Modern Art and the art of auctions

Modern Art is not my favorite auction game. That's probably Ra, as far as games where the primary mechanic is having auctions. For Sale and High Society are also high up there. (In fact, I'd even go so far as to say if you only own one auction game, For Sale is one of your best choices)

But Modern Art wasn't just my introduction to auction games. It was a great introduction because it is a crash course on auctions. It is one of the fundamental games on the subject.

Instead of going over the rules in detail, I'll put in a link to the review I wrote back in 2005: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/88939/essential-auction-game Okay, let me get back to talking about the game.

Modern Art pulls off being such a fundamental auction game by using four different methods of auction, not counting the double auction. You got the traditional caller auction, the blind auction, the once around auction and the set price auction.

Really, the only auction it doesn't cover per se is the moat common form of auction in games, going around until everyone but one player has dropped out. 

Modern Art also has a really neat economic system going on, with only the three artists earning any money at the end of each season but the values adding up through out the game. Some folks have argued that that keeps it from being a 'pure' auction game. Considering that Knizia basically sawed the auctions off in order to create Modern Art the Card Game, I can see that.

Still, the auctions and the determination of the value of each system are all tightly knit together to form the economy of the game. In particular, the players are auctioning off the paintings to each other and pocketing the profits themselves. Everyone is invested in the economy of the game.

I'll admit that one of reasons Modern Art isn't at the top of my auction list is because people who overbid can not only knock themselves out of the game but literally hand the game over to someone else. Fortunately, you can teach people what the maximum potential value of a painting is but not everyone is good at listening :P

Modern Art is a very engaging game, involving all the players. It really explores auctions and has a tight economy tying everything together.  It's a really fun game that is great for exploring game mechanics. It really has earned a place in my collection. 

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/118/modern-art

Shopkins and matching games, gotta catch them all!

I am coming to the conclusion that matching games are even more common then roll-and-move games when it comes to board games that are aimed at the under five set.

Not that I am really complaining, seeing as how matching games still offer some real choices, as opposed rolling a die and doing whatever it tells you. And I figure that learning matching skills and memory skills is at least as educational as learning how to count spaces.

 

But, wow, are there a lot of them out there. Every single licensed product under the sun has one, which makes sense. All you need is the artwork and you are ready to go. No further game development necessary.

So every time I find a matching game that has some kind of twist build into it, it's kind of interesting for me.

We recently picked up the Shopkins Make A Deal Matching game, based on the chibi Shopkins toys. Those are cute little anthropomorphized things you buy in stores. Seriously, it's that general. Food, jewelry, wheelbarrels, tennis rackets. If you can buy it with cold hard currency, they will make a cute little figurine of it.

The game follows the general matching game formula, building a grid of facedown tiles and flipping them over to find matches. You know the drill.

Where the twist comes in is that you get one point for each unique tile that you have. If you make a successful match, you can choose to take another turn or to make a deal.

If you make a deal, you get two choices. You can swap a tile with another player, netting you reach a point. Or you can flip a coin with heads letting you steal a tile from another player. It has to be one that they have two of, though. You don't get to steal points.

Mind you, that still not enough to make it really that interesting a game. The swap action only works if you have more than two players and with more than two players, it means that the people not involved in the swap are the ones actually taking a loss. More than that, the entire make a deal series of actions only works once people have got a collection of tiles.

For actual playing purposes, it still doesn't thrill me the way Spot It or Animal Upon Animal do. There are clearly more interesting games for toddlers out there. I still find it interesting to find an additional mechanic and one that fits the theme of got to catch them all.

Huh. Wonder if the mechanic was first developed for a Pokemon matching game.

Leadfoot Gettaway - an RPG for two players and one fast car

Leadfoot Gettaway is not just a two-page RPG, it's also a game straddles the line between a role playing game and an adventure board game. To be fair, that's a super thin line and I don't know of an adventure board game that doesn't have one foot in role playing. However, it's still a good trick for a game fits on a double-sided sheet of paper.

Part of the Indie Mixtape Megamix, Leadfoot Gettaway plays out a particularly tough job  in the life of a Driver. You know, the role that's pretty much defined the career of Jason Statham. Although, the genre has been around for a whole longer than that. Still, it lets you describe the game to someone in one sentence.

