After about three years now of writing regular articles about board games, I find myself in a similar position when it comes to game criticism. I’ve looked, long and hard, for things about the design or the mechanics that unite favourite games, be they personal or popular favourites. But I’ve done better at coming up with things that you shouldn’t do: things that seem to unite weak games, such as meaningless design goals favouring money or play time rather than robust ones concerning theme or mechanics. The nearest I’ve come to finding a unifying thread was what I discussed in my last column about building on the shoulders of previous titles and making sure you add something better. And while I continue to support that argument, it’s hardly scientific.

And this is a problem, for two particular reasons. The obvious one is that as games become increasingly expensive in the aftermath of the global recession it becomes increasingly important for us, the consumer, to be able to make solid and informed choices about what we’re going to buy now that our gaming expenditure has been effectively squeezed. We need to make sure we buy games that we’re going to enjoy and that are going to see good table time to make sure we get a return on our investment. And obviously, since we can’t all have the luxury of trying out every game that we’ve ever considered buying, reading game reviews and informed criticism from people that have played them is a vital tool in our armoury. But if it’s finger-in-wind time when it comes to personal taste, who on earth can we trust?

The less obvious problem is that taste in games seems to be a divisive factor in board gaming more than almost any other corner of hobby gaming generally - perhaps even more than hobbies in general. If, like me, you enjoy video games then obviously you’ll have some favourite genres of game to play. Personally I like FPS and sports games best, and I don’t usually like platform games very much. But if I were to go to one of the many sites that collate game review scores and pick the top few platformers for my console I know for a fact - because I’ve done it - that I can buy with confidence and get a game I’m going to enjoy. Because people who like video games generally, it seems, like a good video game no matter what genre they favour: their preferences come in to play when filling in the gaps with slightly weaker games. There’s generally a solid agreement that the best games are, well, the best games, no matter what particularly you like to play. You can see a similar pattern in RPG’s and other areas of the hobby. But in board games, one man’s meat is very much another man’s poison. If you look at a list of the ten highest-rated video games for my Xbox, I’d agree that nearly all ten deserve to be there, or close. I’ve played most of the supposed ten best board games in the world, and I think perhaps just two of them deserve their prestige.

This great divide in personal taste amongst board gamers makes it all the more important that we can find some sort of standard against which we can judge and measure games. Yet it remains frustratingly elusive. And unfortunately that’s about the best we can hope for. Reviews, impartial or otherwise, can’t offer an awful lot of help. Advertising is obviously biased. Word of mouth and heresay through friends or through the internet isn’t at all reliable, especially considering how excited we all tend to get for the first couple of plays of a brand new game. It rather looks as though games have a bit more common with fine art than perhaps we thought after all.

But wait. Isn’t that a bit of a strange conclusion to have to draw, considering that most of us, including me, would readily admit that game design is built on mathematical fundamentals? Even highly random games have a rules framework and a probability curve. If we’re analysing something which is basically a maths exercise then surely there’s something we can latch on to to start to draw up an agreed and objective standard by which to judge things? The trouble is that as I’ve been arguing all along, the current state of affairs rather suggests that we can’t. After all, if this many hyper-intelligent geeks have had this long to look at the situation and have come up with zero answers, what hope is there of a late breakthrough now?

So we’re left in the exceptionally strange position of being involved in a scientifically-backed hobby without any sort of objective analysis. In fact I think that it’s precisely this odd no-man’s-land which makes games exciting and interesting. The maths is all very well but games like Ricochet Robot which are based on little except maths don’t half get dull quickly. What keeps a game exciting and interesting is all the non-mathematical stuff: the chrome, the excitement of the unknown and above all the human opponent(s) you’re playing the game with. Of course I’ve been arguing along these lines for years, but what I find interesting in this current article is the angle that the lack of agreed standards by which to judge games rather lends weight to this particular argument: if the game was all about the maths, surely something approximating an agreed standard would have emerged by now?

