Slave to the Hotness – an Epic Gen Con Roundup
Hello folks – this week, instead of some contemplative topic, we are selling out to the hotness – Gen Con hotness, to be specific. I’m going to give a mini-review of a dozen or so games I played at Gen Con, and in many cases, have played a bunch since. The games are listed alphabetically.
In case anyone is doubts that I’m abandoning my principles as a ‘serious’ reviewer, I’m even including an x/10 rating of each game – I have no shame, particularly in giving a rating to games I’ve played once or even less.
The one thing I will spare you is a travelogue describing my hotel room, where I ate, what the BGG hot games room smelled like etc. Be thankful for small favors.
Abomination: Heir of Frankenstein (3 plays, 8.5/10)
Abomination is dark, gory, lunatic fun.
Set in a dark 19th century Paris, the game continues thematically from the end of Mary Shelley’s novel by supposing Frankenstein’s monster has hired (or bribed or blackmailed) the players into building and shocking to life a companion for them, while a human captain is hunting the monster through Paris. The game ends when one player has brought their monster completely to life, or when enough rounds have gone by for the captain to find and kill the original monster.
Building the monster is grisly work. You need a steady supply of body parts, both to build the monster itself and to dissect to increase your expertise. You collect muscles, organs, blood at bone at various locations:
- Digging up bodies at the graveyard is relatively safe, but the bodies are old and in poor condition, and you can’t get blood. It’s a good source of bones, however.
- The morgue allows a step up in body part quality for the price of a small bribe.
- If you gain a good reputation as a scientist in Paris, the hospital will allow you to take a fresh corpse or two from its limited supply
- If there’s an execution in the public square that round, you can hurry to the executioner and get a body there.
- You can go to the slaughterhouse and get fresh animal parts, though they might not work as well as their human equivalents.
- You can go to the docks and hire a cutthroat to get you fresh parts from somewhere (best not ask where) or a thief to steal someone from the hospital
- If all this sounds like too much trouble or too expensive, you can simply murder someone in a dark alley for the freshest and most abundant parts of all, for the mere price of a small piece of your small.
Look, I’m a eurogamer. I like dry, mechanical resource conversion games. My mouth curls into an unconscious sneer of contempt when I hear a diatribe about the importance of theme.
But, cmon. Any game which gives 7 unique worker placement locations to acquire body parts has stolen my heart, literally and figuratively. And while this is a straightforward worker placement game, every action space feels fun and makes sense (notice I didn’t say ‘thematically grounded’).
The academy allows you to increase your reputation by lecturing, and your expertise by doing research, sometimes by dissecting a body you’ve acquired. The market allows you to buy equipment to shock your monster to life and ice to prevent your parts from decomposing, and sell your extra body parts. Who’s buying these parts? A butcher? I’m not quite sure.
And then there’s my favorite, St. Roch, the church, which allows you to acquire a mission to do something good or screw up the other players. You see, the church is trying to talk you out of your unholy mission. They want you to delay all the other players in their ungodly work. So you do something like steal some of their body parts or set their lab on fire and you are rewarded by your humanity rating. In other words, you get to be a dick and feel holier than thou about. The hypocrisy is pitch perfect.
Usually I loathe take that cards like the card carrying eurogamer that I am. But these just make me laugh. Plus they aren’t too strong and their conditions of use are very specific, so you can see them coming. Or you can just go to the church, get a mission (‘atonement’, it’s called) and take your revenge.
At the end of each round there’s a lab phase where you can start a body parts, complete body parts, and ultimately shock your monster to life. Also during the lab phase, body parts you haven’t used will decay, eventually becoming unusable.
During the game, in addition to building your monster, you are advancing your humanity, your reputation, which gives you more and better workers, and your expertise, which allows you to make and complete more advanced parts. There are points for advancing along these dials and also for being the first to meet certain in-game goals.
There are also events at the beginning of each round, some involving encounters with the monster, which, without giving spoilers, can be said to be extremely dark.
