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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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I know that Quarriors was one of the big games of last year. There was plenty of love and hate for it and it was kind of hard to not notice it. Back when I was a part of the Cult of the New, I would have snatched up Quarriors so fast that the metal of the box would have been red hot. However, between being burned by hype in the past and trying to be more fiscally responsible, I didn’t pick Quarriors up and, for the longest time, neither did anyone else I know.
Fortunately for me, another friend got Quarriors as a gift for another friend. So I didn’t have to actually buy the game to find out what it was like. Amusingly enough, I was the one who had to take Quarriors off the shelf, read through the rules and teach the game so I could actually find out what it plays like 
Last weekend, that’s exactly what I did and three of us got to find out what makes Quarriors tick.
And, having gone through that experience, I’m not sure what to think of the game.
Quarriors has been billed as a deck-building game that uses dice instead of cards. And, I would say that is a fair description of the game. You have stacks of dice that are color coordinated (which I was able to cope with, despite my color-blindess) and you use a dice bag as your draw-pile, which does make shuffling easier than falling off a log and less painful too.
I’m not going to go over the rules of the game. I have a sneaky feeling that most of the folks reading this have played Quarriors a lot more than I have  But I will talk about my initial impressions of the game.
First of all, as a mechanical exercise, it definitely seems to work. All the bells and whistles seem to fit together well and the pieces click together in a way that makes the game move well. We all had a good time playing it.
HOWEVER (and you knew there was going to be a however), I am honestly not sure if Quarriors has legs, at least as far as I’m concerned. (Since the game has sold quite well and expansions have already come out, clearly come folks want to play lots and lots of it) I’ll also admit that some of my concerns about the replay value of the game come from comparing it to other deck-building games I’ve played.
Okay. I’m going to do something completely unfair. I’m going to compare Quarriors to Dominion. They are two different games and asking one to be like the other is not making a fair assessment. And, no, I’m not going state that playing a card offers you more control than rolling a dice. When you pick up Quarriors, you pick up a ton of dice. You know that there’s an additional random element going in through the door. Get over it 
No, my gripe about Quarriors in comparison to Dominion is that the dice, for the most part, seem to all do the same kind of thing. Summon up a monster with the goal of fighting with that monster one way or another (offensively or defensively) and then cashing it in for points. Maybe I have not explored the depth and variety of the spells and monsters but Quarriors felt like it had a lot more rinse-and-repeat. It seems like, underneath the possibilities, buying the critters that are worth the most and hoping the dice love you seems to be the word of the day.
Having said that, Quarriors was still a fun game to play and there’s no denying that rolling the dice adds a lot of fun tension to the play. And it took a few plays of Dominion to realize that Big Money didn’t equal Big Winner. Since everyone had fun, I figure we’ll be able to get Quarriors back on the table and only by playing it more will I find out if my concerns are real.
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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As I have mentioned before, Super Duper Games is an awfully convenient way to try out games that I might otherwise not get a chance to play. While I could cobble most of the games on the site together without much problem, it’s a lot easier to entice folks into trying out a game that has plenty of chrome and colorful packaging. There is also the fact that most of the games on the site are pure abstracts and those tend to offer a quieter, slower kind of fun. Playing a move or two a day works for me when it comes to games like that. (Playing a move a day on, say Dominion, on the other hand, would get old fast)
Lately, I’ve been trying out games I’ve never actually played before on Super Duper, inspired in part by stumbling onto Alfred’s Wyke and finding that to be an interesting, if strange, game.
Amazons is one of those games. (I swear I’m not being paid anything by Super Duper. I just have been playing a lot of games there lately) Unlike Alfred’s Wyke, which is a game whose mechanics really do seem to coming from out of left field, Amazons is a game whose rules seem to come out of the conventional move-and-block school. That said, it’s a classic example of a game whose rules can be spelled out in a few sentences but are open to some juicy decisions.
