Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 5)

I made an off-hand remark to Dale the other day that I believe there is more compassion in gaming these days.

Maybe it’s just me but it feels more important to more and more gamers these days to ensure everyone is enjoying the game and is engaged from beginning to end. That social contract has always been part of the hobby since I started 25 years ago but it feels more taken to heart now. Over the last decade I’ve felt a drift towards co-op games, towards more sandbox Euros, and away from social deduction elimination games like The Resistance. There was a recent discussion in our email group about the love / distaste for mean Euros (think Lowenherz, Santiago, Barrage depending on your game generation). While there’s a market for these and the alpha gamers who don’t mind when either collateral damage or a targeted move makes the next hour for a player rather pointless and non-enjoyable, nearly all gamers I play with (across 4 different groups) are taking a more caring approach to their fellow gamer’s experiences.

It feels like game design is responding to and facilitating this shift as well, for example Ark Nova catering for peaceful card actions, the rise of point salad games, and so on. James Nathan, a fellow Opinionated Gamer, made the interesting observation recently that card game design used to accept that players would have bad hands and they relied on multiple hands to help balance the game. But now designers are trying to find ways to provide options to fix bad hands so that each hand provides a chance of coming good – think Scout with the option to flip cards and take cards from played sets to improve your hand. It’s a form of showing compassion to gamers regardless of the deal. (“It may be one in a million.” “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”)

Is it too simplistic to say that video-gaming is where people go to live out the things they can’t do in real life and boardgaming is our avenue to social enjoyment away from the pressures and hates, allowing us a safe place to like people rather than pound them?

Anyway, enough logorrhea, let’s get to business. New-to-me games played recently include …

BRIAN BORU: HIGH KING OF IRELAND (2021): Rank 730, Rating 7.5 – Sylvester

The 25 action cards are drafted pseudo-7 Wonders style and come in 3 colours plus some wilds. Play a “trick” and then, from lowest numbered card to highest, each player resolves an allowed action on their card, with the trick winner putting out a town ownership marker on the board. The actions involve earning money (to buy towns) or moving up various tracks for benefits. Play a few tricks each round and the aim after 4 rounds is to gain majorities in regions, be spread across many regions, and earn as many in-game VPs as possible. It worked fine, and in a nice timeframe, once you came to grips with the fact that it’s all about keeping cards for the actions you want, not necessarily winning the tricks (which is good but usually comes at a cost). It’ll see some play but without getting raves.

Rating: 7

FLOWERS (2024): Rank 7695, Rating 6.2

Draw a card (ranged 1-4 in 4 colours), play it to your tableau. Cards will die at end-of-game if they’re not part of a valid group (which is similar to Splitter) – 1’s will only stay if next to no other 1’s, a pair of 2’s if not adjacent to another 2, and so on for three 3’s and four 4’s. Each death scores -ve and each card that remains will score a point if they’re in a group of 5+ cards in the same colour. Which turns out to be easier than expected but makes for some planning to keep spaces alive for the right card(s). However you’re very dependent on the draws, especially at the end of game – scores are close and 1 or 2 unfortunate draws at the end will kill you so there wasn’t much call for replay. It also doesn’t win favour having an unnecessarily commonly re-used title for an abstract game.

Rating: 6

INVENTIONS: EVOLUTION OF IDEAS (2024): Rank 942, Rating 8.1 – Lacerda

This is the game where chaining jumped the shark for me. The barrier for entry is ridiculously high – I read the rules twice, watched the video, and still had no idea how everything was going to hang together and how to function positively. So much of the game is taking advantage of all the different ways to string actions together on the cards and tiles to get the best result. Which means you need to fully grok every icon. And every action has so many gotcha’s which need to have been met to be available. Which results in an inordinate amount of downtime working through all the possibilities. Which no doubt is glorious to players who revel in deep-dive full-monty analysis resulting in massive satisfaction but it’s just bored dead-time to those who prefer a quicker pace and are happy to settle for good-enough turns. The further problem being that the game makes it difficult even to work those out. If I was forced to repeat-play it I know I’d develop a sense for it and enjoy it but too many other games require less work to get to the fun part.

