June 2024
Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.
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You Gotta Be Kitten Me – 6/10Â
You Gotta Be Kitten Me! is a card game that draws strong inspiration from Liar’s Dice. Each player is dealt a hand of cards, each of which depicts a cute animal that has a hat, glasses, or bowtie illustration crudely overlayed. On your turn, you must make a bid for how many total hats, glasses, or bowties you believe exist collectively in all players’ hands. Eventually, the bidding will rise high enough that the next player in turn order won’t want to increase the bid, and will instead “call” the prior player’s bid. At this point all cards are revealed and the fashion accessories are tallied. The player who was incorrect (either bid too high or called a bid that was not too high) reduces their hand size by one, and then cards are re-dealt. When a player’s hand size hits zero, the game ends, and the player who has lost the fewest times is the winner.
There are a few additional twists here. Because each accessory is depicted in one of three colors (pink, blue, green), it is possible for a player to make a color bid as well. Bids must always increase in quantity, whether color or accessory type, but this does allow the bidding to have a second axis of interest, somewhat reminiscent of “wild bids” in Liar’s Dice.
There are also three “skip” cards in the deck, which can be played in lieu of bidding or calling on your turn. Unless bidding is quite low when your turn comes around, it seems nearly always correct to use the skip card, especially at high player counts. Why take the risk of losing a card when you could push the risk onto someone else? So while skip cards don’t create particularly tactical decisions, they do represent a twist that would be difficult to replicate in a pure dice game, which does a bit of work towards justifying the game’s existence.
Unfortunately, cards have a difficult time replicating the interesting probability distributions that come with dice rolling. This is somewhat offset by the inclusion of cards that have two or three accessories on them, but that also seems to create more unpredictability than is probably ideal. Even when you know the card distribution (there is a single player aid that contains this), it still feels much fuzzier to determine the riskiness of a bid you are making than it does in Liar’s Dice. This, to me, is a the most serious strike against the game.
Nevertheless, there are many people I’ve played Liar’s Dice with who never consider probabilities and would have no interest in viewing the distribution player aid in this game. Perhaps even more so than Liar’s Dice, this game is designed to be a casual, lighthearted party-style experience. If your tastes run more towards “puppies wearing hats” and less towards “poker-style bluffing and probability analysis”, I would commend You Gotta Be Kitten Me! to you. For my tastes though, it feels a bit redundant.ÂÂ
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MLEM: Space Agency – 7/10
ÂMLEM is a game about astronaut cats exploring outer space. Despite the capitalization, MLEM is not an abbreviation. but is instead internet slang for the sound of a pet sticking out their tongue. Now you know. In each round, each player will load one of their cats onto the spacecraft. One of the players is the captain, and gets to roll the dice and make the decisions about how to use them. This is a push-your-luck game, so after each successful roll, each player has the option to bail out of the ship and land on the nearest planet or moon. But the longer you stay aboard, the more points you will score when you finally land. If the captain bails out, the next player in turn order takes over as captain, and this continues until either all cats have landed or the ship has crashed. Each cat also has a special ability, often granting bonus points based on the type of celestial body they land on. These add some much needed spice and decision-making and are very easy to understand, despite coming in eight different varieties. After a set number of crashes, or when one player successfully lands all their cats, the game ends. Those two possible endgame conditions really pull some weight in adding a touch of strategy to an otherwise primarily tactical game. If players are being overly ambitious and creating lots of crashes, a more conservative approach to simply landing all your cats for fewer points can work quite well. But because crashed cats are returned to the player, it’s possible to take a few attempts at landing the perfect cat in the perfect location for lots of bonus points. There are strong parallels in this game to Cloud 9/Celestia in the way that a “captain” decides what to do while the other players simply decide when its time to bail. Even thematically, both games involve ascending ever-higher in a craft. But MLEM is the better design for sure. It even includes a couple small variant modules right in the box for additional variety. MLEM is quite fun despite its shallowness, and I think it’s possible it could become a classic push-your-luck filler in the vein of Diamant/Incan Gold.ÂÂ
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Captain Flip – 7/10Â
If you haven’t heard of Captain Flip, this certainly won’t be the last time. It was just announced as a nominee for Spiel des Jahres. And while I don’t think it’s likely to be the winner, just being one of the three nominees will likely increase its visibility. This is the kind of game that could be on the shelves of Target before too long.
