Dale Yu: Thoughts on some recent games

I figured this week would be a good chance to take a look back at some of the games that I’ve played recently.  I’ve had a chance to play a number of games that were new to me (some good and some bad), and I really doubt I’ll ever get around to doing a full review of any of these, so I thought that I’d go ahead and share my thoughts on these games now. 

Android (Fantasy Flight)

Android was a highly anticipated game for me.  It was purported to be a deduction game with a cyberpunk theme – and both portions of that description really appealed to me.  The official FFG description is: “Android is a board game of murder and conspiracy set in a dystopian future. Detectives travel between the city of New Angeles and moon colony Heinlein chasing down leads, calling in favors, and uncovering the sinister conspiracy beneath it all. The detectives must balance their pursuit of the murderer against their personal lives and their inner demons. Android’s innovative mechanics ensure that no two detectives play alike. Will you play as Louis Blaine, the crooked cop tormented by guilt and loss? Or will you take the role of Caprice Nisei, the psychic clone who struggles to retain her sanity while proving that she’s as human as anyone else? Whoever you choose to play, you’ve got just two weeks to solve the murder, uncover the conspiracy, and face your personal demons.”

The game, like most other FFG releases, is absolutely beautiful.  The board has fantastic graphics and the cards and other components are of the high quality that you would expect from Fantasy Flight.  As the description says, each player in the game takes on the role of one of five detectives.  Each of these detectives has different special abilities which will cause the player to play the game differently based on which detective he is that game.  Additionally, each detective has an individual set of life story cards which further make each one play differently by giving different goals as well as individualized rewards and penalties based on how the game is going.

At the heart of each game is a “crime” – though in terms of gameplay, it doesn’t really matter what it is.  There are different suspects in the game, and at the end of the game, one of them will be found guilty of the crime.  Players will score victory points based on things they do during the investigation, based on their life story cards, and based on a final bonus determined by cards (randomly dealt to them at the beginning of the game) which predict that certain suspects will be innocent or guilty.

Though I am severely simplifying gameplay, essentially you move your detective around the board trying to track down clues or leads or you play cards.  Let me first talk about the cards – there are two different decks of cards for each detective, a “light” deck which provide good things for the character and a “dark” deck which has cards that are played by your opponents on you that will make your life suck.  The dark cards can be quite punishing and give the game a very large “take that” feel.  There is also a very random feel to the dark cards as their effects are quite variable as it the timing of when they get played against you.  The cards were one of the biggest negatives about the game for me as they were a huge randomizer in an already complex game.

The other big part of the game are the clues - when you get one, it usually allows you to place evidence (either negative or positive) on the different suspects.  At the end of the game, you add up all the plusses and negatives for each suspect, and the one who has the highest positive score is the guilty party.  Add up your bonus points and see which player won the game.  So what’s wrong with that?  Not much, unless you were looking for a deduction game.  In the end, there’s not really much deduction going on here – merely picking up chits and giving them to suspects.  In fact, there was no feeling of discovery or investigation at all in our game. 

The game is humongously complex.  So complex that it needs a 48-page rulebook.  A rule book so convoluted that we couldn’t find answers to some of our rules questions as they arose.  A rule book that is more confusing because they don’t even include an index or meaningful table of contents.  A rulebook which took us 75 minutes to read through together to play the game.  Ugh.  As a further “ugh”, the game hits upon one of my big pet peeves which is that the designers felt the need to give each player “Strategy Guides” on how to correctly play each detective.  When this happens, I generally get turned off by the game because either 1) the designer thinks I’m too dumb to get the game OR 2) the game is felt to be too complex to be picked up by regular people.  In either event, this is usually a sure sign that it won’t be a game that I want to try.

Normally, I’d be able to tolerate a random pick up chits game where each turn can be interrupted by random and punishing event cards played upon me by my opponents, but I could barely make it to the end of Android.  Why?  Well, mostly because the game took 3.5 hours to play (in addition to the 75 minutes it took to read the rules and set up the game)!  If the game lasted about 30-40 minutes (which is about as much fun as the game really provides), it would be OK… but to stretch it out to 4 hours+ is pure torture.  As I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t the deduction game that I thought it would be, and the only cyberpunk feel I got from the game was thinking about the Neal Stephenson novel that I had recently read (which I finished in about the same amount of time it took to finish our one game of Android)

I had a chance to play it once, and I must say that I’m frankly underwhelmed and disappointed by it.  So much so, that I’m fairly sure that I don’t want to play it again.  There are plenty of nice mechanics that are interwoven in the game (not all of which I could mention here), and I have certainly run across a few people who simply love the game and the theme - but as far as I’m concerned, the book is closed on Android after play #1.

Toboggans of Doom (Bucephalus)

Toboggans of Doom made it to the table in a recent evening of Bucephalus Games.  It is advertised as a beer-and-pretzel style game where two players race to the bottom of a mountain.  The first person to make it all the way to the end wins.  If no one can make it after three tries, the player with the most victory points wins.

Toboggans of Doom uses dice.  A lot of dice.  The dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20 for each player) are also used in an interesting manner to help the player choose upgrades to their toboggans which will give them special abilities to help them overcome the obstacles.

At the beginning of each of the three rounds in the game, players roll all their dice.  They then choose from amongst 12 different upgrade cards to add to their sled.  Some of these can be “purchased” by using dice whose faces add up to the exact cost on the card.  Other cards can be purchased by simply sacrificing a die of a required type – regardless of the number on the face.  Finally, to end each round, the player may use all of his remaining dice to choose any upgrade still available.  Once upgrades have been purchased, the game moves into the racing phase.

