New Bedford: No Whale Before We Sail

In a vast ocean of bland fantasy dungeon delvers and dark zombie-battling miniature games, the historically unique theme of New Bedford was like a breath of fresh salt-tinged air. It was a Kickstarter I hated to see fail. My original observations can be found here, but to sum up: New Bedford looked like a smaller, tighter version of Minotaur-favorite Le Havre, with a better less-clunky system for building ships.

With the project canceled, Dice Hate Me Games posted this final update

As most of you have no doubt noticed by now, the campaign for New Bedford has been cancelled. We did not make this decision lightly, and ultimately felt that it was what was best for the project and for Dice Hate Me Games. Although New Bedford was tracking to fund by Sunday, we felt that a relaunch at a better time of year will allow us to bring more attention to the game and, ultimately, bring all of you more added value for your pledges.

And I started to wonder just what people had not liked so much about New Bedford. Constantly evolving and growing worker placement opportunities? Random whale tile draws out of a glorious bag of mystery?

Then suddenly, quite recently, the campaign was relaunched with this updated message on the original campaign:

We greatly appreciate the support that you all lent us in this first campaign, and we hope that many of you will consider supporting us in this new endeavor. We took a good look at feedback and lessons from the first campaign, and we have a lot of new goodies for everyone this time around, including a special promotional and lots of cool stretch goals to unlock!

There seem to be a few changes. The art looks like they’ve been doing some fine tuning. And a few of the buildings have different names. The designer attributed the poor previous start mostly to timing, and the new campaign displayed confidence things would be quite different this time around.

And they were right.

With 12 days left to go in the campaign, Dice Hate Me Games has managed to raise an incredible $55,000 and collected more than twice the backers of the original campaign.

It probably has something to do with timing sure. But also it might have something to do with that glorious white whale.

White Whale, Holy Grail

The previous Kickstarter was all about historical accuracy. But this relaunch of New Bedford finally surrenders to a classic blood n’ thunderous piece of New Bedford-related fiction.

When the original whalers of New Bedford went out to sea for their next hunt, very rarely did the pursued whales rise up and devour their ship. In New Bedford, it might happen just a little bit more often than true history would indicate.

But adding Moby Dick makes for a more fun game. And gives the whales just a little more of a fighting chance. One step removed from reality, you’ll feel less like a dirty whale killer. and more like a ship sailing into a sea of myth and adventure.

Batman Fluxx and the Ghost of Todd McFarlane

Should I get excited about Batman Fluxx?

Because Batman Fluxx is what Looney Labs is doing. Making new versions of Fluxx, while not exactly a full time job at Looney Labs, is at least a really hardcore flex-hours position that somehow avoids health benefits.

Per the press release:

We're very excited to announce that Batman™ Fluxx will be in stores August 7! With art and the style of The New Batman Adventures, Batman™ Fluxx introduces the Caped Crusader (and his Rogue's Gallery of villains) to the ever-changing card game of Fluxx.

It’s not like Batman is hurting for new pieces of merch to slap his gloomy face over. Even in the board and card game industry, The Bat is basically all over the place. He’s Here. He’s There. Plenty of Batman to go around.

What made me excited enough to set my tips to tapping on the keyboard was this line: With the art and the style of The New Batman Adventures.

The bone I’ve got to pick with Batman,  at least the current board game implementations of Batman is this foundation assumption Batman needs to be a gritty, demented roller coaster ride into madness. Batman is a detective, and sometimes you could call his environment “noir” in that Gotham City if full of corruption, forcing this man to solve crimes and met out justice from the vigilante position. But it's not Halloweentown, people.

But all I see from the Batman stable is artwork and theme that looks like American McGee killed Todd McFarlane and resurrected his ghost using ancient Korean black magic.

