by Hobbes
size=18]Vanuatu :star::star::star::star::halfstar:
(image credit: henk.rolleman)
Wow. What a great game. On the surface, it's a fairly straightforward worker placement game where you're trying to gain money to finance actions that cost money, while also using actions to gain VP.
The thing that elevates Vanuatu is the very unforgiving and nasty rules on worker activation. Once the workers have been placed, the players take turns activating their workers. You can only benefit from removing your workers from an action space if (1) you had more workers there than any other player, or (2) you are tied for most and are earlier in turn order than any of the other players. If you don't meet those criteria, you won't benefit from the action space. You'll essentially forfeit the workers on that space for that turn.
And the status of your workers changes as other players remove their workers. You might be unable to activate the "fishing" action now, but if you can hold on for another round, Green might remove and activate their fishing workers, leaving you with the most workers there. Hey, now you can fish. (Or you can hang on for another rounds so that Red can't use her workers on the fishing space. Ha ha.)
This can be brutal. If things go wrong, a player can wind up forfeiting all of his actions for an entire turn. Re-read that last sentence. Major screwage potential.
This creates an extremely interesting and fun dynamic in the worker placement phase of the game. Not only do you need to think about the actions that you want to take, but also whether others are likely to block you from taking them (and whether you can block others in return). When workers start to come off, there's delicious tension (and schadenfreude) as it becomes clear that some players are going to get hosed (unless it's you).
As an added bonus, the game is really a great package in terms of its physical production. The components are excellent and the artwork is very handsome, functional, and thematic.
Loved it.
[hr]Ginkgopolis :star::star::star::star::nostar:
(image credit: henk.rolleman)
Silly theme (SF city building using Ginkgo trees).
Silly name (I'm thinking about calling it "Slamdance Cosmopolis").
But the game is quite good.
Ginkgopolis is an attractive tile-placement city building game. On your turn you can build out, build up, or just play a card to generate resources or VP.
There's an interesting tableau building component. Handled right, this can give you a solid stream of resources and VP every turn.
There's also a somewhat volatile area influence end-game VP contest. Players get VP for having the most influence in each of the city's "districts." But overbuilding can break up districts (this reminded me a little of Java) and there are other ways to expand your influence in a district or displace your opponent. In the early and mid-game, you probably aren't too worried about this. But toward the end there's a lot of cut and thrust.
The game can be a little frustrating if your tableau never really gets into gear, while your opponent's is humming along. But with repeated play we're getting better at avoiding that kind of misfiring.
With two, Gingkgopolis plays in an hour or a little less. It's a very pleasant medium weight, with thinky spatial and tableau building elements. And it's fun.
[hr]Friday :star::star::star::star::nostar:
(image credit: Jupklass)
I liked this much more than I expected to. I don't do a lot of solitaire gaming (except on iOS), so I wasn't too interested in trying Friday. But it's small and inexpensive, and it has a goofy charm to its art. So I put it on my want list and waited until there was a chance to use it to balance a trade.
I'm glad I did. It's a very clever solo deck building game, where you're trying to survive three runs through a hazard deck before the end-game pirate ship boss fight. If you defeat a hazard card, it goes into your discard pile where it recycles into your hand as an attack or special ability card. If you lose to a hazard, it will come back stronger in the next round, so you need to be consistently ramping up your abilities.
Also, if you lose to a hazard, you can choose to dump some of the cards that you played, taking them out of the game entirely. This is a key way to "thin" your deck to get read of weak or disadvantageous cards.
But you don't want your deck to be too thin, because every time you exhaust your deck, you add an "aging" card to it. Aging? That's probably good right? You gain in wisdom and judgment and skill? Nope. You get weak and stupid. Hmm.
All of those mechanisms are clever and interesting. Happily, they also produce a game that I found fun to play.
A very nice little pocket sized game.