It's designed for two players. Obviously, someone gets to be the driver. They get to stat out the driver. Or, really, they get to stat out the car. The sweet ride gets four stats, ranging from one to four dice. The stat that stands out is Style, which adds gadgets to your car.

 

The other player is the passenger, which really means the game master. In addition to playing all of the NPC's, they use a regular deck of cards to randomly generate the road the driver is going on.

Without going into enough detail to tell you how to actually play the game without getting it, each card provide some sort of challenge to the driver. Red cards are cool stuff while black cards are tough challenges.

Something that amuses me is that while Leadfoot Gettaway is a ridiculously focused game, so focused that it could pass for a board game without much trouble, you can still really play with the setting. You could have it be set in the 70s with old school muscle cars or really hit the style and make it science fiction like Knight Rider or Speed Racer. Heck, you could make the sweet ride a horse and have it be a western.

Despite the simplicity and tight focus, there do feel like there are some meaningful gaps in the rule. For instance, other than losing gadgets or benefit tokens, there doesn't seem to be a damage system. In theory, eventually the driver will always make it.

Despite the super tight focus and some rules issues, I can immediately think of people I'd like to play Leadfoot Gettaway with. It didn't leave me in awe but the fact that I want to try it out says something.

Auctions - a fun but dangerous mechanic

I had a recent discussion with a friend where discussed how we both liked auction games but we had both had experiences where poor player decisions had completely wrecked games.

I have seen games of Power Grid, where the power plants are auctioned off at the start of each turn, when a player has their heart set on a specific plant and effectively puts themselves out of the game. And auctions are only one part of that game.

More often than I care to remember, I've seen games of Modern Art get thrown out of whack when winning an auction becomes more important for someone than winning the game. That's particularly bad since you can figure out the maximum value of a painting and money from auctions usually goes into a player's pocket.

Although the worst game I've seen for bad player choices making everything fall apart is technically not an auction game, although I can see how it can be seen as one. That's the venerable Executive Decision by Sid Sackson. It's a game where supply and demand is entirely determined by the players and one player can wreck the whole economy. When played well, it's brilliant but when played poorly, it's a train wreck.

All of that said, there are ways that designers can help mitigate poorly bid auctions throwing games out whack. For instance, in For Sale, everyone will get a house or a check each round, no matter how poorly they've bid or how bankrupt they might be. Poor choices won't kick anyone out of the game.

The best game I've seen that manages to balance auctions is Ra. It does this primarily by only limiting the number of times you can win an auction and limiting how much you can bid. 

And, mind you, with players who understand what is going on and aren't going to be silly, auctions are a lot of fun. They create a metric ton of interaction and tension. And, if if you need to teach someone how to judge auctions, games like Ra and For Sale are great tools to do that, as well as just plain great games.

Employee of the Month - a profoundly quirky game

Employee of the Month is a game that has stuck in my head far longer than it has any right to. I got rid of my copy long ago since the game isn't that great to play but the quirky mechanics of the game continue to stick in my head.

Simply put, Employee of the Month is an auction game where everyone shares the same pool of money.

The way it works is every turn, a positive card and a negative card get auctioned off. Players take turns choosing from a row of money cards, high card winning.

And here's the twist. The money comes in two flavors, your reputation with other employees and with the boss. And you keep your winning money cards. At the end of the game, you only score the negative points if you have the most in either of those two denomination. (If you have the most in both, you get double the negative points)

Oh, just to make it even crazier, some of the points are special Kudos points. You only get those if you have the LOWEST in a denomination.

Employee of the Month uses a mechanic which I honestly haven't found anywhere else. It fits the theme of office politics surprisingly well and creates some interesting brinksmanship situations.

However, while it mechanically works, it has some playing issues. The two denominations are limited enough that it's easy for most anyone to do card counting. That makes it easy to force someone into a downward spiral to lose points from the negative cards. It's even easier to prevent someone from going for a Kudos strategy. Plus, there were times when a high negative point card would be tied to a low positive point card. Nobody would make a bid and that round would be a wash.

On top of those issues, there are other auctions games that are quick and portable. For Sale and High Society, for example, are stellar games that take up the same spot on the game shelf and are much, much better.

