Board Game: Ticket Ride: Rails & Sails

Ahoy! All aboard! Toot toot!

The Game: Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails
The Publisher: Days of Wonder
Time: About an hour, I think, but we were playing at a leisurely pace
Players: Me, Cael, Ada, Del

Game Play: As with other forms of Ticket to Ride, this is the basic game with an extra couple of things. In this case, it's boats! In addition to trains (the usual rules apply), there are ships. You start out with 50 trains and ships in whatever combination makes you happy (the remainder of your 65 total ones are kept in reserve), choose tickets, etc. You can build routes with trains or ships, depending on the shape of the route (trains are rectangles, ships are ovals). 

Virgin territory, mostly

You can also build harbors in any city that has a port (which is most of them), but that costs two ship and two train cards, all of the same color, and all with the harbor symbol, which can be pretty hard to come back. They're good point adders (10 points per ticket you complete involving that city at game's end), though.

Opinions: It's Ticket to Ride, again, and I like Ticket to Ride. I don't know that ships add anything that, say, Europe didn't already with stations, other than having a little more to coordinate, but the gameplay felt very much like the standard game. There are two maps (Great Lakes and World), but I think the difference is just cosmetic. 

Keep? Sure, though if I had to get rid of one it'd probably be this one just because I don't think it's adding much to the proceedings.

Board Game: Watergate

Michelle and I are road-tripping this month, so we took a couple of two-player games along. So here's one!

The Game: Watergate
The Publisher: Capstone Games
Time: 15 minutes or so
Players: Me and Michelle

And we were actually playing in a hotel, how meta

Game Play: As mentioned, it's a two-player game. One player plays the evil Nixon Administration, the other plays the heroic Washington Post. The game board is basically a big murder-board:

The object, for the Administration, is to build up five points of "momentum" and get to the next election, while for the Post, it's to uncover enough evidence to force impeachment. That's accomplished by marking pieces of the evidence in the appropriate colors from informants (the photos at the margins of the board) to Nixon. 

Every round, you play cards to move tokens - the white initiative token, the red momentum, and the evidence tokens - up and down the research track. The round goes until both players are out of cards (one starts the round with 5, the other with 4, depending who has initiative that round). At that point, you collect anything on your side of 0, while anything still on 0 is discarded. If you get the momentum token, you add it to your momentum card (which for the Post has knock-on effects after two points, but really the best effect is that if you've got it, Nixon doesn't). If you get the initiative token, you get initiative the next round.

Michelle-Nixon ponders her options

Evidence tokens get added to the board as evidence (if you're the Post) or face-down as blockers (if you're Nixon). It's possible to flip them or move them after they're placed, too. What that means, then, is that you've playing Nixon your focus needs to be on getting momentum, but also blocking the Post from using evidence effectively. If you're the Post, vice versa - you need to open up informants and link them to Nixon, but you can't ignore momentum or you'll lose in five rounds.

Journalism in progress

Opinions: I like this game! It's a fun two-player game, which is handy, and it's got enough moving parts to feel interesting to play but it's not so complex that you have to devote a long time to setup or game play (once we knew how to play, setting it up took all of a minute). It's got some nice strategic elements, the production designs are solid, and of course if you're playing Nixon you can go "ARRRROOOO" like Billy West playing him on Furturama. 

NIXON ALWAYS WINS!

Keep? Yep.

Board Game: Rainbow Pirates

YAR.

The Game: Rainbow Pirates
The Publisher: Sweet Bros
Time: 15 minutes or so
Players: Me, Michelle, Gus, Megan

Gameplay: It's a card game! You've got sets of cards numbered 1 to 7, each with a distinct color and artwork (so like, 1 is red and is the "Mom" card), some wild cards, some Rainbow Pirate cards, and some black cards that allow actions like stealing other folks' cards or checking the first four cards in the deck and rearranging them. 

Step one: Shuffle

On your turn, you rearrange your cards, putting them down in front of you (your "island") in matching sets of three or more, or in sequential sets of three or more. Rainbow pirates just get put straight onto the island and don't join sets, they just chill out until it's time to score (or someone steals them). You can play black cards on your turn, but each black card has a counter. The Pirate Thief, for example, can be countered by His Mom (the "1" card), so if you try to use it on an opponent they can play a 1 card and cancel it.

