Larry Levy:  Coming Up for Air, Part 2

Here’s a continuation of my look at the games I’ve played over the past two months.

Die Wiege der Renaissance - This is an Essen release from a first-time publisher called DDD Verlag.  The designers are Willfried and Hanno Kuhn, who have been sporadically creating games for 15 years.  Probably their best known designs are An Den Ufern Des Nils, a farming game on the banks of the Nile, and the tower building game Campanile.

Wiege is a card/placement game themed around the events of the Renaissance.  The theming is pretty much paper thin, but I still felt this was an intriguing and very unusual game.  I don’t really have the time to describe the game in detail, but I hope to be able to play it again and write a full review.

In the game, the players play cards that enable them to place their markers on spaces on various events.  For those who have played Sternenhimmel, the rules for placement vaguely resemble those in that game.  However, the mechanics are such that the tension hits you from the very start, making all your plays significant.  There’s also quite a bit more to the game, giving the players a good deal to think about.  I found the choices to be involved and enjoyable.

I wish I could give you more details, but it’s been a while since I’ve played and the memory of the precise mechanics is fading.  They’ve also removed the English version of the rules from the publisher’s web site, possibly because they’re not the best translation.  So I’m going to have to wait until I play the game again to describe it better.

The ratings for the game on the Geek are all over the place, but it’s safe to say my first game went better than most others’ experience.  However, many of the complaints deal with the tenuous theme or the opaque mechanics, neither of which bothers me too much.  I’m not certain my follow-up games will work as well as my first one did.  But I did want to mention this in case any of you have the chance to try out this obscure title.  I think it’s well worth a play, particularly for those who like something different.

Down Under - This was an unexpected gift, thanks to the generosity of Peer Sylvester and designer Günter Cornett.  Peer had asked if he could include my game Deduce or Die in his book So spielt die Welt (What the World Plays), published by Cornett’s company Bambus Spieleverlag, a proposal I happily agreed to.  My “payment” was to be two copies of the book, but I was surprised and delighted when the package from Peer included not only the books, but a copy of Down Under, Cornett’s latest design.  Thanks guys!

The game itself is a pretty good no-luck abstract.  You play tiles onto the table to extend your own road and possibly those of your opponents.  The key innovation is you’re trying to get as many animals (all native to Australia) onto your road as you can, but because of the placement rules, you must do this indirectly.  It’s also fun to try to guide your opponents’ roads into directions they might wish to avoid, but you can also wind up helping them in the process.

While not a game that I’m dying to play again all that soon, there’s enough going on here to overcome my usual allergy to abstracts.  Look ahead is important, but the actions of the other players can lead to some unexpected twists and turns (literally!).  I can see where experience would be important, as a few subtle tactics became apparent even from a single play.  This isn’t really the sort of game my group particularly cottons to, so it may not get the extended play necessary for its full potential to really emerge, but it’s a solid game and one I’m happy to have in my collection.

Handelsfürsten - Another little known game, this time by Knizia.  It’s a filler, the kind he used to excel at.  The rules looked intriguing and the reviews were reasonably positive, so I plunked down the somewhat excessive price of $20 and picked up a copy.

The game is themed around the European trading families of the 16th century, which, of course, is mere window dressing.  There are six types of goods.  Essentially, each player has some goods on his ships and their value is based on the number of cards of that good in the central display.  On a player’s turn, he can exchange a goods cube and then play cards of one type of good to the display (covering up other cards).  Everyone who has goods of that type gets one coin per good for each card of that type showing.  So if there is one blue card in the display and the player plays two more, each player gets three coins per blue good they own.  Rather than trigger a scoring, a player can choose to draw two cards.  Players also have the option of buying a special card rather than exchanging a good.  Special cards include additional ships (allowing the player to own more goods) and ways of increasing your card draws, your goods exchanges, and the coins you earn.  That’s pretty much the whole game.

There’s a few interesting decisions to be made and the special cards allow you to formulate a strategy, which is kind of unusual for a filler.  But our game soon became repetitious, as you automatically covered up the cards of the opponent’s colors and tried to raise the value of your own.  I think there’s a little more here than first meets the eye and I wouldn’t mind playing again.  But there really isn’t anything special to recommend this.  It also doesn’t help that the game is overpriced, at least in the U.S.  Knizia has fallen to the level of a hit-and-miss designer for me, and given how much enjoyment his games have given me in the past, that’s rather sad.

Kingsburg - The Golden Age of Dice Games continues with this new entry from Italy.  And a very nice one it is, with gorgeous components and some clever mechanics.  I’ve played it twice now, with five and with three and enjoyed both games.

