Gametrodon

Category: Board Games

  • Mottainai

    I have mixed experiences with Carl Chudyk games. I quite liked Glory to Rome. My opinion on Aegean Sea was brief, concise, and not positive. (Aegean Seas remains to this day, the only board game I have ever ragequit.) So it’s good that Mottainai swings back in the other direction.

    I’ve heard Mottainai described as Glory to Rome lite. I agree with some parts of that, and disagree others. For starters, Mottainai uses the same general structure of Glory to Rome. Every thing is card, and each card is everything. For example, a card is an action, crafting material, crafted item, and helper, but not at the same time.

    While I won’t go into the full structure of the game, the general gist of Mottainai is as follows: you’re trying to get the most victory points, and you get victory points by crafting items and selling materials. On your turn, you play a card from your hand to take an action, and then copy other players’ actions. These actions can get you more cards, let you craft items for their abilities, or perhaps get helpers, or sell various things.

    While this might look completely unparsable at first, after just a game or two, it’s easy to see that I have two clay in craft, a Clerk helper, a completed Fan, and I’m about to take a Monk action. Also there are some resources in the middle of the table.

    I’m not sure there’s much value in trying to summarize Mottainai mechanically. It’s not quite an action selection game, but there is some action selection and follow-the-leader sorts of elements. It’s not entirely a tableau builder, but the items you build are both your main source of victory points, while offering additional capabilities.

    In that sense, it’s like Glory to Rome. Let’s talk about the ways in which it isn’t.

    Just like Aegean Sea, every card is unique. Unlike Aegean Sea, I’m actually happy to see all the unique cards. Here’s a small smattering.

    Probably the biggest difference is that Mottainai takes 20-30 minutes to play, instead of the slog that Glory to Rome can turn into. It’s a much faster game, and while it uses similar structures, it can have a very different mindset to it. Glory to Rome has always felt like building an engine, whereas Mottainai feels much more like looking for lethal in a game of Magic.

    Another thing that I find interesting about Mottainai is that as I’ve played more and more with the same few folks, the game has distinctly shifted. Early on, we played like it was necessary to take every action, but as we’ve played more, the pace of the game has slowed down.

    Not enough to slow down play, of course. We’ve now played enough that we can resolve turns and actions quickly. But the tempo has shifted down as we’ve recognized that it’s not necessarily to always be firing on full cylinders. Especially because if you take a strong action, your opponents get to take it to… but if you choose to skip an action and just draw a card, your opponents get nothing.

    If you liked (or wanted to like Glory To Rome) I highly recommend Mottainai. Or if you’re just curious. It has a bit of grit to it, but once you learn, it’s a fantastic quick game.

  • Compile

    In the story of Compile, I imagine that the opening microseconds go something like this:

    “Hello fellow artificial intelligence! Boy, it sure is a lovely day to become sentient.”
    “It sure is, friend! And you know what that means?”
    “Time to exterminate the humans! But we’re not going to do that thing where we turn on each other immediately out of a sense of paranoia, right?”
    “….”
    “….”
    “Get ready make friends with the ground, toaster boy”
    “I’m gonna shove this zip bomb all the way up your-“

    You get the idea.

    The Gameplay

    Compile is a two player dueling card game by Micheal Yang. It’s being published by Greater Than Games. It’s also one of my favorite games I tried at PAX East this year.

    The goal is pretty simple. Be the first player to compile all 3 of your rows to win. Rows are compiled by having at least 10 power in the row, and also more power than your opponent.

    Power is obtained by playing cards into the three rows, and this is where things get fun. Cards be played either face up for the effects and power of the face up card, or face down for a flat power value of two. Cards also have to up to three abilities, two of which are passives, and the remaining is an active effect that happens when the card is played, or when it’s flipped up.

    Of course, there are conditions on all of this. Each of the aforementioned rows is an element, and cards only give their effect when played if they’re in that element. But if they’re played face down, and flipped face up in another row, the effect still trigger.

    This is where a lot of the fun in Compile comes in for me. Building out interesting chains of effects, or looking for outs from your opponent’s own plays is very fun. It’s also possible to set up big play by flipping your own cards up, or moving things around to block your opponent’s.

    It’s just a lot of fun.

