Via Nebula, Islebound, and Evolution
Via Nebula: Via Nebula is a route building and pickup and deliver game, beautifully executed and easy to learn. The main focus of the game is constructing buildings, which you accomplish by transporting resources to construction sites. Problem is, you can only move resources over certain routes which aren't built yet, and most of the resources are locked. You and those playing with you will lay tiles down to create routes from the resources to your construction sites, but these tiles can only be placed on certain terrain which makes for an interesting puzzle in how to get resources where you want them to go. You also each have two workers that you can use to unlock resources which gives you points, but comes at the cost of your little guy hanging out until all of the resources that were unlocked have been moved. Buildings can be erected once you have the required resources, and they give you both points and a bonus action on the turn they're built. The game ends when the first player builds their 5th building, but the winner of the game is the one with the most points.
Via Nebula offers a simple concept with complex decision making, especially when playing with more than 2 players. There's the puzzle aspect of figuring out how to get resources to your construction site, decisions to be made as to which resources to unlock and when (especially since your opponents can access those resources once unlocked), and deciding whether to erect an easy building or hold out for one that gives more points but costs more resources to build. While it may seem like buildings will win you the game, I actually won having only constructed 3 buildings by focusing on laying tiles and unlocking resources.
One thing that stands out about Via Nebula is how beautiful the game is. The artwork is amazing, and it's a joy to play for this reason alone. While I enjoyed the game and love the way it looks, I'm not sure it's something I want in my collection. While I like the puzzle aspect of the game, I don't feel the pickup and deliver aspect of the game is enough to hold my interest over time. There's also not enough randomization in setup to make subsequent games sufficiently different (while the resources may be moved around and buildings come up in a different order, the board itself is static). I'd love to play this game again anytime, however, if someone else has a copy!
Islebound: Islebound was an interesting game, but I didn't get to play enough of it to really say too much other that I'm interested to play again but not enough to run out and get the game. You see, we played this game with a stranger, and I learned a lot about other gamers through this experience. The guy we played with (lets call him random dude) wanted to read the entire rule book before playing instead of just diving in and looking things up as we went - he claims he wants to play the game "right" and it's not the same if you don't play by the correct rules. This made for a long time spent reading rules out loud, where all me and my husband wanted to do was get to playin'. In the end, we didn't even play the game properly (missed some rules), which led to random dude deciding the game was "broken" and constantly commenting on how the game was crap.
But it sure didn't seem like crap to us! It was beautiful and somewhat engaging, at least engaging enough for me to want to play more. In the game you travel between cities with your boat and crew, and the cities allow you to perform actions such as building a building, collecting wood and fish, trading, recruiting pirates, gaining influence, etc. The game is over once a single player builds 8 buildings, but the winner is decided by victory points.
You can take over cities through warfare (using your pirates) or through diplomacy (using influence points), and doing so makes it less expensive for you to visit that city and perform its action in the future. Warfare is straightforward, dice-based, similar to exploring in Above and Below (roll dice and if you get that number or higher your pirate will be able to attack).
Diplomacy, on the other hand, is quite interesting. The way you get influence points is to collect influence cubes and put them in empty spots on an influence track. Each spot has a value assigned to it, increasing as you move up the track, but numbers are repeated (meaning there might be 3 spots for 1 influence, but only 1 spot for 6 influence). To use the influence, you remove cubes with enough value to take over a city, but the interesting part is that you can choose to do the math here in any way you like. For instance, if you want to take over a city and need 12 influence, you can remove a high value influence cube and a lot of low-value ones or remove just high value ones. Once cubes are removed, other players must place their cubes on the influence track in the spaces you emptied, so it might be in your interest to remove low-value cubes so your opponents will take these spots next, but if they don't it could be a problem for you if you're the first to get more influence and have to place your cubes there. I'm not sure I explained this well, but it was the first time I've seen something done like this in a game and I was intrigued by it and the tactics involved.
The way we played there wasn't much taking over of cities, though I suspect this is supposed to be an integral part of the game. I focused on buying buildings (mostly because I just wanted it to be over, thanks to random dude), random dude was doing random things and complaining that there wasn't enough money in the game to keep the game going (we got a rule wrong here that negatively influenced gameplay), while my husband got into a strange loop of heading to get pirates and heading home to rest, spending the entire time doing these two actions on his turn because he had a building that gave him points for every unused pirate at the end of the game. That felt strange to me, but after reading some reviews of the game it's a loop (one among a few others) that players do get into, and its up to other players to stop them (perhaps by taking over the city the player is heading to, making it more expensive for him to perform the action, or blocking him from entering the city altogether).
