Alhambra, quietly great

Ah, Alhambra.

While I was already exploring and playing designer games by the time I got to Alhambra, I have still been playing it for many years. It combines a couple of layers of simples decisions (What tiles do I buy and where can I place them are the fundamental ones) and I don’t think I’d turn down an offer to play. And I’ve yet to actually play with any of the expansions :D

The thumbnail sketch is that you are in charge of the restoration of the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. Each player is building their own palace. You have to buy the tiles, which have a set price, but they are randomly placed in the market which determines which of the four currencies is needed to buy it. You can choose to buy tiles, draw money cards or do some limited rearranging of your tiles. Three tiles during the game, you score points based on having the majority of tile types, as well as the length of your largest outer wall.

As you can imagine (and probably know full well since I bet most of the people reading this have played even more Alhambra than me), I’ve glossed over a lot, like placement restrictions or the value of paying with exact change. But the basic idea is everyone is building their own castle and buying the tiles to do it.

Alhambra won the Spiel des Jahres in 2003 and I’m pretty sure it has never been out of print. It has had numerous expansions and spinoffs. It’s one of Dirk Jenn’s biggest successes, although my friends who are fans of Shogun would threaten me with bodily harm if I said it was his greatest :D And Shogun is pretty awesome.

You would think that Alhambra would be one of the cornerstones of family-weight gaming like Ticket to Ride or Puerto Rico. And, in reality, I’m pretty sure it is. And yet, I never seem to hear it come up in discussions about family gaming.

My two theories on that are that I’m just not hearing the right discussions and Carcassonne. Frankly, apart from being tile laying games, I don’t see any real resemblance. But Carcassonne casts one big shadow. 

And, like I said, the differences are huge. Everyone has their own tableau in Alhambra, unlike the shared one in Carcassonne. You flat out buy the tiles, making money management a huge deal and meaning you know just what tiles you’re getting. The tiles have an orientation, adding a layer of difficulty in placement. And the scoring is also directly compositing for majorities.

I really love Carcassonne and think it has earned its place of being successful enough that it’s hip to diss it but, man, Alhambra is also a great game with a lot going for it.

Again, I’m not saying that Alhambra deserves to be a cornerstone of family-weight games. I’m pretty sure it already is. In an industry full of flash-in-the-pan, gone-the-next-year games, it has kept on going. At the end of the day, dollars do mean something and Alhambra is doing okay.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6249/alhambra

Pausing in the middle of Sin de Jour

I just finished Idle Ingredients, the fourth book in the Sin de Jour series.

I would have never even heard of the series, let alone started reading it, if Howard Tayler hadn’t recommended it on his Schlock Mercenary site. His recommendations get some extra grains of salt.

The elevator pitch is that the series is about a catering company that specializes in events for the supernatural community. However, the books are not nearly as wacky or as whimsical as that might imply.

The catering company works for the government and we are definitely looking at a Cancer Man-style government. One of their primary clients are literally demons from Hell and damnation is definitely a driving theme of the series.

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

I bought the first three books as a bundle so I knew I was getting into to at least read those books. The first book felt a little strained but it had a fair bit of world building to do. The second book involved a wedding party turning into rape lizards being treated as a spot of good fun, which I found distasteful. At that point, I was not sold on the series.

Until the epilogue of the second book, which I hadn’t cared for. The government liaison slices the head chef’s throat and sends his soul to Hell to show him that the government isn’t happy with him. In hat one scene, I felt like the series finally found its voice. It’s dark voice but it’s a clear voice. And with that, I was sold on reading the rest of the Sin de Jour books.

I have learned that there will be seven books, one for every deadly sin. And I’m not surprised after the third and fourth book, that this isn’t an ongoing series but a story with a definite end. Indeed, I won’t be surprised if not every character lives to the end. Actually, I won’t be surprised if it ends in a blood bath.

I’m lucky I bought the first three books as a bundle. That committed me long enough to get to the good stuff.

Been a while since my boots touched Elfenland

It’s been many years since I last played Elfenland. It won the Spiel des Jahres and was Alan Moon’s first major success. And it saw frequent play at one of my gaming groups of the past.

But it’s a game I’ve never really gotten into. I picked up a copy many years ago and ended up giving it away with that copy unplayed. Although I have hung onto the card version, King of the Elves. Which also hasn’t been played :P

Elfenland is a gorgeous game. The artwork is whimsical and detailed, depicting a world of elves and dragons that makes Harry Potter look like death metal. And the player pawns are these chunky wooden boots that are still some of the cutest pawns I’ve ever seen. The game still hold up well visually by modern standards and has to have been beyond amazing when it came out in 1998.

The game is basically one big traveling salesman puzzle. There are twenty cities or towns on the map and your goal is to visit as many of them as possible. You also have a secret town card that you want to end up at at the end of the game. (I’ve been told that that is a variant but it’s the only way I’ve ever played)

The board is a network of roads between all these cities but, here’s the thing. You need some kind of transportation on those roads, be it an elf-cycle or a magical cloud or a troll pulling a cart or a dragon. Oh and you have to pay for them with matching cards.

So, on each of the four turns that make up the game, you take turns placing transportation tiles down on roads (each one can only hold one) and then paying with your cards to travel as far as you can.