Each player has four queens on a ten by ten grid. They’re called queens because they move like chess queens. On your turn, you must move one of your pieces, which then fires an arrow in any direction, also like a chess queen. The arrow’s landing point becomes a null point. There is no capturing or moving through either another queen or an arrow’s landing point. You win by making sure that your opponent has no moves to make.
As I have already said, Amazons is a game of move and block, move and block. The rules and the goal are both easy to understand. There aren’t any exceptions and there really don’t seem to be exceptions. Something I try to always look for is if there is a way to break a game, to see if there is a way to derail it. As near as I can tell (and lord knows I’m not an expert), Amazon seems to stand on its own without any problems.
When a game is as brutally simple as Amazons, the twist has to make the game original and interesting. In this case, the twist is the arrow. As the game progresses, more and more of the board becomes impassable wasteland. Not only do the positions change from move to move, the board itself is morphing and changing. The board is shrinking and the game becomes about coping with and using negative space. There can never be a stalemate or an indefinite game. Eventually, even with theoretically perfect play, the board will be swallowed up.
The two games that Amazons really reminds me of are Hey, That’s My Fish and TAMSK. While it is simpler than either of those games, both games are about an incredibly shrinking board and a shrinking number of possible plays. Both of those games are all about limiting your opponent and locking them in. And, since the rules for creating negative space are more flexible, Amazons makes the vanishing board a very dynamic and hard-to-predict element.
Amazons isn’t a game that I’m going to try and play every day. So far, it feels well balanced and seems to have a lot of room for clever play. However, it doesn’t quite set my world on fire. Even for someone who likes abstracts as much as I do, it is pretty abstract. That said, I am still impressed with Amazons. It is a clean and simple design that allows for a lot of different possibilities.
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about how I accidentally clicked on a game of Sticky Fingers on Yucata and ended up learning a game that I hadn’t even heard of before. Being the kind of guy I am, I did my best to learn the rules and play through the game. Apparently that’s a bad habit of mine since I ended up in a game of Alfred’s Wyke on Super Duper Games in the same way!
Super Duper Games is a haven for obscure and curious games. Most of the games are pure abstracts (which are perfect for its turn-based system) and many of them are use systems like Piece Pack or Looney Pyramids or were clearly developed using Go or Chess or Mancala boards. You can usually see exactly where the designer was coming from, not that that’s a bad thing. Reinventing the wheel is not a crucial part of designing a new car.
Alfred’s Wyke, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish. It’s a quirky little game that isn’t really like anything I’ve ever seen before.
While in reality, the game is as abstract as Checkers, the theme is that of a struggle between the Saxons and the Norwegians . One player is a Saxon builder, trying to build a group of reinforced houses. The other player is the Norwegian Viking, trying to completely tear down a group of houses to the ground. The name comes from the fact that Wyke is an archaic term for a row of houses.
The board is a four by four grid. Each square of the grid is broken down into a smaller four by four grid. Each smaller space starts off with a tile in it. (Two of the corners have an empty space but this is just a rough overview. Heck, the rules are free for anyone to look at if you want the nitty gritty details) The builder adds tiles, trying to create squares that are 2x2x2 (Yup, this games uses the third dimension and stacking), while the destroyer tries to remove every last tile from a square. Once a square is either completely full or utterly empty, the appropriate player claims it and there’s no further mucking about with it.
The goal is to claim either a line or block of squares or just plain claim more squares than the other guy.
So far, Alfred’s Wyke sounds like a fairly simple game. In fact, if the rules ended here, it sounds like a set-up for indefinite stalemate. But wait. It gets far, far more interesting and kooky.
You see, each turn you can choose one of five different placement options that determine how many tiles you can put down AND how many squares you put them on. 1-1-1-1-1, for instance means you are placing five tiles but they all have to be in different squares while 3-1 means you place three tiles in one square and one in another. Oh, but it gets better. You can’t use either the option that your opponent just used OR the one that you last used. So you have to choose from a constantly changing list of three options, all while considering what your choice leaves open for your opponent.
In the end, while there is not a single random element in the game, Alfred’s Wyke is a game that plays and develops in strange and curious ways. It’s definitely quirky and I have yet to figure out how to really read the board more than one move ahead, if I’m lucky.
