Notre Dame Review

A great little game that I bought by fluke last year is Notre Dame.

In Notre Dame, each player controls a section of the city, and they are attempting to help build the cathedral of Notre Dame - while avoiding being overrun by rats!  The game consists of thee rounds, with each round having three turns.  Each turn, a player will draw three of his nine cards and select one - passing the others to the player on his left.  Then, from what is passed to him, he selects another one and passes.  Finally, he accepts a third card.  These cards represent actions that a player can perform, but he will only perform two of the three.  These actions can allow you to remove rats, gain victory points, earn money, move your carriage, unlock more of your influence markers, and build Notre Dame.  At the end of each turn, each player has the opportunity to hire a special helper, who can assist in moving your influence markers, gaining victory points, and dealing with rats.  After this, rats frantically charge at the players, avoiding clubs, boots and gunfire on the way to bite your ankles, and anyone that is overrun with rats loses two victory points and an influence (perhaps I made that sound a bit more exciting than it really is).  Finally, if the round is over (not just the turn), then players score victory points based on who assisted in Notre Dame and get their starting action cards back.  At the end of the third round, the game is over!

The first thing that I enjoy about Notre Dame is the action card drafting.  I have played a few games with a drafting mechanic in them, but I believe that Notre Dame does it at least as well as any other game I've played (including 7 Wonders).  I really enjoy the fact that what actions you are able to perform are based on both what you draw and what other players pass to you.  This forces you to adjust your strategy based on other players.  For example, if you are passed a lot of carriage cards (I generally pass these), then it might be a good idea to go ahead and start implementing a carriage strategy.  At the same time, you can look and see what the opponents on your left are doing, and you can decide to keep cards simply to prevent them from having them.  (Though, this strategy obviously does not focus on earning your own victory points, and so it is less than ideal.)

The available action cards - and the Hunchback

But, do you know why it might be important to adjust your strategy based on what you draw?  Well, it's because of this part of the game that I didn't tell you about before - as you continue performing the same action, you become better at it.  Which I also think is brilliant.  If you perform the action to gain victory points, then you gain a point.  That's less than impressive.  However, if you do it again, then you gain two points.  If you do it again you gain three points (assuming that you have left your previous influence markers on it).  In fact, each of the action spaces gives you a reward that is related to the number of influence that you have on that space.  And so, the game rewards you for having a strategy and sticking with it.  I'm ok with games rewarding you for performing a single action repeatedly - but I think that it works amazingly well in Notre Dame because you really have no control over whether you will be able to perform an action repeatedly.  It all depends on what cards are passed to you.  And so, if you get to perform the victory point action nine times (throughout the game), you can point and laugh at your opponents who passed you those cards!

And, though your actions improve by doing them repeatedly, Notre Dame also forces you to do multiple different actions.  How?  Well, there are nine cards in each round, none of which repeat.  And, you will be performing six actions each round.  Even if you draft every copy of a given action, you will only be able to perform it three times - and so, you have to do something else, too.  (Which is good, because I really don't think that you would have a chance at winning if you did any of the actions 18 times.  Except for maybe the victory point action; but you would run out of influence that you could place on it!)

The board configuration changes based on number of players

My final pro for Notre Dame is that I like the rat mechanic.  You gain no points from killing rats.  None.  Instead, you don't lose points.  Two of the actions deal specifically with killing rats - but as a bonus, one lets you kill rats as you earn them, and the other lets you gain extra victory points.  The space that lets you kill rats as you earn them can be incredibly useful at preventing rats from overrunning your board - but if you focus on this, then you're not earning points.  And, you've been stacking all of your influence on a place that won't help you earn points in the future, either.  But, being overrun by rats is bad.  Not bad enough that it will cost you the game, but bad enough to make you try to avoid it.  I think that Notre Dame has found the magic balance between having rats be important enough to force you to pay attention, yet trivial enough that you don't have to spend the whole game obsessing about them.

If I had to name a con for Notre Dame, it would be that there are not many special helpers (the cards that you hire at the end of the round).  Each game, you will see all of them, and you will see six of them repeatedly in the same game.  More of these would allow the game to have more variety from one play to the next.  Yet, with that said, I think that the special helpers are well balanced, and the game gets a different feel based on who you play with and how they choose to draft cards each time, so this con is really very minor.  (Also, the Notre Dame mini-expansion provides you with more of these.)

