Game of Thrones Review

Another game from this weekend to review (while its fresh in my mind) is A Game Of Thrones.

In Game of Thrones, each player takes on the role of one of the noble houses from George R.R. Martin's book series A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire) (which I recommend, as it is a great fantasy series). From there, at the beginning of each turn various random events will occurs including mustering new troops, adjusting players' supplies, having the "Wildlings" attack, bidding on positions of power, etc. After this, all of the players place "orders" at the same time, and after all of these have been placed, then the players will execute the orders in turn order. At the end of 10 rounds, or once someone has taken a certain number of cities/strongholds, then the game ends and the person with the most cities and strongholds is declared the winner.

There are several things that I like about Game of Thrones. First off, I like the orders, where there is a limited number of things that are available to you each turn. For example, there are only 3 orders with which you can attack, and they each have a different attack modifier. If you are only planning on attacking once, then you can use the +1 modifier - if you plan on attacking with all 3, you wind up using a -1 modifier for one of your attacks. Another aspect of orders that I like is the concept of the "Raids". These orders are executed before any others and can allow players to destroy some of the other players' orders. Overall, the concept of how the orders works is incredibly well executed and adds a lot to the gameplay.

The next thing that I like about Game of Thrones is the combat system - specifically the support. One of the available orders is "Support". If a player places this on some of his units, then those units are able to lend their combat strength to any battles that happen adjacent to them (even if they are not directly involved in the combat). This is a neat system, as it will allow a third party to potentially determine the winner of a battle, and thus they can determine who they want their closest aggressor to be. Also, when battling, at the end of the battle each player chooses a "character card" to add to the total combat value (and affect other aspects of the battle such as casualties). However, once the character card is used, it will not be available again until all of the other cards have been used. This aspect of the game allows a prudent player to attack when they know someone doesn't have their valuable character cards available, and also forces players to sometimes choose how critical a fight is (in addition to adding a bluffing aspect to the game).

A third concept of Game of Thrones that I liked was the positions of power. There are three positions: the Iron Throne, the King's Messenger, and the ruler of the Fiefdom. Players bid "points" on these positions, and not only does the winner matter, but placement matters as well. For example, the winner of the Iron Throne gets to break all (non-combat) ties, but the order on the Iron Throne track also determines what the turn order is. Another example is that the King's Messenger gets to adjust one of his orders after all of them have been revealed, however the order on the messenger track affects how many "special orders" a player can play each round.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of cons with Game of Thrones. The first one is that it does not scale well. If you read the rules, it states that it is a 5-player game that can be played with only 3 or 4. It means this. With less than 5 players, the game is not especially well balanced and a lot of time is spent expanding each player's kingdom without running into any opposition by other players. This makes the game mechanics not work as well.

The next aspect of the game that I did not think worked very well dealt with random events.  As stated previously, at the beginning of each turn various random events occur - one of these events is a "muster" event in which players are able to gain reinforcements. Unfortunately, these cards, since they are randomly pulled out (and since there is a card that does nothing but reshuffle the deck) may occur very frequently but also have the potential of not occurring for the entire game. (In the most recent game that we played, it was a 7-round game and a muster came up once.) Another frustration that I had with the random event cards is related to how frequently the card can come up that allows players to re-bid on positions of power. These cards have the potential of coming up very frequently, which would mean that a player gets very short term benefit from gaining a position, but they could also come up hardly ever which would cause people to have the position for longer than they should simply due to random luck. (In the latest game we played it took several turns for one to occur, but then they occurred back to back, which meant that the first time positions went for about 10 power points, and the second time they went for about 1-2 points.)

Overall, Game of Thrones gets a 7.5/10. It has a lot of good aspects, but unfortunately the difficulty of getting a game together (since it really needs 5 players) limits how often you will wind up being able to play the game.  Also, you need to be willing to deal with random elements of the game being... well... random.  Being familiar with the books will help a player enjoy the game a little bit more, but is not a prerequisite for being able to play and enjoy the game.

Some other Fantasy Flight games that you might be interested in reading about are Game of Thrones: The Card Game, Battlestar Galactica, Chaos in the Old World, and Civilization.

Skallywaggs Review

After a fun weekend of gaming, it is time to start writing up some reviews. First up is Skallywaggs.

Skallywaggs is a simple pirate game in which each player is trying to get enough pirates in his crew in order to be able to set sail with his ship. In order to do this, each player matches up different cards representing a pirate's legs, chest, and head. If the player is able to play a set of these cards that are all for the same pirate (such as the "First Mate"), then they will get bonuses and it will be harder for their opponents to disrupt that pirate. Finally, there are also cards that allow a player to perform actions other than just simply matching.

There is not too much to this game, so I will keep the pro's and con's section fairly abbreviated. When thinking of the pros and cons of this game, unfortunately, it's biggest pro is that it's "cute." This is a game that may attract some people because it seems neat at first (and is fairly inexpensive), but the pro's really stop right about there.

The biggest con of this game is that its not particularly fun. All of the game mechanics work, but after about the third turn I was tired of playing the game - unfortunately it lasted closer to 20 turns before it was over. After discussing it with others after the game concluded, I realized that they didn't find it particularly fun, either.  The strategy consists primarily of holding cards in your hand until you are able to match a pirate, and then hope that your opponent doesn't immediately get rid of that pirate on their turn.  It really just did little to hold our attention.

Overall, Skallywaggs receives a 5.0/10. This may be a game that children may be able to enjoy, but for the most part, I would recommend that you look at other games instead of purchasing this one.

Falling Review

One of the games that I pulled out of the back of my closet to play again and then review was Falling. (FYI - I have an older printing of the game than the one in the link, so the image will not match entirely).