Each player takes on the role of a ship captain adding members to their crew. On your turn, draw a tile from the bag, being careful to view only one side of it. Then you either add it to your ship, or flip it over and then add it to your ship. The two sides of a tile are never the same, each one depicting one of nine possible crew members. There is a mini-push your luck element in deciding whether to keep the tile you drew as is, or to flip it hoping for something even better.
Every crew member provides some ability. Some will be immediate points. Some will be points at the end of the game, based on various conditions. And some will be immediate effects (such as flipping over an adjacent tile). Each one of these effects is quite simple on its own, but together they allow for clever sequencing and powerful combos.
As if that wasn’t enough, the game comes with four separate player boards, each of which will change your overall strategy. Maybe your crew is relaxing on a desert island, or maybe they are fighting a sea monster. Each of these boards changes the bonuses for where each tile is placed. This too is quite simple to learn, but it adds an additional layer to your decisions that is most welcome.
Captain Flip plays in about 20 minutes and takes just a minute or so to teach. It has lovely illustrations and makes an excellent family game. More serious gamers will probably also enjoy it as a filler, though it’s not likely to become a true favorite due to its simplicity. I’d be happy to be proven wrong on that though, perhaps discovering after more sessions that this game has the replayability of the very best fillers like For Sale or King of Tokyo.ÂÂ
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Haspelknecht – 8/10Â
You probably don’t know what Haspelknecht means, but fortunately, there is a subtitle: The Story of Early Coal Mining. Are you excited yet? No? Well let’s translate that German title then: “reel servant” or “spool laborer”. Yes, this game is named after the worker who has the job of using a bucket on a rope to retrieve the mined coal. Be still my heart.
Jokes about the theme aside, there is a game here that offers some genuinely exciting twists on action selection mechanics. Your goal is to score the most points, generally by mining the most coal each round. This starts out easy: you simply assign action points to your coal digger and he digs the coal for you. But once you’ve exhausted the easy-to-mine coal at the surface, you’re going to have dig down, bracing your tunnels with wooden beams and hiring a Haspelknecht to empty rainwater so your mine doesn’t flood before you can bring in that big-ticket bituminous.
Each round begins with a draft of action disks. These come in three colors: black for coal mining actions, brown for wood gathering actions (for bracing beams), and yellow for grain harvesting actions (to feed your workers). The more disks you take, the more times you can do these actions, which means this phase is quite competitive. However, drafting higher quantities and qualities of disks will also seat you later in turn order, meaning you could have a difficult time in the following round. For such a simple and quick part of the game, this really is where Haspelknecht shines the most.
The actions of bracing your mine, emptying the water, and mining the coal are quite easy to understand; the entire process is no more complicated than one of many scoring methods in a game like Agricola or Caverna. So the more complex decisions come from the other way you can use your action disks: buying development tiles. These tiles take the form of a tech tree of sorts, with access limited only to the cheapest and least-useful bottom row developments at the start, but with each development purchased opening up newer and better options. These developments provide one-time bonuses of hard-to-get resources, grant ongoing special abilities, or provide endgame point bonuses as an alternative path to victory over pure mining. Purchasing a development means spending your action disks, and thus doing less mining than you might like. But the developments are powerful enough that purchasing one each turn is a reasonable goal.
Haspelknecht is a mid-weight euro with the trappings of a heavier game. It’s only 90 minutes long and a step below games like Terraforming Mars in complexity. If you prefer mid-weight euros, but like a gritty agricultural theme instead of a soothing or whimsical one, maybe give Haspelknecht a try. See if you can annex an auspicious abundance of anthracite.
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Dungeons, Dice & Danger – 8/10
ÂI somehow missed until now that Richard Garfield (of Magic: The Gathering fame) had designed a roll-and-write a couple years back, which is a shame because it’s a good one. Players will compete to score the most points by blazing a trail through the dungeon in order to defeat each monster contained therein. Because the player sheets involve connecting paths from one symbol to another to collect rewards, you’re most likely to be reminded of the gameplay in Trails of Tucana.
The active player rolls the dice (four white and one black). Then each player pairs the white dice into two sets of two, a la Can’t Stop. The active player may substitute the black die for one of the white dice, but each other player must only use the white dice. Each player then crosses out two boxes on their player sheet, each corresponding to one of the sets of dice. In order to cross out a box, you must have already made a path to it by crossing off other boxes. Staying flexible by leaving lots of number combinations open is important; it can be devastating to have a couple turns in a row where you simply can’t cross off any boxes. Each time you have a set of dice you can’t use, you will take damage, and it is possible to lose the game by dying, not just by scoring the fewest points.
