A Game Comment Journal

Where I, Gerald "Linnaeus" Cameron, post my new Geekdo game comments as I write them so you don't have to go hunting through my Geekdo account.

[linnaeus]

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer

While the great deckbuilding game hasn’t been created yet (sorry Dominion fans), Ascension:Chronicle of the Godslayer is a good step in the right direction. It plays quite quickly (if a bit slower than Dominion) and it trades off some luck in exchange for fun, meaningful decisions throughout the game and a purpose beyond fiddling with cards (namely, defeating monsters).

The result is a fun, yet flawed game that I’ve played more than a dozen times face-to-face plus any number of games via the iOS app. It’s starting to wear a bit thin now (I haven’t gotten to check out the expansion yet), but I’m happy with it.

It avoids the two largest traps Dominion fell into: frontloading all of the interesting decisions and making the game about nothing more than fiddling with the cards. The former it cures with the randomly drawn tableau, and it comes at the price of a healthy dose of luck – if the right card is drawn right before your turn you can be off to the races and having a hand tilted toward runes when it’s all monsters available (or vice versa) is a bummer. Also, there is a mild-to-moderate rich-get-richer problem since lucky breaks make it easier to take advantage of subsequent lucky breaks. It’s not so bad with more players, since there is a higher chance that another player has the luck and tools to keep up, but being left behind is no fun.

Since it’s hard to win the game without defeating some significant monsters along the way, your focus is not just on acquiring card which help you acquire more cards. This secondary note gives the game more variability than Dominion and is welcome. While Ascension still suffers from long turns caused by deck-churning combos, they do not seem to reach the epic proportions of Dominion’s worst excesses.

I think Ascension would have been better with separate monster and “runes” decks and tableaus, so both paths are always viable. Also, the economies of scale for paying higher prices are a little out of whack, since the designers and developers did not seem to take into account the value of getting an effect using a single card in hand versus relying on multiple cards in hand. Nevertheless, there are enough viable strategies, and the factions have enough distinct flavour, to keep the game worth exploring for many plays.

[linnaeus]

7 Wonders

I enjoyed 7 Wonders, and if you are a fan of the new wave of euro engine card games (Race for the Galaxy, Dominion and it’s imitators) I would strongly recommend that you try it out. While direct comparisons to those other games are superficial, there’s no denying that it’s becoming a genre. The main draw is the drafting mechanic. While it’s as old as Magic: the Gathering booster drafts (about 15 years), it hasn’t been heavily explored yet–Fairy Tale is about the only other major game to try it out. It has the virtue of keeping the game moving at a decent pace (everything in 7 Wonders is keyed off what card you draft, including a couple of “pass” actions which require discarding a card). While things can seize up with players who are unfamiliar with the cards (my game was one veteran and five newbies), and experienced group should finish a game in 20-25 minutes, probably faster with a smaller group. As much as I enjoy 7 Wonders (and I do – I will happily play it again soon), it’s a little hard as a fan of rich, meaty euros not to notice a couple of places where 7 Wonders could have been more interesting. The resource mechanism is a bit dull – it promotes some player interaction and keeps the rules density low, but the decisions are rarely tense. Either your neighbour has what you need or she doesn’t. Frankly, this is a problem with most post-Caylus cube-pushers (7W doesn’t use cubes, but the feel is similar), so it’s hardly fair to single out 7 Wonders, but a problem is a problem. Also, the elements – military, economic, science, monuments/structures – are distinct silos. With one notable exception, there are no instances where building up your science helps your military or improving your economic power (beyond basic resource production) makes scientific progress more efficient. In some cases, playing a card will let you play a card from another silo for free later, which is a nice touch, but it only comes up if you see the relevant card and if playing it will help you out more than the other cards you have to choose from at the time. Finally, it’s weird that the purple guild cards – analogous to 10-cost buildings in Puerto Rico or 6-cost developments in Race for the Galaxy – score points based on your neighbours’ position. It creates an incentive for your right-hand neighbour to take a different path than your left-hand neighbour, but the main effect is to give you much less control over which guilds are useful to you. It’s bizarre that the capstones of your game have nothing to do with what you’ve played up until now. Nevertheless, these are quibbles. The card drafting is fun, that game’s arc is a little forced, but reasonable for a short card game and once you know the cards better, the game will go quickly. Like the start worlds in Race for the Galaxy, the different powers of the different wonders will help to keep the game from feeling too much alike from play to play. Unless you are completely europhobic, it’s certainly worth trying out. It may not be every gamer’s cup of tea, but the overhead for trying it out is low.

