Hareeb's Hangout

New Entries (10/8 update)

Ark Nova 3.0/4

Gartenbau 2.5+/4

Everdell 2.5/4

Canvas 2.5/4

Castles of Burgundy 2.0/4

Enchanting Plumes 1.5/4

Deus 1.5/4

Khora 1.0/4

Raccoon Tycoon 0.5/4

Planet 0/4

Palace of Mad King Ludwig 0/4

Run Fight or Die Reloaded 0/4

Gartenbau (4 plays, 2.5+/4) I actually didn’t like this game very much the first time I played it- we were using the advanced tiles and it was a bit too much- but after a couple of plays with the basic tiles and a return to the advanced tiles, this game is actually a pretty good tableau puzzle and it plays pretty crisply.  Every turn is a decision of what to value more, planning is rewarded at multiple levels, etc. The seedling runout is random, but between being able to pay to skip spaces and being able to take a turn off of resource gathering to buy/build something, it doesn’t feel like there are too many useless turns, and there’s huge agency anyway in minimizing the number of potential turds. The one thing I’m not sure about is how much balance there is among various flower combinations. Some don’t work at all together (e.g. holes+rectangle), and some work quite well (e.g same-type surrounding+contiguous area), but given that you aren’t likely to build all of your flowers anyway in advanced mode, it may be that you usually have at least one reasonable subset to go after. If train-wreck draws aren’t very common, then I’d probably bump this up to 3.0 or 3.5.  It feels sneaky good.  Having the small seedling/plant icons being so damn small is annoying though, and the two purples are too close together for something that tiny.  That just adds mental overhead for no good reason.

Everdell (3 plays, 2.5+/4) Castles of Burgundy to a lesser extreme.  The game is pretty fun, but it has issues- free cards showing up or not can be game-changing, balance doesn’t seem particularly great, you can get train-wrecked if you can’t find production early, but it’s still mostly fun.  Except for trying to read the fucking cards.  It’s simply impossible.  I can read the fine print on a sweetener packet at arm’s length with no problem.  I can’t come close to reading the partner card print in the meadow without picking the cards up.  Also, the costs are printed on a picture background (instead of a static background like Magic or Pokemon or Ark Nova) that makes reading them extremely difficult, and open-closed spaces iconography, holy shit.  I don’t even have words.  There used to be contests to make the worst possible UI.  This is on par with the winners.  We house-ruled out open spaces in tableaus because nobody can see them (and it’s just a stupid and unnecessary idea anyway).  The tree is so extra that it made me use “extra” for the first time, and on top of that it’s actively detrimental to gameplay (having the mission cards elevated makes them harder to read and having jumbled game pieces instead of a defined/segmented area on the board makes it harder to verify seasons).  It’s still good.  It’s just annoying that it wouldn’t have taken much at all to use better game pieces for a significantly better/less frustrating experience, and it shouldn’t have been hard at all to get that information/feedback (or to just start off imitating similar elements in card games that have done it well for decades).

Canvas (4 plays, 2.5/4) The basic idea here is simple and brilliant. There are good puzzles to solve in trying to put various pieces together to meet objectives. The scoring is good. People seem to enjoy the pictures and names (I don’t personally care much, but it’s not a negative). This would be like a 3.5 or maybe even a 4.0 if a couple of things got fixed. The card flow is simply too slow and the low easel count means that you’re picking the first card almost all the time, the second card occasionally, and a higher card maybe once per game. If the market were such that either of the first two cards were free, the third card cost one (easel placed on the second card, etc), and the oldest remaining card in the market got discarded every turn, this would work better. The elephant in the room though is objective balance. We drew the 2 triangle mission, and I was to the left of a good gamer who’d never played before and 2 to the left of a competent gamer who had. The other two were fairly random players. I was almost sure I couldn’t win because they’d be smart enough to bogart triangles in general and any double-triangle card like it was made of gold, and that’s what happened. I had to struggle to even get one for the “at least one of each type” mission. A lot of the missions support everybody going for them at the same time. The missions that don’t, like 2 triangles, also don’t hugely impact the ability to go for the more general missions, so some seats are going to just have almost no agency where even maxing the actually available missions isn’t enough, and that’s a miserable experience. When I play again, I’ll try to make sure that any mission that can’t be chased by everybody simultaneously “somehow” doesn’t make it onto the board.  Fix those things for Canvas 2.0 and you’d have a real.. masterpiece.   

