Is it worth Bear Duty?

There is no genre of game with which I have quite the same love-hate relationship as traitor games. Part of this is just plain old burnout, since it’s a popular genre over the last several years and one that frequently is trotted out in large groups. The other part is that it’s a difficult genre to do well. It embraces a specific player personality, so they often struggle to be fun for someone besides the most outgoing and verbal person at the table. It’s also tricky to nail the right complexity level. Too much mechanical flourish, and the social component is stifled in a miasma of rules questions, as sometimes happened in heavily-expanded games of Battlestar Galactica. Not enough structure and they meander pointlessly, like the senseless Are You The Traitor?

Have you ever noticed how so many games put the player in the role of a tycoon? It’s one of the oldest settings, going all the way back from Monopoly to classics like Acquire and the 18xx series. It’s a simple concept: the most money wins. In modern designs, it’s more common to represent amassed wealth and power in the form of some kind of victory point, like in Imperial. So the structure changes, the settings shift, but the message is always the same: financial success translates directly to victory. Of course, most of these games aren’t really interested in making any kind of economic or societal comment. Games are usually about competition, so money is just another metric by which we can compete, like taking over the world in Risk. But what if a game actually used that trope as a way to reflect back on our society, all while still making an absorbing game experience? That’s exactly what Greed Incorporated does, and the result is impressive.

Matt and Andrew share some TV time with Gil Hova's The Networks

Haunted house type horror board games like Mansions of Madness and Betrayal at House on the Hill tend to suffer from one overriding problem which is that they’re pulled in all sorts of different directions by their requirements. How do you create a game that’s full of both mystery and well-informed decisions? How do you give it variety and replayability with limited tile stock and table space? How do you make it competitive and exciting without giving one player too much power?

The answer, obviously, is to make it into a computer game instead, and have the CPU handle all the fiddly bits for you. Enter upcoming game The Occult Chronicles, currently available to purchase as a playable beta-test. But in a twist worthy of the dark and disgusting gods that inspired the game, developer Cryptic Comet has seen fit to breed in elements of a Rogue-like as well.

In some respects the result is no more than what you might expect. After creating a character with a points-based system and choosing from a number of loose scenario templates, you’re unleashed into a large mansion populated which in turn unleashes eldritch horrors upon you. As you’d expect from a title inspired by Rogue and board games, it’s a turn based affair where you move from room to room on a geometric grid, trying to reach the bottom cellar of the house and defeat the ancient evil lurking therein.

That simple framework could have been a disaster. It could have been a re-run of the most laughable elements of ZAngband where your overpowered paladin squared up against Cthulhu, triumphed and looted gold pieces from his stinking cephalopod remains. It isn’t a disaster. It’s a game where you’ll gnaw frantically at tender fingernails as you wait to die horribly for merely trying to open a door.

A big part of what makes it work is the writing and presentation which are absolutely top-drawer. The game has a wonderfully self-aware line in dry parodies of Lovecraft and other popular horror tropes, and balances perfectly between the yawning pits of becoming ludicrous and becoming comedy. There’s a lot of text, and you’ll learn to read almost all of it, because it’s excellent.

The words are well supported with comic-strip style pictures which walk a similarly fine line between humour and horror. And the designer has crammed in not just every Lovecraft reference you can imagine, but sucked in everything from the realms of literary and televisual terror too. I spotted sly and often amusing homages to a number of popular horror memes, and I probably missed many more.

There are an astonishing number of different things to stumble over in the dark, which translates as an astonishing number of different ways to die. I’ve been killed by doors, ghostly ballerinas, zombies, rats, fire demons and talking pediments. But together with the random mansion layout and choice of scenarios, it helps ensure that no two games are the same.

Mechanically, it’s currently a mixed bag although I suspect that’s more down to bad documentation and minor usability niggles than it is to actual problems with the system. Most challenges are resolved with a trick-taking game using, slightly predictably, tarot cards. The number of cards in your hand, the number of tricks you can attempt to take and the number you need to win are determined by your stats and what you’re trying to do.