Eventually, you’ve done enough work to attempt to bring your monster, or at least parts of it, to life. You set off your equipment and roll a big handful of dice based on your expertise. It’s a memorable moment in a game full of memorable moments – you shake those dice and hope to hell some of your monster actually comes to life instead of being just fried by electricity, along with your dwindling humanity.
Now ordinarily, I hate roll to resolve for key moments of a eurogame, but it’s just perfect for this one. There is mitigation in the form of the academy cards which can be used to reroll dice instead of raising expertise.
And the tension and uncertainty are just perfect for what happens here. This isn’t a eurogame where you want to be able to say near the end that you’ve played 10% more efficiently than your opponent, so you have the win in the bag. You want to have to go through the agonizing moment where you throw the switch and either scream ‘IT’S ALIVE!’ or groan at the smell of burnt flesh.
Note that bringing your monster to life doesn’t automatically win you the game, it just gets you a helluva lot of points, though doing it completely is an endgame trigger.
I haven’t even mentioned the variable player powers or the writing. You can play one of six gothic characters that include a charlatan, a zoologist, an heiress and a psychopath. The writing in their backstories and on the event and action cards is some of the best I’ve seen in a board game – macabre and hilarious without being campy.
I’ve loved every one of my three plays of the game so far, and so have most of the players I’ve played with, but I will acknowledge that there are some rough edges.
The game is a bit too long – about 3 hours or so, and it’s hard to simply house rule it shorter since events in the game can change its length on the fly anyway. I don’t find the time to be a problem, since I’m captivated by the game, but when it’s too long it’s too loose – you can get too much done.
Three is by far the best player count – two is way too loose on the board, and four makes the game too long. A couple of the action spaces are a bit weak – I wish there was more incentive to use animal parts.
And then there’s the take that cards and the dice. If you don’t like this setting, then those things might be problems for you, and I’m usually one to go along with the proposition that a long game and lot of luck don’t go well together. But if you are enchanted with the whole thing like I am, then you’ll probably roll with those things.
The game plays similarly from play to play, and the event cards will repeat themselves, so this isn’t one to play 8 times in a month to better optimize your play like I’d do with a Heaven & Ale or a Marco Polo. But as an occasional event game, it’s unparalleled.
It’s the one modern board game where the theme (I’ve succumbed to using that word) just carries it for me. Saying the game is oozing theme isn’t just a dumb cliché, it’s almost a reality as you can almost feel the blood and viscera sticking to your fingers as you pick up the realistic looking body parts and happily slide them into place on your monster.
Amul (4 plays, 8/10)
Amul might be the best Gen Con game you’ve never heard of. The game might be what you’d get if Fantasy Realms and 7 Wonders had a baby. It takes the former games notion of drafting and scoring cards based on the conditions of what other cards you also have in your hand (or in this case, in your tableau), and combined some ideas with Antoine Bauza classic, such as collecting military icons which you compare to your neighbors.
Unlike 7 Wonders, this military strength doesn’t give you points, it simply gives you first pick of a draft, a change which I think is in Amul’s favor.
You start with 5 cards, and each round you draw a new one, and then put a face down card in the market. Then, in order of military strength, each player takes one of these (a couple extras from the deck are also thrown into the market each round).
Then each player simultaneously reveals one of these cards which they are playing into their tableau. Scoring is interesting in that some cards only score when they are played to your tableau, while other cards are only scored if they are in your hand at the end of the game. The hand scoring cards can be quite strong, but they clog up your hand, limiting your flexibility.
The conditional scoring of the cards isn’t quite as wild as Fantasy Realms, which is a bit of a shame – there’s simple set collection, scoring based on not having cards of a particular type (for instance, an ‘Opium’ card which scores 6 points in your hand at the end but only if you have no military), cards that score based on how many other cards your opponents have, etc.
