Category: Games

As long time readers of this site know, I used to review board games in this space fairly regularly. These days, though, it’s pretty rare to see a here — not because I am playing less (although The Squirrelly does crimp my ability to stay up until 3:00 am playing Risk and drinking Pabst), but because most of my board game reviews now appear in the magazine Undefeated. (Uhh, did I ever mention that I now write board game reviews and strategy articles for Undefeated? Maybe not. But I do. You should subscribe!)

A quick trip through my game review archive will reveal that my favorite game of approximately forever is the strategic powerhouse Puerto Rico. So it was a no-brainer for me to pick up San Juan, a card game based on Puerto Rico and by the same designer, Andreas Seyfarth.

As with it’s progenitor, the players of San Juan are trying to produce commodities and construct buildings; unlike the complex Puerto Rico, though — which comes equiped with game boards, money, colonists, ships, goods, buildings and plantations — San Juan is played entirely with a deck of cards. The cards depicts buildings and can be played as such, but, in an ingenious twist, can also be used as money (as you will see below).

On a turn, a player chooses one of five Roles. Each Role permits everybody to take a certain action, with the selecting player receiving some modest advantage. When someone chooses the Builder, for instance, each person may play a building from their hand and pay for it by discarding a number of additional cards equal to the building’s cost, with the person who chose Builder paying one less for his building. Other Roles allow players to produce goods, sell those goods to acquire more cards, or take cards directly from the deck. The game ends when someone builds their twelfth building.

The buildings are the heart of the game, and come in two varieties: Production Buildings and Violet Buildings. Production Buildings are used to generate commodities for later sale, while each Violet Buildings confers some special advantage onto the player who has it in his city. A players with a “Smithy,” reduces the cost of all Production Buildings for one, for example, while the owner of a “Tower” can hold up to 12 cards in his hand (the usual limit is seven). With 24 different Violet Buildings in the deck, the players can acquire a wide variety of benefits, and some of the cards interact in powerful ways. Discovering interesting combinations is part of the fun, and the myriad of building permutations allows for plenty of strategies for players to pursue.

Halfway through my first session of Puerto Rico I felt “the buzz,” the sense that the game before me was something an extraordinary. I have never felt the same about its little brother. That said, I enjoy San Juan quite a bit, and I’m always eager to play it. At first I liked S.J. because it “felt” like Puerto Rico in half the time. Now, after repeated playings, it no longer feels like P.R. at all — and that’s a good thing. Now view San Juan a fine game it its own right, and not just the card game equivalent of a tribute band. Yes, the game is quicker than P.R., and lighter, and more dependant on luck, but there’s quite a lot of room for skillful play, and the decisions to be made over what to build, what cards to discard when building, and what Roles to pick are always compelling.

San Juan is also one of those rare games rated from 2-4 players that actually works well with two players. And the art on the cards and game box is really rather handsome. Sure, it’s no Puerto Rico, but that’s a mighty high standard to hold any game too. Judged on its own merits, San Juan gets high marks as a solid, medium-weight strategy card game, and that’s good enough for me.

I’m not a big fan of abstract games. That’s what I keep saying, at least, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Much of that evidence has been provided by Michael Schacht, who has designed a number of games I quite like, including one of my favorites Web of Power. And now I find myself enamored with Schacht’s most recent release, a enjoyably agonizing little gem called Hansa.

The gameboard shows nine Hanseatic cities, connected by a web of water routes and home to an assortment of consumer goods. The players, meanwhile, are merchants on a ship zig-zagging across the Baltic sea, visiting the various cities as the vendors ply their trade. The crucial point here is that all of the players are on the same ship, and only control it on their individual turns.