You get choices. So, if some nightmare denizen of the outer planes comes slithering in to view you might be given a choice to fight it with sorcery or flee. Mentally capable characters will get more promising numbers for the former, while dexterous ones will have an easier time with the latter. But success is never guaranteed, and as the available tricks tick down without a win the sense of tension that builds up is palpable.

The problems start right afterwards. Following a challenge you pick a number of cards to find out how good or bad the results are, depending on if you won or lost. This seems a slightly pointless extravagance, eating up play time for no real benefit.

You can earn experience tokens when you win, and spend them on improving your character, but they’re not tracked on the central screen and it’s easy to forget about the ones you’ve collected. Likewise with the item and trait cards you character can start with or acquire: you need to frequently check your personnel file on a separate screen to properly track your character.

Various other tabs and screens hold other important pieces of information like traits, heroic feats and “bones” (dice). This is where the current documentation and the game interface get confusing. It’s not always clear when and how to use these things. Many of them require dice rolls, but you have to have the right kind of dice before you can roll. It’s all as mysterious as the plot of the average horror novel.

In that respect I guess it’s not that different to a lot of Roguelike games, but it seems a little basic by modern standards. You can’t even use the arrow keys to move: instead they scroll the map and you have to click around like a lumbering elephant.

This is, remember, a beta, so there’s plenty of time to sort some of this stuff out before the final product goes live. And I hope some of it does get smoothed over, because playing this you really get a sense of how a haunted house game really ought to be done, and why none of the current crop of board game contenders have never quite lived up to the billing.

For starters, it’s a Roguelike, and that means permanent death, which is far more terrifying in and of itself than any plastic miniature of a tentacled horror from outer space. The huge variety and random room tiles means each game is a true mystery and creates believable layouts without heavy-handed preparation. Your character can gain and track the progress of quests as you creep through the house, without shuffling new cards into decks or worrying about the right item being in the right place.

Speaking of quests, they’re mere sideshows to the main event, Banishing Elder Gods Back From Whence They Came. But as if the game wasn’t mean enough already, you can’t just build up your character and plunge down. Instead there’s a timer ticking down on each and every move. Every so often these trips a story event based on your choice of scenario which adds a nice sense of metagame to the proceedings. But tick off too many and time runs out, ending your game in ignominious defeat.

The Occult Chronicles suffers from some very rough edges at the moment, but it’s an inventive and addictive take on an old genre, which has the potential to please board and video gamers alike. If you’re interested, get in there now and starting sending feedback to help the developer sandpaper down the splintery bits

The world is full of things that should not work, but somehow do: pineapple on Pizza, or mixing opera and hip-hop, or making jokes about death. Some examples are personal, others largely universal. And to that last list we can now add a game called The Quiet Year.

The Quiet Year calls itself a map-making game, but it isn’t really, even though you do make a map as you play it. A lot of people seem to refer to it as a role-playing game but it isn’t that either, since it actively discourages you from the minutiae of its character’s lives. It’s one of a small but growing group of storytelling games, where a simple structure is used to explore the player’s imaginations.

All games share the same basic setting: a year in the life of a small post-apocalyptic community. They’ve just survived one war and at some point in the next twelve months another will begin, ending the game. What happens in between is up to you, a deck of playing cards, and some pencils and paper.

The setting is left deliberately light on detail. At the beginning the players collaborate to chose a physical setting for their community and flesh it out with a few key details. Some wooden huts, for instance, built near a poisoned lake in a forest clearing, short on food. These details are drawn on paper to begin the map that will be the focus of the game. What ended modern civilisation is not explained, nor is the founding of the community or the nature of the conflicts that shape its past and future.

This lack of detail feels very strange at first. With such a minimal framework, players start out grasping for foundations on which to build their tale. Plentiful examples in the short rulebook help a bit, but the whole thing is just too overwhelmingly strange. Not to mention the social awkwardness associated with telling a collaborative tale, not wanting to speak out with a bad idea, or accidentally choosing a wrong narrative turn and annoying your peers.

