This Sprawlopolis is really good

I have to confess that I have largely admired the Sprawlopolis family from afar. I have always thought the games were downright brilliant but, until quite recently, I played their parent game Circle the Wagons more than the entire family put together.

That’s really because I have a black and white printer and I’m colorblind on top of that. The textures in the original game aren’t super distinct and even when I printed out the game in color, the colors were diffuse enough that it was hard for me to tell some of them apart.

Both Agropolis and Naturopolis do a much better job at both texture and color contrast but I was already derailed by the original game. Which is a shame because the family is very good.

Micro tile-laying games were already a well established concept, including ones with overlapping cards. Variable scoring conditions were also established. Sprawlopolis also has a variable winning score depending on the scoring conditions, which I hadn’t seen before but I would be surprised if it wasn’t already out there.

What Steve Aramini has done, though, is a really good job of packaging all of these elements together into a tight, well balanced, challenging game. 

Revisiting Sprawlopolis, what I am really struck by is how many tough and annoying decisions there are in the game. I look at a lot of 18 card games because, well, they’re really easy to print out and play. And from my experience, Sprawlopolis has a lot of weight for a micro game.

I feel micro games and more minimalist games have become more a part of the gaming culture. This started a ways back since both Love Letter and Qwixx helped get that ball rolling in their own ways. (Feel free to tell me how I’m wrong)

And I feel that a design goal that some micro games pursue is for the game experienced to feel like a “big“ game. It doesn’t always work and sometimes the results feel cluttered and fiddly. And it isn’t always the goal of a particular game. In the first set of Pack O Game, HUE is solid but feels intended to be small. On the other hand, TAJ feels ambitious but fiddly and GEM actually feels like a bigger game.

Sprawlopolis feels bigger than eighteen cards. More than that, the gameplay is intuitive, not fiddly. Scrabble and Carcassonne and other games have made tile laying second nature to so many of us. You don’t have to concentrate on how to play but on the actual choices you need to make.

I revisted Sprawlopolis because I signed up to playtest Casinopolis. Now, I want to re-examine the entire family.

Ukiyo: Clever use of familiar ideas

 Ukiyo is an 18-card tile laying game that brings absolutely nothing new to the table but it packages all its familiar ideas really well. More than that, it has both a solid multi-player and solitaire mode.

It’s actually a 16-card micro game since two of the cards are player aids. The actual cards you play with each have a two by three grid of symbols and a goal. (The four symbols are origami crane, cherry blossom, butterfly and acorn. Ukiyo has an aesthetic and it sticks to it)

The goals are different patterns, ranging from just having the  entire grid full to having a three by three square of acorns. They are numbered and the higher the number, the harder the goal. Which serves as a tie breaker in the multiplayer mode.

In either mode, the placement rules are the same. The symbols have to be within a six by six grid. Beyond that, cards can overlap and cover each other up all you want. 

In multiplayer mode, everyone gets a hand of cards with the size of the hand depending on the number of players. Your last card, instead of being played, is your goal. (If no one fulfills their goal, you then place that card to try and make your goal)

I first came across the mechanic, that your last card serves as your winning condition, in HUE from Pack O Games. I really like it. It helps remove any player order bias and makes games more tense.

For solitaire the play, Ukiyo has twenty sets of three to four goals, broken down into blocks of difficulty.  You take those cards out, shuffle the rest and then play one card at time, trying to end up with a grid that fulfills all of the goals.

Since each shuffle creates a new puzzle, there’s a lot of replay value built in. And the brutal level puzzles are actually brutal.

As I said at the start, Ukiyo doesn’t break any new ground. But implementation counts more than innovation (Is the game actually fun to play?) and Ukiyo does a great job there. It’s easy to understand but still challenging with a solid decision tree and plenty of replay value.

Some micro games feel like bigger games in little packaging. Not Ukiyo. It feels like an 18-card game. But it’s a really good one.

Why are there so many games in my wallet?