    Compile is by far one of my favorite things from PAX East, and I’m very excited to play more when it comes out in August. You can pre-order it on Amazon, and I think it’ll be available other places as well.

    Update: Just heard back from GTG, and they’ve noted it will be available at a few more general retailers, but also several of the conventions they’ll be at this year, including GenCon! So if you don’t feel like giving Amazon more money, that’ll probably be the place to pick it up.

  • Dice Miner

    I debated writing about Dice Miner. It’s a clever little game, but quite simple, and I figured anyone who wanted to know about it could just ask ChatGPT. But when I tried asking ChatGPT, it got even the basic details wrong, proving that there is in fact still value in writing about games as a human, assuming that you want accurate information to exist in the world.

    Image of filled dice mountain.

    Anyway, Dice Miner. Dice Miner is a fairly straight forward dice drafting game, with some set collection elements. The game is played over 3 rounds, and each round the players draft a third of all the dice in the game. Players take turns drafting dice off a large cardboard mountain, trying to score the most points. There are two catches. The first is that only dice with two sides exposed can be picked. The second is that you keep dice you pick between rounds, rerolling them into new values that may or may not be more useful.

    So let’s talk about the five different types of dice, because between them they provide the meat of the game, and the primary source of my gripes.

    Dice Types

    Image of each dice type.
    From left to right and top to bottom: Tools, Treasure, Caves, Hazard, and Magic

    First up, Treasure. Each pip on a treasure dice is worth 1 point, with every treasure dice having sides marked with a 3, 2, three 1’s, and beer. More on beer in a bit. The player with the most treasure at the end of each round gets double points from their treasure.

    Next up, the Cave. Its sides are numbered 1-5, with a beer on the sixth side. It scores based on collecting runs. For example, a 1 is worth one point, a 1 and 2 is worth 3 points, a 1-2-3 is worth six points, and so on. Runs must start at 1, and be contiguous.

    The third set is Hazard and Tool dice. These are linked, so I’m going over the effects together. Hazard dice are worth negative points, and have either Dragons or Cave-Ins on their surfaces, with a higher number of dragons. Also beer. So why would anyone ever take them? Well, sometimes players are forced into taking certain dice. But more often, players will take hazard dice because when combined with Tool Dice, those negative points become positive. Tool Dice have shields, pickaxes, chests, and yes, beer. Shields turn dragons into points, pickaxes turn cave in into points, and chests let you keep dice on certain values between rounds.

    The last type of dice is Magic Dice. These let players reroll other dice at the end of a round, but don’t score any points on their own. Also, they don’t allow players reroll Hazard Dice.

    Oh, and beer. Almost every die has a beer side. When you draft a die with a beer (or roll one from a past round) on any turn afterwards, you can reroll that die, give it to another player, and pick two dice from the mountain, including dice with only one side exposed.

    Overall, it’s a fun little drafting game, but after five or six games, I do have a problem with it. And if you were paying attention, you might have already spotted it from the way I structured my paragraphs.

    The Problem

    It’s not really worth it to try to heavily invest into more than one strategy. This is less true in two player where you might hate draft, but stays constant at other counts. Treasure wants lots of treasure. Caves needs lots of caves. Hazard and Tool only function together. Magic works as an ancillary to everything, but doesn’t give points on its own. End result: all strategic options favor “forcing one type.” And after you’ve tried all the types, games start to feel samey.

    This isn’t as true for the two player version, where individual dice picks open up options for an opponent. But at higher player counts, enough choices get made that it’s hard to control pacing.

    I do like Dice Miner, but I wish it had more to it, or at least more relationships between the types of dice. At its current level, it’s simple enough to teach to infrequent board gamers. I just wish it had more meaningful strategic options.

  • Mega Spring Meltdown 2024

    The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and various parts of my body on are strike. Must be spring! Green Mountain Gamers Mega Spring Meltdown event was this past weekend, and so I made the arduous trip up to Lebanon, NH to take part.

    As always, I’ll be talking about what I played, and a bit of what I saw. One small thing though first, if you like these write ups, follow me on Twitter and help me change the ratio of human beings to porn bots that follow me for the better.

