Innovation: Echoes of the Past Review

After enjoying Innovation, I decided that I should track down a copy of it's first expansion Echoes Of The Past. As I normally do in my expansion reviews, I will assume that you are familiar with the original game - if you're not, then please check out my Innovation Review.  There are four main additions in Echoes of the Past, and so we'll simply go through them: Foreshadows, Echoes, Bonuses, and Extra Achievements.  

Foreshadowing is the first new concept, and is probably the "most different" from what you experience in the base game.  Various new cards will give you a dogma effect that allows you to "foreshadow" a card.  When you foreshadow, you take a card of the appropriate value and place it in your "foreshadow" area next to your score pile.  Then, on any future turn in which you perform a meld action, you can play a foreshadowed card of value less than or equal to the card just played - and immediately perform it's dogma action.  This is a neat way of stacking up extra cards and getting a nice one-two punch on turns, but in the games that I have played, this hasn't really been done especially much. 

The next new concept is "Echo" effects.  Some of the new cards have text in the place of an icon (this is the "Echo" effect).  When you perform a dogma effect for a color that is showing one or more Echo effects, these Echo effects are performed first, just like additional dogma effects - they are even shared between other players that perform your dogma effects.  I like the Echo effects.  I think that they can be very useful, and I like that they are balanced by the fact that Echo effects takes up an icon space, which prevents the card from being overpowered.  And yet, if you have several Echo effects, you can really make certain colors incredibly powerful.

Artificial Heart has a huge bonus!

The third concept is Bonuses.  This is really my favorite new mechanic, though it's one of the more simple ideas.  Essentially, certain cards have point values in place of an icon.  This value is added to a player's total score (for purposes like determining if you can achieve).  However, to keep the bonuses from growing too powerful, you only get the "full" value for your most valuable bonus, and you get one point for each of the others.  So, if you have a "10", "12", "8", and "5" showing, instead of getting 35 points, you only get 15.  But, this is still a nice way of getting points by melding instead of always having to find ways to add points to your score pile.  Again, this is my favorite addition to the game.

The final new mechanic is "extra achievements."  Essentially, certain cards will allow you to achieve a card if able.  This includes achieving an Age that you have already achieved.  But, to keep this from being waaaay to powerful, each time that you achieve the same Age, you have to have add the Age's score requirement an extra time - so, the first time you achieve in Age 1 you have to have a score of 5.  The next time your score would have to be at least 10, then 15, 20, and so on.  This element just adds another way for players to gain achievements, which adds more diversity in possible strategies, so I also like this new concept.  (There are also some new "special achievements" that the expansion adds, which provide even more ways of acquiring achievements.)

Bangles uses three new mehcanics

Now, with the primary new mechanics covered, I should mention the setup.  In the basic setup (there is a variant that can be used also), you shuffle some cards from the expansion with some cards from the basic set, but the basic cards significantly outnumber the expansion cards (by the way, this makes the setup and cleanup a bit of a nuisance).  Because of this, some games will have a lot more of certain new effects like foreshadowing than others - after all, some games may not even have cards that allow you to foreshadow!  The thing that I really like about this new setup is that it changes the color distribution of the Ages - instead of having 2 card of each color (minus the achievement card) like in the basic game, you could actually have 4 cards of one color and none of another in a certain Age.  Realizing this and trying to capitalize on this knowledge can really be helpful - especially when using dogma effects where you are guessing colors and drawing cards accordingly.

Overall, I give Innovation: Echoes of the Past an 8.0/10.  I didn't find it revolutionary, but I did think that the new concepts were well implemented, and added some additional variety to an already enjoyable game.

If you like engaging card games like Innovation (and Echoes of the Past), you might also check out 51st State: The New Era, Friday, Glory to Rome, and Sentinels of the Multiverse.

I would like to thank Asmadi Games for providing me with a review copy of Innovation: Echoes of the Past via Game Salute.

Fealty Review

An interesting area control game by a small publisher (Asmadi Games) is Fealty.

Fealty, at it's core, is a very simple game. The (full) game consists of eight rounds, in which players each place a single piece. Specifically, each player starts with three cards in his hand. Each player selects one of his three cards and all of the players reveal them at the same time. Whoever placed the lowest numbered card places first, followed by the other players in ascending order. Finally, each player draws back up to three cards. There are a couple of rules to note when playing pieces (your cards each correspond to one of your pieces), though. First, you cannot place on the same "duchy" (one of the boards that makes up the playing area) as another player in a single round. Also, you cannot place in the same row or column that you have placed a figure in earlier. Finally, you can't place on top of "obstacles" - mountains (apparently there are no dwarves in Fealty), other pieces, etc. At the end of eight rounds, you add up influence - again, starting with the lowest numbers claiming tiles, and continuing until all of the pieces have claimed everything that they can. Whoever has the most influence is the winner.

