Larry Levy:  An Early Thanksgiving

Four of us got together the week before Turkey Day and played some terrific boardgames.  It was one of the best sessions I’ve had in a long time and given the time of the year, I thought I’d share it with you.

Agricola
It seems to happen every year, or maybe even several times a year.  A game bursts out of nowhere, from an unexpected source, and is suddenly being hailed by the lucky few who have gotten an early glimpse as the Next Great Thing.  Caylus, Twilight Struggle, Age of Empires III, and Through the Ages all fit the pattern and all debuted in the past couple of years.

And now we have Agricola.  A relatively unheralded design from tiny publisher Lookout Games, it finished second in the Fairplay poll at Essen and has garnered other-worldly ratings since the fair.  People were literally begging for an English translation and the game swept to 750 preorders for Z-Man in an insanely short time.  It seems we have another shooting star in the gaming world.

Unlike the other games I mentioned above, Agricola features a well known designer (well, AoE’s designer did have a reputation, but based on Drover’s earlier work, it was more of a negative factor to many).  Uwe Rosenberg is best known for Bohnanza, but he’s also created such unique and innovative games as Schnäppchen-Jagd, Klunker, Mamma Mia, Babel, and Bali.  However, since 2001, most of his output has been lighter fare, party games, and Bohnanza expansions.  During his peak, I considered him one of the best of the German designers and unparalleled in his ability to think and design outside the box.  One of the things that first attracted me to the game was a desire to see if Rosenberg could again design a great meaty game.

Before all this furor began, a friend who was going to Essen said he would pick up some games for the group, so I took advantage of this most generous offer and asked him to grab a copy for me.  I figured it might take several years (if ever) for this game to be available through the Stateside online stores, so this seemed like my best chance to own it.  Of course, I had no idea what I was going to do with a text heavy game containing 360 cards!  My answer came soon enough after the rave reviews started pouring in:  paste it up, son!  About a dozen hours of work later (and thanks to the enormous translation effort provided by the saintly Melissa Rogerson), I had a version ready for the group to play.

Agricola belongs to a family of games that utilize what is usually called the Caylus action selection mechanism:  players take one action a turn, with a limited number of tokens, and there is a limit to how many times each action can be taken a turn (most often, it’s one, so when you take an action, you block everyone else).  Caylus was indeed the first really popular game to use this procedure, but it goes back at least eight years, to Splotter’s Bus and Martin Wallace’s Way Out West.  Richard Breese also used it in several of his “Key” games.  However, after Caylus appeared, games of this sort started appearing much more frequently, including such notable designs as Pillars, Age of Empires, and Leonardo da Vinci.  Just like area majority games are very different under the skin, what distinguishes these designs are the other details of play.  So what really differentiates Caylus is that it’s the players who determine how the different actions come out and that the player who placed the action gets a bonus if another player chooses it.  With Agricola, it’s that the order actions appear is semi-predictable and that the number of actions players can take can grow significantly over the course of the game.

And then there’s the cards.  Lookout made the unusual, but very wise decision to include what was to be the first two expansions with the original game.  Consequently, it ships with two decks which together contain over 300 cards!  And in each game, every player sees only 14 of them!  The cards go a long way toward determining how you approach each game and the vast number you are provided with gives the game an insane amount of replayability.

There are 10-16 action spaces available at the start of the game (the number and kinds are tuned to the different number of players).  The turn structure is simple.  It begins with a new action card being revealed.  Then some resources are placed on some of the spaces, where they can accumulate (another small innovation).  Then, players claim the actions one at a time.  The tokens used to claim them represent the members of the farmers’ families.  Naturally, you can have kids and they start claiming actions the very next turn (you start ‘em young on the farm).

Every player has her own 3x5 square display representing the land she can develop.  Most of the actions either allow you to gain resources or develop your land spaces in one of three ways.  First, you can expand and renovate your hut.  You begin with a two-room wooden hut, just enough for the farmer and his wife.  Extra rooms take up spaces and can lead to points, but their real reason is to provide room for younguns.  Naturally, blessed arrivals have their own action space.