While I don’t read any of the current Batman comics books, I discovered while trying to catch up on Suicide Squad that the current version of the Joker decided to cut his own face off and sew it back on for some reason. This would have been super cool back in the 90’s when Spawn was stabbing pervert ice cream vendors to death with pudding pops but the scary clown well has seriously run dry. Instead of the clown prince of crime, The Joker is now basically a retread of Hannibal Lector.

I know, everyone wants something different and certainly there must be a huge market for scary clown Batman comics. But I’m saying there is at least a tiny market for cartoony fun Batman comics, and investing in a game of Fluxx might be the only current way to support such a position.

High Production Value Board Game Videos -- Mirror Box's Chaosmos

A mirror box is a therapeutic device to help relieve the symptoms of phantom pain felt in missing limbs. Famous performed on an episode of House. Let go of the grenade! And he finally did. He let go of the grenade after all those years. House is a miracle worker.

But what you may not know is Mirror Box is also a independent game studio, famous for running a successful kickstarter to fund the space-exploring card game Chaosmos.

I don't know anything about Chaosmos other than the boardgamegeek page, but this video obviously took an incredible amount of time and work to pull off. An incredible display of dexterity game action, and even pyrotechnics.

My hat is off to them.

Agricola: Facing off Against the Lord of Grain

Check out this guy

Jacking in to the Game-Net

One of the banes/benefits of playing online is this…you have access to some of the world's best gamers. The magic of the Internet draws the infinite distance close, like pulling a string into a knot. They might be in their basement and you in yours. But now it is one basement, a forever basement, full of men (and potentially women) who play Agricola for real.

After a lot of plays, I can honestly say online Agricola players are special.

For many online games, there are the people who have optimized their play style to take the absolute most efficient path to victory. They are in the game for the big W…grinding out ELO, or whatever loopy-doopy imaginary point system the particular online game uses. These lizard people typically squat around random Puerto Rico games, complaining you aren't playing it right and petitioning the rest of the players to vote to quit the game early so they don't have to sit through this travesty.

Farm Living is the Life for Them

Agricola players are a different breed. When you play Agricola, you get these cards that create all sorts of modifications to your available opportunities each turn. The other members of the Rosenbergian dysphoria…Le Havre, Cavera, etc…never adopted this and the occupation/minor improvement cards are one of the unique things about Agricola. They even create combos…situations where you might be able to do something more often, make it cheaper, and then do BOTH and really run away with the game.

Behold the Lord of Grain

In this match, during the time I was flailing around trying to feed my starving children my opponent was instead getting down to business. The Potato Dibber and The Manure Pit both increase the number of grain/vegetables you get when you sow. While the Field Watchman plows a field for you whenever you take a grain. Which is how my opponent ended up with 12 grain and 4 vegetables.

With an oven to bake the occasional bread (which also allows you to sow grain/vegetables at the same time!), the guy never had a problem feeding people at any point in the game. Each field also uses a space, so he had a fully utilized board at the end, too. A really masterful and unusual use of space that makes you think more about the game rather than gnashing your teeth over what you didn't do.

Agricola Looking Forward

I started 2 new games immediately after losing this one. Opening my mind is a challenge, but I am buoyed by the fact that if I can't see the cool card combinations in front of me at least my opponent will be able to show me theirs. And that is almost as fun as winning. Or so I tell myself.

The Exploding Kitten Situation

There is a huge Kickstarter going on right now for a game about Exploding Kittens. I read this blog post about it and it sparked enough interest I needed to jot my thoughts down too.

Exploding Kittens is making a lot of money and good for them. The Oatmeal is a funny website. The guy makes really funny, completely original content and that is one of the hardest things in this world to do. He is a master-class promoter, too, and when you combine those abilities you get crazy stuff like a Tesla Museum or a game about exploding cats.

What is this general malaise I feel, looking at the Kickstarter which is now topping $1,800,000?

One of Hung's issues was the huge number of people from outside the gaming community who were jumping on the wagon, merely because it was illustrated and promoted by The Oatmeal. This should be good, right? It's good to bring new people in. And it IS good to bring people in. We should all be happy.

