Bohnanza

Mmmm beans

Trading games are good for determining who your real friends are.  You know, the people who offer your wife cards just so she doesn’t trade with you.  Or your wife who happily accepts.  Maybe I should switch to a series on solo games.

  Publisher:

  Amigo

Designer:

Uwe Rosenberg

Elevator Pitch:

You are trying to harvest sets of beans that you have planted for gold.  Each turn you may plant and harvest beans, trade or donate cards to opponent, and draw replacements.   The key difficulty in the game is that you can never rearrange your hand, but must play cards in the order that you drew them.

Personal Impression:

Bohnanza is the type of game that is very group dependent.  Find a group that will negotiate until they “win” every trade, and it will drag on endlessly.  Or with another group of quiet and shy people and the game will be a bore.  However, in a group that enjoys dealing, but doesn’t overanalyze every opportunity, it is a blast to play. 

Good for People who Grew up Playing:

In the dirt or trading cards. 

  

Ease of Learning:

It will take some time to get into the flow of the game.  There aren’t a lot of rules to remember, but the sequence of play is unique and not always intuitive. Expect new players to break rules on the first few turns until they get the hang of it.

Fidgety Index

Nope.  All you get is cards and you can’t ever rearrange them.

Universal Theme:

You are planting beans!  I can feel your excitement through the interwebs.  Sadly, even those who appreciate a good stalk will not find this game overly thematic

Player Count and Length:

2 to 7.  The two player variant is fun, but it is almost a completely different game from its brethren.  3-7 all work fine, but more players leads to more interaction.  Game speeds up considerably in later rounds and you should be able to finish within 45 minutes or so.

Expansions:

There are numerous expansions, but many of them are only in German and I haven’t played any of them, so I can’t give much advice here.

Spin Offs:

Uwe Rosenburg has designed many other Bohanza and bean games well, also with the majority in German.  However, in this case I have and thoroughly enjoyed one of them, Wurfel Bohnanza.  This is a simple dice game that other than the name has nothing to do with the base Bohnanza.  What it does do is provide players a strong reason to pay attention to the dice other players roll, which makes it more interactive and interesting than many of its brethren.  

Introducing the Game to New Gamers: 

Pay attention to make sure they are following all the rules.  Agree to any trade that is at least neutral for you.

Apps:

I was excited that there was a Bohnanza app before quickly remembering this is the type of game that makes a terrible application.  The app failed to live up to my limited expertise, so I deleted it off my phone after a couple of plays. 

Links:

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Dominion

My Dominion Storage System

Dominion takes the concept of building a deck and makes it into a game. Way cooler an invention then figuring out how to slice bread.

Publisher:

Rio Grande Games

Designer:

Donald Vaccarino

Elevator Pitch:

Each game of Dominion is a puzzle:  Which cards should you buy, and in which frequency to make the most efficient deck possible.  Then when to switch to buying victory cards which are worthless in your deck, but do make you win.

Personal Impression:

Most of my Boston gaming life, and a good deal of my social circle, can be traced directly to my first game of Dominion.  Which means that I would really be thankful for Dominion even if I didn’t like it, but  Dominion is my favorite game.  I have always loved building decks and Donald Vaccarino built a game that revolves around it, which is incredibly elegant yet dynamic.  Cards that are worthless in one setup, can be incredible in the next.  With expansions there are trillions of game setups that can be used, yet the game has and needs no errata.  There have been many copycats of Dominion, but playing them mostly makes me wonder why I’m not playing Dominion instead.  I don’t get to play it as much as I used to, but I’m always happy to play.  In fact, I run periodic tournaments for it, which are mostly an excuses to play a full day’s worth of Dominion.

*Conveniently named Periodic Dominion Tournaments

Good for People who Grew up Playing:

Magic or other collectible card games.  

  

Ease of Learning:

The basic rules of Dominion are pretty straightforward, though the timing of when you do things can be a little confusing if you haven’t played similar games before.  Most of the complexity is in what cards you use (you pick 10 kingdom cards to play with each game), so you can choose how difficult you want the game to be.  There is the added difficulty that after you learn how cards work, you will likely be using at least some different ones in the next game.

Fidgety Index

How much do you like shuffling?  If the answer is constantly you are in luck.  Expansions add some more little shiny things to play with.

Universal Theme:

As much as I like remodeling villages into mines, Dominion is one of those theme in name only games.  Reading the thematic text in the rule books, though is highly amusing.

Player Count and Length:

2-6 though I wouldn’t recommend 6.  It varies depending on cards used and player’s analysis paralysis tendencies.  Let’s say 20-45 minutes with perhaps another 10 minutes to setup and take down the cards.

Expansions:

I am morally obligated to buy every Dominion card ever made.  Your god may not require such an obligation, but still having an expansion or two will greatly increase replay-ability and strategic depth.  The base games is not as well balanced as future sets, which allows for some boring strategies to prevail.  Basically any expansion fixes this problem.

Intrigue:  The first expansion and the only one to include all the base cards, which allows it to be playable out of the box.  When combined with the base set it allows for up to 6 players if you want (you don’t).  It adds interactivity which is good, but some of that comes in crippling attacks, which can be less enjoyable.  It also introduces cards with multiple choices.  

