Larry Levy:  The Two Faces of Essen – The Bad

As I mentioned in my previous column (cleverly titled The Two Faces of Essen—The Good), there’s been a strange dichotomy in the new Essen games I’ve played (particularly the ones that got their first tryout at BGG.con).  They’ve either been very good or very bad.  This week, we deal with the lesser side of that equation.  Other disappointing Essen games I’ve played prior to the con were Gonzaga and (in particular) Turandot.

Before I get to the baddies, let me talk about the small number of games that fell between those two extremes.  I give you, The Decent Games of Essen:

Assyria: The latest Ystari seems to be a perfectly reasonable design.  But I thought after reading the rules that it would be too dry and abstract for my tastes and that was exactly my impression after playing it.  There’s things to do and some clever plays to be had, but it never drew me in.  Losing a good chunk of your pieces after each reign also gives the game a peculiar feel, although I can see how that can be a big part of the strategy.  So I have nothing too bad to say about this; I just don’t really want to play it again.

FZZZT!: This is a cute little filler themed around using robots to do production tasks.  The main mechanic is blind bidding, which is usually a turnoff for me, but can be acceptable in shorter games.  You’re bidding on both robots and the projects they can be applied to (for victory points).  What’s clever is that the robots have different ways in which they can help you:  some add a lot to your bidding power, some can do more than one task, and some are worth a high number of VPs.  Thus, it isn’t always clear which cards are the best to go after, giving the game more depth than is first apparent.

There’s one rule which kind of spoils the game for me, but fortunately, there’s a simple fix.  Not surprisingly, ties are common in the bidding, so one of the participants is designated as the Lead Player.  The Lead Player wins all ties, and then you go in clockwise order.  The player who lost the tie then becomes the new Lead Player.  That’s all well and good, but there are times when no one wants to win an auction.  For example, one of the cards has a good value for bidding, but is worth -1 VP; you want to avoid that card at the end of the game, since you won’t be able to use it in time to help your bidding.  In addition, if you can’t apply sufficient numbers of robots to a project, it costs you VPs (think Ticket to Ride), so in many cases, you won’t want to bid on one of those when they come up very late.  The trouble is that even though the rules aren’t particularly clear here, they seem to indicate that cards must always be assigned following an auction, even if no one bids for them.  Thus, if I’m the Lead Player and one of those crappy cards comes up, I can bid zero, but if everyone else does the same thing, I’m stuck with the card.  Not only that, but I no longer get to be Lead Player!  This is a pretty bad rule, IMO, as it seems unnecessarily capricious and can lead to bad feelings.  You can’t even plan ahead for this effect, since the cards to be auctioned off are only revealed a few at a time.  Michelle Zentis was in my game and she suggested a potential house rule where, if everyone bids zero for a card, the Lead Player would have the option of either taking the card or discarding it (and remaining Lead Player).  With that change, I’d happily play FZZZT! again; without it, I’m afraid my desire to play would fizzz-le out.

Okay, that’s the last of the acceptable games.  Be prepared for the horror that is...THE REALLY BAD GAMES OF ESSEN!

Alcazar: Something went terribly wrong with the design of this game.  Here we have a world class designer (Kramer) and a first-rate publisher (Kosmos) updating a popular and much sought after game (Big Boss, a 1994 Kramer design which is essentially a linear version of Acquire).  How could they mess up this badly?

Because of the peculiar German dislike of business games and the even more peculiar German love of Medieval castles, the businesses of Big Boss have been replaced by castles.  Thematically, this probably makes a bit more sense, particularly since building upwards is a big strategy in both games.  Players can no longer buy shares in the structures they create; these have been replaced by nobles which stand on various floors of the castle.  The higher the level of the floor the noble stands on, the more VPs it is worth at the end of the game.  Each player also has two Grandes available to them, which are nobles that cost twice as much to place, but are worth double the normal VPs.

The switch from shares to nobles is a big part of the problem, though.  The trouble is that when you merge castles, the nobles on the smaller one don’t go away, but instead stay where they are and just become part of the newly enlarged castle.  Thus, if you own nobles on the castle which was just swallowed up, this doesn’t affect you in the least.  In fact, the size of the castle where your nobles are based isn’t really a major concern (it affects things somewhat, but not tremendously); all you really care about is how high your dudes are.  The rules for mergers go into considerable detail about which castle gets credit for the newly placed piece, but it really doesn’t seem to matter at all.