 I was startled to see how many games I had stuffed into my wallet when I did a quick inventory. It wasn’t a crazy number, only four. Still, it’s just a wallet.

I’ve kept a copy of Coin Age, the one they printed on credit card plastic, in my wallet basically since it was available. And I’m not sure it’s ever seen any play since I never carry coins unless I know I’m going to a place with penny squishing machines. Still, it’s a size and material designed for a wallet so I don’t mind having it there.

(And now I want to play Coin Age)

The game that has spent years in my wallet and actually gotten played is Down, an in-hand game of tracing a line along eight cards. It’s honestly just a fidget activity while waiting in the car but that has been enough to let it see plenty of play. 

More recently, I added a business card-sized copy of 13 Sheep. I don’t always have a dry erase marker on me but it has seen some play since I added it. Plus, if I ever have to explain how a multi-player solitaire R&W works, it’s a good example to show someone.

A couple weeks ago, I added a set of Flip Word cards. That is where I wonder if I crossed a line with the whole game in a wallet thing. Still, it’s a good game that just needs those cards so it stays.

I know there have been One-Card Game Design contests last year and this year. If a wallet game library is something to develop, that might be a place to mine for ideas.

The Count of Nine is a fun nine cards

 If you’re even just casually into PnP games (which, since I’m a lazy PnPer, is really where I’m at), you’ve heard of Count of Nine. It’s a Euro in just nine cards. No dice or cubes involved.

The game is all about infrastructure building. You are trying to build a big building and that is going to take resources and smaller buildings.

The cards are double sided and orientation matters. When they are in your deck, they are sideways. When you build a card, it goes upright in your tableau. When they are sideways, the resource on the top of the middle is the active resource.

You slide cards and flip them in order to expose resources and potential building to build. When you run through the deck, you can leave the deck unchanged, rotate the whole deck, reshuffle it or rotate just one card. All this can give you access to different resources.

The game ends when either there are no more possible moves OR you choose to end it. Your score is based on the buildings you built MINUS how many rounds you played. So there can be a reason to stop early.

It took me two tries to figure out the game. While the sliding and flipping was kind of different, what needed to click in my head was how the cards interacted. For one thing, you need a crew to build anything. At my current understanding of the game, building a tavern to get guaranteed access to a crew once a round is important. And some buildings require smaller buildings so you can’t build a different building on that card.

Okay. I definitely enjoy Count of Nine. I think it’s fun and well designed. It gives me a legitimate Euro experience in five, ten minutes with just nine cards. After a couple learning hiccups, the game becomes intuitive so you can just shuffle and go.

I do sometimes wish there were more cards. The game can sometimes feel formulaic, particularly if you play it a few times in a row. But the game is well balanced as it stands and adding more cards would make the game less tight.

The Count of Nine is one of those Print and Play games that I would say, if you have the slightest interest, make it and try it. It will be worth the work. It’s not perfect but it’s a pretty cool nine cards.

Squire for Hire is Inventory the Game

 Squire for Hire is a tile-laying game disguised as an inventory management game disguises as a dungeon crawl.

Oh, it’s also an 18-card micro game that is available as a PnP and offers a solitaire option that’s pretty effective. Those last two items are why I ended up trying Squire for Hire out :D

In the game, you are a cute little anthropomorphized animal person who is serving as the squire for an adventurer, which pretty amounts to being their caddy.  You have to make sure they have the right weapons, magic, armor and such at the right time, not to mention make sure the inventory bag is properly sorted.

Really, it’s Nodwick without the horrible injuries.

Enough other folks have given detailed descriptions of the rules so here’s the thumbnail. The cards are double-sided. There’s a story side, which requires you to use specific items in your pack to be able to get loot. The other side is the loot side. That’s the tile laying side, three by four grid with random items taking up different numbers of squares. There’s some empty spots too.

Points are earned by having good stuff,  duplicate items next to each other and special bonuses from your squire card. And you lose points for garbage.