At the start of the game each player receives three coins and places markets in some of the cities. Players then spend their turns sailing the ship from its current location to a new destination — in accordance with the route lines, and spending a coin to do so — and taking actions: buying goods, establishing markets, or selling goods. To buy a good, a player takes one of the good counters from the ship’s current city and pays one coin to whomever has the most markets in that city. To establish new markets, a player discards a previously purchased good and places 1-3 markets in this ship’s current city. To sell goods, a player turns a number of previously purchased goods face down (adding them to his score pile) and removes one market from the ship’s current city (if the player has no markets in the current city, he may not sell there). Complicating all this is the restriction that a player may take more than one action in a city at a time. At the end of the game, players receive points for all the goods they own, and two points for every city in which they have at least one market.

What makes the game hum is the clever (and often maddening) way in which money, goods, and markets are intertwined. Owning the plurality of markets in a city is always a boon, not only because other players will pay you to buy goods there but because you can take goods from that city for free. The coins you receive from your markets can be used to purchase goods, and these goods can be later discarded to establish still more markets. This would be a powerful positive feedback loop were it not for two limitations: each player only has a total of 15 markets, and every time you sell goods (a necessity, if you wish to win) you remove markets from the board.

Hansa is very much a tactical game rather than a strategic one — that is, every turn you evaluate your current position and decide what to do, with little focus on long-term planning. In that respect, each turn of Hansa feels like solving a little puzzle, as you noodle out where to buy and sell goods, establish markets, and sail the ship, all with a finite number of coins at your disposal. These kind of mental gymnastics might become taxing over a long period of time, but I find them quite enjoyable over the course of Hansa’s typical 45-60 minutes playing time.

Unlike some of my previous recommendations, this one isn’t necessarily for everyone — although the rules couldn’t be simpler, playing well does require a willingness to mentally crunch the permutations before making a move. But for folks game for a little analytic reasoning, Hansa is about as addictive as they come.

I’m not the kind of guy who feels an overwhelming need to see a movie on its opening night, purchase an album the day its been released, or watch the sixth season of the Sopranos now rather than wait for the DVD. Even so, I went to my local game store and picked up a copy of Ticket To Ride the first day it became available. The advanced buzz on TtR said it was the best light strategy game to come down the pike in long time, and my first few playings seem to confirm this reputation.

The board shows a stylized map of the United States and Canada. Cities are scattered throughout the nations and a series of dashed lines connect the burgs into a web of routes. These routes are of one of eight colors and consist of 1-6 “dashes” (actually, small rectangular boxes). There is also a deck containing cards of nine suits: the eight route colors found on the board, and a ninth “Wild” suit. Players start with four of these cards and a pile of small, plastic trains.

Players strive to establish railroad lines between cities. To do so, a player may use his turn to either draw cards or claim a route. In the latter case, the person plays a set of cards of the same color and in same quantity as the dashed lines in the route he wishes to claim. The route between St. Louis and Pittsburg, for example, consists of five green dashed line; to claim it, a player would have to discard a set of five green cards. When a player establishes a route he places his trains onto the dashes to denote ownership.

Players earn points for every route they establish, and can also score by completing “Tickets.” Tickets bear the names of two cities and a point value (e.g., “Dallas / New York: 11”) . At the end of the game, a player receives the points shown on a Ticket if he managed to establish a continuous string of routes between the two cities; if he was unable to make the connection, he loses the Ticket’s points. Most cities are connected to their neighbors by a single route a piece, although a few sets of cities are joined by double routes. This means that once a player has claimed the St. Louis to Pittsburg line, it becomes unavailable to everyone else. That’s bad news for the guy holding the “Dallas to New York” Ticket, as he will need to find another way to traverse that stretch of the Midwest.

So nabbing routes first is crucial. But you can either draw cards or claim a route on your turn — but not both — deciding to claim a route at the expense of increasing your hand is never easy. This is made all the more agonizing by the fact that you draw from a face-up pool of five cards, so on the same turn you might want to assume ownership of a particular route, a Blue card that you’re eager to acquire might be sitting there taunting you. You may also forego both the drawing of cards and the establishments of routes and use your turn to take more Tickets; the points on Tickets are vital to winning the game, but skipping an entire turn to gain more is never easy.