The way in which you use the dice to select characters is appealing in its simplicity, but it’s implemented well enough (with the +2 chips and some building powers) and with enough variety in the abilities that you consistently have pleasant decisions on how to split your dice.  I also think the designers did a good job with the different strategies inherent in the buildings.  Requiring that the buildings in a row be constructed in order is a key rule and gives you enough varied strategies to try out to keep the game fresh.  In fact, in my second game, I decided to go for a strategy based on the bottom row of buildings, with the plan being to build the last two buildings (which can generate VPs each season) as quickly as possible.  While this didn’t work out quite as easily as I’d hoped, I was basically able to implement this and managed a close victory.  As one who usually favors tactical games, I found this quite satisfying.

With any dice game, there’s always a concern of what role luck plays and that goes doubly for this one, since there’s a planning and strategic element to the play.  Obviously, there’s some luck involved; a player rolling a high number (the right high number) at a key moment can change the course of a close game.  But the principal concern—that success is more about rolling well than choosing well—is thankfully unfounded.  I’ve found that when I roll low, I can often get just about as much accomplished as my opponents do by splitting the dice up and going for the low numbered characters.  It’s by no means a guarantee and you need to take both the needs and the individual dice faces of your opponents into account, but I’m able to pull this off more often than not.  This is a sign of a good design.  Of course, consistently rolling poorly will probably doom you (since there are some items that are only available with average to good rolls), but unless you walk around with your own personal dark cloud, you should find that the luck of the seasonal dice rolls to be at an acceptable level.  There’s also plenty of catch-up mechanisms worked into the design, so even a temporary string of bad luck shouldn’t be a killer.  I was also concerned about the die roll used to resolve the battle each year.  In theory, this could determine the game, since a player who consistently gambles with his army strength will benefit from good rolls and be crushed by bad ones.  However, in practice, this doesn’t appear to be a major problem at all.  There’s enough reason to win battles that ignoring your military doesn’t seem like a particularly viable strategy.  And with a reasonable portion of the enemy cards, the losing effects aren’t that severe.  I’m not saying that one or two of the battle die rolls couldn’t be very important in a game, but they don’t seem to dominate things nearly as much as I feared, so it winds up adding a little spice to the game without bothering us luck-averse types too much.

My only complaint with Kingsburg is that our games have gone on a little longer than I’d like.  Because of the mechanics, there’s little downtime, but I’d be happier with the listed duration of 90 minutes than the slightly longer than two hour games I’ve played.  I was hoping it would play more quickly with three than with five, but even with that number, it seemed to last just a bit too long (maybe because the decisions are a little more interesting with a crowded board, I’m willing to deal with a longer game with more players).  Perhaps with more experience, we can shorten this up, but it takes a bit of time to decide how to split your dice and react to your opponents’ choices, so I’m not sure this will happen.  Not a big deal, but enough to maybe keep this from my personal top 10 from last year’s strong list of designs.  Still, overall I think this is a very appealing entry from new designers Andrea Chiarvesio and Luca Iennaco and I hope we’ll be seeing more from both of them in the future.

Race for the Galaxy - I’ve now played Race about eight times, including the sessions before it was actually published.  And that’s enough for me to conclude that, while I like and admire the game, I’ll never love it, certainly not nearly as much as so many of my peers.  Given the game’s astonishing popularity (some fans report averaging three, four, five, or even six playings a day) and the fact that I’m a big fan of designer Tom Lehmann’s games, it’s natural to wonder why that should be so.

One reason may be my lack of enthusiasm for CCGs.  Race obviously isn’t of that genre, but it originated from one and, to me, it bears a reasonable resemblance to a CCG.  Out of the 114 cards in the game, only 19 are duplicates, so you’ve got a whole bunch of different cards to deal with.  Having at least some familiarity with those different types is quite important.  You also have to work out how they work together and what the good combos are.  Moreover, the high-scoring “6” cards are all different and many of them are quite complex.  Lots of different cards, combos, complex interactions—even without a deck building aspect, that sounds a lot like a CCG to me.  I can see the average RftG player poring over the deck, working out these tactics, but that’s not the kind of thing I’d ever do.  Consequently, I’ve found this to have a much higher learning curve than many others have.

When I mention that Race isn’t an 11 for me, the first question I’m usually asked is if I like San Juan.  Actually, I love San Juan, but despite the fact that it’s one of the two parents of Race, I don’t think the two games feel much alike at all.  SJ scores with its speed of play and its approachability.  There’s only a couple of dozen different cards and most of them are very straightforward.  It should only take a few games to get the hang of most of the strategies, which is very appropriate for the middleweight game it is.  Many of these strategies revolve around the “6” cards and they’re all easily understood.  Race, on the other hand, is very much a gamer’s game.  There are multiple ways to play cards, multiple ways to add cards, and lots of different ways to score.  There’s a large number of strategies and it probably takes quite a few games to even discover some of them.  The “6” cards are just as important, but most of them feature numerous ways of assigning VPs and many of them are very difficult to easily summarize.  They may be children born of the same mother, but they are anything but identical twins.

