1960: The Making of the President Review

 
A game that I've been eager to play for quite some time was 1960: The Making of the President.

In 1960, one player takes on the role of Richard Nixon and the other player is John F. Kennedy, and they are both attempting to win the 1960 presidential election. The game is played over 9 turns. In 7 of the 9 turns, the bulk of the turn consists of playing 5 cards. The cards can be used either to activate their event or for their "CP" value. If you use the CP on the card, you can do one of the following 3 things: campaign (and each CP translates into influence in a state, or allows the candidate to move), position yourself for issues, or mount an advertising campaign. Each time that a card is used for CP, your opponent has the opportunity (if they have enough momentum) to activate the event that is in the text of the card (unless you preempt them using your momentum). The final card(s) each turn are placed in your "campaign strategy" pile. The 6th and 9th turns work differently. These turns represent the Debates and Election Day. During the Debates, the candidates use the cards that they previously had placed in their "campaign strategy" in order to try to win the debates (to get more state influence). During Election Day, the players get to perform a few last support checks to try to get extra influence, and then they add up their total number of Electoral Votes to determine the winner.

The first thing that I really enjoyed about 1960 was how "support checks" worked. Various things (like campaigning where your opponent was located) require support checks. There is an opaque bag which is originally seeded with 10 cubes of each color. Each turn, as players play cards, they gain "rest" cubes (the lower the card's CP value, the more rest they gain). At the end of each round, these rest cubes are added to the bag. Any time that a support check is required, cubes are pulled from the bag and if you pull your own colored cubes, the support check is successful. This was a really interesting mechanic, and was also nice to help balance cards that are weaker in the game - if the card is less helpful immediately, it will be more helpful long term.

The next aspect that I liked about the game was Momentum. There were a couple of ways of getting momentum: either through successfully positioning yourself on issues (you would gain momentum at the end of the round), or by playing events that gained momentum. Here's what Momentum was used for: one momentum triggered an opponent's event when they played a card for it's CP value; two momentum preempted an event to prevent your opponent from triggering it. The actual triggering of events may not actually occur all that often in a game (because you are typically trying to avoid allowing your opponent to activate your events), but it definitely plays a major role. Instead of being able to play the cards that help your opponent without any penalty, now you must be very careful of the order that you play cards and how much momentum your opponent has while playing them. This may have been my favorite aspect of this game.

A third pro that I found while playing 1960 was the importance that all of the different options had in the game. If each player plays all of their cards for campaigning (gaining cubes in states), then the game would be quite boring. However, because of things like momentum, it is important that you use some cards to position yourself on issues, some to campaign, some as events, save some for debates or election day, and use some to advertise. Any of the elements of the game that you ignore can significantly be used against you. As an example, if you don't position yourself on issues, then I will gain extra momentum (letting me trigger events on your cards) and gain endorsements (allowing me to win in states which neither player has influence over). Another example, if you fail to campaign, I will simply defeat you by having more influence.

My final pro for the game is true for each of the games from these designers (they also designed Twilight Struggle and Founding Fathers if my information is correct) - the historical depth of the game is amazing. I am by no means a historian, but here is something that I now know because of the game: Eisenhower was horrible for Nixon's campaign. Every time that I drew a card with Eisenhower's picture on it when I was playing as Nixon, I knew the card was going to be horribly negative for me. The pictures and the flavor text for the cards help me learn history while playing games - sweet!

The neutral thing for me to mention is the tug-of-war aspect of the game. This is neither a pro nor a con, but definitely something you should be aware of going into the game. Since the game is based on winning favor of the different states back and forth, there is definitely a tug-of-war feel. You may be going back and forth with a single state most of the game (New York), and thus you're really frustrated if you lose that state - even if you win the election!

Now for the cons. The first con is that I felt like "controlling" a state did not matter enough. You "lead" a state if you have influence in that state, but you "control" the state if you have four or more influence in it. Controlling a state forces your opponents to perform "support checks" when trying to add influence to that state. However, with the sheer number of events that add state influence directly (with no support checks needed), there are far too many ways to break an opponent's control without having to perform this check - and so it winds up being fairly pointless to spend enough influence to actually control a state. This really frustrated me about this game, and was the single biggest factor for which I dropped it's score.  I also think that this limited the replayability of the game to an extent.