Overall, I give Notre Dame a 9.5/10.  I love this game.  It is easily one of my surprise favorite games, and has quickly jumped up to be one of my favorite "euro-style" games, on the same level as games like Puerto Rico.

If you like Notre Dame, you may also be interested in Biblios, Pillars of the Earth, and Le Havre.

Sorry Sliders Review

Sorry! Sliders was described to me as a "poor man's PitchCar" (since it's about $20 instead of $80).  This made me immediately start looking for a copy of it.

In Sorry Sliders, the goal is to move all of your pawns up to the "Home" scoring region.  To do this, you take four "slider" pawns, and you roll them up the ramp onto the scoring board.  After each player has slid all of his pawns, you score points based on where the pieces landed.  Each "slider" can move one scoring piece, and to move a piece onto "Home", you must get the exact score that you need.  Also, in true Sorry! fashion, if you have a slider land in one of the corners, or go off the board, then your top scoring pawn (that hasn't reached "Home" yet) goes back to the starting position.  Keep playing rounds like this until one person has moved all of their pawns to "Home."

One of the alternate setups

The first thing that I like about Sorry Sliders (aside from the price) is that it is quite customizable.  There are several different setups that you can play.  There are four different "ramps" (for lack of a better term), and you can set these up on each side of the scoring board, or you can stack two in a row opposite the scoring board.  You can also set them up so that you form a right angle with the tracks, or even stack three or four ramps in a row.  Finally, there are different scoring boards to make the game easier or harder - the easier one includes an "automatic Home" spot in the center; the hard one contains "danger" zones that remove any sliders that land on them.

The second pro for Sorry Sliders is that it is very kid friendly (and, for that matter, targeted at kids).  It's ages 6+, but could probably be played with 3-4 year olds.  I'm not really sure that it is more kid friendly than other dexterity games (what kid doesn't like flicking things around?) except that the pieces might be a bit heftier, and so they might be able to handle a bit more abuse.  Plus, if your kids completely destroy it, you're out $20 instead of $50+ (depending on what else you play with them).

However, though I liked those two things about the game, there were a few things I was disappointed by.  Our first game we played four player, and so we used the basic four player setup - a scoring pad surrounded by a ramp on each side.  This, essentially, doesn't work with adults.  If you're playing with really young children, this might work out, but for adults, this just means that all of the sliders clump up into the middle.  And, once a few of them are there, it forms a giant blob of pieces that aren't easily moved.  So, instead of having skill or strategy, you're just ramming your pieces into all the ones that are already there.  We wrote off this configuration and started playing others. 

The triple decker

These new configurations lead to my next con - I don't feel like you have as much control over your sliders as you do in other dexterity games.  We switched to the configuration with three ramps in a row leading to a scoring pad.  This made the game much better, but we found ourselves just clumping on the back of the track.  In order to get enough power to get onto the scoring pad, you almost always will give it a bit too much power.  When putting several ramps together, each ramp is at an incline, and so you have to put some extra power in order to slide uphill - and so several of these in a row will remove most of your precision.  Plus, frankly, I don't think that the plastic/ball-bearing combo slides very well on the cardboard playing surface.  It just isn't very smooth - and this added friction forces you to focus more on shooting with enough power instead of aiming your shots. 

Overall, I give Sorry Sliders a 7.0/10.  I was disappointed in it, but that doesn't make it a horrible game.  It's something that I would play more if other people wanted to, and that I think that you can enjoy with the right group of friends.  Also, I think that kids will enjoy it.

If you're looking for some other good choices for dexterity games, you might also look at Caveman Curling, Elk Fest, and AttrAction.

Clash of Cultures Review

This review is brought to you by the letter "C" - guest reviewer Chris C.
 

Clash of Cultures is a civilization building game for 2-4 players.  It plays in about an hour per player. Designed by Christian Marcussen (also the creator of Merchants and Marauders), this game follows in a long tradition of historically-themed “4X” games, spanning back at least to the 1980 Avalon Hill classic, simply called Civilization.  That board game was the inspiration for Sid Meier’s classic Civilization computer game, and this thread has bounced back and forth several times, resulting most recently in Fantasy Flight Games’ popular 2010 release, Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game.  I'm happy to report that Clash of Cultures stands up very nicely against these giants.

