W. Eric Martin: Short Takes—Star System, Jamaica, Age of Gods

Rather than wait for additional plays in order to write full-blown reviews, I thought I’d go ahead and present half-blown thoughts on a trio of new titles.

Star System

Any game with a deduction element usually gets slapped with the “deduction game” label, even when the game has more going on than the mere deducing of hidden information. Clue and Mastermind, for example, are deduction games plain and simple. Once a player has sussed out the solution to the murder or mystery pattern, the game ends.

Mr. Jack, on the other hand, involves deduction, but the crucial element of game play is that Jack must be captured in order for the investigator to win the game. If the Jack player can keep the fiend out of reach for eight rounds, then he avoids capture and Scotland Yard ends up with egg on its face—again. Deducing who Jack is can help you win, but legwork remains once the mental work is over.

Star System, from Walter Obert and Italian publisher Scribabs, falls into the same category of games that might seem like deduction games but aren’t. The two players are movie directors who have hired five actors each out of a deck of 20, and your goal is to figure out who the other player has hired. Can’t you just read Variety? Apparently not. Shouldn’t you be focusing on your own production and not worrying about someone else’s film? Yes, you should, but let’s indulge the cult of artistic paranoia and carry on.

The ten unemployed actors are placed in a face-down row. Players take turns each round choosing one of four action cards, each of which has two actions on it. If a card is chosen by a player, that player carries out the action on the top half; if not chosen, the action of the bottom half of the card takes place, sometimes applying to both players and sometimes applying only to the player who is physically closer to the card. This last twist will sometimes inspire you to take a less attractive action to prevent the opponent from getting a freebie.

The actions let players look at certain face-down cards, exchange a card in hand with an unemployed actor, ask for information on the opponent’s actors (gender or movie specialty), or—most important of all—guess a name. If the player guesses correctly, that card is revealed, placed face-up on the table, and now out of play; if the player is wrong, the opponent can counter-guess.

Sounds like a deduction game, right? Sure, except that the winner is the player who reveals the most cards, not the one who deduces the most.

In my first game, I mentioned this detail to my opponent, but neither of us grasped the implication until halfway through the game when I revealed the first actor from his hand. That same turn, he figured out all five of my actors (something my wife confirmed), but since I was ahead in the revelation race, he had no chance of winning. I would go first the next turn and reveal a second actor in his hand, while still having actions available to figure out the final two.

I played again with someone else, stressing this end condition. On the second turn, I had figured out that my opponent had one of four cards, so I took a chance on Revelation, hit the jackpot, and rolled to an easy win from there.

Star System presents an interesting challenge—and I adore the mechanism used for choosing actions—but it’s not clear after only two plays whether the need for early guesses in order to stay ahead in the revelation race makes the rest of the game a crapshoot. I expect not since we’ve been underusing the action that lets you swap one actor for another, a feature that should complicate your opponent’s deduction.

Jamaica

The glory of the card game Animalia is not its design—enjoyable as that is—but the artwork by Matthieu Leysenne: thirty-six unique illustrations of animals that look soft and endearing and real. Yes, even the mangy cat looks cuddly. The artwork is the perfect draw to get non-gamers interested in playing, then the Medici-like bidding and set collection provides a light challenge perfect for the skill level of people unfamiliar with Eurogames.

The crew that created Animalia—game designers Malcolm Braff, Bruno Cathala and Sébastien Pauchon through their GameWorks company—have now produced Jamaica, which like the first game is available from Swiss insurance company ASSURA as a promotional item for its customers. (Jamaica is available for purchase, but the cost with shipping from Europe takes the price over $80. Animalia received a limited release at Spiel 07, so perhaps Jamaica will follow in the future. For now, though, five copies will be given away to Boardgame News members over the next few months.)

Jamaica is a race game that has players hauling boat around the Caribbean island. Each player has a ship with five holds, and you’ll be picking up food, gold and cannons during your travels in order to keep your crew fed, pay port fees, and beat up on other players. In general, the game play is quick and fun except for a pause each round while the Captain decides how to allocate two dice; the only choices are A-B or B-A, yet somehow most players hem and haw, shuffling through their three action cards again and again, counting and recounting their possible movements.

Thankfully Leysenne has provided artwork once again, and although the cards depict pirates instead of plush animals, it’s still a joyous distraction when you’re sitting around waiting for Captain Knucklehead to slowly make one choice or another.

After three games, I’ve noticed that players tend to get caught up in the competition for treasure or the desire to blast a fellow player with cannons and forget that the game is in fact a race. The game ends once someone circles the board, and if you haven’t reached a milestone on the track, you lose a handful of points, negating all your piratical action. While it’s good to gather gold during the game, your ship has a limited capacity and you might be better off just booking for the finish line.