You can also grow crops.  This requires you plow a land space, then sow it with either grain or vegetables (obtainable through action spaces).  Additional crops of the same sort are placed on the plowed space, simulating crop growth.  These crops can be added to your supply one at a time during a harvest, which happens six times over the course of the 14 turn game.  Like so many mechanisms in the game, this one uses simple rules to strongly reflect actual aspects of farming.

The third way to use your land is to devote it to livestock.  There are sheep, boar, and cattle in the game, but first you need to fence off areas of your board to house them.  Every harvest, a new baby animal comes into the world if you have at least two creatures of the same type.  Awww…

There are two principal goals for each player.  There’s a reasonably complex (but easily understood) scoring system at the end of the game, in which points are awarded for achieving different levels of things (like how much grain, sheep, and family members you have, or how many plowed fields or fenced pastures you’ve created).  There’s a limit of how many points can be scored in each area, so what’s really rewarded is balance across all the areas.  Making these targets tougher to reach is the sad reality that your family’s gotta eat!  Every harvest, you must provide food for each of them or suffer a very stiff penalty (quick tip:  don’t fall short of food!).  Harvested crops and animals can naturally satisfy their hunger, but only if you’ve spent resources to purchase Improvements like fireplaces or ovens.  This not only takes actions and resources, but reduces the quantity of crops and livestock that you’d like to save to score points with.  The constant need to feed your family while still growing your engine and storing enough to score well provides the tension that really makes the game work.

The cards you are dealt at the start of the game each give you helpful advantages when played.  However, getting them on the table takes actions and often precious resources.  More than one player has scored poorly because he fell in love with the combos in his hand and didn’t devote enough energy to the actions on the board he needed to worry about.  Because some hands seem to work together better than others, a few have suggested drafting variants and the like.  But I think the rules provided work just fine and give the players a wonderful challenge, as each game you have figure out how to best use the collection of cards you’ve been dealt.  Because of these cards, each game of Agricola truly is different.

Agricola is an efficiency game.  Not only do you need to take actions in the correct order (all the while cursing at the opponents who snatch the best ones just before your turn arrives), but you also need to utilize individual actions efficiently.  Rosenberg has included complex actions, like “add a family member and then play an Improvement card”.  These are carefully crafted to give the players difficult choices and reward proper planning.  The nature of these actions, as well as the scoring, means this is not an elegant game.  But all the complications work wonderfully well.

So is this the greatest thing since Baked Bread?  Well, I’m not in the habit of handing out 10s after a few plays, so you’ll have to forgive me if I can’t be found at the top of the ratings list on the Geek.  But it’s awfully good.  So far I’ve played eight times:  two family games (no cards), both with three, two full games (with three and four players), and four solo games.  I’ve loved all of them.  Turns move quickly, although by the end, with four or five actions per player, things naturally slow down a bit.  Still, the publisher’s estimate of 30 minutes per player seems to be accurate, so this isn’t a fast game.  But it doesn’t drag at all and you’re constantly fretting over how to implement your plan and above all, how to feed those damn kids!  Direct interaction is limited (although some of the cards can be pretty nasty), but you absolutely need to check on what your opponents are doing, both to project which actions they’ll take and to occasionally play a little defense.  Like another “sandbox” game, Through the Ages, Rosenberg seems to have gotten the balance just right.

The solo game was a revelation and a huge surprise.  You have to understand, I never play solo boardgames—it’s gotta be 20 years since I tried anything more involved than Patience or Solitaire Dice.  But this seemed intriguing, so I gave it a shot.  It’s wonderful!  There are only a few rule changes and your only goal is to improve your score.  But with no opponents, you can now study the cards you are dealt and try to squeeze every last drop out of the opportunities you have.  And they provide such variety that each game features entirely different strategies.  This is an enormous bonus and I actually raised my rating because I enjoyed the solo game so much.

The components are top notch, no mean feat considering how much they’ve crammed into the box (it weighs a good five pounds!).  In addition to 360 cards, there’s a ton of wood, a bunch of cardboard tokens, and no fewer than nine boards.  There’s also some very helpful player aids for each participant (well, they were helpful after I pasted translations on them).  Newcomer Klemens Franz undertook the herculean effort of illustrating all the cards and they inject character and some subtle humor into the design.  This is not an inexpensive game, but I don’t think anyone will feel cheated when they see how much they get for their money.