To try and combat this, the game then proceeds with players taking highly structured individual turns. First they take a card, look up its meaning in the rulebook, and choose one of two options listed to resolve. For example the six of diamonds says that outsiders arrive in the area, and asks that player to decide either why they are a threat, or how they are greeted.

It’s these cards that are the heart and soul of what makes the game work. The designer is clearly some sort of terrifying psychic. Or possibly he spent a very long time refining the choices on them to make sure they were likely to mould in to the evolving nature of the story. Either way, it’s the cards that suddenly provide the missing pieces of structure that the players need to work with.

And they’ll grasp on to those structures like they’re drowning in the limitless seas of their own imaginations. Grasp the structures, haul their bodies up onto the land and start to build. What began as awkward, hesitant suggestions will become stronger, more confident, start to interweave with one another into a coherent whole.

And this is where the cards reveal their majesty. The first few times you play the manner in which the questions and choices they pose will mirror things you’ve already mentioned in your fragile narrative threads and help you explore and strengthen them defies belief. I guess there are things about a post-apocalyptic community that are more likely to come up for discussion than others: finding food avoiding predators, other survivors. But it still feels just a little bit like magic.

Once they’re decided on the effects of the card, the player then gets to choose from introducing a new thing to the map, starting a discussion about something that affects the community, or beginning a project, the progress of which is tracked by counting down a dice.

Through both card and action, the active player is totally in control: they decide how the card is interpreted and how their chosen action impacts the game. Discussion isn’t forbidden, but the clear intent is to keep it limited, leave the active player in charge and thus keep the game moving along. Other players can signal dissatisfaction or disagreement with the active player by taking something called Contempt Tokens.

The purpose of these tokens is simply to remember disagreements. They’re an interesting idea: there are curious social dynamics around accruing too many, or indeed too few of them which can start to leak into the game. They can be put back into the pool if someone feels the Contempt has been atoned for, or spent to allow a player to make a deliberately selfish decision.

But they’re the one thing in the game that doesn’t seem to work very well. Players are generally more interested in collaborating to make a compelling story to have serious disagreement or indeed to spend their Contempt to do nasty things to the community. There’s a shared goal to move things forward and that makes major disagreement rare. Or maybe I just played it with polite people.

Eventually the cards begin to dwindle and at some point, late in proceedings, the Frost Shepherds arrive and end the game. Their nature is left as obscure as everything else in the metagame, for the players to explore and decide themselves. As you do so, you’ll realise that you’ve told a tale of extraordinary richness, full of detail and wonder and drama. And you’ll wonder how those bare-bones mechanics helped your group fill in so many of the blanks you started out with.

There will still be blanks at the end. The sudden conclusion will undoubtedly leave many unresolved crises, unexplained mysteries and unexplored areas. But then again, so do most of the best stories. It’s disappointing, but strangely satisfying. And you’re left with a filled map to remember your exploits.

You can play the game with minimal household equipment. Buy a rules pdf, stick it on your smartphone and you can play it anywhere. Alternatively there’s a properly produced version with text on the cards and spiky contempt tokens in a little bag. The designer takes seriously the idea that his games should bring people together: if you want to buy The Quiet Year, or another one of his games, you can pay for it with good deeds.

I like this game a lot. I like the way it helps people pull the gossamer threads of a story they never knew existed out of thin air with minimal effort. It’s easier to pick up and play than trendy storytelling RPGs like Fiasco. But it’s not for everyone. Many of those I played it with were hardcore board gamers, most were quite suspicious of such an open ended game and some remained so after playing. But others joined the flow and watched their minds blossom into strange and wonderful shapes. Take a Quiet Year to yourself, and find out where it takes you.

 An impressionistic, sure to be divisive design from Prospero Hall.