I found it odd the game ends when one player builds 8 buildings, but buildings are not the only path to victory. What I mean is, if I focus on buildings while no one else does and I'm the one to end the game, I might still lose because others have secured victory points through other means. Maybe I misunderstood this in my semi-play of the game, but did find that the game dragged on when there wasn't much of a race for buildings.
We ended the game early because random dude kept complaining, and he was a pain overall to be around. When he declared "this game is broken" for the Nth time (due to us getting rules wrong, not an issue of the game itself or its designer), I finally agreed and asked if we should quit after the next round and just tally up VP. Thankfully he agreed and it was over. I've never played with someone this negative, annoying, and board-game-elitist before, yet we're still talking and laughing about random guy months later so he must have really made an impression on us!
And the game made an impression on us too. We all had a good laugh once random dude was gone when one of the others asked me, "Did you really think the game was that bad?" to which I responded, "No, I really liked it actually, I just didn't like playing with him!" which resulted in an eruption of laughter and discussion of the fact we all liked the game and were afraid to say anything! We've been mulling over what we got wrong, how the game COULD be played, the potential strategies involved, and wanting to play again ever since. I'm just not intrigued enough by it to want to drop $40 on the game right now (its current Amazon price), but we might see if a local board game cafe has a copy so we could check this bad boy out again. If you get the chance, definitely try Islebound!
Evolution: This is a game that I've been wanting to play for a long time. I have a BS in Genetics and a fascination with evolutionary theory, so this seemed like a game that would be right up my alley. Luckily, North Star Games was showing Evolution at PAX West and I was very excited to get a chance to play with my husband.
But it sure didn't seem like crap to us! It was beautiful and somewhat engaging, at least engaging enough for me to want to play more. In the game you travel between cities with your boat and crew, and the cities allow you to perform actions such as building a building, collecting wood and fish, trading, recruiting pirates, gaining influence, etc. The game is over once a single player builds 8 buildings, but the winner is decided by victory points.
You can take over cities through warfare (using your pirates) or through diplomacy (using influence points), and doing so makes it less expensive for you to visit that city and perform its action in the future. Warfare is straightforward, dice-based, similar to exploring in Above and Below (roll dice and if you get that number or higher your pirate will be able to attack).
Diplomacy, on the other hand, is quite interesting. The way you get influence points is to collect influence cubes and put them in empty spots on an influence track. Each spot has a value assigned to it, increasing as you move up the track, but numbers are repeated (meaning there might be 3 spots for 1 influence, but only 1 spot for 6 influence). To use the influence, you remove cubes with enough value to take over a city, but the interesting part is that you can choose to do the math here in any way you like. For instance, if you want to take over a city and need 12 influence, you can remove a high value influence cube and a lot of low-value ones or remove just high value ones. Once cubes are removed, other players must place their cubes on the influence track in the spaces you emptied, so it might be in your interest to remove low-value cubes so your opponents will take these spots next, but if they don't it could be a problem for you if you're the first to get more influence and have to place your cubes there. I'm not sure I explained this well, but it was the first time I've seen something done like this in a game and I was intrigued by it and the tactics involved.
The way we played there wasn't much taking over of cities, though I suspect this is supposed to be an integral part of the game. I focused on buying buildings (mostly because I just wanted it to be over, thanks to random dude), random dude was doing random things and complaining that there wasn't enough money in the game to keep the game going (we got a rule wrong here that negatively influenced gameplay), while my husband got into a strange loop of heading to get pirates and heading home to rest, spending the entire time doing these two actions on his turn because he had a building that gave him points for every unused pirate at the end of the game. That felt strange to me, but after reading some reviews of the game it's a loop (one among a few others) that players do get into, and its up to other players to stop them (perhaps by taking over the city the player is heading to, making it more expensive for him to perform the action, or blocking him from entering the city altogether).
I found it odd the game ends when one player builds 8 buildings, but buildings are not the only path to victory. What I mean is, if I focus on buildings while no one else does and I'm the one to end the game, I might still lose because others have secured victory points through other means. Maybe I misunderstood this in my semi-play of the game, but did find that the game dragged on when there wasn't much of a race for buildings.
We ended the game early because random dude kept complaining, and he was a pain overall to be around. When he declared "this game is broken" for the Nth time (due to us getting rules wrong, not an issue of the game itself or its designer), I finally agreed and asked if we should quit after the next round and just tally up VP. Thankfully he agreed and it was over. I've never played with someone this negative, annoying, and board-game-elitist before, yet we're still talking and laughing about random guy months later so he must have really made an impression on us!