Right now, Agricola is in strong contention for my Game of the Year.  Uwe Rosenberg has made a triumphant return to gamer’s games and it’s been well worth the wait.  The play is engrossing and the variety is perhaps the best of any game ever created.  Just as good, all the actions are strongly tied to the farming theme, which makes them both easy to remember and a pleasure to perform.  Whether you’re a country boy or a city slicker, I suspect you’ll enjoy your time down on the farm when you play Agricola.

Brass
I’m a big fan of Martin Wallace.  He is a master of integrating eurogame inspired mechanics into games with interesting historical themes.  The length of some of his most recent games, though, have made it hard to get them to the table.  Moreover, he tends to employ a little more luck in his combat resolutions than I usually like.

So when I heard about Brass, I was very interested.  Its listed duration is two hours, relatively snappy by Martin’s standards.  And it’s a pure economic game, his first since the blessed Age of Steam, with nary a battle in sight.  I had been wanting to try this out for a while, and our pre-Thanksgiving bash was our first chance to play the game.

The title, by the way, comes from a British saying, “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”.  If you’re anything like me, that leaves you just as clueless as before.  Friends on the other side of the pond have provided me with this English to English translation:  there’s money to be made in activities where you have to get dirty.  So Brass, in this instance, means “wealth”.

First, let me get the issue of the rules out of the way.  Despite what you may have heard, they are not poorly written.  What I don’t care for is their organization:  the first section goes over the basics of the game and then the appendix describes the details item by item.  This is fine if you only use rules to check on answers that pop up during play.  But I want to be able to learn a game from the rules and I felt the organization made this a more difficult job (to be fair, not all agree with this).  However, it’s by no means impossible to learn the game like this; it just requires some patience and careful reading.  So don’t be dissuaded from picking up this great game because you’re afraid the rules will be unintelligible.

The setting for Brass is the early days of the Industrial Revolution in Britain’s Lancashire County.  The players are entrepreneurs who seek to utilize this new technology to make their fortune in the cotton industry.  As in many of Wallace’s games, what is important is the income stream.  Income (and victory points) are earned by making sure the industries the players construct (cotton mills, ports, coal mines, iron works, and shipyards) are used.  Before I explain how this is done, let’s look at the components.

The board shows the area covered by Lancashire, which includes about two dozen cities.  Each city contains from one to four spaces where industry counters can be placed.  Each of these spaces is dedicated to one (or occasionally two) of the five industry types.  The board also includes two types of potential transportation links between the cities:  canals and railroads.

Each player begins with his own supply of industry counters.  Each counter has a tech level.  The players divide their counters into separate stacks for each industry type, in order of tech level (with the lowest, least developed counters being on top).

There is also a deck of cards.  Cards either show one of the cities or one of the technology types.  Players begin the game with eight cards.

Each player on her turn will perform two actions.  These include building an industry, building a transportation link, selling cotton, development, and taking a loan.  The same action can be taken twice in a turn.  A card must be discarded to perform the action, but the details of the card only matter when industries are built.  The cards are replenished at the end of the round; when the deck runs out, cards are played until the players’ hands are depleted.  At this point, the period ends.  The game consists of two periods:  the Canal period and the Rail period.  There are 8-10 rounds in each period, depending on the number of players.

Industry counters can be built in a city that has an empty space devoted to that type of industry.  The player then can either play a card which shows that city, or one which shows the industry type.  In the latter case, though, the city must be connected with his transportation links to another city where he has an industry counter.  Each counter has a cost which must be paid.  There are some other requirements to building which I’ll get to in a bit.

Transportation links (canals in the Canal period or rails in the Rail period) must either directly connect to one of your industry counters or another one of your links.  The card played has no bearing on where you build your link.

Some of the industry counters or links require the expenditure of a coal or iron cube.  These are conveniently provided by the coal mines and iron works that players can build.  Each of these states how many cubes should be placed on the counter when it is built.  To use a coal cube, a connection must be made between the newly built item and the coal mine.  Anyone’s links can be used for this connection, but the closest mine with cubes must be chosen.  There is no cost for using these cubes, but the mine owner still benefits, as we shall soon see.  Iron cubes are used in the same way, except that there is no need to establish a connection; it is assumed that the established transportation network is sufficient to handle these deliveries.