Castles of Burgundy (3 plays, 2.0/4) The game play idea is neat. I mean, it has to be really good to get this rating given the other problems. The iconography is simply the worst I’ve ever seen. The buildings all look roughly the same and none of the differences have anything (that I can tell) to do with what they actually do. I’ve spent hours with the game and I’m still staring at them like “this wide one with one column over here, scan the player guide, ok it’s this one, that does that”. And the yellow tiles are even worse- basically 1/3 of the yellow tiles are functional on reading, 1/3 are incomprehensible without a rulebook, and 1/3 are useless without binoculars because they contain even smaller versions of the already indistinguishable buildings. If you have a PhD in Comparative Hieroglyphics and can effectively learn a full new alphabet on the fly, knock yourself out, but otherwise this game is going to be annoying as shit for a long time.

Deus (1 play 1.5/4) It’s an interesting system with a major randomness problem. You may not need a given action on a given turn, but if you go too long without the ability to do something, it’s crushing, and the most reliable mechanism to find a card costs an entire turn and itself requires a specific card type. There’s a full action/baby action system, but you can’t even take the baby action of the type you want without a card of the right type, and with a 5-card-hand/ 5-different-action framework, you’re missing what you need a fair bit. One of the good gamers and I were talking afterwards and decided that you should be able to play the wrong type of cards as blank buildings, and.. that turned out to be an optional once-per-game variant in the rulebook. I’m not sure that’s enough, but maybe it is. I’d much rather be fighting the other players than the game though. Baby actions at strength N-1 if you don’t have the right color maybe?

Khora (1 play, 1.0/4) Not bad, but it seemed pretty on-rails. You have an action you clearly want to do every turn. You draft as well as you can to maximize that and hope that nobody else is competing for your civilization type (e.g if you have two economy and 1 military player, the military player has free access and should have a big edge). Heaven help you if the randomness disagrees. The iconography here is also terrible. An owl is used for both money and tax. Only some tokens count for VP and they look the same as other tokens that don’t, that are gained the same way, except the scoring ones have a fancier design. I’d shit all over that even harder if I didn’t already shit on Burgundy and Everdell in the same update.  

Enchanting Plumes (2 plays, 1.5/4 at 5 players, possibly better at fewer).  It was actually more fun than that in the two plays, and the design is really cool, but the direction it was going was pretty clear and that game won’t be as much fun by play 5-10.  Maybe it’s a significantly different game at 2 or 3 where each player has more control over the speed of deck churn, but at 5, it was pretty clear that the meta is YOLO play 2 with maybe one turn playing 1, mostly drawing 2, legal plays > card quality, and first-player advantage is huge since turn order is pretty likely to split who completes their peacock(s) and who doesn’t, and it takes a hell of a lot of card quality from playing slowly to make up for a big bonus and an extra 1-3 scoring cards.  A very good 4+2 still usually loses to a 5 or 4+3, and anything smaller or less good just has to hope nobody else finishes. I’d want to play at a lower count to see how that seems to work out, and it may well be a significantly better game there since the design concept is pretty sweet.  The suits are way too close in color/shape, but somehow this is SO bad- SOOOOOO bad that you should warn any new player and then warn them again once cards are dealt- that you don’t actually screw it up because you learn to be extra careful, and the visible card flow is low enough that you don’t have to process them fast.