[hr]Libertalia :star::star::star::halfstar::nostar:
(image credit: W Eric Martin)
Libertalia is a pirate-themed simultaneous role selection game with some interesting twists. First everyone has the same set of role cards (which are a randomly drawn subset of the whole deck, creating inter-play variability).
Once roles are secretly selected, the role cards are sorted, first by role number (each role has its own number), and then by a tie-breaker number used to determine sort order when more than one player has chosen the same role.
The role cards may have special powers on them. Those powers get resolved in sort order, from low to high. Then, any players with surviving role cards choose from an open pool of treasure tiles (some good and some bad), in reverse number order.
The heart of the game is second-guessing the other players in order to successfully surf the sort order, forwards then backwards. That's hard to do well, as everyone else is trying to do the same thing and you can't be sure which roles the other players will choose (which then determines sort order).
The graphic design is solid and the art is quite good. I enjoyed the first play, but this isn't my favorite type of game. I generally suck at second-guessing role selection. (I'm routinely crushed at Citadels.) But this is pretty good if you like that kind of thing.
[hr]Canal Grande :star::star::star::halfstar::nostar:
(image credit: m.hamburg)
This is a two-player card game derived from San Marco. Both share the same art design motif (though it's much better implemented in San Marco; the card art in this game is muddy and lackluster; and the card backs are inexplicably plain and unattractive).
Both also share the "I divide, you choose" mechanic. That's always good for producing turn angst, on both the dividing and choosing ends of the deal (and it's satisfying, as the divider, to create particularly painful choices for your opponent).
It also helps to avoid the luck-predominance that I often find annoying in two-player card games.
The other game mechanics are serviceable, if a bit threadbare. On the whole it's a decent little two-player game. There's still a healthy dose of luck, but the game gives you a chance to mitigate it.
Pretty good.
[hr]Milestones :star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
(image credit: a_traveller)
This is a solid, handsome resource to VP euro. Each player has their own player board that operates as a rondel. You move your dobber clockwise and perform the action you land on. The most interesting twists on that mechanism are:
(1) You customize the top half of your rondel, by buying and placing worker tiles on the available spaces. These are then available action spaces that give you resources.
(2) A space on the lower half of your rondel lets you "build" onto a shared countryside board. That's where most of the points are. When building, you extend a common road network and build markets and dwellings.
(3) The last space on the bottom of your rondel is the castle. You must stop there. When you do, you're taxed and must discard resources over a specified number (preventing hoarding from turn to turn) and discard one of your worker tiles (ouch!).
That last point keeps you under constant pressure to be buying new workers and fiddling with the composition of your rondel. At the end of the game, there are also significant VP for having the most of each worker type.
It's well designed and thinky, but I didn't enjoy it much. I couldn't get my head around the worker tile management and was always lagging i terms of efficiency (and then endgame VP). I've found that I don't really enjoy games where your success depends on your ability to manipulate a puzzle (like the mancala in Trajan). Milestones fell into that category for me.
[hr]Tokaido :star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
(image credit: henk.rolleman)
In Tokaido, you're moving your meeple along a linear track. The track is dotted with locations of several different types that give you things (items for set collection VP, money, random bonus, etc). Most sites can only be occupied by one player (some have two spots).
You can move as far forward as you like on your turn, but turn order is determined by whoever is farthest behind on the road. It is always that player's turn. (Think Thebes.)
This should create some interesting choices. Players can race ahead to grab crucial stuff. Or they can hang back and take multiple turns in a row until they've caught up with the other players. In my first play, we all stayed mostly in a jostling pack, moving just far enough ahead to take the next available good spot. It was rare for anyone to get more than one turn in a row because they were far behind the pack. Much more common: the spots you want in order to advance your set collection goals were already taken, so you do whatever is next best. I won, but I'm not sure why.
A note on the art: As art, it's gorgeous and thematic. But as game art, it fell a little short. To my taste, there's too much white space on the board and the illustrations are too small and spidery to easily recognize. YMMV.