Legit Civ-lite in eighteen cards

 The Rise of a Jarl has been described as the most complex game that Button Shy has published. Which, to be fair, isn’t that strong a statement, seeing as how Button Shy is a haven for casual gamers.

While my own introduction to Jarl was through Button Shy’s play testing forum, it was attracting interest even before then. 

Jarl is a solitaire Civ-lite game (If Roll Through the Ages counts as Civ-lite, Jarl definitely does) where you are building up a Viking kingdom. You’ve got resource management, warfare, tech, geographic expansion and infrastructure. Honestly, the biggest absence for the Civ-lite label is a lack of epic time scope.

That’s pretty hefty for an eighteen-card game. One card serves as your play mat while the other cards wear many hats as actions, resources, coins, population, countries and technology. 

The game lasts four rounds. Each round ends with an increasingly strong raider attacks. If you can’t fight off the last one, you lose. Otherwise, you figure out how many points your Viking empire is worth. (There is already an expansion which changes victory conditions but I’ll get to that later)

Back in the day, one of my old gaming groups used to play Glory to Rome a lot. And Jarl uses the same basic structure as Glory to Rome. If you know it or one of its descendants like Mottainaj, you are three quarters of the way to learning Jarl.

By giving me a solitaire, more compact Glory to Rome experience, Jarl turned out to be a game that I didn’t know I was looking for.

There are, of course, meaningful differences. Having so few cards makes resources for everything incredibly tight. Choices in technology are key, to the point where there are clear strategies based around specific tech.

If you do reach the point where play becomes too formulaic (which I think will take some time. I’m certainly not even close to it), the first (or only?) expansion adds point goals which will adjust depending on your choices. I don’t like expansions that ‘fix’ games but I do like ones that breath new life to games.

The Rise of a Jarl punches above its weight. It does its theme justice and is well worth the play.

My March Gaming

 March was a month where time wasn’t on my side for gaming, let alone learning new games. Despite that, I managed to cram in some decent faming.

I learned:

Zoning Out

Weeds (TravelSoft)

Unstable Potions (Alexander Shen)

Rolling Slimes

The Cursed Cat (playtest)

On top of that, I also was part of the playtests for most recent prototypes of Jarl and Reawakening. Both are on the heavier side for Button Shy. I hope Jarl in particular finds its audience.

I also have to say that I enjoyed The Cursed Cat enough that I may very well keep playing the beta version even though the play test is over. The fact that we just got two black cats is a total coincidence.

I always try and learn at least one Roll and Write a month. This time, the only one I learned was Rolling Slimes. Which I did not enjoy. But I’ve already written about that.

Actually, the only game I learned last month that I don’t plan on playing again is Rolling Slime. That’s pretty good.

So, you want to play Sprawlopolis with pyramids

 Zoning Out is a Looney Pyramid adaptation of Sprawlopolis. That’s the elevator pitch and also pretty much everything you need to know if you’re going to be interested in it.

Personally, I have been a longtime fan of the pyramid games. I started following Button Shy when they kickstarted Cunning Folk and the Sprawlopolis line is one of their high points. I’m about as target demographic as you’re going to get.

You are building a city out of pyramids. All the pyramids go in a bag so the only thing you can decide when pulling one out is the size. And that’s key because the big placement restriction is that a pyramid can’t be next to a pyramid of the same size. 

The rules don’t quite out and out say this but is very clear that the city is a grid and a little pyramid and a big pyramid functionally occupy the same amount of space. Diagonals don't matter so you’re only worrying about orthogonals. 

Where Zoning Out really shows it’s Sprawlopolis roots is that there are eighteen special scoring conditions. I made cards for them but you could just use scraps of paper. In addition to new ways to get points or rule changes, they all have a number. You use three to a game and the sum of their numbers are your goal for the game.

Just like roads give you headaches in Spawlopolis, black pyramids are there to make life difficult. They are worth negative points. Each one costs its size multiplied by the number of pyramids around it. Which doesn’t sound that bad but the bad stuff piles up fast.

You score the largest group of each color, the special scoring conditions and subtract the black pyramids and hope you win.

There are two questions that Zoning Out has to answer: Is it any good and of itself? Would I rather play it than Sprawlopolis? From where I’m standing, Zoning Out is a good game but Sprawlopolis is better.

You ultimately have more control in Zoning Out. Each move is only dealing with one square while Sprawlopolis has you juggling four at a time. You decide what size pyramid you’re pulling. And you know that all forty-five pyramids are going to be in your city. 

Sprawlopolis was a game changer. Zoning Out reflects that. Sprawlopolis has inspired expansions and spinoffs. Zoning Out doesn’t have the breadth to do that. It is a solid tribute though.

The Daily Weather just keeps delivering

 I think The Daily Weather was designed with me in mind.

The Daily Weather is a solitaire tile-laying game where the really clever bit is that it generates a different goal for every day on the calendar. It's also short enough that, in theory, you could easily play it over a cup of coffee. The designer specifically mentions the New York Times daily puzzles as an inspiration and I can clearly see where they were coming from.