Raccoon Tycoon (1 play 0.5/4) The pricing and selling part of the game is kind of cool, but everything else has the feel of something that was playtested by an extremely small group of people who aren’t very good at games. Many buildings are comically overpriced. One building type is essential (roughly +50% or more production), but only 4 are available in a 5-player game. You can house-rule that easily enough if you know to, but come ON. The endgame trigger had to be completely changed post-production. Several buildings and rules things are either unclear or clunky/counterintuitive. It’s a shame that a decent designer didn’t have this idea instead, because there probably could have been a good game here instead of just a good idea.

Run Fight or Die: Reloaded (1.5 plays, 0/4) Imagine playing a game of Yahtzee. Might be a little quaint for experienced gamers to bust it out in 2023 with with so many other options, but it’s still basically going to be fine. Now imagine playing Yahtzee with 5 players and it’s a race to 15 game wins. Yeah. “Basically fine” goes to complete torture when you overstay your welcome that much. There’s a little bit of a game here- probably less strategic depth than Yahtzee- but there’s nothing to do during downtime and the game drags on For Fucking Ever. If there were some way to speed it up, by, like, a lot (say the mutant zombie appears faster, is meaner, and killing it once ends the game), it might be a tolerable diversion, but as is, the correct choice from the title options is clearly Die to end the game (which I wound up doing on purpose when no other end was in sight).

Planet (2 plays, 0/4) The idea of using magnetic pieces to cover a globe is cool, but the magnets are too weak, and so is the game. It’s virtually impossible to tell what anybody else is doing, so you can chase things you were drawing dead at, goals are often literally 100% completely contradictory, and the randomly appearing objectives are almost half the points and hugely luck-dependent. Use dry-erase markers to color a balloon and save yourself the trouble of this mess.

The Palace of Mad King Ludwig (1 play, 0/4) If you took 4 cutthroat gamers and decided to commit to mastering this game, it would probably be ok eventually (although that’s a questionable life choice with so many fundamentally better games available). Played with random actions of having your stuff connected to/completed/hosed on a whim or through outright incompetence is just a brutal experience. Setup takes forever, the tiles are way too small for as many icons as they have, the scoring is beyond fiddly and requires tracking tons of counts of other player’s stuff, the gameplay isn’t that engaging to begin with, and it takes way too long. It sucks overall, but it’s not quite the no-redeeming-qualities utter dogshit tier most of the other 0.0s are even though you’d have to pay me a lot to ever play it again.

Ark Nova (many plays, 3.0/4)  As much as I bitched about iconography all over this update, Ark Nova truly nailed it and did it without sacrificing cool artwork.  Put symbols and text on a ~mono-colored background with good contrast and make them a readable size.  You can do that and still have a shit game, but having readable/distinguishable game pieces and symbols is like the lowest-hanging fruit imaginable and so many games just seem to botch it hard for no apparent reason.  

The game can also be frustrating, but far more often in the “What did I just do, I’m a total fucking moron” way than the game kicking you in the nuts with randomness, and because money and appeal snowball, if your opponent doesn’t blunder back quickly, the game can be clearly and hopelessly lost early, but you still have to sit around and wait to die.  If you’re still new/terrible, you can learn things while you’re getting killed, and your opponent might somehow throw even a huge edge away, but once you’re both kind of decent, it’s pretty miserable to just be somebody’s hostage. And occasionally the game just deals out wildly imbalanced starts (hello Side Entrance) to where a medium-decent player like me can annihilate a great player pillar to post or where I can lose to a total trash can without making big mistakes and never feel like I’m in the game at any point.  Some amount of randomness in this respect is fine.  It’s just a bit too much here for a game of this length.  And then you have the Eagle/Sun Bear issue where you think you might be winning, but you’re actually just beyond dead the whole time to their hidden resources and you’re annoyed at wasting the last 30 minutes of brainpower when you never had any chance (and not from the opponent slowrolling to be a dick- the endgame trigger condition rewards “still had all these”-style gameplay in many cases)

All of that said though, the game is really fun, playing a clean game is really rewarding, and most of the time it doesn’t shit on you.  There’s tons of room for tight play, lots of different plans, lots of small-picture and big-picture puzzles to solve, and for a game with this many moving parts and so many different cards, it’s impressive that it fits together seamlessly and the egregious balance issues don’t pop up all that often.   Definitely worth investing some time into if you want a heavy game.