[linnaeus]

London

In the wake of Race for the Galaxy and Dominion, resource management card games are all the rage and London is Martin Wallace’s entry into the genre. Nominally about the reconstruction of London after the great fire of 1666, London mixes things up a bit by having a gameboard featuring a map of city districts that the players can claim, rather than being a straight-up card game. Nevertheless, the heart of the game lies in the cards. You play buildings from your which do nothing until you “run your city,” at which point all your face up cards do that thing they do. Those things include generating money, generating victory points, preventing poverty (which is damaging, but only at the end of the game) plus a few other special powers here and there. Some cards require an additional price to activate – although the most common price of discarding a card from your hand can be quite beneficial – and most are one-use-only, so you flip them face down after you activate them. The catch is that there is tension between wanting to play as many buildings as possible and playing them in small numbers. Cards are played into stacks, and when you run your city you can only activate the top card in each stack (provided it is face up). You can build over other cards keeping things under control and you don’t want to create stacks willy-nilly because each stack generates a poverty point (whether you activate its top card or not) when you run your city. You also generate one poverty for each card you have in hand when you run your city, though, so hoarding cards for your next go round has a cost as well. At the end of the game you tote up your VPs from buildings constructed (including those buried in the depths of your stacks), VP chits earned, the city districts you have claimed and money on hand, with a penalty for poverty which depends on how much worse you are than the player who best kept their poverty under control. Overall I enjoyed playing London, but I’m not sure yet whether it has legs. There are some issues with card balance (already there seems to be a consensus that one player getting both Omnibuses is a gamebreaker, something I experienced in my game) and I don’t think the low poverty strategy is as viable as one would hope because of a flood of strong poverty-control buildings in the late stages of the game. On a personal taste front, I wish there were more cards that stayed around for more than one run to add a bit more strategy (versus working with what you’ve got), possibly including cards that you could pay an additional price (or accept diminished returns from) to keep in play. Also, I’d want a significant reduction in playing time once you’re familiar with the game (three of the four players in my game were first-timers). It feels like a 60 minute game, but the learning curve makes your first game likely to run to 90+ minutes. I am definitely up for playing more to see how some of those “what ifs” resolve, though. If enough things fall on the right side of the line, London promises to be a rewarding mildly-strategic resource management card game, in the same vein as Saint Petersburg if a bit heavier.

[linnaeus]

Taj Mahal

While Taj Mahal’s reprint a couple of years ago was hotly anticipated, it did not seem to produce the acclaim it deserved. Before the reprint, it was a holy grail for board game collectors because it is a candidate for Reiner Knizia’s best design. It is definitely one of the most distinctive eurogames I’ve ever played. First, it is the only game with randomized setup that is strategic because it lays the entire landscape of play out at the start. Right away, you know what you are fighting for and when. The only unknowns are the cards you use to bid, and an observant player will have a good idea about them, as well, after a couple of rounds. Second, the way the auctions are evaluated whenever a player withdraws is ingenious. It creates a delicious tension between conserving resources and not wanting to leave openings for your opponents to drive through and seize, freezing you out of a key objective. Added to this is the tension between dropping quickly to seize a choice palace location and sticking things out to try winning more. Plenty of euros, especially those with an area control element, feature tough choices based around choosing your battles so you don’t waste scarce resources, but no game does a better job than Taj Mahal of tempting you to commit just a little bit more. Often you are not only cutting loose sunk costs, you are genuinely tempted by unexpected opportunities, only to be defeated at the last second and left bereft. While the failures can be crushing, the tension is delicious and the victories all the sweeter because of the high stakes. Layered on top of this is the irony that moderation will get you further in the long run. Taj Mahal is not just another auction game. The rhythm and the decisions are unique – it hasn’t even had many second-rate imitators – and a pleasure. It is also exhibit A of how to take familiar mechanics, tweak one or two and put them together in a new way to create a completely new, distinctive experience. Every eurogamer owes it to himself to try it out. It’s one of my top ten boardgames of all time and a masterclass in game design.