The Spoils has to be the strangest collectible card game I've ever seen. Admittedly, I have not played them all, but I would wager there are not very many games that pit elves who only write in 733t speak against bankers who are, quite literally, fat cats. And that's before you roll in a commodities market that buys and sells natural forces like gravity, tiny illegal aliens that are actually inch-tall robots, or any of the other exceptionally odd things you'll find in The Spoils.

Finally, a game where you can be Wilford Brimley.

Since I’ve been in the hobby, I don’t think there’s been an event quite like the 2009 release of the 3rd edition of Space Hulk. There was a lot about it that we may never see again. It was before every classic from the 1980s was getting a major reprint, before Kickstarter created dozens of miniatures games that cost over $100. It was wholly unexpected and at that point arguably the biggest hobby board game release ever. And for the hobbyist sector, it had a bizarre and far-reaching response within the online community. A concerted effort by the game’s fans pushed the game into the BGG Top Ten, which evidently alerted Games Workshop to the presence of fan material on the website and resulted in a spate of C&D letters. Hundreds of users protested by adjusting their rating Space Hulk a “1,” which prompted a backlash-backlash of people who now rated the game a “10” on principle. It was staggering in its absurdity, and was exacerbated by the fact that Space Hulk vanished from store shelves in a matter of weeks, scooped up by scalpers and eager fans who hadn’t seen the game at retail in 15 years. It was assumed it would be years before another edition was produced, until just last week when Games Workshop announced an expanded version of the 3rd edition.

The phenomenal success of the X-Wing game has made it an irresistible model to follow. Grab a hot media franchise and slap a miniatures game on the top of it. The latest member of this herd is The Walking Dead: All Out War. The game art makes clear that it's based on the eponymous comics rather than the TV series. But it's all related enough to catch the eye of anyone with a passing interest in either.

I was only six years old in 1989, and my memory of that year mostly involves moving to a new kindergarten. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe was totally off of my radar. I think I only realized some change had occurred when I noticed that maps were being printed with only one Germany. I regret that I wasn’t more aware of something so monumental, because what an extraordinary year it was. Since the Cold War was so plastered on the consciousness of US history, it feels like a climax, a sense of right winning and evil being defeated.

Of course, the truth was much more complex than that. Still, the United States is only now in a position where we don’t automatically regard the Soviet Union as the de facto “bad guys” in the Cold War. That idea of fighting a battle of ideas is still deeply ingrained in American culture, and that was one reason why Twilight Struggle was so well regarded. It captured not so much the “facts” of the Cold War, but the emotions and the paranoia. In that regard, the good guys vs. bad guys angle of the revolutions of 1989 feels like a natural fit for a game in the vein of Twilight Struggle. Clearly designer Jason Matthews felt the same way, because he joined forces with Ted Torgerson to release 1989: Dawn of Freedom.

If you’ve played Twilight Struggle, then 1989 will not be difficult to grasp. There are two sides, the Democrats and the Communists. Each side takes turns playing cards to affect the allocation of influence on the board. These cards represent different events throughout that pivotal year, like the legalization of Solidarity in Poland and the dramatic flight of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. These events all favor one side or the other. You can play an opponent’s event to do other actions, but the event will happen either way, so some tricky planning is in order. Each country will eventually be the focus of a power struggle between the two sides, to determine the future of the nation. Winning a power struggle grants you victory points, which exist on a single continuum. That means there’s one long scoring track with a zero in the middle, and -20 and 20 on the ends. If the overall score is negative at the end of ten turns, the Communists win. If the overall score is positive, Democracy has won the day.