The first thing that I like about Fealty is it's simplicity. Essentially, the designers have been able to distill area control to it's core; and what is left is the game of Fealty. Everything you need for a quality area control game is included, but there is really very little excess. This allows you to have a game with depth, yet it can be played in around 30 minutes. You are able to have a give and take interaction with other players where you can block them from claiming influence (of course they'll do the same to you), or you can peacefully each try to claim as much as possible (well... at least theoretically you can do this - I've not seen it.  Of course, I'm normally the one doing the underhanded blocking of my opponents, so maybe I'm the wannabe warmonger in this scenario.) Due to the nature of the scoring, it is entirely possible to remove most of the value of your opponent's early placed piece by placing a piece of your own (with a slightly lower number) which will claim several of the squares around your opponent - thus cutting off his access to other tiles.

The next thing that I like about Fealty is it's replayability. The game comes with double-sided terrain, and also comes with two different sets of pieces. You can play the game where all nine of your cards are available to you from the beginning, or you can play where you draw three at a time. You could even play where you get to pick cards from each of the two sets, if you really wanted to.  These fairly minor inclusions add quite a bit of replayability. I could play it repeatedly (which is really the definition of replayability - which Blogger keeps telling me isn't even a word; stupid Blogger, it should play more board games) and not feel like I always know where the best placement of my figures should be on the board (since the board will be different every time).

The third thing that I will mention is the collapsing options throughout the game. I thought this part was very interesting. Since you can't place in the same row or column that you have previously used, the number of options you have throughout the game will decrease (and the importance of some of the pieces' powers that allow you to move will increase). This adds quite a bit to the strategy (though I'm far from having mastered it). You have to decide whether you want to use your large pieces, which can claim a lot of territory, in the middle of the board early (while you can still legally place there); thus opening yourself up to having your opponents block most of your scoring, or if you want to wait until the end to place that large piece. You have to decide if you should leave an open spot somewhere in the middle for your piece(s) to be placed towards the end of the game - and hope that your opponents don't take it from you. As the game progresses, your options become more and more limited as you eliminate a row and column each round, and if you're not the first person to place, your opponents will even be eliminating entire duchies!  By the end of the game, you may only have about 5-10 legal placements.  And these placements may be horrible if you don't plan ahead (author's note: this is from experience; my final placements in Fealty are often horrible).

However, I did have some cons with Fealty. First, I felt that the rules were unclear on some points. Fortunately, there were examples, so I was able to figure out what I think the correct rules are, but I'm still not entirely sure. I wish that they had addressed some of my issues more directly. Specifically, (I will admit that I may have missed these things in the rules) I never saw the rules explain what a "conflict marker" does (we assumed it was an obstacle). I also never saw it clearly tell me if an opponent's influence marker counts as an obstacle to prevent you from drawing a path through them to claim tiles on the other side. (An example suggests that opposing influence do count as obstacles, so we played it that way).

The other con that I have is harder to explain. Because of how the scoring works in the game (and that the person influencing any given tile might change from one round to the next until final scoring), the first game or two will be very hard to see how well each player is doing. Until the end when you place all the influence markers, you won't know if you are doing winning or getting obliterated. However, once you get past this initial blindness, you run directly into "Analysis Paralysis" (taking a long time to decide what to do on a turn because of too much information or too many choices). Since the influence is not immediately visible, you will have to continually look around the board to determine what positions might be valid. And, inevitably, once you finally find the correct position it is illegal because of your previously placed pieces (there's an alliteration for you), and so you have to start looking all over again!  This is almost begging for a computerized version of the game that allows you to highlight where each person is successfully influencing (and where you can legally place).

Overall, I give Fealty an 8.0/10. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised with the game. It's not something that I'm going to yearn to play repeatedly, but I thought that it was very intuitive and really a very solid title. This is now the second game I've played by Asmadi Games (Innovation being the first), and I am pretty impressed with this small publisher!

If you like Fealty, you might also read about Princes of Florence, Smallworld, and Alien Frontiers.

I would like to thank Asmadi Games for providing me with a review copy of Fealty via Game Salute.

Innovation Review

One of the most innovative games I've played in a while is Innovation! (First, yes I love puns. Secondly, this is actually a true statement.)