Islands taking shape

You end your turn by either taking the two face-up cards on the table, or drawing two from the deck. I like that that ends your turn, because it's a nice clear signal to the next player - you drew, now you're done, on we go. 

I WAS JUST TAKING A PICTURE GUS I'M NOT TRYING TO SEE YOUR HAND

 The game goes until someone goes out, which requires two full rainbows (cards 1 through 7) and no cards in your hand. It can also end if the draw pile runs out, but that didn't happen for us. At that point, you score on point for every card in your island, 5 points for every Rainbow Pirate, and 5 points if you went out first. Easy-peasy.

My victorious island

Opinions: I mean, it's very similar to any number of other "make sets or runs of cards" games, so that's not a big innovation. I have to say, though, it's been a while since I've played a game that we could just pick up and play without having to poke through the rules little by little and figure them all out, and it's nice to do that every so often. Plus, the artwork is really fun and colorful, the game play allows for some strategy but it moves pretty quickly, and it's absolutely replayable. 

Gus, victorious. Victorigus?

Keep? Yarp.
 

Board Game: Cyclades Legendary Edition

Nothing improves a game like doubling the box size.

The Game: Cyclades Legendary Edition
The Publisher: Open Sesame Games
Time: 2 hours-ish
Players: Me, Gus, Michelle, Cael

 

Game Play: This is a new edition of a game I talked about back here, 10.5 years ago. The guts of it are the same. We're in ancient Greece, every turn you bid on an offering to one of several gods (options include Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Athena, and Ares, with Apollo as a backstop if you can't get anyone else). Each god gives you different things, but they all give you a building (Zeus gives you a temple, Poseidon a port, Athena a university, Ares a fort, and Hera gives you whichever you want) and then something else, be it some kind of troop or a priestess or a philosopher. Get one of each type of building or four philosophers and you get a Metropolis, get three Metropoli and you win!

But there's so much more now.

SO MUCH

For one thing, Hera is a new addition to the game. Having a god that gives you a wild card as far as buildings go is a huge help, because since not every god turns up on every turn, it means there's usually someone you can bid on to get what you need. But also, in addition to the monsters, which I'll talk about in a second here, Legendary Edition adds Heroes. We have a bunch of them from Greek myth - Pandora, Hector, Ajax, etc. - and they have their own little minis. They're useful in a fight, and they generally have some kind of ongoing power (Ajax destroys an enemy troop before a land battle begins, f'rex). In addition, they have a sacrificial condition that often, though not always, can get you a Metropolis. Heracles, for instance, kills monsters if he enters their area, and if he kills two, you can sacrifice him to get a Metropolis. Pretty cool!

The known world

And what about those monsters? As with the previous edition, some of them are just cards that have an immediate effect, but a lot of them have (really impressive) minis, and they get added the board and stick around as long as you sacrifice priestesses to them. As such, it's possible to do some very clever strategic things with them over multiple turns (f'rex, I used the Hydra to clear an opponent's troops from an area, then brought Heracles in to kill it for me). 

Unlike the previous edition, you need three Metropoli to win, which prolongs things but also opens up new strategies. You can still take over people's islands by killing off their troops, so that doesn't change.

Opinions: There's a lot more to the game, but the stuff that worked about it didn't change, so that's a pretty good update. The production values are amazing, and though the game has more moving parts, I don't feel that it got notably more complex. Overall it's a great revision and I want to try it again. Oh, also it takes up to six players, which I think is an increase, but I don't remember.

The birthday boy was victorious!

Keep? Yep.

Board Game: Three Cheers for Master

ALL HAIL THE OVERLORD. ALL HAIL THE OVERLORD.

Got to be funky

Boy, that's probably something of a niche reference.

The Game: Three Cheers for Master
The Publisher: Atlas Games
Time: 30 minutes, I think, but we were feeling our way through
Players: Me, Amanda, Cael, Michelle

 

Game Play: The basic conceit here is that you're the goblin-like minions of the titular "Master." The Master is having a bad day (his glowing red weak spot got poked, maybe, who knows) and you're trying to cheer him up with a tower of minions! 

Every turn, you play two cards and then either keep or discard the third, and then draw back up. Cards are either minions or orders. Minions have this simple, delightful kinda Johnny the Homicidal Maniac kind of vibe to the art, and they have various traits (Weak minions die easily, Hungry ones eat Weak ones, Heavy ones crush those under them if they fall, stuff like that). 