None of these industry counters is worth anything when it is built.  As I stated earlier, it’s necessary to use them to gain a benefit from them.  The way this happens depends upon the type of industry.  Cotton mills and ports get used via the Sell Cotton action.  If one of your unused mills is connected (using anyone’s links) to an unused port (either yours or an opponent’s), you can choose this action to flip both the mill and the port counter.  You literally turn over both counters, revealing an income increase and a VP value for each.  The income increase is immediately applied for the owning player on the game’s Income track; victory points aren’t scored until the end of the period.  These counters are now considered used and are no longer eligible for participation in another Sell Cotton action.

Coal mines and iron works are flipped when all of their cubes are used up.  This again adds to the owning player’s income and eventually, to her VP total.

Shipyards don’t have to be used; they’re flipped when they’re built.  There’s only a few spots where they can be built, though, and they’re hard to get to; in addition, the counters are very expensive.  However, they have the highest VP values in the game.

The principal goal of the game is to get as many of your counters flipped as possible.  This entails maintaining a good income stream, getting into key areas, and establishing a healthy transportation network.  Mastering all of these concepts is a real challenge.

Another of the player actions, and a very important one, is development.  Taking this action allows you to discard one or two industry counters from your stacks.  This is important for a number of reasons.  Some of these can only be built during the Canal period, so if you’re in the Rail period and these haven’t been built, the only way to get to the ones you can build is through development.  Another reason has to do with the transition between the two periods.  After the Canal period is scored, all the links and all the Level 1 industries that were built are put out of the game.  This is somewhat similar to the start of the second age in Amun-Re.  The only things that will remain at the beginning of the Rail period are industries of Level 2 or higher.  The way the stacks are laid out, it takes a real effort to get these built that early.  Development can definitely be useful here.  This effort can be quite worthwhile, as these leftover industries make it much easier to get started during the Rail period.  Finally, the higher level industries are worth more victory points, so this is another reason to try to quickly work your way down your stacks.  All of this has to be balanced with the loss of an action, of course.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a Wallace game without loans.  Money isn’t quite as tight as in Age of Steam, but it’s still an issue and most players will have to visit their banker at least once a game.  Loans subtract from your income level, so the interest payments are handled automatically.  (By the way, the Income track uses an expanding scale.  Each flipped counter adds points to your running total on the track and this translates to an income you receive at the beginning of each turn, but not in a linear way.  At the beginning of the game, your income goes up one pound for each two points you’ve accumulated.  After a while, it takes three points to increase your income by one, and then four.  So players with a higher income get less of a benefit out of it.  This is similar to the income reduction mechanism from Age of Steam, but implemented in a more refined and less obvious fashion.  I believe a similar scheme will be used for the new Mayfair AoS 3rd Edition, assuming it ever sees the light of day.)

At the end of each period, victory points are tallied.  Industries just score for what’s listed on their counters.  Links are also worth points:  they score for the number of flipped counters at either city they’re connected to.  This can be particularly lucrative in the second half of the game, as economies are sufficiently robust that there should be a lot of flipped industries.  The VPs for the two periods are added together and the player with the highest total wins.

Those are the main rules; I’ve actually left quite a few details out.  Like Agricola, this is anything but an elegant game, as there’s exceptions to practically every procedure.  But just as with the Rosenberg design, the extra details all add to the richness of the game and are well worth mastering.

Brass is Wallace at the top of his game.  The game isn’t all that easy to get into—the concepts are somewhat unintuitive, keeping all the exceptions straight takes a while, and you won’t really know where to begin as you start your first game.  But unlike Princes of the Renaissance or Struggle of Empires, where the vast number of choices provided from the very start really adds to the learning curve, here things are more manageable.  Things should clear up within half a game, although you’ll still find there’s plenty of strategies to explore.  I’ve played twice, enough so that I’m comfortable with the game, but I’m nowhere near to getting a handle on solid play.

