Sunrise City Review

I would like to thank my guest reviewer Chris C. for continuing to bring us wonderful reviews such as the following:

Sunrise City is a recent tile-laying game by Clever Mojo Games, who also made the excellent and very popular Alien Frontiers.  Tile laying is a widely-used mechanic, appearing in games as diverse as Taluva and Eclipse.  The giant of the genre is certainly Carcassonne, and Sunrise City draws on this lineage while adding some neat new ideas.

A game of Sunrise City is played over 3 rounds, each divided up into four phases.  First, players draw zoning and building tiles and pick a unique role that will give them a special power until the next round. In the second phase, players place their zoning tiles on the table, extending the city outward.  Then players bid on the right to build on the empty zones.  Finally, in the building phase, players place their building tiles.  Buildings can either go on zoning tiles that a player has won the right to build on in the bidding phase or on other buildings to create upper floors.  They must always be placed on zones or other buildings that match their color (except for the purple “mixed use” zones and buildings).  The color-matching requirement creates exciting tension as you hope the spots on which you can build will remain available.

Double points for landing on 10

The scoring mechanic is a particular novelty of Sunrise City.  As players earn points, they move up a 10-place track with a star at the top.  Every time a player gets past the star, they earn a star-shaped “benchmark token” and loop around to the bottom.  But a player who lands exactly on the star earns TWO benchmark tokens.  The player with the most benchmark tokens at the end of the game wins, so a large part of the game’s strategy comes from maneuvering to land exactly at the top of the track and “double” your scoring.

Points are scored every time a building is placed, but also in a variety of other ways.  A player can earn points by placing a zoning tile next to another of the same type to create a “district”, by building next to the special “community” tiles, by building odd-numbered upper floors, or by a number of special powers on the role cards.  Managing the various scoring methods to land exactly at 10 points is a fun challenge.

Another wonderful aspect of this game is its components.  The building tiles are the thickest pieces of cardboard I’ve ever seen in a game, and give you the feel of building a city in three dimensions.  The pieces for bidding are thick wooden poker chips and the game includes large black plastic pieces for keeping track of the odd-floor scoring bonus - they look really neat on the city.  Everything is bright and colorful, though there is one problem in that the blue on the buildings doesn’t perfectly match the blue on the zoning tiles.  Happily, the zoning and building tiles also have icons corresponding to the colors.

Building three dimensional cities

I do have one complaint about this game, which is the amount of luck.  Depending on the tiles you are dealt, it simply may not be possible to get to exactly 10 points, potentially giving your opponents a major advantage.  Luck can be a problem with any number of players.  In the first round of one 3-player game, I drew two all-green building tiles, but there was only one green zone on the entire board.  I ended up having to discard the tiles and miss this major point-scoring opportunity.  In games with 4-players, there are more opportunities for scoring on any given turn, but it’s very hard to plan for landing on 10 points across multiple turns because your opponents will often cause you to score points during their turns.  Since landing exactly at 10 points is so important, it would be nice to have more control over the scoring.

Despite the luck problem, I found this to be a very fun game.  Looking for the best place to play your buildings on the city provides a neat puzzle every turn.  And the game plays very quickly, often in less than 45 minutes with folks who have played before.  In such a quick game with so many fun parts, the amount of luck is probably forgivable.  It certainly feels more strategic than tile-laying
classics like Carcassonne, especially since you draw 4 zoning tiles and 4 building tiles at the beginning of each turn, allowing for a little more planning.  And building a large city in three dimensions is very satisfying.

Overall, I think this is a nice game.  It’s the best game I’ve played that uses tile laying as a central mechanic.  If you like tile laying or are looking for a light-weight strategy game and don’t mind a bit of luck, you should definitely check it out.
7.5/10

If Sunrise City sounds interesting, you might also check out Architekton, Carcassonne, and Cityscape.

I would like to thank Clever Mojo Games for providing a review copy of Sunrise City.

