Larry Levy:  Naked Emperors and the Unloved Classic

A new game is released.  Everyone is singing its praises, claiming it’s the cat’s pajamas, the bee’s knees, and the greatest thing since sliced bruschetta.  You can’t wait for the day when you finally get to play it.  The great day suddenly arrives—and it’s a flop.  No zing, no spark, a child could have come up with this design.  What does everyone see in this piece of crap?

Sound familiar?  Hopefully, it doesn’t happen to you too often, but we all know of games that the world at large considers masterpieces, while we’re that lone voice in the crowd shouting out, “But the emperor has no clothes!â€?  I’m lucky, in that I thoroughly enjoy almost all the highly rated eurogames out there.  And some of the ones I don’t care for, it isn’t because they’re poorly designed, but because I don’t like that kind of game.  So I avoid Citadels because I don’t like psychological double-guessing games.  But there are some games, universally regarded as among the greatest game designs ever etched into cardboard, which leave me cold.  What’s more, it’s not clear to me why they have their exalted status.  At the risk of inviting abuse and curses upon my head, I thought I’d talk about a few of these games this week.

First, a few top rated games that I’ll be perfectly content to never play again:

Acquire – I know, criticizing this game is like kicking a puppy.  And it’s by no means a bad game.  But I’ve been playing it for over 40 years now (my parents were early purchasers of the 3M Bookshelf games).  As a youngster, I thought it was okay, but a bit frustrating; too often, you couldn’t draw the tiles you needed.  I’ve played it multiple times as a teenager, in my twenties, and then with experienced gamers.  My initial take on the game really hasn’t changed.  A little too much luck, not quite enough control.  I recognize how innovative the game is and agree that it was one of the principal inspirations for the eurogame revolution.  But as a game, it’s never excited me,

El Grande – Earl Weaver, the Hall of Fame baseball manager of the Baltimore Orioles in years gone by, once said of his star pitcher Jim Palmer (who, in his pre-underwear modeling days, was always criticizing Weaver), “I’ve given him more chances than I gave my first wife!â€?  That’s the way I feel about El Grande (except that my first chance with marriage is working out just fine, thank you).  Every time I’ve played this game, it’s been a disappointment.  There’s usually an excuse for why it turned out poorly:  once, it was mostly newbies, another time, we used too many expansions.  Finally, five of us El Grande naysayers decided to play a game together at a Gulf Games just to see what all the hoopla was about.  It was disastrous—it took over three hours and all of us couldn’t wait for it to end.  Again, that may have been an aberration, but for me, the game has pretty much run out of chances.  I have several basic problems with the game.  It seems pretty chaotic, so that your position in an area can change in a blink.  Plus, each turn, you have to scan the new Action cards that come up to determine what Power card you will play; for those of us unfamiliar with all the cards, this adds a good deal to the downtime.  It isn’t because this is an area majority game, because I love area majority games.  It just seems that El Grande hasn’t aged as well as some other designs from the mid-nineties.  The game’s fans continue to sing its praises, and that’s fine.  But this simply may not be the game for me.

Wallenstein – This falls into a category of game that irks me—designs that require a good deal of planning and that also include a high-luck mechanic.  Games like this drive me crazy because I’m attracted by the plotting and thinking ahead, but the effort is often pointless since luck plays such a large role.  Wallenstein features lots of planning and is just loaded with random elements.  The fact that you have to start committing to your actions when you only know the order of half of them introduces what seems like a needless level of chaos; the order of the face down actions may be critical and a wrong guess can cripple you.  Similarly, the order of the random events can play havoc with the best laid plans.  And don’t get me started on the damn cube tower—this is the only wargame I know of where you can wind up with more units than you started with!  (Who knew zombies were so prevalent during the Thirty Years War?) With the huge variance the tower introduces, I’d rather they’d used dice instead (and I’m no fan of dice resolution).  The design is slick and designer Dirk Henn certainly knows his craft.  But I really have no desire to strain my brain on the strategy when my best efforts can be routinely overcome by bad breaks.  Too bad, because the premise is good and the components are absolutely gorgeous.

That’s the big three—let the catcalls begin.  But there are some other games that I don’t dislike, but my appreciation for them is much less than the average gamer.  Here are a few of these:

Settlers of Catan – Might as well get the big guy out of the way.  At the time the Mayfair version of this came out (around ’96 or so), I had been dissatisfied with American boardgames for quite a while and I hoped this would introduce my group to a whole new style of gaming.  Well, the style was different, and the game was pretty good, but it didn’t really live up to the rave reviews.  One of the reasons for my lack of enthusiasm was the frustration caused by the inevitable periods when the dice aren’t letting you produce any resources.  Even though the luck usually evened out by game’s end, it meant that you’d have several turns (sometimes many more) where you couldn’t do anything.  I was just hoping for a little bit more.  Fortunately for us, my group did discover our gateway game soon afterward (Alan Moon’s Airlines) and I was well on my way to becoming a eurogamer.  Settlers was something of a casualty, however—it’s probably been five years since I played it last and I’ve still never played anything but the original vanilla design.

