#19
June '04



Axis & Allies: D-Day
a review by
Jon Waddington

It's true: Axis & Allies: D-Day is just another iteration of the tried and true formula that Larry Harris (the designer) knocks out every few years. Aside from nearly every game mechanism, that is. If you know everything there is to know about the series, you basically don't have this one covered at all. Rather than belabor this, let me offer up this advice: forget everything you thought you knew about Axis & Allies. This really should've been called "D-Day: Using Nifty Axis & Allies Pieces." Sort of rolls off the tongue, yes?

From a distance it looks about the same: loads of nice plastic figures (in country-specific molds, no less), a big map divided into areas, and scads of dice. Only the scale is different, as it covers the Normandy region instead of a couple of continents (or the whole world). As in the "old" game (newly redone), the rulebook is formidably thick, but turns out to be quite simple, with loads of illustrations and clarifications. I suspect most folks will be up and running within 10 minutes or so. Or would be, if it wasn't for the setup. Annoying in all A&A games, it's just a bit less so here, as there are icons printed on the map to help out. You'll do a bit of scanning the board and reinforcement charts (which are tightly packed, leading to toppling infantry and mild jumbling -- do not let a stray die near these!). The map spaces are roomy, though, so the overall effect is nice.

Reinforcement charts? Well, you don't buy units in this game. They arrive in a specific order, but at somewhat variable times. They're placed into an historic organizational structure, but that's just for flavor. Really it's just one long queue of units. It's a nice touch, though, one of many. You may also notice three decks of sixteen cards each, all numbered so you don't slip up and shuffle them. Yes, it's played with cards you don't shuffle.

It's not just the card system that makes this a totally different animal than ordinary A&A, but they're quite noticeable, so we'll start there. "Order" cards determine the flow of the game. They serve as a very easy to follow sequence of play, spelling out the few "special" instructions and reminding you who is doing what, when. You just draw one, do what it says, and when you've gone through all sixteen, flip the deck back over and go again. Over the course of 10 turns (the maximum length of the game) using them gets a bit repetitive, but the sequence is also listed on the Battle Board (yes, a holdover from the original game, and yes, you won't use this one either), so you can ignore the card-flipping if you like. The other types of cards, "Fortune" and "Tactics," operate before and after (respectively) each Order phase. Fortune lends a chance element to reduce predictability, and Tactics give a one-shot advantage for the "phasing" player (use it and lose it, or wait for a better opportunity). It's a nice system, and you can season it to taste, using just the vanilla Order deck, or Fortune and Order, or Order and Tactics, or the whole lot. At its heart, it's just a means of organizing play; this needn't have been done with cards, but it works very well to keep the game proceeding in an orderly fashion, and it replaces volumes of rules that would be more unwieldy placed in the rulebook or on a player aid.

Gameplay is also quite a departure from old-school A&A. There is a stacking limit (eight per side), opposing units can occupy the same area over the course of many turns, there is only one round of combat per turn -- well two, once with the Allies as the attacker, then the Axis a bit later. There are blockhouse pieces that mow down troops on the beach; well, until they're taken out by naval bombardment. Victory is keyed on the cities of Cherbourg, St. Lo, and Caen; if the Allies occupy all three and hold them for a full turn, the game is theirs. Prevent this by turn 10, and the Axis wins.

Combat itself is the usual "roll less than X" simultaneous fire, but other rules make it quite different in practice. Large battles demand a constant trickle of replacements for losses, as it's unlikely that one side will be eliminated in one turn in an 8 on 8 conflict. Once engaged, there is no retreat; you either destroy all enemy units in the same area, or they destroy you. This makes for some tricky decisions, as committing to a fight might mean your units are tied up in a region for several precious turns. The mandatory combat also produces some interesting effects for the Axis when trying to defend with just infantry, as those infantry are forced to attack later in the same turn that they defended. This system provides an effortless means of favoring combined arms over homogeneous forces, and again is a nice touch.

Airpower is handled in a radically different way from the original. Fighters no longer operate as just another unit, but rather serve as interdictors. Only the Allies have them, and each turn they are spread (or concentrated) across the map. Axis units moving into or out of interdicted areas get strafed, once per unit, per fighter. Thus, if the Axis concentrates some armor and the Allies plunk down three fighters in that area, each armor will be fired on three times if it moves out of the area (hits occur on a one). Also, the fighters can camp out on the areas where Axis replacements arrive, and blast at them as they come on the board. Very nasty. The only way to mitigate this is with artillery units, which do double duty as anti-aircraft and fire on the fighters. The Axis is thus incented to create artillery "channels" to get units to the front, as it can get really deadly without them. This whole sub-game of interdiction is quite interesting, and produces a number of tough decisions for both parties. For the Allies, is it best to wall off an area you want to concentrate on and make it painful for the Axis to move through? Or is it best to pin down the strongest Axis areas without much regard to location? For the Axis, intentions to reinforce may prove to be only that. Losing armor to fighter interdiction can be a fatal blow; is it best to chance the move, or stay put and beef up the region with artillery? Two bombers serve as snipers for the Allies; each turn they target a specific Axis unit (provided no Allied units are present in the same area) and get a fifty-fifty shot at it. Zap! There goes your last unit near Cherbourg.

