Postcards of war

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve found Battle Card Market Garden an interesting little work. The game really plays itself but it’s an interesting to show Operation Marker Garden on a post card.

Looking into it a bit more, I quickly learned it was from the Postcards From the Front game design jam. (Not a contest!)  (https://itch.io/jam/postcards-from-the-front) It’s a collection of almost fifty postcard war games. They range from small scale hex-and-chit games to much more abstract interpretations of conflict.

While I am not really a war gamer by any stretch of the imagination, I still find this collection fascinating. Honestly , that’s just because the printing effort is one page per game and many of them are either solitaire or have solitaire options. 

I can’t decide if my interest in these small scale games is a compliment or an insult to war gaming. War gaming’s roots are in historical simulation and I assume post card games fall short of war college standard.

But I also have to admit that I’m not being fair to postcard games. Tactics and Strategy Magazine has been including a complete war game since 1967. And magazine inserts are clearly a step between World in Flames and postcard games.

Looking back, the first time I heard about postcard war games was Postcard From The Revolution, which came out in 2004. As a format, it may not have taken the world by storm but it’s stuck around for at least twenty years.

More than that, many of both the postcard games from the jam and other places I’ve seen are focused around specific historical events. Heck, one of the non-historic games about ants and termites was designed by an entomologist.

In short, if an educational component is something you are looking for in a war game, this jam has that. I have learned about the Great Emu War of 1932. I learned that Jose Garcia saved the Alhambra from being blown up. I found out Germans impulsively sacked Rome in 1527. Even if I never play any of the games, I’m learning stuff.

I don’t know if I will play any games from the Postcards from the Front jam but I have gotten plenty out of looking at it.

Dabbling with one-card games

In order to ease myself back into the mindset of both making PnP projects and learning PnP games, I made a few of the simplest entries in this year’s One Card Contest: Flyswatter, The Flea and the Circus, One Card Maze. None of them feel like I could get an entire blog out of them but I’ll throw them together as a pack. 

(https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3093370/2023-1-card-print-and-play-design-contest)

Flytrap

Pick one of three different cards that each have ten flies and three fireflies in different patterns . Flip the card up in the air and catch it between your hands. Every fly you cover is a point but if you cover all the fireflies you get nothing.

…

Was this designed as a drinking game?

I don’t even mean that a knock. I found even catching the card to be tricky. I don’t know how much skill as far as earning points can come into it.

But I can see it being fun with drunk people.

Maybe not for drunk people but definitely fun with drunk people.

The Flea and the Circus

It’s a Roll and Write where you draw a line across a minuscule grid. Roll a six-sided die, draw a line that many spaces. You get points by drawing over tickets and you win by reaching the far corner of the grid. Ending on dogs can let you teleport.

The Flea and the Circus occupies the same space for me as 13 Sheep and Blankout.  Very short and simple Roll and Writes that work well for when I am either time strapped or brain dead. And, yes, they get more use than I care to admit.

That said, The Flea and the Circus doesn’t have the decision space those two games have. In fact, bad rolls can easily make sure you can’t make it to the far edge. 13 Sheep manages to take that tiny design space and be a good game. 

It will still get added to the folder for now for variety’s sake.

One Card Maze

Honestly, One Card Maze is what made me decide to do this little exercise. It does come with this caveat: it is most certainly not a game. It is a puzzle.

It’s a card-sized maze that double sided and part of the gimmick is that you flip the card and special spaces let you reorient the card to unlock gates. 

And it is impossible for me not to compare One Card Maze to Thin Cube/Flipuzzles from the 2021 contest. And the Flipuzzle family wins that comparison. They offer more variety and trickiness, hands down.

The one thing One Card Puzzle does better is being casual. I can sometimes struggle to track where I am in a Flipuzzle. It’s much easier with One Card Puzzle. Mind you, that also makes them simpler to solve and remember the solutions.

I still signed up for their mailing list and have looked at the other two mazes available. My one disappointment is that there hasn’t been an additional mechanic added to the spin room and orientation locks. Still, I want to see what else they can do.

