 Hacienda is about as generic you can get. An tile-laying game with card drafting and a farming theme. Wow, how exciting. But don't judge it by its cover: while it isn't the most original game ever, it's still pretty fun, and manages to allow some interesting strategic thinking and unexpected turn-arounds during a match, even with its lack of originality. Players are farmers in Argentina trying to secure land and cattle for Vps. Yes, money is not what farmers are after; victory points is where it's at. You get victory points by owning huge... tracts of land (well, not really that huge, just 3 spaces or more is enough, but I couldn't resist the reference), connecting to different markets on the board, building haciendas on your land or and having stuff (animals or land tiles) adjacent to water hexes. If it sounds abstract, then it's because it essentially is, even if the art and production values are nice. Hacienda is basically a connection game. One wouldn't be wrong to compare it to Knizia's Through the Desert, only with more elements thrown in (namely, an economic system). You connect your animals and your land pieces to different important parts of the board, while trying . The main strategy here is blocking. Being nasty is definitely not merely an option, but a necessity, if you want to be competitive. Otherwise, the game is solved through mere luck of the draw. Not only do you have access the important parts of the board, you also have to do it in a way that keeps other players from doing this as well. Rules are simple: you get three actions per turn, which can be either to buy cards (open cards costing more money than closed ones) buy haciendas or water hexes (which strangely cost the same regardless of size, but after playing you find out that it's balanced this way) or play cards, placing your animals or land hexes. As you can probably tell, the game has that classic dilemma between “buying more and wait to see what others will do” and “acting right now, before others do”. In a way, this game reminds me a bit of Ticket to Ride, but without the specific destinations: everyone wants to connect to the same spots all over the board, and know that it's impossible, so they must choose which spots they think they can reach.  The game comes with a double-sided board, with a symetrical bone-shaped map on one side and an entirely asymetrical map on the other. While the symetrical side is probably more fair, I definitely prefer unfairness that is more interesting. Sure, the game usually clumps around the same spots, but the matches are far more interesting on the crooked side of things. On an online boardgaming website (yucata, I think), you can play on several different maps, and if you do an extensive search on the internet, you can find a way to print out these different maps for more variety. Although the game is essentially the same, some variety in the tile placement adds a bit of replayability to the game.  Production values of the game are nice. Tiles are eurogame-standard thick, and the art is nice, and even manages to hide the abstract nature of the gameplay from most eyes. All the tiles are double-sided, probably to save money in production, and while it may be somewhat bothersome to flip tiles looking for the one you're looking for, it's hardly a big deal. A game this simple and so lacking in original charm probably couldn't afford a bigger price tag. I do like the art for the animals, for some reason that smiling pig creeps me out in a funny way. The sheep is not too far behind, either. The game lasts between 70 and 90 minutes, and rules explanation is mighty quick. Although the experienced player will definitely have the advantage (knowledge of the good spots on the map, knowing the dynamics of blocking and so on) and the game can get quite nasty, I think this game is good for newbies and non-gamers. The advantage of the experienced player can be clearly shown in his plays, and it's not hard to pick up on the different strategies of the game after just one play. While players that are prone to getting frustrated at being attacked would probably be better off not playing this in a competitive environment (I wouldn't play it with kids younger than 10, for an example), the clarity of the rules make this game quite accessible even to non-gamers. The box says it's for 2 to 5 players, but the 2-player game is clearly lacking (being a game exclusively of hurting your opponent) and with five there's too little board space for you to plan anything, with downtime becoming more annoying with more players between your turns and more things changing until you can act again. The game comes with two variant scoring rules, in case the base game is too light for you. Me, being the heavy-games fan, gave these a go and I can tell you they don't make that much of a difference. The changes are deep, but even with the extra thinking I end up having pretty much the same amount of fun as I do with the basic rules. Go figure. If I'm in a more serious-gamer-like environment, I'd probably put the complex rule for earning money in there, but then again, I'd probably pick a different game.  Hacienda is one of those cases where it's hard to explain why I like it as much as I do. It has zero originality: it does nothing that I haven't seen before. Most of the thinking involved deals with luck-of-the-draw in the card drafting. But I enjoy the defensive thinking the game forces you into doing, as in “how to take the least chances when playing my stuff on the board”? There's a strange charm to the game, a sort of appeal that can't be really described with its mechanisms and competitive dynamics. It's not enough for me to love the game or put it among my favorites, but it secures a 7/10 and a place in my collection for those moments where I don't want to scare off a non-gamer with a more daunting game like Imperial or Chicago Express. Nothing you can't miss, but you'll probably have a good time when you play this economic cousin of Through the Desert. Click here to buy Hacienda on eBay
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 Maharaja surprised me quite a bit, the first time I played it. I knew few games back then, and was amazed by the dynamic aspect of the design. The good looks of Phalanx's production didn't hurt either, and for a while the game remained among my favorites. About two hundred other games later, and around a dozen matches of this title, I'm not as excited as I once was about this game, but it's still a worthy design and I enjoy playing now and then. This is essentially an area-majority racing game: players compete to be the first one to build all seven palaces they have in their personal stock. To do so, players need money, and they get money by fighting area-majority battles (in which the palaces themselves help win, but not too much) throughout the board. Players decide their actions simultaneously using disks and have them resolve in player order, with the players going last having bigger bonuses than the ones going first. What's surprising about the game at first is the amount of freedom the game gives the players: movement is free (as long as you pay for it, which isn't the paradox it sounds like), and you can split up your actions freely as well, as in first-half-of-action-A, action B, then second-half-of-action-A. The only punishment is that if you don't manage to complete both actions entirely (some of them being two-part affairs), you're punished by the bank giving every other player 2 bucks (leaving you a bit behind). All this freedom can make the game feel a bit chaotic at first, specially with the switching of the special power turn-order chits between players (or, in other words, players stealing them from you when you didn't expect to lose them), but after a few matches you start taking the opponent's moves and desires into consideration when choosing your actions. The structure of the game is rather simple. At the board, one of the seven palaces is being visited by the Maharaja, and that's the place where the scoring will occur (where money will be paid to the players that have built stuff there). It's standard area majority: player with the strongest presence gets the most money. What is interesting in the economics of the game is that a palace costs 12 moneys and only gives you 3 points if it was the first one built there (turn order is thus crucial); otherwise, it's just 1 point, like the houses that cost 1 money. Still, building palaces is what makes you win the game, so you should still do so, even if it's crazy expensive (you start off with 15 bucks, so that you have an idea, and that's pretty close to the most money you can make in a scoring round).  It's a game that has a strategic quality that I enjoy a lot: you have to learn how to pick your battles. You cannot win every dispute, and you cannot even really fight every dispute: sometimes you just have to go ahead to the are that will (hopefully, since that can be modified too) score next. Even if you can move all around the board, every time you cross a path that you haven't built you give money to the other players, so you have to be careful with your movements. The development of each match is interesting to see. The relative freedom of action allows players to move all over the map, influence a bunch of different places, making the game really feel dynamic and alive. Even players that didn't really enjoy the game, for not liking simultaneous action as a mechanism, or thinking that the strategies are confusing, admitted that this design is mighty clever. Nobody in the group hated it or thought it was a bad game. Matches take anywhere between 90 to 120 minutes, depending on the analysis paralysis of the players in choosing the actions, and also the experience level. This game strongly rewards experience, to the point where a newbie has a very small chance against someone that has played it a couple of times before. Last time I played it I was the the only non-newbie at the table and won by a distance of 2 palaces, which is quite sizeable. The production values of the game are astonishing. The game is gorgeous, and the pieces are very functional. Even if the font used to name the palaces on the board is almost unreadable, it hardly matters since we've nicknamed every character on the board (Mad hatter, for the guy in the top-middle part of the board). The glass pieces for the palaces are specially good looking, and the art is very nice. The manual is poorly written, in usual Phalanx fashion, but this being a rather normal eurogame, one can figure out the rules through the ambigui Still, after more than a dozen matches I must say that I'm not as enchanted by the game as I once was. I still quite like it, and have played some exciting matches (I've even won on the second tiebreaker!), but I feel like I've pretty much seen all what the game has to offer. I'm not afraid of suggesting it when there's 4 or 5 people (ages 10 and up, I'd say, even though the publisher says 12+) willing to race non-linearly across a board , but I nowadays I prefer games that have more depth, or at least keep showing new strategic aspects even after a dozen matches. Wolfgang Kramer seems to have recognized this and included a couple of variants at the end of the manual (as he usually does), and while they are interesting and do add some replay value, it's essentially the same game, requiring the same kind of thinking with or without the extra rules. It's a solid area-majority eurogame, one that I enjoy playing and am glad that I own, but it isn't really essential to my collection Click here to buy Maharaja on eBay