For example

Orders let you move or swap minions, or activate aggression, meaning a minion attacks the one indicated by the arrows on the card. 

The base layer of the pyramid.

You build up your pyramid, but you have to be careful which minions you put where, because you (and therefore your opponents) can play minions on any tower. So, for instance, you can play a Hungry minion next to someone's Weak minion, causing it to eat said minion. Once minions move or die, gravity kicks in, minions fall, and that can have consequences of its own.

Plus, every so often a Big Hairy Fight card comes up, meaning all minions get aggressive and attack as indicated on their cards, and if you haven't been careful about how you've arranged things, your tower can destroy itself right quick.

Cael considers his options

Eventually the "Master is Here" card comes up, there's a Big Hairy Fight (three of them, really), and then scoring depends on the height of the toward and where your minion-leader is on the tower (represented by a little cardboard token riding another minion). 

Opinions: It's a rare game, I've found, that can give you this kind of premise and then actually make a game that gives you a play experience that actually captures that experience. Three Cheers for Master does, though - it's a strategy and placement game, but you have to think ahead and remember what the different symbols mean in a gameplay context. It takes a little getting used to, and if you're playing on a big table it can be hard to see what's on someone else's tower, but the game itself flows nicely and presents a nice balance between screwing your neighbor and building yourself up. 

If I have a complaint, it's that there were only three reference cards included, which for a game that can take up to 10 people is weird. 

But I won without one, so

Keep? Yep.

Board Game: Detective

Put on some coffee, it's gonna be a long night. *lights cigarette*

The Game: Detective
The Publisher: Portal Games
Time: 3-ish hours
Players: Me, Emery, Tim, Kate, Michelle

Game Play: We didn't wind up playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians last night, so we wound up playing, like, the opposite of that, kinda. Detective is a cooperative campaign game in which you take on the roles of folks working for Antares, a specialist investigative agency under the FBI. (It was remarked, a couple of times during the setup, that we were tired of things being topical in the sense of "hey, this might not exist soon.")

Anyway, everyone has a character card, all the characters are specialists in some investigative field - journalist, analyst, PI, ex-cop, and so on. They all have special abilities, but the abilities are pretty flavorless (that is, they're useful in the context of the game but there's no easy way to explain them in the fiction). There are five cases included in the base game and there's another season available; this game isn't so much a legacy game (no stickers or rules changes, to my knowledge), but a campaign game in that the fiction changes as you play it.

CHRIS STONE - PI!

The game presents a case. Your boss gives you a briefing, and then you have a specific number of days in which to solve it. Each day is divided into eight hours, and various tasks cost hours of your day - traveling to a location costs an hour (Richmond PD, the Lab, Headquarters, Fieldwork [which is basically "everywhere else"]) and then the actual work can cost anything up to four hours. If you go past 4PM you can keep working, but every hour gives you stress, which affects your score at the end and can end the investigation prematurely if it gets above a set limit.

(As a side note, I've read John Douglas' book Mindhunter, in which he talks about the early days of Hoover's FBI and how Hoover wanted everyone to work overtime and be constantly working more than they did last week, meaning the only way to fill out your end-of-week reports was to lie like crazy, so it's amusing to me that this game presents a hard stop of an 8-hour work day but prevents you from pulling all-nighters. It's clearly written by Europeans.)

So, anyway, you can perform various actions to pursue the case. You can type names into the Antares Database (a real live website for the game), sometimes you get a symbol to search something on the plain ol' internet, but the real fun is the cards. Every case has a deck of cards, and the cards often present a novella's worth of text that explains what your characters do, the coffee they drink, the chairs they sit in, and, oh yeah, what relevant info they find. 

 Michelle and Kate diligently taking notes

From there, you decide what leads to follow and try to synthesize all the data and solve the case. At the end of your time limit (or if you hit your stress cap), you go to the end-of-case bit of the website and take the post-quiz to see if you solved it.

Emery is a master of disguise! 

