Tom Rosen

The collected writings of Tom Rosen, who will be posting new columns on Boardgame News on alternate Tuesdays. Here's what Tom has to say about himself:

Tom Rosen discovered modern board games like so many others, through Klaus Teuber's The Settlers of Catan. Unlike most people, however, he didn't discover the wider world of German board games for another five or so years, with Settlers being the only such game played during that time. Years later, he happened upon Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's Carcassonne, which proved to be his rabbit hole into the boardgaming hobby.

Shortly thereafter, Tom founded the Columbia Strategic Simulation Society at Columbia Law School in order to find and create fellow board gamers at law school. (He's proud to say that the club has exceeded all expectations by surviving his graduation and thriving up in Morningside Heights). He also began writing a variety of articles about this newfound hobby at his NYC Gamer website (where he also had the chance to practice another new hobby of writing HTML code from scratch in Notepad) and he quickly became active in the BoardGameGeek community, where he has served as an Administrator for the past few years. Tom currently lives in New York City, where he works as an attorney, dreams of some day visiting the board game capital of the world – Essen, Germany – and games with a variety of groups throughout the City, including the Neutral Ground Meetup and the Astoria Gaming Society.

Tom's favorite games run the gamut from El Grande and Nexus Ops to Crokinole and Bonaparte at Marengo, and he plans to share an equally wide variety of thoughts and reflections on the hobby of board gaming through his Boardgame News columns.

Tom Rosen: Non-German Three-Peat

A third consecutive year with a non-German designer winning my Game of the Year would have been unthinkable in the 1990s, but in this day and age it’s perhaps not even noteworthy.  The globalization of board game design over the past decade has been remarkable, and these days we have great designs coming from all corners of the world, and especially from all corners of Europe.  I’m not quite sure what has happened to the Knizias, Kramers, Dorns, Moons, and Teubers of the world in recent years, whose games still dominate my all-time Top 25 favorites, but I think it has something to do with the classic great designers getting stuck in a rut (see, e.g., Alcazar, Ra: The Dice Game, Samurai: The Card Game, and the ad nauseum additions to the Keltis, Ticket to Ride & Settlers of Catan families), while the new designers are the ones pushing the envelope and innovating.  The German dominance of my Game of the Year ended in 2006 with Mac Gerdts’ Imperial, and the non-Germanic three-peat started with Vlaada Chvatil’s Galaxy Trucker and Antoine Bauza’s Ghost Stories.  After sending the award out to the Czech Republic and then France, what country will it land in next?  For the answer to that, you’ll have to first read through a discussion of the nominees.

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Tom Rosen: J&J Con

The worst thing about recently moving from NYC to DC was leaving behind all of the friends with whom I played board games.  Sure I miss the restaurants, and the theater, and the convenience, among other things, but the people back in NYC top the list.  The isle of Manhattan does not have a particularly robust or organized board gaming community, as opposed to other cities across the country such as Denver, but there is a smattering of gamers who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting over the past few years.  I managed to convince two of them - John and James - to travel down the coast to visit DC on two different weekends in January.  The nice thing about moving from NYC to DC is not only that I now have room for a third bookcase of games, but also that I have a guest bedroom for hosting out-of-town visitors attending our own personal board gaming extravaganza.  This is the tale of the gaming marathons that ensued in our nation’s capital in the dead of winter - J&J Con.

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Tom Rosen: In With The New - Q3 & Q4

The number of new games being released each year is absurd, and my urge to try as many of them as possible is even more absurd.  I tried 77 new and new-to-me games in the second half of 2009 and am here to report on my findings.  The following is a brief discussion of each game organized alphabetically within the month in which I tried them.  These are meant to be a cross between mini-reviews and tangential commentary on topics that these games bring to mind.  This is a follow-up to my previous column on Q1 & Q2.  My hope is that these blurbs spur your interest in a game or two, regardless of whether or not its one I personally enjoyed.  My goal is to provide at least a kernel of information on each game to pique your interest so that you further investigate and try out a few new-to-you games, or if you’re looking to prune your wishlist then perhaps I can be of some assistance in that regard.  As far as how this crop of games turned out overall, I have to agree with Larry Levy when he says in his article on The Two Faces of Essen that the new games of 2009 have been unusually split between very good and very bad, with far fewer middling games than usual.  I’m sure reasonable people will differ over which side of the spectrum many of the new releases belong on, but below you’ll find my thoughts on the matter.

