Played with review copy provided by Rio Grande Games
Glory Islands is set in 1660 on the island of Tortuga. The players are all pirates or rogues, wanting to be known as the best. The board shows an interesting and conveniently polyomino shaped island group that forms a square. There is a track of sea spaces that bounds this square archipelago where your ships will travel. There is a sailing track where you mark how many sailing points you use in the game, and outside this is a Glory (VP) track.
Boardgame Geek has just announced the winners of the 2021 Golden Geek awards. The awards separate their Game of the Year into three categories, with the following winners:
Light Game of the Year – Cascadia (designed by Randy Flynn)
Medium Game of the Year – The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (designed by Thomas Sing)
Heavy Game of the Year – Ark Nova (designed by Mathias Wigge)
Here are the category winners, as well as the designs that finished second and third in each of the Game of the Year categories.
Two-Player Game – Radlands (Daniel Piechnick)
Artwork/Presentation – Sleeping Gods (Artwork by Ryan Laukat)
Cooperative Game – The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (Thomas Sing)
Expansion – Lost Ruins of Arnak: Expedition Leaders (Michaela Stachova, Michal Stach)
Innovative – Oath (Cole Wehrle)
Light GotY:
Winner – Cascadia (Randy Flynn)
Second – Canvas (Jeff Chin, Andrew Nerger)
Third – 7 Wonders: Architects (Antoine Bauza)
Medium GotY:
Winner – The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (Thomas Sing)
Second – Sleeping Gods (Ryan Laukat)
Third – Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (Sydney Engelstein, Jacob Fryxelius, Nick Little)
Heavy GotY:
Winner – Ark Nova (Mathias Wigge)
Second – Oath (Cole Wehrle)
Third – Imperium: Classics (Nigel Buckle, David Turczi)
Party Game – So Clover! (Francois Romain)
Print & Play – Gloomholdin’ (Joe Klipfel)
Solo Game – Final Girl (Evan Derrick, A.J. Porfirio)
Thematic Game – Sleeping Gods (Ryan Laukat)
Wargame – Undaunted: Reinforcements (Trevor Benjamin, David Thompson)
Best Podcast – Board Game Barrage
Best Boardgame App – Gloomhaven
A few weeks prior to that, the American Tabletop Awards opened the 2022 game award season by announcing their winning games. The ATA’s have four Game of the Year categories and the following games were cited as the winners of each category:
Early Gamers – Happy City (Toshiki & Airu Sato)
Casual Games – Cubitos (John D. Clair)
Strategy Games – Cascadia (Randy Flynn)
Complex Games – Lost Ruins of Arnak (Michaela Stachova, Michal Stach)
The win for Lost Ruins of Arnak wrapped up a terrific performance in the 2020 annual awards for the CGE title. There are 13 Game of the Year awards I track each year; Arnak won 6 of them and received nominations for 10 of them. It was clearly the dominant game of 2020.
Congratulations to all the winning games and the creative people behind them!
Daybreak is a new cooperative game by Matt Leacock and CMYK Games (the maker of one of my favorite party games, Wavelength). At a recent convention, I had the chance to play a prototype of the game with a few of my friends, and it was a great experience. I’ll try to recap the game – but please remember that most of this is from memory (and my memory isn’t what it used to be). Despite that risk, the designer and publisher of the game have graciously granted me permission to describe the game and what I thought about it.
The main story of the game is climate change. The players in the game take on the role of different countries/regions of the world, and their goal is to combat rising global temperatures over the maximum 6 rounds of the game. Each of the world powers comes with its own bonus/handicaps (based on their unique starting set of cards) and energy situation as noted by chits on their board. There will be 5 areas for climate card stacks. The Climate cards are the main point of the game, and there is a huge deck of cards. Each has a main action found at the bottom, oftentimes activated by “tags”. At the top of each card, you’ll see one or more “tag” icons. More on this later. The right of the player board has an area for your “communities in crisis”, 12 in total. As you play the game, you will get more communities in crisis if you can’t control your pollution. The bottom of the player board has areas for three types of defense against climate change – I can’t remember the names of the types of resilience, but each has a different icon.
This is the second half of the compilation of experiences, gaming and otherwise, of Larry and Ben at the recently concluded Gathering of Friends. Yesterday, our alphabetical list of games played got us through the letter “I”; let’s pick up the action with one of our least enjoyable experiences of the week.