There's an elephant in the room in the board gaming community. Every single gamer who has even casually strolled through the board game isle at Target or Walmart knows it to be true. In 90% of the board game market, the true board game market comprised of everyone who buys board games, game play has no value whatsoever. The actual rules of the game are entirely immaterial.

Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers figured it out a long, long time ago. The reasons people buy board games, unless you are the kind of board game aficionado most gamers assume all board game buyers are (when they obviously aren't) are completely separate to any judgement of quality whatsoever. They buy the game with the Disney characters on the front. Or even the John Kovalic illustrations.

And like so many other, more important things in society I have to sit back and reaffirm the simple truths:

This is the way of the world. I didn't choose for it to be this way. And so it goes.

But, say about 900,000 people start their gaming careers with Exploding Kittens. For 810,000 people, that is the only game they will ever play. Most of them will never even play it, but instead stick it in their closet where it will languish in shrink wrap hell for all eternity.

But 90,000 people will wonder if there is more out there. Imagine…90,000 people! Say a tenth of that start playing games I'm interested in. 9000.

The Kickstarter for Exploding Kittens is not for a game. It is a Kickstarter for a brand that everyone really enjoys, enjoys enough to plop down some serious coin.

But the unintended result, and this I am certain of, is that I will get at least 1 new Star Realms opponent somewhere down the road. That 1 single person is worth the anticipated $28 million dollars of other people's money. And its worth the inevitable newspaper articles around this Oatmeal guy.

I will bide my time, and shuffle my cards.

Catan Junior: A Twisted Parrot-Strewn Path

Sometimes I go on the Internet and argue about things. Sometimes on this blog, more often in some dark virtual alleyway elsewhere.

If the Internet is a series of tubes, than BoardGameGeek is in fact a series of winding dark alleyways, twisting and turning over each other. How many are there? One for every board game ever made.

If you don't care about a particular game, you don't have to partake in any discussion about it, because you don't have to go down that alleyway. You just pay attention to the games of interest with all your like-mined fanciers.

Well, if you go walking into the Catan Junior section of BoardGameGeek you are asking for it. Because I'm there, lurking. I've got a cardboard box all broken in and cozy. And if I hear you come down my alley, I'll come out of my box in a great stinking mess, raving incoherently.

No Bells or Whistles to Get Hung Up On

Catan Junior boils the main game down to the basest of elements. Roads are ships. Settlements are forts. There are no cities. There are no expansions. You only roll 1 die, and there is an equal chance of generating resources on every hex. Development cards are tiles, and those tiles are called Polly Tiles. As in the stereotypical parrot.

The resource card. Behold the Polly Tile, available for 1 sword, 1 molasses and 1 gold

The Main Argument

The complaining about Polly Tiles is a constant thing, really just about the only thing going on with Catan Junior at this point in the game's cycle. And I will defend, to my dying breath, that the Polly Tiles are not in the least bit overpowered or unbalanced. They are perfectly fair, and only 1 route of many to advance your position towards victory. I will argue this. On BoardGameGeek, in the dark alleyway of the Catan Junior forum.

But I can't lie like that here. Not to you.

And no, I'm not intentionally being a troll in the Catan Junior forum. It's not my fault! They make me do it! When I am there, I truly believe the Polly Tiles are fine. And I love playing with the Polly Tiles.

I have not, and will not play any kind of convoluted variant of the game designed to rebalance the Polly Tiles  Because that's what they are always trying to do in the Catan Junior forum. They see a broken pipe. They want to fix it.

What is Catan Junior?

Catan Junior is a kids game. There are kids games adults also play. Silly games. But Catan Junior is not a silly game, It is a simple game.

If you are playing your kid, and he/she figures out to start spamming Polly Tiles  that is not a problem you need to rebalance. You need to get down on your hands and knees and thank the higher powers your kid is figuring out how to be a gamer. He or she has discovered there are paths to victory, a method to the madness of a tabletop game.