Ticket To Ride is easily the best family game I’ve played all year, the best in years, to be honest. The theme is fun, the play is exciting, and the rules can be explained in five minutes or less. At $35 it won’t be the cheapest game available on your local game store’s shelves, but the beautiful components justify the price. Furthermore, Ticket‘s accessibility and short playing time (about 45 minutes) ensure that it will hit the table more than enough times to get your money’s worth. All this makes for a game I heartily recommend, and that will be on the top of my Good Gifts Games list for 2004.

Since I used to maintain the board game site acesup.com, and because I now write about board game here from time to time, I often get email from folks asking if I know of game groups or game stores in the Seattle area.

I’ve been meaning to improve my CSS skills for a while anyhow, so I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and create a website devoted to the Seattle boardgame community. Thus, my new side project: http://www.seattlespiel.com.

If you heard me on The Beat and are are looking for more information on the games described, head on over to SeattleSpiel.

There will be few (if any) posts this week, because I am working on a side project: the Hugo House Annual Inquiry. But if you are a Seattlelite (or will be in town next weekend), read on — this may be something you’ll be interested in attending.

Hugo House is a Seattle-based non-profit somethingorother that focuses on literacy and the arts. Every year H.H. hosts a big event called a “Cultural Inquiry,” where they pick a theme and host a number of activities and installations related to that theme. Two years ago the theme was Maps; last year the theme was Surveillance. This year, the Annual Inquiry is all about Games. As it turns about, a couple of the folks over at H.H. read the yeti and know about my fondness for games and hornswoggled talked me into participating.

There’s a lot of really great stuff going on (check out the schedule), but here are the pies that I have a thumb in:

• Friday, 10:00-11:30 pm — A Guide To Visitors Story Slam: I am a frequent participant in A Guide To Visitor’s storytelling shows. The theme of this evening’s tales will be “Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave: the way we use others as pawns and the mind games we play on each other.” I helped arrange this, and there’s a fair chance I will also tell a story.
• Saturday, 2:30-3:30 pm — “Break The Safe” Tournament: Local game company Forrest-Puzan Creative will be showcasing a new game they designed by throwing a “Break The Safe Tournament.” Break The Safe is a very-cool cooperative boardgame where the players work as team, finding keys, disarming booby-traps and evading guard dogs. (More details on the game here.) The winning team will win an seminar on the art of locksmithing sponsored by Broadway Locksmiths, which is so cool that I wish I wasn’t disqualified from winning (although I’ll probably try to finangle myself into that seminar just for helping put this thing together). The tournament will include a tutorial on the game, so even if you’ve never heard of it you are still encouraged to participate. If you’re interested in joining, assemble a team of four and register by either emailing tournament@forrest-pruzan.com or calling Wendee (206-547-7155 ext. 106). (Please note the caveat mentioned below, though.)
• Saturday, 10:30-midnight: Late Night Lying Game and Gamenight: Come watch me sit in front of a crowd of people and lie my fool head off. Afterward I will be participating in the Hugo House’s casual gamenight. And by “participating in” I mean “drinking”.
• Sunday, October 5th, 10:30 am — Treasure Hunt: I’ll be hosting a Treasure Hunt similar to those I hold for my friends every year. (See this as an example.) I’ll have a semi-official page up for this later today or tomorrow. The hunt will be run in teams of three or four and should take around 90 minutes. If you want to participate, I’m asking that you let me know in advance (Again, see the caveat).

The Caveat: To participate in any of above events (including the Break The Safe Tournament and the Treasure Hunt), you have to pay that day’s admission. That the bad news. (Well, it’s not really “bad,” since all the $$ goes to a good cause — namely, Hugo House.) The good news is that once you pay the admission, you get access to all of the events that are held during that time frame. And, like I mentioned before, there’s a lot of good stuff going on. Sherman Alexie will be talking about “Dungeons and Dragons” (seriously), James Ernest (the guy who is Cheapass Games) will be there giving game design seminars and talking about high-stakes poker, there will be a couple of panel discussions about video games and society … it’s gonna be cool.