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 Neuland is an evil game. And, in retribution to its sheer evilness, gamers everywhere have ignored it, even if it's a superb design and a joy to play (even if your tortured brain may not agree). This is by far the most difficult and brainburny game I've ever played. It even scares me a little, and I'm a difficult-game enthusiast: my favorite game is the 18xx series, train games that can last over 6 hours and have so many money transactions that the use of poker chips cuts out over an hour of duration. But this game... this game scares me. Rules are simple. First player to reach a certain number of Vps wins. You earn Vps through the construction and activation of buildings. To build and activate these buildings, you have to navigate through a dense (though pretty clear, actually) technology-tree of products and buildings, slowly and carefully advancing so that other players don't steal away your hard work, or get too free a ride out of it.. On the second turn you're already 100% into the game, calculating different possibilities and different directions to take on the multiple forks-in-the-path the game throws at you. As if walking along a path that divides itself at dozens of different points wasn't enough, the game throws another tough choice at you: you must decide how many actions to take in a turn: if you take few actions, you have a bigger chance to play again (and act upon other players' choices); if you take more actions, you can chain together more decisions. For those of you who have played Tinners' Trail or Thebes, it's exactly the same turn order mechanism, applied to a much heavier game. And that was exactly what I was looking for after playing Thebes and Tinners' Trail: it's a brilliant mechanism, and here it's used to its maximum potential.  Even if I love this game to death, I must warn all that there is one huge problem with it, entirely unavoidable and un-fixable: analysis paralysis and downtime. You have A LOT to think about all the time, dozens upon dozens of choices, all with their specific consequences, never forgetting where your opponents are during the game. You will do a lot of thinking, but you will also do a bit of waiting for your turn and complaining about the downtime. For this reason, I suspect that the game is damn-near unplayable with four people. Three is most definitely best, to keep the waiting down and the interaction more dynamic, less head-to-head, zero-sum. Being essentially a logistics game (an extremely complex one at that), it's definitely not for everyone. The theme is bland (even if the art is nice, but more on that later) and the gameplay is quite dry. You will think, think and think when playing this. If there's any table talk, it's definitely between players whose turn it currently isn't: there's no space in your mind for chit-chat as you plan your next steps. The game is that intense. Interaction is definitely high, to a point where explicit conflict breaks out between players, and those last couple of turns can be grueling, if there's only one building left. This is not one of those games where you can play it lightly or heavily: the game's own nature keeps pulling to to the “dark side” of Analysis Paralysis. It came to a point where the chaos-loving player in our group (who loves it when “a lot of crazy random stuff happens”) asked for paper and pencil to plan out his turn. And even he enjoyed this luckless game.  While it's great that this small-printrun game was picked up by a large publisher, a few terrible missteps got in the way of this game's success, to the point where it was found with huge discounts only a few months after it was republished. First of all, the manual. It's impossible to understand the game from the rulebook. The rules are rather simple, and to a point intuitive (once you get the spirit of it), but the confusing way it is written makes it sound like a terribly obscure design. Thankfully, there are plenty of player aids and rulebook re-writes available online, so this should not stop you from trying this game. Other major flaw is a couple of tragic rule changes that seriously affect gameplay. Why they added luck in mine construction is beyond me: did they really think they could turn this into a more family-oriented game? This monster? It's a horrible change (the other ones are silly, but mostly harmless). Again, you can find guides to revert rules back to what they are in the first edition, which is the only way this game should be played.  One flaw that cannot be adjusted is the game's graphic design. It looks nice, drawn by the same guy that did Agricola, but it's insufficiently clear when you're first trying to understand the game. The diagonal building-mat is particularly confusing, with arrows only vaguely pointing towards buildings and little differentiation between one row and the next (“is this coming out or going in?”) After the first match or so you get used to it, but this game's learning curve is steep enough (hitting close to 90o) without the colorful mess of the building mat. The board looks nice, though, I should say. So, considering the super-heavy gameplay, the unexciting theme, the incomprehensible rulebook, the lame rule-modifications and the confusing graphic design, it hardly comes at a surprise that this game wasn't a huge hit. It's too bad, this failure encourages game designers to play it safe and keep churning out generic worker placement titles, instead of doing something truly unique and refreshing with their games. I love it. If my brain is up for this exquisite torture, and I have two other maniacs along with me for this 2h30 hour trip of logistic madness, I can hardly think of a better game. I give it a 9/10 because of the production issues (sad) and the downtime (unavoidable), but I imagine this game will bring much more joy beyond the mere three times I managed to get this to the table. I recommend it (for the gamers that are crazy enough). 12+ feels like an optimistic age estimate, here. Click here to buy Neuland on eBay
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 Ubongo is fast. It's pretty. It's completely lacking in strategy and (almost completely) in decisions. And it's fun. It's a riot. You should definitely give it a try, if you get the chance. There's supposedly a theme in this game, somewhere (Ubongo meaning “head” or “brain” in swahili, or so I recall), of some sort of festival for rain or harvest. My edition is in german, but I can safely say that any theme is pasted on. This is essentially cardboard tetris. Well, not really tetris: you're not filing up horizontal lines with tiles that are given you in random aorder and trying to make the tiles disappear. But it's pretty close to that: At the start of each round, each player picks up a puzzle board and tries, within the period of the sandtimer (45-60 seconds), to fill up the white space with a set of tetris-like pieces (everyone's set is identical). What pieces you have to use is indicated by a die roll and a unique chart that is printed on each board. When you finish your puzzle, you yell out (or maybe just say it out loud, if you're the shy type) “Ubongo!” and grab a few shiny rocks. The first person to finish his puzzle has more choices in picking up shiny rocks, but everyone always picks up two. The winner is the player that has the most rocks of a single color after nine rounds of puzzle-solving.  As you can see, it's dead simple. Games rarely take more than half an hour, regardless of player count. It's a game where the number of players at the table hardly matters, since the meat of the gameplay is pretty much solitaire (each with his own puzzle), and makes one wonder why they didn't include piece sets for 5 and 6 players as well (with a few extra puzzle boards along with it). Even if each player is dealing with this own particular situation, it doesn't really feel like multiplayer solitaire. The shouting of “ubongo” and the pressure to solve it faster than other players make the game more lively; if you're the last one left that hasn't solved his puzzle, you can feel the other players stare at your direction even if you don't raise your eyes from your board. Shouting out countdowns is fun, too. The obvious complaint to make about the game is the scoring system: it's most definitely pasted on the rest of the game, and worse, it's unfair. A player can solve all the puzzles given to him and still lose to another player that. I usually play with a set collection variant, that while still feels pasted on is a little more fair towards the endresult (I should note that Ubongo extreme's scoring also feels artificial). This being such a quick and somewhat mindless (or at least completely lacking in brainburny moments), it's not a horrible fault that kills the game, as it would with most boardgames.  The game is quite newbie friendly. Rules explanation should take less than 5 minutes, and is probably acessible even to children 6+, if you get a bigger sandtimer and are more lax on the competition aspect (they will probably enjoy the puzzle part by itself). Still, like many puzzle games/activities, one gets clearly better with more experience, a sort of muscle one exercizes over and over, unable to transfer any of his experience to a new player. But, not being the strategy title, it's still pretty fun if you do badly (or, perhaps I should say, a person's enjoyment doesn't depend at all on his performance in the game, unlike what happens sometimes in a few deeper games) After around a dozen plays, I must say the game does become a little on the easy side (something I heard does not happen so quickly with Ubongo Extreme, but having played it only twice I cannot say for myself). You will definitely finish most puzzles, even on the “hard” side of the board (the one that requires four pieces instead of three), but still you'll get stumped from time to time. In those moments, you will get stressed out and tense, and your opponents will all be looking at you as you helplessly try to solve the puzzle. When the timer runs out, you'll scream “it's impossible!”, and toss the board back in the box, just as one opponent decides to pick it up and manages to solve it in five seconds. For those moments, the game remains entertaining, even after you've become really good at it.  The game is very nicely produced. The publisher, KOSMOS, has wisely picked up on the mainstream appeal of the game, and didn't save any pennies in the production values: the cover and the graphics are colorful, the pieces are nice and sturdy, and even the (almost irrelevant) player pawns look quite nice. The simple gameplay and nice look has paid off: Ubongo is a best-selling game, having spawned a whole bunch of spin-offs, with travel editions (that appear quite limited in replay value, from the pictures I've seen online), hexagonal “Extreme” editions (that are tougher, but still too similar to the original to be worth owning both of them) and now even a 3D edition, with chunky blocks to be placed on top of each other in some parts. I've even bought a “duel” version, in which players try to solve the same puzzle (on different boards, of course) and has a duel-type scoring that at last won't be tacked-on or random. Normal ubongo is fine with two players, but considering it's usually played to “fill holes” between matches of more “serious” games, a two-player variant with more tension will probably be welcome. Like it or not, we'll see a bunch more of ubongo in the future. I'm not the biggest fan of the series, but I'm usually willing to play, specially if I have non-gamers over. I give it a 7/10.