The cards are chibi as all get out. The cards you actually play with are two-by-three grids with what I'm going to call emoji weather symbols because if I call them that, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I almost never worry about color printing or getting a published copy of a game but I am sorely tempted to do that just because the cards would look so cute.

There are double-sided cards for the months and days of the year. Using ones for your current date (or another date, there's no reason why not), you use them as a base for the game. Using six double-sided cards, you try to cover all the months and days except for the date you're playing for. The placement rules are that you have to cover at least matching symbol when you place the card. In addition, you have to complete a designated pattern of symbols. If you do all that, you win the game and can figure out if you get any points.

But here's where it gets cool. There is a separate set of cards for the days of the week, which week of the month and what season it is. (Since this is a game you can play anywhere, it works whether or not you are in the northern hemisphere or the southern hemisphere) They will determine how you set up the month and day cards for your game base, what pattern you have to create to win, and what the scoring conditions are if you win. 

There are plenty of rule details I skipped over but I think I've given you enough of an idea to know if this would even interest you.

I was part of the large playtesting crew for the Daily Weather and it still boggles my mind how much development had to go into making the game work for every possible date. I try not to go into my play testing experiences in any kind of detail but I will say the Daily Weather was one the few games that I fit into testing during my lunch breaks. Part of that is because it is short and part of that is because I enjoyed that much.

Experience helps but some dates are definitely harder than others to beat. When I first started playing the Daily Weather, I was happy if I could get the month and the date. I still usually have to play a setup at least a couple times to beat it. And actually scoring points if I win, that's just taunting me at this point. Which isn't to say that the game is frustrating but that it is properly challenging. And that I'm probably very bad at it but it's a solitaire so it's all good.

The Daily Weather is a very puzzly game but you are only using six of the twelve possible card faces (the cards are double-sided but you don't flip them) and they come out in a random order. For me, that lets the Daily Weather cross the line from puzzle to game. And it is possible to get the wrong cards in the wrong order to create an impossible combination but you never know until you try. And you usually have time to try again.  

I have tried a lot of coffee break style of games since I got into PnP. And a number of them have ended up in my regular rotation. And the Daily Weather is one of the best I have found. It offers a wide variety of challenges and, at least for me, they are challenging. It manages to make placing six cards interesting and that is not an easy thing. And I can fail three times in a row in one cup of coffee.

The Daily Weather is worth daily play. 

I go to the beginning of Maigret

 It had been a couple months since I had read one of Georges Simenon's Maigret books so I decided it was time to go back to them. More than that, I decided I should read the first one. The copy I read was called Pietr the Latvian but it has also been published as The Strange Case of Peter the Lett and Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett, and each one was by a different translator. 

I think, when it comes to serial characters (characters who are the protagonists of several individual stories, as opposed to one distinct story. Superman compared to Frodo Baggins, for example (yes, I’m stealing the term from Robin Laws) ), I don't think it's necessary or even wise to start with the first work. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries are a series I routinely go back to but I don't know if I had started with Fer De Lance if it would have sold me on the books.

Pietr the Latvian isn't as extreme a case but I am glad that I started with one of the later books, Maigret’s Dead Man. At that point, Simenon had clearly gotten a very defined idea of who Jules Maigret was and how he operated. To be sure, Maigret is still very realized in Petr the Latvian. This isn't an case of you can see the seeds of the character to come. It's the sapling of the character to come.

I did have much more of a sense of Maigret's physical presence in this first book, as opposed to his emotional, intellectual presence. In the later books, I was never struck by the fact that Maigret is big slab of a human being while this first outing never lets me forget that. I have read some folks compare Maigret to Hercule Poirot, which I think is a stretch, but it's an even farther stretch at their starts. 

That being said, many of the elements that got me hooked on Maigret are already in place. The descriptions of places and people are very grounded and realistic. More than that, there is a strong psychological element to both the book and Maigret's methods. While Maigret is willing to use footprints and cigarette ashes to figure things out, he is much more about getting into the head of a suspect right out of the gate.

Pietr the Latvian has more of a noir vibe that the other two Maigret books that I have read. Maigret gets shot around the middle of the book and just powers through that in order to continue the investigation for crying out loud. That feels more like something Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett would write. (I'd have to go back and look but I'm sure Hammett's Continental Op has done that more than once) To be fair, the book was written when both those guys were active. 

And the title character who is also the central antagonist is more of a larger-than-life bad guy compared to my previous reads. Not a super villain (and, yes, there’s a big twist to his nature) but not a realistically grounded character.

To be fair, Simenon wrote seventy-five books in the series, along with over a dozen short stories. I have read far too small a sampling to speak authoritatively about what Maigret and his stories are really like. However, despite what I think is some early installment weirdness, Pietr the Latvian just wants me to keep on reading.