This in itself gives the game a peculiar feel and would seem to take away one of the principle strategies of Big Boss, namely that of using mergers to hurt your opponents (I say it seems to because I’ve never had the chance to actually play Big Boss).  A bigger problem, though, comes from the way that the Etage cards from Big Boss are reimplemented in Alcazar.  The Etage cards are used to build upwards in Big Boss.  They have been replaced by Tower cards, which are no longer shuffled into the building deck but are now available in a separate pile for any player who wishes to buy them (they cost twice as much as a regular building card).  This sounds like an improvement, as these powerful cards are no longer subjected to the luck of the draw, but it isn’t.  The problem is that it lets the players employ a ridiculously obvious, but reasonably powerful strategy:  get your Grandes on the board and then, in alternating turns, buy a Tower card and then use it to raise the level of one of your Grandes.  Repeat until the Tower cards are gone, which ends the game.  This gives you 2 VPs every two turns, and if the castle that your Grande is in is sufficiently large, this comes close to 3 VPs per two turns.  You probably can’t win by using that strategy exclusively, but it seems as if every game is going to end with the players playing like that and that’s just bizarre.

Two of my opponents were major fans of Big Boss and they were both bitterly disappointed with this new version of their favorite.  What’s more, during our game, someone else wandered over who had just finished his own game of Alcazar and he had the same complaints about the gameplay that we did.  So the likelihood that groupthink was at work was diminished.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Alcazar is broken, but a good part of the strategy now seems to be trivial.  Even worse, it just isn’t a whole lot of fun.  I’m not ruling out the possibility that we were playing incorrectly.  The English translator did his best, but the text is a bit wonky.  Additionally, the original German rules are very poorly organized, requiring the reader to jump around the rulebook to figure out how to play.  So it’s possible that this game is actually better than our experience led us to believe.  But for now, I have to call this a major disappointment and unless you want to use the components to play Big Boss the original way (the game comes with rules that let you do nearly that), I’d advise you to stay far away from this one.

Carson City: I’m bummed at how my game of this turned out, because I really enjoyed designer Xavier Georges’ first game, Royal Palace.  But this was one of those games where my rating seemed to fall a point every turn.  Carson City is a thematic Worker Placement game set in the Wild West.  There are two features which distinguish it from other WP games:  there are an unusually large number of choices each turn and players can fight over the same choice.  It’s the latter concept that gave me trouble.

When two players both put their cowboys on the same action, they fight a duel.  A player’s strength is affected by some of her buildings and maybe some earlier actions she took that round, but mostly by the number of cowboys she still has in front of her.  However, if you fight a battle and lose, the cowboy you tried to place on that action returns to your supply.  Thus, you get stronger for your subsequent battles.  This is fine for the player with multiple attacks, as she receives some compensation for losing the fight, but it sucks for the players she’s attacking late in the turn.  Suddenly, that very manageable attack has very short odds.  Since you can’t be sure how those earlier battles will play out (and you might have even passed before they were launched), putting any sort of plan into play is very difficult.  It all comes down to the cowboy battles, which makes the game much less interesting IMO, requiring you either get lucky or, more likely, not get picked on as often as the others.

I can’t even complain about the dice rolling, because we used the “Might is Right” variant listed in the rules.  The standard rule is that each player rolls a die and adds the total to their strength before determining the winner.  In the variant, each player is secretly dealt some tiles (numbered 0 to 5), with the players starting with a low sum of tiles being compensated with additional starting money.  In each battle, you play a tile secretly and add it to your strength.  As it turns out, the tile variant might be worse than rolling dice.  Having a high tile total does you little good if you get attacked often; even spurious attacks will leech away your good tiles (and it’s too risky to routinely play low ones).  Once you run out of tiles, you blindly draw some new ones, so you’re once again dealing with a crap shoot.  At least with the die rolling, you aren’t subjected to psychological doublethink games.

There are some good ideas here and I thought the game had promise based on the rules.  Unfortunately, the design seems to be dominated by the attacks.  Someone on the Geek mentioned that using the alternate side of the characters (the red side) reduces the emphasis on attacking.  With fewer gunfights, the strategic side of the game might be restored.  So if I’m asked to play this again, I’ll see if I can get them to use the red characters.  But honestly, I’d just as soon avoid this in the future.  If you like your Euros sprinkled with a liberal dose of AT bloodletting, Carson City might very well be the game for you.  But if you prefer a quieter existence, you might agree that this is a title that needs to stay safely buried on Boot Hill.

