Bitin’ Off Hedz - not a good game but maybe a good learning curve

Bitin’ Off Hedz is definitely in the running  for the worst Cheapass Game I’ve experienced. 

It came out in 1996 and I think that James Earnst was still  finding his bearings. We had already gotten Kill Doctor Lucky, so there was the  promise of things to come.

The theme of the game is that you are all dinosaurs who are all so bored that you’ve decided to race to the volcano to throw yourself in. By Cheapass standards, that’s pretty normal.

Anyway, at the end of the day, it’s a roll and move game where you can sometimes throw rocks at other pawns that makes them go back to start and optional powers depending on what kind of plastic dinosaur you’re using for your pawn. When one of the main twists in the rules is getting forced back to start, that isn’t a good rule in my book.

The selling point (?) of the game is that the board is huge. It’s made of sixteen sections that you have to hold together (post it notes on the underside are recommended) and is close to three feet long. The completed board shows a winding path that forms the shape of a dinosaur skull.

Back in 1996, Bitin’ Off Hedz was an ambitious physical design, particularly for a self-publisher. Time has not been kind. Sixteen black and white pages of illustration on poor quality paper falls short of even PnP standards, particularly paired with a subpar rules.

However, these days, I am more forgiving of Bitin’ Off Hedz. Not in and of itself but for its place in the history of Cheapass Games. I knew it was an early game but I hadn’t realized how early it was when I first tried it.

From that standpoint, I view the game as an experiment, James Ernst still figuring out what would work with the Cheapass format. I find it telling that the next time he made a roll-and-move game, Devil Bunny Needs A Ham, it was smaller, quirkier and a much tighter design. Multiple pawns and a claustrophobic board, that game offers more choices on top of a really silly theme.

Bitin’ Off Hedz isn’t a good game. But it may have been a necessary step to figuring out what makes Cheapass work.

Riding on Ticket to Ride: Europe

I was remembering how, long ago and far away, I used to play with a group that played Power Grid almost every week. Enough that, even though I think it is a profoundly brilliant game, I got burnt out on it. However, the other game that you could pretty much count on always being played was Ticket to Ride Europe and I never got burnt out on that.

When I first started really playing board games, which was back around 2002, it felt like Catan and Carcassonne and Puerto Rico were the three pillars of board gaming. Almost everyone in the hobby knew and play those games. You could just count on it. And Ticket to Ride ended up becoming like one of those pillars, a position that I think it still holds to this day, better than Carcassonne and Puerto Rico in fact.

I haven’t played a lot of the new boards yet but I feel that if you are only going to buy one Ticket to Ride Product and call it quits after that, Ticket to Ride Europe is that one box.

There’s really two reasons I feel that way. I feel that only distributing the super long routes at the beginning and the stations help flatten the randomness of the game and make it a little more forgiving for new players without dumbing the game down. It’s still tense game that I’ve seen lots of adult language used during.

Mind you, I didn’t stop at one box so I don’t own the Europe board :P In fact, with the 1912 expansion, I like the US map better. Although I still think the Europe board is the best for easing new players in before the knives come out.

For a game described as a family game, Ticket to Ride can be a vicious game :D

And, it has been a long runner for me.

Very early impressions of Isle of Skye

My first game at Rincon was Isle of Skye. I had heard of it before. After all, it won the SdJ for strategy games. But, since I'm not buying new games, I didn't look any further. What I discovered is a game I'd love to play again.

In Isle of Skye, you are all building your own little map of tiles. It reminds me a lot of Alhambra. Which is a compliment. Alhambra is an older German Family-style game that has held up very well for me. (I can see someone also comparing it to Glenn More but I think Isle resembles Alhambra more closely with its tile market)

In Isle of Skye, you create your own market. Everyone draws three tiles and secretly decides to discard one and out prices on the other two. Everyone gets a chance to buy one tile and any tiles that aren't purchased, the person who put them on the market buys them. I definitely like this. It creates a lot of interaction but it's a kind, gentle interact. 

At the every round, there's some scoring. And here's where Isle gets all cute. There are several different scoring tiles, each one showing a different way to get points. And you only use about a quarter of them in any given game. So every game, there's a different way to get points and it will be in a different order for when you use the tiles. That adds a lot of replay value and means that you are always looking for something different in how you build your little map of tiles.

After just one game, I am definitely no kind of expert at either how to play or what the game structure is really like. I do know that I had fun.

Isle of Skye seems to blend the German Family ideas of heavy interactions and intuitive rules with Euro point salad. It feels like the kind of game that should be a good family game but still has enough meat to make more serious gamers respect it and enjoy it.

