Love Letter Review

So, after Essen last year, it seemed like everyone was talking about the little game Love Letter. And, since I often succumb to peer pressure when it comes to trying the new, "hot" game, I decided to give it a whirl.

In Love Letter, you start with a card in your hand.  On each turn, you draw a card, discard a card, and you obey the text of the discarded card.  Once the deck (of 16 cards minus a random one that you toss out each round) is exhausted, then the person with the highest card wins.  You can also win a round by eliminating all of the other players.  You play until a person wins a certain number of rounds, or you decide that you've played it enough.  That's it.  No more rules; the rest of the game is simply what the different cards do.  

So, with all of that, Love Letter's greatest strength is this - it knows what it is, and it does that very well.  Love Letter is a "micro game."  It has barely any components, can be played in very little time, takes about a minute to teach, and basically has no setup.  Yet, even with all of the factors that I just named, it is still an enjoyable experience (and many would argue that this is an "experience" more than a game).  The game has a lot of luck, people might be eliminated before they even take a turn in any given round, and has a fairly low amount of strategy.  Yet, we get back to this - it is fun to play.

It comes in fancy packaging, too

The second pro that I have for Love Letter expands on the "fun to play" element that I just mentioned.  There are various things that will occur during the game that are incredibly amusing - or at least were amusing in the games that we played.  One of the cards (the Guard) allows you to name a role and pick a player - if they have that role in their hand, then they are eliminated.  If you play a Guard as the first action of the game, you're blindly guessing at what another player has (though some roles are slightly less statistically likely than others).  When this blind guess pays off, most people at the table generally get a chuckle out of it - even the player eliminated (since he knows that each round only takes a minute or two).  Another thing that can occur is when one player plays a "Baron."  The Baron allows two players to compare cards, and the player with the lower card is eliminated.  What will inevitably happen at some point is that someone will play the Baron, and the highest two cards will be compared.  This allows all of the other players to see who has the top card (the Princess).  The Princess' special text is that she is eliminated if her card is discarded.  So, suddenly this Baron has eliminated the second highest card in the game, and has also made it glaringly obvious how to eliminate another player.  These were some of the situations that my group found amusing in the games that I played - I'm sure that your group will find others.  The important thing is to worry more about enjoying the game than winning the game, since there are a lot of ways outside of your control to lose the game - but you can still have fun in the midst of those situations.

I could continue rehashing very similar sentiments about what is good about the game, but I think that you are beginning to understand the crux of the pros.  The first con is this - some people will hate this game.  I mentioned earlier that some will view this more as an experience than a game.  Those people (or any other people that really only enjoy strategic games) may hate this.  There are too many ways to lose the game and so you don't have a feeling of controlling your own destiny.  In theory, when you play a strategic game, the player with the best strategy will win more consistently than players with lesser strategies.  I doubt that is the case with Love Letter.

You'll probably want sleeves - and check out that rule book!

My other con for Love Letter is incredibly nitpicky.  Here it is: the rules are 24 pages long!  24!!  Granted, the pages are small (the height of a card), and the font is large (about 14 point), but still - 24 pages!  Did you read the paragraph at the top where I taught you all of the rules?  Yeah; that's all of them.  The rules include a backstory, a full FAQ of the different cards, and the rules for different numbers of players... but I still find it ridiculous that there are more pages of rules than there are cards in the deck (there are 16).

Overall, I give Love Letter an 8.5/10.  I enjoy the game and will probably continue playing it as a filler in between other games - after all, when I can play a couple of rounds of Love Letter in the time that it takes my friends to clean up after their game, then I think we have found a great "filler" game.

If you're looking for light, quick games, then you might also check out For Sale, Monopoly Deal, and Tsuro.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me with a review copy of Love Letter.

Omen: A Reign of War Review

So, after letting it sit in my closet much longer than intended, I finally got in some plays for Omen: A Reign of War. (BoardGameGeek link - it's apparently not on Amazon.)