The next con to the game is more of a "missed possiblity" than a true con. The candidates in the game are too similar. I realize that this was setup to balance the game, but it would have been nice for the candidates to have more personality. Whereas in the game as it is now, it does not matter too much which candidate you play, I would have liked for it to matter much more. I would have liked Nixon and Kennedy to have different strategies, strengths and weaknesses, or something like that. There are different cards that set them apart, but most of the cards balance out, as do starting positions, and everything else in the game.

Overall, I give 1960 a 9.0/10. I debated this back and forth, and I definitely don't like it quite as much as Twilight Struggle. But, I do really like the game, and if you enjoy games where you're constantly struggling back and forth with your opponent, this is something you should try.

If 1960 sounds interesting, you might also check out Campaign Manager 2008, Glory to Rome, and Mage Wars.

Thunderstone: Dragonspire Review

Now that I've had the privilege of playing Thunderstone: Dragonspire, it is time to post my review.

So, this is the part of the review where I normally summarize the game. I'm going to assume that you have already played the base game, and if not, you should probably read my review of Thunderstone. Instead, I'll try to focus on the differences that set Dragonspire apart from the other iterations of Thunderstone that I've played. In all honesty, I skipped Thunderstone: Doomgate Legions, so I'm not 100% sure what was introduced there instead of in Dragonspire, but after doing my due diligence on Board Game Geek, I think I have a pretty good handle on what aspects were introduced in each set.

Dragonspire really doesn't introduce very much in the way of new mechanics to Thunderstone. The only two things that I saw that seemed to be new were Settings and a new cooperative way of playing the game. However, it did include everything necessary to play the game (it is a fully playable standalone game), and also expanded upon all of the features that were added in previous expansions (new Thunderstones, Treasures, Traps, Mercenaries, and Guardians). Therefore, whereas the game isn't especially innovative, it does allow a new player to jump into the fully developed Thunderstone game.

Now for the pros, cons and something in between. We'll start with the in between, which is the packaging. If you have read each of my previous Thunderstone reviews, I thought that the packaging for Thunderstone was absolutely atrocious. However, I thought the Wrath of the Elements packaging was amazing. I personally think that Dragonspire is somewhere in between those two. Instead of the sleek, spartan packaging of Wrath of the Elements, AEG went back to the ridged plastic dividers, but with the ridges meant to keep the cards from sliding instead of to separate cards.  They have also continued providing nice, labeled dividers. I'm not completely sold on this being "better" than what was in Wrath of the Elements, but it is definitely better than what was in the original game. Along with the new packaging design, they also included plastic experience tokens and a dungeon board (to help keep track of light, guardians, etc). These are (though unnecessary in my opinion) nice little additions to the game that make you feel more like you get your money's worth. Regardless of which packaging I prefer, I have converted all of my cards to be in the Dragonspire box, because it is big enough to actually hold the board and the instructions (which annoyed my about the Wrath of the Elements box because it wasn't big enough to hold the instructions from the original game).

Now that I've had the obligatory discussion about packaging, time to get more into the actual game. I'll do one quick note about Settings, and then I'll go on to the cooperative play. So far I like the Settings mechanic. What the Settings do is change the actual overall game. They add rules like "every time you defeat a monster you gain a disease" or something similar that makes one game of Thunderstone different from the next. This is a plus, in my eyes - especially since they are optional, and if certain players find them annoying they are easy enough to leave out.

The innovation that I found in Dragonspire was around the cooperative play. My wife refused to play this game competitively with me after our first game (I have lots of deckbuilding experience and she has very little, and so she found the experience quite frustrating). With a new cooperative game, I was excited that I felt like I could convince her to try again (and in fact, I was successful at this). The cooperative game works very similarly to the advancing monsters game variant that was introduced in Wrath of the Elements, where the monsters attack and cost the players points every certain number of turns. There were a few big differences, though. In the cooperative version of the game you have a shared experience pool, you can trade cards (to a limited amount) when resting, and you can turn in monsters when visiting the village to gain experience (and remove them from your deck). This mode of play worked fairly well, and I would be willing to continue playing it. I really appreciate the fact that each release I have played has added a new game play option.

Another quick pro is that in Dragonspire, the heroes have diverged from the standard setup. Whereas in the previous versions all the heroes had levels 1-3 and the same number of cards (from one hero to the next) for level 1, 2, and 3. This is no longer the case. In Dragonspire, some heroes have 4 levels, some have 2, and therefore the heroes are actually becoming more unique. This helps the game not feel like it is the same every time through.