Clash of Cultures is played over six rounds of three turns each.  Each turn, players take three actions.  Actions include moving units, researching technologies, harvesting resources and improving cities.  As in most civilization games, players begin with one city and a settler unit and the board is configured with randomized face-down land tiles waiting to be explored.  Each round is followed by a status phase where players have an opportunity to score objectives and then receive an action card, an objective card and a free technology advance.  Action cards provide special abilities, while objective cards provide ways to score points.  At the end of the game, players also receive points for each of their cities, their technology advances and constructed Wonders.  The player with the most points wins.

Beautifully sculpted pieces.

Cities form the heart of each player’s civilization, and the game features a number of novel related mechanics.  A city may be activated as an action to harvest resources, build units or increase its size with one of the four building types - temples, academies, ports and fortresses.  As a city grows larger, it can harvest more resources and build more units.  However, the size of individual cities is limited by the size of a player’s civilization, providing incentive to explore and found additional cities.  If a city is activated twice in the same turn, its citizens become unhappy and will be less effective.  Morale can be improved using mood tokens earned by researching new technologies.

The technology tree features a number of interesting options and combinations that I have not seen in previous 4X games.  One example is the Trade Routes technology, which will earn players resources each turn for putting units in potentially vulnerable positions near enemy cities.  Research technologies may also trigger events, where a player draws and resolves the top card from the event deck.  These can be good or bad - the player might be attacked by barbarians or simply have a good harvest.  Events introduce a substantial element of luck to the game, but also add much-needed variety and replayability.

The novel mechanics are supported by the excellent components.  Cities are round plastic miniatures, and the buildings are on curved bases so that each fits beautifully around the city taking up a quarter of the circle. Each player receives plastic warriors, settlers and ships in their color and as they march across the landscape the game takes on an epic feel quickly.  The individual player boards list the entire tech tree.  They are made of thick cardboard with square holes next to each technology - when a player researches a new tech, they simply place a cube in the appropriate hole.  This basic idea is a major improvement on previous 4X games, where players must often search through a deck of technology cards and refer to the manual if they wish to see all of the dependencies.  Each player also gets a reference card clearly listing the game’s phases, the ways to earn points, and the cost of each unit and building.

The highly intuitive player board

Though this game is excellent, it is not without flaws.  I wish more had been done to encourage combat earlier in the game.  In the groups I have played with, it is quite rare for players to attack each other before the last round of the game (and then only to attempt to capture cities containing valuable Wonders).  It is relatively inexpensive to found new cities, and additional cities after the first few do not benefit a player during the game, so there is little reason to attack other players earlier.  As a result, the game doesn’t have as much direct interaction as one might expect from a Civilization game.  This problem was solved elegantly, for example, in Empires of the Void, where mid-game scoring rounds provide an incentive to take planets from other players earlier.

The game does try to encourage combat with the objective card deck.  Each card lists two ways for the player to score points, one having to do with building up a civilization, and the other having to do with warfare.  However, players may only complete one of the two possibilities and both are worth the same number of points.  Since the civilization-building objectives are easier and combat will usually weaken the two players involved to the advantage of the other players, the groups I have played with have rarely attempted the combat objectives.  Additionally, the civilization-building objectives aren’t as varied as I’d like.  More than half fall into a few basic categories like building up a certain number of resources or completing a certain branch of the tech tree.  And, unlike in Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game, players do not have races with unique powers, so the game doesn’t feel as varied over repeat plays as I’d like.

These complaints are fairly minor, considering the overall quality of the game.  Any fan of Civilization-style games should pick this one up immediately.  It’s also a great choice for gamers new to the genre - it has an excellent rule book and is easier to learn and play than the Sid Meier’s Civilization board game, even if it lacks a little of that game’s variety.  It also works very well with 2 or 3 players, which is a bit rare for this style of game.  And while it might seem like a small thing, the game’s innovative components relating to cities and tech trees really make it a joy to play.

If Clash of Cultures sounds interesting, you should also check out Empires of the Void, Civilization (by Fantasy Flight Games), and Civilization (by Eagle Games).

I would like to thank Z-Man Games for providing Board Game Reviews by Josh with a review copy of Clash of Cultures.