In Omen, the players are in the midst of a mythological war that seems to be set in ancient Greece.  They are struggling to accomplish feats and overtake a few war-torn cities by using Soldiers, Oracles, and Beasts (such as Satyrs, a Phoenix, and Minotaurs).  Each turn consists of a few different steps - first is the wealth step in which you are allowed to take a combination of three cards or coins.  If you use all three of these choices to take the same thing (three cards or three coins), then you get a bonus item of the type you selected.  Next, you play hoards of cards from your hand into the three different cities.  When playing soldiers, they have effects that occur immediately, with beasts you either get to use their ability or play them for strength, and with oracles, they have abilities that occur every round.  After you are satisfied with what you have played (generally because you ran out of coins), then all of your oracle abilities occur.  Next, you check to see if you have accomplished any of the six feats (such as having a soldier in each city).  Finally, it's time for action.  You check to see if any of the cities are "war torn."  A city is war torn if your opponent has three units in it, or there are a total of five units (or more) in the city.  If this occurs, both players compare strength in the city, and whoever has the highest strength is the winner  - thus getting to claim the top card from the city (each city has four cards).  Whoever wins must remove all but one of his units, and the loser can keep two of his.  (Note: during all parts of the game, including this one, beasts count as two units, and so the winner cannot keep a beast.)  The last step of the turn is an optional offering - the active player has the option to discard a card from his hand in order to gain extra cards or coins (not a combination) equal to the card's offering value.  Play alternates in this fashion until one player has accomplished five of his six feats, or until two of the cities have been scored four times.  At that point, whoever has the most points (from scoring cities and feats) is the winner.

A war torn city

Honestly, I have a lot of feelings about Omen; this review might be a bit tricky as I attempt to translate those feelings (that have been swirling in my head for a few days) into more eloquent thoughts about the game.  Either way, let's start like normal - with the pros.  The first pro for Omen is that I like the war torn rules.  Specifically, I like that they're setup to allow your opponent to respond, yet allow you to intentionally overload a city enough that it forces it to score immediately.  This is especially true early in the game, before either player has many troops on the table.  During those turns, in order to force a city to score, you may have to place five units in the city by yourself (which happens to also be a feat, so it's not necessarily a bad thing to do).  Later in the game, though, there are more turns when you will end your turn with three units in a city; either because that's all that you can afford, or because you don't think that your opponent will be able to take the city from you before the end of his turn.

The next pro that I have for Omen: A Reign of War is that I like the different unit types. I like that each type has a different way of being used in the game, and that each of these different types can be incredibly effective if used correctly - oracles can give you long running bonuses, soldiers can give you a one-two punch of gaining strength and an effect, and beasts can powerfully swing a battle for a city (or do some other ridiculous ability).  This diversity of types is a nice touch, and it is also nice that there are different Feats that can reward you for each of the different types.  (There is a feat for having one soldier in each city, another for having one beast in each city, and a third for having one oracle in each city.)  Granted, the downside of the feats focusing on having several units of the same type is that this adds a luck of the draw element to being able to accomplish some of the feats - which can be frustrating, since feats are one of your only two ways of scoring points.

The final pro that I will mention about Omen are the amazing combos that are possible.  It is really interesting to watch how some of the different cards combine together to make for incredibly powerful turns.  You may be able to play a soldier that allows you to draw two cards and force your opponent to discard two cards, then you can play another soldier that allows you to move the first soldier - thus triggering his effect a second time.  (And, by doing so, accomplishing a feat of forcing your opponent to discard three or more cards in a turn.)  If you add in another card that allows you to draw a card and steal money from your opponent, suddenly you've been able to cripple your opponent in both cards and money, draw five cards (yet another of the six feats), and get a lot of strength on the battlefield - all with three cards!  (Plus, you've refilled your hand, which helps set you up for the next turn.)  Again - watching some of these combos can be a lot of fun.