The next thing that I have learned to really appreciate about AEG (through my interaction with their Thunderstone brand) is that they seem to both learn from their mistakes and fix them. As an example that was stated previously, the original Thunderstone storage was horrendous. AEG realized this and setup the Wrath of the Elements box to use labeled dividers between the card sets. The problem was, these were not included in the original set. AEG, fixing their mistakes, provided labels in Wrath of the Elements for both the original game and the Wrath expansion. They have done this again in Dragonspire. They determined that it would be very convenient for the randomizer cards to have different colored backs. Therefore, they provided new randomizers for each of the previous sets. I really wish that all companies tried to fix their mistakes like AEG has done with the Thunderstone brand.

Now that I have talked about the pros, here are a few cons. First off, I noticed more than ever that you need to be careful when picking the heroes and village cards that you play with. If you randomly select them, you will often get cards that do not mix well together and so you will have several cards that are essentially unusable in your setup of available cards. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to fix - look at the cards selected and make sure they work together; ie, do not have a wizard that works well with spells and then no useful spells available (this happened to us).

Something that I have mentioned as a con previously in the Thunderstone set, but that I noticed again (and so I will mention) is that the game seems to be setup where nobody attacks the dungeon for quite a long time. It seems to be all buildup for the first half of the game, and then attacking for the second half, but not intermixed. Because of this, I will continue recommending that you play with the advancing monsters variant that was introduced in Wrath of the Elements.

There are several other pros and cons to the game, but these are the same as what can be found in the previous versions of Thunderstone, so I don't really feel the need to retype them, since you can click on those reviews from my links on this site.

A few final quick notes before wrapping this up... First, I like Treasures and Mercenaries (these were introduced in Doomgate Legions, and I will write more about them if I play and review that expansion). Second, the game seems to work best with about 3-4 players, as with 2 your deck will get too watered down with monsters, and with more than 4, you will not have the opportunity to purchase many village cards.

Overall, I give Thunderstone: Dragonspire an 8.0/10. It is not nearly as innovative as the original game (and so I seriously pondered giving it a 7.5), but it introduces some useful new aspects to the game and so I keep them on par with each other. If you really enjoy the Thunderstone brand, then you should pick it up, because it will add more replayability to your sets. If you are debating whether to try out the Thunderstone system, I would recommend getting this set before the "original" base game, as it includes everything the base game had plus more.

If you want to read about more Thunderstone, I've also reviewed Thunderstone, the Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements expansion, and the Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin franchise reboot.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me a demo copy of Thunderstone: Dragonspire to review.

Bootleggers Review

Sometimes when shopping for games you wind up getting a great deal. One of the games that I had never heard of that I bought because of this reason was Bootleggers.

Do you remember prohibition? If not, then (like me) you probably weren't alive in the 1920's. Fortunately, to teach young gamers about this time, Eagle Games created a game about it. In Bootleggers, each player takes on the role of a mafia which is trying to make the most money by creating whiskey and selling it to speakeasies. (Yeah, "speakeasies". More things that you might not be familiar with if you weren't alive in the 1920's.) To play the game, there are several phases. First, each of the players picks one of their "muscle" cards. Next, in muscle card order, each of the players gets to take a special card. After this, players can "send in the boys" in order to influence speakeasies. Next, players produce whiskey based on the number of stills that they have available (each still provides a die that determines how much is generated). Finally, the players sell their whiskey to the open speakeasies and make money for it.  (How much depends on who controls the speakeasy and how much demand the speakeasy has - again determined by dice.  Bigger speakeasies have more dice.) The game continues like this until one of the players has made a certain amount of money or the players have played a certain number of rounds. At the end, whoever has the most money wins.

The first pro of Bootleggers (which has a con associated with it) is how the muscle cards work. Each of the players starts with one muscle card for each round of the game (8 in a short game, 12 in the full game). The muscle cards are separated into 4 different colors, which each represent a spread of about 15 numbers. (ie, cards 1-15 are red, 16-30 are yellow, or something like that). The different colors are shuffled separately and then dealt to the players so that they get the same number of each color. During the game the players must determine how important it is for them to go first each round, as they will wind up playing all of their muscle cards during the game - if they burn their highest cards in the first round they will get stuck going last in the later rounds. Plus, each muscle card has a dollar amount associated with it that the player must pay - the little cards are free, but the higher cards cost quite a bit (though now that I think about this, all the cards wind up being played and all of the players have roughly equal cards, so all the players will spend approximately the same amount throughout the game on cards.  Seems like this element of the muscle cards may be pointless).