Opinions: I'm being somewhat snarky, but I actually really enjoyed the game. Let's start with my criticisms: The prose on the cards is a little overwritten and since the game is such a cognitive load, I did find myself thinking "please get to the fucking point" more than once. Also, all of the investigators move as a unit, which makes sense mechanically, but in the fiction it's weird that we can't split our efforts and maximize our time a little (and led to jokes about how the five of us all inhabited one body or were some kind of amorphous blob thing).

But once you understand the mechanics, they're not hard to use. The abilities that the characters have all revolve around maximizing time; digging deeper into leads requires Skill tokens, but you only get so many of the different types. Michelle's character could swap out Authority tokens (which you get for being on the right track, among other things) for a "wild" Skill, for example. The mechanics nicely get out of the way and let the players dig into the meat of solving the case, which is the point. And it was gratifying to watch the story come together. 

In the end, we solved the case, but didn't get the maximum score not because we missed something, but because we forgot a detail that had been presented right up front in the briefing. The case was also rife with information that probably won't be relevant until later in the campaign, so I hope we get to play it at some point!

Keep? Definitely.
 

Board Game: King's Vineyard

Insert your favorite grape-related pun here.

The Game: King's Vineyard
The Publisher: Mayday Games, but it's not on their site anymore
Time: 30 minutes
Players: Me, Megan, Sarah

Game Play: Everyone gets dealt six cards. Cards either have grapes or tools to facilitate gardening (shovel, manure, watering can). Mixed into the deck are three King cards. Turns progress in a series of steps: You draw back to six, you discard down as much as you want (but note that you don't redraw until next turn), vines attached to ripe grapes wilt, you harvest ripe grapes (this is only compulsory if all of the vines are wilted), you plant new vines (normally just one, but you can use a shovel to plant more), each non-ripe cluster grows new vines, and lastly any clusters that have reached their maximum number of vines have to ripen. 

If the King gets drawn, you score at the end of the round. Scoring takes into account ripe grape clusters and how many vines are attached to them and what color they are, but only inasmuch as there are matches. So if you have multiple plants the same length and/or the same colors, you score more points. 

The strategy here is tricky. Harvested grapes don't do much for you; they break ties at the end of the game but nothing before that. You get points for having ripe clusters of matching colors (and some clusters are "hybrids," so they count as two colors) and matching vine lengths, so scoring is about managing the vines and the ripening process until the King shows up...but you don't know when that will be.

Behold my vineyard! And also Megan, kicking my ass.

Opinions: It's not a bad game and it's actually pretty easy to play (though the strategy is tricky), but the game is really badly explained. There's a reason that turn progresses in the strict way it does, but the game booklet doesn't explain that process especially well, so it's very much the sort of game you just have to play for a while and get the hang of. It's not bad, the artwork is pretty, and I think it'd be interesting to play with a few more people and see how it goes.

Keep? Sure, for now.

Board Game: The Refuge

Starving zombies, man. No brains around h...wait, I feel like I made this joke.

The Game: The Refuge
The Publisher: B&B Studios, though they don't seem to have a website (googling the game brings up eBay)
Time: 20 minutes-ish
Players: Me, Michelle, Megan, and Amanda

Game Play: The conceit of the game is that the zombie apocalypse happened and the players, as survivors, are trying to get to a safe place. Evidently there's only room for one, though. On your turn, you can move one space (horizontally or vertically), play a card, or draw a card.

The vast wastelands

Some spaces have skulls on them, which spawn a zombie that you can put on any skull-space. Some are "SAFE" spaces, where zombies cannot tread, but some are "switch" spaces which let you swap places with any player on a safe space. And some are "hazard" spaces that let you move a zombie one space (again, non-diagonal). The cards let you do things like jump a space, move diagonally, or kill a zombie (but weapons are gone once used). 

Zombies show up pretty quick, as is typical

Opinions: It's a nice, simple strategic movement game. You have to balance forward movement with doing enough to screw the other players, and you have to be careful about camping on safe spaces because it's real easy to get swapped with a switch space much further back in the board. Moving a zombie onto someone else can kill them (sending them back to start), but if they have a weapon it can actually be of benefit at times. 

I like it well enough; Michelle felt it was a bit thin. If I want zombie-themed survival games there are better ones, though this one has the advantage of being fast (unlike games like Dead of Winter or Zombies!!!).

She was victorious, though

 

Keep? Sure, for the moment.

Board Game: Zombies!!!

I suppose they're all starving. Not a lot of brains around here, after all.