Colonia: Speaking of AT, if you have a friend who’s an Ameritrash fan and he likes poking fun at theme-starved Euros, do him a favor and show him Colonia.  Here’s a game in which you acquire Resource Type #1, which you trade in for Resource Type #2, which you can then exchange for Resource Type #3, which at long last you can trade in for Resource Type #4, which thankfully are the game’s victory points.  Trust me, he’ll laugh his ass off—it’s an Ameritrasher’s wet dream!

Despite that description (which is not exaggerated by one iota), it’s possible that something like this could work if it was handled properly.  And since the game’s designer is Dirk Henn, the odds for that are higher than you might expect.  Unfortunately, this hope is not realized and this is one time you should definitely listen to your AT buddy.

I first suspected Colonia was going to be trouble during the game’s setup.  While laying out the possible ways of obtaining the various Resource Types, you will be confronted with 30 to 40 different parcels of data.  I believe the proper term is “information overload”.  There’s just too much to take in, at least for my limited brain.  If you’re lucky, you’ll find one thread that looks promising and you pray that no one will interfere with this one Master Plan.  Of course, there’s no chance of that happening, so you either subject your fellow players to a severe case of AP or you just play by the seat of your pants and hope for the best.  Sadly, no part of my pants has ever managed to win a game.

Okay, I’ll grant you that some may be better at assimilating all this data than I am.  But the real killing blow is that not all of these choices are available and whether they are or not is determined by luck.  So you are given that only some of Resource Type #2 can be obtained this turn, but then, after you’ve all chosen which ones of these to pursue, you roll a die six times to see which additional ones might come to life.  If you somehow managed to seize upon a plan, this could obviously make it null and void.  You could also have the situation we experienced in our game, in which one of these resources stubbornly refused to show up for over half of the game, which warped the subsequent exchanges considerably.  Even worse is Resource Type #3, which are arranged on ships.  From one to three ships will be available per turn.  The difference between these two extremes is enormous and can really skew play.  If you’ve set yourself up so that on the last turn, you’ll finally acquire that much sought after combination of Step 2 resources you need to cash in on the second ship, which will lead to oodles of VPs, imagine how thrilled you’ll be when only one of those ships sails.  Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Of course, the random factors can work in your favor as well, but that’s not really any more satisfying.  In my game, over half of my VPs came during one turn and they just fell in my lap.  A very fortunate series of die rolls meant that I had just the right combination of resources to make a killing.  It wasn’t even something I had considered as a possibility, it just happened.  There were some turns where players planned out a path to VPs and made it work, but it didn’t happen often enough to rescue the game.

Tying together all these wondrous exchanges is a cube management mechanic; you bid cubes to determine turn order and then you use your remaining cubes in various ways for the exchanges.  Naturally, your cube supply is limited and the idea is to get something accomplished while managing your cubes.  The idea is a sound one, but it didn’t seem to affect play too much.  Maybe if planning was better rewarded, the players would be more tempted to be reckless with their cubes.  I’ll assume that this comes into play more with experience, but the restriction really only served as a minor annoyance in our game.

There’s also a system of proposed laws, where you vote whether or not you want the temporary event to happen.  Again, a good idea, but one that gets buried under the weight of the rest of the game’s activities.  It felt distinctly like putting lipstick on the pig, but this time in a non-political way.

The game’s greatest crime is that it lasts for six long turns, for no particular reason that we could ascertain.  Our game went on for over two and a half hours and we really didn’t waste too much time in over-analyzing things.  It then had a very anticlimactic end in which few things could be bought on the last turn.  If anything, this soured us even more and there was considerable relief when the game finally crawled to a close.

Look, I know I’m being harsh here, but this really was a fairly miserable gaming experience.  I know the title has its fans, but I’m struggling to figure out which group it would appeal to.  Despite the morass of information available, Colonia feels more like a family game than a gamer’s game, since the individual decisions aren’t particularly challenging ones.  But it’s a family game heaped with detail and side mechanics which lasts for quite a long time; I’m not sure that’s a terribly overpopulated niche.  Maybe players who delight in sifting through lots of data are enjoying this, but that sure didn’t include any of us.  It’s a shame, because I’ve always thought that Dirk Henn was a talented designer and this is the first meaty and completely original game he’s created since Alhambra appeared six years ago.  I had hopes that despite the Resource Type Tango, this would be another one of his successes.  Sadly, that wasn’t the case.

