Game Review -- Encyclopedia

When I heard the name of this game, I thought it would have to do with trivia knowledge. In reality, it's a dice-placement game.

As an assistant involved in the creation of the world's first encyclopedia, you travel the world researching animals and publishing your findings to earn prestige (and victory points.)

It took a few turns to get the hang of the game, but once I did, I enjoyed it. The dice-placement mechanic is structured so that you're torn between taking the die you really want and giving rewards to your opponents. Add to that the fact that the available dice get progressively worse and you have some really tough decisions to make. But there are so many choices on the board that you always have useful moves on your turn. If you can get animals with matching habitats or diets, you have a chance to score big, really big, in a single turn.

A few details my be off-putting to some, but they have less to do with game play and more to do with game design. For example, the cards feature pictures of animals without names, except for the Latin taxonomic name. That's no problem for my family of animal-loving encyclopedia-readers, but those who can't tell a wombat from a fruit bat might grow tired of calling every creature 'that thing.'

The names of the various sections (Expedition, Publication, Experts, etc.) should be printed on the board; it took me several turns before I could remember which was which. And the reference guides are so badly organized as to make them almost useless. But none of these things should stop you from having fun collecting your critters, sailing the world to study them, and then rushing to publish your findings, all in a mere six rounds of play. And, who knows? You might even come away knowing what a Monodon monoceros is.

By Whatsits Galore.

Game Review: Monopoly Ultimate

First, let me say that I hate Monopoly. It's light on strategy, it depends too much on trading (not my favorite game mechanic), and it benefits you after all the properties are bought to stay in jail as long as possible. But mostly because it's the game that never ends. I will only play if a time limit is set beforehand, player with the most money wins, game over.

All that changes with Monopoly Ultimate. It's your father's Monopoly, but with 3 added expansions that speed up the game and make it actually fun. Not my favourite game by any means, but fun. Here are some of the changes:

Every space is for sale, including Income Tax, Free Parking, and Go. Just Visiting now includes paying for the privilege.

The golden car (I forget the actual name and always call it the Cash Cab), which you can become temporarily, picks up properties it lands on for free.

As soon as every property is acquired, the game ends.

My favourite part: special power cards you can purchase or get for free create game chaos. With the right card, you can build houses without owning a full set of properties, or become the bank and pay fines with embezzled funds, or win the game by rolling three doubles in a row. These are powerful powers, but you lose them as quickly as you gain them to keep the game even. More or less.

The game I played still took two hours, and I didn't win, but it went by quickly because it was entertaining. And I no longer have to excuse myself when Monopoly is suggested, as long as it's the Ultimate.

Tales of a Tabletop Gamer

If you play as many tabletop games as I do, you are bound to encounter some surprising events in the course of gameplay. Here's a sample.

If you haven't played The Totally Insane Card Game, you are totally missing out. It's like Uno on steroids. Besides a host of insane cards too many to name here, there are more familiar cards like Skip and Reverse. This particular story involves the Take 2 card, just like the Draw 2, except you take from your opponents, diminishing their hands while you increase your own. In Totally Insane, when a Take 2 is played on you, you have the option of playing another Take 2 on top of it, thereby passing 4 takes to the next player.

The game in question started with a Take 2, played by my brother-in-law Tim. I played a Take 2 on top of that. The next player, instead of taking 4, played another Take 2. Cries of, "Take 8," "Take 10," and "Take 12" rang out as everyone played their Take 2 cards, going around the table more than once.

Finally, somebody was out of Take 2 cards. It was Tim, the guy that started it all, who had to take 36 cards from the rest of us, emptying all our hands and ending the round. We each scored zero. Tim scored enough to end the game on turn one. We all won, he lost.

The most amazing part is that the very same thing happened again on a different game night. We played all our Take 2 cards first thing, Tim took all the cards from our hands, lost the game in one turn, and gave the rest of us a shared victory.

Tales of a Tabletop Gamer

If you play as many tabletop games as I do, you are bound to encounter some surprising events in the course of game play. But none, I'll wager, stranger than this one.