About 85% of 1989?s rules are lifted directly from Twilight Struggle. That last 15% however has a pretty huge impact on the feel of the game. The broad concepts are consistent, but the minutia makes for a markedly different feel. In fact, in many ways I feel like 1989 is a more approachable game. Some little confusing moments have been sanded away or combined. The biggest one is the support checks. These correspond roughly to the coups in Twilight Struggle, where you would roll a die to reduce enemy influence and maybe increase your own. Twilight Struggle also had realignment rolls, which served as a softer touch when you couldn’t afford to coup a country and start nuclear war. 1989 basically combines the two rolls into a support check, and it’s a savvy move. The addition of a card’s value is still added to the roll, but now you use the old realignment modifiers to alter the role one way or the other. It’s a lot cleaner and a lot easier to explain than two different but similar mechanics from the old game. Twilight Struggle also had a “Space Race” track where you could toss an event that would do too much damage. Here that is represented by “Tienanmen Square,” the demonstrations happening in China around this time. It’s not as good a thematic fit, but it’s executed in a more intuitive way, where your card is added to your die roll to advance along the track. It’s more consistent and easier to explain.

The two games differ the most in the process of scoring. In the old game, you simply played the scoring card, got your points, and continued on with the game. Here, there is a new side game that will determine victory in that country. Hands are dealt from a second set of cards according to how many spaces you control in the country. One side leads a specific suit, and the other player must match. If a player runs out of cards or cannot respond, they lose the power struggle. Players of other card-driven games will recognize this from We The People, and Hannibal: Rome Vs. Carthage. Should the Democrats win, they have an opportunity to take control of the government, depending on the outcome of a die roll. Roll high enough, and democracy wins, removing the scoring card from the game. If communism sticks around, not only does the card stay in play, but the Communist player receives bonus points for hanging on. It’s a pretty strong outcome to be given a 50-50 shot, barring any modifiers that come up. It’s this aspect of 1989 that takes the most adjustment, especially for people who come from Twilight Struggle. No longer is playing a scoring card a sure thing. There’s about three levels of randomness that have to be conquered before you get the outcome you want. You can pull at them to improve the odds, but it’s never a sure thing. There were already people who thought that Twilight Struggle was too random, so if that’s you this game will rankle you no end.

But for my own part, I actually like the power struggles. The uncertainty allows for some catastrophic failures (like the time I won by scoring Poland as the Communists in two consecutive turns, ending the game in Turn 3), but you can also squeak by with some good luck. For someone like me, who is not much good at wrestling down the logistics of making scoring cards work, it’s a more forgiving mechanic. Actually, 1989 is simply a more forgiving game. The power struggles allow for some lucky comebacks, and while you can still lose the game by getting too far behind, there’s no longer any Defcon track to worry about. That alone gives the game a little more breathing room.

So if the game is both a little more forgiving and a little cleaner than Twilight Struggle, do I like it more? Not necessarily. Twilight Struggle’s triumph was that it recreated the tensions of the entire Cold War. The struggle between two superpowers was such a natural fit for the two-player card-driven genre. That tension of trying to anticipate your opponent was ideal for the Cold War. That allowed the game to really draw at the suspicion and nervousness that we think of when we think of that 40-year conflict. 1989 still has that tension, but I don’t think it fits as well in this setting. This is partly due to the multi-faceted nature of the 1989 Revolutions. It wasn’t as simple as Democrats vs. Communists, but 1989 wants to distill it to that. Twilight Struggle did some reduction of its own, but that worked because it was a reflection of the mindset that drove the Cold War. And besides that, whenever you have a “sequel” game like this, you must ask if its worth owning both games, as similar as they are. I actually think they compliment each other well, different takes on the same subject matter and mechanics. But shelf space is limited, so it’s still a question worth asking.

In the end I don’t know if 1989 ever had a chance of escaping the shadow of its predecessor. But that’s hardly a deal-breaker. The truth is, it’s still a tense, exciting game, filled with historical flavor and given the usual excellent graphical touch from GMT. 1989 finds its own voice without ever feeling like it takes away from its older brother. It’s more than a mere imitation. It’s a fascinating take on familiar ideas in design and theme, and it’s a successful one at that.

Nate Owens is a weekly columnist for Fortress: Ameritrash. He drinks too much coffee and likes the Star Wars prequels. You can read more of his mental illness at The Rumpus Room.