There are points to be gathered by various means along almost any path, but the primary goal is to race towards the creatures (which are large boxes that have several paths leading towards them). Being the first player to defeat each of these monsters gives a significant point bonus. And there is even a boss monster, centrally located, that deals damage to you when you defeat it. Certain dice combinations can be used to deal damage to these monsters, but this is of course in lieu of further exploring your board. There are always interesting choices to make, so long as you maintain the aforementioned flexibility in possible numbers.
If DD&D has a flaw, it’s probably that the player count is remarkably low for a game in this genre, capping out at just four. Many roll-and-writes effectively have no player limit, with the boxes for games like Welcome To, Cartographers, and Rolling America boasting “1-100 players”. While the upper end of that range would be a nightmare in actual practice, the fact remains that most roll-and-writes are a great option for large groups that don’t want to split up but still want meatier gameplay than party games offer. DD&D provides no such option, and in fact is probably more enjoyable the fewer players you have.
Dungeons, Dice & Danger (that lack of an Oxford comma is killing me) is an unjustly under-the-radar game. If you are the market for a roll-and-write for low player counts, I think you’ll find it holds its own against the best of the bunch. There is admittedly a glut of roll-and-writes these days, but DD&D still manages to stand out from the crowd.ÂÂÂ
A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.
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Wonderland’s War – 9/10Â
The denizens of Wonderland are at war. For some reason. Look, let’s not get hung up on sensible thematic integration; they’re all mad here after all. In Wonderland’s War, you will take on the role of one of the iconic characters from the story (Alice, The Red Queen, the Mad Hatter, etc.) and battle the others to score the most points.
Each round proceeds in two distinct phases. First is the tea party phase, where players will draft cards that will help them win battles and second is the battle phase where said battles are resolved in push-your-luck style. Both drafting and push-your-luck mechanics are favorites of mine, so I was already predisposed to enjoying the game. But the way in which both of these elements work is really inspired.
The tea party draft phase is no mere “pick and pass” affair. Instead, it uses a rondel of sorts, where players can pick any card on the table, but must do so by advancing their character around the track. Each lap of the track will give that player black crystals worth negative points. So deciding whether to take the crystals to get great cards or to settle for lesser cards with fewer negative points is at the heart of this phase. The cards themselves let you place minions and lesser characters (Humpty Dumpty, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, etc.) into the battle locations. They also let you add chips to your bag. Oh didn’t I mention? This is also a bag-building game.
With your minions in place and your bag full of powerful chips, it’s time to begin the battle phase. While this might appear to be an area majority game at first glance, simply having more minions in an area doesn’t automatically grant you victory, it just tilts the odds in your favor. Each player involved in the battle will pull chips from their bag, one at a time. The powerful chips will boost your strength total, and the highest strength wins. But your bag also contains bad chips, which will kill your minions. Lose all your minions, and you bust and can’t even get second place anymore. This push-your-luck element is very simple to understand but also creates great moments of tension and unexpected comebacks.
We’re really only scratching the surface of what Wonderland’s War has to offer. Your character has a set of unique special abilities to unlock. You have quests that can be completed for bonus points. In battles where you do not fight, you have the opportunity to wager on the winner, keeping all players involved at all times. This is a tight and elegant design that still manages to deliver a lot of personality in how it plays.
If Wonderland’s War has a drawback, it may be that it runs a bit long, especially at higher player counts. But I still fell immediately in love. Here the bag-building push-your-luck of Quacks of Quedlinburg and the card drafting area majority battles of Blood Rage come together in a Lewis-Carroll-themed package that just ticks all the right boxes for me. |
Dale Yu – GenCon 2024 Anticipation Post
Well, GenCon is essentially here. By the time that you’re reading this,I’ve hopefully cleared off my schedule so I can soon be on the road on the way to Indianapolis to take in as much as I can for a day and a half! While the tagline for the convention is “The Best 4 Days in Gaming” – but my schedule never allows me to be there for the whole time.
While it’s impossible to see everything in that short amount of time, I’ll try to list some of the games that I intend to learn more about this year. Of course, this list could not possibly be comprehensive – even with the great preview on BGG – there are always games that I run across that I’ve never heard about!
First and foremost – my brother’s best game is a getting an anniversary release!
Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters Anniversary Edition – Mattel
This is a re-release of the 2014 Kinderspiel winner – that now includes 2 new ways to play:
Cooperative Mode – All players work together to win!
Head Haunter Mode – Brand new One VS All mode where one player controls the ghosts against up to 4 other players!
Games are alphabetical by title otherwise…
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