Board Game Roundup

Cry Havoc and Scythe

Cry Havoc: This game had a lot of hype around it when it was first announced, but many people came away disappointed so it fell out of favor among the masses fairly quickly.  I'm assuming it didn't do very well because you can find it for as much as 50% off in online sales.  What turned a lot of people off is the seeming imbalance among the factions of the game, and that you only get 15 turns in the whole game which is not a lot to work with.

But for me?  I was hooked on my first game - its the first game in a long time that I wanted to set up and play again immediately.  Cry Havoc is an area control game in Euro style, meaning you're not trying to kill all of your enemies or wage constant war - you're simply trying to control areas with crystals, and if you can score the most points off of these crystals you'll win at the end of the game.  But to take and maintain control of these regions with crystals, you'll have to wage constant war and kill your enemies.  The game comes with 4 very different factions that all play differently, which is where questions of imbalance come in.  Some of the factions are easier to pick up and play than others, but after 4 games I can say that it does feel balanced once you know how to play the factions (though admittedly I played the blue Pilgrims the most and haven't figure out how to win with them yet!).

Board Game Roundup

7 Wonders Duel, Imhotep, and Lord of the Ice Garden

7 Wonders Duel:  I've never played 7 Wonders, but 7 Wonders Duel is a neat little 2-player only game of tableau building.  On your turn you have 3 options: construct a wonder, or choose a building (card) from the playing field and build it if you have the resources or sell it for gold.  Your built buildings become your "city" and they provide you benefits and resources for the rest of the game, which you can use to build new buildings or wonders (this is where the tableau building comes in).  The game plays over 3 ages and there are 3 victory conditions - military, scientific, and point counting if you get to the end of Age 3.  My first game was won by a military victory, but if it had gone to the end the other player would have won with double the number of victory points I had!  7 Wonders Duel is an award-winning game that I liked quite a bit since it's easy to pick up and play and requires some thinking and planning ahead, but the person playing with me wasn't that into it, unfortunately.

Board Game Roundup

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.  

Review - Lords of Waterdeep

Man, I really wanted to be the builder.  Everyone knows I like being the builder.  At least they think I'm the builder - I bought buildings in the first three rounds to trick them, and now they're buying buildings left and right to try to stop me from getting any more.  This is a win-win situation for me, but nothing else this game is going my way.  I just finished a quest and need to pick up a new one, but only arcana and peity quests are available and I'm Durnan the Wanderer, the Lord who is hell bent on completing commerce and warfare quests.  Oh well, I gamble and place my agent on the option to reset the quests and pull 4 new ones:  arcana, piety, skullduggery, skullduggery.  Dang it!  I grab a skullduggery quest and it finally gets replaced with a commerce quest - which one of my opponents quickly snaps up and refills with another piety quest.  DANG IT!  It's my turn again, hmmm... The wizard spot is taken so I decide to recruit a cleric and smile inwardly as scowls form across my opponent's faces.  I didn't need a cleric, but they did...

Lords of Waterdeep is a game that takes placed in the Dungeons and Dragons world, but doesn't feel like D&D in any way.  It's a standalone game that I wouldn't have even known was related to D&D if it hadn't said "Dungeons & Dragons" on the box.  You don't have to be familiar with D&D to play the game and there's little back story or explanation on the cards or in the rule book, though if you're familiar with the series you'll enjoy the references on the board and throughout the quests.  

For those of you, like me, who aren't interested in D&D or want nothing to do with D&D, don't let that deter you from this excellent game. There's no role playing, no dice rolling, and completing quests isn't about telling stories, it's about collecting different colored cubes representing adventurers such as rogues, clerics, wizards, and warriors to earn perks and points. 

The way you collect cubes is through a mechanism called worker placement.  Lords of Waterdeep is my first introduction to worker placement games, and I have to say I'm a fan.  In this type of game, you put a marker on a spot to claim a specific action, and since Lords of Waterdeep limits your placement to one Agent (marker) per action it means that once claimed, no one else is able to take that action.  