In fact I’m being a little unfair here because such a standard does exist, although it’s not widely recognised as such. I’m talking again about that old “meaningful choice” chestnut. Well, I tried to put a lie to that in a previous article but here’s another stick to beat that particular argument with: the fact is that whilst meaningful choice is an important standard for many gamers it doesn’t guarantee a solid game. Age of Conan, for example has bags of meaningful choice but hasn’t been widely celebrated as a game. Instead it was derided (unfairly in my opinion) for being unthematic and (rather more fairly) for being too slow and undramatic. In other words it lacked exactly those sorts of intangible qualities like chrome and excitement that I alluded to earlier. It’s precisely those sorts of non-quantifiable qualities that set games apart from the crowd, and since they’re non-quantifiable well, you can’t quantify them. There is no agreed standard. What is it that separates games like Puerto Rico and Agricola from worker-placement clone #1134? Not just slicker mechanics, to be sure, but a certain something that you can’t quite put your finger on.

So with regards to reviewing games it just looks as though we’re going to have to fall back on the same selection techniques that we already use when buying other products of intangible quality such as books and music. Reviews and popular opinion help but at the bottom line it’ll be one sentence, maybe even just one word, that swings us one way or the other and helps us decide which we’re going to buy and which stay on the wish-list. The trouble is of course that games are more expensive and, it seems, becoming more expensive by the minute. Not much we can do about that except budget more carefully, buy less games and perhaps read a few extra reviews before we buy. But there is one nice thing about making choices based on intangible criteria - instead of weighing and checking and balancing and making a decision based on a sound statistical argument, it means we’re making choices out of our own free will, like the responsible adults that we are and that, too often, overly-scripted and mathematically prescribed games stop us being when we’re at the gaming table.

Jules and Hodge are competing for the attentions of the Lady Ashley. Each wants to speak with her alone. They must do this by crossing bridges to leave the others behind.

There are six pieces on the board. You control a master piece and a servant piece. On your turn you can move one, or the other, across a bridge and decide who follows. (The bridges only permit a certain number across.) Some players try to lead her away from the group, and others use their servant to lead others away.

And a video of Taylor showing off the pieces and explaining the game:

Taylor, a graduate student of interactive media at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, designed and developed Gentlemen on his own, incorporating a huge backstory into the game origins – stating that Jules and Hodge were real people, for example, and that the game they created to represent their quest for Lady Ashley is more than 200 years old – in order to bring all kinds of associations to the game and its world. As Taylor explains in this post titled “How Do You Sell an Artsy Board Game?” on the blog of Professor Henry Jenkins:

The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands is a fantastical board game with a rich history, an unusual narrative, and surreal Victorian-style artwork. It is a board game that sits comfortably at the intersection of art, logic and literature. It pushes boundaries and opens critical discussions in each of these realms: the board art needs to stand on it’s [sic] own, but also remain subservient to the game play; the story provokes questions of gender, desire, master-servant relationships, reliable narration, and the permutations of the game over a questionable 200 year history; and the game itself has a rule set that structures a peculiar mode of courtship…

Soon after opening the box, a player will discover that no one controls the female characters. The rules state: “the Ladies move on their own turn and move independently of the group.” The phrasing (deliberately) implies that the girls are aloof and disinterested, that they do not care about this and have other places to be. But the problem of gender is unavoidable: if no one controls the Lady characters, then they do not have creative agency. Instead, they move along a set path.

In many ways this sounds like nothing more than late night college bantering – how many other designers use the phrase “diegetic layers” to discuss their creations? – but at the same time I’m tickled by experiments like this. I can appreciate the thought and effort that has gone into Gentlemen and its world, with Taylor approaching game design from a direction untrod by any other. As for games being art, here’s an excerpt from another interview with Taylor:

Board games are pretty wonderful because they not only have art and story to them, but they also have a rule set. We know that art and story can be discussed critically (just look at hs and college classes), but few people consider how designing a rule-set can be a profound and philosophical activity. When you design a rule set, you are making a statement about the way the world works – or at least about the way a system works. If you can start spotting and recognizing systems, then you’ll probably begin to realize that 1.) there are all types of systems around us (big and small) and 2.) that there is plenty of room out there for profound, interesting, artistic rule sets that say something new and different about the way the world works.