I brought my favorite party game, Time's Up, to a church picnic and taught it to an interested group. The conversation with a teen I'll call Tony went something like this:

Me: You have to get your team to say the words on the card. It can be a movie...

Tony: Like Titanic?

Me: Right. Or a song or a book. Give clues to your team...

Tony: Like, "The movie where a ship hit an iceberg"?

Me: Yes. But don't say any of the words on the card.

Tony: Like you can't say, "In this movie, the Titanic started to sink"?

Me: Right. Okay, let's start. You go first, Tony.

(Tony picks a card)

Tony: Okay, it's a movie about a ship, and it hit an iceberg and sank.

At this point I leaned over to the player next to me and whispered, "Freaky."

Games For Sale on Board Game Geek

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Game Review -- Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

I received this cooperative tabletop game for my birthday. It would seem to be the perfect gift, since my siblings and I so enjoyed the Choose Your Own Adventure book series when it was a brand new thing.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, the CYOA books told a story in the second person, so that "you" were the protagonist. Then every few pages would end with a choice: if you open the door, turn to page 27, if you go back to the library, turn to page 42. You would make a choice, turn to the appropriate page, and continue the story. This went on until you came to an ending, but then you could go back and read the story again, make different choices, and wind up with a completely different ending.

This was amazing! A book with choices you made that turned out differently every time. And the board game does a good job of replicating that vibe. Through the use of numbered cards, you make choices that take you through different scenarios to the five stages, stopping places, really, of the story, all in your quest to solve a mystery surrounding a strange house.

It's certainly not a game of complex strategy. Some choices might be logical, but many are purely random as to whether they turn out well or badly for you. But the fact that "you" are the protagonist makes it easy to immerse yourself in the story, giving it a tingle of anxiety when you send yourself into a dangerous or frightening situation. At least it does for me as I try to imagine what I would really do if I was there. The ease of play also makes it perfect for game nights that include younger players, though we played with strictly adults.

The original book series that began so wonderfully soon degenerated into a ho-hum experience, due to many of the subsequent titles that lost sight of the elements that made the whole idea so appealing. Later books contained overlong narratives with fewer choices and unnecessary gimmicks, like endless loops, teaser pages you could never reach, and lack of bad endings. As if we kids couldn't take it when our character died from making foolish mistakes! And copycat books from other publishers were even worse. It's like they didn't "get" the appeal of the original.

And that is the one real problem with the CYOA game. It includes several failsafes to ensure that you win, that you avoid the bad endings and come to a good one. When you come to an ending where you die, and the game does include some, you are instructed to immediately go back to your last card and choose again. Why? If we die, we can take it, just like we could take it back when we read the books. Just like we can take it if we fail in any cooperative game.

Not only that, but if you happen to succesfully reach the end of a stage without having found every useful item in the game, you are given a chance to go back and search some more. Really? Why then give us choices at all if you're going to micromanage us into picking the right choice in the end?

In fact, because there is only one story in the game, the failsafes completely take away the game's replayability. And who wants to buy a game you can only play once? Oh, there is a die roll involved at times, to get you out of a dangerous situation. And it is possible to fail enough times to die. But, hey, just go back to the previous card, right? Wrong! Better to lose and then vow to play again tomorrow to show that game who's boss.

But fear not, reader. There is a simple workaround to fix this. When you die, ignore that return-to-the-last-card stuff. Dead is dead, no do-overs. And if you neglected to find the sword or the flashlight, that's your tough luck. Save it for your next trip to the House of Danger.

You'll still eventually go through every possible scenario in the game, but at least you'll have multiple plays before you do and get your money's worth of a simple, fun game to pass an hour with.

All contents are strictly my humble opinion.

My Top 10 Card Games

Ever since publishing My Top 10 Favorite Tabletop Games, I have been dissatisfied with the result. There are just too many fabulous games that had to be left out of the list. To solve that problem, I've divided the world's greatest games into categories. Here's the second: my Top 10 card games.