It’s a pretty simple game, which is good because the rules definitely need some work. It’s a problem I’ve seen in a lot of micro games that are designed to fit into a tiny box or folder. There are number of points that could use some clarity. And, because of that, I thought Squire for Hire was easier than I thought. As I worked through some plays, I realized rules I had gotten wrong and the game became more interesting. 

When you actually get the rules right, the puzzle element of the game is solid. You have lots of options and every decision will turn out to be wrong :P But it’s the theme that honestly sells the game. There are _lots_ of micro tile laying games out there. Invoking the grid inventory system that even I, who don’t play many video fakes, am familiar with, that’s the hook. And the mechanics make sense with managing that inventory.

At the end of the day, Squire for Hire is better than my first impressions and an amusing solitaire.

The world is full of tinier games!

I messed up making a copy of Petals from this year’s two-player contest. I made it just to blow off steam with a quick project and  I made it as six cards because I didn’t realize it was three folded cards.

 I’m not the only one this happens to right?

Honest, anything more than nine cards I actually pay attention to. But sometimes I like to make one-sheet projects just so I can make something. 

However, now I’m actually interested in Petals as more than just a crafting distraction. Condensing the idea of Tussie Mussie to three cards is more of a legitimate nano-game than six cards :D

But now I had four cards (one card of instructions) to laminate after I cut and fold them. So I asked myself, what can I do with the rest of a 9 x 11.5 sleeve? So it became a game of making use of space :D

I had already printed out Gator from this year’s Solitaire contest because, frankly, I thought it was hysterical. I also printed off a One Minute War because I have been wanting to make thinner laminating plastic because business card laminating pouches made the tabs too stiff. Finally, I decided to fill in the rest of the space  with Handful of Hazard cards since each one in the base set is a stand-alone game. 

When I first dabbled in PnP, Bonsai Samurai was an interesting little experiment because it was a game that consisted of one card. It’s not actually a good game but it was just one card! Well, there are now enough nano games out there that I can actually find ones that I’m interested in trying :D

 

Trying to make This Town et al ‘work’

I have very mixed feelings about This Town Ain’t Big For the 2-4 of Us. 

I backed the game on Kickstarter back in 2004, right when my interest in micro games was really kicking in. And, in theory, I still think it’s a great idea for a micro game. Twenty-four tiles with the symbols printed on them so you don’t need separate meeples. And I still think think the scoring system is really neat and leads to interesting choices.

In a nutshell, it’s a tile-laying game with fences and symbols printed on the tiles. Everyone has a symbol for their own. When an area is enclosed by fences, you score it. Here’s how that works. Whatever symbol has the greatest number of symbols in the area gets points equal to the number of second greatest symbols. And so on until whoever has the fewest symbols gets no points. 

The scoring system doesn’t just make for interesting decisions. It also means that drawing a tile that doesn’t have your symbol isn’t a useless turn. Instead, any given tile has the potential to be useful to you.

The idea of a Carcassonne experience distilled down to 24 tiles that can fit it in any given pocket is a really compelling one for me. One of the major draws of a micro game is as a travel game. And there are elements of This Town et al that make it its own, distinct experience.

Buuuut... there are problems.

In my experience, there have been runaway leader problems. With only 24 tiles, when someone gets a lead, they have a good chance of fighting to protect it until the tiles run out. The game play doesn’t live up to the potential This Town et al seems to have.

An additional problem I had with the published version is that it came with a bunch of expansions that used itty, bitty tokens, along with a scoring stick that also had itty bitty tokens. The value I got out of not having meeples was taken away by having much more fiddly tokens.

And since I got This Town et al, I’ve found more the one game that fit into the niche of micro tile-laying game. The print-and-play Autumn and HUE from the Pack O Games both address the issues I had with This Town et al.

However, I still want to make it work.

So I have made a beater copy of the PnP version. (Yes, I could just pull the tiles out of the published edition but making a PnP copy just felt cleaner.) Strip the game down to its absolute basics, which also solves the travel problem.  I don’t know if that will make the game ‘work’ for me but I want to give it another try.