Ra – I find 90% of this game appealing, but one thing kills it for me:  the Ra tiles.  Try as I might, I don’t see how this game won’t be decided by guessing correctly if these tiles will come up quickly (giving you a short round) or sloooowly (giving you a long round).  Your strategy is very different depending on how many tiles will be seen during the round, but there’s no way to figure which way it’s going to go.  There’s lots of subtle tactics you can employ, but they all seem to take a back seat to this.  At any rate, all my games have worked out this way, so this is a design I tend to avoid.

Lost Cities – If I lived in a cave, far from gaming web sites, I’d be perfectly happy with this design.  It’s a nice, light game that I can play on autopilot; mostly luck, but with some good judgment required.  But after it came out, the game was getting praised to the skies and I kept reading about all the design’s subtleties, which slowly revealed themselves only after a number of plays.  I’ll be honest with you—after two games, I thought I fully grasped the strategy and dozens of games later, I’ve seen nothing to make me doubt that fact.  It’s nice, it’s Knizia, but no way is it that good.  There’s a bunch of other two-player card games I’d rather play, including Knizia’s own Schotten-Totten.  Right now, Lost Cities’ main niche is a game I’ll suggest when I’m tired, since I can play it just as well (and just as fast) as when I’m alert.

Modern Art – Okay, this is unquestionably a good game.  But many consider it to be Knizia’s masterpiece and I’ve just never seen it.  I’ve yet to play a game of this where I said, “Wow!â€?  A number of our games see a somewhat disappointing rush in one or two artists, not really allowing those turns to develop properly.  Plus, the Double cards can dominate play and the player who draws the most of them often has an advantage.  None of these are critical flaws and the game does provide an interesting exercise in valuation.  But it just doesn’t seem to have the veneer of greatness that so many other gamers ascribe to it.  I have no problem playing Modern Art, but I’ll never suggest it and there are many more auction games that I prefer.  There’s also about two dozen Knizia designs that I think are better.  Maybe one day I’ll see the subtleties that I’m currently missing, but for now, I’ll have to be a gaming heretic with this one.

Cosmic Encounter – This game deserves its reputation as a very innovative and influential game.  It’s just too chaotic for my tastes, and the way most of my friends like to play it (multiple powers, multiple expansions, multiple everything) doesn’t help matters.  It ain’t no Borderlands, that’s for sure!

Wyatt Earp – The most popular of the Mystery Rummy inspired games and, paradoxically, my least favorite.  The reason is the bullet mechanic used to activate most of the Sheriff cards.  This is a classic form of “resolution luckâ€? that I always dislike.  I’ll play Wyatt Earp if asked, but I’d much rather play any of the other MR games.

Tichu – Don’t worry, the emperor is fully clothed on this one.  It’s just that I originally learned other games in the same family first and prefer them.  Tichu is also a little fiddly for my tastes.  The biggest problem I have with the game is that I’m invariably the least experienced player at the table when I play, so I usually feel like I’m dragging my partner down.  If I’m going to screw up, I’d rather do it when I’m playing for myself!

Bonus Rant
What does the U.S. presidential campaign, root canal surgery, and the World Cup have in common with the Spiele des Jahres?  In each case, the process takes too damn long!  Although for the first three, at least there’s the excuse that something is being accomplished during the duration.  Really, can someone tell me why there’s seven weeks between the announcement of the nominees and the unveiling of the winner?  Surely it doesn’t take that long to actually select the winner—you could vote them off the island one by one quicker than that.  I suppose the idea is to build anticipation, but most folks do their speculating during the first one or two weeks and then forget about it.  Maybe in years past, when the entire gaming world revolved around Germany and its two big shows, this was a winning strategy.  But now, there’s tons of stuff happening:  Origins and other cons, new game releases (like maybe Tempus, at long last), lots of news on BGN and BGG.  Right now, I expect the attitude on Sunday night isn’t going to be, “I wonder what’s going to win?â€?, but rather, “Haven’t they announced that yet?â€?.  Maybe the Jury wants to give the public a chance to buy up all the nominated games (which would at least ensure that the number of folks who own Just 4 Fun is greater than the numeral in its title).  But as much as I hate telling professionals how to do their business, I have to think that the hobby would be better served by a shorter gap between nominations and award.  Despite this, I’ll still be checking out BGN on Monday morning to see if Thurn und Taxis or Blue Moon City (or, heaven forbid, one of the other games) takes home the big prize.

A Geeklist worth checking out
On BoardgameGeek, Jesse Smit has put together a very interesting Geeklist called
Top 100 Availability.  He lists the top 100 ranked games on the Geek, together with their availability (whether they’re easy to find, out of print, or in the process of being reprinted), where you can find them, and how much they will cost.  This is a marvelous service to provide and has to be invaluable to someone just starting out in the hobby or even experienced gamers who want to know which games should be purchased before they become impossible to find.  Just having all this data in one place is great.  The costs seem to be list prices, which means they won’t have much relationship to reality if you do most of your buying online, but even so, this is a wonderful list to have available and must have taken a good deal of effort to put together.  Great job, Jesse!

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