A True Boss Monster Knows to Enjoy the Simple Pleasures

There are a number of candidates for my 3rd critique of the worker placement genre. None of them were Boss Monster. You aren't getting another worker placement game…you get this!

I finally played Boss Monster yesterday, and now this funny Nintendo game shaped experience have left a tremendous, 8-bit, mark on my game-playing soul.

Two full dungeon line-ups square off in fierce competition

I had VERY few expectations. Sometimes you hear "buzz" about a game and when you finally play you get disappointed. One thing Boss Monster had going for it were my expectations. Before we started playing Boss Monster…I had only negative expectations.

The game comes to our reality by way a small company called Brotherwise Games. So small, I think Boss Monster might be their only product. As a company creating its very first product, lacking in traditional board game creating experience, you don't often see a polished, well-crafted product.

The only thing I had heard was in regards to their rulebook which is legendarily bad. I won't go into it too much, but without the Internet, I would be playing a far different game, and I would be liking it far less.

So let's just skip over that speed bump (thanks to our brave new interconnected world) and go right to the beverages!

The Lemonade Stand

Imagine a lemonade stand. You are trying to attract people to your business. So you can kill them and make a trophy out of their bones. But not everyone likes lemonade so you are going to have to stock more beverages like root beer, fruit punch and bloody mary mix.

The central conflict of the game is simple. You adding different flavors of beverage, or improving on the quality of your beverages, while your opponents are trying to do the same thing at their lemonade stands.

Whoever can lure the most customers in wins.

But you're forgetting something. You also have to satisfy your customers. So while you are juggling the quality of your lemonade, you also have to be adding enough poison sugar so they die enjoy themselves before leaving your establishment. When you first start, you might not even WANT customers because they will just eventually leave unhappy. And unhappy, still-living customers will eventually pile up and lose you the game.

Here are the phases:

1) Build your dungeon

You build one room of your dungeon. This adds either 1) more flavor, 2) more killing power or 3) hopefully a little of both.

The Golem Factory has one sword, which Fighters like (maybe its root beer). And it has 2 killing power to help finish them off. And it even has a little bonus if someone dies in it.

2) Bait the adventurers

This is a judging round! I love judging rounds. All players compare their dungeons and the people randomly drawn into the village automatically go to the most attractive establishment. Only takes about 10 seconds.

The Dragon Hatchery has all the kinds of treasure a hero might want, but absolutely no killing power.

3) Kill the adventurers

The customers go through the line, sampling each room and taking the damage printed on the room. If they come out dead you get gems, if they come out alive you get wounds.

4) Did you win the game?

A player wins when he or she has 10 gems, or loses when he or she has 5 wounds.

The speed of the game

The rooms are all easy to understand. You can easily see what your opponent's rooms do at a glance from across the table. And there aren't many kinds so you quickly become familiar.

Most of the actions in the game can be done simultaneously.

I've logged about 50 games of the DC Deckbuilding Game. And until I played Boss Monster I hadn't realized how annoying it was to sit and WAIT while your opponent went through a long drawn out combo.

In Boss Monster, the turns are INCREDIBLY short. Maybe a minute or two per turn. It is awesome.

Winning the game

Here's another thing, and I feel this is getting rarer all the time. There are TWO end game conditions, and you can meet either of them.

For whatever reason, game designers have slowly moved to a environment where most games end after a set number of turns. You can see how many turns you have left, and you can plan everything out. I'm looking at you, worker placement games!

Boss Monster harkens back to an age when gameplay itself also has to move the players towards a resolution.

This, combined with the overall speed of the game, means you are never sitting in round 3, waiting for final round 8, knowing you have already lost. In Boss Monster if you get blown away in the first couple turns, the game is probably over. I love that!

If you see your opponent is only a few gems away from victory, but also only a wound away from defeat, you can play a spell card and turn one of his potential customers into a powerful assassin to remove him from contention. No need to count up those victory points!

My Big Surprise

Boss Monster looks like a boring, casual, "play a card, see what happens" game. But there are so many little beautiful things you find as you play. There is real strategy here. Some serious out-of-the-box thinking went into it, and I have to applaud the brains who put this game together. I hope there is a Boss Monster 2 coming out there, because I am picking it up.

Contemplating his next move.

Kickstarter

I don't know if I have ever mentioned Kickstarter in a positive light. But today I do so, because I also see Brotherwise is attempting to raise funds to make a digital (iOS AND Android both!) version of Boss Monster. I have never been tempted before, but I think I might have to back this game. It's also a perfect way to grab the game if you don't have it already.

Rarely do I pitch anything, but there you go.

