Rat Hot keeps a space in the back of my mind

 I haven’t played Rat Hot that much but it’s one that I find myself referring back to a lot in my head.

That’s because it was either the first tile laying game I played where the tiles were allowed to overlap or it was the first good one I played. Anyway, it made an impression.

The game has thick, chunky tiles that are three by one so it’s like you are playing with itty bitty planks. I’ve seen one PnP file for the game that’s designed to turn a Jenga set into a Rat Hot set. 

Which actually isn’t a crazy idea. One of the placement rules is that, while you can stack tiles in top of each other, you can’t have gaps underneath. Using Jenga tiles would definitely help make that an easy rule to track.

But, in all honestly, what makes Rat Hot stay stuck in my head is the sudden death rules. If you end your turn with three rats of your color exposed, you lose. Good day, sir, you get nothing. To be honest, if memory serves me correctly, it takes either bad luck or bad play for it to actually happen. BUT it does mean you can make moves that your opponent has to react to. In Go terms, atari. (As opposed to in video game terms where Atari means something quite different)

But, as I mentioned, for me, this was one of the first times I saw overlapping tiles. Since then, I have seen that mechanic enough that it’s not even remotely novel. And I am absolutely sure it wasn’t the first use of it either.

I also don’t think that Rat Hot represents an innovation point in game design. I’m pretty sure games like Micro Rome or Hanging Gardens would exist without it. I do wonder if it influenced  HUE from the Pack O Game series.

Rat Hot isn’t one of my favorite Michael Schacht games. It doesn’t even make it into my top ten of his games. But it has survidd many purges and stayed in my collection.

Quality fidgeting with online games

Somewhat to my surprise, instead of playing just a couple games on boardgames-online.net and leaving the site, I have found myself having a few of the lighter games almost constantly going. 

There's  actually a very simple reason for this. Unlike Yucata, which is my go-to place to play board games online, it is really easy to use boardgames-online.net on my phone. Well, at least for the more casual games like Patrician and the members of the Coloretto family. Hansa might not be so easy.

Of course, if I am pausing and making a move in a game while I'm doIng something like standing in line or waiting for water to boil, I don't want a brain burning game. A casual game like Coloretto fits the bill perfectly.

Now that we live in a world where smart phones are pretty common, they offer no end of ways for us to distract ourselves. Too many ways, really. However, playing games against other folks is probably my favorite way to occupy myself on the internet so this works out well. 

This also reminds me that good casual games, even if they are simpler in design, are not that simple to design. You see a lot of them but you don't see a lot of them with staying power. Off and on, I've been playing Coloretto since 2005, which isn't bad. Particularly when my first plays weren't that good :P 

I know that boardgames-online is not going to become my primary game site. There will come a time when I will finish the current games and not start new ones. And letting me fidget isn't the biggest compliment I can give a site. But I am fidgeting with some good games.

Zooloretto for the very young

Earlier this year, I decided to learn Coloretto Amazonas at boardgames-online.net. So, since I have never played Zooloretto Mini/Zooloretto Junior, I decided to learn that game too.

Compared to Amazonas, Mini was much less of a stretch :D It uses the same cut or choose mechanic that every game in the family uses, except Amazonas. It is basically the bridge between Coloretto and Zooloretto. Seeing as how those two games aren't very different, it's a very short bridge :P

In all brutal honesty, Mini is a simplified Coloretto with tiles instead of cards and the zoo theme. No coin actions like Zooloretto and a smaller variety of types than either of the parent games. For me, the most interesting element are landscape features. Those are effectively wilds for filing enclosures but don't count towards making sets.

The real question is if there is a reason to choose Mini over either the razor simplicity of the original Coloretto or the more nuanced choices of Zooloretto. Particularly if you are like me and already own both of those games. And that is some tough competition. While I have had some bad experiences with Coloretto, it's a standard for light card games for good reason. And Zooloretto is one of those games that is the perfect centerpiece for a family game night.

Frankly, at the moment, the only reasons I'd think of picking up Mini is the small size of the box and the relatively sturdy components and it is more forgiving than its parent games. Storage space and playing it with a small child.

And yet, if you look at Mini as a children's game, it is a very good game. If I see it for a good price in the next couple years, I'd pick it up for just that reason. The parent games I think are better fold older kids and teens and adults but I think Mini is super younger child friendly.