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Tom Rosen: In With The New - Q1 & Q2

Out with the old, in the with the new - it’s a way of life for many in the board game hobby.  I love to revisit old classics from time to time, but nothing beats exploring a new game, learning the rules and working your way through that first play as you see how the game comes together and the mechanics interact.  As I discussed last month, many games lose their appeal after you’ve played them a few times because the sense of adventure is gone and the spark of interest that unfamiliarity breeds is extinguished.  In that spirit of constantly trying new games and exploring their rule sets, I decided to mentally revisit all of the new and new-to-me games that I played during the first half of 2009 and share my thoughts on them with you.  I’ll save the games from the second half of 2009 for a follow-up column at the end of year.  These are meant to be a cross between mini-reviews and tangential commentary on topics that the games bring to mind.  Hopefully these will spur your interest in a game or two, whether it’s one that I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy personally, perhaps these comments will provide a kernel of information to pique your interest to further investigate and try out a few new-to-you games.

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Tom Rosen: Essen 2009 - GeekBuzz Meets Fairplay

Essen is dead; long live Essen.  The International Spieltage in Essen, Germany closed its doors on Sunday, and there are 359 days until those doors reopen, which should leave us just enough time to sort through the roughly 600 new board games that were released at the fair.  Despite the fact that I didn’t attend Essen, have only played a handful of the games discussed herein, and the fact that my last attempt at an Essen recap in 2006 was more than a bit off base (e.g., underestimated Imperial, overestimated Gheos, but at least I was right about Anasazi and Justinian, let alone Knizia’s Genesis); I am nevertheless going to try to breakdown some of the potentially most noteworthy releases at Essen 2009.  How do I propose to do this?  Scientifically of course, and also based on more than a little hearsay thanks to the tireless reporting efforts of attendees such as Kulkmann and Melissa.  Scientifically speaking, I am going to use a combination of the longstanding Fairplay ranking along with the brand-new BoardGameGeek GeekBuzz ranking.  As for hearsay, you’re more than welcome to check out my primary source material, such as Kulkmann’s G@mebox (by Frank Schulte-Kulkmann) and Obsessing about Everything (by Melissa R.).  Moreover, I suggest you check out the videos that the GeekDo crew broadcast live throughout the fair, such as interviews and game demos, and which have been conveniently arranged in this GeekList.  I particularly enjoyed the interviews with Matt Leacock, Jay Tummelson, Uwe Rosenberg, Reiner Knizia, and the game demoes by Martin Wallace, Mac Gerdts, and the Czech Games Edition crew.  If you’re looking for purely audio rather than video, then check out Garrett’s Games & Geekiness episode 184 recorded live at Essen.  Last but not least, I have tagged over 100 forum threads and GeekLists with the “essen09” tag on BoardGameGeek, so peruse those for a wealth of fantastic firsthand reports on the Essen experience.

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Tom Rosen: Getting Better All The Time

Many games lose their appeal after you’ve played them a few times, maybe most games.  You spend months looking forward to their release, perhaps you even pre-order the game and then check the FedEx or UPS tracking number constantly once it finally ships.  Then it arrives and you eagerly tear off the shrink wrap, punch out all of the pieces, bag them, and read the rules (if you haven’t already downloaded and read a PDF of the rules).  You bring the game to game night and convince the group to give it a try.  If you’re lucky it’s a blast and everyone enjoys it.  Then you play it again a couple weeks later, and maybe a third time within a month or two.  It’s still fun but it’s no longer shiny and new.  It’s still enjoyable, but not quite as exciting and the sense of adventure is gone.  Then again, this may not sound like a familiar pattern to you, but it certainly is to me.  That’s why I particularly treasure games that get better the more you play them.  These are games that may not even be very good the first time you play them due to the lack of familiarity with the system or possibilities, but if you give them a chance, they’ll repay you many times over.  It’s a small crop of games, and a disparate one as well.  They’re treasures in my collection because this is the type of game that never gathers dust as it ages.  The only thing they really have in common is that they all fell flat at first, and now their vintage is properly aged and coming into its own.

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Tom Rosen: Paranoia at its Finest

One game just barely missed the cut to be one of the Final Five in my Best in Show article last month highlighting my favorite games from 2008.  It’s a game where you play the people just as much as the game itself, if not more so.  It’s a game that you simply have to experience and go along for the ride, and it’s one of the most group-dependent games, meaning that your experience will depend in much greater part on the other people involved than in most other games.  The game is Battlestar Galactica, based on a television series that ran from 2004 to 2009, which in turn was based on an older television series from the 1970s.  The game was designed by Corey Konieczka and published by Fantasy Flight Games.  It’s nominally for 3 to 6 players, although the consensus seems to be that it’s better with more players, with some I’ve talked to preferring 5 players and others opting for 6 players.  I’ve tried it with 4, 5, and 6 players, not with 3 yet, and enjoyed it with all of these player counts.  There were advantages and disadvantages to each player count, which I’ll delve into a bit later.

