Rick Thornquist: Hard-to-Rate Games / Battles of the Third Age

Last week I finally got a chance to play Battles of the Third Age - the War of the Ring expansion.  As you’ll see in my description below, I had many problems with the game, but ended up liking it.  Games like this I find very hard to rate - I’m usually pretty hard on games that have problems, but in certain cases the game is so good I’m willing to overlook the problems and rate the game highly. 

A perfect example of this is Die Macher.  I think the game is superb, but I do have one major beef with the game - the poll cards.  The polls drive me crazy - they are just way too lucky and you can blow a pile a huge pile of money on a poll that’s completely worthless (and the increase in party membership just isn’t worth it).  Even with the poll cards, I’ve rated it a 10 on BoardGameGeek.  The rest of the game is just too good otherwise.

Another example was my recent experience with Jenseits von Theben.  There’s so much good stuff in there mechanics-wise, but the luck is humongous.  How should I rate this game?  I would probably never want to play it again, but I do admire the design of the game a great deal.  If the luck was tempered it may be an 8 or 9.  As it is, it’s probably a 5 or 6.  I guess I’ll split the difference and give it a 7.

With Die Macher and Jenseits von Theben, the difficulty in rating is because of the luck, but there are other things that make a game difficult to rate.  Take Europa Tour, for example.  I really like the game with two players, with three players it’s marginal and with four it’s pretty much unplayable.  How do I rate a game like this?  With two players it’s probably a 7, with three a 5 and with four a 3.  I hesitate to split the different because a 5 doesn’t do justice to the fact that it’s a pretty fun two player game.

One more example is the Cheapass game The Big Idea.  If you play three rounds of the game, it’s hilarious and a ridiculous amount of fun.  The problem is that the rules prescribe TEN rounds and, believe me, after ten rounds its welcome has more than been worn out.  Played with just three rounds I’d rate it a 7 or 8 because of the hilarity factor, but if I had to play it for ten rounds I’d probably rate it a 2. 

The Alea game Rum & Pirates was the same thing for me - after three rounds I though it was an okay game and was going to rate it as such, until I found out we were supposed to play up to five rounds!  Each round after three dropped my rating significantly.

This is why I have a hard time with numerical ratings.  Sometimes is just very difficult to boil a game down to a numeric rating.  I have rated many of my games on BoardGameGeek because I know people find these ratings helpful, but I actually don’t include numeric ratings in my reviews because I think that people may put too much weight into them.  A single rating, as evidenced by these examples, can be deceiving.

Games Played
These days I’m so busy with Essen stuff that my game nights tend to be more on the spur of the moment when I have the time.  I also have a lot of new games that I need to play, and last week I tried to do as many of these as I could.  I played Battles of the Third Age, Graenaland x 2 , Krumble!, Yspahan, High Society and Web of Power.

I’m going to be spending the rest of this column writing about Battles of the Third Age, but I’d be remiss of I didn’t mention Graenaland.  I was sent a prototype of this game by Czech Board Games - this is one of their Essen Games.  I must say I was very impressed - I thought the game was very good.  I hope to play it again this week and I’ll be writing up a first impression either for this column or my Essen Preview, or both. 

Battles of the Third Age
I finally got a chance to play Battles of the Third Age last week.  This game is not only an expansion for War of the Ring, but also includes two battle scenarios - basically separate games - Rohan and Gondor.  This was the last of the International Gamers Awards nominees that I needed to play before I voted. 

Most of the other nominated games I had played numerous times, but this one got only one play before I needed to vote.  One play is not nearly enough for a game of this size and complexity - it really requires a number of plays - but due to lack of time, it was simply not possible.  Still, with my one playing (the Gondor scenario) I think I did get a pretty good feel for the game - enough to be comfortable rating it for the awards.

Battles of the Third Age, like War of the Ring, is basically a wargame.  It has some interesting mechanisms that separate it from the typical hex / counter / combat results table games, but at its heart it’s a “line up the troops and roll the dice” game with chrome.  Lots and lots of chrome.

First of all, let’s talk about the bad parts of the game.  Why?  Well, because there’s lots of them.  First of all, the rules aren’t very good - and that’s putting it charitably.  The organization is just plain goofy and there are sections that are duplicated, contradictory, or just badly written.  Inconsistencies abound - the same thing is called by different names in different parts of the rules.  The component manifest and component illustrations are confusing and inaccurate, and the illustrations are barely helpful with microscopic counters and figures on them.  I spent way, way too much time reading a rule multiple times trying to figure out what it meant - and this isn’t the most complicated game in the world (oh, and the FAQ didn’t help at all). 

Though the components themselves are beautiful, the graphic design is atrocious - whoever did the graphic design should be fed to Shelob.  The iconography is bewildering, inconsistent, oftentimes microscopic, and sometimes just plain wrong.  Many of the small counters that are supposed to be different look almost exactly the same - you practically need an electron microscope to tell them apart.  The bad graphic design made the game way harder to set up and play than it should have been.  Note to Nexus - the next time you do a game, please, please, please get your graphic designers to take some lessons from Cyril Demaegd.  Better yet, hire him.

When we first started playing, the first turn took us an hour to get through.  There was much muddling through the rules and at times we were spending blocks of five or ten minutes just trying to figure out one rule.  I gotta tell ya, at this point I thought the game was just a disaster and was dreading having to finish it.

However, by the second turn things started to fall into place.  We finally clarified most of the rules (or just made educated guesses as to how they were supposed to work) and at that point the game sped up substantially and we really started to get into it.  We finished the game in about five hours and I do have to say that by the end I was really enjoying it.  I like the loads of strategic options, the theme, and the very interactive gameplay.  Even with all the crap we had to go through to get the game played, in the end it was worth it and I’m actually very much looking forward to playing it again.

That’s it for this week!

© 2006 Rick Thornquist

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Comments:

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Rick, I agree a game like Jenseits can be tough to rate.  To me, it comes down to the game experience.  The high luck factor makes me cringe, but the theme is executed so brilliantly, that it picks the rating up dramatically.  Plus, were it ever to become a regular game in our group, it would be quite easy to implement some variants to take care of much of the luck.  So I give it a good rating. Games like Europa Tour, where the rating varies depending on conditions, are easy for me.  My rating always assumes optimal conditions.  So I rate Carcassonne a 7, because that’s my rating when played with two, using the Inns & Cathedrals expansion.  When played with four or more, my rating is much lower, but that’s not the best way to play it for me, so why should it affect my rating? The toughest games for me to rate are those that don’t work for me, but are obviously well designed.  My one game of Java was a horror, but it’s clearly a quality game, so for a while, I kinda split the difference and rated it a 6.  Lately, I’ve gone away from that.  If the game isn’t one I care for, it gets a poor rating, regardless of how it might appeal to others.  It’s hard enough figuring out my own mind without having to read the minds of other gamers! Posted by Larry Levy on Sep 12, 2006 at 08:36 AM | #

I try to stay away from giving games a numerical rating simply because I like games so much.  Sure, I can compare and contrast games I like with others I prefer less, but by the numbers and thier definitions over at the BGG my ratings are skewed pretty high… as I find I would be _willing_ to play so many games I am hard pressed to rate many things below a five. Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Sep 12, 2006 at 01:33 PM | #

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