And the game made an impression on us too. We all had a good laugh once random dude was gone when one of the others asked me, "Did you really think the game was that bad?" to which I responded, "No, I really liked it actually, I just didn't like playing with him!" which resulted in an eruption of laughter and discussion of the fact we all liked the game and were afraid to say anything! We've been mulling over what we got wrong, how the game COULD be played, the potential strategies involved, and wanting to play again ever since. I'm just not intrigued enough by it to want to drop $40 on the game right now (its current Amazon price), but we might see if a local board game cafe has a copy so we could check this bad boy out again. If you get the chance, definitely try Islebound!
Evolution: This is a game that I've been wanting to play for a long time. I have a BS in Genetics and a fascination with evolutionary theory, so this seemed like a game that would be right up my alley. Luckily, North Star Games was showing Evolution at PAX West and I was very excited to get a chance to play with my husband.
In Evolution, you control groups of species that evolve as the game progresses. Your species start with 1 population and a body size of 1. Each round you get cards that allow you to modify your species in various ways, such as turning them into carnivores, giving them long necks so they can collect extra food, fatty deposits so they can store extra food, defenses against various other species, etc. You can also use these cards to create new species to evolve, or increase your current species' body size or population.
After everyone has managed their species, it's time to feed. Herbivores eat from the watering hole, while carnivores attack other species that have a smaller body size than them. Various card modifiers will provide more food, and the goal is to feed each species up to the number of its population. If not, or if you get attacked, your population size goes down (and your species goes extinct if the population falls below 1). At the end of the game, the person who collected the most food wins.
The thing that struck me most about the game once I started playing was that I wasn't having fun. At least, not the type of fun where I have a smile on my face and I'm engaging in lively play and discussion with those around me, and that disappointed me.
The game is incredibly interesting, and although it's an abstract game the card modifiers and population/body size elements are extremely thematic, reflecting factual evolutionary theory. All of the pictures on the cards are from real animals, and the modifiers and how the body size/population works fit with everything I've ever learned about evolution and the struggle for existence. I loved that, and yet it wasn't a game that had me enthralled other than geeking out in my own head. My husband, who didn't connect emotionally with the thematic elements and played the game simply based on what the cards said/did, was just plain bored.
But not bored because of lack of depth to the game - there's actually a ton of depth in the game. Each round you adapt your species in response to what other players are doing. Someone created a carnivore? Make sure your species is as big as or bigger so you don't get eaten. For instance, I evolved what we called a "giant amoeba" - a species with very large body size and no modifiers that I kept having to make bigger to not get eaten. If you've got more than one species and one is smaller, you might want to switch out cards to allow the bigger one to give a warning call to the smaller guy. Since each card is used for all of the various actions (modify species, provide food to watering hole, discard to create a new species, and discard to increase body size/population), each round is a struggle of deciding whether to us the modifier or discard it, and which ones to use/discard for what purpose. And every modifier is one you'll want to use, which makes it that much more difficult to let them go. You species really are adapting and evolving as the game progresses!
So much thinking and so much reaction, and yet still not very fun. I can't quite put my finger on why, though. It's a game that reaches me to the core intellectually, but just doesn't hit the "fun" button for some reason. Part of my disappointment is probably due to the lack of variety in the game. New species all start with the same cardboard sheets with holes to put your body size/population cubes in, which all look exactly alike, and all of the modifiers of one type have the same artwork, so they're exactly alike as well. The same modifier cards also kept appearing over and over, and while you'd want them for your different species, it got boring after only a few rounds. If you end up with several people choosing the same modifiers you'll have identical species, and because everything looks alike and feels the same, you don't become emotionally invested to the species you're evolving. We had to leave the game half way through to head to a panel discussion, but we were already bored of it by that point anyway. I'm pretty sure this lack of variety or attachment to your species is what made the game fall flat for us.
And yet, although I had a lot of "fun" playing Via Nebula and Islebound, Evolution is the only game that's still on my mind days later. I keep mulling over the options and combinations in my head, and want to play more just to see how the species evolve in the action/reaction tug-of-war that goes on among players.
This game is more of a cerebral experience, one where you quietly consider your strategy as others take their turns. I thought I'd really love this game, and while I'd love to play it again sometime, I'm sorry to say it's not something I want in my collection anymore.
*These are games I got to experience at PAX West. I don't own these games and have only played them once, some of them not even a full game through. These
descriptions are my interpretation of the games after having them
explained to me as we play, or having read the rules quickly. Since I have not read the full rules, it's
(highly) possible that I've explained something wrong or misrepresented a
game. Please accept my apologies in advance if this is the case!*
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