W. Eric Martin: First Impressions – Rattus, Jaipur, Cornucopia

Time to take a look at a trio of new games, all of which have hit the market since December 2009 or are on the way to store shelves as of this date. Note that I received review copies of all three games.

First up, Rattus from designers Åse and Henrik Berg (Oregon) and publisher White Goblin Games. In case you didn’t guess from the name and the furry faces on the box cover, Rattus is themed around the Black Death, with player cubes dying off again and again as the plague travels throughout Eurasia.

One face-down rat token starts on each region of the board. On a turn, a player adds one or more cubes to one region, with the upper limit of new arrivals being the number of rats in the area; optionally takes one of the six special characters; optionally uses the powers of any characters he holds; then moves the plague figure to a new region of the board, most likely spreading more rats along the way.

If the plague figure – being the personification of death – stands on a region that contains both rat tokens and player cubes, the rat tokens are revealed one by one. Each rat token has a limit value showing the number of cubes (1-6) that trigger an outbreak and symbols that show who dies in the event of an outbreak. Those symbols are M (meaning the player who has the most cubes), A (meaning all players) and the six symbols that represent the special characters; if you hold the special character shown on the token – or have the most cubes in the event of an M, or exist at all with an A – you lose one cube for each matching symbol. If rats and cubes remain in the same area, you keep revealing rats until one group or the other dies off. Whoever has the most people on board at game’s end wins and gets to bury the dead.

Since the rat tokens are placed face-down, you’re playing in the Dark Ages for much of the game, running the odds mentally for how many dudes you might potentially lose – but not really knowing because you didn’t memorize all the rat tokens prior to the game anyway.

Rattus presents you with the dilemma of taking characters in order to gain powers while simultaneously setting yourself up for future death. If you have no characters, after all, you die only when facing M or A on the rats. I’ve played only a single two-player game, and my “awesome” strategy consisted of piling three dudes a turn into a single region while holding only one character. I was gambling on not losing too many guys when that region was ratted at the end of the game, and my opponent let me do it because he had no idea whether that would work either. He beat me by one, but given the turn of the rats either of us could have won.

One game of Rattus played by stupid players doing obvious, semi-random actions means I can’t say anything conclusive about the game. I’ve seen enough people dismiss Qwirkle as an obvious game with no room for strategy or thoughtful plays to know that I should keep my mouth shut at this point, so I will – except to say that I’m charmed by the rules referring to a player’s pieces as “cubes,” instead of people or tribes or any other such descriptive word. Probably best not to think of the dying oozing pus and blood. Don’t think about it, I said!

Sébastien Pauchon’s Jaipur is the first title from GameWorks that isn’t a commissioned design, instead marking the growth of GameWorks – co-owned by Pauchon and Malcolm Braff – into the larger world of small, independent publishers.

The theme of Jaipur – merchants trading and selling goods to earn the most money – isn’t going to excite anyone familiar with modern games. It’s a comforting gloss along the lines of the story in James Cameron’s Avatar, the soft chair of familiarity that you sink into without really thinking about it so that you can get to the good stuff.

And the game play is good, akin to Reiner Knizia’s Lost Cities in the way that luck and skill blur across one another. You roll with the punches of which cards turn up when, while having a larger degree of control over what happens that you initially realize. After five games, I’m getting a better sense of when to cash in goods, when to shoot for large hauls, and when to play for the end of the round – and I feel like there’s more hill to climb in the future.

The card deck in Jaipur contains six types of goods and camels. Players start with five cards in hand, and a display of three camels and two other cards. On a turn you can:

• Pick up a goods card and add it to your hand.
• Take all the camels on display, placing them in your herd on the table.
• Trade cards from your herd and hand for goods on display, adding them to your hand.
• Cash in goods of one type for scoring tokens, taking as many tokens as the number of cards you discard.

1. The most valuable scoring tokens are claimed first, while bonus tokens are available if you cash in three, four or five cards at once. You want to hold out for that five-card wallop, yet by doing so the opponent might claim the more valuable scoring tokens first, shaving off the margin you hoped to gain.

2. You have a hand limit of seven cards, and you bounce against that ceiling all game. You want more in hand to sell in the future, but you can’t take it all – and the more you wait, the more likely your opponent is to beat you to the punch.

In short, while the randomness of the card draw can strike like a loose power line, there’s more going on in Jaipur than is apparent upon the first play, which is another reason not to judge Rattus just yet.

Cornucopia, designed by Carlo A. Rossi and Lorenzo Tarabini and published by FRED Distribution in its Gryphon Games line, is two games mashed into one. If only potatoes were one of the goods in the game…

First, on your turn you play a bidding game, choosing how many cards (1-6) to draw from a deck to try to fill one of five baskets with fruits and vegetables. One basket must be filled with five goods of the same type, while the other four can be filled with either five of the same type of good or five different goods. You draw cards one at a time – possibly discarding one of them – and place each in one of the baskets as long as the play is legal. Fill a basket before you run out of draws, and you win some tokens and the bidding card; fail to fill a basket, or draw a card that can’t be played, and your turn ends, with you being penalized.

The second game takes place when you’re not the active player, with you bidding on whether that person will fill or fail to fill a basket on her turn. Guess wrong and you lose the 1-3 tokens you bid; guess right and you double the bid. This second game, running concurrently with the first, doesn’t affect your primary performance one way or the other. It’s a way to score (or lose) a few points, which might be the margin of victory depending on how everything else shakes out.

More importantly, this bid gives you a reason to care about what other people do. Yes, their actions affect you – if she fails to complete that row, you’ll likely draw a different number of cards than you would if she succeeds – but bidding directly on their success or failure creates an emotional connection to both the active player and the other opponents that wouldn’t exist otherwise. If you and one other player think she’ll succeed while two others want her to fail, you have a reason to root for an outcome; you want to root; you’re invested in her success.

This secondary bidding system isn’t perfect. If everyone votes for success or failure, as is the case in some situations, you lose that attachment – especially when the card draw becomes a gimme. “You’re drawing six cards? Yeah, sure. Now train a bazooka on that cricket.” Given the point system, however, with players earning points for collecting sets and runs of bidding cards, such bidding choices will be made unless everyone plays like a foolhardy daredevil. Worse, with nearly everyone bidding each round, tides of chips flow back and forth across the table: two to you, three to the pot, three to you, one to the pot.

Worst of all, the bidding feels superfluous in the two-player game. With two players, you’re alternating card draws so the bidding on success/failure feels like an interruption of the main action. At best, between active turns you win or lose a point, which is a distraction from the bidding cards and rewards for filling baskets. With five players, though, the bidding can net you four points between your “real” turns, so it becomes as important (if not as interesting) as the main game.

The game ends once three bidding piles empty or you run through the deck twice, with players then scoring for the aforementioned sets and runs of bidding cards as well as for the tokens they’ve collected. With a big group, Cornucopia brought out a rah-rah feel; with two players, Cornucopia brought out a desire to play the game with a big group.

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