Coloretto Amazonas, the odd man out

Coloretto Amazonas is the red headed step child of the Coloretto family. Out of the six standalone games in the family, it is ranked last on Boardgame Geek. (Which really doesn't prove anything but still is worth noting.)

A big part of that is clearly because it falls under the same category as Halloween III: Season of the Witch. You know, when Carpender thought that the Halloween movies were going to be an anthology series as opposed to all about a Shatner mask painted white. Coloretto Amazonas is the second game in the series and the only one that doesn't use the cut-and-choose mechanic that defines the family.

Since Coloretto Amazonas can be played at boardgames-online.com, Michael Schacht's site, I decided it was time that I learned it and tried it out.

Coloretto Amazonas is a card game with four different colors for suits. The ranks are different animals. And here is where it gets tricky, each suit has its own set of animals and each suit has a different number of ranks. Personally, this sort of thing makes card counting tough for me.

The object of the game is to collect sets. You have a hand at three and on your turn, you either play a card on your side or your opponent side. To make things trickier, you can only have one of each animal in your collection. You can play the same animal, either on yourself or your opponent, but you have to discard both cards.

When you get a complete set in the suit, is that those cards to one side in the name of points and you can start over. If you are the first person to complete that particular suit, you get a bonus points card. Once someone has two or three completed sets, the game is over.

You score points based on both complete and incomplete sets using a triangular number sequence (you know, 1,3,6,10 etc), which is the only thing it has in common with Coloretto. No negative points though. Whoever has the most points wins.

Out of the four games in the family I have now played, Coloretto Amazonas is my least favorite. The simple binary choice of either adding or taking creates a razor edge choice in the other games, a tension and elegance that Coloretto Amazonas can't touch. Having said that, I still enjoyed the game and I am planning on playing some more games of it online. And I wouldn't turn down the chance to play at face-to-face as well.

The biggest problem Coloretto Amazonas has is that there's no way you can't compare it to the other games and the family. I mean, for crying out loud, it shares the name. And not sharing any of the mechanics or the feel of the other games, it just feels off. On the other hand, I believe it is still in print and I don't think it would be if it didn't have that name.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/15156/coloretto-amazonas

Starting at Web of Power and going so much further

While Michael Schacht has designed a lot of games I like, the Web of Power/China family is my favorite. One the the purest area of control games, very tight conflicts and it plays out in under an hour.

It's had at least three different published forms: Web of Power, China and Han. On top of that, Michael Schacht has offered additional maps on his website. Personally, I found the subway map to be strangely hard to process :D

Elevator pitch: the different maps show various regions that have spaces connected by paths. Players play cards to place either forts on the spaces or diplomats on region markers, then draw cards Ticket to Ride style. (Although it predates Ticket to Ride) You get points by fort majorities, forts in a row and the diplomats score by majorities BETWEEN regions. 

Trust me, that elevator pitch glosses over tons of stuff. Basically, you play cards to place pieces and try take over areas. 

What makes the system really tick is scarcity. You have a limited number of pieces. There are a very limited number of spaces on the board for those pieces. And since most of the cards are for two regions (every map I've seen has one big regions with its own cards), cards are scarce as well. The economy of the game is very tight. Every card you play can be played in many different ways but you only get to do one of them and it's never enough.

While there is a strong tactical element to the game, since you cant control what cards come up and other players are going to do their best to mess up your plans, there's a strong strategic element to Web of Power/China. You need to go in with a plan or you'll get crushed, just make it a flexible one. 

I first discovered Web of Power on BSW back in 2003 or 2004, including some speed games that played out in less than five minutes. I picked up China as soon as it came out. And I get in online games on Schacht's own site. I've had years of fun with this family of games and that doesn't sound like it will end anytime soon.

Patricians: Building towers and memories

Patrician is not one of my favorite Michael Schacht games. However, it was a watershed game for me as far as his designs are concerns. And, even though I don't consider it to be one of his greats, it is still a pretty fun game and one that has stayed in my collection.

In Patrician, you are competing to build towers in Renaissance Italy. The theme is pretty thin. You could just as easily be building sky scrapers in US cities or rockets in the moon or just abstract symbols. 

The two-to-four player board shows nine cities while the five-player board has ten. Each city has a distinctive crest of arms, two spots for towers, two spots for scoring tokens and a space for a card. Every card had a city crest on it, showing which city it will let you build in. In addition, every card has another symbol, giving some of a bonus. These include a second crest of the same city for another build, the power to draw a card from any city, the power to move the top piece of a tower and patrician heads which are worth points at the end. Everyone gets tower blocks in their own color, which are slotted so they can stack up without slipping.