Mariner - an amusing exercise in card management

2019 9 Card Game Print and Play Design Contest - Mariner

As a lazy PnPer, this contest has been an enormous boon to me. One sheet of components is pretty reasonable as a project, even when I’m low on time and energy. And the returns I’ve gotten from the entries I’ve played have been a great return for the time and materials I’ve put into them. I will admit that I focus on short solitaire games so I’m sure the be missed some gems. But I’ve still had a great time.

Mariner is a tiny little game that was inspired by the NASA missions of the same name. It consists of eight cards you actually shuffle and a checklist of missions. The contest rules banned pencils or pens so Mariner’s rules list cubes to check off missions but I used a dry erase marker.

You draw a hand of three cards. If you have a card in the check list, check it off (the order is Venus, Mars, Venus, Mars, Mars, Mars, Venus + Mercury) Then, you discard one card out of the game and the rest into the staging area, which is really a discard pile that you you get to shuffle when you need to draw.

Three of the cards are Mariner missions, which let you pull specific cards out of the discard pile. That’s the sum total of special powers but we are talking about eight cards.

So, the game is all about constantly cycling through a tiny deck, among sure that you keep from discarding Venus, Mercury and Mars. Because then you’re going to lose, period.

Okay. This is the biggest issue I have with Mariner. It is too easy. Once I had an idea to manage the deck, I’d say I’d win at least two thirds of the time over the course of a couple dozen plays.

But, here’s the flip side. I got In a couple dozen plays in short order. More than that, it has kept in coming out and kept on getting played. Like so many tiny solitaires, it’s takes no time and no space to play but I also like the card manipulation. There’s just enough there to keep my mind rolling along. It would be interesting to see the game expanded to eighteen or more cards.

Oh, and I also like very simple, from-a-science-text-book-from-the-70s art for the low ink version. Very ink friendly but very evocative at the same time.

When I wrote the rough draft for this blog some weeks ago, I ended by saying Mariner is a fair-to-middling game. And I still think that’s true. But I keep on playing it. It’s like a comfy pair of slippers that won’t do for a real walk but are nice to have on.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2135871/wip-mariner-2019-9-card-game-print-and-play-design

The Hip Pocket Line and the path it paved

Back when I was first starting my tottering steps into board gaming, Cheapass’s Hip Pocket line served as a starting point for me. Cheap and portable and many of them had more game to them than some of Cheapass’s larger games.

They might also mark my fascination and love of micro games. They might be a bit high in the component count for the modern definition of micro game (particularly the several that need extra components) but the idea is still clearly the same. Small, short, portable, affordable.

While micro games have long been with us (Hi, Ogre!), Love Letter really marked the start of the golden age of micro games. And looking back at the Hip Pocket line, I think that doesn’t just mean commercially viable but innovative as well. 

I look at Love Letter or Buttonshy’s Wallet Games or Perplext’s Pack O Game line, there’s a lot of variety and even innovation. In comparison, all but one of the Hip Pocket Line was some kind of tile laying game. To be fair, they really explored that design space but later micro games went so much farther.

I’m not trying to bash the Hip Pocket line. Some of them still hold up very well today. I think they mark a watershed for James Ernst’s game designs with more refined mechanics. I think they an important step in micro game design and development. And, someday I will finally play Time Line, which has to be the deepest game in the line!

And to be even more fair, while I think the best of the new generation of micro games are amazing, Sturgeon’s Law is still very much in effect. There’s a lot of bad ones out there. By that standard, the Hip Pocket line is a statistical wonder :D

When I look at the Hip Pocket line now, I appreciate how much fun they gave me years ago and how they helped pave the way for more games down the line.

A one-card PnP I never heard of?

I spend a lot of time looking for and at print-and-play games. I have a particular interest in micro games since, well, I’m lazy and they’re easy to make.

So I have no idea why it took me four or five years to learn that One-Minute War, a two-player, one-card bluffing game exists :D (And, no, while I am prepared to accept a very broad and flexible argument about what is a war game (or a train game or an RPG, etc), I can not call this a war game)

The whole game consists of one card with ten foldable tabs, one row of five for each player. Each turn, you simultaneously throw one to five fingers to indicate which tab you’re using. 