Ramses Pyramid: This is a children’s game, a genre I rarely play.  The only reasons it got tried—and the only reasons I’m talking about it here—are:  1) the components are made entirely of Legos; 2) Knizia is a co-designer; and 3) it won the Spiel der Spiele, making it Austria’s Game of the Year.  All I can say is, “Oh, those zany Austrians!” The Lego construction doesn’t affect the gameplay at all, so it’s just a gimmick.  What’s left is a simple roll-and-move game with a kind of pointless memory element (I say it’s pointless because after I reveal the item to use it, everyone can now take advantage of this information) and a “take that” mechanic which can send you back to the start when you’re on the verge of winning.  Totally uninspired and if it was made of normal components, no one would give it the least attention.  I have to believe that there are a ton of better children’s games than this, but I still recommend you buy it for your kids.  Then you can play it with them, hand them their own Legos and say, “See how that played?  Now, I want you to do better!” And I bet they can.

Seven Hills: I don’t want to be too hard on this game, as it appears to be a first effort from a Korean startup.  But I’m afraid the kindest thing you can do with this game is avoid it.  It’s an Area Majority design where your pieces are placed by playing Rummy-style sets from your hand (similar to Ticket to Ride).  Not an awful idea, but it’s sabotaged by some faulty design choices.  First, the cards come in seven suits and the hand limit is seven cards.  Since most of the cards you acquire come from blind draws, you won’t be surprised that rainbow hands come up with frustrating frequency.  There’s also a weird mechanic where you can draw additional cards if you don’t play a set, but the number of cards you can draw alternates between one and two.  So if the number is at one and you choose to draw cards, not only do you get screwed by only getting a single card, but you allow the next player to grab two.  Very strange.  The rules are pretty poor as well.  So if the less charitable among you want to rename Seven Hills to “Seven Hells”, I won’t dispute it.

Strada Romana: Since I live in the congested Washington DC area, the last thing I want to see is a game about traffic jams, but that’s the main theme of this design set in Ancient Rome.  To be fair, lots of racing games feature choke points and bottlenecks, but not so prominently.  And it plays out about as excitingly as you might expect.  I don’t think Strada Romana is bad so much as it’s kind of pointless.  There are ten wagons on the board—five traveling from left to right and five traveling from right to left—and they travel over the same set of roads.  On your turn, you get to move some of them and based on where they end up, you might be able to take a counter and/or a cube.  If you have a counter and a cube of the same color in your supply, it represents a delivery.  Your score at the end of the game is equal to the number of different colored deliveries you’ve acquired multiplied by the highest number of deliveries you have in one color.

Okay, fair enough, but in our game, at least, this proved to be ridiculously easy to do.  On the vast majority of turns, each player was able to grab a counter and a cube of the same color.  Often, it was in the color they most needed.  There was no tension and few clever moves, just move, grab, grab, “Your turn.” The traffic jams didn’t even come into play until very late in the game, so even the game’s main focus was lacking.

You can also predict which wagons will complete their journey, but that wasn’t too exciting either.  It really only made sense to do this in the middle of the game—too early, and it was a crapshoot; too late, and the likely finishers had all been chosen.  Finally, there are some special moves you can make for a cost (like moving sideways or diagonally), but these were rarely necessary to accomplish everything you wanted during your turn.  I don’t know, maybe we weren’t playing the game very well, but without any real challenge, it was pretty boring and...well, like I said, pointless.

Designer Walter Obert did a good job getting his games published this year, but this one pales in comparison to Aargh!Tect, the party-style game of his where you try to communicate with your caveman partner by smacking him on the head with an inflatable club.  Then again, I guess that’s not a fair comparison; if you had the chance to play a game about Roman traffic jams or a head-bopping, club-wielding caveman game, which would you choose?

That’s my Rogue’s Gallery of games from BGG.con.  Thankfully, it was balanced by an equal number of very good games I played.  While the time spent on pre-Thanksgiving turkeys wasn’t pleasant, sometimes that’s the price you have to pay when you try new designs.  There are still more Essen games yet to be played and, with any luck, I’ll find more of the Good and less of the Bad in the days to come.

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