Frankly, if I had a regular group at the moment, I would seriously think about picking it up. Although, if I did have a regular group, somebody would've already picked it up by now. 

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/176494/isle-skye-chieftain-king

King's Breakfast - a tiny but tasty card game

It has been years since I've played King's Breakfast but, back in the day, I played the heck out of it. A simple little game of card drafting and brinkmanship, I got a lot more fun out of it than I would have expected.

In the game, you've been invited to the castle to have a sumptuous meal with the king. Fame and glory in the form of victory points will be showered upon you if you share in the king's tastes. But not if if eat more than the king.

The game consists of a deck of cards of different types of food, plus five dragon cards since dragons always mix with royalty and fine dining. 

Each round, you deal out twice as many cards as there are players. You then sort them by type of food, with any dragons placed on the side. Then, on your turn, you can take all the cards of one type of food or draw a card from the draw pile or use a dragon to eat two cards from the king's collection of cards. After everyone has had a turn, all the unclaimed cards go in the king's collection.

When there aren't enough cards in the deck left to deal out a round, the game's over. You get points by multiplying the number of cards of each food type by the number the king has. Oh, unless you have more than the king. Than you get nothing for that food type. Naturally, whoever has the most points wins.

It was designed by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum. Moon is the man who have given the world games like Elfenland and Ticket to Ride. Weissblum has done a number of collaborations with Moon, including the 10 Days series.

King's Breakfast was not one of their big hits. It's a light little filler with some card counting mixed with pushing your luck and a dash of spite with the dragon. (Because, since everything accept the blind draw is open knowledge, you just use the dragon to mess with someone else's scoring) There aren't any compex decision trees going on here.

And yet, every time I played King's Breakfast, I had a good time and ended up feeling happy. It wasn't just a pleasant little game. It was a relaxing one, a game that took away any grumpiness the day might have left me with.

One part of my enjoyment of games from the meditative state I can get from playing them. Lord knows that is part of why I love Ingenious, although I also enjoy it's tactical play. For me, King's Breakfast was almost entirely meditation.

I don't think King's Breakfast is for everyone. I don't think it's either designer's finest work. But it did right by me.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6263/kings-breakfast

Take It Easy, a game that seems to have inspired a quiet little genre

For such a simple and inoffensive little game, Take It Easy has had quite an impact on my gaming life. For that matter, it seems that it has had a lasting influence on the hobby as well.

In case you haven't played it, Take It Easy is what I describe as bingo with choices or strategy. Like bingo, everyone has their own board. Everyone has a hexagram shaped board with nineteen empty spaces, along with an identical set of twenty seven tiles. One poor bastard gets to be the caller, drawing one random tile at a time, with everyone then placing that tile on their board. You're trying to form colored lines across the board but if the colors get broken up, those lines are worthless.

I'd read about Take If Easy for years before I got a hold of a copy and I've been playing it on a regular basis for years after that. It's been a hit with serious, lifestyle gamers and with folks who don't know Catan from Warhammer. If that's all there was, it'd be a good game that had proven that it has serious legs. (Which, to be fair, is still quite something)

Take It Easy came out in 1983 and, as near as I can tell, has been in print ever since then. And for the first twenty or so years of its life, it was fairly unique (Again, as far as I can tell. If someone can tell me different, go for it) However, in the last ten years, it seems like new games that use that bingo with choices mechanic have started coming out in a regular basis.

Some of them, Take It To The Limit and Take It Higher, are direct sequels to Take It Easy. And since Reiner Knizia designed Take It Higher, it's pretty easy to assume that Take It Easy was an influence on FITS and BITS. Other games, like Cities or Wurfel Bingo, I have a hard time believing that they weren't strongly influenced by Take It Easy.

Seriously, it has gotten to the point in which I can't even keep track of games where everyone has their own board and is doing their own thing. It isn't like an explosive genre like work replacement or deck building or maybe even card drafting (I swear I can't look at Kickstarter at any given moment without seeing a couple new cars drafters) but it does seem like a genre that keeps on going and going.

Literally two days ago, I came across both Limes and Karuba, which I had never heard of but both clearly use the Take It Easy mechanic. And at some point, I'd love to give either of those two games ago to see what they've done with the genre.

If you had told me 15 years ago that I would be a huge fan of what could be described as bingo variations or multi player solitaire, I would've thought that you were crazy. But these are games that I honestly just keep on playing.

They aren't heavy or life-changing or burn out my brain. However, as a parent of a hyper toddler, these are games that are relaxing and easy to pull out good and good for winding down at the end of the day.

I have a feeling that I'm going to be playing Take It Easy 20 years from now. There's hundreds of games that I played that I can't say that about.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/128/take-it-easy