[linnaeus]

Alien Frontiers

Alien Frontiers is a new indie dice game about colonizing planets. It combines a handful of standard euro ideas – resource management, worker placement, area control, even using dice as “workers” seems to be the new new thing – into a more or less fresh package. While it is not without issues, it works pretty well. Since I went to the trouble of coming up with a set of criteria for judging dice games, I may as well apply them here:

Downtime is the Enemy: This is the biggest problem with Alien Frontiers. While you only roll your dice once on your turn, there are enough options (plus a small special powers element which broadens the decision tree) that analysis paralysis is a real possibility, especially among players that are unfamiliar with the game. My first game (with four) took almost an hour and a half (with me and another player perhaps being a little too chatty for the flow of play). I’m sure this would come down to an hour or even 45 minutes with experienced players, but that’s a big hurdle to jump over. There’s a little bit to consider while other players are going, and a bit of mild take-that to add player interaction, but downtime is, by and large, downtime.

No More Than One Roll per Turn: The biggest win of the design. You roll once each turn and only reroll, maybe, one die thanks to a special power card. Almost enough by itself to make me recommend AF :)

Give Players a Chance to React to the Dice: Also a big win, although also the root cause of the AP problems. There are some special powers that offer simple dice manipulations, but the important part of the game here is that you assign dice to different actions, with each action requiring a certain pattern (like a straight or a pair). There is one option that works best with low dice, plus a dump option for miscellaneous dice, as well. As a result, you usually have a couple of plausible options to consider after you roll. This does not mean that there isn’t still a luck of the dice factor, but it’s not out of line.

Low Rolls Should Not Suck, High Rolls Should Not Rule: A mixed bag here. Some of the actions have multiple slots available for workers/dice to occupy, but if a player already has dice present, you can only place if your set is higher than theirs. This mechanic adds some indirect interaction and tension, but it also ups the luck factor by making high rolls generally better than low. There is at least one action that works better with low dice, but it’s also the least used, alas.

Overall, I like and recommend Alien Frontiers. It’s just fresh enough to be fun, and it does feel like you have enough control over what you’re doing. I do wonder if it would hold up to heavy play, though. It’s not quick enough to be filler, and I don’t yet see much variation in the narrative from game to game. Learning curve will keep things fresh for a handful of plays, but let’s see if it lives past that.

[linnaeus]

Prolix

Prolix is an attempt to design a word game that improves on the weaknesses of Scrabble and Boggle. Except for the timer, needed to maintain the pace of play, it succeeds nicely, with rules that almost anyone can grasp. Where most word games reward for making words only from the letters available, Prolix lets you score for any word, but you only score for the letters in your word that are currently available. This subtle change makes a world of difference. While Prolix rewards knowledge of obscure words that cover unusual letter combinations, it does not operate in the fussy and weird niche of two- and three- letter words. This, alone, makes it better than standard word games to me. Instead, a strong general vocabulary, plus knowledge of some longer words that feature odd letter combinations, will win the day. Like most word games that allow challenges, it’s better to use a normal, and moderately-sized dictionary instead of a beast like the OED or an online dictionary. That discourages the study of bizarre, obscure words simply for the sake of gaining advantage. Instead, word games, properly used, can foster a healthy expansion of one’s vocabulary. In some ways, Prolix can do this even better than most, thanks to its more freeform nature.