In Falling, the concept is that you are all falling to the ground (skydiving gone horribly wrong, perhaps?) and that you want to be the last person to hit the ground. One person plays as the dealer in the game, and everyone else plays as people falling to the ground. There are no "turns", but the dealer goes around giving players cards until everyone but one has been eliminated by getting a ground card. While the dealer is giving out cards, each of the players has certain "actions" and "riders" that he can play. A rider is something like "Hit" (which gives the player it is in front of an extra card), "Split" (which gives the player it is in front of an extra pile), or "Skip" (which prevents him from getting any cards). The actions are things like "Push" (where you can push a rider from in front of you to in front of another player) and "Grab" (the opposite of Push).

Falling is an interesting game. The concept is different than I've seen anywhere else, but ultimately, there seemed to be several cons. The first of which was that it was hard to physically play the game. You need to be able to reach across the playing area in order to be able to play riders in front of any of the other players. We played some games with 4-players (minimum required) and some games with more, and the biggest problem we ran into was people running into each other's arms as they are trying to play cards.  Also, if the game were to be played 8-player (maximum suggested), you would have the problem of not being able to reach in front of other players to play riders.

The second problem with the game is related to the concept of it - the speed of the game. Theoretically, you should be playing the game faster as you have more experience with it. Unfortunately, the initial "slow" speed that we played was hard enough to follow - there were often times where players had multiple riders in front of them (which is not legal), and there were several out of place cards that nobody could explain. The dealer is supposed to be the moderator in these situations, but since he is busy dealing out cards, he is not able to follow all of the flow of the game, so he is not really able to make an educated decision on what to do in these situations.

Overall, I give Falling a 5.0/10. The concept is unique and interesting, but the actual execution of the game was somewhat frustrating. If you are a die-hard "speed" player, then this might be a game to checkout, but for most gamers, I would recommend looking elsewhere.

Stone Age Review

One of the games that I was able to find a copy of to play earlier this week was Stone Age.

Stone Age is a worker placement game in which the players are each trying to place their workers in the right positions to gain resources, new workers, etc. in order to gain the most victory points. Each turn, the players will go around taking turns placing one (or more) of their workers. Some of the places that they place workers can cause them to: gain a new worker, increase food production (workers have to eat), increase "tools" available, or have an immediate gain in the amount of food or resources the player has, or allows the player to build buildings or gain "civilization" cards (these primarily gain victory points).

Whereas there have been many different worker placement games to come out recently (such as Caylus, Le Havre, etc), Stone Age adds some new concepts to the genre. The first area in which Stone Age seems to distinguish itself is through resource gathering. Whenever you place workers at a given resource, you are allowed to place several workers at once, but whatever you place that first time around is the total number of workers you place on that resource for the round - if you start with 3 workers trying to collect wood, then you cannot add another worker later if your other plans don't work out. Also, when gathering resources, the number of workers that are placed relates to the number of dice you roll in order to gather that resource. The better the resource, the higher number that you have to roll per resource gathered. How this works is that, if you are trying to gather wood, you roll a die for each worker and then divide by 3 (round down), whereas if you are trying to gather gold, you roll a die for each worker and divide by 6 (round down). This resource gathering works pretty well, and I haven't seen any other games that have a similar mechanic.

The next positive aspect of Stone Age is directly tied to the first, and it is the use of "tools". As described above, you roll dice to determine how many resources you gather. Die rolling can often be very frustrating (like in The Settlers of Catan). Here comes the use of tools. When rolling dice for a resource, a player can (after rolling) add one of more of his "tools" to the die roll, thus helping him get the total number he needed. (For example, if a player is trying to collect wood, and he needs multiples of 3 to do this, and he rolls a 7, the player can then add 2 "tool" points to the roll to make it a total of 9 - thus collecting 3 wood.) The use of tools makes this game work very well and helps the resource gathering not to be burdensome.

A third aspect of Stone Age that helps the game is in feeding your workers. There are 2 different ways of doing this: increasing farming (the food automatically gathered each turn), or by hunting (which works just like resource gathering). I found the gathering of food to be an important part of the game, but whereas this can often be a very frustrating aspect of other games (as I found it to be in Agricola), in Stone Age it just added a new facet to the gameplay.

A final pro that I will point out about Stone Age is the scoring system (which I will admit that I was at first very skeptical about). At the end of the game, each player scores points for a few different things - food production, tools, cards, buildings etc. However, these points are scored by multiplying the initial number by the number of civilization cards that match with that value. For example, if a player's food production is 10, and he has civilization cards showing 4 farmers, he will get 40 points for farming because it will be 10 farm production x 4 farmers shown on cards (and similar mechanics for buildings, tools, etc). This mechanic forces players to determine how much to specialize (as this can be worth a lot of points) against how much to balance their play (which will help them as the game goes on and can also help them to score in multiple ways). This mechanic adds definite value to the gameplay. In addition, since all of each player's cards are kept facedown, you are never able to tell who will win the game until the very end.

The only thing that I can say negatively about Stone Age is that it is a bit simple. To me, Stone Age is a "Caylus-lite". That is not all bad - it means that it can be played much faster and can be taught to a wider audience, but the strategies that go into the game seem a bit more stripped down than the strategies available in some other worker placement games. With that said, however, Stone Age still had enough appeal and depth to cause me to want to play it some more.

Overall, I give Stone Age an 8.5/10. I did not think it was quite to the level of some of the other worker placement games, but the areas that were lacking allow for non-gamers to more easily be introduced to it.  With that said, I felt like it was definitely worth playing, and I would encourage people to try it out if the opportunity presented itself.

If Stone Age sounds interesting, you might also want to check out Glory to Rome (Black Box Edition), Innovation, and Kingdom of Solomon. Or, if you're undecided and want to read more about this one, you might check out this Stone Age Review at I Slay the Dragon.