Another point of interest is how Taylor is bringing Gentlemen to print, namely through a Kickstarter project in late 2009 that set out to raise the $7,600 printing cost for 500 copies of the game. (Kickstarter functions like GMT Games’ P500 system, in which people preorder games or other items, but don’t pay unless the project hits its financial target.) As of February 10, 2010 the project had collected nearly $9,000 from 151 backers, with anyone donating more than $25 being promised a copy of the game once it’s printed.

Now I’m not saying that Gentlemen will be a fantastic gaming experience or fun or endlessly replayable or anything else along the lines of how most gamers think about games. (Based on his interview comments, Taylor’s gaming experience seems limited.) Rather I’m pointing out that the boundaries of game design stretch a lot farther than the ludicrous and pointless “Eurogame or Ameritrash?” “Wargame or no?” discussions with which many people become embroiled. I look forward to seeing more such experiments in the future.

For more on this topic, I suggest reading my December 2007 column ”Games ≠ Fun? Or, What Is a Game Anyway?”

Matt Leacock’s Pandemic took second place with 419 points, while Uwe Rosenberg was in both third and fourth place with Agricola and Le Havre, despite the Japanese version of the game not even being available until March 2010.

Let’s Catch the Lion – an introductory version of Shogi from designer Madoka Kitao and publisher Gentosha Education in which each player has only four pieces – won the “U-More Award” for best game for beginners and families.

For a list of all the winners and links to their publishers, head to the Boardgame Prize 2009 page on U-More.com.

For the typical abstract, roll-and-move, or trivia game, you’ve seen everything the author put into the work the moment you’ve read the rules, and sometimes the moment you’ve read the back of the box.

Barring the author having you consult external media during the game, if you have imagination and experience with similar games, you can do a fair job of envisioning what the experience with the board game will be like. The dice may be screwy and you may pick all the wrong cards, but a trivia game is a trivia game, an economic game is an economic game. The other players will be the main unexpected factors in the game.

However, there are exceptions to this. Games like Go or Chess look and initially play like simple abstract games. However, there are depths in these games that reveal themselves after several plays, depths that you could not have expected or understood from simply reading the rules.

Hmm, the fudge word “judge” in the question makes this difficult to answer, but in general I’d say, no, I can’t judge a game by reading the rules. Plenty of other people apparently can, based on the rules previews they write (even on this site) or the opinions they project about games they haven’t played, but even after playing hundreds of different games I find that I often don’t have a clear idea of how the game plays, much less how I would judge or rate the game. Sure, I’ll understand how a game functions – that is, what players are allowed to do and which game functions are handled automatically – but that’s vastly different from getting a feel for how action A affects your standing in the game three turns later or why you’d want to draw cards instead of moving or how letting player X claim that area restricts your growth down the road.

What say you, fellow gamer?

“It’s pretty disturbing to think that they would actually make a game of a very horrific history that started with the King Philip’s War,” said Jim Peters, executive director of the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs and a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe who has also recently waged a battle against the Indian symbolism in the state seal. “It’s just an ongoing insult to the indigenous people of this country.” ...

“I don’t think (Poniske) took into consideration that the descendents of the people that he wishes to exterminate in his game are still here,” [Julianne] Jennings [a Nottoway Indian and adjunct professor of anthropology and Native American studies at Eastern Connecticut State University and Rhode Island College] said.

“It’s an awful idea for them to do,” said Ellie Page, historian for the Pocasset Wampanoag tribe of Fall River. “To make a game out of it is to diminish the sacrifice that these people had to go through at that time.”

Unlike the article in The Providence Journal that I linked to on March 16, this piece seems more balanced in how Poniske’s game is presented, but it still gives the impression that people have no idea what they’re really protesting. Do they think King Philip’s War will be like Yahtzee, with players rolling dice and yelling, “Yay, I massacred half a tribe!” when they get three-of-a-kind? Have they looked at the Multi-Man website to see what these games are like?