Gen Con or Gen Cool? 5 Board Games of Interest

The next worker placement critique in the series is still on the way.

But I've been hanging out on my Twitter feed a little too long. And unfortunately, I caught something that's been a real lamprey to get rid of. But this blog post might just do it.

I try to avoid current board games. The marketing blitz surrounding them often conceals key inadequacies only later revealed once you open the box. You pull back the curtain, a woman screams and you say "My God, what have I done?" And the game is already on your shelf.

The last game whose spiky hype I fell upon was a little pirate game called Get Bit. And MOST ironically…that is exactly what happened!

Far better to look at the games people are still talking about 1 or 2 or 3 years later. What has survived the hype?

So I was loitering on Twitter and picked up a true social disease. We'll call it Gen Con Fever.

I'm not even going to Gen Con. It's happening this weekend. If you didn't buy tickets a year ago, you are out of luck. If you really want to go to Gen Con, trying going to literally any other board game con. There is probably one in your very own metro area, and possibly as many as three…get researching!

One thing publishers like to do is show off brand new titles, and this is where the fever found a way into my brain. So the following games might completely suck. But something about each of them draws me in, pulling my strings, enticing me with a spicy, curious brain scent I am unable to identify. Before long I'm zombified and dangling from a tree branch.

1) Destination: Neptune

Seen in action: PairofDice Paradise's GTS coverage
I really love space flight and space exploration. Today's "science fiction" games typically don't deal with the technology of space but instead use it as a setting to trot out the traditional tropes. I used to play Buzz Aldrin-approved (he approved the computer version at least) Liftoff!. To see something with similar theme added to more a modern almost Puerto-Rico-esque design makes me take notice. I have 90 minutes for that, easy.

2) Pay Dirt
Seen in action: Rahdo Runs Through It
I'm am going to be so sick of worker placement games. But, add a new theme, with cool interactive mechanics and I start to get interested again. Love speculation. Love blowing up my opponents. Love creating machines. The publisher saw fit to make this as a promotional video. Despite the fun everyone seems to be having, this might be a little too complicated for my blood…but there's only one way to find out.

3) Imperial Settlers

Seen in action: Portal Training Video
For a long time, I have tended an interest in Ignacy Trzewiczek's 51st State. The game is a complex hand and resource management game with drafting. Somewhere in the same vicinity as Race for the Galaxy. But the game keeps going through different revisions. And the very last revision is a complete overall into something called Imperial Settlers. Did I say I love creating machines? The main mechanic of Imperial Settlers seems to be finding a combo and taking over the game with it. And if you are on the receiving end? At least the game is short.

4) Five Tribes

Seen in action: Boardgamegeek designer preview
This has been described to me as a "worker placement game in reverse". Designed by famed game artisan Bruno Cathala, I think Five Tribes looks more like Carcassonne in reverse, where you are picking meeple back up to score points. I love Carcassonne, I love Kingdom Builder. And what really blows my mind…this game starts out with all the pieces on the board, and during playing the game you're actually picking it up! Who hates long maintenance phases in board games (I raise my hand)?

5) Abyss

Seen in action: GreyElephant LivePlay
Another Bruno Cathala game! Fantasy themes are boring when absolutely no effort goings into making them different. The underwater theme of Abyss, full of jellyfish acquisition in order to woo powerful aquatic lords, is something completely different. And the money for the game is pearls!

The best thing to do for all of these games is to wait a couple months at least. After some of the hype dies down you will start to hear about the problems. Some of these games are no doubt completely broken and unplayable (or maybe not). Push down your emotions. Or forever will they rule you and your wallet.

Belfort Rap

Today I am a fan of 2GoaTees.

I hope one day to make something with this level of creativity.



This rapper has a really good point on how awesome the player aids are. There are far better games that run far less smoothly because you have to keep referring back to the stupid rulebook.

A Study in Worker Placement Deux: Prêt-à-Porter

For the next game in the series, I wanted to try to find a polar opposite to Belfort. Can something have more than 1 polar opposite? With magnets, the answer is no. With board games, the jury is still out.

The game we will discuss today is Prêt-à-Porter.

"Ready to Wear" as they say. A game I have already commented on previously, but so deliciously interesting I had to drag it back out of the word hell I had specially constructed.

Before we dive in, let me emphasize something…it is monumentally difficult to continuously refer to and search for a title containing both hyphens and accent marks. But I did it all the same, time and time again. It's those sorts of sacrifices you can expect to see in this blog.