List of Ratings

Game Comments

I’ve been playing a weekly game session and we’ve tried out a bunch of games.  Some good, some not so much.  I’m generally a competitive, always trying to figure out how to win type of gamer, and generally prefer games with enough strategy and agency that players can realistically try to outplay each other, but there are a couple of games in here that aren’t very serious that I still enjoyed.

Rating system:

0-

Let it run until 1:12 for the full description.  Actively unpleasant to play.

1- Replacement level- about equivalent to not playing and just doing a couple of Squardles on my phone instead.  Thoroughly meh.

2- Has something going for it, but either not much depth or some flaws that keep me from rating it higher.

3- Solid depth, solid design, or a silly game that delivers exactly what you signed up for in a fun way.

4- Excellent.  Plenty of depth, plenty of agency, plenty of replayability.

There’s also an implicit bonus for length not exceeding depth.  Light games are much better if they don’t also take forever.  Heavier games can get away with taking longer.  Basically anything 2/4 or higher is a reasonable choice if you’re in the mood to play a game.  These aren’t meant to be in-depth reviews of the games or anything, just my commentary- everything has a BGG link where you can read full reviews if the games are new to you.

 

List of Ratings

Azul 4/4

Cat in the Box 3.0+/4

Jaipur 3.0/4

Hues and Cues 3.0/4

Splendor 2.5/4

Black Fleet 2.5/4

Parks 2.0+/4

Bunny Kingdom 2.0/4

Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza 2.0/4

San Juan 1.5/4

Crystallo 1.5/4

Sagrada 1.0/4

Overboss 1.0/4

Endangered 1.0/4

Black Hole Rainbows 0.0/4

Here to Slay 0.0/4

Reviews

 

Here to Slay (1 play, 0/4).  Crab bucket effect, the game.  One person tries to do something.  Everybody else categorically always wants that to fail*, so they gang up to make sure it fails.  Repeat ad infinitum.  Except failing is quite punishing, so people mostly stop even trying to really accomplish things.  On top of that, there are lots of heroes in play at any given time, they all roll dice, and some of them read like Questing Beast, so nobody really knows what’s going on and it takes forever.  And the timing rules are effectively nonexistent (if you actually passed priority properly, it would take even more beyond forever) Nobody wanted to piss off the first-timer who brought the game by just saying “f this, we quit”, *but this game was so miserable to play that a table of mostly competitive gamers all defected to helping each other just to “legally” get the game over with.  This fully earned the Beavis and Butt-head treatment.

 

Overboss (1 play, 1/4).  I have the suspicion that this is closer to a 0.5, but it’s also possible that it’s not quite as bad as I think it is.  The problem in my one playthrough is that some synergy strategies are highly rewarded when they hit, there’s not a whole lot of time to pivot, and hate-drafting has the usual multiplayer problem of significantly advantaging the players who aren’t involved, so what’s the counterplay? There’s also very limited foresight as to what could come out.  Going for a build-around can either be an easy win or a complete disaster and there seems to be very little agency involved or non-suicidal intervention possible. Plus the gameplay didn’t really catch me- too many moving parts for not enough payoff. I’ll play this one more time just in case, but I don’t think it’s very good.