I dunk on Rolling Slimes

 I have made it a habit to learn at least one Roll and Write every month. So I try and keep a few quick and dirty R&Ws on deck for the months where it’s tough to find gaming time. And sometimes, that’s how you find a diamond in the rough. And sometimes you don’t.

Rolling Slimes is not one of the diamonds.

It’s yet another game where you roll shapes and draw them in the grid. And It’s a formula that can lead to some really fun games.

If you have at least two players, the active player rolls three dice. The highest one gets pulled (if it’s a tie, you just pull one of them) The active player chooses one of the remaining dice and everyone else uses the other. If you’re playing solitaire or with a huge group, you roll two dice and take the lower one.

You are drawing shapes that are the same number of squares as the die number. You have to follow Tetris rules, no floating shapes. However, as long as it’s the right number of squares in a legal spot, you have flexibility in making the shape.

So, here’s the clever bit. At the start of the game, you can only place shapes of the three squares. Fours and fives and sixes are treated as ones. But when you get two three-shapes next to each other, you draw a four shape and fours are unlocked. And you unlock fives and sixes the same way. 

You win by unlocking and placing a seven shape.

I am amused at how Rolling Slimes reminds me of the video game Suika Game, although the best part of that is the physics engine and Rolling Slimes doesn’t have that lol

Okay. I think the problem with Rolling Slimes is a very simple. In order to get a seven shape, you have to roll double sixes (or triple sixes in a multi-player game for a non-active player to win). More than that, it has to be in endgame. Boxcars at the start of the game are worthless. 

And not only does it take a long shot to achieve the winning conditions, you don’t have a way to mitigate the odds. The die rolls are the die rolls.

While you could measure Beat-Your-Own-Score by the efficiency of how you fill the grid, that isn’t inspiring when you have actual winning conditions. And in a multi-player game, I want to win, not just lose as bad.

Now, there are a bunch of expansion modules. However, most of them actually make the game more difficult to win. The Wizard’s Apprentice is the only one that gives players a boost and I’m not sure I enjoyed the base game enough to try it.

I can’t be too hard on a free download but I didn’t enjoy Rolling Slimes.

Weeds is kind of, sort of good

 Weeds by TravelSoft (as opposed to other games named Weed or Weeds) is a (currently) free PnP Solitaire Tile-Laying game.

The game consists of twenty-seven cards. Eighteen of them are weed cards, which show a two-by-three grid of six weeds, ranging in size from one to three. The other nine cards are weed killers, which just show a spray bottle. The weeds are color-coded but the fact that they are clearly numbered and slightly size-differenced makes the game gray-scale friendly. In fact, I am colorblind enough that printing the cards in color wouldn't have helped me. 

The idea behind the game is that you are trying cover up all the weeds. Draw a card, place a card on your tableau. Cards can overlap (or else there wouldn't be a game) but weeds can only cover weeds of the same size. After you place all the cards, you take the weed killer cards and try to cover up all the weeds or at least as many as you can. That's the basic idea of the game. There are a couple other elements that I'll get to.

Okay, Weeds is pretty clearly a simplified version of Orchard: The Nine Card Solitaire Game. For me, Orchard was a game changer, completely changing my thoughts on how small a tile laying game could be. More than that, Orchard and its sequels, Grove and Forage, are truly solid games. One of the big questions that Weeds has to ask is "Is there a reason why I would play this over Orchard or Grove or Forage?" It also reminds me of a game from a Nine-Card Design Contest, Condense the Code, which also focused on laying cards to take up the smallest area possible.

First of all, I am just going to say that Weeds is not as good as the Orchard family. I do like it more than Condense the Code, whose noteworthy element was legacy play that felt very gimmicky. However, Weeds does bring one thing to the table that I think adds value: variations.

The base game has you use all eighteen weed cards and only six of the weed killer cards. However, the rules include variants for using fewer weed cards (and even identifies the two hardest-to-cover cards) and tweaking the number of weed killer cards, up to the complete nine. Shuffling all twenty-seven cards together and play the weed killer cards as they come out. And encouragement to make up your own variations.

I will also note that Weeds doesn't actually have a formal losing condition. Obviously, if you cover all the weeds, you win. However, there isn't a scale for officially judging how badly you've done. However, with the different variants requiring their own scale, I guess I can forgive that absence.

Weeds has one major issue, which I’ve already gone over. There are better alternatives to it. I've already mentioned the Orchard family, which share a core mechanic but add resource management (you only have so many dice for scoring), scoring, goals and ways to nudge the placement rules. Even if I am looking for a quick tile-laying game where I don't have to worry about dice and tokens, I would reach for Ukiyo or Confusing Lands or part of the Sprawlopolis family first.

With that said, Weeds should still get some play. There are too many times when I am too brain foggy to really do an Orchard or Spawlopolis game justice but I could still handle Weeds. The fact that you can easily shrink the game just makes that use even easier.

Weeds isn't a bad game. I don't mind having it around. However, there's a bunch of games I recommend before it.

https://travelsoft.ca/weeds.php