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 One word best sums up King of Siam as a game and as a design: Minimalist. It deals with the Thailand's (or Siam's) struggle to remain independent from Great Britain's colonialism, all the while the three main political factions of the land fight for dominance. The players themselves are not the political factions, at least not directly: each player controls every color on the board and have to decide in which color they will focus their attention on during the game, while influencing all the others. It's an area control game, basically, in which the disputes are not between players but instead between the colors in which players can invest in or not. What makes King of Siam an impressive design is its tightness. Each player has a hand of 8 cards (7 different types, one type with two equal cards) and all that the players can do in the game is either pass or play one of those cards, following the instructions. And you never get that card back. Yep, you only get 8 actions per game, so your choices are very, very hard. The game only lasts eight rounds, with the scoring of a region happening at the end of each round: round ends when all players pass in a row, with a color winning over the territory if it has more cubes in that area than any other color. In the case of a tie, that space goes to Great Britain. With four ties (in a row or not, doesn't matter), the game ends immediately.  When you play a card, you place the cubes on the board (or switch them around, or switch scoring order) following its specific conditions and you take a cube from the board, anywhere on the map. The cubes you take are placed in front of you, and show your allegiance to the three factions. At the end of the game, the faction with the most territories determines what the cubes are worth: if the Red faction has the most territories, the player with the most red cubes in front of him wins the game. If four regions are tied, then Great Britain has taken over the land, and then the player with the most set of cubes (one of each color, much like the scoring in Tigris & Euphrates) wins. So even if the color you've been supporting is in bad shape, you can still fight for a sudden death ending. The game is tense from start to finish. What is cruel (deliciously cruel) is that the “cube roster” is rather small: a lead of two cubes, for an example, is rather strong, since it's the most of a single color you can add with a single card (remembering that each player can only do each action once!). So, at the same time you invest your future in a color, you make it weaker in the area disputes (by removing a bit of its presence from the board). In one specific match, it came to a point where two players had invested so much in the color that the general supply ran out, and the color no longer had the capacity to be placed back on the territories to fight for the majorities.  As you can probably tell, with the reduced number of actions and rounds, it's a very quick game. Matches take thirty to thirty five minutes, but it would feel weird to call this one a filler. It's a tense, tight, and punishing game, with strong possibilities for sudden (and irreversible) turn-arounds. You have to make tough decisions every time it's your turn: if you're taking your actions lightly, you're probably headed for a defeat. One player used up all his cards in the first half of the game and had nothing to do while the other two opponents defined the final configuration of the board, both of them making sure that the sitting duck finished in last place.  The game is best played with three or four patient players, ages 12 and up. The four player game is particularly evil and nasty. It's played in partnerships, with teams alternating play. The stroke of genius, or what makes this mode so amazing, is that players are not allowed to communicate between themselves during the game, so it becomes a game of trying to syncronize your thinking with your partner (scoring is team-based, so both of you lose if you go to different directions). I guess it goes without saying that this mode is for experienced gamers only, or at least players that are tolerant to other people's momentary strategic blindness costing them their match. Being so brainburny, it's definitely not a game for everyone. At first it even seems incredibly chaotic and almost random. If it had any random factor other than the setup, I'm sure many would claim it's a luck-fest. However, with a few plays of it (I have 6) you start understanding the dynamics of the game, which is much different from the usual area majority game. It rewards subtlety, patience and observation. The most useful skill you can learn is not just “what to do” but also “when to remain quiet”: I've read about the game people commenting that you have 8 decisions, but they forget that passing is also a decision, and the most difficult one to learn when you should do it. Managing to make a game out of so little material (8 actions, 8 rounds, etc) and still striking amazing originality with simple and tried-and-true mechanisms (it is an area majority game after all) is a remarkable achievement. Even if I hadn't enjoyed playing it (and I did, since it's my kind of game), I'd probably admire it. One player that disliked the game even commented “it's not fun, but it's quite impressive”. And even if half and hour of silent brainburn is not for everyone, it's still a game that I'm glad I own, even if it isn't played as often as I like. The random setup and the clever design of the regions' borders definitely give this some longevity, but I've only played this half a dozen times, so I can't say for sure. Still, I give it an 8/10; the partnership game alone would be worth the admission price, but with three the game's still pretty solid. Click here to buy King of Siam on eBay
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Like many gamers, my first few games of Settlers were a real watershed for me – a window into what games could be, a world beyond 32-page Avalon Hill rulebooks and marathon player elimination games like Risk. Settlers of Catan was easy enough to teach a 10-year old, but challenging enough to attract a whole passel of kibitzing hard core war gamers at our local game club. A little luck, a lot of player interaction, and multiple viable paths to victory. I even remember buying my own copy during a long layover in London (no store in Seattle carried Settlers back in 1995). These days, none of my gamer friends play Settlers any more, mainly because it is just about all we played for so long. And all my many expansions sit in my basement, collecting dust. Over these many years we have all been on the lookout for the next Settlers. Some games, like Carcassone and Alhambra, Notre Dame and Pillars of the Earth, lacked the continuing challenge of Settlers. And while some wonderful games like Puerto Rico, Caylus and Le Havre (plus many Martin Wallace titles) surpassed Settlers in depth for real gamers, none of them matched its broad appeal. Not even Agricola - the family game is a tad too static, and the “real” game’s 14 opening cards are overly cumbersome for most non-gamers. And then came Stone Age. Stone Age is a quick worker placement and dice-rolling game with numerous paths to victory, a well-orchestrated theme, and enough challenge for hundreds of replays. It plays well – and quite differently - with 2, 3, or 4 players. Although Stone Age borrows some mechanics liberally - the worker placement of Leonardo Da Vinci, the resource collection of Pillars of the Earth - it is quite original in its own right. Each player starts with five workers and twelve food. Each turn players place workers in sequence (much as in Leonardo Da Vinci) till all workers are placed, then each player resolves their workers in any order they like. At the end of each turn, each worker eats one food. If you don’t have enough food you may choose to spend any one resource for each food you are lacking. If you cannot or choose not to feed your workers, you lose 10 points. There are four types of places for your workers: First, there are seven worker spaces for each of four types of resources, and each worker you place on one type of resource rolls one six-sided die. Then, divide the total by 3 for wood, 4 for clay, 5 for stone, or 6 for gold, rounding down, and that’s how many of that resource you get. Any leftover workers can be sent to hunt for food. The number of hunting spaces is unlimited and you get one food for every 2 pips of the die. Second, there are three places to visit in “town”: one gives you a farm (which produces one food per turn), one gives you a +1 die bump tool for your resource rolls (which may be used once per turn), and finally the “love hut” (which naturally requires two workers) gives you a new worker (up to a max of five extra for a total of ten). Note that “love hut” is just a nickname, and is distinct from actual huts. Third, you may spend resources for huts. There is one stack of seven huts for each player in the game. So in a three player game, you have a choice of three huts to build. Some huts require three specific resources (such as brick, stone & gold). Others require 4 or 5 resources of 1, 2, 3 or 4 types (such as 5 resources of any 2 types). There are four uber-huts, allowing you play between 1 to 7 of any type of resources. You receive victory points exactly equal to the sum of the resources you put into the hut: 3 for wood, 4 for clay, 5 for stone, and 6 for gold (exactly the number each divides by in the resource areas). Fourth, and most interesting, are the cards. Each round there are exactly four cards available, one for any one resource (wood is best of course), one for any two resources, one for three, and one for four. Each card is divided into an upper and a lower part. The lower section only gives you end of game victory points. These are divided into 16 end of game multipliers (1X or 2X your farms, tools, or people, and 1X, 2X or 3X your huts) and 16 civilization cards (2 each of 8 different types). Civ cards follow a common progression (similar to St. Petersburg’s nobles) for each unique civ: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49 or 64. Unlike St. Petersburg, you can also score a second set of civ cards, so if you have 6 cards of 4 types you’ll get 16 points for four different cards and 4 more points for 2 different cards. The upper section gives you immediate rewards: 3 victory points, a set amount of food (1 to 7), one or two specific resources, or two dice towards a specific resource (tools may be used just as on resource spaces). About half the cards have you roll one die for each player in the game, then gives each player a reward in turn order: 1=wood, 2=clay, 3=stone, 4=gold, 5=tool and 6=farm. Thus the player who buys the card will have the advantage of choosing first, which is obviously a much bigger deal in a 4-player game than in a two-player game! The game continues until either the last hut in any one stack is built or there are not enough cards left to fill the card row. This means that the pace of game varies greatly depending on both how quickly players build huts and how quickly they buy cards. The latter is determined mainly by how willing players are to pay 3 or 4 resources for a particular card. How It Plays While Stone Age lacks the interesting map and wonderful trading of Settlers, it offers a world of interesting placement options, lots of simple but interesting probability challenges, and a delicious mix of balancing infrastructure building (farms, tools, workers), short term food needs, and end game victory points. Placing Workers Like numerous worker placement games, Stone Age offers indirect player interaction based on divining the perceived value of each area to other players. For example, if I am the only person who has a lot of tools, it is fairly likely that one of my opponents will take a 2X tools card if it only costs one resource (just to deprive me of the points). But how long can I leave it in the three-spot? The four spot? If I am going first next turn, I might even risk letting it go this whole turn, knowing that I can take it with my opening play the next turn when it will drop down from four resources to just one resource. In general, the town is most popular early in the game, because farms, tools and people are more valuable the earlier you get them. The cards are valuable throughout, but especially in the middle game, as players take cards to maximize the infrastructure they have already started to build. And huts are especially valuable at the very end, because resources are worth just one point each at game end (food is worth nothing) instead of 3-6 points each on a hut. The civ cards are challenging because they are most worthwhile only if you get at least five or six of them (25 or 36 points). Because there are only two of each, two players may collect them profitably. Added to this, most of the best rewards are on civ cards – seven food, a farm, a tool, two stone, your choice of any two resources. This last card is peculiarly powerful