The Comparison is Made

While Belfort's workers are represented by elves and dwarves taking up resources and visiting buildings, the generic worker placement pawns of Prêt-à-Porter aren't really workers at all. They aren't employees. And you can't get more of them, you always have the base 3. What are these guys?

The choices you make

The worker pawns are opportunities. Moments in the timeline of your company where an appointment is available, where a contract is open, when a future employee is job-hunting or when a lease is on the market.

Instead of sending people out to do work, Prêt-à-Porter feels like an incredibly complicated Choose Your Own Adventure novel. You get 3 choices per month, then the unchosen decisions go away forever. Leaving you to easily go back in your mind and remember the one poor decision you made where your whole business started going in the crapper.

The number of opportunities is incredible, each section has a huge stack of cards. But they are never overwhelming because you always have at most 3 to choose from.

so many things to keep track of

Board but never Bored

While Prêt-à-Porter has a hoary host of tokens, counters and chits to keep track off, one of the big things it has going for it is a more streamlined design.

I spoke a bit about the annoying "micro turns" in Belfort, and its true Prêt-à-Porter still has them. But there are fewer (only 3 workers) plus everything is easily contained on the one single board. A simple rectangle, far better than scanning around 3 different boards to see your action options.

4 Phases of Stuff

This should feel just an inane as Belfort, but each action feels like so much more. In Belfort, you might spend a gold to generate 2 metal. In Prêt-à-Porter, in the same time you can hire an ace employee who is going to positively influence your company for the rest of the game.

Something as excruciating as paying operating costs even feels better. And it shouldn't. Prêt-à-Porter replaces Belfort's cartoony capitalism with a swimming-with-sharks once-you-smell-the-blood-you're-already-dead economic nightmare. Prêt-à-Porter has loans. It has regular bank loans, and then it has the kind of loans you take out to make the interest payments on your other loans. Sick.

This player board tracks your operating costs in a simple manner. 

Of course you always screw up the accountant, don't you?

Prêt-à-Porter more directly connects operating costs with the stuff you sign up for. You can actually play sort of conservatively and keep your costs under control (try to stay away from most buildings) while Belfort taxes you more as you get victory points, regardless of your ability to pay them.

And that's right, there are no taxes in Prêt-à-Porter. Because you are in an special economic development zone, or something. I'll take it!

Pole Position

So lets go back to the poles. One one side, we have Belfort. Belfort workers operate similar to the peons in Warcraft. You tell them to go out and do things, and that's what they do. Prêt-à-Porter is more like opportunities in your life you are presented with.

Do other worker placement games fall between these 2 poles? Or do other worker placement scenarios fit into other poles, strange poles separate and yet infinitely interconnected to this reality we live in.

I will continue to study and report on this issue. This Worker Placement series has already exceeded my wildest dreams, so I may have to move the success goal posts out a little.

Until next time!

A Study in Worker Placement I: Belfort

Everybody loves worker placement. I like worker placement too. Can you have TOO MUCH worker placement? We will see.

I'm going to give me thoughts on a number of worker placement style games and lets just see how far this goes.

First up…Belfort!

Belfort takes everything you know and love about worker placement games and doubles it. And then it adds area control on top of THAT!

The ancient philosopher Plato teaches there are ideal versions of everything, and the real objects we interact with on a daily basis are just imperfect copies. Like shadows on the wall of a cave. So since this is the first review in what is hopefully a long and extensive worker placement series, let me describe some components of the ideal worker placement game before we delve into the Befort-shaped shadow.

The Ideal Worker Placement Game

1) You have a limited number of workers. Your workers are a resource you spend to do things.

2) You place the workers in houses, or spots on the ground or other sections and in return you get to take some kind of action or collect some kind of resources.

3) The first workers to get placed in the turn are the more important ones, because they block those squares for all the other workers trying to find spots later in the turn.

Now, this is a fairly generic description. What are some of the other features? Well, we don't know since we can only observe this perfect worker placement game by examining cruddy old Belfort. We might even LIKE Belfort. But compared to the immaculate version shining down from the 5th dimension, it is bantha fodder.

Setup

Belfort has a sweet 5-way pentagon pie of doom you slide together to get started. If I start to harp on Belfort too much, do remember I am incredibly fond of unusual board designs and this board is quite sweet. You also get another boring rectangular board. And a clipboard shaped board for distributing gnomes. And a bunch of player boards. It's a board-nanza!

Boarding Party

The pentagon board has 5 "guild" squares each ready to receive one of your willing workers. These are randomly selected from a pile, basically there's a guild each to collect extra resources of various kinds, plus some other special powers like drawing extra cards.