Beasts can have amazing abilities

And that leads us into the cons.  I mentioned "watching" some of these combos.  That is because Omen can be an incredibly streaky game.  Even in the combo that I just mentioned, it not only does powerful things to help you, it also severely cripples your opponent.  Because of that, there will be times when one player feels somewhat helpless.  You won't be able to do anything, your turns will be useless, and you're just waiting for your opponent to score and remove troops.  This can grow even worse if your opponent has a lot of oracles in play, as they have effects that occur every round!  So, if you are struggling to get anything out on the table, and your opponent has oracles that are forcing you to discard a card, and giving them a coin and a card every turn, it is very hard to feel relevant in the game.  You will wind up spending several turns in a row doing nothing but wealth actions and offerings, hoping to get something together.  However, once you finally do get some more meaningful turns, you might suddenly be able to turn the tables and have some insane combinations of your own - and hopefully your opponent won't be outscoring you so badly by that point that your turns are irrelevant.

My next con for Omen is also about combos.  Too often, executing powerful combos feels like a result of luck more than a result of planning.  Why?  Because the best combos generally come from getting to draw cards mid turn.  Let's take the scenario that I gave in my final pro.  On most turns, you will start with only a few cards.  So, first, you play the soldier that allows you to draw two cards and force your opponent to discard two cards.  This card is strong, all on its own.  Now, say that you draw the soldier that allows you to move another soldier - boom, you're able to trigger your original soldier again.  And thus you draw two more cards.  What do you get next?  A card that allows you to get more coins (or steal them from your opponent)?  Now, you can play that, which then gives you enough resources to play yet another card.  But what part of that was planned at the beginning of the turn?  Playing the original soldier.  More often than not, I felt like the combos, though powerful, were very reactionary.  I'm not going to say that everyone agrees with this opinion - but it was definitely a sentiment that I had after playing.

The last con that I will mention has to do with countering your opponent.  In this game, every strategy seems to have cards that help you counter them.  This is a good trait.  So, you might be wondering, why is it listed in the section for cons?  Because whether you actually get the cards you need for countering them will all be based on the luck of the draw.  Take oracles as an example.  Oracles help you in some small way every turn - they give bonuses like drawing a card, gaining a coin, or stealing a coin from your opponent.  Fortunately, there are several different soldiers that can discard oracles.  But, if you don't ever successfully draw these cards (or you are forced to discard them before you can play them), then you won't ever be able to get rid of their oracles, because they won't be forced to discard them by anything that they do, including scoring a city.  So, you may draw the exact same cards two games in a row, but if you draw them when you need them one game and draw them when they aren't relevant the next, then you will have drastically different amounts of success.

Omen is very text heavy

The final thing that I will mention is something that you should be aware of, but not necessarily a "con".  This game is very text heavy.  I mentioned this same fact about Smash Up (though, because of additional factors, I believe I called it a con in that review).  However, I would say that Omen is even more text intensive than Smash Up.  Every card has a significant amount of text.  There are also a lot of cards, and not terribly many copies of each.  This means that you will be seeing new cards throughout most of the game.  Ok, that's not so bad.  Now, you have to factor in that several cards allow you to "search through the discard pile" or "search through the draw pile."  Uh oh.  Whereas in other games that do this you are either familiar with your cards (because it is a game where you build your deck before (or while) playing), or the number of cards is somewhat small (each person has a 50-60 card deck for example).  Not so in Omen - if you are searching through the entire draw stack, then you might have around 200 cards to look through, each with a large block of text on it.  And, if this is your first time to play, you have no idea what most of them do - which leaves you the options of either pausing the entire game for about half an hour while you read through all of them, or making a selection that isn't ideal, simply to keep the game going.  This is the balance of having a text intensive game - so it is definitely something that you should be aware of when considering if this is a game for you.

Overall, I give Omen: A Reign of War a 7.0/10.  I really thought that I was going to love this game.  In fact, when I traded for it, I was incredibly excited about getting to try it out.  But, for whatever reason, it fell somewhat flat for me.  Hopefully I've been able to solidify my thoughts well enough to help you understand if this one would be a good choice for you, or if you think it's one that you should pass on.

If you like games like Omen, you should also check out Summoner Wars, Glory to Rome, and Eminent Domain.

Anachronism Review

Are you looking for an awful game that you can buy to get free shipping?  Well, then lucky for you, I'm going to talk to you about Anachronism!  (To be fair, I bought this game at full price when it came out originally, and then I bought it again a few months ago because it was $1 and I needed another couple bucks in order to get free shipping.)

