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.

Doing a good job reinventing the wheel is hard

While almost everyone who we’re going to see on our holiday travels are folks who don’t play board games, I knew that I’d get one good chance to game when an old buddy brought his son to see us.

As I’ve written before, I packed a tiny game library of four Pack O Game games. And that was enough for us to get a couple hours of gaming in.

We got in two games of Hue, a game of SHH, a game of DIG and three or four games of GEM. The consensus was that HUE was fun, SHH was okay (good word game but no one felt like playing a word game) and DIG was really interesting.

And they both really liked GEM. GEM was the big winner by far.

To be fair to DIG, it was the last game that I taught so that might have lessened its impact. And I do think that more plays of DIG would have made them like it more. But GEM was a hit from the first play. Replays were demanded and it’s the longest game of the four (still pretty short) My gaming buddy said that the others were fun, small games but GEM felt like a ‘full’ game.

In fact, while my friend’s son has played a lot of board games, this may have been his first auction game. If it really was, it was a good introduction to auctions. (For Sale would have been better but GEM was still good) I forwarded them the black-and-white demo so they could make a copy but I bet they will be ordering their own copy before long.

This is far from the first time I’ve taken games from the Pack O Game series out. They’ve seen plenty of play at home and at conventions. However, this is the first time they’ve had to stand on their own as the entire game library and they did well.

My holiday gaming session (so far)

While almost everyone who we’re going to see on our holiday travels are folks who don’t play board games, I knew that I’d get one good chance to game when an old buddy brought his son to see us.

As I’ve written before, I packed a tiny game library of four Pack O Game games. And that was enough for us to get a couple hours of gaming in.

We got in two games of Hue, a game of SHH, a game of DIG and three or four games of GEM. The consensus was that HUE was fun, SHH was okay (good word game but no one felt like playing a word game) and DIG was really interesting.

And they both really liked GEM. GEM was the big winner by far.

To be fair to DIG, it was the last game that I taught so that might have lessened its impact. And I do think that more plays of DIG would have made them like it more. But GEM was a hit from the first play. Replays were demanded and it’s the longest game of the four (still pretty short) My gaming buddy said that the others were fun, small games but GEM felt like a ‘full’ game.

In fact, while my friend’s son has played a lot of board games, this may have been his first auction game. If it really was, it was a good introduction to auctions. (For Sale would have been better but GEM was still good) I forwarded them the black-and-white demo so they could make a copy but I bet they will be ordering their own copy before long.

This is far from the first time I’ve taken games from the Pack O Game series out. They’ve seen plenty of play at home and at conventions. However, this is the first time they’ve had to stand on their own as the entire game library and they did well.