Game play is very simple. Play a card. Place a tower block in one of the spaces in the matching city and take the face-up card from that city. Each city has a number over the city crest to show how many tower blocks can be in it, which is also the number of its higher score token. Going through the deck will complete every city.

When a city is full, you score it. Whoever controls the higher tower gets the higher score token and the shorter tower gets the lower token. There's an odd number of blocks allowed in each city so there will always be a higher tower. Whoever has more blocks in a tower controls it with the top block being the tie breaker.

At the end of the game, when every city is full, players also get points for having sets of heads from the cards they played. And, of course, whoever has the most points wins.

I was initially interested in Patricians because of the stacking towers. So I picked it up and tried it as a two-player where it fell flat. Not enough tension, too easy to do what you wanted to do. So Patricians went to the back of the closet to gather dust.

Months later, Patricians was one of the games Mayfair was running as part of their ribbon quest at Origins so I played it with five players. And it was so much better. With five people, the board was so much smaller and there was so much more struggle to control the board and get any points. Since then, I've played it with three and four as well and it was good at those numbers too.

So, they should have just put three-to-five players on the box.

As it turns out, stacking towers up isn't really what makes Patrician interesting. It is the very simple decision tree that ends up being intriguing when your simple decisions collide with everyone else's. Patricians has a simple but almost hypnotic rhythm, playing a card while knowing what card you will be taking, plotting out your moves to the entire table.

Patrician sits in a weird place for me. It's a bit too long and set up is a bit too involved to be a game I just plunk down at the drop of a hat. At the same time, its not as long or as heavy as, say, Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne, a game that could be the centerpiece of a quiet game night. So it never came out that much back with the old game group, although everyone liked it when it did.

However, what Patricians really did for me was have me look up who made it. And then I looked up what else this Michael Schacht guy had done. That's when I realized I had been playing his games for years.

Patricians did not make me a Michael Schacht fan. It made me realize I was one.

Visiting Michael Schacht's site

Back when we became parents and moved across the country at the same time, I made a decision to cut my online gaming sites down to Yucatá. I didn't have the time or focus to play games on a bunch of different sites. Yucatá, between having a wide selection of games and a great community that includes some of my face-to-face friends, was the perfect choice for me.

Since then, the only site that has slipped back into regular rotation for me is Super Duper Games, home of obscure and curious abstracts. Seriously, between its perpetual beta status and unique selection of games you've never heard of, it is like nothing else on the web or face-to-face life.

However, I will go to other sites for the purpose of trying specific games. For instance, I went back to SpielbyWeb to try out Reef Encounter in order to find out if I should keep my hard copy. (The answer was a giant yes)

My recent musing about Michael Schacht made me decide to go back to boardgames-online, his personal site to play his games. After all, so many of his games really need at least three players to either shine or just play.

It is actually quite a nice site. It has good interfaces that are easy to use and it has a surprisingly wide selection of his games. The only thing I can knock about it is that it doesn't have the largest community, which I think is of the most important thing for an online gaming site and the most difficult thing for one to achieve.

Although Michael Schacht himself will show up and play games, which is pretty darn awesome.

Keeping to my original plan of not spending too much time playing board games online, I'm planning on playing only one or two games at a time at the site. My need to make sure that I have a good time management hasn't gone away.

Although my original plan of just playing a couple games and then leaving the site might get adjusted because there are games there I don't know and it would be fun to learn them.

This is just one more of the many examples in my experience of Michael Schacht being a ninja game designer. Despite winning awards, he doesn't seem to have his own call to personality. However, he makes really good games.

From Coloretto to Zooloretto and beyond

The Coloretto family will probably be Michael Schacht longest lasting legacy. And I don't just say that because it includes at least six standalone games and more expansions than I can keep track of. I believe that because Schacht took the simple framework of the original Coloretto game and added a super family-friendly theme and a couple more mechanics to create Zooloretto and all the games and expansions that followed. When he did that, he developed a game perfect for the wider family audience.

The core mechanic of the family is a variation of I cut and you choose. You can either draw a card or tile to add it to a group or take a group to make sets with. Your three best sets are worth happy, positive points. All the rest give you negative, sad face points.