because you may choose the resources at any time – such as on the last turn to ensure that you won’t get shut out of the resources you need to build the hut you have just occupied. There is also one civ card that actually gives you another, secret civ card (bottom half only). The importance of these ultra-valuable immediate rewards is that it is often worthwhile for a player to take a particular civ card just for the reward, even if they are not collecting a big set. This of course puts more pressure on the players who are collecting civ sets. Note that you can place as many workers as space allows in a resource area, but you can never return to place more workers there the same turn. Probability The dice aspect of Stone Age, like Settlers, is challenging but rarely grueling or tedious. For example, let’s say I need two wood to buy a card and five food to feed my workers this turn. How many workers do I place on the wood and how many on hunting? How early in my turn do I need to lock up the wood before it is blocked? If have tools, I have more flexibility, because I can use tools to compensate for an unexpected bad roll. There are also some interesting statistical issues. On average a game will last about 10 turns. Since food costs two pips apiece, a farm on turn one is worth about 20 pips. A tool on turn one is worth about 10 pips on turn one (though this is more complex, because sometimes you can’t use some of your tools, depending on what resources you choose, and sometimes a single resource will get you another gold, worth six pips). Each new worker is worth 1.5 pips per turn (3.5 average dice roll minus 2 for the food to feed him) – and it takes two workers to make a worker, but just one worker to make a tool. Of course, the later in the game, the less valuable each of these infrastructure items are – unless you have matching multipliers that is. If you accumulate all the tools multipliers (8X) and maximize your tools (at 12), you will end up with 96 points just on this bonus. Balancing short-term and long-term objectives One of the most satisfying aspects of Stone Age is how you have to balance your short term food needs with both hut infrastructure and getting victory points. Getting a juicy 2X multiplier early helps set you out on a defined strategy, but is often at the cost of a farm that will feed one of your workers for the whole game. Different Strategies Feel Different One complaint I have about a lot of euros is that although there may be several viable paths to victory, they don’t really feel distinct. For example, in a lot of area control games, many placement decisions are really just about sorting out what area will net you the most points. Pillars of the Earth, a decent game, also tends to devolve into sorting out some fairly fiddly multipliers for squishing different resources into victory points. One of the strengths of Settlers, by contrast, is that a road-building strategy feels different and plays different than a technology strategy. Stone Age builds on its great theme (it even comes with an ancient-looking leather dice-rolling cup) by nicely differentiating the various elements of the game. Tools make production less risky, while the sheer number of workers lets you block a whole type of resource by brute force. A hut strategy requires many distinct resources (plus a few hut multipliers), while a card-driven strategy instead requires lots and lots of wood. Note that the more hut multipliers you have, the more efficient it is to build small huts (letting you build more huts, each multiplied by say 5X or 6X). So you will likely use the 1-7 hut to crunch just one resource, just to maximize the power of the multiplier. By contrast, if you have no hut multipliers you want to just build a few really big huts, to maximize efficiency. Here you would want to use the 1-7 to crunch as many resources as you can. The most controversial aspect of the game is the so-called “starvation strategy.” This entails procreating early and often and essentially ignoring food. You will soon be losing ten points a turn, but you can make it up if you build a lot of huts and procure several of the worker multipliers (and usually the hut multipliers as well). Critics complain that allowing a viable strategy without food denudes the game of its theme. I disagree and have my own fantasy about how the -10 points is simply the cost of “importing” food from a nearby village in exchange for future favors. Regardless, it is only a marginal strategy, successful primarily against weak opponents and/or conservative opponents who habitually ignore the love hut. It is marginal because it allows other players to have even more farms (since you will not be taking them), thus making it viable for them to visit the love hut earlier once their marginal food need per turn is lower, and because smart players can both block the love hut and speed up the game (usually by buying one hut per turn). Because the workers max out at 10, the starvation strategy is generally more viable the more turns you can play with all 10 workers. Summary Although Stone Age is a real favorite, I do have a couple of small quibbles. Although the four-player game is the most fun and challenging, there is a clear disadvantage to going fourth (second is generally agreed to be best, depending on what cards are out). In our games, we usually give the fourth player 2 extra food to make up for this. End game scoring is not difficult, but with scores often over 200, it is certainly not as elegant as Settlers’ race to 10 points. This is one small advantage of the online version. Finally, while it is a fun game to play with younger players or non-gamers, it’s not great for a mix of non-gamers and a couple of hard core competitive gamers. This is because, like Puerto Rico, there is a huge advantage to sitting on the left of the newbie – mainly because weaker players will fail to take strong cards (or other spaces) when they should, allowing you to get cards (and sometimes farms, tools, etc.) that you would not get in a more evenly balanced game. Nevertheless, with the right mind set, Stone Age is a great gateway game because it includes lots of fun dice rolls, comes through on a great theme, and because it’s not necessary to delve into all the deeper strategies in order to have fun building your own little ancient town. I particularly prefer it to Kingsburg because it is less mechanistic (Kingsburg has strict sequential building requirements) and especially because while there are lots of die rolls, they generally (but not always!) even out over the course of a game. Kingsburg’s relatively few monster rolls are annoyingly game-changing, especially at the end. What makes Stone Age enjoyable after more than 500 plays (most of them online, though I do own a copy) is how important the order of cards is. There are just 32 cards in the game, and it’s pretty easy to track the more important cards after a few plays without much effort. This makes card order crucial – especially because you won’t see all the cards if players buy huts faster than they buy cards (or if one player drives down one hut stack relentlessly). While Stone Age is not the most original game of the last few years, it has truly taken and perfected some of the most interesting mechanics of the last decade. The design is truly elegant and clean. The one real innovation – cards split between end game victory points and short term rewards – is brilliant. Perhaps above all, Stone Age plays quite fast and is not usually the cause of analysis paralysis. So even if you get screwed by a dice roll or two, your tragic end won’t be far off! Click here to buy Stone Age on eBay
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 Wyatt Earp surprised me a lot when I played it. It's a simple card game in which players are sheriffs fighting to see who gets the most money by arresting notorious criminals. Instead of healthy cooperation in name of peace and public safety, we are a selfish bunch who would rather see the criminal rob banks and shoot innocent people rather than have him being taken down by a fellow peacekeeper. Nice. What the game is, with all the frills removed, is a simple rummy variant. Each bad guy would be a suit (the game thus has seven suits) and players try to form sets of . Every time a player significantly contributes to the presence of the suit (ok, ok, bad guy) in the game, more money is added to the reward, making it more worth fighting for. The game's balance is quite well tuned: you need 3 cards to be able to start a suit (or a search for the bad guy), but that only adds up to 6, and a reward is only paid if the total strength of the search is 8 or more. So an element of cooperation among adversaries can occur during the game, specially considering that other people's contributions can add up to the final pot (just make sure you're the one with the most power in the search in the end and not let that reward slip your hands...). There's even a clever mechanism where a runaway leader in a dispute can end up taking all the money, without having to split it with anyone. Along with the normal cards, the game also has a bunch of special cards, called “sheriff” cards. Most of them are generic upgrades to search parties, giving you some flexibility in your disputes against other players. The problem is, you can only play one of these cards per turn, so sometimes you can end up being “stuck” with a bunch of them. The round ends (and midgame scores are added) when a player finishes his turn with no cards in his hand, but unlike many other games this is far from defining the winner of that round: it's just a small advantage that others weren't able to react to his last couple of plays. More than once I've seen a player be able to end the turn and not do so because it would've been bad for him.   The appeal of Wyatt Earp is somewhat undescribable. I'm usually not a fan of light games (I play games to torture my brain, as I frequently say) and even so the game's mechanisms do not seem particularly brilliant when coldly analysed (as I am prone to do with the games I play). I am not attacked by super-difficult decisions or face interesting strategic dilemmas during a match. Most of the time when I lose I'm forced to conclude that it was mostly due to bad luck of the draw, instead of any poor decisions that I've made. Skill seems like a matter of mere familiarity with the rules, instead of deep knowledge of how the mechanisms interact together, or guessing how your opponents will react. You mostly do what you can, given the cards that you were given. But still, while in most other games this would mean that I would rather not play (much less own, like I do), for some reason I really dig this game. It's fun. There's really nothing much to say about it. Other players that have liked it expressed it similarly: I don't know, I just dig it. “Really neat” is a common expression used to describe it by those who like it. Other gamers in our group that didn't like it just don't get it. But, honestly, neither do we, really. I mean, it even breaks one of my game-enjoyment axioms. Theme to me tends to be somewhat irrelevant: I usually focus on the strategy and the mechanisms. I usually say that theme is like a food's appearance: nice if it's good and attractive, but it's far from being really important. In Wyatt Earp's case, I actually get into the theme, we sort of narrate among ourselves the little events that occur during the game “Oh, I heard that Billy the Kidd robbed the bank... let's see if it's true... nope, he's a damn coward!”, and so on. This is not the cold calculating game of Mü, or the I-dare-you laughter-filled matches of Tichu, or even the masochistic endeavor that is Sticheln. It's not completely random and filled with tension, like 6 Nimmt (or Category 5, whatever). It's just a relaxing game of rummy, with a cute theme implementation and some nice art. The art is nice, but it's still irritating to deal with these super-small cards. Not only are a pain to hold and fan out, but they're also difficult to find sleeves for. Still, all the cards are pretty clear in what they do and the drawings look nice. The cardboard money is fine and the posters for the criminals look great (they even have a printed-wood back that's almost so nice it makes you want to leave the posters face-down). The box is a little too big for the components, but not ridiculously so Overall, I give Wyatt Earp a 7.5/10. I recommend it specially for 3 players, since with four things can get a little too busy with the players getting in each others' way. A match takes only about half an hour, and pretty much anyone can play (the official age estimate of 12+ is a quite over the top, perhaps due to the criminal theme; my guess would be 8+), given the simple rules. It only takes about one hand for the newbie to understand what's going on, and it's quite possible to catch up if you fall behind. I've played this around ten times already, and even though it's not something I'd choose every week or so, cardgames tend to be quite replayable, given the variety of the card draw.