When all the options are thrown in, the overall game flows quite smoothly, though there are a significant number of die rolls (sixteen Fortune cards over ten turns***, minus a few here and there as phases become irrelevant and are skipped, makes for a lot of rolling, and that's not even factoring in combat rolls***), which can get a bit numbing. Harris put significant constraints on the system (likely to speed things up), but he left in enough choices that every turn has at least a handful of agonizing decisions for each player. Due in part to the scale, but even more to the unique rules, the game feels stronger thematically than any other A&A game. Airpower's effect on the battle might be a tad overstated, but the reinforcement schedule seems weighted to allow for higher Axis casualties than would "naturally" occur. For the Allies, getting units ashore is a two-stage process. While waiting, they may be fired on by the blockhouse units, creating the expected killing ground and a high incentive to get ashore quickly. However, the stacking limit can work against this, and a stout Axis defense at the beach can produce Allied logjams, stranding units in the line of fire and backing up the reinforcement cycle. Interestingly (perhaps oddly), the most important unit appears to be Axis artillery. Airpower produces such a dampening effect on Axis armored counterattacks that it is generally best to spread the armor out piecemeal to avoid catastrophic losses (or complete inaction)--again, a natural, elegant effect of the ruleset that is just another nice touch, both thematically and mechanically.

There are, of course, points of concern. One is replayability. The setup is fixed; there is no opportunity for debate about how to best set up for the invasion or the defense against it. In my opinion, the strength of variable setup would be negatively offset by a large increase in setup time and complexity. As is, the game takes about two hours, and that's an impressive achievement as it really does pack a lot into that time. But there will undoubtedly be a sense of "sameness" from game to game, and there was undoubtedly a missed opportunity here for advanced rules that could shake things up before the first card comes out. Another potential criticism is the lack of clearly differentiated strategic options. Three cities must be taken and held. Not two of three, nor a sufficient number of troops destroyed, nor a breakout to a particular map edge. This of itself is not damning (chess, after all, retains its interest), but it might have been a missed opportunity.

As it is, the game is about operational and tactical decisions relating to how to approach (or defend) each city, and there are enough choices here to provide many interesting replays. Both sides have compelling operational decisions concerning Cherbourg (it's isolated from Axis reinforcement, but by the same token it requires the diversion of a chunk of U.S. forces). Finding the proper balance between hitting the Allies on the beach and dropping back for defense in depth should prove interesting for the Axis. At a tactical level, there are a host of difficult decisions for both sides every turn.

What this all adds up to is a refreshing new game from Avalon Hill, one strong enough to conceivably spawn a series of operational-level light wargames with the market-friendly but otherwise inappropriate Axis & Allies moniker. It's short enough that it should appeal to people who usually shy away from wargames, but interesting and thematic enough to appeal to grognards (assuming they can accept the propriety of a light wargame in the first place).

Jon Waddington lives in the Denver area, where he plays German games (and the too-infrequent wargame) with family and friends. Sometimes they even let him win. Contact him at jon_waddington@yahoo.com.

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Hansa
a review by M. Barnes

One of the primary things that drew me into European boardgaming during that boom period of the mid-1990s was the sometimes arcane and unusual themes that were often little more than vessels to communicate an abstract set of rules and mechanics. Still to this day, I love bringing out a new game and announcing to the group, "this is a game about Alexander the Great!" or "this one is about the Thirty Years War!". It was with this same zeal that I proudly announced that Hansa, the new Michael Schacht game published in the US by Uberplay, was about 17th century sea trading during the time of the Hanseatic League. Of course, we all know by now that German games rarely steep you in particular times or places but at least it's a nice backdrop to what is a highly tactical, light game that has little to do with the Hanseatic League.

The bad news though, is this. Hansa, although it does bring us back to the good old "Renaissance trading" theme, is a fairly average game for the strategy-minded gamer that will have a larger degree of appeal to fans of tactical games affected by what I've seen termed as "player-driven chaos". I certainly don't mind a well-done tactical game (I love Alhambra, for example), but I do like to feel like I at least have a variety of options and approaches I can take to winning the game despite what my fellow players are doing. Hansa ultimately feels like a game of limited decisions- at least limited worthwhile decisions- and as such I found it to be unengaging but fairly enjoyable despite its shortcomings.

Anything Schacht produces these days is instantly compared to Kardinal Und Konig (Web of Power in the US), and Hansa certainly is no exception. It shares with KUK a similar play time (30-45 minutes), an almost constant pace, and a fairly minimal set of rules featuring Schacht's beloved "majority at a node" mechanic. Your turn will consist of a few options. You will receive three talers (money) which is a fancy theme-way of saying action points. At the beginning of your turn you can opt to refill all of the depleted goods markers on the board by paying one taler and refilling all the ports to their maximum capacity (one or two goods markers). The chief action you may take is the movement of the trade ship (common to all players) from one port to another following the trade routes pre-printed on the board, at a cost of one taler per movement. At each city you stop at, you can perform one action. Each port offers one or two goods markers (in six different colors and representing 1-3 barrels of unnamed, unidentified goods), one of which which may be purchased by the active player with the taler going either to the bank or to the player with the market majority at the port. Markets are represented by wooden tokens in the players' colors and are purchased with goods markers- not money- which makes for a somewhat interesting twist. Plunk down a three-barrel goods marker and take over the port from player yellow's two markets- but at what cost? It's one of the few interesting choices in the game- to hold on to your goods or expand your markets at the risk of losing the opportunity to sell sets of goods.