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Tom Rosen: Best in Show

The annual board game award season is upon us.  The committee members for the Spiel des Jahres have just recently announced their nominees for game of the year from the previous year, and the committee members for the International Gamers Award will soon follow suit, among many others.  You’ll be inundated with recommendations from people whose opinions you’ve come to trust and rely upon.  But before all that gets too far under way, it’s time first for an award that’s neither brought to you by a committee nor by someone whose opinion you necessarily trust.  It’s my very own NYC Gamer award.  Established in 2007 with my Games of the Years article, it has a long and distinguished history of honoring the best game of the year.  Then again, the retroactive awards date all the way back to 1876, so in a way, it’s the longest running award in the industry (with a mere 83 year gap between Crokinole receiving the 1876 award and Diplomacy receiving the 1959 award).

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Tom Rosen: Project ZOCH

It all started innocently enough.  I’d played Bamboleo a few times before and I was learning to play Zoch Verlag’s earlier offering Bausack.  I’d gone from removing strangely shaped wooden blocks from a teetering structure to adding strangely shaped wooden blocks to an increasingly teetering structure.  It seemed like a natural fit to combine the two, removing a block from the Bamboleo board and then adding that same block to your Bausack tower.  I had no idea how far the concept could go.  Soon I was suggesting that almost any game could be combined with Bamboleo.  Why not have to remove any and all of the components that you want to use from the Bamboleo platter before getting to use them in another game?  Things may have gotten a little out of hand when I started contemplating new rules for Antiquity or Roads & Boats, requiring players to carefully remove a granary or raft factory from the Bamboleo platter before constructing their desired buildings.  However, up to a point, I still think combining games with Bamboleo is potentially a good idea.  Thus was born Project ZOCH.

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Tom Rosen: Diplomatic Smörgåsbord

Allan B. Calhamer is a genius.  Move, support, hold, and convoy.  It’s an amazingly simple system that underlies an incredibly complex game of psychological warfare.  It’s also an admirably adaptable system that has been modified to fit over a thousand variants of the original.  The “game” is Diplomacy.  It’s infamous as the game that’s been “Destroying Friendships since 1959.” It’s certainly not for the faint of heart as it’s a brutal reenactment of pre-World War I political realism where alliances are merely a means to an end and allies are tools to be used and discarded.  Diplomacy is the quintessential negotiation game where everything rides on your ability to make others see things your way and nothing can be accomplished without convincing your neighbors that you’re not a threat.  It’s really the perfect board game, as long as your friendships are solid enough to withstand the bald-faced lies and deceitful betrayal that are an inherent part of the experience.

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Tom Rosen: Six is a Crowd

Five is perfect, six is a crowd.  You’ve got a great night planned with El Grande, Wallenstein, and Santiago on tap, but then that dreaded sixth person shows up and your plans are dashed.  What’s a game group organizer to do?  Six is the dreaded number of people.  There are countless threads in the forums on BoardGameGeek inquiring desperately for recommendations of board games that work well with six players.  People inevitably respond with their best efforts, with games that work with six, with games that are okay with six.  That’s a disservice to the people and to the games.  The only real answer when you have six people is to play two three-player games.

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Tom Rosen: Joe and Bob

I have two acquaintances at work, let us call them “Joe” and “Bob,” who adamantly refuse to learn any modern board games.  Both Joe and Bob enjoy and somewhat frequently play Chess, Scrabble, and Poker.  They’re intelligent and clearly enjoy board games.  Joe has also expressed nostalgic interest in Risk.  They’re an interesting case study in the spread of modern board games because I’ve tried everything I could possibly think of to interest them in trying a modern board game and, being the lawyers that they are, they have an abundance of counter arguments to explain and justify their disinterest.  What’s particularly confounding is that I had a fairly good success rate at converting people to the board gaming hobby in law school, where I founded a student organization.  People came to the club expecting to play Monopoly and Risk, and left intent on purchasing Settlers of Catan among others.  Not so with Joe and Bob, who are convinced and adamant in their opposition to learning new games.  I find this an interesting subject for discussion because there are many of us in the hobby who hope for the day when modern board games replace the tired old classics in every family’s cupboards.  We, or maybe just me, truly believe that Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne should replace Monopoly, Risk, and Life in every home across the country.  We see the slowly growing widespread popularity of Settlers as a testament to the inevitable superiority of modern board games.  Maybe we’re deluding ourselves…

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Tom Rosen: Round Number Gaming

Gamers have an obsession with round numbers for some inexplicable reason.  Every year around this time we flock to compile our “Five & Dime” lists.  These are lists of games that we played at least 5 times in the previous year and at least 10 times in the previous year.  Being the logical fellow that I am, and given the exceedingly large number of times that I play some games, I decided to add Quarters (games played at least 25 times) to the list along with Nickels and Dimes.  I’ve been keeping track of my games played since June 28, 2005.  So that means I now have three complete years of statistics to pore over.  On June 28, 2008, I celebrated three years of keeping track of my games played by publishing my Quantifying Your Fun article.  But now I have three complete calendar years, so unlike last year when I could only compare the partial year of 2005 and 2006 with the plays from 2007 in my Nickels & Dimes & Quarters, Oh My! article, this year I can compare three full years of gaming.  I’ve decided to celebrate the occasion with a large table of results, and a few bullet point lists to boot.