I got Coloretto when it first came out, as you might guess from all the gray in my beard and the fact that I sometimes have to use a cane. And my initial experiences were terrible. I played with a group that focused on spite. The goal wasn't to get the most points but to bring the pain to everyone else.

After that, I did play games where people focused more on points than pain but Coloretto still didn't have that sing for me. Which was a real shame since it was and still is one of the most colorblind friendly color-based games ever.

When Zooloretto came out, it added a theme, slightly more complicated choices and an extra kind of action, the coin actions. It's still easily the lightest of the Schacht board games that won't be leaving my collection but those changes added charm and diversity to the game and those things made a huge difference.

As far as I know, Zooloretto has never been out of print and I've seen it in stores like Target aimed at the mainstream audience. I know it has been the real source of expansions and spinoffs and that my life would be better if I played Aquaretto. It is a game that has had success with both the broader audience and the serious gamer audience.

Zooloretto isn't my favorite Schacht game. (Hi, Web of Power family) However, I think it is the one that will go the farthest in the world.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/3279/coloretto-series

An American on Paris Paris

Paris Paris is a fairly simple game that took me a strangely long time to wrap my brain around. I'm going to use the excuse that learning it online at BSW and being colorblind made it harder. On the other hand, once I got my own copy, it made a lot more sense. (I bought it during my compulsive game buying phase but it has stayed in my collection)

Michael Schacht seems to have a knack for themes (Seriously, running your own zoo would seem a lot more unusual if Zooleretto and its family wasn't such a staple. And, yes, I know O Zoo Le Mio did it first) Paris Paris is up there, being all about setting up tourist shops along tour bus routes.

Which is kind of funny since that's a pretty reasonable idea. Just not one that you think of with board games.

The board shows a map of Paris with different colored bus routes, each one with several stops along it. Through out the game, there will be small tours, where one stop will be scored, and grand tour's where every stop on the route will be scored. At the start of the game, everyone gets a secret color. That route will get a grand tour at the end of the game.

Each round, tiles with stops on them are set out, one more than the number of players. You take turns taking tiles and placing shops at that stop. There's a small tour at the leftover stop and the tile gets put to one side. When you get two tiles of the same color, you discard them and that route has a grand tour.

You can kick someone off of a spot and put your own shop up but whoever loses the most shops will get points for them at the end.

When you score a stop in either kind of tour, the shops at the stop or, if there aren't any, at the closest stop get a point. When you run out of tiles, you have those secret grand tours. Most points wins.

While Paris Paris is not a complex game, I think I had to really play it face to face to see how the process really worked. Moving the physical pieces let me understand the flow of the game. Playing it live made everything click. The game has a natural cadence that playing it live really brings out.

And while the game is simple, there is some nuances to the decisions. While you will always take a stop that is on the intersection of two routes, you also have to consider blocking your opponent's from getting stops. And what you don't take influences what will end up getting scored and that's a big deal.

That said, Paris Paris is not a game for everyone. It is definitely a game for families, not for serious gamers. (Of course, serious gamers are allowed to have families too :P) If you are looking for complex systems and point salads, Paris Paris will not fit that bill. It's an old school German Family Game. It will play out in an under an hour with plenty of interaction and light decisions. Great for family play.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5825/paris-paris

Reminded again why I like Michael Schacht

Since my lifestyle has made shorter games, half an hour to an hour, a lot more desirable, I've found myself thinking that Michael Schacht has become one of my ideal game designers.

Seriously, Web of Power/China, Hansa, Paris Paris, Hansa, Zooloretto, Patrician and California are all standbys in my collection and fit that time bill. While I know Schacht has made heavier games, for me, he is a master of quirky, medium light games that are engaging and thought provoking.

Unlike Knizia or Kramer or Teuber, I didn't have a sense of Schacht as a designer for a while. However, thanks to Paris Paris and Web of Power being on BSW, he was part of my initial gaming experiences.

His games kept finding their way into my gaming experiences and collections (and I don't think I have ever culled one of his games out of my collection) but it wasn't until Patrician that I put together how many games I liked were by him. Which is kind of ironic because I would say that it's the weakest of my personal Schacht collection.

Unfortunately for me at the moment, pretty much all of his games in my collection either play better with three or more or flat out need three or more. And we're currently a gaming group of two :D

Still, one way or another, be it the toddler getting old enough or finding other parents who game, we will be three or more again. And then, these games will shine.