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 In the Year of the Dragon was released in Essen 2008 and proved to be quite a hit among the eurogame crowd. The core game is quite simple, player with the most victory points wins, and you get victory points by having many palaces, purchasing privileges, hiring geishas (an otherwise useless employee) or using the specific victory point action (an otherwise useless action). What brings a twist to the formula is the fact that while players try to get these nice points a whole lot of horrible stuff descends upon their heads. You have famine, pestilence, war, taxes (worse than death!) and... fireworks festival. Okay, that last one isn't that much of a threat, but you'll spend a lot of time preparing for the worst in this game. To make matters even more difficult for us chinese administrators, the game is structured around a rather elegant worker-placement variant. Depending on the quality of the personnel you have on the palace, you get to go first (if you have less efficient people) or last (if you have more productive ones). There's only one worker per player, one action per turn, and if you choose an action that has already been chosen (or is paired with another action that has been chosen, the only random aspect of the game), you have to pay 3 chinese bucks. Just so you have an idea of how tight money is in this game, you start the game with 6 bucks and it's likely you'll never go pass this. So, it's expensive to do stuff that has been done before this turn. If there's nothing even remotely interesting left, you can choose not to do anything and re-set your money to 3 bucks (if you had 0, you go to 3. If you had 2, you also go to 3) so next turn there's at least the option of paying for something. What could leave many players confused in the first couple of plays (or at least this was my case) is that this is not a game of survival: a player that strives to be the one least affected by the disasters will probably lose. The disasters are there not to define the winner, but to keep the players from scoring Vps. The winner is the person who keeps scoring Vps regardless of the disasters. In eight out of the game's twelve turns you'll have to deal with a blow that's about to strike. You're constantly fighting against a game system that does not seem to be pleased with your existence, or at least your comfort. It's easy to lose yourself in this fight and forget that your real fight is against the other players, to score more than they do while fighting for survival. It's damage control, but not to lose the smallest number of personnel, but to lose the smallest amount of scoring capacity, overall.  Thus comes what I see as the only flaw of the game, or at least the characteristic of the design that pleases me the least: the indirect aspect of the interaction in the game. Don't get me wrong, this game definitely has a lot of interaction (specially considering the eurogame average), but it's essentially one of those games where each player builds his own separate thing and the player that builds the best “thing” wins the match. The interaction is just in the part of getting more stuff for your “thing”, like dozens of other eurogames before it. There's no messing directly with what other people create or do (just try to keep them from doing what they want). What keeps the game alive is the tightness of the system (the classic “I have one action but I want to do 3 things” problem pops up every turn or so), but it bogs down to how well you now the intricacies of the system (which aren't really that numerous), with the intricacies of how your opponents play coming at a somewhat distant second place. One other issue with the game is the balance. This game is incredibly well designed and went through very good playtesting, but it may not appear so in your first half dozen matches. There's one action that a player can take in the beginning that is very strong, rather easy to do and with irreversible benefits, to the point where it was questioned if the game is fair or not. It's quite possible to beat the player that makes this move, but it requires experienced players. Thus, in a rather unusual way for a eurogame, balance relies mostly on the players, and on game experience. It could be frustrating for the first couple of games, but after a while players understand what's going on.  The game scales from 2 to 5, but the 3 player game would be only for beginners. Four or five is the way to go (though full quorum might be too rough for a first go). The two-player game is probably very stale, I've never played it and suspect I never will. The number of unblocked options would be too numerous for the biggest interaction of the game (blocking) become as relevant as it should. The machine-building aspect of the game (not the most interesting part) would be too strong.  I've played the game around fifteen times (some of them online, at Mabiweb) and I've always had fun, though the game's starting to get just a little bit repetitive. This is not something to be played obsessively: even though the random order of the disasters during setup keeps one match different from another, after a while it becomes clear that some disasters weigh more than others, and are the ones you should really focus your construction around. There's a tiny expansion coming out in a Alea-anniversary box (bundled together with a bunch of expansions for games I don't own), but from a quick glance at the rules, I imagine it adds some nice variety to the game. Some of these fifteen matches have been quite memorable: a come-from-behind victory by the third player by just a single victory point, or one where everyone played very poorly and a “money-acumulation strategy” (a non-strategy, by all rational means) won the game. Even though it's a machine-building game, the tightness keeps the interaction high, and the disasters keep everyone at the table interested and laughing. There is no laugh like when you laugh at somebody else's misery. Because of this cruel element, non-gamers should probably proceed with caution, even though a player does have a good chance at doing well in his first match, if he's experienced in eurogames and pays enough attention. Overall, I rate In the Year of the Dragon a 7.5/10. My love of damage control decisions keeps this one in my collection. Some players around here do not like the idea of having to lose so many resources to plagues and such (they prefer to build stuff that remains built, as they say), but overall the reception of this game in my group has been good. Frustration factor can be high, due to the cruelty of the system, so the 12+ age recommendation is probably wise, but with four or five players and 75-100 minutes, it's definitely one of the better games out there. Click here to buy In the Year of the Dragon on eBay
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 Race for the galaxy was born during the development of the Puerto Rico card game (released a few years earlier, as San Juan). Tom Lehmann wanted to make something more complex out of the basic mechanisms of discarding cards for resources: a clever system that here is explored to its maximum consequences. It's a game that will sure leave all cardgame enthusiasts quite satisfied, specially the ones willing to spend time to understand a more complex game. First thing you'll notice about Race for the Galaxy is... holy crap that's a lot of icons. The game is very intricate, with many variations upon the same basic actions, each one of them with its specific icon. Your first match or so will be spent just digesting the monstrous amount of information the game throws at you. Many will be turned off by this high learning curve (you don't even feel like you're playing a game, at first, you're 100% in learning mode), but you'll be surprised at how intuitive it becomes after a small while. They've actually done a fine job in creating the iconography for this: the difficulty here really is the number of possibilities that you have. Race for the Galaxy is a gamer's game, make no mistake. It takes about 15-20 minutes to explain the rules, the newcomer won't be competitive and the whole match lasts about 30-40 minutes (experienced gamers may be able to take it down to 20 minutes, even). It takes effort to understand everything that's going on, and since everything is always going on at the same time, everything's quite a bit harder. It's probably the most difficult-to-learn game in my entire collection (though I have quite a few that are more brainburn than this one), so it's definitely in last place as far as “what game should I show to this non-gamer?”. What players do in this game is quite simple: you make a point-machine out of the cards that you play in front of you. Points come from consuming goods and from the intrinsic value of the cards themselves (these values go from 0 to 7, with a few of them being variable, that is, depending on what other cards you have in front of you). To make this machine, what you do mostly is combo different special powers that these cards have: for an example, a card may give discounts for your next purchases, or let you draw a card every time a certain phase occurs, or make one of your abilities more powerful. So knowledge of the deck, like in most other cardgames, is quite important for competent playing.. It's definitely useful to know that the brown product is able to build a mean combo, and that the yellow product is usually very expensive. But the possible relationship between cards is quite clear, and with just a few games you'll understand what's going on (there aren't any degenerate or unintuitive combinations to invent during the game)  Race for the galaxy scales wonderfully from 2 to 4, although with less opponents you're probably more able to track down what's going on in their games. This is probably the biggest problem of the game: lack of strong interaction. It's an efficiency game of combo-building, and although you do take advantage of other people's actions, the game is essentially about what you have going on in your hand and in front of you. There's no element that influences directly other people's hands or what they've built (though the second expansion adds something like this) so what you really have to deal with is essentially what cards appear in your hand and choosing which ones you will build. In a competitive environment, the small interaction in using the other players' action is very important for maintaining small leads, but even so, the luck of the draw will sometimes influence the game more strongly. Like in all card games, you're limited to what the deck gives you. In this case, the game minimizes this problem by giving a lot of options with the cards that you draw (you only need two or three useful cards per hand of ten, the rest is just what you spend to ) but still it's clearly there, and specially painful when it happens in one of those close, nail-biting game. But, like my friend said, “the game is so fast that a rematch takes less time than your complaint”. Production values are quite satisfactory. The theme is somewhat vague (though I hear the expansions build up on it) but apparently coherent, and the art is just fantastic. The game is flat-out gorgeous, with unique art on almost every single one of the 100+ cards. The card stock is nice and resistant, but the card back being black and the title being prone to obsessive and continuous playing, one would be wise to buy cardsleeves to go along with this. The box is a bit too big for what is essentially a deck of cards (oversized player aid or no), but with the expansions that are coming out (two, so far), it's probably safer to go for bigger rather than smaller.  This actually would be a second complaint of mine regarding the game's design, although I'm sure many fans won't agree with me: it somehow bothers me to know that a game was designed to have its expansions, to a point where the base game feels a little bit incomplete without them. Without the first expansion, yellow products are a bit too weak; without the second expansion, military strategy is a bit too weak. I don't mean to say that the game is insufficient on its own (like some Fantasy Flight Game titles explicitly are), but the overpriced expansions (20 bucks for just a few extra cards?) do improve the game's balance a bit. In a game of combo-making, balance is essential, so it does bother me that the enthusiast is kind of forced (to the point where a willing customer can be forced) to pay again for the game.. Race for the Galaxy, in the end, is a solid design, one that clearly went through extensive playtesting and design calculations, and is worthy of all the success that it has achieved. Even though I'm not a cardgame enthusiast (take that Dominion away from my sight!) and I usually prefer games with more interaction, I appreciate the speed in which you can play this game (30 minutes tops, with experienced players) and the amount of information you have to process quickly throughout the game: it feels like you have to make more than three decisions every minute. It's definitely not for the casual gamer, not for kids (ages 12+, says the box, and seems correct) and not for the player that demands direct conflict in his games. I've played it about 20 times, and the initial excitement (which was tremendous) has worn off already, but I still give it a solid 8/10, with a safe place in my collection. Click here to buy Race for the Galaxy on eBay
