Timeline Review

A deceptively simple game that I've been playing recently is Timeline.

The premise of Timeline is very simple - you are supposed to place events (or inventions, discoveries, etc, based on which set you are using) in their correct order in the timeline.  To start the game, each player is dealt a handful of cards, which they place in front of them on the table.  One other card is dealt into the center of the table, date showing, to seed the timeline.  (These cards each represent something that happened at a specific point in time.  One side of the card depicts the event, and the other side depicts the event and also has a year on it.)  Each turn, the active player attempts to play a card by placing it somewhere in the timeline and then flipping it over.  If they have placed the event in the proper location, then their turn is over; otherwise, they must draw a new card.  The first person to run out of cards is the winner.

The currently available versions of Timeline

Timeline is a bit of an enigma to me.  The game doesn't really sound very exciting.  And yet, my first pro for the game is that it is fun to play.  I am not typically a person that enjoys trivia games and, though it plays a bit differently than a "normal" trivia game, Timeline is still a trivia game at its core.  It's really amazing how something so simply can create an enjoyable experience.  And, as an added positive - Timeline is simple enough that you can teach it to anyone.  It could easily be taught to any of your friends, regardless of previous gaming experience, and they could pick it up quickly and enjoy it with you.

The next pro for Timeline is that there is, surprisingly, strategy about playing the game.  With a normal hand, you will generally have some cards that you know pretty well, some that you have a decent idea about, and some that you have no clue about.  But, with those, when should you play each card?  Should you play the ones that you have no idea about first, and hope that you're able to successfully play them since your odds are better of guessing correctly when the timeline is small?  If you do that, then the ones that you only have a vague idea about will become much harder to play later - after all, if you know that something happened in the 1800's, and there are several cards already played in the 1800's, then suddenly your card is much harder to play.  What's more - you know what cards your opponents have.  So, should you play some of your cards that happened around the same time as theirs in order to make their cards harder to play?  Like I said, the game itself is very simple, but forming a strategy about the order of playing your cards adds some depth to the game.

Is this where the Can Opener goes??

Yet, Timeline still has a few drawbacks.  First is that I think it lacks in replayability.  When I love a game, I really want to play it over and over again.  However, if you do this with Timeline, you're going to wind up learning the dates of the various events.  And, whereas learning is generally considered a good thing, and may help you feel better about yourself, it will also break the game of Timeline if one player knows when everything happened.  This issue can be mitigated in a couple of ways - first, there are four different Timeline sets that you can purchase (separately, of course), and this allows you to play the game with different cards.  And, secondly, if you are careful to leave a few weeks between your plays of Timeline, then you will likely not remember when everything happened.  Regardless, Timeline isn't something that you're going to be able to sit down and play all night.

The second con is that the enjoyment of the game is going to be highly dependent on the equality of the players.  Since Timeline is a trivia game (and not a game of highly obscure trivia game like Wits and Wagers), some people will know more answers than others.  And those people will win the most.  So, the ideal group for Timeline will be a group of people that have an approximately equal knowledge of history.

The last con that I have for Timeline is that the cards drawn can sometimes highly favor one player.  Why?  Because there are some cards that are really obvious about where they go in the timeline.  Cards like "The Earth is Formed."  Well, I may not know an exact date for that, and regardless of what you believe about creation versus evolution, you still are going to know that this card goes earlier than anything else on the timeline.  As long as a lot of these obvious cards aren't drawn, everything should be alright - but I had a game where I drew "The Earth is Formed," "Dinosaurs Appear," and "Dinosaurs Become Extinct" in my opening hand.  These three cards were all especially easy to play, and, un-surprisingly, I won that game.

Overall, I give Timeline an 8.0/10.  I'm glad to have it in my collection, and I intend to continue playing it for a long time, but the amount of time that I have to wait between plays keeps it from being one of my upper echelon games.

If Timeline sounds interesting, you might also check out Wits and Wagers, Biblios, and Code 777.

Alhambra Review

A game that I tried out based on a friend of mine mentioning it to me was Alhambra.

Alhambra is a tile placement game, similar to Carcassonne. In Alhambra, a player may choose one of three actions each turn: either they can take a currency card (or several as long as they add up to no more than 5), they can purchase and place a new building tile (which doesn't count against them if they spend the exact amount of money), or they can rearrange their alhambra (by removing a tile, adding a tile purchased on a previous round, or exchanging a tile). When replenishing cards after a player takes a currency card, a scoring card may appear which then will initiate scoring. Scoring occurs three times during the game - twice based off of cards, and once at the end of the game. When calculating scores, whoever has the most tiles of a certain type gets points (and in later scoring rounds, whoever has 2nd and 3rd most also get points). Finally, players also receive points for the longest exterior wall that they have built around their alhambra. At the end of the game (when no more tiles are available), the player with the most points wins.

The first thing that I like about Alhambra are the walls. The walls force a frustratingly delicate balance - they are worth points, so you want to connect a lot of walls, but they also limit your future tile placement, so you have to decide if it is worth it to seal off that part of your city. In one of the games that I played I wound up with a lot of exterior walls too quickly, and it caused me to not be able to place all of my tiles - but I was scoring 21 points for my walls. I like the delicate balance here, and it leads me to my next pro.

I like the tile placement rules. They are pretty intuitive once you are playing, but they can still be very limiting. One of the specific rules that can affect you if you wind up building a ton of walls is this: you cannot leave an empty square that you have built completely around. This caused me some frustrations during the end of our games because I ran out of places that I could put new tiles - I wouldn't be allowed to place them to complete my exterior wall until I had finished building all of the interior. And most of the interior pieces that were valid for me to play had already been purchased.

A point of note that's neither a pro nor a con is how currency works in the game.  There are 4 different kinds of currency (represented by different colors and a small symbol) and 6 different kinds of tiles (represented by color and number of diamonds).  When purchasing buildings, you base the purchase price on the number on the building tile and the purchase square that the tile is in (which shows the currency needed).  I thought that how the different currencies worked was really neat, but I thought that the conflicting color coding was pretty confusing.  I'm sure that if I keep playing the game, I will get used to it, but it takes an adjustment at first to know that I need to pay 4 blue for the green tile (and not 4 green) when it is on the blue space.  Make sense, or did I throw too many colors around?  If you're confused, then at least I'm not the only one.

With those pros, my biggest complaint with Alhambra is that it just didn't really excite me to play it. I'm realizing that I may be biased against tile placement games (I wasn't in love with Carcassonne either), but this game didn't really "strike my fancy." I could play the game again, but I could also not play it and be about equally happy. As a disclaimer, I will point out that we played the game two player, and we both agreed that it would probably be ideal to play with 4-6 players instead, and so you should factor that in with my previous comments.

After "much" internal debate (maybe 2 minutes worth), I give Alhambra a 7.5/10. I did not dislike playing the game (thus it does not get lower), but I'm also not itching to play it again. If you like tile placement games, you should check it out, because it seemed to be a good variant of the genre, but I think I will move on to other genres.  I also gave it a bonus 0.5 because I think that it would work well as a game to be played with non-gamers.

If you like tile laying (unlike me) you might also want to read about Tsuro (this one is good enough I forget it's tile laying), and my favorite "traditional" tile laying game - Architekton.  Or, if you're looking for games that you can play with non-gamers, you might read my review of Monopoly Deal or Sorry! Sliders.