[linnaeus]

Vegas Showdown

While it’s not as good as Ra or the hypothetical, idealized version of Saint Petersburg that resides openly in my head, Vegas Showdown is a pretty good middleweight gamers’ game. It’s possible that it has been overlooked by gamer snobs like me a bit because it was released by Avalon Hill/WotC, who made some dubious production decisions to cut costs/retail price. If you go past the superficial issues, though, VS fits in quite nicely in the eurogame ouvre. The systems are tight and clean and the randomness is well-calibrated. The auction system, while reminiscent of Amun-Re and (the much later) Homesteaders, it is still distinctive. While the event cards are a tad more random than I’d like, and the tech tree doesn’t quite rise to the level of creating distinct strategies (the game is still primarily an exercise in tactical optimization) the overall experience is fun enough that I want to play again. Recommended if you like middleweight euros and auction games.

[linnaeus]

Travel Blokus

If you’ve played the original Blokus, you probably have a good idea whether you should buy Blokus Duo. If you enjoy Blokus a lot, and play any amount with two, Blokus Duo is a no-brainer. If Blokus bugs you, you’re unlikely to enjoy this variant. That’s because Travel Blokus is virtually identical to Blokus. The differences amount to a smaller board, each side playing one colour (rather than two in 2p Blokus) and the start points located about halfway between the corner and the centre. That said, the feel is marginally different in Travel Blokus. It's a noticeably shorter game and it largely cuts out the maneuvring stage that occurs at the beginning of original Blokus and the players are engaged in a knife fight almost from the first move. The result is a less satisfying arc, but increased intensity. The effect is reminiscent of the difference between 9×9 Go and 13×13. If you haven’t played Blokus, by the way, you really should (or this if you mostly play games with 2). It's such a pure design that it seems like it should be hundreds of years old, not a little over a decade.

[linnaeus]

With Great Power…

While it shows its age a bit, With Great Power… is my favourite superhero RPG, which makes the fact that it’s going out of print rather unfortunate. There are several elements that set WGP apart from standard supers RPGs like Champions, M&M or MSH, and I only know of one game in development that will even reside in the same region of RPG design. Of note, WGP gives systemic support to the traditional superhero (and, not coincidentally, pro wrestling) story structure of good guy gets a mudhole stomped in him, he does research and/or soulsearching, then comes back and beats the badguys (usually barely). While this has been done more subtly since, when WGP first arrived it was a revelation, and I think that with a little spit and polish it still holds up well. It also provides systemic support to hurting superheroes in ways other than hit points. In WGP it’s as easy – probably easier – to put a PCs relationship with his girlfriend under stress than it is to break his arm. While there is less focus on it, the same can happen to the villains, too. Truth & Justice (and possibly Smallville) are the only other games I know of that incorporate this important part of many superhero tales. Finally, WGP does not rely on catalogs of fiddly superpower rules. I *like* fiddly catalogs of superpower rules, but they’re a pain when you’re trying to get new players up to speed. WGP treats powers as another source of drama and, otherwise, they are colour under the control of the players. It’s not perfect. Conflicts go on a bit too long, and it requires experience and a willingness to hack in order to change the pacing (which, by default, takes a few session to complete a story arc). Nothing else on the market scratches the same itch, though, even poorly. Hopefully a new game will appear that fills the void using the latest gaming technology, because it’s an important one and one that I like playing with. Luckily, I already have my copy of WGP to do the job.

