Clever is cool but not enough

I recently tried playing Heaven & Ale for the first time. It might not be the only time but it’s not a game I see myself getting my own copy.

This isn’t actually a review but here’s the thumbnail of it. Which might have terrible errors in it, seeing as how I’ve only played the game one time. You control the lives of medieval monks trying to make beer. Everyone has their own mat where you place tiles that will either give you money or brewing components.

And here’s how you get those hexes. There’s a track with different types of tiles of on it. You take turns going around, going as many spaces as you want to. And some of the spaces let you get bonus tiles and  discs that let you activate tiles. 

Your game end score is the lowest supply multiplied by the level of your brewmaster after you use your brewmaster to rearrange your supplies, plus bonus points.

I figured that it was going to be just one paragraph and I still left out so much that you could never play the game from my description.

Okay, here’s the thing about the game. It’s very clever. It’s terribly, terribly clever. But I’m not sure if it’s fun. Oh, I had fun trying to parse the game but I can’t help but really think I’d get bored with Heaven & Ale fairly quick.

And, looking back, I know this feeling from other games I’ve played back in my game binging days. Neuland and Toledo are two such games that come to mind. Exploring the process was more interesting than the game part of the game.

Heaven & Ale is a game that I’m glad to have played and I wouldn't mind a couple more plays. But I don’t see myself feeling the need to go beyond that. Which is fine since I didn’t buy the game and don’t have to store it. But I used to be that guy and having a game like this was a bit itchy. It wasn’t a good investment but it was an interesting learning experience.

A friend who lived through my binging said that it was like getting an education in game design. We went through a lot of games and some of them were so clever but didn’t draw us back. 

But what I learned was that wanting to play a game over and over again was more important than how clever it was.

My September RinCon time

Saturday was the last RinCon fundraiser. I’d missed the ones in July and August so I wanted to make sure that I got this one in. I was there for four, five hours and every game I played was new to me.

I started off with Wingspan, which I’ve been wanting to try because I quite like Tussie Mussie. And the promise of Elizabeth Hargrave’s earlier design did not disappoint. Wingspan is the better game of her so-far two and there’s a lot more game. You build up a tableau of birds but you get fewer actions every round,

While Wingspan wasn’t billed to me as an engine builder, that’s what it really made me think of. There are enough random elements, particularly the bird food dice tower, that made me wonder if the random elements could be too swingy but I really enjoyed the game. I definitely want to play it again.

The heaviest game I played was Heaven & Ale, which is a game about Medieval beer brewing. It was almost insistently counter-intuitive. You don’t build up points but various supplies that get crunched into a simple formula to create points at the end of the game. It was a very interesting process but I’m not sure if the game was fun or if trying to parse the system was fun. Heaven & Ale is a game where I know it’s clever but clever can fool you into thinking clever is good.

The last and simplest game I learned was Reef, which has absolutely nothing to do Reef Encounter. It is really an abstract themed around building a coral reef with chunky, stackable pieces. You either draw a card or play a cards. Cards let you place two of those chunky pieces and score points if you match a pattern on the card. It was jolly good fun and I can see it as a game my family would enjoy.

Sometimes, I end up playing lots of little games. This was more playing a few middle-sized games and it worked out well.