How good is it? I’m honestly not sure yet. Alfred’s Wyke has never been put out as a boxed game. The rules were published in Games Magazine a few years back but I kind of suspect that Super Duper Games might be the real reason the game is still in circulation and not gathering dust, completely forgotten. It’s definitely a seriously obscure game, even if you could just play it with some scrape paper and scrabble tiles.
However, I can say this. While I accidentally ended up in my first game, it intrigued me enough that I went back for more.
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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As geeky as I am, perhaps it was inevitable that I should have a particularly game-centric bachelor party. That’s certainly what I asked for when my friends asked me what I wanted for it
With our wedding day fast approaching, it looked like I might not even bother having a bachelor party. After all, a big part of the last couple weeks before a wedding should be spent running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to deal with all the little details that slipped past you. Thank goodness for check lists and computerized calendars that will give you nudged to remind you to do stuff!
However, we’re getting married in her parents’ home town and many of my friends won’t be able to make it. (Come to think of it, a number of her friends won’t be able to make it either. Let’s not make it all about me ) So having a party where the folks who can’t make it could see me off from the single life was a good thing and a couple of my groomsmen made it happen.
All I asked for was a good steak dinner and a night of board games and that is indeed what I got 
My friends took me out to a Brazilian steakhouse, which is essentially an all-the-meat-you-can-humanly-eat experience… You know, there’s at least a couple good board game ideas in that, be it either being a waiter trying to keep up or a customer trying to get the maximum gorging experience. This one had a wine steward on a flying trapeze (because, you know, a normal rack would just be boring) and my friends arranged for us to get a table in full view of that, which made us wonder what was on the top of the two-story shelf and how much would it cost.
Back at the host’s house, we started a Dominion table for them that wanted Dominion and a second table that had rotating games. To be honest, the more hardcore gamers tended to stick to the Dominion table while the games at the other table tended to be lighter. Since more people rotated through that table, I stuck to that. Plus, the host prides himself on mixing drinks that are so strong that they make reading the print on Dominion cards tricky
We got in a number of games of Ascension since the iPad has turned quite a few of my friends into addicts and I got to try out Forbidden Island for the first time. I really wouldn’t call it so much of a dumbed-down version of Pandemic as a stream-lined one with enough differences to make it distinct. I do like how everyone has to get back to the chopper to win the game. I think that makes for a tenser end-game.
Of course, it was a party so we had some party games. That is to say, I made sure that we had a couple games that everyone in the room could play together. Alas, that didn’t mean Advanced Civilization but we did get in a game of Saboteur and, as the evening winded down, we played several rounds of Slide 5.
I know, I know. A proper bachelor party should have hookers and cocaine and embarrassing tattoos and should end with someone’s car on fire and everyone in jail. We fell well short of that ideal However, it was the bachelor party that I wanted
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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I’m always on the outlook for new venues to play games, particularly online. While nothing beats playing a game face-to-face with real plastic and wood and cardboard, it is often a lot easier to play games online than in real life. Heck, sometimes online is the only way I can get gaming in. I know I am swamped by work when I find myself signing up for more and more games on SuperDuper Games
For all that, I tend to be kind of conservative when it comes to my online gaming. I tend to stick to tried and true sites, like BSW or Yucata or Isotropic and the like. More than anything else, what I look for is an active and friendly community. Even when you’re playing online, the most important thing still ends up being the people you play with. SuperDuper might be in eternal beta mode and the graphic displays may give me flashbacks of my dad’s Apple IIe but the community is awesome
When the iSO Board Games blog included a link to Happy Meeple, I decided to check it out. I’ve found that that the iSO blog usually gives good advice and I was also intrigued by the fact that they were recommending a web site as opposed to an app. Sure, the reason was that Happy Meeple could be used on a tablet or other mobile device but that still caught my eye.
I’ve only dabbled my toe in the waters of Happy Meeple and I’m not yet sure what to think.