[linnaeus]

Liar's Dice (aka Bluff; aka Perudo)

Easily my favourite pure dice game, and one of my top two or three fillers. Liar’s Dice features a quick pace, a nice rhythm, good tension and a few cool tactical options. I’m a fan of the one-roll-then-a-couple-of-turns structure, which is the inverse of many dice games. Also, the bidding is an almost unique way of letting players react to the randomness of the dice (although it is, of course, familiar from poker and the like). It’s easy to underestimate how much the star/wild face adds to the game, too. It adds some real bidding choices between going with a conventional bid or a nearby stars-only bid, and it also changes the probabilities on the normal bids in useful ways. Liar’s Dice is probably at its best with 5 players, and also very good with 4. 6 is very chaotic, and it is possible to go from a full allotment of dice to wiped out with one bad or unlucky bid. 2-player is better than you might expect, featuring a sort of knife fight quality, but 3-player is too staid for my taste. Note that some versions of the game let players reveal some of their dice and then re-roll the rest. This seems lie it should be a good thing, reducing the importance of luck, but it screws with the pace a rhythm in ways I find rather distasteful, and also detracting from the purity of the game as well. It’s not necessary for most gamers to go out and buy a copy to play Liar’s Dice, by the way. All you need are 5 6-siders per player and a cup or a shield for each. There are several mats for bid-tracking available in the Geek’s files section. Minor trivia points: a variant of Liar’s Dice is used as the conflict resolution mechanic for the RPG Dirty Secrets; it’s also the game the pirates play in the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie. The movie-branded version of the game uses a rather dull version of the rules, though.

[linnaeus]

The Bucket King

I think the nicest thing about the bucket king is that it fills a useful niche – almost mindless, but not so mindless as to be completely boring. Admittedly, this is damning with faint praise, but there are times when every gamer wants to play something with a group of friends without having to think too much about it. The Bucket King permits this without the endless tedium of take-that card games. There is also some direct player interaction – if only with the players to your left and your right – without open warfare. A player usually doesn’t get cornered until many cooks have played into the pot, so to speak, so it’s rare to look at your neighbour and say “you bastard.” Oh, it happens, just not a lot. Typically, the best choices come when you need to play more than one card in order to avoid losing several buckets from your pyramid. Playing multiple cards is bad because a lower hand size makes it harder to respond to future threats, but allowing multiple buckets to go is letting yourself leap toward final elimination. Of course, once you choose to play multiple cards, you tend to find yourself facing the same problem again shortly. There is a variant where playing exactly the same total as the last player reverses the flow of play. This is kind of fun for the person playing the tie, and it changes the rhythm of the game a little, which is good. It does cause downtime at the upper range of the player scale, though, since you can go several turns without playing anything if there is a series of tie plays that don’t involve you. Over all, I think it’s a good variant, but use with caution if you have a full table.

Inoffensive, if not exactly inspiring.

[linnaeus]

U1: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh

While I generally have an appreciation for the classic D&D modules that get pointed to as great examples of the form, I find U1: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh rather weak. It is certainly far weaker than its sequels, and weaker than such classic introductory modules as B1, B2 and T1 (I haven’t read the much-praised L1 yet).

The problem is an almost complete lack of exploration. While I can’t call Sinster Secret a railroad, it does feel unpleasantly constrained, and also quite small in scope compare to those other modules. It is little more than a couple of set pieces with a few atmospheric touches nearby. Even Saltmarsh is given short shrift when compared to the eponymous Keep of B1 or town of T1.

Mind you, U1 is not completely devoid of charms. The party may end up with a distinctive pet, and they can make a couple of valuable allies going on to the (by reputation) deadly U2 and U3. Also, those latter modules are some of the best examples available of dungeon maps outside of the Judges’ Guild megadungeons and B1.

Nevertheless, U1 is a rather limp introductory adventure that I would primarily recommend only because it leads to the much more interesting sequels.

[linnaeus]