The markets serve a greater function, however. Stopping at a port where you have the majority will enable you to sell goods markers provided that you have at least two of the same color. Selling them requires you to remove a market in that port but in return your sold goods are turned face down to be tallied as victory points at game's end. Further, everyone with goods markers of the same color must discard one of the sold color. This makes it possible to crash the market for particular colors and sabotage another player's ability to sell on his or her next turn.

The game is timed by six stacks of face-down goods markers which are used to replenish the board. When the last stack is drawn from, the game ends following the round and players count up the barrels of indeterminable content on their face-down goods markers. Additional points are scored at each port for market owners- 4 points if there is only one color market, two points if its shared between players. This is another point at which there is at least a worthwhile reason to choose wisely- sometimes it's better to leave markets and net bigger points than selling a couple of barrels- which, as I have mentioned, contain some unnamed product. It might be mulch. Or chum, for all we know.

I have seen Hansa called a "gamer's game", "considerably deep", and prone to "analysis paralysis", claims which I frankly consider to be ludicrous. Hansa is a purely situational game- your options depend entirely on what the players before you do, what goods are left on the board following their turns, and where the ship is when it's your turn to play. Long term strategy (other than deciding where to place your markets) is out of the question because of the tactical nature of the game and also because of limits imposed by the rules prohibiting you from stockpiling goods or money. A tax is imposed requiring that any money or goods tokens over three get discarded at the end of your turn. The only way to begin your turn with more money is if someone sells goods at one of your market-majority ports, which of course most players will avoid doing if possible. While this does provide an uncanny feeling of absolute balance, as each player starts with a limited number of goods and money, it also conveys a sense of limited choices.

That said, my group found Hansa to be very casual, almost breezy, in its gameplay. There are rarely difficult or stressful choices, largely because of the sense of detachment we felt while playing it. One of my fellow gamers said, "This is the kind of game where it doesn't really matter what you do, it's what everyone else does", and to some degree that's absolutely true. Many turns I found myself actually not even thinking about what I was going to do because it didn't really matter. It's almost as if the game is so bound to the rules that any chance for creative strategy or intuitive play is eliminated in favor of processional, ordered play. I never once made or saw a play that was surprising, clever, or exciting because it's just not really possible. I'm sure there's some ex-grognards out there who sit and stare at the ports for fifteen minutes every turn in order to maximize their points or try to figure out how to end their turns as detrimentally to the next player as possible but I can only see this as destroying what limited excitement the game provides. Played casually and in 30 minutes, Hansa is pleasant if neither wholly engaging nor ingenious.

As a side note, I find it endlessly irritating that the same people that complain about luck in games fail to see that player-driven chaos is far more detrimental to strategic planning and analysis. Hansa is virtually luckless, but the player has far less control over their choices and outcomes than one would find even in something like Risk.

Hansa is for me, a good game but far from great and definitely not as strong as some of the better games of the year. It definitely won't replace Serenessima as my favorite maritime trading game and despite a certain x-factor charm that recalls those classic games from a few years ago it just seems to fall short of exceptionality. Nonetheless, it is a very attractive production with excellent graphics and color choices and it's fairly easy to pick up and play. It's brief, harmless, and will suit 2-4 players equitably. I'd also recommend it as a purchase if nothing else to support Uberplay and their mounting efforts to get German games more widely known here in the US- "Don't forget to wash your Hansa". God knows they need our help.

 

M. Barnes traces his love for gaming back to such classics as Ants in the Pants and Hungry Hungry Hippos. When he's not gaming, he's working as a librarian for a labyrinthine government agency and making independent horror pictures.

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Shark
a review by Darrell Hanning

Sharks, Llamas and Snakes! Oh, my…

About five weeks ago, I was still riding a very tall wave of work following a trip to the London area three weeks before that – a trip, I might add, in which I had virtually no chance to peruse any hobby stores. Not that it would have mattered; Her Majesty’s Pound is currently drop-kicking the US dollar back across The Pond with vengeance. Suffice to say that nearly everything one might buy will cost about twice as much as it does here, except perhaps coal in Newcastle, itself. On top of that, the bleeding country had the sheer temerity to only let the sun shine on parts of two days out of eleven. Coming from Florida, I think I should have got a visitor’s discount, simply to offset the abysmal weather.

Anyway, a very tall wave of work, indeed, which had a brief hiatus of, oh, say two days, before it resumed its normal intensity of chaos. This had actually been going on since shortly after Christmas, which explains why the last Boulder Games’ “Game Notes” was missing my name.

I got a bit fed up at one point, five weeks ago, and thought “Screw it, I want to see a REALLY BIG pile of games. That’ll make me feel better..” At the urging of my wife, I had gone to see the Crown Jewels, while in London. Hmm, I thought as the motorized walkway carried me past this crown, that crown, and the other crown. Very pretty. Very shiny, too. (I was actually much more impressed by what must have been the drug-induced indulgence responsible for a hand-carved gold punch bowl the size of a home spa!) But it seemed to me that shelves of games I don’t yet own would be one helluva lot more interesting to me. So, I sent Jim at Boulder Games an e-mail, and asked whether he could stand a visit. He said “Sure”, which is actually very generous of him (and certainly not something from which anyone should infer an open invitation), because he is not set up for visitors. No, indeedy.

Jim lives west of Macon, Georgia, which is only about a four-hour drive from Jacksonville, so I took a Friday off (somewhat to the amazement of my supervisor), plopped the wife down in the passenger seat, and off we went. The single advantage I can find to being a contractor working lots of extra hours is the extra income, so I was prepared to commit myself to some pretty serious game-buying. I think the wife was a little leery about just how committed I was, versus whether I should simply be committed. As we crossed the Georgia border, she was still giving me these sidelong glances.