Happy Meeple is a meta-environment that allows you to play four different games. However, the environment itself is a game. You have to use achievements and resources in order to unlock two of the games, as well as earn the right to play against high level robots and online opponents.
To be honest, that kind of environment is not what I look for in a game site. I want to be able to sit down and play the game, not play another game in order to be able to play the game. Also and this might just be me being too dumb to find it, I can’t find a FAQ to explain how resources are generated. I have a map with a couple of buildings but I don’t actually know what the buildings do
That said, the meta-game doesn’t seem that complicated and if I wait a couple days, I have a feeling that I’ll be able to see what resources generate and figure things out. And while I cannot yet play Level X or the Keltis Card Game, I can play Lost Cities and Finito.
And that is where the real meat of the site is, at least for me. What is the interface of the actual games like and how easy is it to get a game going?
I have played a ton of Lost Cities over the years and I think they did a really solid job on the interface. It is easy to use and the fact that I’m colorblind wasn’t a problem at all. I have never played Finito before but the tutorial made a simple game simple to learn. I’m not honestly sure what I think of the game since every game of it I have played has ended in a draw but the site makes the game easy to play.
So they get a gold star on the interfaces.
As near as I can tell, when you request a game, the site spends ten seconds searching for an online opponent for you. If it can’t find one for you, you get sent one of the robots, which admittedly seem to be pretty sharp when it comes to playing Lost Cities and apparently come in a variety of styles. In addition, I didn’t see any kind of dialogue bar so you could actually communicate with your opponent, which is a black mark for me.
While I would prefer a system that would let me challenge folks or let me know who my pool of potential opponents are, I will give Happy Meeple this: they are set up to keep your waiting time to a minimum.
As I already said, I have only spent about a day prodding Happy Meeple to see how it works. I honestly don’t know what I think yet and I don’t know what assumptions about the site I have wrong. They have done a good job making the site accessible so I know I’m going to poke at it some more before I decide if it is going to be a regular stop for me.
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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Oddly enough, Sticky Fingers is a game that I stumbled across completely accidentally. Literally. I had been trying to join a game of Six on Yucata and accidentally clicked into a game of Sticky Fingers instead. Under the circumstances, I did what anyone would have done. No, not forfeit the game but do my darnedest to learn the game as we went along.
Yes, I lost terribly, particularly because I didn’t quite get how to fence stolen goods but the experience was enough for me to look into actually getting a copy of the game.
Last night, I brought the game to my usual gaming cronies. We went over the rules and played the game. We nodded out heads and then played the game again.
Sticky Fingers is a worker placement game about being a bunch of scoundrels and burglars. Actually, I’m just taking the rules’ word that the players are scoundrels but you are definitely burglars. The whole point of the game is break into homes and museums, steal stuff and then sell said stuff for sweet lucre.
Sticky Fingers may be the most bare bones worker placement game I have ever played. There are five areas on the board: The City, where you can get tools; the Villa, where you can use said tools to break and get a loot card; the Ruins, where you can discard tool cards to randomly draw more; the Museum that has even more loot cards for you to steal; and the Harbor, where you can fence said loot.
Since it’s a worker placement game, you already know that there are only so many positions in each area for players to take and there’s an even more limited number of cards in each location. If you have ever played a worker placement game, the bare bones mechanics of the game will feel like a pair of comfortable old sneakers. Easy to slip on and run with.
The game revolves around the aforementioned loot cards. Each card requires a different combination of tools for you to gaffle it and each fence will only buy a few very specific kinds of loot. And loot is the only way for you to get cash and cash equals points, which are what you need if you want to win the game.
If you’ve played Agricola or Stone Age or Carson City or Pillars of the Earth or quite a few other games, Sticky Fingers is going to feel awfully familiar to you. In fact, it will seem awfully simple as well. The basic process of the game is tools -> loot -> fence -> points. There are a few tweaks, like every player card is also a tool which doesn’t get discarded and the loot cards with chests on them are auto-points and don’t have to be fenced, but that’s the game in a nutshell.