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 Tichu is probably the most popular traditional-looking cardgame among the hobby enthusiasts. The components couldn't be simpler: a traditional deck of cards (four suits that go from 2 to A) but with four specific jokers instead of the normal two. The company even adds a second deck of cards, as if they were ashamed to charge us eurogame prices (or euro cardgame prices) for just a normal deck of cards (different art or not). Don't worry, though: the game is great, the designer does deserve your money, and even the production values are nice, with the cards being made of resistant material (good, since they'll spend a lot of time on your sweaty, tense hands) and sporting quite nice artwork. The game is exclusively for 4 players, divided into two teams, and (usually) played until one team gets a thousand points. Even though there are variants for three and six players, I'd say that these are just for the desperate, even without having played them. The entire game was clearly designed for this strict player count, and the flow of it would be severely interrupted with any modification in that sense. As a supporting argument, every single report I've read online says that the variants are just excuses for the publisher to extend the player count in the box back. Since I'm specially picky about player counts, and consider my gaming time to be quite precious, I'd rather play other games with different player counts. But with four, you can hardly beat Tichu. It takes a little bit to get used to the dynamics, and can be a little uneventful to play with newbies or players who don't get into the spirit of the game, but it's such a fun experience and so addictive that I'd be willing to spend an entire game-reunion on an extra-long tichu match. Though the game usually lasts 90 minutes (Varying a bit depending on how the game evolves, it could take twice that time or end in half of it),  The rules are rather straightforward, even if they do take about 10 minutes to explain. You have the traditional hierarchy of cards (2 at the bottom, ace on top) with the phoenix card being the standard joker (stronger than the strongest card that was played so far) and the dragon being the strongest single card out of them all. The mahjong card shows which player will start the dispute and the dog card gives the initiative to your partner, in case you deem it useful to do so. Players play cards until all hands are emptied. When you have the lead, you can begin with a single card, a pair, three-of-a-kind, a full-house or straight sequences with 5 cards or more. After that, all players have to maintain the style of game (you cannot play a pair in a dispute that started with a single card). This goes on until all players have passed, with the player that played the highest card taking the pile of cards and the lead for the next dispute (and thus defining what sort of card combination can be played). The scoring value of the cards is quite simple: Tens and Kings are worth ten points and Fives are worth 5 points. The dragon is worth 25 points, but you have to give the pile of points to one of your opponents (you only take the lead). The phoenix, due to its flexibility (it can also fill up a hole in a sequence, or add up to a three-of-akind, a true joker-like card) is worth -25 points, as a compensation for its strength. Up to this moment, what I've described is a rather bland game. Play cards, collect points, go on and on. What truly makes this game special is one small thing: the ability to call tichu. Any player can do this as long as he hasn't played a single card yet from his hand: it's a bet that says “I'll be the first one to get rid of all my cards”. If you manage to do so, you get 100 points (which is equivalent to the value of all the cards in the deck.). If you fail (even if it is your partner that beats you to it), you get -100 points. This is the center of the game, to make a gutsy call like that and try to prove yourself afterwards, with your partner trying to help you (as hard as that can be) and your opponents doing everything to stop you. Things may even get really heated if one of the guys in the other team calls tichu as well,   Tichu is about gut feeling. You get your hand of cards, pass one card from your hand to each player (and receive one card from each player's hand) before you begin, arrange them in a useful order and hope everything works according to plan. The game's golden rule is the fact that you have to follow the type of combination that was used to initiate the dispute, so while your hand may have a killer 10-card combination, it won't be useful if everyone keeps playing pairs or three-of-a-kinds. Try to get that initiative somehow, or watch as your killer hand nets you negative points. The juiciest decision in the game, though, is deciding if you should wreck your pre-set hand according to how the disputes are developing or if you should remain patient I've played Tichu over ten times already and I'm pretty far from being sick of it. In fact, I'd guess that this is one of those games where you can play your entire life. I'm pretty sure 8+ kids could play it, since the game is about being reckless (and sometimes having it pay off). It's not a brain burner like (there are some tough decisions, but most of it is based on instinct) but it's a guaranteed good time with your friends, specially if you're the talkative group. I give it a 10/10, I'm always willing to play it. It only takes two or three hands before the newbies get the spirit of it (unless nobody calls tichu, which renders the game quite bland), so I'd say it's quite accessible. I totally recommend this, unless you hate traditional-like cardgames. Click here to buy Tichu on eBay
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 Modern Art is one of the great classic eurogames, first published in 1993 and still managing to hold its own more than a decade after. It's the classic auction game: all you do in it is auction off stuff between players, trying to guess how much each painting is worth and how much profit you'll get from your purchases The design, in classic Knizia style, is quite minimalist, with the rules being pretty easy to understand. It's just a deck of cards, some money bits (I use poker chips), screens to keep money hidden and a small chart to keep track of the overall values of the paintings during the game. At the start, each player gets a hand of cards (with a few more cards at the end of each round after that that represent the paintings he is able to place on the market to be auctioned off. In a somewhat schizophrenic way, you can participate in the auction and end up buying paintings from your own hand (paying the bid to the bank), but you have to win over other players (and is usually not a good idea. All bought paintings are placed in front of each player's screen, so the results are always available (with the player's money being kept hidden. The round ends when the fifth painting of any artist goes into the market: this painting only serves to end the round, it's not auctioned off. Paintings from the most popular (most frequently sold) artist are worth $30, with the second most popular artist being worth #20 a piece and the third one worth $10. These values acumulate from one round to another, so a painting from an artist that was first place twice in a row ends up being worth 60, and so on. So, what you do in the game is try to buy paintings that you think will become popular and sell paintings that you think will fetch a nice price when the other players fight amongst themselves for the purchase. Of course, each time you choose a card to sell, you help increase the price for that artist, so always take that into consideration before choosing which card to play. Turn order goes clockwise and in your turn you just choose a painting from your hand to auction off. That's it. There are five different types of auctions: a free for all type, a closed bid type (everyone places their bid secretly and reveal simultaneously), a each player can only bid once type (helping you or the player to your right, who gets the final say) and a fixed price auction (helping the player to your left; you say a price and in clockwise fashion the first player to accept the price takes it). There's also a multiplier card, that lets you sell two paintings (in the style defined by the second card you play along with it) at once. This is definitely the strongest type card, to a point where people have developed variants that attempt an even distribution of these, since they allow a player to get a lot more money (or influence the market a lot more) at once. I don't find it too big of a deal, but this could be because I've yet to play a game I haven't got any of those cards, heh (and it doesn't define the winner, once I got a bunch of them and still ended up third out of five).  It's a game that's heavily dependent on groupthink: the value of the paintings depend solely on whether or not players put the artist up for sale frequently enough. All you do in the game is either auction off stuff or participate in other people's auctions. Interaction is constant, and the player's thinking is what defines the game and the game's results. While I love interactive games (and hate the so-called “multiplayer solitaire” types), Modern Art really takes it to a new level, as far as eurogames go. You can make all the right decisions and still lose due to other player's miscalculations/poor strategy. When playing with complete newbies, I keep reminding them the possible values that a painting might be worth before bidding; since this is a game of prediction, it can be somewhat difficult for the player who has never played it before to do well (though more than once I've seen a newbie win). In those situations I'd probably risk at creating a house-rule that forbids players from bidding more than the picture could possibly pay off at the end of the round, since in the heat of the dispute (and they can become quite heated) one can lose sights of the objective and throw off the balance of the game.  Still, this being a market-driven affair, it's hard for me to qualify it as a “serious game”, a title that one ccould spend time analysing the possible outcomes and strategies: the luck of the draw can singnificantly alter your game. A painter ends up being popular and you never get a single one of his pictures. You are thus cut out from a big source of money (or victory points) from the game. Container, in that sense, is a much better design, since it's luck free and much more prone to this kind of strategic analysis (it does take twice as long and isn't as easy to explain, though).  Even so, there are some insteresting dynamics in Modern Art, even with the barebones ruleset: sometimes it's useful to let another player beat you in an auction so that you have another player interested in making a certain painter (and, with that, his investments) more valuable. You do not want to be the only owner of the works of a painter, even if you do have a bunch of his paintings on your hand of cards. There's a level of cooperation that goes with playing this game well, you really have to play your opponents. The edition I own (and have sent pictures for) is the apparently rare brazilian edition, with art by Mike Doyle. From what I've seen on the internet, the production value for the american edition is not so nice, but it's probably quite playable. For money, I use poker chips, like in every other money-intensive game (If you play money games frequently, I recommend that you get yourself a set). I've played this around 15 times, and I can tell you it's quite replayable and is still interesting to see the market develop. I've seen players win by just selling pictures and those by mostly buying (selling what's convenient for their investments, instead of the priciest one). With 4 or 5 players (the 10+ age estimate is precise, if the kid is pays attention to the incentives) and 60 minutes, it's one of my favorite games, luck factor and groupthink and all. With only 3 players, there's just not enough pushing around going on for me. Overall, it's a solid game, one that I'm glad I own and happily pull out from time to time. I give it an 8/10. Click here to buy the Modern Art Board Game on eBay
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 Chicago Express can fool you at first glance. The colorful cover, the nice components (wooden trains and action gauges on the board), the pretty map, it all looks like a splendid family game much in the vein of Ticket to Ride. That's wrong. Chicago Express is one mean, nasty and ugly machine. Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic game, but Queen Games seems to have been under the impression that this is a mainstream title, approachable by anyone. This is not the case.