The rules for where things can be built are relatively simple and logical, but they have a large impact on the game.  The two main elements of Brass are positioning and timing, but both are implemented so subtly that it takes a while to recognize which are strong positions and which are weak ones.  A seemingly innocuous link can make all the difference in the world, particularly in a game where the total number of actions is small, so you can’t afford to waste any.

I’ve read in a couple of places that the cards have little effect on the game, to the point that some wondered why they were there.  All I can say is that these people are certifiably insane.  The cards have an enormous effect on your strategy and on the flow of the entire game.  This is not to say that there’s much luck in the cards you receive; you do have eight cards most turns and there’s plenty of good ways to play each hand.  The trick, of course, is optimizing the cards you have.  But where on the board you start each age, where you will expand to, the types of industries you concentrate on; all of that is influenced by the cards you are dealt and draw.  I view this as a big plus, because it means that the game isn’t susceptible to standard strategies.  A good Brass player will have to be able to work several types of strategies to best take advantage of the cards she will receive.  It also means that the several games my group has played have all played out very differently.  Given the mechanics, this variety is quite surprising, but it all comes down to the way the cards influence play.

The “flipping” of the industry tiles is the game’s distinctive mechanic and it works very well.  The tactics of flipping your cotton mills and ports is fairly straightforward, although it can be a struggle to get some of these cashed in as each period comes to an end.  Flipping the coal mines and iron works is less direct, as you have to project where these resources will be in demand.  Building them is quite worthwhile, though, both for their contributions to the bottom line and because a supply of their resources can be so vital to expanding your network.

Development is easy to overlook, but I think it’s an inspired concept.  Using the simplest of rules, Wallace reflects the advantages of greater industrialization and smoothly introduces a tech tree with practically no bookkeeping.  It’s impact on the game is considerable; probably the biggest difference between a beginner and a more experienced player is that the latter will develop more frequently and earlier in the game.

Like many of Wallace’s games, the object is to survive the beginning and score at the end.  Getting your income up quickly brings in much needed cash.  But most of the scoring occurs in the Rail period.  This is a lesson I’m still learning and the different tactics needed to play well in these two periods only add to the challenge of this most challenging game.

Agricola has been getting most of the ink from the crop of Essen games, and rightfully so.  But right now, Brass is running neck and neck in my personal battle of Game of the Fair.  I might give the farming game a slight edge because of how well the solo rules work, but I’ve enjoyed my games of Brass every bit as much.  To find two such superior titles is a huge treat and I expect to have a lot of fun deciding which game I like more.

King of Siam
I love complicated games.  Their intricacies lead to deep strategies and varied possibilities and those are the things I play games for.  But a game designer has to balance complexity with intractability.  Just like it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, it’s certainly possible for a game to be too complex.

The same is true at the other end of the spectrum.  Elegance is a much prized quality in a game.  There is probably nothing as difficult as making a truly elegant, a truly simple game.  However, sometimes simple is, well, too simple.  Those are games I tend to avoid.

That was my first thought when I read the online rules to King of Siam.  KoS is an Essen game from Histogame (which released the celebrated Friedrich a few years ago).  The designer is Peer Sylvester, who has a few party games and abstracts to his credit.  He’s probably best known for authoring a couple of German language collections of games for Bambus Spieleverlag (Günter Cornett’s company):  Jam Dudel and So spielt die Welt (What the world plays).  King of Siam is his most ambitious design to date.

Much of the game will sound familiar to experienced gamers.  The board shows eight provinces in nineteenth century Siam.  Each of these are seeded with cubes of three different colors, representing three factions fighting for control of the country.  The players will also be collecting these cubes over the course of the game.  The player with the most cubes of a color owns that faction; the object is to own the faction that controls the most provinces at the end of the game.

Each province has a tile and these are shuffled and then placed in a row from first to last.  This is the order in which control will be checked for the provinces.  Each player begins the game with the same eight action cards.  These do things like let the player add a cube of his choice to a province, swap cubes between provinces, and switch the position of two tiles.  The rules are very simple.  Each player on her turn either plays an action card and follows its instructions, or passes.  If a card is played, the player then takes a cube from any of the provinces (which is how cubes are collected).  This increases their strength in that faction, while, of course, simultaneously weakening that faction’s position on the board.  If a player passes in one turn, he can choose to play a card in the following turn.