The con of how the muscle cards works is that it makes the game not "fair" (or "even" if you prefer). Most of the middle cards balance out throughout the game since you play them when you just don't want to go last, so they're not really important. What is important is what each player receives on the high end. There will most likely be a round during the game in which several players desperately want to go first. In this round, they will all play their highest card, and whoever wound up getting the highest card dealt to them goes first. I'm not really a fan of how that winds up playing out, but it is somewhat minor and didn't detract from the game too much.

The next pro about Bootleggers is how well it implemented the theme. Whereas lots of games take a game mechanic and then plaster a theme onto it, I felt like the theme was integrated well here. Granted I'm not very imaginative, but I can't really envision the mechanics used in Bootleggers in a game with a different theme (unless it was incredibly abstract - yes, euro games may be able to use these mechanics).

Finally, Bootleggers was a pretty fun little lighthearted game. It plays relatively quickly, is pretty easy to teach people and I enjoyed playing the game. That is definitely a pro. However...

Bootleggers lacks replayability. I enjoyed my first few games of it, but then I found a strategy to the game that seems to be overpowered. Since you have stumbled upon my site, I will generously share with you this strategy... control a decent speakeasy and sell all of your whiskey there. It often takes quite a bit of patience to do this (and you look like you're getting destroyed during the first half of the game, which is actually useful because the player in last gets extra influence markers on certain turns).  Nevertheless, if a player focuses on collecting influence markers and then keeps all of them until they have enough to permanently take control of a speakeasy, it is almost impossible to beat them. As much as I enjoyed this game, once I realized that there was really only one strategy that worked, I essentially gave up on playing it.

Overall, Bootleggers receives a 7.0/10. I enjoyed the game, but it doesn't hold my interest for long enough to receive a better score. I think you should definitely play this game once, but I wouldn't go out of my way to buy it, because you probably won't get more than a few plays out of it. Also, you should try to get as big a game of it as possible going when you try it, because the mechanics seem to work best when it is a full game (6 players I believe).

Scotland Yard Review

An old-school classic game that I played once it was "only" 26 years old (at least the copy we used) was Scotland Yard.

In Scotland Yard (which is even more of a hide and go seek board game than Mr.Jack), one player is a criminal that is trying to elude all of the other players (the detectives). As in real life, there are different means of transportation - taxis, buses, subways (and for the criminal, ferries), and each player is limited to the number of times he can use each method. In each round the criminal will move (and show all the other players what he used to move) and then all of the other players will move in an effort to either capture him or pin him down (to catch him on a later round). Every few turns the criminal will reveal himself (and then the detectives will frantically have to go in the other direction because they realize he slipped past them). If any of the detectives wind up on the same square as the criminal within 22 rounds, they win - otherwise, the criminal has successfully eluded them and he wins.

I thought that there were some interesting aspects in Scotland Yard. The different modes of transportation and the limited supply of rides on each one made for a neat mechanic. When to use each transportation mode was critical as you could easily go right past the criminal without knowing it (or for that matter, as the criminal you could go right past the detectives).

The next part of the game that I enjoyed was that the criminal had several different ways of sneaking around the detectives. He gets a limited number of "wild" transportation tickets which can be used for a taxi, bus, subway or a ferry to prevent the detectives from knowing which way you took. In addition, he has two "2x" cards that he must use at some point which allow him to move twice (which can be critical if timed just right).

Though I thought the game mechanics were really neat and I saw why lots of people would enjoy the game... I thought the game was horribly boring. I do not remember the last time that I was so bored while playing a game. First of all, the game is about 2-3 hours long, but I remember sitting during the game and thinking to myself that it felt like doing a chore to play. I do not blame other people for enjoying it - my friend that brought Scotland Yard really likes the game (but he doesn't write the blog, so it gets written based on my opinion). I realize that this is subjective, and that I've given you no reason that I thought it was so boring, I just do. In all honesty, I think that the appeal for this game will be to engineers to calculate the different places that the detective could have gone from the last place where he emerged. Playing the game reminds me of building a circuit board - why would I do this for fun?

Overall, I give Scotland Yard a 5.0/10. The mechanics were fine, and I have no problems with them. However, in my admittedly subjective opinion, I don't think the game is fun. I could have written more on this review to keep telling you that I think it was boring, but how many ways do I need to say it?  You can disagree if you want. That's ok.