One lets you bring back a dead soldier. Two beats five. Three beats two and one. Four beats one, two, three. And five beats one, three, four. 

A beaten soldier gets folded down. There is a special rule to throw zero fingers, sacrificing a soldier of your choice to win the turn. The game ends when someone runs out of soldiers/tabs or there is a stalemate or an agreement to end.

Okay. Let’s get the obvious out of the way. The whole one card with ten tabs is just a cute alternative to having ten cards. That said, it makes for a super portable game and it makes it easy to play as an in-hand game, standing in line or such. So it’s a gimmick that actually has a point.

More than anything else, One-Minute War reminds me of R, a micro game that came out a few years earlier. R had eight cards with more complex powers (not that takes much) One-Minute War is simpler than R in almost every way and, let’s be honest, not as good a game.

Which really begs the question, why play One-Minute War when R is out there? Which can be a question for a lot of PnP games but feels particularly striking due to the similarities between these two games.

The first and most obvious answer is that it’s not only free to download but such an easy build that is virtually free from a component standpoint too.

And the novelty of it being one card is actually its biggest selling point. Yes, it’s cute but it also makes it ridiculously portable, as well as an In-Hand game that can be played anywhere. That’s a legit selling point. One card and you’re good to go.

One-Minute War isn’t the first game I’ve seen that’s just one card but it might be the best I’ve seen. No, there’s not a lot of competition. If you let me throw in dice or coins or such, that one card gets more interesting. And you know I’m going to end up carrying a copy everywhere.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167786/one-minute-war

My November PnP

Okay. In November, I made copies of Elevenses for One, Murderers Row, Palm Island, Get the Girl, The Coins Tribe Revolt, Sun Starters, D6 Wizardry, Gladiator Gauntlet, Race for the Rhine, Slicer, Tussle-Mussie, and Hyperdrive Odyssey.

While that list is a lot more impressive than just making a copy of Micropul in October, most of those games are just nine cards worth of crafting, with the biggest games being eighteen cards. I’m hoping that December will see a project that’s larger than a micro game or a roll and write.

(Not that micro games and roll and writes are a bad use of PnP time. They are a great use of it. However, I also want to push myself)

The Mini PnP Secret Santa was the culprit. I literally did no PnP crafting for almost the entire month. As the end of the month started to come up, I decided I’d better start working on what I’m planning on sending out. And when I started doing that, I just kept on going. All of my crafting for November was done in a flurry over three days at the end of the month.

(I have a feeling my crafting for December will be another flurry at the very start, a continuation of this one)

I do wish I was being more steady about my print and play projects. Spending literally weeks doing nothing and blazing away at a breakneck pace over a couple days. It takes away from the meditative, calming element of making PnP projects.

I knew that I wasn’t done with print and play, even though I had gone into hibernation. It is still nice to have that knowledge confirmed, even if I went from zero to sixty.

Parents breaks with print and play

Looking at the Print and Play solitaire games I have played over the last several months, I’ve noticed that some of them not only play in a few minutes, they require minimal decisions. They are more like momentary activities than games :)

The designer of Down used the term parent break, which is probably the perfect description of them for me. They are a way for me to take a quick breath when I don’t have time or space for even a five-minute game that requires any real thought. Games like Down or Muses or Ambagibus fill that niche.

For me at least, brevity is only part of the equation. Not having to think hard is also part of it. Very short games like Murderer’s Row or Orchard, which I enjoy a lot, feel too much like ‘real’ games. There has to be a zen ritual quality to parent break games :D

And here’s the thing. If it were not for PnP, I would not have any games that fit this description. Sorry but I wouldn’t pay money for them. The cost of time and materials is small enough that they really are next to nothing.

I did buy Onirim when it came out, which is a purchase well worth making. But not only does it take longer to play, it has a _lot_ more decisions.