What’s the real issue here: the depiction of Native Americans as killers? As victims? Their mere presence in a game because “game” = “trivialization” or “mockery”? Amazon.com lists dozens of books about King Philip’s War, and I’ve seen no protests directed at those authors because they wrote about the historical situation covered in Poniske’s design.

Games have taken stuttering steps towards being acknowledged in the mainstream as something beyond child’s play – which is similar to what happened with comic books in the mid-1980s thanks to Maus and The Dark Knight Returns, decades after underground comics for adults had already appeared from Crumb, Shelton, Stack, Wilson, Williams, et al. Of course comics are still regarded as children’s material by most people, so games obviously have a long way to go, too.

Jackson notes that the company’s gross sales for 2009 increased slightly over the previous year, falling just short of $3 million. One of the main reasons that gross sales did rise is that for the most part SJG kept Munchkin and its multitude of spin-off titles in print throughout the year. As he notes later in the report:

The Munchkin line, including the Munchkin Quest boardgame, accounted for nearly 80% of our revenue in 2009! It is now available in 15 languages, with one more licensed.

Wow.

Velo City isn’t the first published game from designer Kevin G. Nunn, but it is the first to debut on the German market. (3-7 players, ages 8+, 45 minutes, €30) Each player in Velo City controls a team of bicycle couriers, and naturally you want to prove that your team is better than anyone else’s. To determine who’s the big wheel in the group, players race through the city street, either singly or in groups, picking up energy drinks along the way while avoiding manhole covers.

On a turn, a player either rolls his team die, then moves one of couriers forward exactly as many spaces as shown – possibly spending energy drinks first to roll a second die for an energy boost or sprint – or rolls his team die along with the die or dice of opponents sharing the same space as one of his riders. If the active player then chooses his die, his rider is the only one to move; choose an opponent’s die, however, and both you and the opponent move ahead.

Players can also spend energy drinks to have their riders draft another rider leaving the same space. Where does your courier team get all these drinks? If a rider stops on a space depicting an energy drink, the player takes one from the bank. When a rider hits a manhole, the player can either pay an energy drink to stay in place or move backwards to the first empty manhole space, picking up an energy drink on the way. Move all the way back to start, and you get two drinks – small compensation for the trouble! (Plus you’ll have to take more frequent bathroom breaks.)

Rules for Velo City can be downloaded from the game’s webpage in English, German, French and Italian.

In Inon Kohn’s Charly, each player brings a horde of animals to the table, and if they have planned well, they’ll be able to feed their beasts without having to reach into their own pockets. (2-6 players, ages 6+, 20 minutes, €17)

At the start of a round, each player receives seven animal cards and one food card. The animal cards show dogs, mice, rabbits, monkeys or pigs, with 1-3 animals on each card except for the pigs, which always come in pairs; the food cards show bones, cheese, carrots or bananas, with 4-8 pieces of each item. Thus, food for each of the first four types of animal is included in the deck – bones for dogs, etc. – but pigs will eat anything because they are undiscriminating and ravenous. One to three food cards are also revealed on the table, depending on the number of players.

On a turn, a player can either draw a new animal card from the deck or discard pile, then discard an animal card, or call for a feast. (If you take the latter action, each player can exchange animals once more.) Players then lay out their food cards and take turns placing animal cards on their respective foods, with pigs eating whatever the player decides to feed them. If an animal card doesn’t enough of the right food available, their owner must feed each animal from the 15 pieces of honey with which he begins the game. Players then begin a new round.

Once a player runs out of honey drops, the game ends, with the player holding the most honey drops winning. The complete rules for Charly can be downloaded from the game’s webpage in English, German, French and Italian.

Designer Michael Schacht continues to add new animals to his ever-expanding zoo, this time with meerkats, ostriches and wolves searching for space in Zooloretto Mini. (2-5 players, ages 7+, 45 minutes, €18)

Zooloretto Mini seems like a cross between the Spiel des Jahres-winning Zooloreto and the Coloretto card game that preceded it. Each player starts with a zoo board that has three empty enclosures, each with room for six tiles. Seven types of animal tiles and three types of landscape tiles are mixed in a bag, then players take turns either drawing a tile from the bag and placing it in one of the available delivery trucks, or claiming a truck and placing the tiles on it in the player’s zoo.