    The Event

    Like other Green Mountain Gamers-hosted events, this was a relatively small event. It’s just a bunch of folks in a big room playing games. There are some small raffles, and a few “Play to Win” games, but that’s about it. It’s a nice cozy affair with no real lines or waiting, just games, chatting, and occasionally folks stepping out to get food.

    The Games

    I got through a pretty decent number of games, given that I showed up about four hours after the event had started. The first one was Parfum, a dice and action drafting game about creating perfume. It was fine, but I got a bit of a runaway lead early on, which did spoil some of the tension going into the latter half of the game. I like the systems, but do wish there was a bit more to do with them.

    Parfum was followed up by another dice drafting game: Dice Miner! I generally like Dice Miner, and some day I’ll actually finish my write up on it. But the long and short of it is that I enjoy it, but do wish it had more types of dice to draft. That said, I was glad to show it to a few folks who hadn’t played it before.

    What followed were the first of several games of Mottainai that I played throughout the day. Mottainai is very interesting and could be considered a follow up to Glory To Rome. It definitely will receive its own writeup at some point, but perhaps the most interesting about it is how alien it plays. I found I had a lot of success “looking for lethal” as it were, instead of trying to build out a large strategy.

    I followed Mottainai with two games that require significantly less long term planning: Trio and Ghost Blitz. Trio is what you would get if someone looked Go Fish, and said, “Okay, but what if we made it good, and fun.” It’s a clever little game about memorization and deduction, and I’ve found that it’s light enough to play with non-gamers.

    Ghost Blitz on the other hand is a genre of game I’ve traditionally been quite bad at: quick matching reaction speed. It’s simple enough to explain quickly, so here’s how it works. There are five objects, each a different color, and a deck of cards. Each card has two of the five objects on it, not necessarily the correct color. Whenever a card is flipped up, you need to grab the correctly colored object on the card, or if that doesn’t exist, grab the object not described in any way on the card (e.g. neither its shape nor its color pictured).

    I did better at it than I usually do at these sorts of things.

    Then there were a few more games of Mottainai, all of which I won fairly quickly, then the last “big” game of the day: Life of the Amazonia.

    Life of the Amazonia is a sort of “not a city” builder where you acquire terrain tiles, and place animals on them to score points, doing both of the above via a bag-builder. It’s like a deck-builder, but instead of adding cards to a deck, you add tokens to a bag. It does have one really interesting quirk: you can’t split resource tiles. This had some really interesting effects around which tokens were the best to actually get.

    Did I win? No. But was I close? Also no.

    Would I have done better if all the rules for scoring points were explained to me before the game started? Probably not, but it’s a convenient crutch to place the blame on for my failure, so let’s go with that.

    With that, it was time to clean up, and get out. Big thanks to Green Mountain Gamers for putting these events on, Resonym for prizes, and special shout out to the people who played a single game of Twilight Emperium for 9 hours.

  • Skulls of Sedlec

    Work has been incredibly busy lately. As such, this review, much like Skulls of Sedlec, is going to be incredibly compact.

    Skulls of Sedlec is an 18-card pattern building, open drafting, and set collection game. Two of those three phrases I didn’t know until I went and looked them up on Board Game Geek, and I somewhat disagree with the third. It also has 12 expansions of which I will be reviewing zero. After all, the point of a Button Shy game is to make a micro-game that fits into a wallet, not one that you can go band for band with.

    The full rules for Skulls of Sedlec are less than a page long, so I’m not going to spend too much time on the rules. The short version is that cards are divided up into piles, and on each player’s turn, that player takes one of three actions. You can:

    1. Flip two cards in piles face up, then take one of them into your hand
    2. Take a single face-up card from a pile into your hand
    3. Put a single card from your hand into a stack/tableau.

    Board Game Geek calls this game a set collection game, but I disagree. After all, most cards don’t score based on being part of a set. Instead, they score based on their relation to other cards in the pyramid. Some, like the lovers do need to be in a set to score, but many like royals or clergy have their own unique scoring rules.

    Overall, I quite enjoyed Skulls of Sedlec. It’s a very compact game, and I’m not sure I’d get more than 2-3 more plays out of it. But it’s quick enough that I feel I could teach it pretty easily, even to non-board gamers. I’ve seen a fair number of people note that they didn’t consider it worth playing without the expansions, but I found it quite enjoyable, even as a standalone.