The race course is a set of obstacle cards, 3 columns of 11 cards each.  Only the topmost card of each column is face up at the start of the game.  All of the other obstacles will be flipped up and discovered as soon as one of the players is able to get past the preceeding obstacle.  There are different types of obstacles which require you to go over, go thru or go around them.  The obstacles all have different values, some of which are fixed and some of which are generated by dice rolling.  Depending on the type of obstacle, the racing player will have to use an upgrade to help him generate a number which is more than (going over), less than (going around), or between a set of numbers (going thru).  If at any point during the run down the mountain, a player is unable to get through an obstacle successfully, he crashes out and his turn is over.  (He will score one point for every new card flipped over during the run).

After both players have had a chance to go down the mountain, the game goes back into another upgrade buying phase to start the next round.  The game goes on for three rounds or until one player is able to get all the way down the mountain.

Admittedly, there isn’t much to the game, but what would you expect for something advertised as a “beer and pretzels” game?  It’s actually a lot of fun to play and a good way to spend half an hour.  The game can be influenced a great deal by luck – but it’s a dice game!  The rules are quite easy to teach, and the game is constantly engaging as you are either looking at the market for upgrades to buy or you’re busy racing.  As the opponent has to roll all the dice for the obstacles the other player faces, there’s always something to do in Toboggans of Doom.

The amount of strategy and tactics in the game is admittedly light, but you will have to make some important decisions along the way when choosing which upgrades you need to buy and choosing which upgrades to use in the racing phase to give you the dice that you want to roll against a particular obstacle.

The biggest downside of the game (for me) is that it plays strictly 2 players.  However, the rules say that you can expand the game to more players if you have a set of dice for the additional players.  I haven’t really looked into how to convert the game into a three or four player game, but it might be something worth looking into in the near future.  Otherwise, it’s a nice addition to the game shelf when you’re looking for a quick, light 2-player game. 

And as a final note, one of the designers is a certain Joe Huber.  But, it’s not the “Ice Cream/Scream Machine” Joe Huber.  It’s a different one.  I was definitely confused at first when I played the game because I thought to myself: “This isn’t the kind of game that I thought (Scream Machine) Joe would design!”

Rorschach (Bucephalus)

Rorschach is a new party game produced by Bucephalus named after Hermann Rorschach, who created the Rorschach inkblot test in 1921.  The game is unsurprisingly based on interpretations of inkblot-like graphics!

The game is simple to explain.  In each round, a number of inkblot cards (taken from the deck of 100 different inkblot cards) and the blots are numbered.  Then, one player takes the top card from the question deck and reads it aloud.  The questions are usually along the lines of “Which would you cuddle with?”, “Which would you most likely eat?”, or “Which looks the most unorganized?”.  Players then use a die to secretly choose which inkblot they think best answers the question.  After all have chosen, the answers are revealed.  Players receive a chip in the color of every other player that matched their answer.  Additionally, it’s possible to earn a chip of your own color if you’re the only person to choose a particular answer.  The game continues onward until one player has chips in all the colors of the players.

In principle, it sounds like this would be fun.  Unfortunately, the game often only lasts two or three rounds as the rules are written.  For an example, sometimes you might get a question which has an “obvious” answer amongst the avbailable inkblots.  If this happens, and everyone chooses this answer, everyone will get a chip of all colors but their own.  Then, in the next round, the game devolves into a guessing game of trying to go where no one else will go in order to get a chip of your own color.  And then it’s over.

We tried it twice and found that it ended too quickly each time.  I think some of it may be that we tried it with only three players.  I’d like to try it with the maximum number of 8 sometime to see if it still breaks down.  I also suppose that we could have futzed with it to try to make up a better game with the great components, but I have yet to be motivated to do that (for just about any game, not just Rorshach). 

Pass the Pigs (Winning Moves)

OK, so this game isn’t exactly new to me.  But my son did get a copy of the newest version of the game for Christmas from his godfather.  For the most part, this version of the game is the classic game that you remember – players “roll” two plastic pigs as dice and then score points based on the orientation of the dice.  The reason I bring the game up now is that the new version has essentially ruined the fun for me.  In the Pass the Pigs of my childhood, there was a condition called “Makin’ Bacon”.  This term has been expunged from the record and is now called an Oinker.  FWIW, this has sapped all the fun out of the game.

One more thing about the game before I leave it behind (possibly forever)… My crack research staff has found indisputable statistical data (found on the exemplary research site known as Wikipedia) which might revolutionize my Pass the Pigs play.  Someone has actually tried to calculate data on the different orientations of the pigs… Below is pasted text from the Wikipedia article:

The approximate relative frequencies of the various positions (for a single pig) are:
Side (no dot) - 6,139/17,581 = 34.9%
Side (dot) ---- 5,372/17,581 = 30.6%
Razorback ---- 3,852/17,581 = 21.9%
Trotter ---------- 1,550/17,581 = 8.8%
Snouter --------- 546/17,581 = 3.1%
Leaning Jowler - 122/17,581 = 0.69%

Sample size: 17,581 (Note: results vary widely.)

The approximate relative frequencies for 2-pig combinations (ignoring Piggyback) are:
Sider ---------------------- 21.5%
Razorback --------------- 28.7%
Trotter -------------------- 11.5%
Snouter -------------------- 4.07%
Leaning Jowler ----------- 0.909%
Double Razorback ------- 4.8%
Double Trotter ------------ 0.78%
Double Snouter ---------- 0.096%
Double Leaning Jowler - 0.0048%
Pig Out ------------------ 21.3%
Mixed Combo ----------- 6.2%
Oinker-------------------- 0.38%

Yes, it’s true.  Some people have too much free time.  Some of us end up writing columns for boardgamenews.com.  Some of us roll two plastic pigs over 17,000 times for statistical reasons.

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

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