Each enclosure can hold only one type of animal, and if you place a fertile male and female critter in the same pen, you’re immediately blessed with a newborn that also needs to find a home. Landscape tiles can go into any enclosure. If you can’t place a tile, such as when you take a fourth type of animal, that tile goes into your barn.

When you place the sixth tile in an enclosure, you can immediately either discard one tile from your barn or snatch a tile from someone else’s barn and add it to your zoo. After each player claims a truck, a new round begins, until the bag is empty and players need to dip into the reserve tiles placed aside at the start of the game. Players then score points for the number of animals in each enclosure – the more, the better – and the types of landscape in their zoo. After subtracting points for each type of landscape and animal in each player’s barn, the person with the highest total wins.

Rules for Zooloretto Mini in English, German, French and Italian can be downloaded from the game’s webpage on the Abacusspiele website.

Each player controls two koi on a 7x7 gameboard, and each turn a player either moves one koi to an empty adjacent space, then drops one of his ten stones on any empty space or jumps one koi over an adjacent stone into an empty space. After each turn, if a player’s just moved koi is adjacent to other koi – whether that player’s or the opponent’s – he scores one point for each adjacent koi. The first player to reach ten points wins.

MacKenzie mentions on the website of his Clever Mojo Games that Jin Li will be available for the iPhone and iPod Touch at some point.

The gameboard can be reoriented because troop movement in Battles of Westeros doesn’t depend on the playing of cards that direct troops in the left, center or right sections of the board, as in the case of BattleLore. Instead, writes Kouba:

Because the only boundaries on the battlefield are the board edges themselves, it is possible to order any units on the battlefield, as long as that unit is “controlled.”

Controlled units are units that begin in a hex within a commander’s zone-of-control (ZOC). A commander’s ZOC in the core set (no matter which House) is two hexes. This means that any unit within two hexes of a friendly commander is controlled.

Sounds like an interesting change from BattleLore as players will always have the ability to move their commanders, and those movements will determine which other troops can take actions or be affected by certain events. What’s more, if you can take out an opponent’s leader, you effectively render certain other units helpless as they’d suddenly lack direction and stand around with their thumbs up their butts waiting for orders.

At least that’s how I imagine things on Westeros. FFG promises more previews in the weeks ahead, so maybe my speculation will turn out to be misguided…

[B]usiness funds had been co-mingled with the personal funds of one of the owners. We believe the missing funds were the result of bad habits that began alongside the creation of the company, which was initially a small hobby group. Upon further investigation, in which the owner has willingly participated, the owner in question now owes the company a significant balance and is working to help rectify the situation.

Bills goes on to note that Catalyst has restructured its accounting procedures and is investigating back payments that might be due to freelancers and others.

Despite this turmoil, Catalyst has shipped two card games to U.S. distributors in the past week, the revised High School Drama: Varsity Edition, which designer Boyan Radakovich self-published through Shifting Skies Games in 2006, and Merchants, an English language version of Pegasus’ Handelsfürsten from designer Reiner Knizia. These games have been updated on Gone Cardboard.

While this expansion will include 42 goblin figures, it contains only two new types of troops, with all of the previous troop types appearing in either the BattleLore base set or the Goblin Marauders expansion. Those new troops are Goblin Halberdiers, who fight well against cavalry, and Ogres. While some players will lament the minimal amount of novelty in the expansion, others will be pleased that they can now do battle with an entire goblin army instead of a mixed human/goblin army.

In addition to the figures, Horrific Horde includes five new scenarios, new unit summary cards, and 15 cards for the Call to Arms expansion so that players can build customized Goblin armies. Pics of the new figures are on the FFG website.

This game has been added to Gone Cardboard.