Any game can have one good expansion. It’s the second good expansion that’s tricky. To my recollection, the only game that really released two amazing expansions was The Settlers of Catan. Even long-runners like Talisman and Arkham Horror just release more and more stuff, which is fine. The point is, it’s easy for the second time through to suddenly feel like overkill, as if the game has taken it one step too far.

Innovation is my favorite card game. Over the past few years it’s stayed fresh and dynamic when lesser games have gotten into a rut. And the Echoes of the Past expansion was quite possibly my favorite expansion to any game ever. Instead of “more cards,” it filled out what was already there, adding new thrills and strategies without overwhelming the game. It made the game feel complete. So with a track record like that, how could I not be excited for the next Innovation expansion, Figures in the Sand? And I’m pleased to report that it’s a good addition to the game. It doesn’t detract from what makes Innovation amazing, and it adds some cool new wrinkles. It’s just not as good as its predecessor.

First of all, each Figures card represents a historical personality who contributes to your culture. Instead of dogma effects, figures have “karma” effects. These affect your entire board, and trigger when a certain condition is met. It may make it easier to score cards, or increase your number of icons, or something else. To keep things manageable, you can only have one Figure face-up on your board at the end of an action. If you find yourself with extra, you “fade” the surplus, scoring those cards. There is a new action called “Inspire.” These are little actions that sit in your splay like Echo effects, except Inspire actions are not shared. You can activate all of the Inspire effects in one color, which can make this a powerful strategy. Finally, there are now “decrees.” By having three different Figures in your hand, you can burn your entire hand to issue a decree. These are basically super-mega effects that can shift the game strongly, like allowing you to splay or to leap ahead in the age order. Decrees also count as achievements, though other players can steal them.

I am a big fan of the karma effects. It’s cool that the new cards don’t add still more dogmas to the mix, and the karma are suitably game-changing for Innovation. I’m especially fond of the fading mechanic, since it can be used to score cards at will if utilized correctly. That fixes a big problem some people had with the game up to this point. I’m a little more torn on the Inspire action, at least in practice. When playing with the base game and both expansions, they are not on a high percentage of the cards, so it seems like they are underutilized in comparison to other effects. Of course, things like that can change quickly in Innovation. It’s possible I just haven’t seen them be a big factor yet.

But the decrees? I love those. The effects of the decrees are strong enough to jumpstart a slow game, since it allows someone to take a massive step forward. It’s a big trade-off for a big payoff, and I really love the effect it has on the game. A lot of karma even make it easier to issue a Decree. Extreme effects get into the game sooner, and the “temporary achievement” factor adds a level of tension to your achievement stack that I don’t even think we’ve utilized fully yet.

If only we saw all of these effects just a little more often. Figures cards are only drawn in certain circumstances, when you share an effect and when an opponent achieves. We haven’t seen quite as many of them in the game as from the first two sets. This is likely a function of inexperience with new cards and strategies, but my fear is that this might be a “corner case” expansion, where different rules are introduced that aren’t used very often. That would be a huge waste of these cool effects, though it might not end up being a problem.

A lot of thought has gone into how Figures will integrate into a game that has already been expanded once. It codifies what was previously an alternate drawing method for Echoes, where players aren’t forced to create 10 new stacks for every game. It’s a little less intuitive, but it works well when Figures is in the mix, and it’s way easier to set up and tear down. They also made the smart move to incorporate all of the new rules from Echoes on the new cards. There are more bonuses and echo effects, so the wonderful parts of the first expansion aren’t watered down at all. This does severely limit the game’s audience, however. I wouldn’t recommend throwing this expansion at someone who’s never played Innovation, even more than I would for Echoes. It’s true that anyone who is buying two expansions for Innovation is most likely a lifer and therefore comfortable with the added complexity, but there’s no reason to get this expansion unless you play a LOT of Innovation. It’s beginning to feel a little like Race for the Galaxy, where so many expansions have created something largely inaccessible to outsiders.