Legacies (2022) Larry: The theme of this recent release is attractive: the players are industrialists who try to expand their financial empires, while recruiting their successors to carry on said empires for the following generations. Unfortunately, the mechanics only marginally support that theme. Instead, the design is a sprawling mish-mash of very different subgames that, quite frankly, made my head spin. I hoped I would be able to figure things out once we started playing, but I never did. The different characters seem quite unbalanced and the various actions seem out of whack as well. Adding insult to injury, our game took 5 hours(!) to play; that’s probably not typical, but by all accounts, this is a long game and I just don’t think it’s worth the time required to play. The game is wildly overproduced, but if more time had been spent improving the gameplay and less spent on gold-plating the components, it would have been much better. Rating: Not for me.
Ben: A friend really wanted to play this over-production of a game. I won by luck of my random draw of character powers. It’s very hard to read the tiles on the 10pt font at the bottom of the game board or on other people’s powers. The explanation was rife with questions. The game lasted many hours and was not overly enjoyable. Normally I like deep games, but not this one. Rating: Not for me.
Loot of Lima (2020) Ben: I won my buddy’s game because I kept asking questions while their note-taking confused them. Decent and well-designed deduction game. Rating: I like it.
Larry: You’d think a game with my name on the box cover couldn’t possibly be new-to-me a year and a half after it was published, but you’d be wrong. When BoardGameTables.com said that they wanted to revise my game of Deduce or Die, the plan all along was for them to develop it, to make it more accessible. I had little to do with the development process and the game was released during the height of Covid. After that, we just didn’t manage to get it to the table. But at some point during the con, Ben and another member of our games group wandered over with a copy of it, so I finally got to play my own game! My biggest surprise is that, even though it’s clearly more straightforward than the original, it’s still a pretty tough deduction game. Which is great! Thanks, guys, for letting me finally try out my own design! Rating: I like it.
Mariposas (2020)
Ben: A game themed around butterflies that I wanted to try. It’s light and cute, but not all that engaging or fun. There’s no engine building, which is disappointing. Rating: Not for me.
Nana (2019) Larry: So James Nathan pulled out this game, after announcing it was a mix of Go Fish and Memory! Hmm, not exactly something I was anxious to play, but damned if it didn’t actually work! The key is that you can only play (or ask about) the cards on the far right or far left of each players’ hand. It’s obviously light, but there’s some decisions, it’s fast, and it’s fun. Yet another James Nathan discovery from Japan. Rating: I like it.
Ben: Memory meets a trick taking game. Sort of interesting and fun. Rating: I like it.
I like to write. You may have assumed that, since I write for a boardgaming blog, of course, and I do write a lot in my actual job. What I don’t get to do a lot of is creative writing, and while I certainly could do that any time I want, sometimes I feel like I need a prompt or suggestion to get started. Well, along comes Tall Tales: A Game of Competitive Storytelling to provide assistance with that.
This is a game about writing a fairy tale with your fellow players. The competition comes in because, while you will all write a paragraph for each stage of the game, only one will carry forth as part of your tale.
To start, every player gets a writing utensil, four half-sheets of paper, a voting card and a voting marker.
Prompt CardsQuest Cards
A start player, heretofore referred to as the Storyteller, is selected at random and begins the Quest Round, which is the first round of the game. That player shuffles the Prompt cards and selects one. The Prompt Cards are large pictures that contain many different elements. They also shuffle and select a Quest Card at random; flip it face up, and then set a timer for three minutes. All players, including the Storyteller, then write a paragraph based on the prompt. At the end of the three minutes the Storyteller shuffles the entries and gives one to each player to read aloud. After the initial reading players give a summary of the paragraph they read and players simultaneously and secretly vote on which one (other than their own) will move forward as the base for the story. Players reveal their votes at the same time by placing their token on the central voting board.
The paragraph with the most votes becomes the story, with ties broken by the shorter paragraph, and the author becomes the next Storyteller.
Superlative Cards
The game continues with three Scene rounds. The Storyteller now draws three Phrase and three Superlative cards and chooses one of each. The Phrase card is a phrase that all players must incorporate exactly as written into their next paragraph; not doing so would deem your paragraph ineligible for consideration. The Superlative card describes the sort of mood or location players need to to try to evoke. The Storyteller sets a timer for five minutes, after which they shuffle the paragraphs, deal one to each player and they read them aloud and then summarize them, and then vote. If you have fewer than seven players you score one point for every vote you receive, one point if your paragraph won without a tie, and one point if you voted for the winning paragraph. If you have seven or more players you just get a point for every vote you received. The player who received the most votes becomes the Storyteller for the next round.
Sample writings
At the end of the third Scene round the game ends. The player with the most points wins, unless there’s a tie, in which case the player who wrote the winning Quest wins. The winner reads the entire story aloud, and, as the rules tell you, everyone lives happily ever after.