Habitat first appeared in a limited print run at Spiel 08 and has been largely unavailable since that time. For a game description, let’s turn to a game preview that I published on BGN in August 2008:

Your goal in the game is to create a diverse forest by collecting and feeding at least one type of animal in each of the eight ranks. Grizzly bears are rank 8, for example, while worms and insects are rank 1. Says Hogg, “Animals are arranged into food chains based on their rank and diet, and whether they swim, fly or live on land.”

Each turn you can play nice and draw cards hoping to get animals you need to complete chains and keep animals fed – or you can play aggressively and use large animals to pilfer resources and smaller animals from opponents. Drawing also brings opportunistic event cards like “Migration” that draws animals from others to your part of the forest. “Additionally,” says Hogg, “each turn you have a chance to save unfed animal populations from starvation by feeding them with lesser ranked cards, as well as the opportunity to redesign your food chains to be more resilient for the struggles of the next round.”

Head to the preview link above for more comments from Elliot Hogg about the design and development of this game. This game has been updated on Gone Cardboard.

Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: FRED Distribution (aka Gryphon Games)

Players: 2-7
Ages: 7+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $15
Links:

Reiner Knizia appears to be the undisputed master of getting his games published and republished … again and again and again. Well over a dozen of his previously published games have been republished, often with new names, themes and artwork. While these cosmetic changes likely mean more dollars and Euros in the pockets of publishers and distributors – and Herr Knizia – they often cause confusion amongst the buying public. I can’t help but wonder how many unsuspecting folks have actually purchased a game, only to discover that they already own an earlier version that was published under a different name.

In spite of this potential confusion, it is good to see good games brought back to life. The latest of Reiner’s reincarnations is Swat! from Gryphon Games, which was previously released by Winning Moves as It’s Mine! I’ve enjoyed this family-friendly game for many years and am happy to see it once again available.

The idea of the game is to grab cards which result in a positive score at the conclusion of the hand. One-at-a-time, the dealer reveals cards from the deck. When a player decides he would like the collection of cards revealed, he slaps his hand to the table. The first player to slap – or swat – the table gets the cards. If more than one player slaps the table, it is up to the dealer to decide which player slapped first. It is not uncommon for several players to slap the table at once, making it difficult to determine who was first. We decide this with a quick match of “rock-paper-scissors” between the contesting players.

When a player collects a batch of cards, he places them face-down in a stack. The player is charged with the task of attempting to remember which cards he has collected so that he can maximize his total in future hands (similar to the idea used in Schnäppchen Jagd). A player can collect at most three stacks of cards per round, so one must be careful on when to slap the table and take a collection of cards. The player who slapped first and collected a set becomes the dealer and repeats this process. Once everyone has collected three hands (or the deck of cards expires), points are tallied from all three stacks and recorded. Three rounds are played, and the player with the highest cumulative scores wins the game. Of course, players can play more or fewer rounds based on their preference or time constraints. The original It’s Mine required a player to win two rounds to capture the game.

Swat! is a game of deciding when to pull the trigger and take a collection of cards. There is the persistent temptation to hold off slapping the table until just one more card is turned. Slap too early and you may miss out on a valuable card or two; slap too late and an opponent may beat you to a nice collection. Of course, waiting can also backfire if a few negative-valued cards are revealed. As each card is revealed, the tension mounts and the butterflies in one’s stomach increases. This tension is what really makes the game click.

Swat! can be played in twenty-to-thirty minutes and is ideally suited for family play. All but the youngest of children can play competently, but there is enough fun and decisions present to keep adults entertained and engaged. I’ve had great success playing the game with my gaming group and family and friends, and it has been universally enjoyed by all. The new packaging and theme is nice, making it even more appealing. Kudos to Gryphon Games for re-publishing this entertaining game.

Designer: Steve Ryan
Publisher: Educational Insights

Players: 4+
Ages: 7+
Playing Time: 180 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $25
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Twice, once each with five and six players

Steve Ryan’s Stix & Stones from Educational Insights has all the hallmarks of a game designed for a mainstream audience as it’s a new take on a familiar game with a clever title that’s a well-known phrase. Here’s the pitch that retailers would give to potential buyers: ”Stix & Stones is like Pictionary, but instead of drawing you build images out of plastic sticks and stones that your teammates then try to identify.”