The Game: Zombies!!! (plus some expansions)
The Publisher: Twilight Creations
Time: I think this game took something like 4 hours, but it doesn't have to be quite that long. It's always long, though
Players: Me, Michelle, Gus, Amanda

Game Play: The game is actually pretty simple, all things considered. Every turn you place a tile, put zombies on the tile, roll a d6 to move your pawn, and if during your move (or before it) you wind up on a space with a zombie, you have to fight it. That requires rolling a 4 or better on a d6. If you're short, you can make up the difference with bullet tokens (you start with 3), or spend a life toke (you start with 3) to reroll, but if you run out of life, you "die", which just means you go back to the starting tile and refresh your tokens. 

You get event cards, which let you do a variety of things - move faster, screw with another play, weapon cards give you bonuses to combat, you can move zombies or stop them attacking, that sort of thing. Events can be played any time, but once you play one you can't play another until the beginning of your next turn.

The very beginnings of apocalypse

You can collect more bullets and hearts around the map (they "spawn" in tiles with named buildings), but there are always zombies around, so at a certain point you have to decide whether it's worth it to risk your existing resources to pick up more. The balance on that is that fighting zombies can be its own reward (see below). 

You can win in one of two ways. Either you get to the helipad tile (which is the very last one in the stack) and clear out any zombies on it, or you collect 25 zombies (every time you kill a zombie you keep it; if you die you lose half your collected zombies). It's a competitive game, which actually took a little getting used to; a lot of the games we play are not.

Pictured: Gus' competitive face

But of course, in the interest of making life difficult for ourselves, we used a bunch of the expansions, too!

Had to take the slats out of the table and everything

There are a bunch of expansion sets, and I don't have them all (which is good, there wouldn't be room). They aren't standalone exactly, but you can play them on their own using the minis from the base game. What we did, however, we play them with the base game, and what that means is that there are entrance tiles to the army base, the mall, and the university mixed into the base stack. When you draw one, you put that on the table and then the tiles for that location become available, meaning you've got a whole other area to explore (complete with a whole other helipad to find, and the expansion stacks are shorter, meaning that theoretically it wouldn't take as long to find).

It does, however, require a shitload of table space

Some of the expansions offer new rules, too; the school on introduces "guts", a new type of token that limits the number of event cards you can have at a time. The army base one has a couple of "special" zombies that only die on a roll of 5 or 6 (and their figs are glow-in-the-dark!). 

Opinions: It's been a good long while since I played Zombies!!!, and it's definitely a fun game - the tile placement makes for a nicely organic way for the town to expand, there's a strategic element that you can approach from multiple directions, and the artwork on the cards is fun. It takes a long time to play no matter what you do, so you need to be prepared for that going in (though you can shorten the game in a few ways, like putting the helipad closer to the top of the tile stack; I'm sure Twilight Creations' page on Board Game Geek or similar sites also has suggestions). 

My main criticism is just that movement is really slow - you only move, at most, six spaces in a turn, which is barely enough to get you across a tile even if you don't go into a building. If you're playing with expansions, there are whole areas of the map that you're never going to get to because there's just not enough time to get all the way to the mall/school/base - actually in our game, we never made it into any of those places (no, tell a lie, I think Gus got into the mall very briefly). It's probably best to just play with one expansion at a time, or play just the expansion if you want to really get into it. Or, you could, I suppose, let people start on different tiles, but I don't know how well that would work. (The other option is to play with like 10 people, which I have done, but that really lengthens the game and requires booze and/or weed.)

There's another expansion called Jailbreak that starts you in a prison and has you break out before you can escape, and we didn't add that because it changes the game too much, but I think we'll play that one separately sometime. 

Keep? Yep.

Board Game: Smash-up

I swear I did this already, but it ain't linked on the list (I mean, now it is) and the box had a dot, so OK LET'S SMASH!

The Game: Smash-Up
The Publisher: Alderac Entertainment
Time: 20 minutes-ish
Players: Me, Gus, Michelle, Megan

Game Play: Everyone gets two 20-card decks, themed around a particular kind of character. The base game (which is all I have) comes with Aliens, Dinosaurs, Wizards, Robots, Pirates, Zombies, Ninjas, and Tricksters (Faeries, really). There's no restriction on which two get paired; I would up with Wizards and Tricksters just because. 