Honestly, none of these games/puzzles set me on fire. However, it was a fun exercise.

Restaurantrepreneur Is a weird name but a good game

 My journey with learning Dark Imp’s PnP games has come to an end with Restaurantrepreneur. Certainly not my journey of _playing_ them and if they publish more, well, I definitely be interested in learning those. But Restaurantrepreneur wraps up me learning all of the one currently published.

The theme of Restaurantrepreneur is opening up a new restaurant, which is thematically similar to another Dark Imp game, the Grand Opening, about a restaurant’s first day. However, Restaurantrepreneur involves things like buying fixtures, advertising and hiring folks.

 

The game consists of five different mini-games. (The Menu, Hiring Staff, The Location, The Fixtures and Fittings, and The Marketing) They all have their own rules, are pretty simple and none of them could really stand on their own.

 

Each turn, someone rolls three dice. Each player uses one die to pick the game (sixes are wild for this purpose), one die to use in that game and one die as money withdrawn from the bank.

Now, if Restaurantrepreneur just consisted of two dice, picking a mini-game and a die to use in it, it would still be pretty good. But the bank is what pushes the game to the next level.

There are three accounts (pips  1&2, pips 3&4, pips 5&6) They each have sixteen money bags. When you have to cross out a seventeenth bag in an account, you are overdrawn and the game ends for you. (You can’t force an end to everyone’s game)

The bank doesn’t just act as a timer for the game, although it does do that. It makes every turn more interesting. And, at a certain point, you have to make sacrifices to either keep the game going or end the game earlier than you might like to get crucial points.

No, none of the elements are new. Dark Imp doesn’t reinvent wheels but it makes good use of wheels that have been road tested. 

While I can’t say that the mechanics really reflect the theme (they are either crossing out numbers or marking spaces), the themes tie together nicely with the overall idea of trying to get a restaurant started.

Restaurantrepreneur is part of Dark Imp’s placemat line, which means that they take up two sheets of paper, have slightly more complex rules and are ink heavy. The ink heavy part kept me away from the placemat games initially but I’ve been quite happy with them after I took the ink plunge.

Restaurantrepreneur lands solidly in casual gamer camp. It has good choices and the thematic pieces click together. It’s a game that I would pull out for a low key family game night. Restaurantrepreneur captures the feel of a Euro family game in two pages.

Railroad Ink hasn’t fired 30 Rails for me

I have finally played Railroad Ink. As someone who is into Roll and Write games, multi-player solitaires and railway games, it’s been a game I’ve been itching to try since I first saw it lol

(I learned and played it via the app but I don’t rule out getting a physical copy. Although which one? Lol) And at some point, I will actually write about just Railroad Ink but, as I learned it, I found myself thinking about 30 Rails.

Okay, let’s be honest. There’s a lot of railroad-themed connection games out there. And there are plenty of connection-based Roll and Write games. But, for me, 30 Rails is one of the quintessential ones.

30 Rails is an exercise in minimalism. Two dice. A pencil. A grid. A chart. If you didn’t have access to a printer, you could easily make a copy by hand. But within those simple elements is a solid game with some real choices and even a smidgeon of theme.

My initial premise, when I originally started working on this blog entry, was that in a vacuum, Railroad Ink was better than 30 Rails but being free and _very_ easy to construct adds a lot of value to 30 Rails. Heck, having 30 Rails made me not bother to try and mock up a copy of Railroad Ink.

And I think that Railroad Ink, by virtue of having more content, does win in a vacuum. Two different types of paths, bonus faces and a bunch of expansions is a lot extra content.

But 30 Rails with a different set of placement restrictions, offers different kinds of choices. 30 Rails hasn’t lost its own challenges. It has solid value outside of being free. It hasn’t stopped being a good game.

I know I will get a lot of play out of Railroad Ink but I am going to still play 30 Rails. I might even play it more because I’ll be in a train game state of mind.