Employee of the Month is a strange, quirky game unlike anything I've seen. I'm glad to had a chance to try it back when I did. However, between the gameplay issues and the fact that there other light auction games I'd rather play, it didn't stay in my collection.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9824/employee-month 

If John Hughes directed a RPG

If you were looking for a role playing game that let you relive movies like Sixteen Candles or Some Kind of Wonderful, Unrequited fits that bill. In fact, that's pretty much all you're going to do with it.

Unrequited is a short form role-playing game for two players. One player will play the Infatuated, who is in love with the Crush, an NPC. The other player plays the Friend, who supports the Infatuated but is secretly in love with the Infatuated. 

Yeah, you can see where this is going.

You play out three scenes, heightening the Infatuated's obsession with the Crush and depending the Friend's love for the infatuated. Throughout the scenes, you develop dice pools that will help determine who ends up with who at the end of the game.

One of the things that I don't like about how you earn those dice. You get them by performing very specific actions during the scene. While the rules state that the setting can be anywhere, the actions are really, really geared towards a John Hughes style 80s teen movie. Seriously, I can't see using this rule set with any other kind of setting.

What I do like is that the Friend can choose to give their dice pool to the Infatuated to help them win the love of the Crush, sacrificing their love for the desires of the Crush. It's pretty standard for the genre but it is the most dramatic choice in the game. Perhaps the only dramatic choice.

In short form games, particularly narratively driven games, I do think that it is important to have a strong framework. A lot of games, you go in knowing what kind of story they are trying to tell and the framework helps you tell that kind of story. In the case of Unrequited, I feel like the structure is so rigid that it's telling me how the story is to be told in addition to what the story will be. In fact, if we were given a very specific setting and three pregenerated characters for the three roles, I think that it would bother me less because the rigid structure would make more sense. 

Unrequited suffers from comparison to a number of games. For me, the most obvious one is Breaking the Ice. Two player, romance games aren't part of my RPG interest but the depth and many interesting choices in Breaking the Ice would make it my game of choice. 

Since Unrequited is part of the Indie Mixtape Megamix, I also can't help but compare it the game right before it on the play list, A Courteous Night, another romantic short form for two. And one that I feel allows for more interesting choices and more freedom, despite also having a very tight structure.

Interestingly enough, although there are other was not very much alike, since the scenes in Unrequited are all conversations, I find myself reminded of Until We Sink. That's a Nordic LARP that consists of nothing but conversations around the table. Making it a tabletop LARP, I guess. 

Unrequited isn't a game that I can see myself playing, even if I was in the mood for a romantic game. It's certainly not a game I can see playing twice.

The Wouldbegoods - good but not Nesbit's best

As part of my reading of public domain children's literature in general and A. E. Nesbit in particular, I just finished reading The Wouldbegoods, her second book about the Bastable siblings. 

The Bastables are one of the prototypes for kids who innocently get into trouble. Their hearts may be in the right place but they have serious issues with bad judgment and poor impulse control.

In the Wouldbegoods, they set out to become better people during a summer holiday in the countryside. A holiday that they were required to go on after wrecking their uncle's yard and taxidermy collection. Needless to say, chaos follows every good deed they tried to do and every game they try to play.

I pretty much have to compare it to the first book, the Story of the Treasure Seekers.  On the one hand, I found the second book a more enjoyable and fun read. And on the other hand, I found the first book to be deeper and more meaningful.

You see, the poor judgement of the Bastables makes you seriously wonder if there is something wrong with these kids. And, it becomes rapidly obvious in the first book that there is. Underneath their jolly play, they are clearly traumatized by the death of their mother and by their father losing everything when his partner embezzled the company into the ground. 

Their lives are much improved by the second book, which means that we are not reading about a group of kids who are clinging together in order to keep it together. Which is definitely more upbeat but not nearly as moving.

One thing that I have to give these books is that the kids don't get away with any of their accidental hijinks. There are definite consequences to their actions. One of the most striking scenes in the book is the younger daughter practically having a breakdown after discovering that a good deed overturned a barge and dump out a load of coal. The kids are well aware of how many scrapes they get into, even though they can't seem to learn from them. 

The book does get kind of formulaic. Each chapter, we read about how the Bastables have some kind of poorly thought idea and how it will inevitably blow up on them. It's not one of Nesbit's strongest works, particularly compared to the first book. 

Still, the Wouldbegoods is an interesting, if sometimes dated (and even racist) look at the beginnings of modern children's literature.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/794