Jim, in fact, is so not set up for visitors that I passed his home twice, before concluding that his address absolutely must lie between the number I could read lower than it, and the number I could read higher than it. Wow, I thought, looking at an unlabeled mailbox, lack of any company sign, a wild array of undomesticated shrubbery, and two largish dogs performing their Cujo imitations, this guy is really not set up for visitors.

Jim, being the friendly guy he is, warned us about the snakes that like to sit in the ceilings of his storage sheds. But try as he might, he could not get his llamas to show up. It was a pity; I had watched llamas on a ranch in Colorado, and they’re funny critters. He could, however, show me the bayonet plant they had chewed up, which if you’re familiar with this plant, you’d swear it wasn’t possible to even nibble on without immediate medical attention. (Check out the pictures for Hoppla Lama.)

I had a list of games I had carefully researched, and found nearly all of them. I was like a little kid at Christmas. Every lower shelf I stooped to gaze upon, every upper shelf I stretched to peruse, contained games I had heard of but never seen. This is where a local store has an advantage over mail order companies – and it’s about the only advantage they have left – that you can actually pick up the box, shake it, feel its heft, and gaze for a while at the pictures on the back.

Anyway, there was one game that was not on my list, which intrigued me to no end. It was called Shark, printed by the esteemed Ravensburger, and emblazoned with the picture of a man’s body in a business suit, with the head of a shark. And on the back was a picture of a board with brightly colored buildings organized on a grid of squares, and pictures of stock certificates. It looked to perhaps have a flavor of Acquire, but purported to be a treacherous game.



“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” – Gordon Gekko, the movie Wall Street

Believe me, Shark can indeed be a treacherous game. Evil, underhanded, gut-wrenching, and often quite surprising, Shark is Acquire, if Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko had designed it.

Take a twelve-by-twelve grid of squares, and divide it into five areas – one area in each corner, and one in the middle. Take 18 buildings in each of four colors, and 35 shares of stock for each of the four colors. And lastly, take two dice – one with each of the four colors and two sides as wildcards, and the other die with the numbers 1 through 4, and two symbols of a shark’s fin. You now have the game Shark. If you’re looking for a game with oodles of fiddly bits, keep looking.

Each player starts with one share in one stock of his choice, and no money. Each stock starts with a value of a thousand dollars a share. The object of the game is to be the person with the greatest net worth when the first stock reaches a value of fifteen thousand dollars per share, when the last building of any color is played, or when all the stock certificates have been bought up.

During your turn, you will roll the dice. One die will show you what color of building you may place on the grid (or two of the sides will let you pick the color), and the other die will tell you in what area you can place that building. If the placed building stands alone, you collect a thousand dollars. If the building can be placed adjacent (vertically or horizontally) to another building of the same color, this constitutes a chain. The value of a stock will always go up when a chain is created or increased in size. The person doing this collects money equivalent to the new value of the stock, and every player holding shares in that stock will collect the amount by which the stock’s value increased, times the number of shares she or he possesses.

Now for the stabbing part. You may place a building next to a building of another color, but only if in doing so you are adding to a chain, and that chain outnumbers those in the color that you’re building next to. That is, you may place the third red building in a chain next to a yellow building, for example, if that yellow building is by itself, or in a chain of two yellow buildings. When you do this, you not only increase the value of the larger chain’s stock (and everybody holding that stock gets a payoff), but you also remove the smaller chain of buildings, and every player holding that stock must lose money equal to how much that stock goes down – which is a thousand for every building removed.

So the board is an abstract manifestation of competing companies, bouncing against each other within the same economy, much like the hotel chains in Acquire, but in Shark the area of placement (although not the location with that area) is random, and what company is placed is also random, with a nod to that one chance in three of it being a company of your choice.

That one chance in three isn’t big, but in the course of the game, it stands on the shoulders of giants, as it were. Because each player is going to build a portfolio of stocks, and he or she is going to try to enhance the value of that portfolio, and part of that enhancement process is watching what stocks other players have in their portfolios. And while you might prefer to enhance your own value, you may often find the best way to do that is in a relative fashion; that is, by cutting down the values of stocks you do not have.

During your turn – before you roll the dice and after – you may buy as many as five new shares of any stocks. You may also sell as many shares of any of your stocks as you see fit.

So, Gordon Gekko is sitting on eight shares of Empire (yellow), and six shares of Smith and Smith (blue). While Smith and Smith is currently worth a little more than Empire (11,000 to 9,000), Gordon owns more shares of Empire than anyone else, and is the second largest shareholder in Smith and Smith. Added to this is the fact that Smith and Smith’s value is a conglomerate of multiple, small chains, while Empire’s value is derived from one, very large chain. Gordon has a gut feeling. On his turn, he dumps all of his Smith and Smith stock for sixty-six thousand, and buys five more shares of Empire for forty-five thousand, giving him a total of thirteen shares. Now, he’s really kicking butt in the Empire market. He rolls the dice, and gets the wildcard color in the Shark zone, in the middle of the board. He adds a tenth yellow building to Empire’s chain, which also puts that chain adjacent to a chain of three Smith and Smith buildings. Empire’s value goes up by a thousand to ten thousand. Gordon collects ten grand, plus one thousand for each of his shares (for the increase in stock value), for a total of twenty-three thousand. Smith and Smith goes down by three thousand per share, and Gordon chuckles as all the holders of blue stock cough up money. Up to the moment that it was his turn, Gordon looked like a really big fan of Smith and Smith stock. Now, he’s pulled the rug out of under it, turned a nice profit on it, entrenched himself as leader in a different stock, and made other players lose money and lose current value of their holdings.