In a lot of worker placement games, you are trying to create your own engine and keep it going to generate resources and points. In Sticky Fingers, the engine is the game board and you are just fighting for control of it with the other players.
Sticky Fingers isn’t the best worker placement game I’ve ever played. However, it is still a lot of fun and definitely shows that stripping the concept down to the most basic gears can still create a lean, mean, worker placement machine. It definitely has some virtues beyond the fact that the box is small enough to take anywhere and the game easily clocks in at under an hour, even with analysis paralysis.
The two things that Sticky Fingers has in spades and keeps the tension high is scarcity and gambling. Scarcity, of course, is the bread-and-butter of worker placement games. After all, everyone is fighting for the same pool of resources. However, unlike, say, Agricola where you can start to generate your own resources, Sticky Fingers keeps the cards scarce throughout the entire game. You spend the entire time starving and fighting over scraps.
The gambling comes from the fact that you have to steal something before you got to look at the other side of the card to find out what it is worth and from the desperate but much needed Ruins that let you discard and draw. There is just enough hidden information that the winner in both the games I played the other night came from behind to claim the victory. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over but, boy, you’ll know when it’s over when the smoke clears.
Sticky Fingers may not be my first choice if I’m reaching for a worker placement game but it is still one I’ll reach for.
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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In my last blog, I wrote about Metro, a tile-laying connection game that I sort-of-like and I sort-of-dislike. I like it just enough to not get rid of it but I think it definitely has some issues.
However, there is another game in my collection that almost seems like a clone of Metro that had some genetic damage done during the cloning process that I have enjoyed quite a bit more: Tsuro. While Tsuro is much prettier than Metro (which isn’t a knock against Metro but just an observation that Tsuro is a gosh darn pretty game), it is simpler in almost every way.
On the off chance that you don’t know how to play, Tsuro is a mega-simple connection game. In fact, it is just about the simplest one that I am aware of. Players use square tiles to create a twisted maze of lines, all alike, moving their own little stone marker along. It is rather like charting the path of flowing water down channels. A stone must continue down the same channel as the tiles extend it. If a stone leaves the edge of the board or meets another stone, they have a severe existence failure. The goal of the game is to make sure that everyone else has an terminal experience before you do.
While the games have a lot of similarities, there are some key differences. In Metro, players have several routes that they are looking after, they can place their tiles anywhere as long as it continues _some_ path, and the winner is determined by score. In Tsuro, players are looking after only one route, they can only continue their own path and the winner is simply the last guy standing.
Metro is definitely the deeper and more complicated of the two games. Tsuro is almost pure fluff and can be described as a filler game without any argument, other than the fact that filler is a questionable label for a game. (I prefer the term appetizer or light snack myself) Metro, while still light, is heavy enough to edge into entrée territory. You would never make Tsuro the focus of a game night. You could make Metro the focus of a casual or time-strapped game night.
Normally, these things would actually weigh in Metro’s favor. It is the deeper game that offers more choices. However, there are two simple things in Tsuro that simply make the game more enjoyable for me.
The big one is that every tile you place has to affect your own position. Sure, you can muck about with other players’ positions but you can’t blithely make moves that only hurts the other guy. Every move you make will move you along an increasingly crowded board. Putting yourself into a position to hurt someone else opens you up to being hurt in return. The difference alone I feel improves Tsuro over Metro to an astonishing degree.
The other difference is that in Metro, you can be virtually eliminated but still have to be a part of the game. In Tsuro, there is nothing virtual about the elimination. When you get eliminated, you are out of the game period. I’m not the biggest fan of player elimination but in Tsuro’s case, it works.
I don’t honestly believe that Tsuro was designed as a remake of Metro. Connection games are a pretty universal idea. But it does feel like someone stripped Metro down to the basics to me and came up with a game that my friends ask for by name.
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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Over the last year or so, I made the transition from simply grabbing every game that caught my eye and stuffing my game closet until games bulged out to starting to cull games from my collection and actually focus on keeping games that would actually see play. I know some folks who go through regular binge and purges of their game collection but I think, in my case, it’s really more of a settling in.