And then we draw X + 1 bases (where X = the number of players). Each base has a "breaking point," and then three numbers, and a special effect. 

Empty bases

On your turn, you play an action, a minion, or one of each. Minions get played on bases, while actions can do any number of things - affect minions, let you play more actions (or minions), lay traps on bases (very big in the Trickster deck) and so forth. When the number of minions on a base equals or exceeds its breaking point, the base gets scored; the player with the most power (as represented by minions) on a base gets the first number, second-most gets the second number, and so forth. And then everything on that base gets discarded, draw a new base, move on! First one to 15 points wins.

CHAOS

Opinions: It's a fun little game! The artwork on the decks is really nice, and quite apart from the conceptual giggles of picture robots fighting alongside pirates, different decks specialize in different things. Wizards, for example, are great at playing lots of action cards, and Tricksters are great at deck manipulation, but neither of them having a lot of heavy hitters as far as minion power goes (next time, I'm thinking Dinosaurs and Wizards). There are a lot of potential combinations, so it's definitely a game with a lot of replayability and different permutations. And, of course, there are a zillion expansions. 

The only real criticism I have is that it can descend into Munchkin-esque "screw your neighbor" kind of play where bases don't get scored because people keep zapping each other's minions, but that actually doesn't tend to last long because with the right combination of cards it's pretty easy to build up enough points to score a base quickly. 

It had been a long time since I played this, but it was a con staple for a while and I kind of want to pick up more decks for it.

Keep? Yep.

Board Game: Trickster: Champions of Time

Love a good trick-taking game.

The Game: Trickster: Champion of Time
The Publisher: Daniel Solis Games
Time: 30 minutes
Players: Me, Gus, Michell, Megan, Yannick

Game Play: Each game uses a deck of 56 cards, eight characters with seven suits each. The characters all have iconic titles (The Nomad, The Peddler, The Magician, and so forth), and each of the suits has a genre title (Superhero, Space Opera, Steampunk) but in practice they're a color and a symbol. The game actually includes a bunch of different characters, so you don't use all of them in the same game, and which ones you do use changes the game (but more on that in a moment). 

The game consists of three rounds, and each round consists of multiple hands. In a hand, the Leader plays a card, and the person to their left (the Trickster) plays another card that determines what the other players have to do - follow suit, follow character, or neither. So if, for instance, the Leader plays the Steampunk Peddler and the Trickster plays the Steampunk Magician, the other players have to play Steampunk cards or bust. If the Trickster plays the Space Opera Peddler, everyone has to play Peddlers or bust. If the Trickster plays, say, the Superhero Guard, the other players have to continue playing characters with no facets in common with anything that's been played.

If you bust, you take the cards already played in the trick and put them out in front of you. If no one busts, the Trickster busts. Whoever busts becomes the Leader for the new hand, and a round goes thusly until someone runs out of cards. 

Yannick plays decisively!

 

But that's not all! Each character has an effect that happens when you play it. So for instance, if you play a Magician, you take a card from your tableau (the cards face-up in front of you) and put it in the trash. If you play a Peddler, you and another player exchange a card from your hands. You have to use a card's effect if you can, but if you can't that doesn't prevent you from playing it. 

At the end of a round, you get "Trouble points" for each card you have in your tableau, but if you have the most of a particular suit, you don't take points for that suit. Least Trouble at the end of three rounds wins!

Not much in my tableau so far, but give it time

Opinions: I hadn't played a trick-taking game in a while, and I really like this one. It's really simple to learn, and the terminology is really easy - tableau, pot, trash, done. As with many trick-taking games, you can play it without any strategy just by following suit (or whatever), but you probably won't win unless you pay attention to what's on the table and what might or might not get played. And we only played once, with the "Beginner" set of decks, so I'd be very interested to see what happens when you add in different mixes of characters (and therefore card effects). 

Plus, as is usual for Daniel Solis games, the art is beautiful and the cards are really pleasing to look at. 

Keep? Definitely.

Board Game: Heat

I always think of "Metaphor" from The Fantasticks; "HEEEEEAATTTT". Anyway.