Carcassonne Review

When a game truly defines a genre, I think it is only appropriate that I give it a try. And so, I wound up buying Carcassonne.

Carcassonne is the tile placing game. In Carcassonne, players take turns drawing and playing a tile. When playing a tile, it must be be placed in a "valid" position (which means that whatever is on the tile matches up with what is on the tiles next to it - no dead-ending roads, castles without walls, etc). After placing the tile, a player has the option of placing a meeple (yes, I believe Carcassonne also brought us meeples - wooden people shaped pieces) on the newly placed tile. Placing meeples is where much of the strategy of the game takes place, as it is what drives the scoring of the game. Meeples can be placed on roads, farms, cloisters, and castles. Whenever one of these things (other than a farm) is "completed" (the castle is completed, the road becomes a circle, etc) then the meeple scores points and becomes available for the user to re-place. Play continues like this until all of the tiles are placed. At this point, farmers score points, and so do all of the meeples on incomplete roads, cloisters and castles. Then, gasp, the player with the most points wins.

What's good and innovative about Carcassonne? Well, we will start with innovative - the whole game is innovative (to me). I had never seen a game where the actual playing of the game is based on placing tiles. Yes, there is a possibility of games before Carcassonne being based on tile placing (feel free to tell me about them in comments), but Carcassonne still managed to define the genre, as it brought it to the gaming market in a big way.

Now that I've told you that it's innovative - is it good? Well, I think that the best aspect of Carcassonne is that it is a nice, simple game. When you want to play a game but don't want to obsess about every move and debate whether it is the best strategy, Carcassonne is your game. It is easy to teach people (though I recommend not beating the snot out of them like what happened to me the first time I played), and can be played by almost anybody - gaming background or not. It is long enough to be engaging, without being so long that you get bored with it (though if you play too many expansions, you might argue that it gets too long).

However, though Carcassonne is very innovative and simple... it didn't click for me. I like to say that I don't care what genre a game belongs to, as long as it does that genre very well. Tile placement may be my exception. I have tried several tile placement games including Carcassonne, Alhambra, Architekton, and a few others. I haven't found any that I think of more highly than "they're ok." Carcassonne falls into this range for me. I can play it, but it's not really one of my preferred games - I would play it when friends want to play it.

Now, for a more objective con, I dislike the reactive nature of Carcassonne. Each turn you must draw a tile, assess the current state of the game, and then place it. There is very little that you can do to form a continuing strategy throughout the game. No matter how well you place things, if you don't draw the correct tiles to allow you to score, there is very little that you can do. I think that this does add to the lightheartedness of the game, and indeed many people will like this. However, this isn't an aspect of games that I am particularly fond of.

Overall, I give Carcassonne a 7.0/10. It is a respectable game that I understand why people enjoy. However, with that said, it appears to have defined a genre that I have discovered that I dislike.

So, admittedly, I'm not a huge fan of tile laying. So, instead of only reading my biased opinion, you might also check out Board Game Family's Carcassonne review, or another Carcassonne review on Games With Two. Or, if you're looking for other gateway games, you might want to check out Tsuro, Cargo Noir, Shadows Over Camelot, or 7 Wonders.

Architekton Review

A game that I picked up without knowing anything about it (I was trying to balance out a trade on 'the Geek'), was Architekton.

In Architekton, players take turns placing tiles (building and/or landscape) in an effort to make their cities connect to each other and to connect to the correct landscape. Players take turns placing 2 tiles from the 6 available face up tiles (3 building and 3 landscape). The tiles must be placed in a checker pattern of landscape surrounded by building and vice versa. Any time a building tile is completely surrounded, it is immediately scored - if it is surrounded on all four sides by the correct landscape, the owner scores a point. If not, the owner loses a point per incorrect side (and can lose the city that he has on top of it to mitigate one point of the loss). The game ends either when a player loses more points than he is able to lose (by scoring a tile with too many sides surrounded by the wrong kind of landscape), or when a certain number of tiles are placed. In the first condition, whoever hasn't been eliminated is the winner; in the second condition, players count the number of points they have scored and the number of cities they have in their largest connected group of cities and adds a point per city - then the person with the most points is the winner.

