W. Eric Martin: Company profile: Immortal Eyes Games/Reviews: Pecking Order & Conquest of Pangea

Winning Moves Games celebrated its tenth birthday in 2005, but the event passed without notice in the spielfriek community. Even though Alex Randolph was one of the company’s founders (along with Phil E. Orbanes, Tom Kremer, and Mike Meyers) and Raj (aka Hol’s der Geier) was one of Winning Moves’ first games, the company’s releases are now so mainstream that they attract little attention from Eurofans. New games in the 2006 Winning Moves catalog, for example, are rehashes or reprints of old games: the re-introduction of Rubik’s World, a travel version of Stay Alive, a new edition of 25 Words or Less, and Easy Money, a boardgame that’s been in and out of print for seven decades.

In fact, the majority of Winning Moves’ offerings are toy-related (Rubik’s Homer Simpson, Rubik’s Sudoku), reworkings of standard games (Super Scrabble, No Stress Chess, Clue: the Card Game) and nostalgic reissues (Park and Shop, Pente, Payday, Pass the Pigs).

But that’s not the case in Europe, where Winning Moves Deutschland has published Eurofare such as TransAmerica, Clans, Alexandros, and Caribbean—all games that appeared in America bearing not the sister company’s logo, but that of Rio Grande Games.

Joe Sequino, director of marketing at Winning Moves, says that he and his co-workers enjoyed the German titles, but didn’t realize the size of the market in the U.S. But once he started playtesting Winning Moves’ products with consumers in 2003, he discovered that most of the testers (including your humble author) were big fans of Eurogames. “That same year, we exhibited at Origins and Gen Con for the first time,” he says. “After witnessing the rabid fans of Eurogames, we knew we had to be part of that market.”

With Winning Moves cemented in the minds of consumers and retailers as a vendor of family and retro games, the Immortal Eyes Games brand was created to showcase the new line of strategy games. The first two releases, Pecking Order and Conquest of Pangea, were released at Origins in June 2006 and are reviewed below; Terra Nova will follow in August.

Even though the two lines of products are aimed at distinct audiences, Sequino plans to present the IEG titles at Toy Fair in 2007. As for other developments, Sequino says, “Once you add in the Winning Moves Germany, France, and UK offices, we have a very rich wealth of inventors, designers, and ‘scouts’ in our family.... We are working on the 2007 line now, but that’s about all I can say.”

Pecking Order

Game #1 in the Immortal Eyes line, Pecking Order is a two-player game by Richard Garfield that is amazing in its bare bones nature: 26 cards and a lengthy tri-fold board. “Pecking Order came to us through Richard Garfield almost two years ago,” says Sequino. Garfield and Skaff Elias, who has been mentioned as the game’s co-designer although his name is nowhere on the box, first showed the game to Sequino’s boss at Essen in 2004. “We mocked up some designs, and I played it with Richard at Origins in 2005. That’s when we struck our agreement.”

Pecking Order is a mix of bluffing and deduction that lists a playing time of 30+ minutes, but my games have lasted far less than that, typically 10-15 minutes. Either me and my opponents possess game-playing skills far above those of mere mortals or else—hmm, that’s the only explanation I can think of.

As for how to play the game, each player has a deck of 13 cards: twelve bird cards numbered 1-12 and a jaguar. The board depicts 11 “perches” on each side, numbered 1-10 with the 8 repeated. Players shuffle their decks, then take turns drawing a single card and placing it face down on an empty perch on their side of the board. If the opponent’s perch on the opposite side of the board is empty, you now control that perch; if the opponent has a card on his side of that perch, he flips his card face-up and one of two things happen:

• If the number on your card is equal to or higher than the opponent’s, you say “I win,” and the opponent removes his card from the game.
• If your card is lower than the opponents, say “You win” and remove your card.

The card that remains controls that perch, and your card—win or lose—remains face-down. In either case, the opponent gains some information about your card.

Two perches have special qualities. Number 3 is the “vision perch”; when you take control of this perch, you can look at one of the opponent’s face-down cards. Number 1 is a tie-breaker, and if you control this perch, you win all ties between cards, whether you’re attacking or defending.