The Game: Heat
The Publisher: Admadi Games
Time: 15-ish minutes
Players: Me, Michelle, Gus

Game Play: The game is themed around heists, and takes place over three rounds (called Heists). Each Heist has four Stages. First is a draft (you know, pick a couple of cards, pass one left, repeat) that gives you a hand of five cards. Then everyone plays cards into their Record, one at a time, and resolves the cards on the right (so the most recent) in order - cards are labeled A, B, C.

Cards do various things; they give you money, they move other cards around, and they give you or remove Heat. Heat is symbolized by little red cubs, and Heat gets more expensive the more of it gets removed from the card. At the end of the game, you have to buy off any Heat you have remaining, which can get bloody expensive if Heat has been allowed to get pricey.

Heat is presently free, here.

Opinions: I mean...it's not a bad game. It works, the cards are pretty clear. My complaint is two-fold. 

First, and I say this all the damn time about RPGs and board games alike, it needs an example of play. You can explain the rules, sure, but seeing them in context means so much more. 

Myah, see?

 

Second, there's a lot of talk in the early part of the rulebook about trash talk and overtly planning your heist and like...none of it means anything? I have no idea what they're talking about. You want me to make up a bank heist and describe it as I'm playing cards? But...why? 

Like, I get the appeal of an improv game in your little card game, but if you want that to be the style of play, first fucking incentivize it (there's no mechanical reflection of any of that) and second, fucking describe it. Lunch Money lends itself to descriptions of the brutality one inflicts, even if that game doesn't require such descriptions. It's easy to see where they'd fit into the flow of play. Here, I dunno, it didn't seem obvious. That may have been because we were just learning it, but frankly I don't feel the need to dig back in (we played it once and then switched to Cthulhu Wars because I wanted something bigger and grander). 

Keep? I'm about 50/50 at this point, which probably means no.

Board Game: Fit to Print

If I'd had this game when I was running Cairn, we might have had a newspaper in the town. 

The Game: Fit to Print
The Publisher: Flatout Games
Time: 20 minutes max
Players: Me, Michelle, Megan, Amanda

Game Play: Fit to Print is a tile-laying game, first and last. All of the players are adorable woodland creatures working at different publications (that's the storytelling conceit, anyway), and over the course of three rounds, you pick tiles blind from a big mish-mash in the center of the table, and then when you think you've got enough, transition to the next part of the round, which involves laying them out on your grid.

The mish-mash

Tiles are of three types: ads, photos, articles. Articles have various sub-types, and you can't put articles of the same type next to each other, photos next to photos, or ads next to ads. Ads don't actually give you points, but at the end of the game whoever has the least total ad dollars over three rounds is automatically cut (their paper goes under because of lack of funding), so you can't ignore them entirely.

The grid

Each round is timed; we've always played at the "relaxed" difficulty which is five minute per round, and that feels plenty rushed to me. 

There are other permutations. At the beginning of the game, everyone gets a random centerpiece, but whoever finishes first in the first and second rounds gets to choose a centerpiece from a random assortment, and the centerpieces have different effects (f'rex, one of them might give you a small point penalty but allow you to put photos next to each other, stuff like that). At the end of the round, whoever has the biggest chunk of white space loses points. Also, there are optional rules that give each of the characters a special bonus and there's a whole deck of "breaking news" cards, but we haven't tried those out yet.

Also there was so much stuff to punch out

 

Opinions: The reason we haven't played with the advanced rules yet is because the game is plenty challenging at the basic level. The challenge is trying to figure out where to stop pulling tiles and start laying out your paper, because once you stop pulling tiles you can't go back. Different tiles are oriented in different ways and have different widths, and you have to be cognizant of stuff like the "slant" of an article (either good news or bad; if it's not balanced you lose points) and what kinds of photos are adjacent to what kinds of articles. There's a lot going on, and the time limit means that you don't always have time to consider all the angles - getting it written is often better than getting it right. 

COPY!

I'm happy that the aesthetic of the game isn't meaningless or underdone; the articles and ads have tags and headlines that are really funny (one of the ads is for a movie called Babe 8: Pig in Space). Likewise, the names and skills of the characters do matter if you use the advanced rules, but the game is broken down in such a way that you can learn and add to it at your own pace. Also there's a very handy scorekeeping pad, which I always appreciate. 

Oh, and everyone has little snap-together desks and they're different for each character! The graphic design here is really top-notch.

Keep? Yep