When you build a building, a wooden house goes on the board (because area control is how victory points are scored) and in front of you goes a building card yet another worker placement position. And unlike some games, you are the only person who can use your buildings.

Personally, I don't mind other people using my buildings, as long as I get a little something out of it. In Belfort, a lot of your buildings end up sitting empty while your elves and dwarves are cavorting elsewhere. Often, you aren't building for the ability, but instead for the position it fills on the pentagon.

Now, what about the regular rectangular board up top? It looks like guys are being placed up there too. How does that happen?

Well, here's one tricky part I manage to screw up every time I explain the game to anyone. The bottom part of the board you place workers on during the first placement phase, same time as on the pentagon board. There's a space there to recruit more workers. And a space to manipulate turn order. And a space you don't place anything on, that eventually forces you to PAY TAXES every turn. Someone call Grover Norquist!

But to place your guys in the top row of these very same board, you have to pass your turn.

If you have ever played Caylus, you pass your turn in much the same way. You stop placing dudes and let your opponents skip over you. Only instead of collecting some extra deniers, you get to dump the rest of your workers onto the resource spaces and collect wood, stone, metal and (shudder) gold.

Resources and Racial Politics

Now at this point, I should probably mention there are 2 different races of workers in this game (3 if you count gnomes, but I'm purposefully not), elves and dwarves. Elves can be placed on the wood, dwarves can be placed on the stone, one elf and one dwarf together can produce a metal and finally any elf or any dwarf can collect a gold. My mind wheels with possibilities on what could be lurking inside that tent.

This weird elf/dwarf dichotomy you get used to fairly quick. Although I don't know how necessary it really is. I can't imagine a designer was thinking "worker placement isn't complex enough. What can we do to make the use, acquisition and collection of workers more complicated." But this is exactly what happens. You need to make sure you have the correct amounts of each race available when you pass and go to the resource collection phase. One false step, and you are 1 stone short of an important building you were going to use next turn. The game makes things just a little crazier by making it possible to upgrade your elf/dwarves into SUPER elf/dwarves.

2 normal elves, 1 super elf.

The third race, gnomes, are not exactly workers. You get victory points for having "racial majorities" with the gnomes but in the game play they are more like building upgrades than anything else. Kinda creepy, but I'll go along with it and not think too much.

The Ecstasy(and Agony) of Gold

Resource Collection is further complicated because the workers on the pentagon and the workers in the resource pits are taken back at different parts of the turn. The resource pits are collected, new workers are recruited, turn over is established then the players have to PAY TAXES. Only after the taxes are paid do we then move to the action phase, where workers placed on "planks" from buildings or the pentagon are removed one at a time to take actions, like getting even more resources. Or MOST importantly…gold you wish you could have paid your taxes with.

A World of Micro Turns

I enjoy Belfort mostly, despite how I've perhaps come off so far. But there is one facet that is always ready to drive me up the wall and then back down again.

You never stop taking turns, and each turn is only about 10 seconds long. Not "turns" in the official game definition of course (there are only 7 of those) but turns by which I mean when someone says "your turn."

You take a turn when you initially place a worker. You take a turn when you take your workers back. It feels like about 10 turns per real turn, and that multiplies with each person you are playing with. And as I've discussed previously, I have a problem taking my turn.

And each turn (or action, I supose), by itself is so completely inconsequential. Could we not lump some of these into a single pile rather than me getting yelled at for not taking my turn, then 10 seconds later yelling at someone else to take their turn? Could we perhaps lump the placement of workers and the actions they take together? But Belfort doesn't do this, for whatever reason.

This "Micro Turn Dilemma" is one of the reasons I decided to tackle the worker placement genre head on.  I 'm taking an analytical eye to every one of them and we will see if there are other more streamlined or elegant ways of moving those workers around.

For more updates, you know where to look. I've got work to do.

Rex: First Impressions

So here we sit with Rex: Last Days of An Empire. An almost mythical game, reborn back in 2012 from the ashes of Avalon Hill's original Dune board game from 1979.

I have taken it apart, assembled all the pieces and played a single turn. The single turn took an hour, because I was constantly checking the rules and explaining the game.

Assembly took 2 hours because of the lively discussions focused on how the battle wheels and Dreadnaught Fleet should go together.

Play was lively, I enjoyed it, but will definitely need more of it to get the full picture.

So these are rough observations.

Flavor

An incredible theme. Dune was one of the first "ecological" science fiction novels. It created an entirely alien culture of distant future humans, inventing an astounding level of detail that nevertheless manages to be very cohesive.