Before getting too deep into pros and cons, I must make a confession. I don't like tile placement games. You may be asking, then 1) why do you play them and 2) why should I read this review? Well, dear reader, I play them because I try to play everything - especially if I own it... and before you ask, I didn't know it was tile placement when I got it (like I said in the intro). Secondly, why should you read it... because you like me? I don't know that I have a better answer. I will try to be objective, but at least you know my bias going in. And, I suppose more specifically, it's not that I don't like tile placement, it's more that I haven't found any tile placement games that were good enough to make me like the genre, and so I blame the genre instead of the games.

For the first pro of Architekton, I really like the fact that the players are able to directly affect each other. Whereas this is somewhat possible in Carcassonne (especially with some of the expansions), in Architekton, through careful tile placement, you are able to put the wrong landscape around your opponent's buildings. This can cost him lots of points long term by making him lose his cities, or can cost him the game if done effectively enough. (As a point of note: you cannot play any tile anywhere; the new tile must match at least one side of the existing tiles. We missed this the first game, and it is critical - otherwise you could just place the wrong landscape around your opponent and the first person to play a city would basically lose.)

The next thing I like about Architekton is that my interest in the game seems to last about as long as the game play. This can't honestly be said about very many games - a ton of games take way longer than I care to play them, and some games are over when I just started to get engaged. In Architekton, however, the game takes about 20-30 minutes, and that seems about right for the complexity of it.

The next thing that I like about Architekton that is especially important since it is a tile placement game is that you have several tiles to choose from. Instead of drawing and placing a tile each turn (and thus far too much of the game being based on luck), you have 3 landscape and 3 building tiles to choose from each round. You still may not have the exact piece that you are looking for, but you at least have options of what and where you can place.

Now for the cons; first of all, there's not really that much to Architekton. I suppose I could look at this as a pro, and call it a filler game, but most filler games for me are very lighthearted. I'm thinking of games like Gloom, Lunch Money, and Liar's Dice; there may not be that much to those games, but there is that special something that makes you want to play it more.  Architekton seems to be a serious strategy game trapped in a filler game's rules set. Therefore, it doesn't really fit into the filler category for me, nor does it fit into the serious strategy game category for me, and I don't envision myself playing it very much.

My other con is that it is tile placement.  And I think tile placement is boring.  This one isn't as boring, but I still didn't really find it very exciting.  So, when you look at the overall score, and you say, "hey, he had 3 pros and 1 con, why did it get such a low score?" now you will know.

Overall, I give Architekton a 7.5/10. Though I don't care too much about tile placement games, Architekton seems to be my favorite one that I've played. With that said, I intend to give my copy to a friend that really enjoys tile placement, and I will play it with him occasionally when he bothers to bring it.

If you're looking for easy to teach games, you might also check out Monopoly Deal, Sorry! Sliders, and Pentago.

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.

Tsuro Review

The next game on my list to review is Tsuro: Game of the Path.

Tsuro is a very simple game and is easy to learn and fast to play. The time from opening the box until you have successfully completed your first game will probably be around 20 minutes (or less). Here is what happens: each player has 3 tiles. Each of these tiles has 8 points of entry drawn on them that are connected with 4 lines. On a given player's turn, he will place a tile, move all of the markers that are affected by that tile, and then draw a new tile. The object of the game is to be the last person to have their pawn remaining on the game board. How this works is that after you play a tile, if there is a pawn that was next to one of the entry points for the new tile that was placed, that pawn follows the route to wherever it dead-ends. If that dead-end is the edge of the game board, they are eliminated.

