Game Review: Path

By W. Eric Martin
June 14, 2009

Designers: Avraham Yoffe & Sagit Ben-Yehuda
Publisher: ToySmart
Players: 2
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30-90 minutes
Rules Language: English, German, French, Spanish and Hebrew
Links:

Version played: Comped production copy
Times played: Seven

I taught Liars’ Dice to someone recently, and a few turns into the game, when facing a difficult raise/call decision, he asked whether he could pass. While charmed by the sincere naivety with which he asked the question, the answer was still no. If he passed, then the next player could pass, and the player after that, and so on until we’re spinning around the table, passing on and on and on until we all pass out. No, you must weigh the options available to you and make a decision – that is, after all, what interesting games are all about: Players choosing one course of action over another in an effort to reach whatever goal has been established by the designer.

Games with few or no decisions, such as Candy Land or The Game of Life, are still games because they present a set of rules for interaction that players choose to follow; they’re simply uninteresting games. All you can do is follow the rules one, two, three until the game ends. You’re an automaton that flips cards, rolls a die and moves pieces. The only real decision – whether or not to play – happens outside of the game itself.

Players do have decisions to make each turn in Path, one of two games from ToySmart, a new Israeli publisher that debuted at Spiel 08 – yet due to the forced nature of game play, you still feel like an automaton going through the motions, which makes the game as laborious and unfun as Candy Land.

The goal of the game is simple and – as I once noted in the BGN Twitter feed – one that new publishers often invoke with first titles: Create a path. Each player takes turns laying tiles onto a 9x9 grid that bears starting tiles in the center, in the corners and in the center of all four edges. The tiles are split into quarters, with the quarters being colored orange or green, and the splitting lines being silver or black. The path itself is silver, and when you lay down tiles, you must both extend the path and match the colors of any tiles adjacent to the one being played. (The starting tiles have black quarters that match both green and orange.) Extend the path from your starting position to one of the tiles in the far corner, and you win.

While this set-up sounds ideal for a simple abstract game, one that could appeal to those learning such a game for the first time, Path is undone by a rule that requires players to play all of the tiles that they can possibly play on a turn, even if you must play tiles on the opponent’s path. Given that players have four tiles in hand and refill their hands to four tiles each turn, the potential for downtime is huge.

Imagine playing Carcassonne with a similar rule, for example, or almost any other tile game. You’d twist and turn and reposition tiles mentally, trying to figure out the optimal situation for this turn as well as what you might draw on subsequent turns, and while you’re doing this, the other players are weeding their gardens or cleaning the kitchen or doing whatever else comes to mind to fill the unpleasant downtime. Being forced to make a play is expected; being forced to make four plays is exhausting, and in practice the opponent would typically join the active player in figuring out all the possible options for playing tiles, checking each location on the board to see what could be played where, simply to keep the game from grinding to a halt. Path became a co-operative puzzle, rather than a game, and our mutual goal was to bring it to an end so that we could move on to something else.

A gamer in my area mentioned that he’s been skimming my reviews to check for this notice at the end of each, a sign for him that the game doesn’t measure up. Hi, Alex! If you, or any other reader, want to try Path for yourself, head to BGN’s Games for the Animals page to see whether the game is still available!

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I just now thought of it… when you offer them on the SPCA deal, does that mean these are games that have literally ‘gone to the dogs’? Posted by William Baldwin on Jun 15, 2009 at 12:51 PM | #

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