Somehow, and quite weirdly, they've been correct in their assumption, at least commercially. The game seems to be selling quite well since it's release, much to my surprise. It's by far the unfriendliest and most cruel game in my collection, and probably the unfriendliest (does that word even exist?) game I've ever played. The rules are very simple. Player with the most money at the end wins the game. You auction off shares of companies that pay dividends according to their connections on the map. That's the only source of money in the game, the dividends paid at the end of each turn: shares are worth nothing by themselves in the endscore calculation. Any shareholder can build tracks for any companies (no majority is necessary to do so) and anybody can auction off any share in any company (except Wabash, which only comes into the game once a company reaches Chicago). Dividends are paid in proportion to the number of shares sold: the higher the number of shares in the hands of the players, the more smaller the amount each share will pay. Strategy-wise, the game is mostly an auction game where you manipulate incentives for other players: you try to shape their options so that their best moves help you. The construction action is secondary, and the development action is only in third place because there is no fourth spot (it's used mostly to manipulate who's the starting player in the next round). The fact that any player can pretty much influence almost anything is a good example of how the game is supposed to be played. 
And this is where the biggest problem in Chicago Express lies: there's a specific way the game is supposed to be played, a way that can easily go unnoticed by the people playing, even if they are experienced gamers. More than once I've read on the internet comments about people that say “I just don't get it, what's so great about this game?”, players that have boardgaming as one of their main hobbies, even. Make no mistake, the game itself appears to be quite the bland experience, if you don't see the complex network of interests involved. The simplicity here creates a depth that is definitely not visible in your first play (or even your first couple of plays). It's not one of those complex games that intimidate newbies right at the start (I'm looking at you, Age of Steam); it's one of those games that appear silly or simplistic but it's actually quite the gamer's game. You can see first turns that guarantee unavoidable defeats or runaway leaders. Chicago express does not hold your hand, does not keep you safe, you're the one that has to do all the work to understand it. On the plus side, as a sort of compensation for this opacity, the game really does deserve the “express” name: a match is somewhere between 30-60 minutes, including rules explanation. An intrigued group can thus invest three hours and play the game four to five times, to see if they can understand better the details. Although one could fit a match of this between two more time-consuming games, I wouldn't be surprised that this would end up being the “main event” of the game reunion, strategy-wise. 
Queen games claims that the game scales from 2 to 6 players, however I find (and most other players agree with me) that it's significantly better with 3 or 4, to a point that I would refuse to play it with any other number. Even so, the game's strategies are significantly different with 3 or four players; you always have to keep a keen eye to see what's going on, what each opponent wants and is planning at all times. As you probably can tell from my previous paragraphs, this is hardly the newbie-friendly game. A newbie on a table of experienced players will probably throw the game to another player without knowing, so a little patience is required. Heck, a table consisted entirely of newbies will most probably end up with a random winner (even if the game has no random elements), the lucky person recipient of the bigger amount of benefits from other player's rookie-mistakes.  Regarding the production values, I have to give the thumbs up to Queen Games: the game is gorgeous, and the components work perfectly for the game (even if it didn't have to be anything particularly fancy for it to work). One significant complaint is the box size, way too tall for the components. I've seen around the internet a player that cut his box in half (height-wise) and was still able to fit all the components in. It was claimed that this was done so that the expansions would fit in perfectly, but considering that the first expansion consists of around 25 wooden trains, I'm somewhat suspicious that it has to do with mostly shelf-space in game stores. My shelf-space, on the other hand, seriously dislikes this decision.
The Verdict Overall, the rating I give to this game varies quite a lot between different situations. In a table with concentrated gamers who take the match seriously, I give it a 9/10, and I'm willing to play several matches in a row (not a very frequent quality for me). With non-gamers and such, I'd flat out refuse to play it (4/10 or lower). Around these parts, it has proven to be quite admired by a select few players, and disliked by the majority. It's a cold, calculating game, and the initial (joke-like) age requirement of 29+ years (from the barebones Winsome Games first edition) is perhaps more appropriate than the Queen Games' 12+. I'd definitely think twice about playing this with teenagers (and I'm sure they'd much rather play something that looks more exciting). If you enjoy games of financial and incentive manipulation, and you regularly play with the same opponents (and they're willing to play a game many times for it to really shine), you can't do much better than Chicago Express. The casual gamer should probably stick to Ticket to Ride, or even Steam (where the challenges are much more apparent). Click here to buy Chicago Express on eBay
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 Twilight Struggle is a masterpiece. There are no two ways about it. It's a miracle of design, a product of sheer brilliance. It's the closest boardgaming has come to becoming a true art, a real and universal contribution to human culture. Yeah, I really, really, REALLY like it. For those of you that don't know it yet, Twilight struggle simulates the political/diplomatic conflicts of the Cold War, from the beginnings to the very end, one player being the United States and the other the Soviet Union. It's mostly an area-control game with hand management, with the cards depicting a historical event (be it generic, like “Socialist governments”, that keep coming back from the discard pile, or specific, like “Marshall Plan”, that are removed from the game once used) and an abstract number that shows the “overall strength” of the card. Both players receive cards depicting american and soviet events; when you play a card with an event from your side, you can choose to either use the abstract number to use “generic actions” or you can choose the event, which influences the map in specific locations. The stroke of genius comes from the other possibility: when you play a card with an opponent's event, you have the abstract number for generic actions AND the oponnent's event occurs. Since you can only hold on to one card from your entire hand from one turn to another, those horrible events you just got WILL happen, sadly enough. A lot of the game, thus, is damage control. Is managing your actions so that the events you just got will hurt you less, while still trying to get control of a solid part of the continents being fought. And the battle is fought all over the world, in six different stages/continents (three, in the beginning, with three more added at around 30% of the match). Scoring is somewhat convoluted to understand in the first match, but it works really well to build up tension during the match: there are scoring cards in the deck that are distributed along with event cards, and scoring is triggered when a player plays the specific card for that continent (this card you cannot hold between different turns). So even the scoring mechanism has a damage control element to it. When you draw a scoring card for a continent, you have to evaluate how well or poorly you're doing in that location, and how possible/impossible it is to get more points (or less damage) from that situation. Sometimes you just have to give up and take the damage (or else you'd risk getting hurt even harder), and sometimes you have to fight. However, if you are too obvious in your actions, the other player can get suspicious and figure out what you're trying to do; since it's always easier to do something without someone getting in the way, you frequently have to be subtle as to how you go about things.  This pressure is augmented by the fact that Twilight Struggle is often a game where a small element can have huge effects. The control of a single country can mean the difference between zero and four points during scoring (in a game where having 20 points more than your opponent gives you an automatic victory), so attention to detail is quite important. A few players have expressed some frustration as to how you have to pay attention to everything in the game, but it only takes a few matches before your eyes are wide open throughout the game. Theme is implemented to perfection in Twilight Struggle. Not only do you have over one hundred historical event cards happening throughout the game (all of them nicely illustrated with photographs of the moment, or at least drawings of the cultural symbols involved) but the overall feeling of paranoia and a fundamental lack of knowledge of what the adversary is thinking is also always present. I'm usually not a very theme-focused player ( saying “theme is a collection of nouns and verbs that facilitate the explanation of the game mechanisms to new players” would perhaps be overdoing it, but not by much) but this game is the exception. I really feel the history in this one, with the coups, the neighbor influence (realignment), the chasing after . For those who are less history-savvy (like myself), the rulebook even includes a paragraph about each event, a true history lesson from the designers. Like pretty much every game ever made, Twilight Struggle is not for everyone. It's a two player affair (in which the 13+ age estimate seems appropriate) with somehwat complex rules (compared to most eurogames; by wargame standards it's quite simple) and can take up 3-4 hours for a match to be played to completion (sometimes it takes only half an hour, but that only happens due to poor/risky playing of one player). It's not the kind of game that gets played in a gaming group reunion, more like the game you invite one gaming buddy for an afternoon of intrigue and mutual plan-meddling. It's a game in which experience clearly counts, and not due exclusively to strategies and mechanism-manipulation knowledge. Just knowing all the 100 cards (you will, by the end of your third match or so) gives a player a HUGE advantage. A newbie has close to zero chance against an experienced player (in over 30 matches I've never seen a newbie win), to the point where the first match pretty much “doesn't really count” (I believe in this for most games, but it's particularly clear in this one). Each new player you teach this game is almost like an boardgaming investment: in a few matches, you'll really have your opponent: until then, you just hope the person will like it. Luck also plays a significant factor in the game, something a few players may dislike. You have the card draw factor AND dice-rolling to solve coups and realignments. Since this can be quite a tight game, and with a few domino-effects developing over the course of the game, a player has to accept that sheer bad luck could be the deciding factor in an agonizing defeat. However, elements like this keep a game with fixed setup and specific cards (“never go into Egypt before sadat comes out”, the american player will keep in mind) with enough variety for multiple plays.  Production values of my copy leave something to be desired (thin and small chits, crappy “what-GMT-calls-deluxe” board) but it seems that this is all being fixed in the newer edition coming out in a few weeks. It even comes with a chinese civil war variant, to address a supposed lack of balance due to the soviets being stronger (they really are, but I think it makes the game more interesting, and can be fixed with a VP auction in the beginning to decide who's USSR) and also a few extra event cards. With these changes, it becomes even easier to recommend this fantastic game, which is something I do every time someone asks me for an intense and engaging 2-player game. Rating Given: 10/10. Click here to buy Twilight Struggle on eBay
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 Carcassonne is one of the most successful eurogames out there, having sold millions and millions of copies (while most titles would feel lucky to break the 50,000 mark), winning the 2000 spiel des jahrers and the hearts and minds of many boardgame enthusiasts and casual gamers out there. With just a few matches of it, the reasons why this happened become quite clear. I don't mean to say that sales equals quality, or that only good games sell well; I like too many (really) obscure games and dislike a good number of popular titles to be able to say this. What I really mean is that this game has quite the wide appeal, being able to please both the more casual side of gaming as well as the more focused, “serious” gamers. This review is kind of a list of qualities that I think made the difference with this game.