My explorations of PnP over the last couple years have been interesting. Exploring this little niche of Parent Breaks is not one I expected.

Minimalism can get in the way

I am a big fan of micro games. A lot of that comes from how, when I first started out, my game collection could fit into a backpack and most of my gaming was at coffee shops. Easy to transport and small footprint were a big deal for me.

Actually, I’ve come full circle a bit because, when I go to a gaming event these days, I just want to take a small courier bag of games with me. (Of course, that’s because I can count on other folks bringing huge bags of big games)

With game lines like the old Hip Pocket Games from Cheapass Games and Pack O Game and Button Shy’s Wallet Games, not to mention individual micro games like Love Letter, I can still get quite the variety in a small bag.

BUT I recently found myself thinking that minimalism can get in the way of teaching, particularly with non-gamers. What gets stripped out can become a barrier for entry.

(And, sweet Catan, it took me four paragraphs to get to the point I wanted to make. Cats alive, I can ramble!)

I’m not a big chrome or theme guy but there’s no denying that those are things that can help not just make a game pretty but easier to understand and play. And those are things that minimalist games, by their very nature, minimize. With some games, it almost seems like the designers assume players will already know core concepts so they can skip them. I have definitely read RPGs like that.

This occurred to me when I found myself comparing Mint Factory to Sticky Fingers, both very light and simple worker placement games. Mint Factory literally fits in a mint tin, which means that it fits in most pockets. Sticky Fingers, with a board and different decks of cards, requires an actual, if small, box.

That said, Mint Factory has a _slightly_ opaque flow of how you build things and the workers are also effectively money. Those are _very_ low barriers to entry and even a minimally experienced gamer should have no problems. But I don’t think it’s a good intro to concepts, just a very portable and very decent game.

Sticky Fingers, on the other hand, has a board which explicitly shows the flow of the game. It also has a very accessible theme. You are burglars who get to tools to steal loot to sell. It is more accessible by having a clear flow of actions and having a theme, bolstered by the art, that makes the actions easy to understand. 

I like both games but I’d rather teach Sticky Fingers to my parents or other folks who have no idea what worker placement is. (I am, of course, ignoring the fact that I’d really use Stone Age or Lords of Waterdeep (or even Agricola, which was my wife’s first worked placement game) )

I appreciate minimalism but sometimes it doesn’t help.

Trying out on an airplane tray

I often use an airplane tray as my standard unit of measure for game footprints. Although, I guess the basic idea is if a game can be played on a airplane tray at all :D Okay, two airplane trays are also worth considering as a viable play area.

Anyway, on a recent trip, I made sure to bring my fidget box of solitaire games along to test them out on airplane trays and airplane travel in general.

Some games were clearly out. Autumn, a tile laying game, was clearly not going to fit. The only tile laying game I’ve played lately that might have worked is Orchard and I didn’t bring my copy along. 

Other games were flat out cheats. I tried both Down and I Am Lynx but those are games meant to be played with the cards in your hands at all times. The airplane tray didn’t come into it but I still had to do it, just to give the fidget box a proper workout.

The real test was Elevenses for One, although I also tried out Murderer’s Row. I knew my copy of Murderer’s Row, with its half-size cards, would work. If a tray couldn’t hold that, it couldn’t hold a beverage with a complimentary bag of peanuts.

As it happened, my ginger ale did get in the way of Elevenses for One but not enough that I couldn’t play it. It would have been kind of easy to play on a completely empty tray.

None of this was a surprise, of course. But it was nice to make a turn of phrase into reality.

Post Script: Carrie noted that the trays on our second flight were smaller and that’s the one I used for games. So it would have been even easier to game on the first flight.

Oh, I didn’t lose these games after all

This blog entry was originally going to be about how I lost my fidget box when we went out of town for a night. But then it turned into it to have just gotten mixed in with the dirty laundry :D

Of course, by then, I had already printed out almost all the sheets of cards :D

Still, it was an interesting experience. If I had lost my fidget box, I’d have lost my current copies of Elevenses for One, Akur-Gal, the nine card beta of I Am Lynx, a slimmed down version of Down, my 2/3 player deck of Autumn and Murderer’s Row.