The Polly Cards are not meant to be obscure. Think if you were crossing a river on your way to work, and something shiny caught your eye in the riverbed. Bending down you find a large gold nugget. Well, if you start panning for gold in that riverbed, are you cheating the system? No, you're just being observant. You found a better way.

This might be a problem in a game where everyone is supposed to be traveling to different places, and instead they start all panning for gold because that's the undeniable best strategy. But I firmly believe part of the game, part of Catan Junior, is having your little game player catch sight of that shiny nugget, all on their own.

2 player End Game

And They Can Still Lose

And they can still lose! One of the complained about bits with these Polly Tiles are the ones giving out a free fort. Imagine in Settlers if there was a development card that allowed you to build a settlement. That would be pretty sweet.

Well, the problem with my son is he still forgets to build out first before drawing these tiles. He forgets to get a ship into position so that he actually has a place to put his fort. So instead of getting a free fort, he gets the runner up prize, which is just a free ship. Something you could normally buy for a pittance...one goat and one stack of logs. When you use the Polly Tiles to build a "free ship," you are actually being inefficient.

The Ecstasy of Gold

There is only one gold spot in Catan Junior (at least for 2 players), right in the center of the board. No one starts out being able to gather the gold resource. And neither ships nor forts require gold. So since the rules of the game state the player who has built all their forts wins, why would I ever want to collect gold, anyway? There's only a single thing in the game you can buy with gold, and that's Polly Tiles. OHHH...wait...

See gold is pretty valuable and once kids have the Polly Tiles kinda figured out, they are going to rocket towards the gold section. And on the way they will learn EXPANSION. Because expansion is key to making your victory machine in just about anything.

Childhood's End

I do not play to win on the Polly Tiles in Catan Junior. I leave that for my son (or eventually my daughter when she gets old enough). But I do play to win in every other way. And there have been times my son has had 7 tiles while I've still come out on top at the end just cruising along, just expounding my empire.

If you need a flawlessly balanced game to play with your kids, you probably shouldn't pick Catan Junior. Or if you do, look up one of the homemade variants on BGG that attempt to balance the issue. I'll be sure to hop on and tell you why you're wrong.

Agricola : Into the Belly of the Beast

For the new year, I should probably start with something special. But instead you get this.

My 2015 prediction: this will NOT be my last post about the demon-game Agricola.

The end state to one of my first games of Agricola. And I busted my brain doing it.

Regrets of the Past

Until I played my 6th or 7th game of Agricola, I hate, hate, hated it. 

There was a lot of looking back to examine the actions I did not take. If there is one thing I have historically been bad at, in games and in my own life, its been long term planning. Caught up in the quick thrill of resource gathering, I get lots of resources only to discover I can't really eat them.

At the start of Agricola, there is no resource (except food) you can actually do anything with. Baking bread evokes the famous Carl Sagan pie recipe…to make it, you first have to invent the universe.

Our universe in this case is a ploughed field, sown with grain. And its also constructing an oven to bake the bread. Which usually takes clay, stone or wood in various ratios. And then you have to put the grain in the oven and bake it. Quite a few actions, when there are only 2 workers and hunger stands waiting.

Animals are no better. You need a fireplace or something to cook them with. And if you are planning on keeping extra animals around for points, you need to build fences to keep them in.

So a beginner's game of Agricola feels a lot like running in place, or worse…working really hard to starve to death. I've heard the game referred to as "Misery Farm" and I don't know why this isn't printed right on the box. It's one of the most essential bits of info to convey to first-time players.

A latter attempt at doing well

Place Your Workers!

Agricola outlines the "standard" method by which workers are placed in a worker placement game. All other games I've looked at so far I have unthinkingly used Agricola as the base, while calling out any differences I then labeled as "innovations."