Okay, so it isn’t Age of Steam, or Puerto Rico. It’s still sinfully fun, fast-paced, dynamic, and really forces you to make some decisions with little other than a gut feeling. It would be a different game with the hidden tiles found in Acquire – a more solemn, thoughtful game – and not as fun a game, I think.

There are some games where random is good, and this is a point, I think, that is lost sometimes, in the vast array of European-style games trying so very hard to step out of the way when dice come rolling towards them.

I have seen seeming juggernauts lose steam and die on the vine, in Shark. I have seen the gaming equivalent of judo, in Shark – I’ve even pulled it off myself, and felt gobs of sinful pride at getting away with it. I have, on one turn, converted myself from an innocuous also-ran in the world-killing mega-corporation to the financial David thumping the crap of out of Goliath. It is – for lack of a better term - a good feeling. “Greed is right. Greed works.” I have been Gordon Gekko, and it can be just as much fun as Michael Douglas made it appear.

For you eye-rolling socialists, communists, and other assorted liberals out there, you too can have fun with Shark, and nobody at work the next Monday has to even know that you trashed your friends by jimmying a stock market. You can go back to saying taxes are good, being rich is bad, yadda, yadda, yadda. And chuckle inwardly at how you took those silly capitalists out behind the wood shed in Shark, on Friday night.

I’m still waiting for my group to get tired of this game. I know they will; they’re too much purists at heart. They’ll soon whine that they want more intricate, more elaborate, less random game systems. But I’ve enjoyed the hell out of Shark, and I’m going to continue to drag it out, every chance I get.

Darrell Hanning continues to reside in Jacksonville, and would like to remind his readers that some problems are made most clear by keeping the Vaseline smear of government intervention off the lens.

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Guilford Courthouse
a review by Steve Pfarrer

Guilford Courthouse is the most recent addition to GMT's American Revolutionary War series, the low-to-moderate complexity, grand tactical games on the American War of Independence. The series was introduced with the popular and now out-of-print Saratoga in 1998 and also includes Brandywine from 2000. The scale is 200 yards a hex, with one-hour turns. Units represent infantry and light infantry brigades and regiments, smaller formations of dragoons, cavalry and riflemen, and artillery batteries; most infantry and cavalry units represent 100 to 600 men, while artillery units simulate anywhere from two to eight guns cannon. Leader counters represent individual commanders and their staff.

Guilford Courthouse actually covers two small battles fought in the South in 1781 in the months before British General George Cornwallis marched his forces north to Virginia, where he surrendered to George Washington in October after the siege of Yorktown. The battle of Guilford Courthouse itself, which took place in North Carolina in March, has 45 units, including leaders, while the battle of Eutaw Springs, a minor clash that took place in September about 40 miles from Charleston, South Carolina, has just 35 units. Cornwallis commanded British troops at Guilford Courthouse against a number of American regulars and state militia forces led by Major General Nathanael Greene. British forces at Eutaw Springs were commanded by Lt. Colonel Alexander Stuart. Though both battles were considered British tactical victories, in a strategic sense the American forces emerged victorious, as the British suffered severe enough losses that their goal -- to eliminate U.S. troops and hold the newly taken ground -- failed. Cornwallis marched on to his surrender at Yorktown, while Greene said of his forces "We fight, get beat, rise up, and fight again."

Given that GMT's Revoluntionary series is already aimed more at playability
than simulation, the low counter density of the battles in Guilford Courthouse -- plus an abbreviated scenario for each battle, based on historical unit positions after their approach marches -- makes for genuinely quick playing games that can be completed in an evening's play (perhaps just a few hours for experienced players). The game comes with a nicely done, back-printed 22'' x 34" map (one side for each battle, obviously), one sheet of 5/8" counters that include various markers, a player's aid card with combat results table, terrain effects chart and various other tables, and two rulebooks. One covers the specific conditions for each battle and includes historical summaries, while the other is a general rulebook for the Revolutionary War series and is a welcome addition. GMT plans to produce more games using this system -- the next will be about the siege of Savannah -- and a rulebook laying out the basic rules for all the games in the series makes for an easier introduction to the system.

The new game also gives each side an offensive and defensive role, as the British are on the attack in Guilford Courthouse, while the Americans take the initiative in Eutaw Springs; the defenders in each battle, moreover, have opportunities to launch counterattacks.

As in the previous games, units are rated for strength (or manpower), movement ability and morale. Morale ratings -- the British units generally have higher ones overall -- provide die roll modifiers during combat and during a rally phase, when units that that have been disrupted or "shattered" by combat attempt to improve their status. A unit's morale can be affected by overall Army morale, which each side keeps track of on a numeric chart that runs from 0 to 15. Take too many casulaties, or suffer too many disruptions or retreats, and the morale of both your individual units and overall force drops. Army morale can either be high (11-15), fatigued (5-10) or wavering (0-4). Once your force hits zero on that scale, you've lost, big-time, a reflection less of overwhelming casualties than of the will of your guys to continue the fight. Keeping a close eye on Army morale is critical, as it can go south on you in a hurry, so it's vital -- especially for the American player -- to know when to attack, when to retreat, and when to stand fast.