You can get ticket information over on this page. Hope you can make it!

Yo: If you have a game group and would be willing to playtest a prototype that I am working on for the Hippodice Competition, drop me a line.

(Note: If that didn’t make a whit of sense to you, you were not the target audience for this post anyhow.)

I played a prototype of Fresh Fish years ago at a friends house and declared the game to be broken. I was certain the bizarro rules couldn’t possibly work, despite the fact that we had just successfully finished a game. Later, when there was a limited release of the game in Germany, game enthusiasts snapped up all available copies and hailed it as one of the most brilliant and unusual games available, leading me to conclude that the game must work after all.

So when Plenary Games re-released Fresh Fish earlier this year, I knew I would have to get a copy and see if I had misevaluated it. Now, after several more plays, I realize that I had, and Fresh Fish has become one of my current favorites. Unfortunately, it’s also nearly impossible to describe. But here goes.

The 10×10 grid on the game board starts empty, except for four Factory tiles — a Harbor, a Game Store, a Nuclear Power Plant and a Petroleum Depot — which are placed randomly before play begins. Each Factory has corresponding Outlets, with one of each kind of Outlet Tile for each player in the game. In other words, a five-player game will have five Fish Stores (for the Harbor), five Game Stores (for the Game Factory), five Nuclear Waste Dumps (for the Power Plant) and five Gas Stations (for the Depot). These tiles are mixed with a similar amount of Generic Buildings tiles to form the draw pool.

Each player also begins with $15 and six Reservation markers. On a turn, a player does one of two things: places a Reservation Marker on any vacant space on the board or flips over the next tile from the draw pool. In the former case, the player’s turn ends after he has placed his Marker, but what happens next in the latter case depends on whether a Generic Building or an Outlet is revealed. If a Generic Building, the player simply places it in a space when he has a Reservation Marker and concludes his turn. But if an Outlet is turned over, all players who don’t already own that particular Outlet bid forthe right to own it, with the winner placing it in one of his reserved space.

Some spaces will become Roads as the game progresses, and, at the end of the game, you add up the number of Road Tiles you have to traverse from each Factory to arrive at your corresponding Outlet. The lowest score wins — after all, the closer your Fish Store is to the Harbor, the fresher the fish you’ll have for sale.

It’s road placement that makes Fresh Fish so unusual — and so difficult to explain. Players don’t place the Road Tiles, you see — the game places the Road Tiles. There are two overarching metarules which determine where the Road Tiles go. Firstly, at the end of the game there can be only one road, so you can’t place a Generic Building or an Outlet in a square that would prevent two or more road segments from eventually joining. Secondly, all Factories and Outlets must have road access by the end of the game. So if a Game Store in the middle of the board has buildings adjacent to it on three of its sides, the space abutting the fourth side must contain a Road Tile (because if a building were placed there, the store would never gain road access). A corollary to the second metarule is that empty spaces on the board also cannot become isolated, because they could, hypothetically, contain an Outlet on a future turn.

Don’t understand? Don’t worry – no one does at first. Although the two metarules are simple to state (“there’s only one road, and all Factories and Outlets need access to the road”), it’s very difficult to wrap your mind around in practice. After each turn, players must check to see if the placement of a building in any of the remaining empty spaces would violate either of the metarules; if so, the space in question is immediately “expropriated” and a Road Tile is placed therein. After a few games this becomes automatic (although even experienced players will occasionally miss one), but the first few times it will feel like your brain is in a garlic press every time you try and work this out.

So it’s not enough to simply place your Fish Store close to the Harbor; you also have to place other buildings around the Harbor to ensure that the road connecting the Factory to your Outlet is as short as possible. It’s entirely possible to place a Gas Station three squares away from the Petroleum Depot, but to wind up with a 12 Road-Tile route because other players placed buildings in such a way as to make the road leaving the Depot snake all around the board before arriving at your Station.