Dragonmaster is out of print and highly sought after. The trick-taking and not-taking mechanism resembles Hearts but is infinitely more satisfying, due to the strategical necessity of choosing the right time to play Staff of Power. And when you're through playing, you can just gaze at the artwork on the cards. Or try some of these Game Variants.

The Crew also features the strategy of taking some tricks and leaving others, but this time it's cooperative. As the crew of a space ship, you are required each mission to make sure certain players take certain cards. It's up to you to see that they do so by throwing point cards away as often as you take them. As long as you throw them to the right crew member. Nerve-wracking fun.

In Sushi Go, you pass all the hands around the table, taking one card from each. To get the right amount of tofu, you might have to pass on the eel or the tempura. Be sure to buy the Party version of the game, as it comes with more entree choices. Maki or sashimi? Decisions, decisions...

There are multiple versions of Boomerang, each representing a different part of the world. I have Boomerang Europe, so that's the version I'm going to talk about. Try to collect every country in Scandanavia before anyone else to score the bonus. Or maybe one card from every geographic area instead. But can you do it while also grabbing up the right transportation cards? You might have to sacrifice one to score the other. And then there's that final card, over which you have no control, which gives you your 'boomerang' for the round. It can make you or break you, depending on the secret card you stashed before the round began.

In 7 Wonders, you need a lot of resources to build your Pyramid, or Hanging Gardens, or one of the other Wonders of the World. Not to mention the smaller cards you build to get points. That Town Hall is so tempting, but you really should have more glass and cloth, or you'll end up buying them from your neighbor, the same guy who's going to pulverise you if you don't build up your army instead.

Don't let the gruesome theme stop you: Guillotine is good family fun. Sure, you're lining up nobles to have their noggins removed, but with cards like, "After You" and "Was That My Name?" to move victims forward or back, you'll laugh your head off.

Trumpet is out of print, but worth searching for. There are six different suits, and you decide when you win the round which one is trump. Too bad for you that the guy who wins the next round places a suit above yours. Now there are two trump suits, one higher than the other. And soon there will be three, and four, and finally, all six trumps in play. But wait, there's more. Now you can switch the suits around to try to give yourself the best hand. Better hurry and play those trump cards before somebody else relegates your stars to the bottom of the heap.

In Nimalia you lay your cards down to form a grid of animals. Each round has its own rules for scoring, so you place your cards strategically to cover certain animals or place some in pairs or rows. As the rounds progress, it gets harder and harder to score well, especially when you have three rules to follow at the same time. You'll have to make some sacrifices to get the best score.

I couldn't leave out the Totally Insane Card Game. Think Uno on steroids. Alongside the familiar Reverse and Skip cards you'll find the Totally Useless Card, the This Hand Is Dead card, and everybody's favourite, the This Is Not My Card card. Fun, frenzied, and frustrating, play can take hours or, and this really happened, about a minute and a half. And it's only sold on their official website.

In Fantasy Realms, you pick a card, discard a card to collect the most points in your hand. Every card has some point value, but they also have qualifiers. Like, that Mountain card earns an extra 50 points if you also possess a Smoke card. But the Knights are minus 8 unless paired with a Leader. The combinations are infinite and you are continually rethinking your strategy. Is it worth it to keep the Wildfire that just blanked your Rangers? Maybe you should concentrate on Army cards instead...

Disney Magic Kingdoms Game Glitches

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New Game Added to the Sherlock Holmes Board Game List

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Basil of Baker Street Gaming Miniature

One of the best ways to waste time online is found at a website called Hero Forge, where you can design your own gaming miniatures. The choices are so varied, that I was able to design this Basil of Baker Street figure from Disney's The Great Mouse Detective. The gaming is afoot!

New Time Waster -- Hero Forge

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Games You Should Be Playing

Even in a family of gaming fanatics, there are some games that stand out. These are some of the best ever:

Time's Up: Is thirty seconds enough to describe these famous people? How about with one word only? How about with no words at all?

Totally Insane Card Game: Best described as Uno on steroids.

Dixit: Blow-your-mind images make this the best by far of the Apples-to-Apples-style games. More...