The games include some rules for team play that could be useful if you are playing with young children or anyone who might be unable or uncomfortable writing a paragraph on their own.
MY THOUGHTS ON THE GAME
The quality of the game box and components is good. The art on the box, in the rules and on the components is beautiful, and the other components function well and seem like they will hold up well to repeated plays. You would at some point need more paper, of course. The rules are clear and make it easy to both understand and teach the game.
The game play itself is really fun. You are guided by the cards, so you have somewhere to start from and can easily come up with something to write, but nothing is too restrictive, so you can take the story in whatever direction you want. For example, in one play we started with the greatest invention of the 20th century and ended up with murderous robotic sharks Hearing what everyone else wrote is also fun, and deciding which paragraph will move on is also fun. Hearing the full story at the end was also really enjoyable. The only negative was that it was hard for people to read other people’s handwriting in some cases, which made the reading a little less enjoyable some of the time,if the reader stumbled over a word or misread a word it affected the story and how it was received. We decided this could be fixed by just having everyone read their own story out loud. I assume the designers thought that having everyone read other pieces would add to the collaborative feel of the game and would eliminate bias from scoring, but we didn’t find that to be important to us.
In fact, we pretty much gave up on the scoring all together in our plays. We still voted, but didn’t really see the point in keeping score, since we were all having a good time and didn’t really care who was “winning”. I can see situations in which the score might be more important, perhaps with people who regularly write and want to use this as more of a contest, or perhaps in an educational setting. My plays were also with big groups, which may also have affected our opinion of the scoring.
This game is not going to be for everyone; you do need to be willing to take a chance, be creative and share your writing with the other players. I don’t mean that you have to be a great writer; you just have to be willing to put what you’ve written out there for public consumption by the other players, and I know there are people who won’t be able to be comfortable or have fun doing that. However, I would suggest that anyone who is skeptical give it a try, because we had a blast, and there are jokes from one of our plays of this still circulating on a text chain; thanks, Harvard ™. . . .
I really enjoyed the game, and I recommend it. It can be a party game, or it could be used as a more serious writing exercise; either way, you should expect to have fun.
The 2022 Gathering of Friends ended a few weeks ago and what an excellent time of good gaming and good fellowship it was. Here’s a summary of what was experienced from two perspectives. Larry has attended many Gatherings over the years, although this was his first time back since 2017. For Ben, it was his second Gathering. These two friends drove up together, roomed together, and got to play many games, both together and separately. We thought it would be fun to list our impressions of the games we played in one article. For the most part, these are new and new-to-me games, but a few old favorites are also included. The games are all listed in alphabetical order, with the year of publication included to help give you a point of reference.
As is always the case with the Gathering, getting together with friends, both old and new, is as much fun as the gaming is. So, while most of our discussions will be about the games we played, we’ll also toss in a few other memorable experiences from the week. Let’s start with a culinary highlight.
Larry’s Interlude #1: Opinionated Eaters, Part 1
I don’t have nearly as many memorable food-related experiences related to the Gathering as most of my other OG brethren. For the most part, I’m there to meet up with old friends and play great games, so I grab a bite whenever I can and get back to having fun as soon as I can. But there were two meals that were worth discussing. The first happened while travelling to the con. Ben and I drove up from Virginia and since Pittsburgh is Ben’s old stomping grounds, we stopped there for lunch. He recommended a place called Primanti Bros. that I had never heard of, but which evidently is well known by denizens of Western PA. Checking out the menu, I saw a Kielbasa with Cheese sandwich which, for some reason, called to me. It came with kielbasa and melted cheese (obviously), along with coleslaw and fries on the sandwich. I like all of those things, but not necessarily together between two slices of bread. But what the hell, when am I ever going to have another chance to eat a kielbasa and cheese sandwich? So I went for it. It came with a huge amount of sliced kielbasa between two really large slices of bread. And it was wonderful! The fries on it didn’t do much for me (after a while, I just picked them off the sandwich and ate them on the side), but, against all logic, the kielbasa and the slaw were great together! It was ginormous and massive (I had to do my best Guy Fieri imitation to wrap my jaws around it) and messy as hell, but I loved it. Definitely got the proceedings off to a great start. Good call, Ben!
1846 (2005)
Ben: This might be the shortest game of 1846 I’ve ever played. The auction, which normally requires a long explanation, went smoothly and the board play was quick with decisive turns. No one sat around staring at the board to count every stop or obsessed over the payouts. Normally, my group plays 18xx once a year and rarely the same title twice. But here, my two competitors were pros, who were clearly familiar with the game, and we finished up in only 2 hours. Rating: I like it.