Naturally, there were some games that I automatically kept and there were other games that went out the door without any hesitation. But, as you can well imagine, there were plenty of borderline cases that I actually had to think about. Sometimes size was the determining factor. After all, it’s a lot easier to find space for a deck of cards than a large box. Sometimes it came down to remembering if other folks had fun playing the game.
In general, once I made my decision to get rid of game, I stood by it. However, there were a couple of games that, after some serious consideration, I went back and fished out of the goodwill bag. There were usually good reasons for me to get rid of a game but it turned out there were better, or at least stronger, reasons for me to keep them.
Metro was one of those few games that had been in the outgoing box but ended up being saved.
I have long had an uneasy relationship with Metro. Unlike some of the other games that ended up getting saved, I would describe it as a mechanically solid game. There is nothing broken or flawed about it. Metro is an easy game to teach with intuitive rules and it’s also a game that offers enough choices that there isn’t necessarily an obvious best choice.
If I were to look at Metro as a thought exercise, I’d say that it was a simple but well balanced tile-laying game that enough little touches and tweaks to stand on its own as a unique and singular game. Heck, if the incredibly basic Very Clever Pipe Game makes the cut for me, Metro should have no problems making the cut.
No, in all honesty, my problems with Metro are with the spirit of the game. Or, more precisely, the spirit that the game seems to be played.
Metro is one of those games where you are creating your own route and the longer the route is, the more points it is worth than when it’s completed. However, you can choose to add tiles to your opponents’ paths instead, shutting them down. And, for some reason, that makes the game seem mean spirited to me.
There is certainly nothing wrong with making plays to hurt your opponents. Heck, I enjoy playing games where that’s the whole point. You don’t win a game like Memoir 44 by trying not to hurt the other guy. No, direct conflict is the whole point and I have a good time. I even like games like Cape Horn where players pretty much have to do their darnedest to mess up the plans of their opponent.
Conflict is a key component of games. If you’re in it to win it, than you should be prepared to roll up your sleeves and do some brawling. Some games are about direct, in-your-face conflict. Other games give you endless ways of messing with your opponents. I enjoy a good game of backstabbing and some front stabbing while we’re at it. Heck, I like games like Intrigue, which is about as mean-spirited a game as you can get until they come up with a game about selling your opponents’ kids for medical experiments.
So why should that be a problem for me with Metro? It’s far from the nastiest game I’ve ever played.
I think it comes down to this: In theory, the goal of Metro is to create the longest routes you can. However, it is quicker and easier to shut down your opponent’s routes. If you reduce your opponent’s score, you benefit from the delta. However, there is something about how ignoring the official goal of the game being a key strategy that just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
There is also the fact that each player only has a limited number of routes. Once they are shut down, the players have scored every point that they can and all they can from that point on is try to hurt the other players. It is a game where you can get eliminated from play halfway through the game but you still have to keep on playing to complete the game.
There is nothing wrong with any of that, per se. I mean, if you aren’t prepared to metaphorically get a bloody nose every once in a while, you may need to find another hobby. However, there just feels like a disjunction from the game Metro seems to be and the nasty brawl it can turn into. On more than one occasion, I have seen one player start to slip and the rest of the players turn and eliminate him from the game before going back to their original plans. That can happen in any game but Metro seems to make it very easy.
Okay, if the game irritates me that much, why did I rescue it from the metaphorically flaming trash barrel?
Well, for one thing, it was one of the first games I picked up. Metro was part of the first or second order I ever made, back in the prehistoric ages when I didn’t even know who Reiner Knizia was, let alone Dirk. Most of my plays of it date back to before I bothered recording plays of games. So, it has some sentimental weight to it. The bloom may have faded from it but I have still have happy memories of the game.
And, to be honest, it is a good game. Just not necessarily the game you think you’re playing. I like the evolution of the crazy spaghetti paths and I also like the enforced orientation of the tiles which I think makes a real difference in how you place them. Just because I’ve been accentuating the negative doesn’t mean there aren’t some real positive elements.