So, nine pages of cards. Even including the plastic case I carried everything in, the material costs would be under three dollars, most of that laminating sheets. And if I did the cutting and laminating in one sitting, it would probably be two hours of crafting.

In other words, the actual loss was an annoyance at worst and an incentive to do some crafting at best. The real problem was that we had forgotten anything at all. After all, it would be a big deal if we lost something that was actually important and hard to replace, like our phones.

In fact, this had been a kick in the pants to actually do some crafting and that push has fizzled out. And that is a small price to pay for the reassurance that we actually are functioning adults who don’t lose random things on an overnight trip.

Boy, am I splitting hairs

I have spent a lot of time lately playing a lot of very, very short and very simple solitaire games. I’ve spent some time writing about them as well, my parent break or fidget games.

On occasion, when I have had more time to work with, I’ve been playing slightly longer games. And it can be amazing the difference between a game that takes less than five minutes to play and a game that takes five to ten minutes to play. Well, at least when that’s what you’re working with.

I’ve been pulling out Micro Rome and Circle the Wagons (Lone Cowboy solitaire variant) and Orchard (winner of this year’s Nine Card PnP contest) lately when I have a little more time and brain space and they feel significantly deeper (not deep, just deeper) than the many games of Down or Murderer’s Row or such I’ve been playing while keeping the other eye on our four-year-old. The first time I played Micro Rome in a while, I thought ‘Ah, this is a real game’

And I know if I had a regular game group, even if it was just a couple hours twice a month, I wouldn’t feel this way. There wouldn’t be an apparent difference in these little solitaire games. It’s only when they are what I mostly play that it feels this way.

I have a feeling that I’ll look back in a couple years and wonder how I could have this point of view.

Parent breaks or Fidget Box part two

The rules for Down, a tiny little nine-card game designed to be played in your hand (and one I know I’ll review sooner than later), includes the term ‘parent break’ which is when you hide from your kids for a few minutes in the bathroom. I love it.

While I have yet to hide in the bathroom to get a game in, I definitely understand that idea. A lot of my gaming is done while keeping one eye on our four-year-old snacking or drawing or playing with play dough. Unfortunately, any game involving dice or pawns is more interesting than whatever he’s doing so it’s cards only. (And this is why I have played Pocket Landship so little :’( )

Heck, I have a tiny fidget box of solitaire games that basically exists for parent breaks. 

It’s an interesting niche. A game has to be a solitaire game, take up minimal playing space and playing time and be playable while being largely distracted. It’s something I didn’t look for a few years ago and now I’m accumulating them. (It doesn’t hurt that you can find a number of games like this in PnP)

I also wonder how long I’ll be needing games that are suitable for these kind of parent breaks. At some point, either our son won’t need as much supervision or HE WILL WANT TO PLAY GAMES WITH ME BY THE RULES!!! 

Still, I can state that parent breaks are a real thing and a perfect time for a quick game. Sometimes, they are all the gaming I’m able to do and they do provide a helpful mental break. A coffee break for my mind and they only take a few minutes.

We all need a break now and then, clear the cobwebs from our brains and de-stress. Parent breaks, of one kind of another, are how keep it together. And sometimes, they can be tiny solitaire games.

I Am Lynx - a nifty pnp

Hysterically, the first game from the 2018 9 Card Contest that I’ve really gotten into is one that the designer pulled from it :P Admittedly, it’s because Marek Kolcun already had other designs submitted.

I Am Lynx is a solitaire game that’s designed to be played entirely in your hand. Which, I swear, is a mechanic that I am seeing more and more often. It’s been around for a while (I’m sure there are traditional card games that use it) but I feel like I’m seeing it more and more often.

I Am Lynx is a simple game, where you have a forest of four cards, including your lynx card. The rest of the deck, which you draw from every turn, is held sideways in your hand, which isn’t that hard when the whole thing is just nine cards.