Yet Rex is certainly not Dune. There is not a character from Dune, a creature or even a word that exists within Rex. The aliens are lifted from Christian T Peterson's Twilight Imperium universe and bear absolutely no relation.

So it comes as something of a shock that I felt connected to Dune even as a I played this game which had nothing to do with it. If you've read Dune, you will see it in this game too. From the suicide-squad-style tactics used in the battles, to the traitor mechanics, to the betrayal win conditions.

The spice Melange, in particular, cannot be under-appreciated.

"Influence" is what you harvest in this game. But as to why it randomly "blows" up from the ground, and why your agents slowly hoover it up a piece at a time doesn't make a huge amount of sense unless you consider the original source.

If you haven't read Dune, the plotting, poker-hand bluffing and inevitable backstabbing might feel torn right from the pages (or TV screen) of Game of Thrones. With the added awesomeness of being in space.

The Play

The movement of the pieces feels like an older game. There is no deck building or worker placement to be found. And honestly, I enjoyed it. You get to move your pieces and pass the turn…instead of the fractured micro-turn splinters a lot of games are serving up nowadays.

And there is absolutely no dice rolling. Movement is standardized and easily anticipated. Combat is a simple affair, once the multiple layers of bluffing and strategy cards are played. Winning or losing is like revealing a poker hand…you know who is going to win, unless they've been feeding a line all along, and only now reveal their true power.

Finally winning (although I never got to this point) is an incredible array of victory conditions depending on faction. There is a faction of magical turtles who must guess which faction will win and on what turn. If they are correct, they are actually the faction that wins. I can only imagine these turtles were once the Bene Gesserit,

Which brings us to…

The Factions

In Ryan Sturm's "How to Play Podcast" on Rex, he mentions how playing the different factions feels almost like playing different games.

Typical Rex faction card.

Each faction has a mountain of special rules. Each starts in a different location, with different currency levels and troop levels as well. I am reminded of Axis and Allies, or any other game based on a real conflict. The sides could not be more uneven, and explaining the exceptions to inexperienced gamers would be a nightmare. Especially if someone refuses to read their faction card.

Do the factions feel like Dune? Of course. It's pretty easy to guess when faction were originally House Harkonnen. And the others stand out pretty well too. But again, referring instead to Game of Thrones it would be just as easy to see them as House Lannister, House Stark, House Greyjoy and so on.

Combat

No one understands combat until you go through it once. I explained it multiple times, but no one "got it" until the first actual battle happened. Let me say it now: in Rex, all soldiers are suicide-bombers. The only soldiers you don't lose are the ones you choose not to commit to the battle in the first place. And if you lose, the ones you held back die too. Battles are horrible, unless you have a trick up your sleeve. And usually your opponent has a trick or too as well.

In the above battle, the mewling Federation of Sol uses a cowardly atmospheric ionizer to cancel out my glorious biological weapon. He didn't really need to, though, because he also happened to have a TRAITOR card matching my deployed leader. Playing the traitor card removes all strategy cards from the battle, destroys my leader, and murders all of my troops being led by said leader at the time. A true Dune-style betrayal.

Finally the Dreanaught Fleet

The Dreadnaught Fleet, under nominal control of the Federation of Sol, conducts bombing upon the board as it leisurely travels in a slow orbit. Anything its path crosses is immediately destroyed.

The Fleet is represented by a intricately crafted miniature.

I'll keep it short: this little guy will break the moment your kid grabs it off the table. The moment someone bumps it with their elbow. The moment you put it in the box and close the lid. But it will be easy enough to use anything, since the Dreadnaught simply moves around the board independent of any of the factions.

More thoughts are certainly to come. But first I will have to play it all the way through. Hopefully with six players. Is it possible? Can I do it? If I can't you probably won't hear about it. But if I do…you know where to read it.

Until next time…

New Twitter Bar and a little bit about Rex: Last Days of an Empire

In keeping with my dedicated up-to-the-minute updates, I have added a Twitter section for you to see when I post things there.

Biggest board game news lately is some sweet Rex action. A game I have wanted to play for some time and then it was right there in my lap.

I will have a "first impressions" style review put together in short order.

My VERY FIRST "first impressions" I am ready to share. The Sol Dreadnaught Fleet, which moves around the board bombing the heck out of things, is a rather impressive miniature.

After a lengthy assembly, I can say with certainty it will never leave my house. It doesn't fit back into the box very well, and the plastic platform feels incredibly fragile. Imagine a base half the thickness of an Eldar Jetbike's base and how easy it would be to snap such a base in half.

Luckily, the Dreadnaught Fleet can be represented by just about anything. So I'll just steal another token of some sort from a different game.