Innovation is an abstract version of a civilization building game. Whereas you go through "ages", your powers get better but you never really feel like you're building an empire (and you don't really get troops to attack people with). But that's ok. What you actually do is this: each turn you get to perform two actions. These can be to draw a card, play ("meld") a card from your hand, "achieve" if you have enough score (gaining a certain number of achievements wins the game), or activate a card effect for one of the cards you have "melded" ("perform a dogma"). That sounds pretty straightforward and possibly even boring. Where things get interesting, however, are when you are performing a dogma. When activating a card's power, the power is related to a symbol - a castle, leaf, crown, clock, etc. If another player at the table has more of the corresponding symbol showing than you do, then they have to do the card action first.  The game keeps going like this until one person has enough achievements to win (or the last draw pile is empty and someone has to draw from it; or one of the instant win conditions is met).

The first thing that I like about Innovation is how the dogmas work. Specifically, there are two different kinds of card powers - there are "demand" powers, and there are normal powers. Both of these are related to the number of resource icons each player is showing. If you perform a demand action, then all of the players with less resource icons than you of the given type are affected (generally negatively). If you perform a standard action, then everyone with as many of that resource icon as you get to perform the action first (this generally helps them, but it can sometimes allow you to perform the action more powerfully). This works really well. It encourages people to both have good cards in front of them, but also to make sure that they have large amounts of resources showing - specifically for whatever power their opponents are using.

Splaying Up

My next pro is something unique to Innovation (as far as I know). It's a concept called "splaying." Splaying is especially important because of the previous pro of how dogmas work. There are various cards in the game that allow you to "splay" cards in different directions. What this means is that you can take a stack of your cards (by default you can only have one card showing of each type (color)) and you can reveal part of the cards underneath the top one. For example, when "splaying right", you slide your top card along with each card underneath it to the right so that the far left resources of each bottom card are displayed. This can be very powerful as it can allow a player to suddenly have large numbers of resources showing - and since resources let you perform actions on other people's turns (or prevent them from doing actions on your turn), this is a crucial component of the game. This is a mechanic that works masterfully, and only works because the cards are both well thought out conceptually and well laid out graphically.

Skyscrapers - A very powerful card!

Now, with those brilliant pros, there are some other things that you need to be aware of with Innovation. First, there feels like a runaway leader mechanic while playing the game. If you are losing (especially because you have less resource icons showing), you can start to feel hopeless. However, there are enough resource types that it is very difficult for one player to be winning in all of the different categories. And, there are some incredibly powerful cards that can quickly sway a game. For example, if one player is winning in every category except for the "crowns", they can have entire piles of their empire (including all of the splayed cards underneath the pile) removed with the "Skyscrapers" card - suddenly the leader is the one playing catch-up! On the other hand, if a player that is already winning gains a powerful card like this, they may be able to completely obliterate their opponents! Essentially, it felt to me like one of the "balancing" mechanics was to make cards that were more and more powerful as the game progressed. This makes sense to some degree from a thematic perspective (we have better weapons and technologies now than 100 or 200 years ago), but you really need to be prepared for this kind of giant power swing before trying the game.  Some people will not have any concerns with this, but I wasn't a huge fan of it (granted, Skyscrapers was used against me, so take that how you will).

Another thing to realize before deciding whether you would like Innovation is that the game plays out quite differently with different numbers of players. I have played it with 2, 3, and 4 players. With 2, obviously you have the most control over what happens in the game - you're going every other turn. However, you have the hardest time catching up if a player starts winning (I believe) because you have nobody to help you slow down the leader. On the other hand, a 4-player game is almost chaotic because so many things can happen between your turns that you almost feel like the game is out of control. Yet, with key strategic moves, you may be able to score a victory. There is a good chance that you will have a strong preference of what size of game you enjoy most when playing Innovation.

My main con for Innovation is that I felt like it deserved to have some better art and graphic design. This isn't something that I normally care much about, but I felt it warranted mention here. Whereas the graphic design that allows for the splaying is beautifully setup, much of the art feels like generic "Clip Art" that you would find anywhere on the Internet. Plus, whereas the player aids are helpful, it would be nice to also include what the end of game conditions are as well as how to gain the non-age specific achievements (these are some special achievements that you can get throughout the game for being the first player to match a certain condition - like having all of the cards on top of your piles be from age 8 or higher).

Overall, I give Innovation an 8.5/10. I really felt like this game brought some fresh new ideas and I really enjoyed them. However, the power swings in the game are a bit more extreme than I would like, which kept the overall game score down just a touch.

If Innovation sounds interesting, you might also enjoy Glory to Rome, Race for the Galaxy, and Sentinels of the Multiverse.

I would like to thank Asmadi Games for providing me with a review copy of Innovation via Game Salute.