W. Eric Martin: My Top Game of 2007 Is…

Not going to be revealed for several more paragraphs. You might think April is too early to unveil my top game for 2007, but let me lay out the facts first to see whether I can convince you otherwise.

To start with, the key words in the subject line are “my top.” I’m not claiming that this title is, and will continue to be, the best designed game of the year. (The game was actually released in 2006 after all!) I doubt we could agree on objective standards for “best” in any case, so I’ll instead rely on personal experience, most importantly the “number of times played” statistic.

I’ve tracked my games played since mid-2003 on BoardGameGeek and have seen a clear pattern emerge. Each year, I acquire one game that my wife Linda comes to love, and we subsequently play that game to death. The first year this occurred was 2004 with Leo Colovini’s Familienbande. I bought the game through Adam Spielt in July, then played it more than 50 times before the end of the year.

As with many Colovini games, Familienbande plays best with two, and the length was perfect for an after-dinner game or two between me and the Mrs. It was the first game, other than perhaps cribbage, that I could suggest with the expectation that she would almost never say no. We kept playing it into 2005, but then in April I purchased…

Diamant, which proved to be the perfect introductory and closer game for my group, which I had started by posting signs at the karate dojo I attended. Although these folks were interested, they didn’t have a background in designer games, so I chose games with shorter rules over and over again whenever we had someone new. What’s more, if you expect someone else to arrive in a few minutes, you can teach and play Diamant—possibly more than once—in that time.

Again, my wife loved the game, and she quickly developed a reputation as a non-stop gambler. She would go into those mines farther than any reasonable person would ever dare to go, which meant that those traveling beside her would have their haul reduced, which would then encourage them to go farther themselves—and before you know it, they all died. Linda ended a huge percentage of her games with zero gems, but every so often, she’d grab 15 or 17 gems for herself, which on top of the other gems she’d put aside would be enough to send her back to camp, usually for a victory dance. (Luckily she exhibited no such gambling tendencies during our one trip to Atlantic City!)

Diamant cooled off in September 2005, when we moved to Concord, NH, and we swapped a garden of gamers to be cultivated for a ripe crop of experienced cube jockeys. It still made a fine intro game when newbies showed up from Craig’s list, but with Linda not being as involved in this group, she stayed away from the tables until 2006 brought not one, but two new games:

Easy Come, Easy Go and To Court the King. I purchased Knizia’s Easy Come, Easy Go used at Unity Games in January, and once Linda had a taste of its push-your-luck dice-combo flavor, she pushed for it whenever we had one or two guests in the house. With its short playing time, we played it two, three or even four times at a session. Strangely enough, I don’t think we’ve ever played the game by ourselves.

April brought a new dice darling to the table. Linda accompanied me to the Gathering of Friends in 2006, and while I could stir up only one game of Bohnanza for her (with the most cutthroat bean traders I’ve ever encountered), she did discover Tom Lehmann’s dice game. The push-your-luck aspect of the game appealed to her, as did its great and speedy game play with two players. These two games hit the same spot for Linda and were played again and again throughout 2006.

Why these four games? What do they all have in common? Here are a few shared attributes:

• Short rules. You can teach anyone these games in just a few minutes, making them perfect for both the initial game and any subsequent games when we have someone new at the table.
• Short playing time. None of these games takes longer than 30 minutes, and depending on the flow of the game 10-15 minutes isn’t out of the question.
• Level playing field. The luck factor in each of these games is relatively high, which balances out most of the gains that can be made through strategy. Don’t draw your family’s trait in Familienbande? Better luck next time.

So what’s this year’s spring surprise?

Although I initially compared the game to Einfach Genial/Ingenious, a better comparison would be to Scrabble. After I taught the game to one player, for example, he said, “Oh, it’s Scrabble with color and shape placement restrictions for tiles worth a single point, with a six-point bingo for maxing out a row.” That’s a great summary of the game if you’re describing it to knowledgable game-players.

I’ve played Qwirkle more than twenty times in a month and expect to be playing it far into the summer. The game plays well with two, three, and four players, and the number of players does affect the plays that you’ll make. With only two players, for example, I tend to create more potential bingoes (that is, rows of five tiles) for my opponent when I can score seven or more points on that turn. Odds are roughly even that I’ll draw the sixth tile needed for the row before my opponent does, so the payout is worth the risk.

The nature of your opponents also affects the flow of the game. Some people like to disrupt rows whenever possible, blocking all players from making bingoes since they have little chance of completing the row themselves. Sometimes neighborhoods of one or more shape develop, effectively killing those regions of the board unless you draw that shape yourself.

With more experience, I can now better see when players are trying to build up an area of the board for future scoring—possibly because I’m learning how to do this myself. Even when you can play multiple tiles on a turn, for instance, you sometimes don’t want to in order to set up a future bingo with a supplemental crossrow score.

After finishing a game recently, we were contemplating with our friend Max the idea of playing Inverse Qwirkle, that is, requiring that all tiles in a line segment not match in both color and shape. A few days later, after playing the game as is, Linda and I shuffled the tiles again and tried our hand at Inverse Qwirkle.

The game played surprisingly well, although both of us complained of immense headaches from about the sixth turn on. The number of plays available to you is astounding, and the order in which you lay the tiles down matters much more as the requirement to not match cuts off plays that would normally be ideal.

As with the standard game, you can create bingoes of six tiles in Inverse Qwirkle, but since you’re forced to not match existing colors and shapes, you have more potential plays when adding to a row of three or four tiles. With four tiles, for example, you have two pairs of tiles that can be played, and with three tiles you have six possible triplets. These options give your tiles in hand values that are more difficult to evaluate—and since you can typically play more tiles per turn than in the regular game, you have oodles more to consider for each play.

The only drawback, aside from the icecreamless icecream headache, was a greater risk of making a mistake while placing a tile. We did this once but noticed only after a few turns when it was impossible to reset the game and subtract the right number of points. In the end, we threw the offending tile back in the mix, attached an asterisk to the game, and moved on.

I’m sure to play many more new games in the remaining eight-plus months of 2007, but I’m unlikely to find a game that will unseat Qwirkle as my top game of the year. I’ve taught the game to people of all ages and game experience levels, and it’s gone over well with all of them. As you might guess, I highly recommend picking up a copy, especially since I have only one copy to give away to a BGN member at the end of April…

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