Times played: 3, with review copy provided by Stonemaier Games
Pendulum is a bit of an odd duck when it comes to TGOO – namely, there aren’t that many real-time games around. In this game, for the most part, players are all doing their own thing, collecting and spending resources, and trying to gain victory points. There aren’t any turns per se – you are allowed to do things based on the status of three sandtimers, and whenever you’re allowed to do something, you can do it as you please.
The main game board is placed in the center of the table, and the three sandtimers (green, purple and black) are placed in their respective colored quadrants of the board. The fourth quadrant has 4 province cards placed face up on it. An achievement cards is placed on the appropriate spot near the center of the board. Make sure that everyone in the game can reach all parts of the main board. The council board is put off to the side – it is less important for everyone to be able to reach this one..
After Brandon Kempf’s recent analysis of the top ranked games on BGG that he had not played, lots of Opinionated Gamers got interested in running the same thought experiment. Unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of good old-fashioned qualms with the rankings, and pining for the days of yore. While some of us (mostly yours truly) were busy wishing El Grande and Tigris & Euphrates could still be in Top 10, others had more interesting thoughts to contribute. Jonathan Franklin shared a fascinating YouTube video with us that he described vividly as “like watching the movie of a trip I took.” While that video displayed the changing rankings over time, Brandon Kempf then circulated a different visualization about “staying power” that reimagined the rankings based on duration of time ranked highly. And somehow this led us down the rabbit hole of discussing traditional card games at some length. I’ve decided to pull these musings together into a traditional OG Roundtable, which used to be a thing in years past when we bantered about crowdfunding, gateway games, or just Legends of Andor. So if you’re interested in hearing our collective meandering thoughts on Euchre, Pinochle, Cribbage, and the rest, then buckle up!
This all started after I saw the video shared by Jonathan above, and I commented that it was surprisingly sad to watch all of the classics fall off the bottom of the video frame, and while I fully recognize there are many millions of far worse things in the world, I think this video makes the current Top 20 seem even more like nonsense. I attribute this partly to the obvious expansion / sequel / re-work effect that mistakenly propels subsequent editions into the stratosphere, and partly to the unavailability of so many classic strategy board games at game stores. When I talk to employees at my local FLGS, they are incredibly knowledgeable about games from the past two or three years, but know remarkably little about games from before 2015, let alone 2010 or 2000. When I reference similarities to Caylus, El Grande, Nexus Ops, or others, they generally have no idea what I’m talking about, which just feels so strange, and unfortunate. I personally find it so much more interesting to look at current board game developments through the lens of what came before, and the shoulders on which today’s games stand… but I suppose the same could just as easily be said about my ignorance with respect to games that came before my awareness or birth.
Larry Levy wisely noted: “And it was ever thus. I know gamers who cursed all those games you’re citing, Talia, because they were crowding out their favorites from the 90s. I guess it’s the price we have to pay for a dynamic game industry. Once, all you found in the game stores were Monopoly and Memory. Now you have tons of titles, but all of them are new!”
There are also those folks who think that Princes of Florence represents the End of Gaming as We Know It, because it included individual player boards. I’m also thinking about something Patrick Brennan said in a recent discussion about the history of games: “Kids don’t play cards these days.” Thinking back to the days of my youth, in the 60’s and 70’s — everyone played cards, including some form of Rummy. But outside of Poker, do people play cards anymore? Gin, Cribbage, 500 Rummy, Hearts — will these be unknown in 20 years?
That turned out to be the spark that lit the OG fires.
And lo did the Opinionated Gamers have opinions a plenty…
Meeple Towers is “a strategic abstract game in which players take on the role of contractors tasked with building the high-rises of tomorrow for meeples to live”. I think they really mean “meeples to live in” not just the reason for them to exist at all… But whatever. In this game, you try to best use your identical set of action cards to be the most successful builder.
To setup the game, you choose two Property Board halves and affix them together with the cardboard clips. This is the area on which all the players will build their towers. Each player takes all the pieces in their color (supports, meeples, 7 action cards, reference card). The other bits (bonus tokens and new building tiles) are arranged near the board.Continue reading →
Times played: 3, with review copy provided by Taiwan Boardgame Design
Ta-Te Wu is a designer who must love cats… Two of his previous games are in my gaming basement: Cat Rescue and Cat Sudoku. This game completes the trilogy of feline fun – where players act as Egyptian cat rescuers (appointed by Cleopatra) trying to save cats in the Pyramids.
Each player takes the three rescuer meeples in his color and places their matching colored score token on the pyramidal scoring track. The three Royal Inspector tokens are placed near the playing area. The 13 Pyramid tiles are shuffled face down and make into a draw pile. In the first round, each player draws a tile from the draw stack and then placed that tile on the table, adjacent to at least one other tile if possible, and then places one of their rescuers on that tile.
Played with review copy provided by Taiwan Boardgame Design
From the box- “Why You Lying” is a tabletop card game that combines dice bluffing game mechanics (similar to Liar’s Dice) and complex math concepts… It’s a great bluffing game to allow children to learn probability concepts while practicing addition and multiplication during game play”. Whew. That is all true, and I’ll admit – if this is the sort of game that Taiwanese children can handle, color me super impressed!
As the box claims, the game is indeed similar to Liar’s Dice or Perudo, a game that many of our readers are likely familiar with. However, there are plenty of differences as well that will set this one apart. To start, there are no dice in the game. Instead, each player gets their own identical 30 card deck of cards – having 5 each of crickets, spiders, fish, chicken, rabbits, and “mascot workers”. In each round, the deck is shuffled and players draw a hand of 5 cards from the deck.
I’ve long been focused on (some might say obsessed with) figuring out my favorite number of players for each game that I own. My goal is to own games that are good at every player count and for every duration, so that I have the perfect game for any opportunity. This goes all the way back to my HTML spreadsheet creating days in 2007, when I wrote about Picking the Perfect Game. At the time, I tried to categorize most of my games along a “player count” X-axis and a “duration” Y-axis. A couple years later, I doubled down when I wrote Six is a Crowd, in which I infuriated many by declaring that you should just about always split your group of six into two tables to play three-player games of approximately the same length. I proposed game pairs that could be played side-by-side for this endeavor, but many folks still prefer to cram six players into a single game. De gustibus non disputandum est. The height of my focus on ideal player counts was in 2012 when I put together Best for any Crowd, in which I decided it was impossible to have a favorite game without first dividing games by player count.
But then in 2020, I moved into a larger apartment, and I was able to organize and display my board games in an all-new approach… by player count! The famous Ikea Kallax shelves have worked perfectly for accomplishing my goal of designing and organizing “Player Count Cubes” that embody the pinnacle of two-player, three-player, four-player, and five-player gaming. Here, I’ll share some of my favorite parts of this new organization scheme, and you’ll get an even fuller picture of my idiosyncrasies in the process.