I enjoy Fresh Fish and am always eager to play it, but I haven’t the foggiest idea why. Even though I can now see at a glance where Road Tiles need to go, I still have no clue how to bend the road to my will. Plus, the game is mentally exhausting – afterwards I typically feel hungover, and on two occasions the play of the game has given me a headache (no joke). But Fish pushes the same, perverse “spatial reasoning” button as jigsaw puzzles, Tetris and Ricochet Robot (another migraine-inducer). It’s like watching a good horror movie: throughout you are miserable, but afterwards you say, “that was fantastic! I can’t wait for a sequel!”

It’s hard to recommend Fresh Fish on the basis of “fun,” because it’s certainly not for everyone. Furthermore, playing the game without someone who can instantly spot where the Road Tiles go can be a chore – often you will realize that you missed an expropriation several turns after the fact, and “rewinding” the game is nigh impossible. On this point, all I can say is that I went from disbeliever to fan after three plays, and many of my friends enjoy it as much as I do. But I can recommend the game without reservation on one point: if you’re in the market for something unlike anything you’ve ever played before, Fresh Fish is unlikely to disappoint.

On April 27, 2003, I held my Seventh Annual Birthday Treasure Hunt on the campus of the University of Washington.

First, some history. While a student at The Evergreen State College, I read this article on the annual MIT Treasure Hunt and decided that I wanted to host a similar (albeit greatly scaled down) event for my friends. So in 1995, the first Birthday Treasure Hunt was held in lovely downtown Olympia, WA.

Two years later I held the second “annual” Hunt in La Paz, Bolivia, for two score Peace Corps Volunteers. Since my return from South America, the Hunt has been run more-or-less-every year, always on the University of Washington campus. The first four Hunts were abstract, with generic puzzles and solutions, but in 2000 I switched to themed Hunts, and have since held “Treasure Hunt 2000: Down the Rabbit Hole” and “Treasure Hunt 2001: A Puzzling Odyssey“. The theme for “Treasure Hunt 2003: There’s No Place Like Home” was The Wizard of Oz.

April 27 turned out to be a beautiful day for a hunt. After oscillating between “crappy” and “also crappy” for weeks, the whether took and abrupt turn for the lovely that Sunday morning, and remained so for the rest of the day. So when the 30+ Hunt participants gathered on the north side of the UW fountain, they did so on what seemed like the first true day of spring.

As in previous years, the mechanics of the Hunt were straightforward. Players assembled into teams of 3-5, each of which received a sealed envelope. Upon my word all teams opened their envelope to find a map and the first clue. The map (seen here) showed a subset of the campus, with only 30 building names listed. All further clues would be found in one of these 30 buildings, a warning noted. The first clue, as with all clues, was a puzzle which revealed the location of the next clue. The object of the Hunt was to be the first team to solve all six clues and get to end location.

At 2:15 I gave the signal and the Hunt began.

Clue One: Welcome To Oz: The first clue came in two parts: a sheet of paper with instructions and a small ziplock baggy full of Jelly Bellies. The instructions said that that there were seven different types of Jelly Bellies in the bag, and that each distinct flavor represented a different letter of the alphabet (as shown on a chart at the bottom of the page). Players were told to first determine the seven letters, then “anagram the seven letters to spell out two common, uncapitalized words — the first with three letters, the second with four. The two-word phrase is a synonym (of sorts) for where you should go next.”

Based on color and flavor, teams had little difficulty determining the seven flavors: licorice, coconut, peanut butter, lemon, banana, cinnamon, and pear. (I was skeptical about the last one, but, by jimminey, it really does taste unmistakably like pear.) These seven flavors corresponded to the letters KLOPRSY, which can only be anagrammed into a single three-word / four-word phrase: “sly pork”. Teams that didn’t automatically assume they had made a mistake when confronted with “sly pork” looked at the list of buildings and quickly found the “synonym (of sorts) for where you should go next”: “Cunningham”. The second clue was posted in that building’s main entrance.