The jaguar removes an opponent’s card from play, whether you attack an opponent’s card with it or are attacked yourself. The jaguar is also removed from the game when this occurs.

The round ends when both players have played all their cards. Each player then scores points for the perches he occupies: 10 points for the 10 perch, 9 for the 9, and so on, with the two 8 perches scoring 19 points (instead of 16) if you occupy both of them. Players then shuffle their cards and start another round, alternating the start player. After four rounds, you total all the scores and the high score wins.

Says Sequino, “Pecking Order was played internally and by the WM sister companies for about a year. As it was a Garfield game, it was pretty much good to go as is. We themed the game and made very minor tweaks. Consumer testing was very important for rules clarity.”

Pecking Order’s rules are extremely clear, and you can learn them or teach someone the game in a few minutes. Basic strategy is obvious—play high cards on high-valued perches and low cards on low—but you do have tricks to pull and tricks to watch out for, such as using low-value cards as scouts against the opponent and laying the jaguar in unexpected places. You can often deduce what two or three values a face-down card might have, but since some cards are removed from the game without being revealed, you also have to read your opponent for clues.

Although game play is similar from round to round, playing multiple rounds is essential as the first player is often being chased by the second and the scores can be lopsided depending on who starts. (Someone who playtested the game at Winning Moves’ headquarters noticed that the printed rules call for four rounds of play, whereas his playtest games had only three.)

Pecking Order is a bit pricey for the components you receive, but it’s an American production and the game play is solid. The age range is listed as “teen to adult,” but I’m sure that eight-year-olds would have no trouble learning the rules.

Conquest of Pangea

The second game in the Immortal Eyes line is a far cry from five-minute filler, and that was the intention. “When my boss, Philip C. Orbanes, Jr., and I put together the business plan for Immortal Eyes Games, we wanted to have three different games that fit three different niches,” says Sequino. “We wanted a ‘big-box’ strategy game that took about 2+ hours to complete, we wanted a ‘fast’ game that had hobby gamer and crossover appeal, and we wanted an import. We were fortunate to achieve all three of our wants.”

(Terra Nova, the import in the IEG line, is available in Europe, but the American edition won’t be published until August 2006. Valerie Putman summarizes the game nicely in her Origins column of July 2. Based on two plays, I agree that this abstract game scales well and plays quickly, while providing a good mental challenge.)

Conquest of Pangea is an area-control game in which players are undefined species trying to dominate sections of the supercontinent hundreds of millions of years in the past. “[It’s] a homegrown game from our president, Phil E. Orbanes, Sr.,” says Sequino. Orbanes started to design Pangea when Winning Moves decided to enter the hobby game market, and the game went through two years of internal playtesting at the various Winning Moves offices, in addition to consumer playtesting prior to release.

“This game changed in a very big way because of the playtesting,” says Sequino. “Game play and the components are almost completely different than when originally hatched. By the time it got to the consumer testing, the changes that came were mostly rules clarity.”

On the board, seven continents, each of which is divided into two to six regions, are placed next to one another to form the supercontinent Pangea. Each region on a continent has a randomly drawn chit that determines its landscape (mountains, hills, forest, plains, or lake), and each landscape has a particular number associated with it (mountains 1, forest 4, lake 6) that determines the maximum number of pieces in that region, the number of power points needed to enter that region, and the points scored for that region at the end of the game.

Each turn, a player has five power points to use to (1) add pieces to regions where he has a presence, (2) expand to a new region (if he has at least two pieces in adjacent regions), (3) battle for control against the leader of a region (which is possible only if a region is full), or (4) migrate to a new region (if all of your pieces are in play). If a player controls at least two landscapes of the same type, he gains a leader card for that landscape that gives him additional power points; a player also gains power cards (worth 1-5 points, with some cards being reusable) by adding pieces to a region, expanding, or winning a battle, so you can have a huge number of power points available on your turn.