This is a basic "I go, you go" system, with some twists. At the start of each turn, both sides roll a 10-sided die to see who gets initiative and goes first, so you may be able to move twice in a row, giving you a chance to mess up your opponent or escape from a bad situation. Following initiative determination, units of the active player move and attempt to rally; the defender then conducts artillery fire (the only type of artillery fire in the game) from one to three hexes away, depending on a valid line of sight. Rifle units from both sides adjacent to enemy units then conduct simultaneous fire; both artillery and rifle fire can inflict disruptions,
retreats, Army morale losses, and occasional step losses. Following that comes the close combat phase, in which the initiative player must attack all adjacent defenders.

Combat is done by basic odds comparison, ranging from 1 to 3 to 4 to 1, and numerous modifers -- for morale, terrain, disrupted or shattered status, partipating leaders -- can add to or subtract from the die roll. Other modifiers can come from what is one of the more interesting parts of combat, in which each side secretly picks an offensive or defensive tactics chit, such as "frontal assault," "stand fast," or "turn flank," and the results are compared on a tactical matrix. The use of leaders in any combat gives you additional chits to choose from. Combat results themselves come in the form of retreats, steps losses, disruptions, capture and "pins" (units are engaged, and the defender must remain in place and attack in his turn, or withdraw and suffer a drop in Army morale). Certain combat results also can give either side "momentum chits" that can be used to reroll a future combat result or to influence the initiative die roll. In addition, disrupted and shattered units lose their zones of control and have reduced combat and movement abilities -- shattered units cannot move at all -- and are highly vulnerable to elimination or capture if attacked before rallying.

That's the basic description. In a broader sense, what the American Revolutionary series does is use some pretty simple mechanics to create the conditions of linear warfare, where the key to success in battle was maintaining an orderly line, outflanking your opponent, and breaking his morale. Units are not required to face a certain direction as in more complex tactical and grand tactical games. Instead, non-artillery units in good order (not disrupted or shattered) have zones of control that force an enemy unit to stop next to it. The rule mandating combat with adjacent units shows how opposing lines of troops would become engaged and find it difficult to withdraw. Stacking limits -- a maximum of six strength points, plus one artillery unit, to a hex -- make it difficult to pile up large odds in combat; this is not an 18th-century blitzkrieg where you try to smash through an opponent's line. Instead, success generally hinges on getting beneficial die roll modifiers from leaders, units with superior morale, outguessing your opponent on the tactical matrix, or using flanking attacks to force an enemy unit to retreat through zones of control of your units. Stacking limits are in effect at all times, so it's important to leave lines of retreat for your units, or they will be captured if forced to retreat -- another simple rule that simulates the linear nature of this period of warfare. You build incremental advantages by disrupting the enemy, forcing him to retreat, and eroding his morale.

The battles in Guilford Courthouse offer interesting challenges to both sides. In Guilford Courthouse itself, the British have superior quality troops, but the Americans have twice as many men. To engage the Americans and win a decisive victory, the British also have to traverse almost the whole width of the map, and it is difficult in the game to recreate the historic rate of advance of the Brits. Historically, the Americans used two seperate lines of troops and militia, some of them strung through thick forest, to slow and disrupt the British; by the time the Brits reached the main line of American resistance near the actual Guilford Courthouse building, they had suffered some fairly substantive casualties and were disordered, enough that the Yanks inflicted serious losses on them, though the Brits captured the field of battle. In the game, since there is no rule that shows how formations could break down even if not suffering serious casualties, it can be easier for the British to drive the Americans back. But the Americans have the numbers, and time is not on the side of the British, so it can be difficult for either side to get much more than a marginal victory, (victory comes in two other levels, decisive and substantial, and the game can also end in a draw).

In Eutaw Springs, the Americans go on the attack with a smaller but better quality force, and there are a number of rules to recreate the historic conditions in which the American attack, against a British encampment, caught the Redcoats napping. However, the American units may become disordered once they enter that encampment, making them vulnerable to British counterattack (simulating the breakdown in discipline among a number of American units as they ransacked the British tents, grabbing bottles of booze and various foodstuffs). In the game, it can be tough for the Americans to drive the roughly equal British force from some good defensive positions, including a stone manor house near the encampment that serves as a fortress. Time is also against the Americans in the battle. But the British can be sent reeling in the initial American attack through a surprise rule that gives those initial attacks a favorable odds shift.

Both games also come with a few optional rules that permit some variations in deployment or reinforcements, and coupled with the quick playing times --
Guilford Courthouse is 13 turns, Eutaw Springs 10 turns -- and low counter
density, these games have a good amount of replay value. Guilford Courthouse
may be the best of the American Revolutionary series for new players, and it's also a solid choice for people with experience with the system.

Steve Pfarrer lives in western Massachusetts and enjoys a variety of historical simulation games, including GMT's June 6, Ukraine '43 and Eastern Front Series, as well as the Panzer Grenadier series by Avalanche Press. In between them, he also enjoys Strat-O-Matic Baseball.

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Okay, so maybe my 'live-action Fish Eat Fish' idea wasn't so great after all.

a cartoon by Scott Starkey

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Die Fugger
a review by Mark Johnson

Some of the first hobby boardgames I discovered 25 years ago were Avalon Hill's bookcase games. As a kid, they were too pricey for me to buy on my own, though I received a couple as gifts. The games I bought myself—and the ones I played the most—were the microgames like Starfire and G.E.V. Small in size & price, and with components more functional than attractive, they nonetheless had great gameplay. Some of them, anyway. The trick was finding the keepers among the entire product line of microgames.