In Anachronism, each of the players takes on the role of one of history's most famous warriors - someone like William Wallace, Ramses II, or Spartacus.  Each warrior also comes with various forms of equipment, which can be mixed and matched between sets.  To start the game, however, you take four "support cards" (equipment and special stuff), and you lay them out in front of you.  To start each round, both players will flip over their next support card.  The initiative of these cards will determine who goes first (and the card will also give you a bonus of some sort).  Each player gets to perform a number of actions based on their character (Joan of Arc and William Wallace as two examples, both get three actions).  These actions can be to move, attack, or use an ability.  Moving is fairly straightforward, and abilities are explained on their corresponding cards.  However, in order to attack, your character has various attack zones that they can target (and weapons may have different zones in order to expand your range).  To attack your opponent, you position yourself so that your opponent ("target") is in one of your corresponding zones, and then you roll the dice and apply the modifier for that zone.  Your opponent also rolls the dice - and if you rolled higher (after applying the modifier) than your opponent, then you hit them for damage as indicated on your character or weapon (generally one).  Play continues like this until one character dies or until you have played five rounds (the last round doesn't get a support card).  At the end of the last round, whoever has the most health remaining is the winner!

Joan of Arc and William Wallace positioned to strike!

The pros for Anachronism are simple - the concepts are amazing.  I really like the idea of historical warriors fighting it out in an arena.  That idea is so appealing that I've bought this game twice for it!  Also, the attack zones are a pretty cool concept, and really makes quite a bit of sense - depending on who you are and what kinds of weapons you are using, it makes sense that you would be able to attack in different areas around you with different amounts of success.  And, in fact, the execution of the attack zones in the game is decent - it encourages you to move around in order to get your opponent in one of your zones.  However, since the ultimate outcome of the attack is determined by a die roll, a slight modifier really isn't worth spending an extra action to get your character in their ideal position.  And thus, the modifiers become fairly unimportant strategically.

Now that I've covered my pro for Anachronism, let's expand upon the con that I started hinting at.  The attack zones, though neat conceptually, don't actually affect your decisions as much as they should.  Each attack is determined by both players rolling dice and the attacking player applying a modifier.  Joan of Arc has three basic attack zones - two of them provide a +0 modifier, and the other one provides a -1.  However, in order to move her from being able to attack with the -1 to attacking with the +0, you must spend one of her three actions for the round.  Instead of moving, you could simply attack an extra time.  And, though your odds aren't quite as good with any of these attacks, making more attacks significantly increases your odds of hitting your opponent with at least one attack, while giving you the chance of hitting them with an extra attack.  So, there's no incentive to position your character.  This could be slightly changed if you thought that you might be able to move your character to a position where your opponent wouldn't be able to easily counterstrike you - but your opponent will probably get as many actions as you do, and so they will simply be able to make similar movements and attack you - with the ultimate affect being that you have less overall attacks.  And so, you don't hit each other as often.

A full set of Support cards

Speaking of not attacking terribly often, Anachronism's next con is that it is too short.  You only play five rounds.  And, each character generally has seven or more hit points, and deals only one damage (though, to be fair, you may be able to attack several times in a round, and if you roll doubles, the attack deals double damage).  And, chances are that you aren't going to hit your opponent on all of your attacks.  So, this game winds up being much more of a fight to the somewhat injured instead of a fight to the death.  Which really ruins much of the theme of the game, as I can't see Genghis Khan fighting an opponent and then going, "oh wait, sorry, I need to leave - I have a professional wrestling match here in a few minutes."

With all of those cons, though, I think that my ultimate con might be that the game just simply isn't very strategic.  There are some strategic choices in the game - how do you want to lay out your support cards, how would you like to position your character, but the ultimate decision maker is the dice.  Whoever rolls the dice better will win the game.  The board isn't large enough to strategically position especially well.  You simply can't get out of range, especially if your opponent's character is in the middle of the board.  So, you will be fighting every turn.  Roll well and you will win.  I don't really know how to express this any better than to share this - the lack of strategic choices made the game so dull that, even with as short as the game is, we were still bored with it before the game ended.

