Game Review: Day & Night

By W. Eric Martin
April 27, 2009

Designer: Valentijn Eekels
Publisher: Mystics.nl
Players: 2
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Rules Language: English/Dutch
Links:

Version played: Comped production copy
Times played: Seven – three as Day and four as Night

Two-player abstract strategy games sometimes appear with a superficial theme that dissolves upon the slightest contact. At first glance, Day & Night – from new designer Valentijn Eekels and Dutch publisher Mystics.nl – would seem to be one of these games, as its black versus white conflict and a familiar gridded gameboard is married to a tale of battle between the personifications of Day and Night. Each force wants to assert its primacy in the world, a goal that translates in game terms to being the first to build two temples of nine squares each in the player’s color.

What differentiates Day & Night from the typical two-player abstract is that the two sides aren’t identical. Each side has a different deck of spell cards that represent its abilities and that consequently require different playing styles; if you try to play Day the same way that you play Night or vice versa, you’re sure to lose against someone who knows what he’s doing. What’s more, both sides provide players with much room for improvement as they learn both the deck they’re playing and the one they’re playing against.

Starting positions

Eekels uses the theme of “day vs. night” in smart ways from the set-up of the game onwards. Day and Night start on opposite ends of the gameboard, as separate in the game as they are in reality. On each turn, you have 12 hours to spend, first by casting any spells that you desire and are able to cast, then by moving on the gameboard. Movement on the gameboard is orthogonal, and you must spend three hours for each space that you move; movement has multiple benefits, the primary one being that you draw a spell for each space that you move.

The gameboard starts empty, and to transform these empty spaces into your own color, you need to cast spells. Each spell has a cost in hours and an effect, with some spells having requirements that must be met before they can be played. The spells might change the tile that you’re token is on, an adjacent tile, multiple adjacent tiles, any tile that’s less than the distance that separates the two player tokens, and so on. Spells also have other effects, such as moving your token or the opponent’s and drawing spells.

Day and Night each have several spells unique to their decks. Day can Mystify one or two tiles, which entails placing some number of special beads on the target tiles. At the start of each of Day’s turn, one of these beads is removed; after the final bead, the tile becomes a single temple tile and cannot be transformed for the remainder of the game. If White can transform a couple of tiles in the midst of a field of night, then Night has no hope of rejoining those tiles to form a temple. If Day can encompass these single temple tiles into a larger field of nine, then all of the tiles form one large temple – thereby winning the game for Day or else getting it halfway to the goal. If the gameboard is divided into groups of eight or smaller non-Day temple tiles, then Night automatically loses since it can no longer create temples.

Night’s special ability is Crystallize, which involves marking some number of spaces (depending on the spell) with a special bead. Until Night’s next turn, Day cannot pass through these spaces or transform them. If Day’s location tile is crystallized, then Day cannot move at all. While this ability seems weaker than Mystify – due to its one-turn duration versus a game-long transformation – Crystallize pulls its weight by either not allowing Day to mess with Night’s tiles or by locking Day into place, thereby forcing Day to lose entire turns. Crystallize throws a shadow on the board, so to speak, preventing Day from functioning as it wants to do.

Once you become familiar with the spell decks, you pay more attention to the requirements for the spells. Day, for example, has only one requirement for its special spells: Night must be located on a day tile. Night must be exposed, that is; it must stand revealed. As such, Night spends much of its time crystallizing its own location or doling out hours for movement so that it can hop from night tile to night tile and avoid being spotted in the light. Day has any number of tiles that can expose Night, however, and since it can’t intercept all of them, the Night player needs to build its tiles in such a way that they can’t be transformed all at once.

Unlike Day, Night has four different requirements that show up on its spells: (1) Night is on a night tile; (2) A day tile was turned to night during this turn; (3) Night has built one temple; and (4) Night has no other spells in hand. (This last requirement is on one spell that appears three times in the deck, a spell that costs zero hours and lets you draw five cards immediately. Since you must draw a card for each space that you move and you can’t cast certain spells due to their requirements, this card sometimes requires a lot of effort to be able to cast it. Players do have a hand size of five, so Night can manipulate his hand by moving, drawing spells, and dumping those he can’t cast.) The spells that require Night to have a temple in order to cast them are very powerful, which encourages Night to act quickly, almost recklessly, in order to get that first temple on the board. Day’s ability to Mystify tiles and divide up the playable space only further encourages such behavior.

Having Night’s location be a trigger for spells for both Day and Night keeps Night moving since staying on a day tile for multiple turns invites huge trouble and an overwhelming wave of day tiles. Movement for both players is spurred by spells that affect either a token’s location tile or the spaces around it. You need to keep moving to give yourself targets for these spells, and while Night wants to stay off of Day’s exact location – since Day can easily transform its own location – it does want to circle close to Day in order to use certain Crystallize spells to paralyze Day. Of course if Night stays on its own starting side of the board and builds a tide of night, Day better do something to intercept it to keep Night’s powerful spells in check.

While the English rules are generally clear, Day & Night‘s terminology takes a few games to sink in. For example, the gameboard starts empty, and each of these empty spaces on the board is called a “neutral tile” – despite no tile being on the board. Some spells specify that you can change only a neutral tile to a tile of your color (rather than any tile), and it’s easy to overlook that minor requirement.

Another stumbling block is that some spells refer to “turning over” tiles and others refer to “changing” tiles. You can change any tile, whether neutral, day or night, but you can turn over a tile only if it’s day or night. The “turn over” spells are cheaper since they tend to be less useful than spells that change tiles, but that discount doesn’t assuage your frustration when you realize that a plan doesn’t work due to having no tile in place to turn over.

Finally, some spells refer to tiles “bordering” a token’s location and others refer to those tiles “surrounding” a location. “Bordering” is limited to orthogonal connections, while “surrounding” includes both orthogonal and diagonal connections. As with the “turn over” and “change” teminology, the words chosen are precise and appropriate – only orthogonal tiles can be said to border a space, while it takes a loop to surround a space. Still, they’re close enough in meaning that you need to read closely and double-check the spells in hand frequently to make sure you’re not about to tip your hand to no efect.

The components are functional, if not up to the standards of German publishers. The gameboard is lined on only one-side, for example, and the cards are stiff and shuffle well in only one direction.

Gaming After Hours

Despite the so-so components and the too precious art, I’ve been won over by the game play of Day & Night. Except for one blowout game in which Day completed several small temples in the first few turns and rolled to victory, all of my plays have been tense. Day and Night tend to dance around one another on the board, shifting tiles back and forth while trying to connect one space with another. You start to read the opponent’s hand and get a sense of what spells he holds and where he plans to attack.

Since you typically need to move in order to draw new spells, and moving costs three hours per space, players constantly need to weigh the costs between moving and casting spells. Do you play down to no cards in hand, then spend a turn filling up – or do you want to move frequently to find the right cards for the current situation, thereby giving up the opportunity to cast less-than-perfect spells that might keep you alive? One opponent dismissed Crystallize as useless, but once I took on the role of Night, I would freeze him in place for multiple turns while he had zero or one cards in hand, effectively giving me several turns in a row as he could do nothing. Lesson learned, I think.

As with any card game, someone playing Day & Night might get lucky with the perfect cards for a particular situation, but the more I play, the more I discover opportunities for turning the odds in my favor, for playing the probabilities of what I might draw, and for properly valuing the cards that I hold and can play for the current game state. Kudos to Eekels for an excellent first design – here’s hoping he can make it available to a wider audience some day or night…

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