drawn my cards for my next hand and figured out what I want to do with them, it’s already my turn again.  I will note that we don’t own this game, his brothers do, so we only play when they come over which means that it’s always a 4 person game.  It would be interesting for Jason to try 2 person Dominion and see if that fixes his issue with the pace.

While Dominion is a very good game, if I have to note some negatives I will say that it doesn’t always seem perfectly balanced, especially when you choose which cards to play with randomly.  Sometimes it feels like you are getting nowhere fast, so you might as well start buying Duchys so you can get some points.  And while I don’t have a problem with the general idea of the attack cards, some of them seem much worse than others and a few I personally feel are too harsh or annoying and don’t really add much to the game.

Overall I enjoy Dominion, but probably not as much as I could because Jason usually is resistant to play, and what fun is it to play a game when one of the players isn’t into it?  I still give it an 8 out of 10 as it’s a fun game and I am pretty much always willing to play it.

Jason says:

I was really fascinated with Dominion the first time I played it.  It was like a breath of fresh air.  It’s another one of those solitaire-feeling games, where you play your game, other people play their game, and (except for a few exceptional cases of indirect influence) everyone compares their work at the end of the game.  In my mind, I put it into the same style class as 7 Wonders.

Like Bang!, Dominion fills a void in my gaming heart that was once reserved for collectible card games.  Bang! fills the game playing part, but Dominion appeals to the deck-building fun.  Yes, a lot of the fun that people find in collectible games like Magic: The Gathering is the search for the perfect deck design.  Dominion knows this, and it turned that search into a game in and of itself.

Regretfully, the more I play Dominion, the less fond of it I have become.  It is fast-paced, especially for a game that goes by turns, but I still get impatient waiting for people to take their turns.  Normally I have the patience of an immortal, but Dominion just hits some spot in my brain that can’t seem to wait.  That complaint might just be my personal problem, so I think others should judge for themselves on that; let me know what you come up with.

My real gripe with the game is the Attack cards, the part that makes people interact more directly.  Because the game feels like such a personal endeavor, attacks and disruptions feels contrary to the spirit of the game.  Also, they make the game slow down more.

I rate it a 6.6/11, which really just comes out to 6/10.  Even though it is one of the lower scores I have given and despite how critical I am of it, I do enjoy playing it, and there are many times I would rather play Dominion than games like Pandemic or Bohnanza.  I will point out that almost everyone I play games with disagrees with how low a score I gave to Dominion, but because of how impatient the game makes me, I'm sticking with my decision.