Remember how I said Echoes of the Past made Innovation feel complete? Nothing in Figures undoes that. But it does take the whole system right to the limit in terms of complexity. When I explain the game now, there’s a touch of weariness beginning to creep into the attitudes of even the most ardent supporters. There’s a third expansion planned sometime in the near future, and I wonder if it might be best to consider a “reset” so that players can scale back everything they’ll have to remember. And of course, added complexity means the game takes longer still. I don’t mind this, because it’s a more exciting and variable game than ever before, but it edges out of session-closing territory. The production also has a couple of weird spots. A new printer means that the box is a different size, and the cards are a slightly different cut. Since the different sets aren’t shuffled together at any point, it’s a non-issue. But it’s just the kind of thing that will drive some people crazy.

It was perhaps inevitable that Figures in the Sand would fall short of the standard set by Echoes of the Past. It doesn’t complete the Innovation experience, it just adds more stuff. The good news is, that stuff doesn’t spoil what’s already there, and indeed offers up new and fresh ideas. It may not be essential, but the game is still so wonderful. However, the system is just about at it’s breaking point, and the seams are beginning to show. I never play without Echoes of the Past if I can help it, and the same goes for Figures in the Sand. But the “if I can help it” is just a little harder to attain now.

The story may sound familiar to you: A rich high society member wears an black mask and cape and uses his physical prowess to best those who menace the common man. He is known for his trademark symbol, had a hidden cave where he hides his mode of transportation, and takes his name from an animal. That's right...it's Fox Man...err...the Fox a.k.a. Zorro.

 Things are slowly returning to normal at stately Barnes Manor now that Young Master Barnes, River Atticus, is here. And of course, I can't stand to miss a deadline so here's this week's Cracked LCD- a review of Cryptic Comet's new PC game SOLIUM INFERNUM. It's a pretty good game- if you're playing it with other people. The solo game sucks. Read the review to find out why. In all, I'm, not nearly as impressed with it as I was with ARMAGEDDON EMPIRES, but there are some really great _tabletop_ game ideas in there.

Gotta run...HE FEEDS.

I've never tried to candy-coat the fact that I am not a fan of games with weak themes. I don't want a theme that could be swapped out with a dog race, elephant hunting or midget dance contests. I like my games to deliver a 'yeah, I sorta did that' feel. I want to hear the screaming starfighter engines (despite the fact that you couldn't hear them in space). I want to feel the hot breath of the minotaur before I cut him down to size. I want to taste... OK, never mind, I don't actually want to taste anything, unless it's a cooking game.

For more "happy place" reviews, check out my blog, The Rumpus Room.

You know those infomercials you see on basic cable at 2 in the morning? I’m not sure what it is about the wee hours of the night, but suddenly you realize that you’ve always wanted a machine that can dehydrate all your food. To drive the need home, they will have footage of someone doing things THE OLD WAY. These old-fashioned people are suffering for not realizing that there’s a better way to dry food than what they’ve always known. Yeah! That’s right! How did we survive before the Jerky-Matic 5000 anyway? After you wake up in a puddle of your own drool on the couch, and you take that first cup of coffee, you realize something: at no point in your life have you ever needed to dehydrate food. In fact, until you heard of the Jerky-Matic, you never once considered that the need existed. The company first had to establish that this was a vacuum in your life, and then they had to sell you something that filled that void.

That’s pretty much what 7 Wonders does. It fills a need that it had to create. It’s a card-drafting game that can be played with up the seven players, and it reliably clocks in at around 30 minutes. Every positive thing I read and hear about this game boils down to this simple fact: there aren’t many 30-minute games that can hold seven people easily. And that’s true. But the fact is, that’s not a niche that I need to fill.

In three rounds, players are each dealt a hand of cards. You take one card from the hand you are dealt and pass the rest one way or the other. You then play the card you have, and select another card. The cards that you play form a tableau over the course of the game, apparently about a civilization. You gather resources, make advancements in science, create a military to hassle your neighbors, all the normal civ game trappings. If 7 Wonders has any strength, it’s that it’s a ridiculously simple concept. It functions a little like a sealed draft in a CCG, a  mechanic that was already utilized (to much better effect) in Fairy Tale.

