ULTIMATE SCHEME

Design by Rich Baker
Published by Sasquatch Game Studio
2 – 5 Players, 1 hour
Review by Greg J. Schloesser

My hesitancy, which often borders on outright disdain, for the Kickstarter process in regards to publishing boardgames is well known.  While I readily admit that there are some fine games being published via this method, for each good game there seem to be a multitude of mediocre to poor ones.  Slick videos narrated by James Earl Jones clones seem to be all that it takes to open the wallets of what appears to be a sea of gullible gamers.

That being said, every now and then I am pleasantly surprised. Ultimate Scheme by Rich Baker is one of those surprises.  The game was sent to me for review—something I generally do not do with pre-publication Kickstarter designs—but the theme sounded interesting, so I overcame my usual avoidance.  I was warned by the designer that the copy I was receiving would not be a finished copy, as final artwork had not yet been completed.  However, it wasn’t the lack of artwork that frightened me; it was the reading of the rules.  Oh, the rules were clear and easy to understand.  The uneasy part was that the game sounded too simplistic; too, well, vanilla.

Once again my skepticism was unwarranted.  There is more to the game than I surmised. No, it isn’t a deep strategic challenge, but it does present players with numerous choices and forces them to adjust their plans as the game progresses.  But much more important than that, the game is simply fun to play…and you get to play the bad guy!

As a criminal mastermind your goal is, of course, to take over the world. In order to achieve your ultimate scheme, however, you must first accomplish a number of lesser schemes and meet the conditions required by the “X-Factor” card in play for the current game.  Fortunately, you have minions to help you achieve your dastardly schemes.

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Once again, the Gathering proved to be a week-long extravaganza of gaming and great fellowship.  It’s always the highlight of my year and I can’t thank Alan Moon and all the other folks who work hard to make it happen enough.

I feel fairly confident in saying that there weren’t any breakout games this year, either published ones or prototypes.  I asked a couple of dozen people if they had played anything that knocked their socks off and I didn’t get a single positive response.  Some years are just like that.  That didn’t mean there wasn’t lots of good games played, just that there wasn’t anything new that was incredible.

As I have in years past, I made a point of trying to play games from the previous year that I hadn’t had the chance to try yet.  Once again, I had success with this and I added a lot of titles to my list of 2015 designs I enjoy.

Here’s a list of some notable games I played during the Gathering.  Obviously, I can’t report on all of the prototypes I got to play, but I’ll talk about the ones I can.  Let me start with the designs I liked the best.

Grand Austria Hotel – So many of my gamer friends were recommending this one that I had to try it out and they didn’t steer me wrong.  There’s a lot going on, with a lot of interconnected parts and it comes this close to being too much.  Instead, it’s just on the right side of complexity for me and I loved it.  The dice selection mechanic works well and I really like that between passing for a reroll or spending dollars to sweeten a result, there are ways to mitigate against a bad roll.  This winds up in my top 5 for 2015, enhancing what was already a strong year. Continue reading →