A similar situation exists for the modern German game fan with publisher Adlung Spiele. They release several unusual card games every year to debut at Essen. Each comes in a box just big enough for the deck of cards and sparse rules. At less than ten bucks apiece, you’d be tempted to try them all. However, Adlung’s track record is such that you’re better off hearing a little about them first, then concentrating on the one or two worthwhile titles. One of those from the most recent batch is Die Fugger.

Designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, the man responsible for the Carcassonne franchise, Die Fugger is a market and speculation game similar to Knizia’s Medici. Not coincidentally, there is another game that links those two rich European families, adding a third: Fugger, Wesler, & Medici, published by Doris & Frank. All of these games are about the fantastic rise in wealth of the families during the Renaissance. While it would be exaggerating to say that the Fuggers invented capitalism, they certainly demonstrated its potential. Starting as weavers, and importing cotton by mule from Mediterranean ports into the central German city of Augsburg, the Fuggers expanded into trade in silk, herbs, and pepper. Their fortunes really took off when copper mined in Hungary was transported by Fugger ships through the English Channel and North Sea. By then the family was in a position to lend money to the Holy Roman Emperor, with additional mining concessions as collateral. When Maximilian I defaulted on the loan the Fuggers had a European monopoly on copper. They went on to run a banking network throughout Europe, acting as financial agents for the Vatican.

Die Fugger focuses on the part of the family’s rise when they were simply selling commodities. In fact, that may even be reading too much atmosphere into the game. It’s just as thinly themed as Medici, but that’s not necessarily a problem. There are an appropriate mix of commodities, or goods, for the period (copper, fabric, spices, wine, and jewels), as well as game mechanics that feel like economics at work.

Playable by 2-4 players (and with minor rule differences for each number), the game takes 30-45 minutes, perhaps a little longer than one might expect upon seeing it. These little Adlung boxes look like they should be filler games. Some of them are, but others (most of the better ones) fit the same niche as a shorter boardgame. In fact, Die Fugger is another one of Adlung’s games that feels like a boardgame in a card game box. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Wrede designed it as a boardgame, perhaps for another possible publisher.

But since this is Adlung, it’s all done with a single deck of cards. Most of them are simply goods cards, each representing a share. Nine “price” cards are used to indicate the current value of each type of goods (from 1-9 florins). Each good has a special card that’s placed next to one of the price cards to indicate the current value of each share. The rules explain that you’re supposed to array the price cards in a circle. (I prefer a simple line.) They also suggest that the value cards for each good be folded in half, making little tent-shaped indicators. I imagine that’s for better visibility, but the gamers I know can’t bring themselves to fold cards! They have to be unfolded to fit back into the small box anyway, and it doesn’t really matter which you do.

The cards are reasonably attractive, illustrated by Alexander Jung (uncredited except on Adlung’s website), though I find the style a bit wispy. At least they’re fully functional. The goods cards have indices with different colors and icons in both top corners. The price cards are distinct with good graphics. Card backs are a drab grey image, but that’s probably best to avoid confusion with the important information conveyed on the front.

Then there’s the rulebook. Unlike some publishers who release German-only versions of their games, expecting avid hobbyists in other countries to develop their own translations, Adlung always includes a multi-lingual rulebook. That should be a good thing. Unfortunately, their official translations are often lacking in clarity, clearly done by someone who’s not a native user of the language, and restricted in length by the small rulebook. I wonder if the same is true for the French and Italian instructions. Luckily, online resources such as Boardgamegeek allow you to clear up any ambiguities, and in this case the rules aren’t too bad as-is.

How does it play? After the price and value cards are initially laid out (all goods start at a middle value of 5 florins apiece), each player gets an initial hand of four goods cards. Two more goods are turned over, said to belong to Jacob Fugger (Jacob the Rich). Jacob even gets his own card in the game, placed face up as if he were at the table with you. Players then take turns, either playing a card or drawing one—not both. You can’t even choose the draw card option unless you have less than five cards in hand. The cards you’re laying down face-up represent the goods you’ll sell for profit at the end of the round. Cards left in your hand are worth nothing, but are retained for subsequent rounds (a full game usually takes several).

Exactly when the round ends, and what value each good is worth are where the game’s strategy lies. Or probably tactics. It’s difficult to say how much longer-term control you have in this game. Some feel you’re at the mercy of the cards you’re dealt, simply playing them the best you can. I disagree, finding some multi-turn considerations throughout the game. However, it is true that you will be limited by the cards you’ve got—and foiled by the actions of your opponents.

During the first two rounds of the game each player has one extra option: to play a goods card face-down. This is a future investment, one that won’t pay off at the end of the round but rather at the end of the game. And when it pays, it pays double.

A round ends immediately when a player lays the 5th card of a single good onto the table. That’s among all players (including Jacob the Rich), so the player triggering the end of the round could have several of that type or even just one. Now the prices change. The good that has the five showing moves up five in price. Whichever good is second in quantity moves up that many florins, as well. Same for third, but the other two goods go down one florin. When there are ties (very common), the goods each go up the same amount. So far, so good, but there are two wrinkles. First, there’s a simple boom-bust cycle built into the game: the next step after maxing out at 9 florins is back down to just 1. (And no, you can’t go “down” from 1 back to 9—it only works one direction.) Second, a few of each good card carry a “royal seal.” These pay out double in value . . . but only if they’ve got a certain rarity: no more than three of that type of goods showing. Otherwise they just pay out at the regular rate. (So there’s no downside, only perhaps a missed opportunity for greater profits.)