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Tom Rosen: It Takes Two

Four-player games are a dime a dozen, but four-player games that allow players to compete as 2 two-person teams are diamonds in the rough.  An exceedingly small percentage of four-player games let the players divide themselves into two teams to square off against each other with a partner at their side (figuratively of course, as the partner is usually sitting across from you).  What’s so special about these team games besides their obvious rarity?  It’s hard to pin down precisely, but working with a partner adds an extra layer to the decision-making process in a game.  Not a minor wrinkle, but rather a major shift.  It forces you to reformulate your entire approach so that you’re thinking in terms of “we” and “us” rather than just “I” and “me.” This is all on top of the more traditional mechanics of the game, whether those involve resource management, spatial positioning, trick taking, dexterity, hand management, etc.

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Tom Rosen: November Madness - Part 2

November was so chock full of gaming that discussing the 158 games that I played last month couldn’t possibly fit into a single article.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote Part 1 of this series where you’ll find my ranking of the 30 new releases I’ve played, from my favorite 2008 games such as Ghost Stories, Planet Steam, and Chicago Express down to my least favorite new games such as Boss Kito, Stone Age, and Street Paintball.  In addition, since I’m breaking down the games played into topical categories rather than going through them chronologically or alphabetically, Part 1 covered all of the cooperative games and all of the racing games.  I’ll try to fit the rest of November Madness into this Part 2 and save you from drawing it out into a trilogy.  There are a few more categories to go though, so this might mean trying to be concise, which has never been my forte.

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Tom Rosen: November Madness - Part 1

The “big dance” is still four months away, but my personal gaming madness was definitely November.  I played more board games in November than in any previous month, many of them new releases thanks to the fabulous BGG.CON in Dallas, so I thought it might be worthwhile to share my initial impressions to help you formulate your post-Essen shopping lists.  Hopefully I can help you winnow your shopping list down a bit if it has grown out of hand, but also help you spot a potential gem or two to throw on the pile that you might have previously overlooked.

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Tom Rosen: Varsity Geek

Athletics and geeks don’t usually mix, but when it comes to board games anything is possible. There are board games about every corner of the globe and every historical time period, so why not a few about sporting events? Board games based on sports are an odd breed because they’re an exercise of the mind that simulates an exercise of the body. You can partake from the comfort of your living room while hardly moving a muscle.

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Tom Rosen: The Bulls & Bears of Gaming

With the real stock market in shambles, perhaps it’s time to play stock market board games instead of gambling with the real thing. We’ve all seen our portfolios take a tumble recently, but there are a number of board games out there that will allow you to amass a fortune, growing your net worth to dizzying heights… if you time these faux markets right and manage to adhere to that age old adage – buy low and sell high.

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Tom Rosen: Dune – The Many Faces of the Desert Planet

I had the opportunity to play the board game Dune three times over the course of a month with different groups of people and was struck by how remarkably different all three games were. Each game of something like Tigris & Euphrates, El Grande, or Age of Steam is different – otherwise I wouldn’t keep playing them – but they tend to follow the same general flow and pattern as the previous game, with a clear beginning build-up, middle expansion, and end-game final push.

Dune, on the other hand, did not conform to any of my board game expectations, even when entering my third game. This is a very good thing for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Dune holds a unique position in my collection, not only because it’s the only great game for six players that I’ve discovered, but also because it’s so different from anything else I own. Second, Dune isn’t just different from the other games I own, but also different from itself, with each game only vaguely resembling the previous games. This is great for the obvious reason of increasing the game’s replayability over the years as long as I can continue to find five other people with four hours to spare.

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Tom Rosen: Patience Isn’t Always a Virtue

In gaming, as elsewhere in life, patience is normally a virtue. You don’t want to commit those meeples until you draw the right tile in Carcassonne. You want to save cards in the Commands & Colors series until they’ll be most effective. You have to time the playing of Bonus cards in Princes of Florence just right to maximize the value of your work.

In some games, however, patience doesn’t pay. In these games you’re given one – and only one – chance to use an ability that will give you the opportunity to decimate opponents, but if you use it too early, you might not maximize its potential. The often overlooked flip side of this equation is that if you wait too long, then you won’t get to use these abilities at all!

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Tom Rosen: Survival Games

From trains to farming to a cathedral in Paris, it doesn’t matter what a game’s setting might be if I have the opportunity to fight the game system itself, in addition to my fellow players. While a game isn’t traditionally thought of as an opponent, a handful of titles let you struggle against the gears of the game just as much, if not more, than you struggle against plain ol’ human opponents.

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