The Opinionated Gamers

Tschak!
Designer: Dominique Ehrhard
Publisher: GameWorks SàRL
Ages: 13+
Time: 40 mins
Players: 2-4
Review by Nathan Beeler

Decisions, Decisions
The first question I generally ask when evaluating a new card game is “can I do something interesting with a bad hand?”  If the answer is “yes”, I’m predisposed to liking the game.  And if the answer is “no”, then it usually has to work very hard to overcome that handicap.  Through passing, careful play, and a dash of luck it is possible to make a reasonable winner out of a jack high hand in Tichu, for instance.  In Mü, even with a bunch of crap you can try to become the vice chief, or perhaps make a run at chief with the help of a good partner and make your strengths trumps.  Or you can try to get points by helping to set the chief’s team.  Both of these are great cards games where you have a lot of options. I find games like them inherently more interesting than something like Old Men of the Forest, where low cards are strictly worse than high ones, and a lot of low cards mean things are that much more dire (not to pick on that game – the problem is rampant).  Card games naturally have high levels of luck, but I still don’t want the luck to play me; I want my choices to matter.

Pass the Dutchie
In Tschak!, a new game from Dominique Ehrhard (designer of the wonderful Marrakech), an attempt is made to mitigate the luck of the draw by ensuring that every player gets every hand as initially dealt exactly once each game.  Players get a hand of three wizards, three warriors, and three dwarf cards, and they use them to assault three levels of a castle filled with monsters and treasure.  At each level of the castle the players form a team of good guy cards, with the highest valued team taking the treasure and the lowest being saddled with the monster.  On the first level players send out one member of the team at a time and then reveal it.  In doing so, players can adapt their strengths of the second and third cards to what others are doing.  On the next level players reveal one and then the final two cards together.  And on the last level players put all three cards out and then reveal them at the same time.  Because of one extra wild card that is seeded into everyone’s hand, the last card is sent to fight over some gold booty that’s laying around outside the castle.  Then the cards are gathered up, passed to the left, and a new hand is played with everyone’s neighbor’s cards.

This passing mechanism, ripped from the pages of games like Zum Kuckuck, would seem to be the ideal way to answer the question I posed above.  You don’t like your cards?  Neither will anyone else on the turn then have them.  And at some point, everyone will get the good hands to make as much hay as they can.  So what’s the lingering “but” that’s keeping Tschak! as merely an ok but not a great card game?  The most obvious problem, and the biggest complaint I hear, is that even though the hands are identical, the situations in which you get to play them are not.  The monsters and treasures have fairly divergent values, so having the good hand on a round where there are a couple of cursed treasures is a bit of a bummer.  In fact, which treasures and monsters come out when seems to dictate the the winner of the game to a large degree.  Suddenly, we’re back in random luck territory. Continue reading →

Designers: Brandon Tibbetts
Publisher: Minion Games
Ages: 13+
Time: ~120 mins
Players: 2-5
Reviewed by: Andrea “Liga” Ligabue

It is not so easy to find a small publisher able to release more than 1-2 games in a year. It is much more difficult if 3 of these are really new releases and it becomes extremely rare to have all these releases at good level. It is rare but not impossible because, according to my tastes, Minion Games 2011 has been an impressive year.

Apart from the nice new edition of Nile Deluxor, that I have reviewed here months ago, and the solid little Kingdom of Solomon, Greg described in his review, other two titles hit my table and impressed me positive: Venture Forth (I’m going to review in the next weeks) and the largely attended The Manhattan Project that monopolized my gaming sessions since his arrive.

Today I’m going to review Manhattan Project, the just released first work from Brandon Tibbetts.

The Manhattan Project live in the huge family of worker-placement games but has some really good twist that make it fresh and new, starting from the unstructured way to place and retrieve laborers on the map … but we have to start from the beginning.

“A revolutionary new technology has been discovered. Immediately, every major military power recognizes its destructive potential. Can your nation take the lead in this new arms race and become the world’s dominant superpower ?

In The Manhattan Project, you are the leader of a great nation’s atomic weapons program in a deadly race to build bigger and better bombs.”
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Designers: Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim
Publisher: Tasty Minstrel Games
Ages: 12+
Time: ~90 mins
Players: 2-5
Reviewed by: Matt J. Carlson

At a recent game night, I imposed Belfort on several friends as I am still in that “just one more play and I know I’ll get my strategy to work” phase of the game. The comment “it’s a little bit like Caylus, but you don’t have to share your buildings” was enough to interest the long-time gamer, but the other player (newer to modern boardgames) smiled and said “ah, yes… Caylus” – we were clearly aware he had no clue what Caylus was. However, knowing my audience, I quickly explained it was a game where you have elf and dwarven workers that gather goods, which are then used to build buildings. Buildings help you control areas of the nifty, pentagon-shaped board for points and also give you special powers – such as the pub that can turn your dwarf into a super-(drunk?)-dwarf. The mention of gnomes as special units that upgrade your buildings was enough to convince him to give the game a try. (The fact that the game components claim to be produced of 100% Ent-free materials was simply icing on the cake.) I was glad to get Belfort to the table once again, as I am currently fascinated by this economic build-up game where money is always tight, and everything needs to be accomplished in a measly 7 turns.

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Do the words semi-cooperative get your gaming juices flowing?  Do the words real-time invoke more than thoughts of Bill Maher?  Is your memory not taxed enough? Sidibaba, a new game from the wonderful folks at Hurrican, has all of these and more.  It is a game that supports up to seven and plays in under 45 minutes once everyone knows how to play.  It is a very nice looking game that offers something a little different than your run of the mill co-op.  All of these attributes are things that will draw me like a moth to the proverbial flame. Continue reading →