Overall, I give Anachronism a 5.0/10.  The concepts of the game are really intriguing, and I wish that another designer would pick up this theme and run with it.  It could be amazing!  But, unfortunately, the History Channel may not have been the best publisher for this kind of game.

If you want to read about a better skirmish game, you might check out Summoner Wars, BattleCON, or Dungeon Command.

Public Libraries Featured Charity

I would like to thank Donald Dennis for sharing this article. Donald is a librarian, small press game publisher, and the producer of the On Board Games Podcast. In his widely varied career he’s worked two table top game companies (Iron Crown Enterprises, & Green Knight Publishing) and been a UI Designer for one AAA video game release. (Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath)

Since 2008 he’s been a special librarian for the Georgetown County Library system where he has managed the Bunnelle Youth Technology Experience Series (BYTES) where he crafted a games program which integrated games and technology to engage area youth in a proliteracy setting, encouraging scholastic achievement while building a game community at the library.


Introduction

As libraries strive to find continued relevance in a modern era where the internet has made information more accessible than any time in history librarians are focusing more on community support and service with fewer resources being dedicated to curating dead trees. While we are still years, or even decades, away from paperless libraries many branches now offer electronic or audio books, online access points, and most importantly: programming and community space for activities.

The situation in the Georgetown County Library System in South Carolina is unique; our four libraries are very disparate in social demographics as well as each having distinctive geographic circumstance. Our main branch is in the city of Georgetown, while our other branches are isolated. One library branch sits in the parking lot of the grade and high schools, a second is within walking distance of the projects, and the third is in a significantly more affluent area with very low foot traffic.

Playing games at the library!

Requirements

There is no requirement for patrons to participate in board games, or educational activities, we don’t even require them to show IDs. Conversely, to participate in video games we have specific requirements; school aged patrons must check out 4 items a month from the Georgetown Library, at least two of which must be books. For that they get 2 hours a day, on days the room is open for games, that they can come play games.

Special Programs

Besides our ground breaking video game activities and tournament initiatives, the Georgetown County Library System has offered game design activities for both video and board games, as well as community games days, and even taught game literacy classes helping patrons to discover sources they can trust for game reviews. In addition to entertainment activities we have used games to support other programs in the library.

Because our libraries are all open five or more days a week, and we have a focus on game events, we have a wide variety of game activities every month of the year. Each branch has at least one staff member who not only provides traditional library services, but also acts as a gaming and technology specialist. These employees check out games to library patrons, run game days, and even help us develop our collection.

Smart Investing @ your Library

Some of the library's games

The GCLS received a Smart Investing At Your Library grant from the American Library Association and FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulation Authority. Because of this grant the Georgetown Library System was able to offer a wide variety of financial programming, called Personal Investment Education (PIE), including game activities. At our annual book sale event where we served free pie to library patrons we had tables of games focusing on economic matters, including Settlers of Catan for Trading, Dividends, Shark, and Acquire for investing, and Masters of Commerce for auctions and real estate. We also utilized auction games like Medici and Modern Art, while games like Loose Change and Exact Change were available to play with younger children still learning how to count money.

Some of our Smart Investing activities also combined with our Summer Reading Program and our game design activities. A quick example includes the use of Northstar Games Wits & Wagers and Say Anything game lines, both of which are popular at the library. Besides playing the games patrons earned game time for helping come up with four questions for a game show we had after a week of financial activities two Wits & Wagers style questions with well written question and a researched answer (including a valid source) and two money related questions for Say Anything. Competition, both at the game show and to submit questions, was fierce.

Conclusion

I encourage you to get involved at your local library, however if you would like to support games in the Georgetown County Library System you can donate games, credit at online games vendors, or time. We always need people to come and teach new games.

I would like to echo Donald's sentiments.  Whereas his library may not be the norm for public libraries (yet!) I would encourage you to check with your library to see if they have a similar program - or if they are interested in starting one.  I know that the public library in Joplin's young adult department was interested in board games, and I was able to donate a few games to help build their collection.