Seaside: Seaside provides cards that affect the current turn as well as the next, called duration cards.  Once you understand the duration mechanic, the cards are simple to use.   If you are going to get one expansion, this is the one I’d recommend.

Alchemy:  The most controversial expansion, Alchemy is a mini-expansion that provides another currency called potions. It features some powerful game changing cards, though the changes aren’t always fun.

Prosperity:  Essentially, Dominion on steroids.   Prosperity lets you do insane things as you go for platinum and colonies.  It is great fun, though you will probably appreciate it more if you play some other sets first.

Cornucopia:  A mini-expansion that encourages variety, so it’s good if you are the type of player who likes to try everything.

Hinterlands: Has cards that have an effect when acquired.  This originally was going to be a starter set, so the cards are on the more basic side.

Dark Ages:  The last expansion designed before Donald Vaccarino was done.  It is filled with cards that change into other cards or have trash or upgrade related effects.  And Rats.  A huge set and a fairly complex one, so including them can slow the game down dramatically even for experienced players.

Guilds:  Designed before Dark Ages, but released after, guilds is a mini set that features cards you can overpay for and cards that let you save up money.  It is fun, but the fact that you can pay any number for specific cards greatly increases the amount of options.

Adventures:  The first after Donald Vaccarino decided he wasn’t actually done making Dominion Expansions.  Donald originally planned on making Dominion spinoffs, but mostly gave up on that idea.  Instead he threw everything in here.  This is the kitchen sink expansion.  Fun, but probably not for a new player.

Base Cards:  The money and victory cards of dominion with alternate art.  These allow multiple games to be played by different groups simultaneously, or for the expansions to be played without first acquiring the Original set or Intrigue.

Promos: A half a dozen or so other kingdom cards.  I especially like the black market, though it is a pain to setup.

Spin Offs:

There are hundreds of deck buildings game now.  With few exceptions, when these other games, I wonder why I'm not just playing Dominion.

Introducing the Game to New Gamers: 

Choose a simple set that has a little of everything.  Try the crazy strategy you always wanted to try rather than the most efficient.  Avoid buying devastating attack cards.  Buy cards your opponents aren’t to show how they work.  Try not to end the game before opponents’ decks can get going.

Apps:

Once upon a time there was a website named isotropic.  It was free and glorious and I spent countless hours playing thousands of games there.  Then it went away and was replaced by something less free and far less wonderful.  To give you an idea of the problems, in the current app, which has been years in the making, you have to purchase in-game currency to buy expansions, but the units of the in-game currency you can buy do not match expansion prices, forcing you t overpay already ridiculous prices.  Of course if the product was good,  I'd pay whatever the cost.  It is not, it is terrible, lacking standard features like ability to play offline.   Thus ended my online play of Dominion.  There are some knock off apps (Android has a pretty good one) to hold you over until the Dominion license reverts to someone who knows what they are doing.  

Links:

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Dominion Strategy

Pandemic

Looks like a good time to go on long trip to Asia

 Or as it is referred to in our household, “World Go Boom!”  Pandemic is co-op game which means all players are on the same team trying to defeat the game itself.  It is good for individuals who are not that competitive or those that want to join a mob to strike down colored cubes. 

Publisher:

Z-Man Games

Designer:

Matt Leacock

Elevator Pitch:

There are diseases spreading around the world that threaten humanity.  That is bad.  Mostly.  Like 99.7% bad.  Your job is to, with your fellow players, race around world slowing down the spread of the diseases while also developing cures.  Cure all four diseases before any number of bad things happen you win, but if too many outbreaks occur, one disease gets to prevalent, or you run out of time, you don’t.

Personal Impression:

One of the things I like about games is that give a focus to my competitiveness.  While I have developed a number of rivals and frenemies over the years, not everyone wants to be cutthroat.  And as experience has shown me, crushing my wife at games is definitely not worth the long term consequences.  Pandemic and other co-ops allow me turn that competitiveness away from my opponents and on to the game itself.  While there are a lot more co-op games out there now, Pandemic remains a star.  Highly thematic and engaging, you are filled with tense decisions as you go from coasting along, to utterly hopeless and back again several times throughout the game.  Variable player powers and card randomization allow each game to feel different with expansions adding even more variety.  

Good for People who Grew up Playing:

Team based games and sports.

  

Ease of Learning:

Pandemic is on the more complex side for a gateway game.  Some of the game play steps, like shuffling used cards and putting them back on top of the deck, are unusual if you haven’t played this type of game before.  Pandemic also has a very tight rule set, so one mistaken rule can cause the game to be super easy or impossible.  On the bright side, an experienced player should be able to take care of the setup and game flow, leaving new players only to worry about what actions they need to take, which is pretty straightforward.

Fidgety Index

There are lots of cubes though they aren’t too interesting to play with. 

Universal Theme:

Pandemic oozes theme.  You can feel the pain of the poor infected people of Santiago as you leave them to die lonely deaths while you take care of outbreaks in Eastern Europe.  Plus there are vials!  And petri dishes!