Overall, the game is mucho fun, even when I finished with -6 points due to incessant raiding, slow tradewinds, and a cursed treasure. I’ll need a few more plays, including some with two players, before I can review it, but Greg Schloesser’s review will be posted on Wednesday, January 23 for those who can’t wait.

Age of Gods

For those who haven’t read Greek history, lemme tell you that the gods had it just as bad as the humans. All sorts of crazy randomness did them no end of harm, and while they might have powers beyond mortal ken, they’re not immune to luck.

That spirit runs throughout Age of Gods, a new release from Croc and Asmodée Editions that’s a revised version of the French L’Age des Dieux released back in 2004. Players take on the role of one of a dozen gods, and each god naturally has a special power. The world is divided among 24 races, six each with a starting size of 1-4 tokens. A similar number of tokens are placed in the Well of Souls (no, really), which means the maximum size of these races are 2, 4, 6 or 8. The minimum size, as you might expect, is zero. The races are a mish-mash of fantasy figures such as halflings, pirates, monks and chaos. It feels like one of those bad short stories that I wrote in junior high…

Players start with a hand of eight cards, with each card having a race and its special ability. They also have a destiny card for a race of size 4; at game’s end, they’ll score points for the size of this race and each city it holds. In later rounds, they’ll receive destiny cards for races of size 3, 2 and 1. You must play one of these cards each round, either to get a race’s special ability or to advance its technology—something totally abstracted out to simply give the race a bonus when attacking or defending.

Each turn, players must initiate one or two attacks, and those attacks can be from practically any race into any other. You’re a god, after all, so you have no qualms about shedding someone else’s blood; the only restriction is that you can’t attack with a race whose destiny card you’ve revealed. They’re your followers, and you don’t want to send them off to battle. Victory in battle comes on a roll of 3-or-better on a six-sided die, with modifications possible due to technology, cities, or card-based abilities.

At the start of the seventh round (out of nine), you can place up to two non-destiny race cards face-down as a bet. If a race you bet on is at its maximum size at the end of the game, you’ll score three points. Add these bonus points, if any, to the points scored from the size of your other races, and the high score wins.

As you might have noticed, you’re running through a lot of fog while playing Age of Gods. You learn about the races you’re supposed to support and grow only as the game progresses; you receive the destiny card for the race of size 1 in round 7, by which time it might already extinct. (One player in our three-player game was gifted with two absentee races.) You receive bonus points only if a race is at its maximum size, but since almost any race may attack another—and attacks are mandatory each turn—it’s easy to imagine one token getting plucked away at the last moment.

Well, it was easy for me to imagine, especially since I wasn’t too subtle about which races I was protecting—"Let’s put this Dwarven Fortress, oh, I don’t know, in this vulnerable Faerie area"—yet somehow both of my bets paid off. Thanks to decent scores from my other races, I won easily.

While I can imagine many players pulling out their hair at the thought of playing such a chaotic game, I would argue that you can still take actions to protect your well-being, mostly involving bluffs and misdirection. Sure, there are huge doses of chaos, but you do have a number of elements under your control. Start planning for your secret bets from round 1, and try to figure out whether another player holds that race’s destiny card so he can help it double down. Don’t be too obvious about which races you control. Don’t rush to play your fortifications early since you have only five.

In any case, whether I won through skillful planning or opponent neglect, I’m interested in trying the game again to get a better idea of what’s going on earth and in the heavens.

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Comments:

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You learn about the races you’re supposed to support and grow only as the game progresses Though notably, you learn about the biggest races, and thus those potentially worth the most points first. Conversely, if your size 1 race ends up killed before turn 7, it was only worth 0-2 points anyways. Posted by Shannon Appelcline on Jan 19, 2008 at 03:27 AM | #

I agree with you. StarSystem is something more than a simple deduction game and I think it still undervalued and underestimated by most. It is actually one of the best 2-players games this year, of course behind “big hits” like 1960 ... good play Liga Posted by Andrea Liga Ligabue on Jan 19, 2008 at 09:53 AM | #

I played Star System at Modcon last year and enjoyed it even though I don’t like deduction games in general. There seemed to be a lot more going on than just deducting. I did not buy a copy because I don’t have much opportunity to get 2-player games on the table, but the demo guy indicated that a multi-player version was being developed. That I would like to try and, probably, buy. John Daniels Posted by John Daniels on Jan 19, 2008 at 11:24 AM | #

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