It moves smoothly, and is engaging throughout. It might get a bit samey long term – I’ll need more plays to be sure. It’s ‘Silk Road’ theme isn’t deep, but it’s there and it has more power than something like Hadara, another recent 7 Wonders wannabe.
Black Angel (2.5 plays, 7/10)
No Gen Con eurogame was hotter than Black Angel, which was no surprise given its roots in the acclaimed Troyes, its striking day-glo color palette from Ian O’Toole, and its cool theme of AIs competing to reseed humanity after its exctinction. I managed to barely get a copy after somewhat violating the door opening intonement of ‘DO NOT RUN!’
Thematically the AIs are controlling the ship, The Black Angel, as it flies to humanity’s new home and helps trades with aliens along the way there, while killing the more violent ones. This is a game which seems quite complicated as you’re trying to learn it, but beneath the chrome boils down to a few actions.
Each turn you can destroy ravagers which are attacking the ship, repair the ship from the damage caused by Ravagers, getting tiles to add to your technology grid, flying a small ship off from the Black Angel to set up a mission (a contract, really) with aliens, or activating that contract to trade resource for points. Those are all the main actions – everything else is just bonuses. Repairing the ship gives you some of those resources, while destroying Ravagers tends to also do that, albeit indirectly by giving you better activations of your technology grid.
The technology grid is a spatial puzzle which you can activate once each turn at the cost of one of your mission cards, and which basically gives you stuff (resources) when you do – the more tech tiles you have down, the more stuff you get.
What makes the game seem very complicated at first is the dice activation/manipulation/stealing. That’s right, I said stealing. One of the resources allows you to take a die from one of your opponents for your turn, which can be quite handy when your own dice are very low – dice have faces between 0 and 3, and the number on the die is the number of times you can perform a given action, for instance, a die of 2 allows you to kill 2 Ravagers.
Another resource allows you to flip a die, which moves 0s to 2s and 1s to 3s. When you’re out of dice and can’t steal anyone else’s you take a reset turn and roll more dice, the number of which can be increased by using a particular action on your tech grid.
Finally, the dice are of three different colors, which limit the actions you can take with each die – one color is matched to each color, except for mission, which come in all 3 colors. At turns end you get a new mission card matching the color of the die you just used.
The game ends when the ship reaches its destination, which happens when a certain amount of reset turns have been taken by the players.
Despite the time it’s taken me to explain the rules, the game follows the very simple eurogame formula of taking actions to get stuff, and then taking other actions to turn that stuff into points, over and over for the whole game.
I liked the game well enough, but I don’t think the game is particularly extraordinary in any facet. One issue I had was that while the game rewards planning, in terms of laying out and fulfilling particular missions, oftentimes what you want to do just isn’t there for you to do, particularly at the 4 player count.
Do you want to kill some Ravagers that you can turn in your points? Well, you better hope there are Ravagers to kill when your turn rolls around – if the player before you keeps getting rid of them instead of spawning them (which happens when missions are initiated), well then you just won’t have opportunities to get them.
The same thing goes with repairing the ship or grabbing a tech tile – the opportunity to do that will be there or it won’t be. Sometimes, you can do something clever to make it likely a resource is available to you, or perhaps more easily, take away action that the next player really wants, but sometimes what you desperately need to do just isn’t available.
For this reason, I like the game best at two players where there’s a good measure of control and not much downtime – at four players, you can be waiting quite a while for your turn, and there’s not much to engage you in the meantime, since your options are likely to have changed by the time your turn rolls around again.
Two players is also nice in that the very mean plays in the game – taking what someone else needs – are more rewarding since the two player game is obviously zero sum.
Cartographers (4 plays, 7.5/10)
This flip and write game set in the Roll Player universe involves each player simultaneously drawing a flipped random tetris shape onto their personal map, sometimes with a choice of which terrain the shape is. The games scores via 4 random condition cards pulled for each game – there are 16 in the box, so there’s a fair amount of variety here. Conditions involve things like having a certain terrain type around the edge of the map, or the largest mass of a terrain type that doesn’t touch a certain other terrain type, etc.