I’ve also found that the sheer variety of Race is something of an impediment to picking it up.  Some have complained about the iconography on the cards, but I think Tom, Jay, and lead playtester Wei-Hwa Huang did a terrific job with them.  But there’s just so many powers and abilities in the game that it’s almost impossible to make them all crystal clear without a verbal explanation.  I’ve found this to be another mild barrier to getting into the game.  In addition, this variety makes it very difficult to quickly perceive what your opponents have in front of them until you’ve pretty much memorized the deck.  This lessens the interaction in a game that already can play like a solitaire game for the inexperienced.

The biggest issue for me is probably the way my group approaches games.  Most Race fanatics report playing it multiple times in a session (sometimes five or six times in a row).  I can’t ever recall my group playing any game even twice in a row.  And that’s the way I like it, as I’m very big on variety.  But without the reinforcement that this repetition provides, I’m not sure I’ll ever be totally comfortable with the play of this game.

So for me, a typical game of Race has me stumbling through my turns, constantly checking the player aids, and squinting at the card icons, my eyes never leaving my own hand and display.  At least once a game, I encounter a card whose function I cannot understand from its icons and, more often than not, I’ll just use it as payment rather than ask for an explanation.  My strategy shifts from turn to turn, with little coherence.  Usually about two thirds of the way through the game, I’ll check what my opponents are doing and try to take that into account.  But it isn’t that much of an issue, as I’m usually far behind by then.

Don’t get me wrong:  I don’t dislike this game.  I think it’s very clever and don’t mind the play at all.  But it’s been eight games now and I still feel like I’m in the early stages of learning it.  I don’t need to win a game in order to enjoy it, but there’s needs to be some minimum level of competence in order for me to really feel like this is a worthwhile use of my limited gaming time. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and I think that’s the prudent thing for me to do with Race.  I’m happy the rest of the gaming world loves it and I’m particularly happy for Tom and for Jay.  But when I think of Mr. Lehmann and 2007, it’s Phoenicia that I’ll be pining to play and not the more popular Race for the Galaxy.

Well, that’s a summary of my recent gaming activities.  I also got in a couple of games of Wabash Cannonball, but I don’t have time to talk that now—I’ll try to cover it at a later date.  For now, I’m getting ready to head on up to sunny Columbus, Ohio and the annual Gathering of Friends.  I’ll do my best to provide a write-up of the highlights of my time there in the days after I return.  Until then, good gaming!

© 2008 Larry Levy

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Comments:

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Good article, Larry.  I’ll be bringing my copy of Die Wiege… to Columbus and hope to look you up for a game.  Assuming I can wade through the German rules before then (I did read them months ago but have forgotten nearly everything!). You can count me in the RftG = Gaming Awesomeness camp, but then that’s not surprising considering my penchant for games that scratch the CCG itch without involving the money-draining collectible aspect.  I fully realize that not all will agree, as the game does have the ‘lots of cards with different things on them’ issue that some folks don’t like, but I’m already looking forward to the first expansion. See you soon! pk Posted by Patrick Korner on Apr 5, 2008 at 01:23 AM | #

The amount of variation in the cards is one of the reasons why I love RftG.  It still hasn’t started to feel stale in spite of 90 plays.  I am looking forward to the expansion though.  I never bothered to go through the deck, preferring to discover the cards as I play.  The more I’ve played the more I’ve seen opportunities to play off other players choices.  It seems like this type variability will also be one of the reasons why Agricola will have a lot of extra staying power. Posted by Greg Williams on Apr 5, 2008 at 10:46 AM | #

I agree about the enormous variability in Agricola.  The difference for me is that you start with all the cards you’ll have in that particular game in Agricola and your knowledge of other cards in the deck is relatively unimportant.  So I can plan my game at the outset and not worry about *potential* combinations that might come my way.  This is a significant difference for me; to others, it might just be similar itches being scratched. Posted by Larry Levy on Apr 5, 2008 at 12:24 PM | #

It is a very important distinction.  Though I find that even that initial set of cards can be tremendously distracting.  In Race you can’t worry about cards you don’t have.  Evaluate your hand and either enhance your plan with a new card or if a better plan presents itself change tacks. Posted by Greg Williams on Apr 5, 2008 at 01:18 PM | #

I find the same to be true about San Juan.  You can’t build towards a card you don’t have.  Searching for cards only slows your pace and often helps your opponents.  I think it’s most effectively played as a race too. Posted by Greg Williams on Apr 5, 2008 at 01:21 PM | #

My only real question Larry is: was there an option where you didn’t come up for air? Jason Posted by Jason Matthews on Apr 6, 2008 at 01:31 AM | #

Come one Larry, Find me a new “meaty” game to love, all these puff pieces aren’t working for me. Posted by Michael Chapel on Apr 6, 2008 at 09:35 PM | #

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