Since there are only so many ways to collect cubes each round and all of your opponents have the same goal as you, it allows for passive aggressive conflict without actually having to do anything to your opponents.  It also means you have to come up with plans and backup plans to accomplish your goals, in case someone takes a spot you wanted.

Oldies but Goodies

The aMAZEing Labyrinth

Some might say we’re in the “golden age” of board games - over 5000 games were released last year alone -  but it's classic games that still dominate the market.  Connect4, Twister, Guess Who, Scrabble, and Monopoly are still in the top 20 best selling board games on Amazon, despite being around for 40 - 80 years.  These games might not get great reviews on sites like boardgamegeek, but they hold a special place in our hearts.

I was at a thrift store recently and found a game that holds that special place in my husband's heart: a Ravensburger classic, The aMAZEing Labyrinth.  As an American you may be more familiar with Ravensburger puzzles than board games, but in Europe Ravensburger is king.  Ravensburger games give Europeans the same sense of nostalgia that Hasbro or Milton Bradley games give us.  So when I found The aMAZEing Labyrinth for $2.00, I figured it wasn't a bad price to pay for nostalgia.

I hadn't heard of this game until I saw my nephews playing it in Holland, and when I asked about it my husband's response was, "What?  You've never heard of Dolhof?!?" (Dolhof = laybrinth in Dutch) It looked interesting enough; there's a maze that shifts constantly, and you're trying to get to certain places on the board and return back to your starting place before everyone else. I just had never heard of it, even though it was released in the US in 1986 and has many different versions today (including Disney versions, which proves it's legit).

So we sat down to play what I assumed was just a silly kids game, but turned out to be fun and challenging, even for adults.  Don't get me wrong, it is a silly kid's game with child-friendly figures of ghosts, spiders, knights, swords, and anything else you might find in a haunted castle, but the constantly changing layout of the maze provides a minor brain workout even if the theme falls flat.  Cards matching pictures on map tiles are dealt to each player, and the goal is to "collect" all of the items on your cards and return to your starting tile.  Sounds easy enough, right?

The challenge comes in having to move the maze every turn, and the fact that not all parts of the maze can move.  You shift the maze by sliding a tile into the end of a row, and the next player uses the tile that came out the other side to shift the maze on their turn.  Once you shift the maze you can move your piece through the hallways of the labyrinth towards your goal.  Your focus is on reaching your objective, but if your target isn't on a static board piece not only is the maze constantly shifting, your destination is shifting as well.

Add to that the fact that you're also trying to thwart your opponent's ability to travel through the maze and you've got an easy to learn game that poses more of a challenge than initial impressions imply.

You'll find yourself staring at the board for a few minutes (or maybe 10) deciding how to shift the maze and move around, and whether it's better to block your opponent or focus on your objective, or if you can do both!  You'll get frustrated by wanting to shift a static row, or wanting to shift the maze back to how it was before the last player took their turn, which isn't allowed.

I quickly learned to take advantage of a rule that says if you knock a player off of the board when shifting the maze their piece is put on the tile that was just inserted, as it provides an easy way to get to the other side of the board and still allows you to move after you're transported.  My husband's strategy is to block me in every turn if possible, so it takes me more turns to get to where I need to go.  His strategy seems to work better, because he wins more often than I do.

More than I do?  That's right, we played more than once and have played almost every day since we got the game!  It's simple, short, easy to set up and take down, doesn't require too much thought, is highly luck based (it all depends on which destination you're trying to reach next and how the maze shifts), and poses enough of a challenge to keep our interest.  What I initially thought would be a cheezy purchase that would end right back up at the thrift store is now a staple in our board game collection.

We may think of classic games as kids games, not worth our time as adults, but they're classics for a reason, able to stand the test of time and begging to be played again and again.  Don't count these bad boys out because you're a designer game aficionado, they just might surprise you from time to time.

Women Like Board Games Rating:

**Full Disclosure: I paid for this game with my own, hard earned money**