Clue Two: The Scarecrow: Next up was the S.A.T.: the Scarecrow Aptitude Test. The puzzle had ten multiple-choice questions — from antonyms to reading comprehension to problem solving — all having to do with brains and each with a numeric answer from 1-4. Players were told to add all their answers together, plug the sum into an equation, and write the resulting six-digit number into a series of blanks: __ __ / __ __ / __ __. Written thusly, the solution gave the combination to a locker, in which the next clue was hidden.

Clue Three: The Tin Man: This was the toughest clue for many teams, because it revolved around a type of puzzle that most people have never heard of: the nonogram. In these ingenious brainteasers, players use logic to determine which squares in a grid to blacken and thereby reveal a picture.

Unlike most nongrams, this one had letters inside the boxes, and the note: “Ignore the letters in the boxes until the puzzle is complete, then use them to determine the building and room number where the next clue is located. Remember: “It’s what’s inside that counts!” This was a reference to the fact that, when the nonogram was complete, the letters inside the picture (a heart, of course) spelled out: ARTTWOTEN. And that’s where the next clue was to be found: on the door of room 210 in the Art Building.

After the hunt, many participants expressed an desire to do more of these kind of puzzle. So here you go: this is my favorite online Nonogram site, here are a bunch more.

Clue Four: The Cowardly Lion: The next clue featured three Quotefall-style puzzles, the kind routinely found those “Penny Press Puzzle Books” available in airports worldwide. This may have been the easiest puzzle in the whole Hunt for a couple reasons. First, crafty teams discovered that they could deduce the full solution to the clue after solving only two of the three Quotedrops. Also, all three of the Quotefalls contained the word “courage,” and figuring that out generally “unlocked” the rest of the puzzle.

Clue Five: The Wicked Witch: “I’m mellllllllllllllllllllllting!!!!” That was the theme to this, the fifth puzzle in the hunt. The puzzle consisted of a table containing 27 numbered cells in three columns and nine rows, with shaded boxes between each of the columns. (Oh fer crissakes, just go look at the damned thing.) Below, definitions were given for each cell, along with the following instructions: “Write the five-letter answer to clue 1 in the first space. Then drop one letter to get the answer to clue 2. Put the dropped letter into the shaded box between the two columns. Drop another letter (again putting it in the shaded box) to get the answer to clue 3. Follow this pattern for every row in the puzzle.”

When completed, the letters in the shaded boxes were: CAPFOUNDONCARTIRES (e.g., “cap found on car tires”). A glance at the sheets listing the building names should have revealed the answer: the “HUB” (Husky Union Building).

Clue Six: The Wizard Of Oz: This was it, the final clue. The clue was in an envelope, which also contained a set of nine tiles. The clue said “Place the nine tiles into the frame of your map so that there every road leads to Dorothy, a house, or Kansas (i.e., there will be no dead ends). The orientation of pictures and letters on the tiles do not necessarily correspond to the correct orientation of the tile itself, so do not rely on them as guides. Once the path is complete, just follow the yellow brick road!” The “map” indicated was the small map that was included with the first clue.

One of the tiles had a hole cut out of it, and it was fairly simple to place it onto the map in such a way that the final building was indicated: Mary Gates Hall fit in the cut-out hole perfectly. But the clue was fairly well hidden within the building, so teams who dashed off to Mary Gates without solving the entire puzzle generally looked in vain.

Those who managed to place all nine tiles onto the map, however, could trace Dorothy’s path all the way to Kansas and jot down all the letters she passed on here journey to spell out: MARYGATESHALLATTHEBOTTOMOFSTAIRONE. (“Mary Gates Hall At The Bottom Of Stair One”). Sure enough, those who went to the stairwell labelled “Stair One’ and walked down it all the way to the bottom found a map of Kansas squirreled away down there. This was the final location and solution to the Hunt.

The first team to arrive at the final location (and win the Hunt) was Toto’s Teeth: Josh Davis, Gunilla Eriksson, Linda Mitchell and William Pross — not coincidentally, the exact same team that won last year’s hunt under a different guise.

Congratulations to Toto’s Teeth, and a big thanks to everyone who participated!