For the mainstream buyer, the phrase “like Pictionary but different” would get many of them to the cash register, but we serious gamers are made of sterner stuff. Sure, “like Pictionary but different” gives someone 75% of a good game – the game will promote creativity, be interactive and provide great moments – yet the final 25% of the game is the critical stuff. Does Stix & Stones have something like the arbitrary die roll in Pictionary that makes randomness as powerful as skill? Or does it fit the Cluzzle model of having cleverness in your artistry be of primary importance?

Before I answer those questions, check out these images from one of my games and take a guess as to what’s depicted:

These creations were half of the first six designs in the game, and no one guessed them correctly – neither the teammates of the picture builder, nor the players on the other team. Score after 30 minutes: 0 - 0.

An Invitation to Fail

The main problem with Stix & Stones is that it invites players to bid to failure. Unlike Pictionary, in which teams compete against the clock or against each other, Stix & Stones has the picture builders on the two teams bid against one another, Name That Tune-style, as to the number of pieces they will use in their artwork: “I can draw that item with only 15 pieces.” “I’ll do it in 13.” “Okay, 12.” And so on with each picture builder mentally shedding bits from an imagined design until the real-life creation will be as illusory as the imagined one and no one will guess anything.

Players can bid to failure because there’s little chance of a penalty for doing so. If your team guesses the object, you score one point; if your team fails and the opponents guess it, they score two points; however, if the opponents also guess incorrectly, no one scores anything. Thus, you might as well drop your bid lower and win the right to draw as your team will guess first – and if your team can’t guess it, then your opponents will likely fail, too.

Simple solution #1: Award one point to the opposing team whenever the team with the winning bid fails to correctly identify the artwork, and two points if the opposing team can guess the object. Teams would therefore constantly advance toward the ten point goal line and not hover at zero while they get drunker and even less adept at building pictures.

Time to Guess?

Stix & Stones also fails to measure up against Pictionary in terms of how players take guesses. In Pictionary players guess the entire time that a drawer is drawing because either time is running out or another team might beat you to the punch. As the drawer, you get to respond to your teammates’ stupid guesses by taking a new approach or editing the work that you’ve already done. Surely those bozos will get it now, right?

In Stix & Stones your teammates are forbidden from guessing while you construct the piece in 60 seconds, then they caucus and can make only a single guess. One! Which means there’s lots of humming and hawing while they debate whether the square with a dollar sign in it is a bank or a vault or money or a bill or something else entirely. Time passes, and everyone gets bored, and there’s no real reason for choosing one answer over another, so you start picking apart every little detail of the artwork even though they don’t matter, and everyone gets even boreder, if that’s possible, then finally someone says, “Oh, whatever, we’ll go with your answer,” then you’re wrong, then the other team does the same thing, and oh, God, when will it end?

Simple solution #2: Allow players to guess while their teammate is creating the artwork or provide a limited amount of time in which players can guess as many times as they want. I mean, I would have been bummed out after I made this fantastic work…

...and we had failed to gain a point because my teammates guessed “aardvark” instead of “anteater.” Thankfully, they intuited that the stones were ants, not termites. (The rules allow you to score when naming synonyms, but aardvarks and anteaters are not the same, despite their superficial bug-eating ways.)

Meeeeee!!!

What’s the most fun part of Pictionary? Guessing what someone else is drawing? Not really, although it does have moments when the drawer is growing exasperated by your denseness and jabbing at the paper again and again and circling the same thing repeatedly as if the sheer quantity of circles will transmit information to your brain. Knowing what the drawer on the other team is doing and quietly laughing at her feeble attempt? This can be good for a few chuckles, yes, especially when you think about how awesome your drawing would have been.

Which just points out that the most fun part of Pictionary is actually creating the pictures – that is, having an idea for how you can dash off lines to create a globe before the other team’s drawer can. When you have a good partner, you as the artist can feel your minds merging, and your heart fills with smugness and joy when she correctly guesses “accordion” while everyone else at the table sees only a half-dozen chicken scratches and the sandtimer is not even a quarter empty.