Is Radoslaw Ignatow the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of PnP?

I dug Radoslaw Ignatow before it was cool :P

I knew his Space Alone Kickstarter was going to do well but I didn’t expect it to get so much wider attention.

It reminds me of reading indie comics in the early 80s and discussing how hard it would be to make a rhyming theme song if they ever made a cartoon of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (In our defense, the theme song didn’t end up rhyming :D And, yes, I’m glad Cerebus never became a children’s cartoons. And don’t tell me they wouldn't have if Sims had been willing. They made a cartoon of Robocop)

Seriously, I’ve followed Ignatow since his first Kickstarter, the LOT of Games bundle. And, frankly, I think he is brilliant at designing Roll and Writes and applying them as PnPs. And he’s been steadily getting better.

I knew that Island Alone had brought him a lot more attention but the fact that Space Alone has gotten up to the number two slot on BGG’s hotness is kind of amazing. 

No, we don’t know how long we will stay there. And you can’t say that it _really_ means anything. (Hands up for everyone who remember when Monkey Auto Race managed to become the number one game on BGG as a mass practical joke in 2007? No one? Man, I feel old)

Still, that’s exposure that justt almost no PnP games get. (I am old enough remember how Zombie in My Pocket was the happy pipe bomb that the community never saw coming) And given Ignatov’s past work, I think the finished product will make plenty of people happy.

It doesn’t hurt that R&Ws can be some of the easier PnP projects to construct. You usually don’t have to worry about making cards or tiles or chits. (Exceptions do exist, particularly the card part) 

I’m not expecting Space Alone to boost the overal presence of PnP games. (Which have been doing steadily better anyway) But it would be fun if it did.

My July Gaming

With our move and all, I had very low expectations for learning games in July. With that said, I exceeded my expectations.

I learned:

Jump Drive

Disney: Eye Found It! Hidden Picture Card Game

Restaurantrepreneur

Rustling Leaves

I’ll be honest, I was only figuring I’d learn Restaurantrepreneur in July. 

Jump Drive was something I tried out of curiosity on Board Game Arena. My initial impressions were meh but the solitaire campaigns made Jump Drive addictive to me.

The Eye Found It game was packed as a hotel game. It was better than I expected and the quality of art was solid. However, Dobble/Spot It is vastly superior on almost every single level. Eye Found It is an okay kids game. Spot It is a great game for all ages.

I intentionally packed Restaurantrepreneur in my travel folder to make sure I learned a new Roll and Write game. Honestly, it made me feel like I was playing a family weight board game, the kind of game that got me hooked on designer games. In general, I have found that Dark Imp’s playmat games are hidden gems.

I’ve been meaning to get the Rustling Leaves app for what seems like forever. And now that I have, it was totally worth it. Lots of interesting choices in each map. And, if you don’t play a lot of Roll and Writes, drawing boxes rather than symbols or Tetris shapes might not be a big change but if you plays tons of them, it is lol.

I have no idea what August will be like. July, with three games that I really liked, July was good.

My July PnP

During July, we drove across the country to our new home, waited for our stuff to catch up with us and have been unpacking ever since. 

So, not a month where Print and Play was a high priority, let alone a possibility. I didn’t even see the printer or the laminator or the paper cutter for most of the month.

However, I did include laminated card sheets for Palm Island in my travel stuff.  I wanted to make sure I could make something in July.

More than that, I wanted to make sure that I made something that meant something to me. I wanted to make something that I knew was a game I enjoy playing, which means making a game I’ve already played.

Actually, I’ve made at least three copies of Palm Island since I’ve worn copies out. Palm Island wasn’t my introduction to In Hand games (That was actually the nine-card version of I Am Lynx. Which made me track down Palm Island) but I do think it’s one of the best In Hand games and helped create a whole new template of them.

Truth to tell, I have other laminated card sheets packed away so I will be able to make more games for the next few months if I pace myself. By then, I’ll have a sense of what my new Print and Play habits will be.