Visuals This game has a ton of visual appeal. It's not luxurious by any means (it has to keep that price tag down, you know, to seel those millions of copies), and it doesn't have anything like beautiful art, that you'd hang on your wall. It's just a great looking game, in a rather simple style. The player tokens have a lot of charm, to the point that the meeple (mini-people) have become a sort of symbol to the entire hobby (or at least the eurogame genre). Also, there's an undeniable and somewhat unexplainable pleasure in seeing the map develop as players lay their tiles and cultivate their cities/streets. Every game ends up with a different map, and although it has nothing to do with the actual gameplay/strategy of it, it's still nice to see the visual end result of the 60 minutes spent playing the game, the players do get a feeling of building something up together. Easy to learn Rules are rather simple, and to a point rather intuitive. Your turn: you draw a tile and you place it on the board, choosing if you want to place a meeple on one of its features or not. It may take a few plays to really see all the possible placements in your turn, but it's rather intuitive. The farmer scoring is probably the only exception to that, with the more recent editions including a player aid that exclusively deals with this rule, but still, it's a game that can be explained in 5 minutes at the most. If you compare it to dominoes (which is a rather good comparison), it'll make it even easier for the newcomer to understand and get started. 
Depth Like I said in the previous point, it takes a few plays to see all the strategic possibilities one has during your turn. For this reason, an experienced player will probably always beat a newbie, even with the undeniable luck factor of the tile draw. True masters will probably memorize the tile distribution of the game, and build according to the probabilities of specific variations coming out; more casual gamers will still take pleasure in seeing their capacity of developing strategies and different plays evolve naturally with each game. You'll quickly (or maybe not quickly enough) figure out what placements are risky and which ones are safe. 
Variety The game scales from two to five players, something that all game publishers push their designers to do. But more than that, the game manages to vary between destruction and cooperation, gamer's-game and family-game. One can play this very agressively, stealing oponnent's cities and laying tiles so that it makes their oponnent's constructions less likely to be finished, or you can just “mind your own bussiness” or even cooperate, with two players building up the same city so that they develop a nice margin towards the other oponnents (just make sure you don't forget the possibility that your “partner” may try to take the city for himself at the end, with an extra meeple placement) .
 
Modular aspect:  As one can see from just browsing online or a local shop's shelf, it's a game system that lends itself to quite a bit of expansions (half a dozen, up to now) and variations (two of them). I don't know how casual gamer sees this expansion phenomena, but I'm sure it doesn't hurt the game, even if some (or perhaps most) of the expansions are somewhat artificial. I recommend the first two expansions (Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders) for those who want a little more going on in their game, but be aware that the blocking strategies will suffer a bit with the new tile designs (some of them rather crazy). The other ones, from what I've heard and seen, are not so hot, and should be pursued only by completists or those who seek extensive changes to the game's mechanisms.
While Carcassonne to me is just “a rather good game” (far from being one of my favorites), its success is definitely understandable. Me, being the agressive type, much prefer the game with fewer players (2 is the best, with 3 being the maximum for me) with more blocking and stealing.. With a more experienced oponnent, I even suggest a variant that has the players keep a hand of 3 tiles at all times, instead of just being forced to play what you get that turn. With this variant, I rate it a solid 8 out of 10; without it, it's more like a 7/10. I'm a rather picky game owner (I hesitate little before selling a game that's “just ok”) and Carcassonne still manages to have its safe place in my collection. It took a few plays to get the depth of it (since the visual appeal and the building aspect were not enough for me), but now it's a game I quite enjoy playing. I've had around 15 to 20 matches of these (more than half without any expansions) and I'm sure I'll enjoy plenty more, it's quite replayable due to the variety of the tile draw, even if there are some clear patterns in the development of each match. But even with all its success, Carcassonne cannot please everyone (no game can, after all): those who severely dislike abstract games, or perhaps more accurately, games with abstract-like gameplay, they will not enjoy carcassonne. People who dislike confrontational games should avoid playing with experienced players (a.k.a pretty much everyone that's playing online). But I'd guess that this would be a fine fist-step for people who want to get into the hobby with their families (the 8+ age estimate is accurate, for casual play), or adopt it as a light-hearted experience, something to play while having a few beers and chatting with friends. It's a quick game, around 60 minutes or so (more, for those who spend a lot of time thinking on their turn), and we usually fit it in between two or more substantial games in our gaming get-togethers. Click here to buy Carcassonne on eBay
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This review was written by Richard Maynes  Most of us remember DOOM from the 90s as one of the first widely circulated first person shooter computer games; and many of us will also recall the 2005 film based on the story of the computer game. What is less known is the 2004 board game version brought to you by Fantasy Flight Games (who you may already know as the publishers of the Starcraft board game and Arkham Horror.) This game for 2-4 players follows the storyline of the original computer game far more closely than the film and is considerably more enjoyable to sit through. First off, the basics of the game. Though the game can be played with as few as 2 players, I have found it most enjoyable when played with the maximum 4 players. In a 4 player game, one player will play as the invaders (monsters to you or I) and the other 3 play as marines. You can decide amongst yourselves which of the 7 levels you play, though level 1: “Knee deep in the dead” is the easiest and would be recommended for your first game or 2. The idea of each level is that the marines must fight their way through the invaders to a red security door, before the invader player obtains 6 kills of the marines (you respawn every time you are killed.) The playing board must be assembled as you go in order that the marines not know what is behind each door. It is also advised to clear a large space for playing this game, as the board can get large. To fight their way through the invaders, and indeed for the invaders to fight back, each weapon and every invader attacks with a certain combination of dice provided with the game. Though it is 3 against 1 play, it is in fact very difficult to complete even a single level as the marines, let alone play through all 7 levels. Not only does the invader player have a large number of invaders at his or her disposal, he or she also has many action cards that can be used to further hinder the marines or help the invaders. I have found that a more fun game can be had if you increase the frag count the invaders need to win the game. Though this is not to say that the marines are without help. Each marine is given 2 special operation cards at random which provide that marine with special abilities. The map, as well as being strewn with invaders, also contains many weapons, extra health, ammunition and armour. 
Play as the Marines Each marine begins the game with 8 health, 2 ammunition and only their fists and a pistol as a weapon. In order to get the most out of the game, each of the marine players must be able to work in a team with their fellow marines very well. Behind every door they open lies a myriad of invaders to kill their way through. The irritating thing for the marines is (especially if this is their first time playing) they don't know exactly what is behind each door because the map is assembled further as each door is opened. By far the most annoying thing for a marine however, is the person playing the invaders. They have a large number of action cards which can be used to remove your ammunition, give their invaders extra turns and many other equally frustrating moves. I would not advise playing this game if you take the way people act as the invader personally, because it is the job of the invader to be as annoying as possible. It is wise to share out all the weapons according to who has the most compatible special operations. Each weapon requires the player to roll anywhere between one and six dice depending on the weapon. Most weapons are ranged, but some, such as the chainsaw, require you to be next to the target. Keen players of the original computer game will be glad to see that the BFG (Big F***ing Gun) makes an appearance, though both the weapon itself and its ammunition are rather difficult to lay your hands on. For the most part, the marines (especially if you have three marines instead of one or two) tend to lose this game. The exception being when they get an especially good combination of special operation cards that allow them to kill the invaders particularly easily. Play as the Invaders In my experience, playing as the invaders is rather more fun than playing as the marines (perhaps it is just my sadistic nature). You control a small army of invaders, ranging from spider-like creatures called Trites, all the way up to the enormous Cyberdemon, which is the only playing piece on the board that requires assembly. That is how big and mean it is. Each turn, you draw action cards from a deck, and can use them at the appropriate time. You can also play one spawn card every turn, provided you are not spawning any invaders within the line of sight of any marines. You also have the advantage of being able to see the map before it is all laid out, so you have a chance to plan a strategy accordingly. Like, the weapons of the marines, each invader has a set number of dice to be rolled when you attack with it. As previously mentioned your big advantage is the action cards you pick up. You have to be able to use them well, but when they are used, they cause no end of annoyances for the other players. My personal favourite is the “Dud” card, which you use to remove one ammo from one of the marines (this is especially funny if used on a player who has BFG ammo). It is of course worth playing as both marines and invaders, but the invaders are certainly my favourite team to be on. All in all, I would say this is an excellent game. At £25.55 before postage it can't be called cheap, but I would say for all the entertainment it provides, it is well worth the money. This gamer says: 8.5/10 Watch a video of Doom: the Board Game Click here to Buy Doom: The Board Game now on eBay
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