Two of the victory condition cards score at the end of each of the four rounds, so each card scores twice. If you’re familiar with Isle of Skye, it’s a very similar scoring system.
There’s a bit of player interaction via monster cards that are occasionally flipped, at which point everyone has to hand their sheet to the person next to them, who draws in the monster shape in a very inconvenient location.
What’s unique and interesting about Cartographers is that all the scoring conditions and the order they score in are completely known from the start, meaning you can and should make a long term strategy right from the get go. While many roll and writes are mostly tactical, to win at Cartographers you need to plan accurately. You can elect not to chase scoring in a particular round to set up a big payoff in a later round, for instance, or you can try to do a bit of everything – it’s up to you.
The emphasis on planning gives Cartographers a depth that few roll and writes possess, though the downside is that its thinkiness can lead to some AP with those inclined – the downside of its depth is that it’s slower and more ponderous than its more breezy brethren. This is mitigated somewhat by the simultaneous play, but you can still be in a situation where you are constantly waiting for one person to finish (my game group: you know who you are).
The production is nice with a ton of sheets included, and the art is the exact some style and artist as Roll Player, so if you’ve played that you know whether you like the look. If you want a roll (or flip) and write with a bit more to puzzle through, give Cartographers a shot.
Curios (3 plays, 6/10)
This little trifle of a worker placement game is simply about placing pawns to acquire four different resources, each of which are worth 1, 3, 5, or 7 points.
The twist is you don’t know exactly how much each resource is worth. You have some imperfect information in the form of 3 cards which show you something a resource is NOT worth, since it’s in your hand rather than face down next to the resource.
For instance, if you have a red 1 card, you know red is worth 3, 5, or 7, since it’s not worth 1, and may be worth acquiring. You can reveal one of your cards at the end of the round to get an extra worker.
The fun of the game is watching other players to see what they’re going after, and to infer the value of the resources from their actions. It’s charming and fun at first, but I don’t think there’s enough meat in the system here for me to be clamoring for a lot more plays.
Lockup (1 play, 7.5/10)
Another game from Thunderworks in their Roll Player universe, this one is a straightforward worker placement game with the strange and wonderful theme of running the best gang you can in fantasy world prison. Your workers are gang members who are collecting resources for a straightforward conversion to points via the purchase of items with those resources. There’s also a set collection element in buying allies for points as well.
The twist is that the workers are of different strengths, you get to play two of them face down, and resolution of action spaces doesn’t take place until the end of a round. Rewards are given in diminishing amounts depending on your rank of worker strength at a location – if you place a worker and don’t qualify for any reward, you get a compensation power (scroll) instead.
The face down workers means there’s bluffing and trying to deduce what other players want in order to maximize your haul each round. It works very well and very cleanly, creating much more interesting interaction than in most worker placement games. It’s simple (Lords of Waterdeep level complexity) but somewhat deep – you can create devious plans for how you’re going to lay out your workers to steal away key rewards from your opponents at the last moment.
The only negative point I have from my first play, and its significant, is that there’s little game-to-game variety – the allies and items come out in different order, but you’ll see most of them each game. I can’t tell how samey the game will feel with repeated plays.
Hats (1 play, 4/10)
I fully acknowledge that I’m not being fair to this game, which I only played once (the game takes only about 15 minutes). In it you are playing card to the table to replace a card there and have that card go to your personal display. The cards on the table determine which cards in your play score at the end of the game.
The game feels both very thinky and very random, which is not a combination I enjoy. You are constrained by the cards you start with, which may severely limit what you can exchange in the main display. It feels like anything you play, your opponents may be able to take advantage of it and leave you worse off. The randomness isn’t just your starting cards; it’s also in what cards your opponents just happen to have left available to you on your turn and what endgame scoring conditions you might stumble into.
I might change my opinion here with more plays, but life’s too short to find out.