Bisikle (and Roadzters) Review

Since I'm a sucker for basically all dexterity games, I was very excited when I got to try out Bisikle (which is the same game as Roadzters, except that one uses bikes, and one uses cars - and the cars have ramps on the back of them).

In Bisikle, each player is attempting to go around the track a set number of times.  On your turn, you take the Z-Ball, and set it directly in front of your bicycle (place holder), and then (move the bike and) flick the Z-Ball.  If it knocks down other bicycles and stays on the track, then you set your bicycle up immediately behind the knocked over one.  If the Z-Ball stays on the track, then you setup your bicycle wherever it stops, and if it goes flying off, then your bike goes back to where it was before the shot.  The first person to go around the determined number of times wins!  (Sound like PitchCar? Yeah, the rules are essentially the exact same except that everyone flicks the Z-Ball instead of a disk.)

Set the Z-Ball in front of your bike and let it rip!

When it comes to pros for Bisikle, there is one aspect of the game that is far better than anything else - the track.  The track is amazing.  It is made of plastic, and each section interlocks with the others.  The game comes with risers, so you can decide to make certain sections be different levels.  It also comes with a jump and an obstacle, each of which can allow you to customize your track however you would like.  It also comes with fences that you can put around the edge of some of the track pieces - and the track is setup so that you can put the fence on either side of it (or both).  Overall, it is highly customizable.  And, what's more - there are no uneven spots!  I assume that this is because it is made out of plastic instead of wood, but whereas PitchCar's uneven spots are enough to make me want to flip the table occasionally (I "normally" just pantomime it instead), Bisikle's track doesn't have any of these!

The next things about Bisikle aren't really pros or cons - just more things to discuss about the game.  The first of these relates to the fences.  The fences are a bit bouncy, and I don't feel like they give you enough of them.  I haven't decided if I like the fact that the fence bounces you back (like bumpers in bumper bowling or something).  It at least helps set the experience of playing Bisikle a bit apart from other games.  However, either way, I don't feel like enough fence pieces are included in the game.  There are not enough included to put a single fence around each section of track - and, with the bounciness of them, there are some sections where you will want to put a fence around both sides.  Yes, I realize that this lack of fences just means that the game is more challenging, but I would still prefer the option of placing more.  (And, on a side note, you actually can buy more - it appears that you can buy additional parts for Bisikle.  You can buy more curved track, straight track, risers, fences, obstacles, or jumps to customize your track - and you can buy more Z-Balls and bicycles to replace any missing ones.  This is another nice aspect of the game.)

The track definitely works with PitchCar disks

The next interesting thing about Bisikle is the Z-Ball.  This is really what makes the game different.  The ball has ball-bearings in it that make it keep spinning (and wobble a decent amount) during and after your shot.  I haven't played the game a lot, but so far, I'm not really in love with the Z-Ball.  Probably the biggest annoyance while playing this game is when I make a really neat shot and then watch the ball continue to wobble for the next 10 seconds and eventually find its way off the track.  Very annoying.  However, if you set up a lot of fences, the Z-Ball does a very good job of flying around the track.  Either way, I'm still "on the fence" about the Z-Ball (but in love with puns).  Maybe I should set up a house rule where you set up your bicycle based on where the Z-Ball went off the track, instead of going back to where it started.  Speaking of house rules and customization...

The track works with PitchCar disks.  The disks even fit through the obstacles (though just barely).  I also tried it with Crokinole disks (to see if you could essentially play PitchCar for significantly cheaper), but they don't quite fit through the obstacles.  Really, I think the best disks if you wanted to actually use the obstacles would be PitchCar Mini disks.  None of them will work well with the jump - your disk will catch the lip of it and flip.  The plastic, of course, plays a bit differently than the hard wood surface of PitchCar, and the fences are much bouncier, but you can definitely play it this way.  I haven't decided if I prefer it, but I definitely like the fact that it doesn't have uneven spots.  And that it is a lot cheaper to buy and customize your track.

Overall, I give Bisikle an 8.0/10.  It is a fun game on it's own, though it probably won't replace PitchCar for me - yet the track is good enough that it might replace my PitchCar tracks; I haven't really decided on that part yet.

If you like dexterity games, you might also check out Crokinole, Catacombs, and Caveman Curling.