The frustrating thing is that there are elements of a good game there. The drafting mechanic at least makes it feel like you are doing something like building a civilization. It’s abstracted to a huge level, but I’m fine with that. If I can handle abstraction in Dominion, I can handle it here. And heaven knows that it’s nice to have a thoughtful game that plays quickly. The problems arise because 7 Wonders is complicated in all the wrong places. The decisions and thought involved in the game is almost nothing, but then it turns to needless obfuscation when explaining the most basic aspect of the game, the scoring.

I’m not going to venture to say that 7 Wonders has no meaningful decisions, though that is my inclination. But I will say that the decisions FEEL small, which is in a way a much bigger crime. The stakes never feel high, and that’s a crippling blow in a civ-building game. It’s entirely without drama or tension, and the decisions are, on their own, not interesting enough to prop up the rest of the game. It’s very common to be passed a hand of cards with which you can do nothing. Oh sure, you can burn one for some money. But that’s basically being forced to bunt, not a strategic choice. And it’s certainly not a decision that you were forced to make because of your own poor choices in previous rounds. It’s something you just deal with because factors beyond your control forced them on you. Why anyone could complain about randomness in games and be okay with this is beyond me. For my part, I LOVE randomness in games, but 7 Wonders has been drained of anything resembling excitement. It’s just making another tiny decision in a game of tiny decisions.

And when you get to the end, you suddenly are thrown into one of the more arcane scoring systems I have ever had to wrangle with. There are about 2 or 3 separate scoring systems at work, but the guilty party is that of the science buildings. These need to be added and multiplied and squared and SOCATOA’d and everything. It’s not like it can’t  be figured out, but it was clearly designed for balance instead of usefulness. I’m sure it’s very well-designed in the sense that it makes those types of buildings a good strategic choice, but it sacrifices a huge chunk of usability. It’s this scoring system that effectively puts the game out of the “casual” sphere, which was about the only sphere it was good for in the first place.

But maybe I’m wrong about the strategy. It’s a losing battle to discuss how empty a game can feel strategically, because there’s always someone who has studied the game and knows it better than you. I don’t know many of these people, since the game has effectively died out in our own group. But usually when people defend 7 Wonders, they say something like this: “At least it plays a lot of people quickly.”

That is technically true. But it’s even more true that 7 Wonders sucks for big groups.

First off, it has to be said that seven players is a stupid number of people to have to play one game. There are numerous options for six people, and even more for less than that.You’re usually just better off splitting into two groups if you have seven people. But wait, you may say! We don’t want anyone to feel left out! Well, you’re in luck. There’s already an entire genre of games that deals with large groups who don’t have a lot of time. They’re called “party games,” and they are designed to be played quickly and taught easily. 7 Wonders fails largely because, while it allows a lot of people to play, it has no idea why it actually wants that many people around the table.

Why do people not want to split up their big group in the first place? Because we want to have fun. There’s a special dynamic that comes with large groups. When you get a ton of people around the table, it’s like conversation begins to open up. People are more likely to cut up, to laugh, to just enjoy the social aspect of gaming. Of course the big trade-off is that it can be very tough to wrangle that many people to listen to a game explanation. Party games work well because they are very simple, and great for promoting the special social interaction that comes from large groups. But you will never see that around a game of 7 Wonders. It insists on only ever embracing secondary interaction, and the goofy scoring guarantees that the game will be a headache to explain. You only ever have ANYTHING to do with your immediate neighbors, in game terms. The other players are basically a way to remove cards from the deck. It’s a big group game for people who don’t want to have to talk to others.

Nothing about 7 Wonders serves any reasonable game function. Instead of a fun social experience, it offers a way to sit around a table of seven people and never have to speak to them. I can live with that in a game with fewer people, or a game that just felt more satisfying. But this? This is like gas station coffee. It’ll keep you awake, but you’re probably better off falling asleep at the wheel.