You hunt prey, do your best to dodge hunters and try and protect your lynx kittens over the course of four seasons. It isn’t complex but there are real decisions to make and the theme works very well. It’s a walk in an unforgiving woods.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with I Am Lynx. It’s easy to play just about anywhere and doesn’t take any real time to play. It’s my current game to reach for when I just have a few minutes.

Marek Kolcun is redesigning the game to be eighteen cards and I’m in the middle of making a copy of the current prototype. Having a greater variety of cards and another layer or two of rules is very promising.

The nine-card version I’ve been playing with is now consigned to permanent alpha or beta. The eighteen card one looks like it will be just plain better. But the nine card version was definitely worth my crafting and it might live on stuffed in my wallet for an anywhere game.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1965957/wip-i-am-lynx-9-card-game-no-table-required

Do limits create inspiration?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the limitations of the medium and how they can inspire and refine creativity.

What got me started down this road was a relatively recent thread about Japanese board game culture. According to the thread, many Japanese designers self-publish small print runs. Which has lent itself to both card games and micro games.

Financial and other practical limits resulting in refining game mechanics is nothing new. Andrew Looney came up with Fluxx because Looney Labs needed a product they could make cheaper than their pyramids. I like the pyramids more but Fluxx is their flagship property. Pico, the predecessor of Pico 2, was the result of a printing overrun and I’d argue it set the gold standard for micro games for over ten years.

And probably one of the biggest examples is that legend and Wizards of the Coast PR has it that Magic the Gathering was developed by Richard Garfield to help finance RoboRally. Which to my mind is like inventing the car engine so you can have power windows. You can tell I don’t like RoboRally. :D

And there certainly seems to be a thriving micro game interest on Kickstarter. Which makes sense to start small if you are new to publishing.

But I wonder if the Japanese game designer culture, if it’s actually like that thread suggests , super encourages this kind of creativity. Seiji Kanai kind of single-handedly changed the world of micro games with Love Letter. Not just because it is popular but because it proved that a micro game could have an actual depth of play.

Of course, I could be a 100% wrong. The idea is just an idea that struck me, unsupported by any research. But I do like the idea that restrictions lead to greater creativity and higher quality.

Pondering Universal Rule before I even play

I recently finished making a copy of Universal Rule from ButtonShy. Since it doesn't play down to two, it will be a while before I play it but I am quite curious about it.

It bills itself as a 4X game, which works if you're willing to count combat as extermination. If you house rule wiping out all of a player's planets, then exterminate would be more realized. (Really, classic 4X exterminate means colonial style genocide) But that would turn the game into pile on the first person to show weakness so maybe we don't need that much extermination.

Mechanically, it's a skinny deck Race for the Galaxy with Cosmic Encounter's combat. And that's where the rub might well be. Race for the Galaxy is one of the best games I've played and Cosmic Encounter is a multi-generational classic. 

In particular, Universal Rule and Race for the Galaxy take about the same amount of time. And if you leave the box behind, Race won't take up much space in a courier bag or backpack or the like. So Universal Rule's size advantage really just makes a difference if you're limited to your coat pocket. (Which to be fair, I sometimes have been)

I suspect that, if Universal Rule is to break into regular game rotation, the selling point will be in the combat. Since it is resource heavy, you're going to have to work your way up to attacking someone but everyone at the table gets involved and it can be worth a hefty six points. So when combat happens, it's going to be a big deal.

Universal Rule actually runs into an issue that I don't often to see in micro games, which is that the small size of the game might interfere with the complexity of the game. Adding another card as a player aide, that would solve that though and the instructions include that.

It also runs into the issue of being a micro game you'd play instead of a larger game. You wouldn't play HUE or This Town Ain't Big Enough for the 2-4 of Us instead of Carcassonne. They take about a fifth the time or less. I have to choose to play Universal Rule instead of Race and that wouldn't happen with my old Chicago crew.

At some point I need to play Universal Rule. It is a micro game that fills a non-micro game space. Can it step up?