There are several great aspects about Tsuro. First, it is a great filler game. I do not envision people getting together just to play it, but when they can't decide what to play next, or just have about 15 minutes to play, it is perfect. Also, Tsuro is very flexibile. It can be played with 2-8 players, and it plays equally well with any of those numbers. Next, it is incredibly easy to teach and is a game that draws people to it. If you play Tsuro in a public place, people will see it, be drawn to it, and then be easily included in the next game - thus attracting both gamers and non-gamers alike.

The only real drawback to Tsuro is the opposite side of the coin of its greatest strength - simplicity. The game is so simple that it is not really a game that people will get together to play. It is a game that people, who are already together for another reason, will choose to play.  More than a get together game, it is a front porch or coffee shop style of game.

Overall, I give Tsuro an 8.0/10. What it does, it does extremely well! I would definitely recommend it to all ages that they try the game, and if you are looking for a good front-porch style game that can be played with non-gamers, it is one of the best options I have encountered. The game play is completely different, but I put this game in the same vein as Fluxx when it comes to fast, easy to learn but fun to play games.

Tigris and Euphrates Review

Now for a review that will be somewhat difficult to verbalize - the review of Tigris & Euphrates.

Tigris & Euphrates plays unlike any other game that I have ever played (well, other than Euphrates and Tigris Card Game), which says quite a bit as I normally own at least 75 games at any given time. On a given player's turn, they get two actions and with these actions they can either place a tile, position a leader, draw new tiles or play a catastrophe.  Most of these actions will be taken positioning leaders and placing tiles.

Placing tiles is usually fairly straightforward - if you place a tile in a "kingdom" where you have the corresponding leader, then you get a point, if not, then whoever does have that leader gets a point. However, if you place a tile that will combine two "kingdoms", then the game takes a drastic change. This is called "external combat", and for each set of duplicate colored leaders in the new united kingdom, the duplicated leaders will fight to see which one stays. (Example: if there are now 2 red leaders in the combined kingdom, they will fight to see which one is the red leader of the combined kingdom). The leader that is banished is banished along with all of the tiles of his color in his original kingdom, and the player that won that battle will get a corresponding number of like-colored victory points. This happens until "external combat" is resolved by either there being no more sets of 2 of the same leaders in the combined kingdom or by the kingdom splitting back into multiple kingdoms.

Positioning leaders can also be somewhat tricky, as this can cause "internal combat" if you play a leader of the same color as a leader already present in the kingdom on which you have just placed. Essentially you are attempting to usurp their power, and so you fight using only red tiles to determine who wins. The winner gets to stay and gains a red victory point, and the loser's leader is removed.

Tigris & Euphrates has a lot of awesome features. The first one is the balance involved in the game. Throughout the game, you will collect victory points in 4 different colors, but your final score is the total of the color in which you have the least victory points - if you get 500 black and only 1 blue, then your total score is 1, and all of your extra black victory points do no good.  This is a refreshing change from most games where you can build a strategy around only one facet of the game.

Another neat aspect of Tigris is simply how the strategy works. It plays so differently than any other game that I have ever played that it challenges me to think in new ways to attempt to determine the best move. Whereas, yes, it is a tile placement game in the same sense as something like Carcassonne, the strategy is much more intricate because of the placement of leaders. It is at least as important when and where you place your leaders as it is which tiles you play each turn.

Another feature that I like is how the combat works, and how important it is in the game. The combat is somewhat straightforward - whoever has the most tiles counting for them between what's in play and what they play from their hand wins, but even with that the combat is a big key in the game because joining two kingdoms at just the right time can quickly score a large number of points to add to a color that you have not scored on well.

Tigris & Euphrate's biggest downside is the learning curve. Because it is so different than most other games, it will take a little bit longer to understand how everything works in the game. This is not a big deal for people that often play board games (probably the people that follow this blog), but when they are trying to teach their friends a new game, this may cause some frustration.

Overall, I give Tigris & Euphrates a 9.0/10. It is a fun game that I think will leave you wanting to play it more.