Schotten-Totten

I'm a bit torn about how much of Schotten-Totten is in the hands of the player and how much is luck, but when I'm playing it it feels like I have enough control to make it meaningful. The catch there is that for the first two-thirds of the game You are really laying to reveal as little information as you possibly can to your opponent. Every bit of information your opponent has helps him decide which plays he can safely make. He learns of one more card he won't get to complete his straight, he knows how strongly you're going after flag X, he knows when you're out of safe moves. And this is absolute torture, but in a good way. Trying to decide which play is the least revealing when you have a paucity of real information (your hand, the cards you have already played and the card your opponent has already played) feels like a meaningful decision that you just can't quite make with what you have at hand. You have to rely on general strategic (largely statistical) principles that you develop yourself through experience. Also, when you do get an easy play, it's such a relief that it's actually really fun. It may seem odd to recommend a game that tortures its players like this, but I genuinely enjoy it. It melts your brain and twists your guts. It's almost like a horror movie for gamers where they are the protagonist. The one real downside to this is that ST can cause significant analysis paralysis in players that are taking it seriously. Like I said, it feels like you can figure out the right play if you just work through the implications enough, and that's a bit of a rabbit hole you can go down. Eventually you have to trust your experience and your instincts and a bit of analysis and play. Of course you could completely blow off any attempt at thought out play and play by your gut, but that would sap all of the delicious tension out of the game for both players, I think. And what's the point in that? A quick note: Battle Line is the same game, except it adds some special power cards (the latest German version of ST includes them as well). I haven't played with them, but it seems to me that they would cut the tension out of the game by rendering analysis and strategic instinct meaningless, since one special card can undercut the foundation your were analyzing from.

[linnaeus]

Steam

I'm now pretty convinced that the genre "train games" is no more meaningful semantically than "network building games," and that's a good thing. Otherwise the world would not have such an array of interesting network building/train games like Chicago Express and Steam (and even Ticket to Ride, which I only enjoy mildly, but respect immensely as a design). This thought came to mind because playing Steam brought into focus the fact that Chicago Express really is a stock game with a train element as a valuation engine, while Steam is a true train game, where the network building is at the heart of the action. One could reasonably argue that shipping goods is at the heart of Steam, but to me it felt more like a method of providing direction for the track-laying. Regardless, the game offers up some meaty decisions and the most interesting ones revolve around laying track. Even choosing your action tends to revolve around what you want to do with your track over the next couple of rounds. While it is hard to get truly blocked out (and yet it seems to happen at the very worst time), it can be mighty pricey to get to key locations if you don't arrive early enough. You generally need a steady supply of new cubes to ship to keep your head above water, too, so delaying more than a turn before tapping into new cubes can be painful. This focus on track building makes sense of the cottage industry that has grown up around alternate maps. If you played a single map too many times in a row, you would probably exhaust the questions it asks of the players in a hurry; 4-6 plays, tops. New maps, if well-designed, pose new questions without the heavy overhead of learning an entirely new rules system each time. I suspect playing new maps can help you look through old maps with fresh insight, too. The one weak spot in Steam is that the economic element doesn't sing, and that stands out in the midst of the interesting decisions elsewhere. While it is possible to get in over your head, it's unlikely, so debt doesn't have much sting in its tail. It's pretty much an automatic decision to let yourself slide 4 or even 5 notches into debt early in the game, since you will defang the debt with a cube delivery or two before you have to pay for it. I'm not sure what I'd like better – the simplicity of this system is almost a necessity to avoid distracting from the heart of the game too much – just that it needs more teeth. By the way, Steam's set up is much more straightforward than all of the tiles make it look. It's not feasible to sort the track tiles, so you can pour them out in a big pile. If you keep the player tokens separated by colour when you store them, setup shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. I'm definitely looking forward to playing more Steam. I'm especially curious to see what effect loosening or tightening the board by playing with three or five does, since my one play is with four (on the Germany map).

[linnaeus]