 

Crystallo (3 plays, 1.5/4)  A basic strategy that seems highly favored to win seems pretty obvious.  Winning while completing 4+ treasures (without memorizing the deck) seems hugely dependent on them coming out earlier than average or luckboxing hard later, so what do you do with the game after a couple of plays?  I guess there’s trying to level up to god-tier mode where you know what all the treasures are and just play to create landing spots for them on your board (instead of prioritizing clearing gems) so as many as possible double-complete if they show up, but that’s more effort than I want to put into this game.  Play somebody else’s copy when you’re waiting for something else to open.  It’s fine for a couple of plays.  It can also be played with more than one player, supposedly, but this seems like a terrible idea.  If both players are about equal, it’s like playing only half the game in the same amount of time.  If one player is better, watching the worse player make terrible moves would be exasperating.

 

Bunny Kingdom (1 play, 2/4).  I absolutely ROFLstomped (240 points or something, more than double second place) the one game, so that probably added some fun to my experience.  I don’t know if the other people simply had hopeless games or if they drafted/built badly and got about what they deserved.  I mean I know I got somewhat lucky, but I could have been significantly less lucky and still won easily.  It’s not bad and doesn’t take that long, but it also seems like Garfield never realized that he was thisclose to a different, better game.  The game can almost be played effectively asynchronously (think store draft vs. timed PT draft), which is a huge plus, but the Camp mechanic, which sucks balls in its own right, also screws this up as well.  Camp should have been the choice of a tunnel to an orthogonally adjacent square, giving you access to its resource types, or a bridge to give connectivity to two diagonally adjacent squares you already control.  Then you’d have full asynchronicity and no nonsense of getting your bunnies randomly punted.  That game would be a 2.5, maybe a 3 if it holds up better than I expect on replays, but alas.  This could be worse than 2.0/4 if drafts really are beyond all hope with much regularity, but it would take more plays to know that.

 

Splendor (5 plays, 2.5/4) Splendor is a great game if nobody knows what’s up.  I’m intentionally not spoiling what “what’s up” means, but you can find it easily enough if you want to find it.  It’s a guaranteed savage beating if only one player knows what’s up.  I have yet to play a game where more than 2/4 know what’s up, so it’s still basically 100% that one of those two will win and completely stomp the two who don’t.  I’m curious what the game plays like if 3/4 or 4/4 people know what’s up.  That could bump the rating half a point in either direction.

 

Azul: (many plays, 4/4).  Easy 4/4.  Play it, then play it some more.  If your group is competitive/strategic at all, it’s a winner.  2-player is good as well.  Just an all-time great game.

 

Jaipur (10 plays, 3/4).  The game is both simple and really complicated.  There are times I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, but also times I can tell my opponents are doing things they shouldn’t have done even when they aren’t transparently boneheaded.  The strategy hasn’t fully clicked to where I feel I have a base level of competence, but I want to keep playing and getting better at it.  That’s a pretty good sign, right?

 

Endangered (1 play, 1/4).  I don’t want to play a co-op janitor game (i.e. go around cleaning up the messes that appear) more than once in a blue moon and generally consider the genre below replacement.  Not a full 0.0 for the competent entries, just been there, done that, not particularly fun.  Endangered actually has a couple of things going for it.  The dice allocation is interesting and the tiger movement/deforestation adds more agency than usual to the messes that appear.  There’s also a full out random mess deck, because of course there has to be.  I might have given this a 1.5, but it’s like they spent all the good idea points on the front half of the game and whiffed pretty hard on the back end.  For a game called Endangered, you’d think you win by.. saving animals, but no.  You win by convincing various UN ambassadors to vote for you.  And they wanted to make a bunch of different ambassadors who have different subgoals, but they didn’t have enough ideas and started going for truly random stuff.  Some of the ambassadors are influenced by doing well on the board (number of tigers, number of undeforested squares, etc) which is fine, but then there are meta ones that care about crap like cards in hand or just randomly rolling dice.  if you love the genre, play it because this seems like an above-average entry, but if you’re not a huge fan, this isn’t going to change your mind.