When you add a piece to a region, it goes on the bottom of the stack—unless you gain numerical superiority in that region, in which case you place it on top. Whoever owns the piece on top is the leader of that region and holds a landscape card showing how many points the region is worth. When you take control of a region, you take the landscape card from the previous controller.

At the end of your turn, you flip the top card of a Time deck face up and follow the effects on that card. Effects include droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, and other natural disasters, which force you to remove pieces (possibly your own) on the continent depicted. Other effects let you add or move your own pieces or give you a raft that lets you move a piece from one seashore to another on a later turn.

Each Time card also has a value on it, from 4-20 million years, and if the face up Time cards total 25 million years or more, the continent pictured on the current card breaks away from Pangea and those Time cards are put aside. (If the pictured continent has already separated, you go to the next continent in line on the card.) Once all six continents have broken away from Africa, the game ends and players add up the region cards they hold to determine a winner.

The continent break-away mechanism is a fantastic idea, and the component design makes it work well. Once a continent has separated, players need a raft (or a lake leader card, which can serve as a raft) to reach it, so holdings on that continent become harder to contest—although adjacent regions on the continent still provide a convenient launching ground for attack.

While the game as a whole works, Conquest of Pangea has several failings that make it feel more like an American design than a Eurogame. To start with, initial placement on the board is mostly random. Players flip over a Time card to determine a continent, draw a random landscape chit, place a piece and the chit in an empty region on that continent, and take the appropriate landscape card. If you’re lucky, you’ll own lots of lakes; they’re worth 6 points and harder to attack; if you’re unlucky, the continent will be full and your piece will go under someone else’s; if you’re really unlucky, you’ll draw one of two 0 chits (volcanoes, representing uninhabitable land), be denied any placement that turn, and be less likely to start with a leader card, hurting your initial growth.

One solution to this problem: put 24 random landscape chits and one 0 chit in a bag and draw randomly to place them in the 25 regions, then have players take turns claiming regions, using a Settlers-style method of alternating clockwise and counter-clockwise placements. Each player will claim the same number of regions, and you’ll have more control over your starting positions.

The randomness continues with the Time deck because the card effects have widely differing power levels and you have no control over what you draw. As one player in my group wrote, “When it wasn’t your turn, you hoped you wouldn’t get kicked in the balls too hard—and when you got your Time card, it was like getting sweet revenge.” (That’s not to say the Time cards are all bad. As he noted, Time cards kept the game from being too analytical and they could break up defenses that would otherwise be unassailable—although other players would have the first crack at the vulnerable territory, so that’s hardly a benefit for you.)

Most leader cards offer you protection from a particular type of disaster, but in a four-player game at least one of the players will likely lack a defense against the Time card and you can slam him hard.

Despite Sequino’s customer playtesting and rule tweaks, the rules were still spotty on where pieces defeated in battle go, how to interpret certain Time cards, when you can use rafts, and how to resolve battle situations when you wouldn’t gain the lead. (I’ll post rule clarifications from Sequino on BGG.)

The most serious problem, one that occurred in both a two-player and four-player game, was that the points became evenly distributed among the players and the points leader was whoever went last. Each turn the active player has five power points to spend in addition to all the cards in his hand, and with so much power available, no one ever failed to take control of one or two landscape cards on his turn, so the lead passed from hand to hand to hand. Continents were peeled off every few turns, yet the lead continued to pass clockwise. Your only hope for winning was for the game to end on your turn.

Now admittedly this problem might have happened because we were all learning the game. Perhaps we were too cautious with our battles, which let us build up huge hands of power cards and kept lots of pieces in play. (Pieces defeated in battle are removed from the game, which reduces a player’s options in future turns. In my two-player game, for example, we had the Risk-like experience of passing control of a region back and forth, gaining power cards each turn with no permanent progress.)

Unfortunately, the lead-passing experience has left no one eager to play the game again to see whether further plays and better strategy would change the situation. I’d love to hear from others who have played Conquest of Pangea to know whether my two plays are atypical. Give me a reason, and I’ll twist arms for another go at this game.

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