When all the players have consecutively passed, the control of the next province in the row is resolved.  The faction with the most cubes in the province wins it.  However, if there’s a tie for most cubes, none of the factions takes the province; instead, the British (the ultimate bogeyman of the nineteenth century) take over.  In either event, control of the province is set and all the cubes in the province are returned to the supply (this is significant, since the number of cubes is limited, so if a card says to add a cube and there are none of that color in the supply, none are added).  The game continues, with the next province in the row ready to be resolved.

The game ends in one of two ways.  If the British win their fourth province, then the game ends immediately and the player with the most complete sets of cubes (one from each color) wins.  In the more typical instance when all eight provinces are resolved and fewer than four of them are British, the player who controls the faction with the most provinces wins.  If this is a tie, then the tied player with control of the faction with the second most provinces wins.  If this is still a tie, the tied player who played an action card last loses.

Simple, right?  Maybe too simple.  That was my thought after reading the rules.  After all, each player has only eight turns they can take over the course of the game.  The two winning conditions are a nice twist, but even the rules indicate that ending due to Brit control is a rare occurrence.  And the whole “try to gain control of the dominant faction through cube pushing” thing has been done more than once before.  So it wasn’t a game I was in that much of a hurry to try out.

But one of our group left and the rest of us had time for a short game for three.  King of Siam fit the bill, so it seemed like a good opportunity to try it out.

And it was good.  Really good.  So good that it was no longer simple—it had graduated to elegant.

The first few actions are typical area majority stuff, usually focused on the next province to be resolved, with one player often undoing what an opponent does.  But soon the extremely limited number of actions comes into play.  And as both the provinces and the actions dwindle down to a precious few, a palpable tension develops.  In our game, control shifted back and forth between all three factions several times and each player took turns sitting in the catbird seat.  Even the possibility of a British victory, bringing with it a completely different set of winning conditions, arose.  Finally, on the very last action, the game was decided.  It was a game full of angst and tension, all jam-packed into a mere thirty minutes.

With only one game under my belt, I can’t really give the game a full recommendation.  But other members of our group have played additional games and all of them have been enjoyable.  Even better, the games have played differently, assuaging any fears about replayability.  The early returns indicate that Sylvester has indeed created a wonderfully elegant game that nonetheless has plenty of gaming goodness in it.  We’ve only played with three; the game also plays with two or four (the latter with partners).  The game didn’t meet my low expectations for it, but that, as your favorite sportscaster is probably fond of saying, is why they play the games.

So it was quite a gaming session.  Two great games, certain to remain in our rotation for years to come, and one very good meaty filler, which should make an ideal closer.  Without question, a lot to be thankful for.

© 2007 Larry Levy

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Comments:

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Hey! You stole my column! <g> Nice comments, Larry… Surprisingly, two of the games I still haven’t really played from Essen are King of Siam (I always seem to be sitting at the other table when this comes out) and Brass (I’ve tried it twice, and unlike you, I’ve been put off and/or thwarted by the rules). I will have to try both soon to see what I think of them given your reactions to them D Posted by Dale Yu on Dec 8, 2007 at 09:02 AM | #

It’s not just Brass and Agricola slugging it out for the “Best in Show” title for this year’s Essen.  There is also Tribune, the game that topped the Fairplay rankings.  And not far behind these are the two Eggertspiele games, Key Harvest and Race for the Galaxy.  It really was a vintage year. Posted by Stuart Dagger on Dec 8, 2007 at 10:14 AM | #

I’d agree with Stuart on the breadth of good games this year. I had a full serving of Brass yesterday and it matched my earlier expectations. It is such a clever game. Posted by Alan How on Dec 8, 2007 at 06:46 PM | #

Very good article Larry I still have to play Agricola (waiting the English version) and Tribune (waiting the soon appearing Italian version) but it seems really to be a a great year. Brass, Race for the Galaxy, Hamburgun ... Many very good games. It will be a real difficult task to determinate the IGA winner this year! good play Liga Posted by Andrea Liga Ligabue on Dec 9, 2007 at 01:15 AM | #

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