Rating: 6

PATH OF CIVILIZATION (2023): Rank 2023, Rating 7.3

In each of the 9 rounds, play 2 tech cards for cubes and 2 other tech cards for tech points. Both come in 5 colours. Spend the cubes to buy leader / wonder cards, move up the philosophy track, or gain wisdom or military power for end-of-round rewards – all provide different effects and VPs. Then spend the tech points to buy a better tech card which will give more cubes/tech points better suited to whichever colour strategy you’re pursuing. The tech cards are the same every game so the replay will initially come from exploring different paths, and later from racing for and capitalising on big scoring cards. It requires some thought to optimise each round but it still zips along because most of the play is simultaneous. I enjoyed it and will be happy to explore despite it feeling ultimately limited.  A full review here.

Rating: 7

QUARTZ: THE DICE GAME (2018): Rank 2136, Rating 7.0

Draw a gem from the bag. Hope it’s a big scoring one. Roll 5 dice to draw more gems, protect them, steal them etc. Some dice faces are strictly better than others. Hope you roll well. Watch mindlessly (there’s no interaction) while others get stuffed by the draws and the dice while you keep drawing and rolling amazingly well and run away with the game. Not doing that again.

Rating: 3

RESAFA (2024): Rank 6390, Rating 7.6 – Suchy

I really like the card selection mechanism, playing a colour/action combination where the colour aspect works you towards bonuses and improved actions. There are 4 key action-type areas in the game and the cards lead you to do a bit of all of them to begin with before really being able to specialise your actions and focus in on maxing the area you’re after. Turns feel meaty but quick enough. The choice between bonus cards vs special cards is interesting. Replay comes from exploring different colour specialities combined with different area specialities. The theme and look is bland, which is a shame, so it’s not going to grab everyone but I think this will get decent play regardless.  A full review here.

Rating: 8

SAUSAGE SIZZLE (2012): Rank 7301, Rating 6.6

Keep rolling 8 dice, must lock 1+ each turn. You get 6 turns, each turn you must score a different animal. Half your dice are animals, half are pips. Hope you get lots of one animal, hope you roll all 5’s because your lowest pip value multiplies the number of animals you’re scoring this round. Unless you roll all 1’s in which case they turn into 7’s. Most rounds are lowish scoring so it only takes 1 or 2 great rolls to win the game, which makes it kind of worth shooting for but risky. That’s the fun part. Because otherwise it’s rather dull watching everyone else roll 7 times before it gets back to you.

Rating: 5

TRICKDRAW (2024): Rank 11156, Rating 6.8

Play a card facedown for its VP, or faceup for its effect, first to be showing 10 VPs wins (unless …). Effects variously flip cards, provide ongoing draw/discard powers, hits opponents, etc – it gets rather wild. This type of game doesn’t usually float my boat, especially when my only game ended after 3 turns when a player lucked into an auto-win card pairing and it was all over. Which was a relief actually.

Rating: 4

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Larry:  I wonder if the shift in recent years towards “nicer” games is at all tied to what is perceived as the “disposibility” of boardgames.  With so many new games each year, the temptation is great to only play each game a few times (or maybe only once), which allows you to try a bunch of them, but doesn’t really let you learn the intricacies of any of them.  When I hear people complain about newbies overusing the Craftsman in Puerto Rico or having their territories destroyed in Lowenherz, my usual response is, “let them play the game a few times and they won’t make those dumb mistakes”.  But if people are rushing to play the next shiny new design, folks aren’t given the luxury of learning to avoid those pitfalls.  It wouldn’t surprise me if designers and publishers are reacting to this and providing their customers with games that are more forgiving and where the ramifications of mistakes aren’t so crushing.  I don’t necessarily mind these more “compassionate” games, but I hope there’s also still room for the occasional unforgiving or aggressive game.  I suspect that won’t be a problem for quite a while; there’s so many new games that you can usually find a few that fit whatever mode you’re looking for.

I’ve also played a few of the games in Alison’s report:

Brian Boru (1 play):  Like Allison, my feelings for this game are mixed.  It seems to work, but I didn’t necessarily feel like I had a great deal of control or that the game was doing what I wanted it to do.  I should probably follow my own advice and play this a few more times to see if I can appreciate it more.  But I will say that, given how many games now exist in the “let’s use tricktaking to do things in a non-tricktaking setting”, you have to give designer Peer Sylvester credit for being one of the first to explore this concept.  Rating:  Neutral.

Paths of Civilization (3 plays):  I’ve very much enjoyed every game of PoC I’ve played.  And yet, I suspect it’s the perfect example of a game I will enthusiastically play if someone suggests it, but won’t really seek out.  It pretty much achieves all its goals, but lacks that spark that makes you anticipate playing it the next time.  But it’s a superior game that’s fun to play and there’s nothing wrong with that.  Rating:  I really like it.