The Opinionated Gamers

Designer: Adam Porter
Publisher: WizKids
Players: 3-5
Ages: 14+
Time: 45 minutes
Times Played: 2 times with review copy

Whether it’s Age of Steam maps or the variety of trick-taking games, I love exploring one system of games and the different places designers can poke at it to make something special happen. It’s something I’ve talked about before, but it’s like the Oulipo group or how many recordings there are of Philip Glass’ piano etudes.

What are the buttons you can push on a trick-taking game? The ranks, the suits. Following suit and what happens if you can’t. Points based on number of tricks vs points for what is in the trick. Bidding. Partners.

But what if the value of the cards was variable?  曖昧フェイバリットシングス (Eye My Favorite Things) explores this a little, though there, you know each suit is ranked 0-6, but you don’t know the rank when you play it. I also have rules for a Japanese prototype “24” where you use dry-erase cards which do not have values printed on them, but each player is given a certain amount of points (guess how many) to distribute among the ranks and writes the value on the cards. Mischievous Yokai does this in a manner through the use of dominos as cards you can play in either orientation.  Bottle Imp does this in a skewed sense as well. But each of these examples only provides variability between games or between hands or adds some ambiguities to what you’re playing. None of them produce a situation where the value is undetermined at the time you play it.

Here, that’s what Adam does.

Your “hand”, and the, uh, things you’ll play to the trick are dice.  As with a growing number of trick-takers, you will be able to see the suits the other player’s have left, as it is the dice on the table in front of them. (There are cards in the game, but they’re going to do something else.)

Designer: Adam Porter
Publisher: Brain Games
Players: 3-5
Ages: 10+
Time: 30 minutes
Times Played: 4 times with purchased copy; 1 time with demo copy at a convention

We used to have this movie theater that never played first run movies. It also wasn’t one of those discount theaters that plays things a few months after they come out. Rather, it seemed to only play things that were several years past their theater age. It would also play them with some frequency when they did. Not unlike going to see something that was just released where you can choose which day and time you’d like to sit in the dark for a few hours.

They had a sign up sheet.  It was a yellow legal pad that hung on a pillar in the middle of the lobby.  You could write down what you wanted them to show. I was fairly young when it was open and can’t report much on how successful these requests could be. What I remember going to see there was Gone with the Wind, The Princess Bride, and a Rocky and Bullwinkle marathon. My father probably took me to see more, but those are the ones I recall. It was a magical place.

They used to send this calendar in the mail. A black and white grid of what they were showing this month. Wait. I found something.

Horse Feathers. I would’ve gone to see that.

I also think they did shorts. Probably not during any of those that I recall above. My memory is more of learning what a short was. It’s like surprise course. Blood Orange Sorbet.

This review is going to have a surprise review.

I first learned of Pikoko from a link someone forwarded of the designer’s video on “Top 10 Trick Taking Types”. I watched delighted as Adam demonstrated a nuanced knowledge of the genre.

Pikoko starts with a conceit that comes with some baggage: what if you can’t see your own cards? Depending on your Hanabi feelings, this may be something that excites you or bores you, but I’d suggest it should do neither. You are playing from the hand of the player on your left: you never play from the hand you can’t see, so the feeling and the effect are much different.

Designer: Klaus Zoch
Publisher: Capstone Games/Simply Complex (Chili Spiele)
Players: 2-5
Ages: 10+
Time: 40-60 minutes
Times Played: 3 times with purchased Capstone Games edition, 2 times with a friend’s Chili Spiele edition

I carry dental floss in my front left pocket. It’s a good one. Short of giving a full review of the floss, I “Love” Oral-B’s Glide Pro-Health Comfort Plus floss. I carry it around for two reasons.  Firstly, my teeth genes aren’t the strongest, and I try to floss an above-average number of times. Secondly, there are some spots here and there between teeth near the back that some bok choy from breakfast or some baby kale from lunch or some broccoli from dinner likes to curl up to hide in. And my tongue finds it and jabs at it. Pokes at it. Tries to pry it loose.  You already know that’s in vain.

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But when I find it’s there, I can’t focus on anything else. I try to focus at work. I try to concentrate at the gym. I try to pay attention to the road. But I have to floss.

Which is all to say I first played Neue Heimat in September 2011 and it was stuck in a crack in my sulci ever since.

Klaus Zoch’s bygone Chili Spiele was a publisher that for a few Icarusian years had my attention for what they would release next. I looked through various archived posts from boardgamenews.com and couldn’t find any mention of Neue Heimat in the convention reports for Spiel 2007. In a complete table of the FAIRPLAY votes, it received, well, 4 votes – compared 51 for Tribun, that year’s top of the list, and 103 for Cuba, which had the most votes. (Aufsteiger, which Capstone/Simply Complex has also reprinted, also received 4 votes.  If you really want to follow me down this trail, a Chili Spiele game “Aufwärts” also received a vote. I asked Klaus and he isn’t sure what this refers to. My theory is that it’s a vote for Aufsteiger where the name was recorded incorrectly.)

Clay and Capstone Games have now published a second of those Chili Spiele games, “The Estates”, a reprint of 2007’s Neue Heimat, allowing me to finally reach where those Neue Heimat reminisces resided and exorcise them.

Your goal in The Estates is to earn the most points, but we’ll need to cover a few things before we get to how those points are earned.

Designer: Tom Russell
Publisher: Winsome Games / Rio Grande Games
Players: 3-5
Ages: 7+
Time: 20 minutes
Times Played: 5 times with review copy of the RGG edition, 1 time with someone else’s RGG edition

In retrospect, one of the worst Codenames clues I’ve ever given was “dazzle”. I was using several meanings of the word, but the one that had less traction than I had anticipated was a type of camouflage.

Dazzle camouflage bears a visual resemblance to Op Art more than traditional woodland camouflage.  The goal is less hiding in plain sight and more ‘course deception’. The idea was that British military ships in WWI were being targeted by German U-Boats via prediction of where the ship would be when the torpedo got there, so: could you alter der seaman’s mental calculations through optical illusion?

This image, and others I’ll sprinkle throughout, are from Blodgett’s 1919 MIT thesis looking at the use of dazzle in WWI and theoretical modelling of results.

While the Bureau of War Risk Insurance and other American parties were researching the best ways to lower visibility at sea in 1917 and 1918, a British Lieutenant, Norman Wilkinson, created what came to be known as British Dazzle.   Around this time, Germany had begun ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ – which is to say survivors were not necessary – and Wilkinson’s camouflage strategy was the distortion of a ship’s size, shape, heading, speed, range, and so forth.  The goal was simply to cause the U-Boat commander to mis-estimate the true course of the ship, resulting in errant torpedos – which were of limited supply and would give away the submarine’s position.

Wilkinson’s designs would be unique for each boat; tailored to the specific ship; and he would find his wife among the team that helped with the final designs. Wilkinson had a model ship and a seascape backdrop prepared and during a demonstration, King George V, who had previously served in the Royal Navy, misjudged the direction of the ship, much to his astonishment, due to the dazzle pattern.

The Armory Show was 1913. Here’s a photo of the HMS Kilbride from sometime between 1914 and 1918.