Creating a picture is also the fun part of Stix & Stones, but the game lacks an “all play” feature in which both builders create a picture at once. You can still have the vicarious thrill of looking at an opponent’s “artistry” and knowing that you can do better, but what’s more likely to happen is that you’ll lower your bid so that you can be active and do something, rather than sitting and watching until you’re next chance to bid, which once again leads to everlasting failure and a neverending game.

Simple solution #3: Add an “all play” feature to Stix & Stones. Perhaps you can change the scoring system so that each picture builder can use as many bits as she wants, but if a team guesses the right answer while using fewer components than the other team, they score more points.

Or players can have bid cards that show an upper limit in the number of pieces they’ll use, along with a point value they’ll score if their team guesses the right answer first. Using more pieces results in fewer points. By taking this approach, the game would then feature a bluffing element of sorts in terms of how players want to approach their bids. Do I bid low and hope my teammates can get Christopher Columbus from only seven bits, or take a safer route? Maybe the picture builders now also have to compete for the building components rather than being able to take the ones they want.

I can think of many different approaches to the 25% of Stix & Stones that isn’t Pictionary, and while those approaches might not be better than what’s in the box – given that I’ve playtested none of them – the game as published drags on far too long for the amount of fun we had, leading us to stop both times before we put in the 180 minutes required to reach ten points. Thus we come to…

Simple solution #4: Put Stix & Stones aside and play Pictionary instead.

Factory Manager is a more modest effort.  The game only lasts five turns, and the key mechanism is an auction for turn order, hardly a major innovation.

In FM, players vie for tiles over the course of the game’s five turns:

• Storage tiles boost a factory’s storage capacity. (A player’s income is based on either his storage or production capacity – whichever is lower.)
• Machinery tiles boost a player’s production, but increase his labor use and his energy use.
• Red robot tiles boost a player’s production without using any additional labor, but they increase energy use.
• Yellow robot tiles don’t effect production numbers, but they decrease labor usage while increasing energy costs.

After tiles are purchased, players adjust their production, storage, energy use, and labor use numbers.  The cost of energy is adjusted by the draw of a random tile (with the cost generally going up over time).  Players then collect income (minus their energy costs).

While some of this may sound complex on the page, it seemed that FM was a fairly simple and straightforward game in practice.  And the game doesn’t overstay its welcome; even a five-player game should not take more than an hour and a half at the most, and maybe considerably less than that.

If there is a flaw in the game, it may the last turn.  When playing with the Appalachian Gamers, I found that most players were content to choose tiles by instinct for most of the game.  But on the last turn, every player did a cost/benefit analysis of purchasing every combination of available tiles.  This made the last turn the slowest of the game, and more than one player thought it diminished the fun of the game.

Nevertheless, I rather like Factory Manager.  I admit that the game is a bit dry, but I am the kind of gamer who enjoys Martin Wallace’s Automobile in spite of the fact that I may never win the game unless I play against ten-year-olds.

I find that there is suspense in each turn to see whether I will get the tiles I need most.  Factory Manager may not be the giant that Power Grid is, but I don’t hold that against it.  There is room in my collection for a few dry economic games, and one of them will be Factory Manager.

The winners of the Premio Archimede receive support funds of €3,500 in the form of research trips, funds for publication, and so on. The jury will also award a few special trophies, such as the Carta Mundi Special Trophy for the best card game, with the prize being 1,000 copies of said card game produced for free by Carta Mundi.

The deadline for entry is July 30, 2010. Visit the Premio Archimede page on the studiogiochi website for a participation form, entry fee information, and other details.

Such agreements have become more common in recent years, with German publisher eggertspiele signing a similar agreement with Amigo earlier in 2010 and French publisher/distributor Asmodee now serving as the logistics partner for GameWorks and Libellud, among other companies.

The first person to submit the game name that subsequently wins each award will receive prizes from Spielbox. All other individuals who submitted the correct names will be entered into a random drawing, for prizes to be announced later. Complete details of the contest on Spielbox.de.