There’s some interesting additional stuff. You also get one tree down tile that will block a road for one turn. Not every transportation works on every terrain. And some cost two cards to use, making them more expensive.

Honestly, looking back at Elfenland, I’m not sure why I’m so meh about it. It’s definitely an interesting design and I honestly can’t think of another game that’s really like it. And it certainly has a lot of player interaction, in the classic German Family Game (the school of game design, not the country, Alan Moon is English) style.

It might well be that the one group that I played it with (quite a few times in fact) treated it as a negotiation game with a strong sense of cooperation and efficiency. (Which is off because they’d play most games as vicious as can be, bless their blood thirsty hearts) I know that there are groups out there that play Elfenland as an aggressive, mean game, making routes more difficult and more expensive. 

And, as I have mentioned before, I have kept King of the Elves, the card adaptation of it. After all, I could break it down to a much smaller box :D

I can see why Elfenland is brilliant. Maybe sometime, I will experience it.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10/elfenland

Spot It: the matching game even for folks who hate matching games

As near as I can tell, I haven’t written about Spot It or Dobble. That surprises me and I really have to wonder if I just can’t find that blog entry for some reason.

Spot It comes in a vast number of editions but, with a couple exceptions, the only difference is the art work. It consists of a deck of circular cards with a whole bunch of images on each card. Every two cards share one picture.

The game actually comes with at least four different rule sets and I bet there are even more by now. However, they all share the common mechanic of being the first to spot the two matching pictures on two cards.

Spot It features an interesting dichotomy. All of the games you can play with a Spot It deck are simple. But the math that it took to actually design the deck is definitely complex. Simple idea but it took a lot of work to pull it off.

I’m not big on speed and reaction games (although in their defense, a lot of them are color-based and being color blind makes that a big problem) However, Spot It is one of the best ones I’ve tried. It’s also one of the most accessible ones I’ve tried.

Well, okay, it’s not like most of them are hard to teach (Fightball might be an exception) but I’ve never seen anyone not have fun with Spot It. Spot It is a game that you can play with just about everyone.

Judging by all the places I’ve seen it sold, Spot It has definitely broken into the mainstream. Which makes sense to me. It’s simple and fun to play. It’s not going to be a game that you can use a stepping stone to get folks to play Twilight Imperium but you will have no problems getting folks to play it. 

I don’t have many real time, reacting speed games in my collection, particularly after quite a bit of purging. Spot It would be the last one to go if I were to do another purge.

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.

All it required was one email so I played it

During a bout of mild insomnia, I came across Animal Professionals of Place Place Number: A Solo Writing Game. When I woke up the next morning, I realized that it was a game that I could just go ahead and play it since all it took was me writing one letter.

Animal Professionals of Place Place Number is basically just writing a gag letter to a game designer about a game that they didn’t design and doesn’t actually exist. There’s a basic layout for the letter but all the details are up to you.

For my first time trying out the game, I chose Steve Townshend because we’ve been friends ever since we met at pre-college many, many years ago. So I knew he’d either enjoy the experience or eventually forgive me :D 

Dear Mister Steven Townshend, 

Thank you for sending me a copy of the prototype of Walrus Zamboni Drivers of Canada Municipal Field 55 to review. I don’t think I have ever seen an RPG like it.

It would have been hysterical to just have intelligent, time lost walruses become zamboni drivers but making them Vikings too was just brilliant. That really helped Rob sink his teeth into playing Tuskrrr. And it was really amazing how Greg used the optional mascot costume instead of a zamboni. Having only one good quality but no bad qualities ended up being a good balance.

I do have to ask if the aliens are supposed to be the ones opening up the time-space portals? Also, do you think it would be better to have a different player write in a new quality when a player has to cross one out?

Again, I have to thank for the chance to play Walrus Zamboni Drivers of Canada Municipal Field 55. You have always created games where the goals of the players drive the story and this was no exception.

Sincerely,

Lowell Kempf 

http://ginger-goat.blogspot.com/2016/02/animal-professionals-of-place-place.html?m=1

Mix index cards and sorrow to make game

Sad Things on Index Cards is a tiny RPG/Storytelling Game/social activity by Ben Wray and Marshall Miller. The closest thing I can classify it as is a Game Poem but it has less context than I’m used to seeing in a Game Poem, which seem to have some kind of narrative involved.

The game consists of either writing down sad things on blank index cards or editing sad things written down on index cards to make them sadder. At the end of the game, you give cards to other players for them to read later.

I have to admit, when I first read Sad Things on Index Cards, my first reaction was ‘Man, why didn’t I write this?’

While my initial opinion of Game Poems was pretty meh, they have really grown on me. To my mind, the object of a Game Poem is evoke a specific emotional response. Which could be sorrow or wonder or humor or even boredom. 

Sad Things on Index Cards strips away any kind of story and goes straight to the emotion. In fact, it seems less like a Game Poem than the skeleton of a Game Poem, like a model that you can slap any set of clothes on. It’s like a protoplasm Game Poem :D

I can see a lot of fun and value in both using the game as a framework to create a narrative and to just play it as is. It is such a simple idea but I think has a lot of potential and replay value, as well as being an easy entry for folks who aren’t used to unconventional game designs. 

Sad Things on Index Cards is a super simple game that fits on one piece of paper and takes just a few pilfered office supplies to play. However, there’s brilliance in that simple little design.