Carcassonne: Abbey & Mayor

After a couple of real clunkers (Princess & Dragon, The Tower, I'm looking at you) Abbey & Mayor is, if not a return to the form of Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders, certainly a step in the right direction for the Carcassonne expansions franchise. There are four small additions, plus a handful of new tiles that add some funky possibilities, like adding to two terrain features at once without a merger, and a road that leads to nowhere. The tiles are fun, if a bit weird, but the real heart of this expansion lies in three types of meeples and a new type of tile that everyone gets to use once instead of their regular turn. That tile, an abbey, can only be placed in a location where it will have a tile orthogonally attached to all of its sides. When played, it acts as a cloister but, more importantly, it also closes off any feature of any type that it borders. In other words, it can plug any hole, no matter how bizarre, as long as you have a tile on each side. This gives players a nice one-time-only escape hatch to complete a major city or endless road that your opponents have been especially nasty to. This does a lot to reduce the luck inherent in Caracassonne's tile draw (everybody but you gets the type of tile you need), and I welcome it. The meeples are a varied lot and a bit of a mixed bag, ranging from bland to quite cool. The eponymous mayor can only be played to cities and counts as a number of meeples equal to the number of pennants in the city. This is an interesting idea, adding a little complexity to city wars, and I like it a lot. At the 'meh' end of things is the wagon, which must be played on a road and when that road is complete the wagon can be moved to any unclaimed feature attached to the end of the completed road. This is probably good in megagames where three or more expansions are in play, but with a sane number of expansions it's little more than a meeple that specializes in roads. Finally, the barn is the latest in the arsenal of anti-farmer technology, but instead of outright nuking farmers, the barn at least leaves the owner of ousted farmers with some points. It's not awful, but there is an arbitrary difference in how many points a farmer scores based on whether the barn is played into his farm or the barn is in play and gets attached to the farmer. Overall, I'd rate Abbey & Mayor a success, but not essential in the way Inns & Cathedrals is. It's a good choice for Carc fanatics that need a way to freshen things up a little without indulging in the excesses of some of the other new expansions.

[linnaeus]

Sticheln

This is the game that helped me realize that trick-taking games could be awesome. While I have cooled on Sticheln a bit since those heady days, I still enjoy playing it on occasion, since the unique puzzles presented by the pain suit are worth the downside that there is virtually no place for aggressive play in the game. The problem is that any time you stick your neck out to take a trick when there are still players to play after you, you're going to get a pile of pain dumped on you. If you do a passable job of counting cards, you can try winning a trick with a card lower than any of your remaining pain cards, but later players are apt to take it on you. The result is a bit staid and stodgy when the premise promises good, backstabby fun. I keep toying with trying to figure out how to deliver on thsi promise, but it's a tough nut to crack. By the way, Stich's sweet spot is 4 players, with 5 next best. Four is a little staid, while 4 is almost static, while 5 is a bit out of control, and more is absolute madness. It's a shame there's no way of playing with 4.5 people :)

[linnaeus]

A Change of Gears

A Game Comment a Day started out as a "kill two birds with one stone" project. First, I wanted to work on my writing skills, especially my ability to write faster, and the only way to do that is to write. The second, which is secondary but useful nonetheless, was to catch up on a backlog of games I had left uncommented on the Geekdo websites, boardgamegeek,com and rpggeek.com. I don't even remember how I started to let my commenting slide, but it had reached epic proportions, and I was long overdue to get caught up. Using the latter with the former seemed like an especially good idea, since it also encouraged me to make my game comments meaty, something I appreciate in others' rating comments on the 'Geeks (and seems to be sadly lacking in the RPGGeek culture so far). It's now about three months and over 60 game comments later, and I think it's time to see if this little exercise is succeeding in its mission, and doing that means easing off the throttle here a bit. I want to maintain the rhythm of weekdaily writing (plus a bit on the weekends as well) and apply it to other avenues, including blogging, reviewing and any other writing projects that crop up. Hopefully, if this works the way I've intended, you will see regular (weekly or so) posts on my gaming blog, My Play, plus two to three reviews a month on various outlets. This Tumblog isn't going to be moribund, however. There are going to be days when I don't feel like tackling something meaty, and on those days I'll fill the space with a game comment here. Hopefully they won't appear more than once or twice a week, but there should be a steady trickle. To reflect this change, though, I'm changing the name here to something that doesn't imply daily posting. By the way, if you find these posts useful or entertaining, please feel free to let me know. It's always nice to feel appreciated. I have accounts on Twitter, and the Geeks, so I shouldn't be that hard for gamers to contact. See you here soon.