Ishtar (4 plays, 7/10)
Point Salad (9 plays, 8/10)
Everything you’ve heard is true: this quick filler is simple, addictive, and delicious. On a player’s turn, they draft either two vegetable cards or one end game scoring card which gives or loses points based on which vegetables they have. That’s it – that’s the whole game.
Despite its simplicity, that are some delightful decisions in whether you decide to get those veggies you need, a promising new scoring option, or screw over your neighbor by taking the veggies they need.
The game works well at 2-6, though it’s more random at high player counts and features more hate drafting at lower counts. I’ve noticed a weak point in my game – I tend to always draft a preponderance of peppers and onions, vegetables I love, while avoiding cabbage. I don’t care though – this game makes me hungry and happy in wonderful ways.
Reavers of Midgard (1 play, 5/10)
In Grey Fox’s sequel to Champions of Midgard, players are pillaging, conquering, raiding, and fighting monsters, eurogame style, over 6 rounds. Each round a player will take just one action where they go to a location, spend resources to take the associated action and get a big bunch of rewards. However, players can also follow the lead player’s action and take a significantly diminished version of the leader’s action.
Besides following, the other striking gameplay mechanism is an ability to tuck cards to give bonuses whenever a particular action is taken (even when you are following). This engine building gives significantly escalating rewards as the game continues.
This was my most disappointing gameplay experience of Gen Con. I’m a big fan of Champions, and I had high expectations here, and while the gameplay wasn’t bad, we had big problems with the rulebook, and encountered one serious balance issue.
It wasn’t that the rulebook was confusing in its wording, it’s that it just left many things ambiguous. We were playing at two players, and had the board flipped to the two player side. The rulebook tells you the rewards for taking each action clearly – however, the iconography on the board told of different rewards than the rulebook did, and this was clarified nowhere.
Eventually, we determined that the rules were simply written from the perspective of the four player game, and that the two player rewards should be adjusted to what it says on the board. But it says this exactly nowhere. Similar ambiguities cropped up around things like whether bonus cards could be taken from a face up display or from a face down pile. We simply took our best guess.
We also found one big balance issue in that the Conquer Territories action is far and away the best action to take early in the game, because each conquered territory is worth points at the end of each round. You get a lot of points compared to the other players, and you also get generous resource rewards, and it doesn’t cost much to take the action. I’ve looked at it closely, and I just can’t come up with a reason not to make that my first action early in the game.
Aside from these big issues, the gameplay itself was generally fun – I would’ve given it a 7/10 as a first impression just based on the fun of the system itself. While there’s a lot going on I didn’t get into, it’s all about various forms of set collection combined with the card tucking engine building, resource conversion, and a bit of dice chucking. It’s fun, but not incredible or revolutionary.
Of course, folks at Gen Con who learned the game directly at the Grey Fox booth doubtless avoided some of my issued. If you’ve backed the Kickstarter or buy it at retail, I would look for a good tutorial video to make things smoother. I haven’t seen any yet, though the Dice Tower did a relatively clear playthrough.
Walking in Burano (2 plays, 7.5/10)
I was taught this for the first time last winter at the Dice Tower Retreat by Sam Healey (in addition to an x/10 rating system, I’m jazzing up my blog with at least one board game celebrity name drop per post), but I’m including it here because it got its U.S. release at Gen Con and I played it at AEG’s big game night.
This is a whimsical card drafting game with beautiful art which reflects the colorful buildings of the Italian island of Burano. The drafting is unique as the cards are laid spatially in 3 levels of buildings, and you must draft for the top or bottom. You use the cards to build out your own street making sure to have each building be all the same color and have no buildings of the same color next to each other.
When you’ve made enough buildings you get end game scoring cards based on things like how many chimneys, plants, cats, and people are on or around your buildings.
The spatial puzzle is simple but fun, and then there’s a dash of an economic element as you get money for drafting fewer cards and inversely pay money to put out more cards from your hand.
I like the play and the look of this game, though I wish there were some common scoring goals or other point opportunities besides the cards.