Player Count and Length:

2-4. Fine in any count, but it little more difficult with more players.  Game lasts about an hour and a half, but it can be much shorter if you die horribly early on.

Expansions:

Pandemic expansions are mainly modular, which lets you pick and use the parts of them you are interested in and ignore the rest.

On The Brink adds purple cubes which can be used for game variants.  We use these occasionally to change the game up and increase difficulty.  Mostly though we use the new roles and events of the expansion to increase variety.  Brink also adds rules for a bio-terrorist who plays against the rest of the players.  For us this changed the feel of the game too much to be worth using.  Finally, it includes rules for 5 players.

In the Lab takes the very simple cure action of the base game and makes it much more involved.  It makes the game even more thematic and allows for some tough decisions, but the added complication might scare off players. 

State of Emergency adds some more challenging ways to play.

Spin Offs:

Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert are similar games to Pandemic also designed by Matt Leacock.  They are in many way simpler versions of Pandemic which makes them good introduction games for children or non-gamers.

Pandemic Contagion lets you play as the disease trying to wipe out humanity.  It is the only Pandemic game not designed by Leacock and thus the most different.

Pandemic the Cure is a dice version of the game.  It is more portable and faster to setup and play.  It is more random than its big brother diminishes the Alpha player problem.  Highly recommended.

Pandemic Legacy Season One is the newest Pandemic game.  The game comes in two versions, red and blue.  They are different in that one has a red box and one has a blue box.  A legacy is a game system in which your actions in one game affect future games.  You play a series of 12-24 games with a narrative that ties them together.  There are hidden elements of the game that only get revealed when certain conditions.  Thus far the game is wildly popular, reaching the status of number #1 rank on board game geek.  We are currently in August of our campaign, and while my personal ranking doesn’t have it quite that high, Legacy adds a compelling narrative arc and many surprises to an already great game, so there is little to complain about.

Introducing the Game to New Gamers: 

Most criticisms of Pandemic revolve around the concept of the Alpha player.  An alpha player is a person when the most experienced or aggressive player at the table tells everyone else to do.  Since in Pandemic everyone is one the same team and there is little player specific hidden information, it is susceptible to this problem.  Thus your job as a teacher is to make sure everyone makes their own decisions, even if they are suboptimal.  You can provide options or rationales, but do not tell players what actions they must take. 

Apps:

There is an ipad version of the game, which is okay.  The graphics and mechanics are fine, but it doesn’t give me the same excitement to beat it as when it is on the table.

Links:

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10 Days in

Beautiful is a Swahili word meaning hideously ugly.

10 Days is a series of games containing pretty yet functional maps.  They even included small countries that are not playable to increase accuracy of geographical renditions.   When buying the Africa version, I ended up unwittingly getting a version called "Beautiful Africa."  It is the same game as 10 Days in Africa, but with different art.  Art that is both ugly and non- functional as the colors are inconsistent and difficult to distinguish.  10 Days is always easy to get to the table, except the black sheep pictured above.

Publisher:

Out of the Box

Designer:

Alan Moon, Aaron Weissblum

Elevator Pitch:

You are attempting to go on a ten day trip, where each day's journey is connected to the next.  You start by drawing ten tiles and placing them, one at a time, each into a specific day of your journey.  Then each turn you draw a tile and may use to replace a tile.  The difficulty lies in the fact that you can never shuffle tiles around, so it can be trickier to get things to line up in the order you want.  

Personal Impression:

10 Days is a perfect filler to spend 20 minutes on at the beginning or end of a game night   It is an educational game done right.  You get some interesting choices and get to plan a trip albeit one that you usually wouldn’t want to go on.  Or perhaps you would like play it twice within 40 minutes.  Or three times within..

Good for People who Grew up Playing:

Rummy

Ease of Learning:

Pretty simple even for a gateway game.  Most players should pick up the rules within a couple of minutes. The challenge here is that everyone’s game board is secret, so if a player is misunderstanding a rule it can be difficult to tell.

Fidgety Index

Not a whole lot to play with, but you can stare your route or the pretty maps and make travel plans.

Universal Theme:

Most people enjoy planning trips and you can learn geography along the way.  One of these times, I'll even be able to place Lithuania on a map.

Player Count and Length:

2-4. Works fine for all count, though can drag a little with 4 players when everybody needs tiles that are already taken.  Still it should never take more than 30 minutes to play and is more often 15-20.

Expansions:

None

Spin Offs:

There are five 10 Day games, USA, Africa, Asia, Europe, and The Americas.  They all have similar mechanics, though there are a couple of rule tweaks or transportation option changes depending on the set.  They are minor so just choose the area of the world you are most interested in.  If you are feeling particularly crazy, you can combine maps and play 20-40 days around the world.  It is fun to fly across continents, though it takes far longer to find that tile you are looking for.  If you want the same mechanics without the geography you can play Racko instead, which replaces countries with numbers.

Introducing the Game to New Gamers: 

If possible, start with a map where players are familiar with the geography.  Make sure all rules are clearly understood before beginning play.  Watch for strange plays, and if able have a non-participant keep an eye on the novices. 

Apps:

None

Links:

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