Kris Hall: Three Middle-Weight Games, Light on Theme

At this week’s meeting of the Appalachian Gamers, we played three games that I had never played before. They were Notre Dame, Rheinlander, and Maya. All three are decent games, each can be played in about 90 minutes, and I would not hesitate to play any of them again. But each was a little light on theme, and I’m not going to go out of my way to acquire any of them.

If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably heard of Notre Dame (from designer Stefan Feld), and there’s a good chance you have played it already, so I’m not going to describe the mechanics in detail. Suffice it to say that it is a game about playing cards to take actions that either earn players victory points, or earn players resources (cash and wooden cubes) that can be used to later get victory points. Complicating the game is the arrival each turn of plague-bearing rats. Players must also take actions to fend off the rat invasion or they risk forfeiting victory points and cubes that have already been placed on the board.

Notre Dame includes a choose-one-card-and-pass-the-rest mechanism that I enjoy. And there are multiple paths to victory which is always a good sign. And the rat mechanism adds some tension to a game that otherwise lacks it.

But the overall impression of the game is underwhelming. Part of the problem is that there is little interaction between the players. As Ted Cheatham said more than once: “This is multiplayer solitaire.”

Also, I am getting a little weary of these resource-churning games. Every action yields points, cash, cubes, or kills a rat. Or some combination of these. Haven’t we played a dozen different versions of this game already?

I got the same feeling from Maya. Maya (from designer Bernd Eisenstein) is a game about building Mayan pyramids. Players score victory points for having the most building cubes in the various levels of four pyramids. But first players must acquire cubes and special action tokens by blind bidding on resource spaces. Each player has an identical deck of cards, and each player takes turns placing these cards face down below the resource spaces. The player whose total combination of cards scores the highest gets the most cubes from the space as well as the special action token. Players who come in second or third only get cubes, and fewer of them.

Then players take turns placing cubes into the levels of the four pyramids. Most of the special action tokens are used in this phase to place or move tokens in some unique manner. The player who has the most cubes in a level gets the most points for that level. Other players score less.

Again, Maya is a perfectly decent game that doesn’t seem very special because I’ve played lots of these kind of games before. For me, the problem with both Notre Dame and Maya is the thinness of the theme. Notre Dame could have been about any city at any time, or even about some non-city experience (say, running a shopping mall). Maya could have been about almost any kind of building project at any time. Because of the wafer-thin theme in these games, it’s hard not to be aware of the unoriginal mechanics.

I found Reiner Knizia’s Rhienlander to be a little more appealing. It’s not that this game of knights and castles oozes theme, but at least I found it conceivable that he came up with the theme first, then invented the mechanics, and not the other way around. Other things that made the game attractive are the fast pace (play a card, place a knight, and draw card; on to the next player), and the high toy factor. Rheinlander has a high luck factor (the cards largely determine where you can place your knights), but I don’t mind that in a game that moves so fast. If a game can’t be deep, it should at least be quick.

Playing three of these lightly-themed middle-weight games in one night has me yearning for a heavy-weight game with lots of strategy and theme. Or maybe a wargame. But there are still some new games to try in the Appalachian Gamer library so I suppose that craving won’t be satisfied for a while.

Comments:

< Back Home