Everyone takes turns plopping down wooden family members onto spaces marked with things you want to do. Take 3 wood? Plop down a worker. Take 1 reed? Plop down a worker. Sow some grain? You guessed it, plop down a worker.

Anyone who has more experience than you is always going to be plopping down workers one turn before you realize you needed to put YOUR worker there.

After several games of pure worker placement hell, what I finally did was break out the scratch paper and make a to-do list to accomplish before each harvest period. This might be a faux-pas for a regular game played around the dining table, but at the time I was playing online and these guys are complete animals to play against.

recipe for making some serious bread

The List Didn't Work

And here is what happens when you force yourself to do the exact things you need to do to be successful. Your opponents take advantage of it.

While I was forcing myself to collect clay, my opponent was filling up on wood. Going into the next round of turns before harvest, he had 16 wood and easily built all the fences he needed. And there is even a house pig to help get the animal population started once those pastures go up.

And the real teeth-gnashing heart of my failure…I didn't even do the list right. See where I wrote "sow" 2 fields. Well, what this actually should have said was "plough" 2 fields. Sowing is an entirely different action, one I never made room for.

What ended up happening, I never picked up the Baker occupation and sowed my grain instead. Then I couldn't bake bread because I sowed both of my grains. So then I harvested my grain, fed my family extremely inefficiently on unprocessed wheat, and continued on to the next turn.

Whoops, completely forgot to get animals in this one.

The Game Behind the Game

Finally, when you start figuring out how to consistently feed your family, you still aren't winning. 

Behind the feeding portion of the game lurks the actual scoring you are probably sucking at while your family consumes all your available resources. A game within a game.

A Score Board of Cows, Fields and Family Members

My instinctive reaction to a new game is to find some small bit of insight and repeat it. If you can find a way to get some extra animals, it makes sense to corner the market on animals, right? 

WRONG!

Each "thing" on your score board only goes up to 4 or so. To get the maximum number of points, you ALWAYS need to have 5 Fields, 4 Pastures, 8 grain, 4 vegetables, 8 sheep, 7 hogs, 6 cattle and 5 family members. 

And there's not really enough time to do all of that stuff, so you are never going to have a perfect farm.

Likewise, the game will punish you severely if you gravitate to one thing, like cows or wheat. You have to maximize everything.

The best I've done so far

A Final Note About the Theme

Since my La Havre post, I've thought more about board game themes. So often in these Euro-style strategy games, the avatar for the player is usually either pretty abstracted or else someone with a level of power.

Go through your game collection and see just how many games you are sacrificing people to win wars, or manipulating pawns in industrial situations. Ticket to Ride might be a fun game about building train routes between cities, but the workers who build those routes mostly died of exposure, hunger or disease out on the frontier and received a shallow grave as their only reward.

But Agricola studies the thrill of entreprenuership. The land is yours, fairly (as fairly as anything else) won away from your neighbors by the size of your club. You and your wife are the only two workers in the game, so anytime you place a worker you have a 50% chance to place your personal avatar.

Of course your wife gets no say in where she gets placed. And as your family grows, they also get ordered around with the same ruthless efficency. No toys or fancy schooling. In Agricola, you move straight from the cradle into the field. Start clearing lumber, Little Jon!

Keeping on Keeping On

Agricola has the rare distinction of being a game I started hating, and eventually liked. Liked so much that after 20 games of being destroyed online I got a real copy. 

Trying to figure this out

I truly admire the easy way Agricola lays out an extremely complicated game. Almost all the information you need is right on the board, written in plain English. Sometimes you have to squint a little but its usually there, in very small print.

Maintenance at the beginning of each turn is as simple as flipping over a card, and then replenishing each pile of stuff. And you know what goes on each square because it tells you! A few simple words really go a long way and bring Agricola setup light years ahead of other games I thought I would like more. (Ultimately, I do like the SCORING on Dungeon Petz a little better, mind you)

So much like the workers within, Agricola finds a way to thrive despite the horrible first impressions. I will let you know how it goes.