 

Hues and Cues (4 plays, 3/4).  This game is extremely silly.  You keep score, but nobody really cares who wins.  People can hop in and out of rounds and it doesn’t matter.  This is the kind of game I shouldn’t even like, and definitely don’t have any great skill at, but somehow it’s just fun and everybody who plays it seems to have a good time.  There’s even a little opportunity for guessing strategy if you’re looking for it, and I really want to bust out the obvious late/last-round dick move at some point just to see the reactions.  For what it’s trying to do, it’s basically perfect IMO.  Unless you have color blind people.

 

Cat in the Box (1 play, 3+/4)  This game could easily wind up a 3.5 or 4 after a couple more plays. I’d be surprised if I drop it below 3 and shocked if I drop it below 2.5.  I’d love to know how many psychedelics were consumed before coming up with “Selective trick-taking game where you try to hit your bid exactly to score your biggest orthogonally connected rank/suit area using a deck without suits”, but it seems to work really well.  Not sure how it plays with 2 people, but with 4, it was great, and I think 3-5 would play well too.  I can’t wait to play it again.

 

Black Fleet (1 play, 2.5/4).  It was.. fine?  The gameplay idea is neat, none of the random cards/abilities seemed absurdly overpowered (although some may be and we just didn’t run into the offending ones).  I can’t recommend it as a must-have or anything, but it’s plenty entertaining and fairly short if somebody has a copy and wants to play.

 

Sagrada (2 plays, 1.0/4)  The gameplay idea is kind of interesting, but the private objectives were wildly unbalanced both times and add a huge layer of luck on top of a game already full of dice.   At least it doesn’t take that long.  Plus if you’re playing a game in this space, why not just play Azul which is so much better in every way?

 

Black Hole Rainbows (1 play, 0/4).  I guess there’s a target audience for these kinds of super-random screw-you free-for-alls, since I’ve seen a few of them around, but it’s so not me.  They’re truly miserable, like New Reddit on desktop or using a porcupine as a loofah.  The gameplay is garbage like Here to Slay, just not quite as bad, the cards aren’t as wordy, and the game is designed in a way that it (mercifully) inevitably trundles to completion before the heat death of the universe, but it’s still REALLY bad.  And you have little idea from the box or the components (both quite nice) or the gameplay description that you’re getting this kind of absolute turd

 

Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza (1 play, 2/4).  You get exactly what you sign up for, and it’s over pretty fast.  The game would be completely unbearable with somebody who would argue or have an attitude about taking an L though, so be careful (thankfully, we didn’t have one).

 

San Juan (1 play, 1.5/4).  I was actually really enjoying this game.  It seemed to have interesting decisions, benefits for accurately predicting other players, etc., and it looked like I was clearly outplaying 2 of the players with the role timing and was a bit ahead of the third.  And then people built their 6s at the very end and invalidated the rest of the game.  I never saw a 6-card the entire game and didn’t even know that stuff existed until the end.  I still tied for 2nd, but it seems extremely difficult to win without a 6 unless you completely outclass the other players, and if you don’t see a 6 early and they do, you either go all-in on a strategy and lose if you don’t find its 6 or stay open and hope you can recover from a few aimless turns because you don’t know what to chase yet.  It’s hard to speak with much confidence after one play, and maybe the councillor role is generally good enough to dig for a 6 early most games (if you know you need to do it), but man.  I was thinking this was like a 3.0/4 that played, very loosely speaking, with the interactivity of a 4-player version of Jaipur, and then the experience went to complete shit.  I might decide it’s a 2/4 after a replay where I know what’s going on the whole time, but the randomness and strategic limitation of 6-drop reliance just kills any shot at being better than that, which is a shame.

 

Parks (1 play, 2+/4).  I liked Parks.  It’s like a cross between Splendor and Tokaido.  I’m not sure if it’s 3.0 good or if it’s not interesting/varied enough on further plays to merit more than a 2.0.  I definitely want to give it another play though.