More than that, it has been a while since I played Metro. I’ve gone from the guy who groaned when the Witch ended up in the kingdom cards in Dominion from the guy who says “Bring it” Metro is a solid enough little game that it deserve another spin before I cast it off into the cold darkness of Good Will.
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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I’ve written about how, at the start of April, my fiancée went on a trip and how I packed a small game library with me, even though I knew that we would have almost no chance of playing anything. At the time, I commented on how, if I need to pack a game as a security blanket, I might as well just pack a deck of cards.
Over the last weekend, we went on an overnight trip via train both ways and this time, I stuck to my own advice and only packed a deck of cards. As it happened, so did Carrie And, even though this trip was much shorter, this time we actually got some games in.
Mind you, this was because of the train ride. Since neither of us were driving, we were able to spend our travel time gaming
When it’s just the two of us and what we have in front of us is a deck of cards, our default game is rummy. We often play Gin Rummy or Michigan Rummy. On this particular occasion, since we didn’t have much space to play and keep it simple, we decided upon the following rules:
We’d use a Gin Rummy style discard pile so you could only pick up the top card. You got a ten point bonus for going out and both players would score their melded cards with the other playing scoring negative for their deadwood. To keep the scoring simple, aces were worth fifteen points, face cards and tends were worth ten points and everything else was worth five points. We didn’t worry about knocking early since neither of our pride’s would let us go out with less than gin
It might have been simpler than playing Gin Rummy but we had no problem being able to play it on a tiny tray and keep track of the score. It may have lacked the depth of playing proper Gin Rummy but we still had fun.
So, it just goes to show: Rummy is always fun and you should never go anywhere without a deck of cards
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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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I am always on the lookout for fast and dirty abstracts. In a perfect world, I would be able to spend any given evening playing a single game of Go. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that you often just don’t have the time to play a game that can take hours to slowly blossom and develop. And, let’s be honest, playing a fast and dynamic game has its own thrill.
Thanks to the power of the iPad, I have had a chance to explore Nestorgame’s Hippos and Crocodiles. As far as uber-simple abstracts go, Hippos and Crocodiles could practically be the poster child. The game is so fundamentally simple that there’s a certain mad genius to it. I don’t know if the game can be ‘solved’ and I don’t know it has the legs to be a game that I’ll keep coming back to for the rest of my life. But it does have a certain charm that keeps me coming back to it for the moment.
The core concept of the game is that players take turns putting their pieces down on the board. The first player who can’t make a move loses. It’s hardly an original idea. There are plenty of games out there that use the idea. Heck, even though that’s not the technical goal of Blokus, that’s one of the fundamentals of its strategy.
What makes Hippos and Crocodiles clever is that it is an asymmetrical game. Each player is only placing one type of piece, either a hippo or a crocodile. Each piece takes up nine,er, I mean ten squares on the grid but they are not the same shape. The crocodiles are long and skinny while the hippos are shorts and fat. They might take up the same amount of space but they do it in different ways.
As far as the actual rules go, that’s it. It’s a game that you can teach in about thirty seconds. There are a couple different board sizes but they are both grids. Either board will fill up fast enough that a fifteen minute game means someone went and got a cup of coffee during the game. As far as my desire to have a quick and dynamic game goes, I’d say Hippos and Crocodiles fits that bill nicely.
However, the simplicity and speed of the gameplay doesn’t mean that the game is easy. I’ve only been playing it against the AI, not my favorite way to play but a dandy way to learn, and I have yet to even come close to beating that son of a microchip with either of the two shapes or going first or second. Hippos and Crocodiles may be as simple as the recipe for boiling water but it is tight and I have yet to figure out a way for it to turn into degenerate play.
There are some games like Hive or Six or Blokus that simply blew me away and I have already spent years playing. Hippos and Crocodiles really isn’t one of those games. But, for a game I downloaded for free, I have to say that it’s given me plenty of food for thought.
Thu Apr 26, 2012 10:38 pm
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