The Opinionated Gamers

I have always found great enjoyment playing abstract games. I am not a particularly good player, and I am more interested in observing the patterns, aesthetics, and game design than I am in revealing a penetrating analytic assessment. I appreciate the relative simplicity, elegance, and legacy of a great abstract game.

In the mid-1970’s when I had my first full-time job (and a bit of disposable income), and I discovered that my girlfriend (now wife of 32 years) would play games with me, I rekindled my childhood interest in games. When I discovered the British magazine Games and Puzzles, I was thrilled to find an assortment of British, French, and German games, many of which were abstract designs. Simultaneously I located Sid Sackson’s Gamut of Games in a used bookstore. The hunt was on! Over the next decade I tracked down what seemed to be the most interesting and unusual abstracts. I wasn’t obsessed, merely interested as any thorough researcher should be. Continue reading →

The Japanese games that tend to make a splash in the U.S. market are those with zany themes and components.  Games like String Railway, Gra Gra Company, and Magical Athlete are the ones that get people’s attention.  But I’d like to draw your attention for a moment to two excellent Japanese card games that are neither wacky nor well-known.  They are Dazzle and Khmer, both released by the publisher Saien in 2010.

Both are two-player card games and each takes roughly 20 minutes to play.  I’d consider them in the same vein as games like Jaipur, Biblios, Lost Cities, Odin’s Ravens, and the like… except that far fewer people actually own them or are even aware of them.  I’d like to do what I can to rectify this by explaining what you’re missing by not having these two gems readily available.

Dazzle

Game Play.  Dazzle is played with a deck of 48 cards in four suits (Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue) with cards ranging in value from 1 to 3.  Before the game begins the deck is divided in half through a slightly funky method such that each player has the same number of cards of each value in his or her stack.  The players each draw 8 cards from their stack into their hand.  On your turn you pick any 2 cards from your hand to give to your opponent face up.  Your opponent then selects one of the cards to add to the VP value of that card’s color and the other card to add to his or her own strength toward winning that card’s color.  You then refill your hand back up to 8 cards and go back and forth until all cards have been used in this manner.

Continue reading →