After the cards on the table are sold for profit (this score being kept on scratch paper), they’re sent to the discard pile, everyone draws two new cards (including Jacob, whose cards always go straight to the table, face-up), and another round begins. Interspersed in the draw pile of goods cards are just a few merchant cards. These aren’t sold like the other goods cards, but if played to the table during a round they permit bonus card draws at the start of a subsequent round. They’re also a good stalling tactic.

These rounds continue until at least one player surpasses a score of 100 florins, whereupon all of the face-down, long term investment cards pay off (double, remember?) as an endgame bonus. Highest total wins.

So there you have it, a pleasant and logical enough little economic system built around a deck of cards. All of Die Fugger feels basically right, and you can devise rationalizations for odd parts without much trouble. For example, what are those royal seals? I imagine they are special commissions or bonuses paid by the king or lord for goods that are in short supply. They don’t pay every time a good is in short supply, but one can only suppose that a merchant-banker doesn’t have control of such things. They must simply make the most of them when the opportunity arises.

Why do the most numerous goods change price by the greatest amount? A simple system of supply & demand would mean the most numerous goods drop in value ... which they do in Die Fugger, as long as they can tip over the top of that 9-to-1 florin boom-bust cycle. Other times they simply rise from 1 to 6 florins, a windfall. I’m less sure about that in terms of theme.

Keep in mind also that there’s never a sense of buying low, selling high. That’s because you never buy anything in the game, you only sell. The cards are simply given to you: at the start of the game, at the start of each round, or by using an action. Using an action is essentially an “expense” on your part, since it’s done instead of laying down a card for later profit. But it still doesn’t feel like a purchase (especially since you have no control over what you draw—a variant using a Web of Power/Ticket To Ride style card draft might be interesting).

As mentioned above, I don’t believe you’re at the mercy of the cards you draw. You’re merely constrained momentarily by them. Even a lowly pair of cards can be enough to control the flow (timing) of a round. You want to push opponents’ goods over the top in price so they bottom-out at 1 florin. A slow & steady approach with your own goods is better. Having two rounds paying out at 6 and 8 florins each is much better than overshooting the market. Saving the goods cards with royal seals is smart, as could be the counter-strategy of playing them early to draw out similar cards from your opponents. You should also consider using one of the middle rounds to build a hand for the endgame, playing off cards that don’t fit your strategy and laying down merchants for bonus cards. Make sure you have a full hand at the end of that round. Doing so will score very few points, but could position you for a big push at the end.

The long-term investment cards are significant in the final scoring due to the doubled payout. You can invest in two cards of the same good—an all-or-nothing strategy for your bonus—or hedge your bets. Since these cards are out of play for the remainder of the game, it necessarily makes those goods less volatile in the marketplace. There are only nine cards for each type of good—if you and other players happen to set aside four of those cards as future investments, that good will change in price very slowly throughout the game. It almost cannot trigger the end of the round! Players paying attention should be able to detect this soon enough. Then whichever players don’t have that good as a long-term investment card had better do what they can to keep its price low at the final scoring.

Die Fugger is a game that would’ve benefited from a more typical boardgame production. The price cards never change, and could be printed on a board along with a scoring track. Jacob himself could have a dedicated space on the board. The cards tracking each good’s value could more attractively be represented by wooden tokens of matching color and shape. Of course, that would be a $25-30 boardgame in place of the existing $10 card game that fits in a pocket. Since we already have Medici, Modern Art, and other boardgames on a similar subject, I guess it’s best that there’s now an inexpensive card game option.

Possibly due to that little rulebook, Die Fugger is one of those games we’ve struggled to play without botching rules. In the beginning we seemed to always forget something, such as the doubling of the investment cards, extra cards for Jacob Fugger, or the little differences of the 2, 3, and 4-player game. Still, it’s a game I’m happy to own and eager to play. The fact that it’s so affordable and easy to store is a bonus.

Mark Johnson is a Mechanical Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which just successfully landed the Mars rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity."

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Blue Moon
a review by Jon Waddington

Only one thing sold me on this game: Reiner Knizia. The rest of it is in most respects a potpourri of familiar things, such as fantasy races, expansions that introduce new concepts, duels decided by a simple comparison of power, and stunning artwork. Sound familiar? It is--and it isn't.

The base game comes with two decks of cards representing two races: the Hoax and the Vulca. Also included are a (superfluous but attractively illustrated) gameboard and three (superfluous but attractively molded) dragon figurines. If the cards were ordinary, this ostentatious presentation would feel a bit like a fleecing of the gullible. Thankfully, the cards, too, are overproduced. They're noticeably larger than ordinary cards, and of a very thick stock. I never riffle shuffle any cards (preferring instead to "pile shuffle" by dealing into a number of piles, then overhand shuffling--it has the twin virtues of preserving the cards and preventing clumping), but in this case, I'm not sure you could. The artwork is front and center (nearly covering the whole card), and each race is by a different artist, giving a distinct but consistent feel for each. One thing stands out: the women of Blue Moon are heavy-breasted, muscular, and prone to wearing thongs. Some also wear warpaint and put little skulls in their hair, while others have replaced their hair with, of all things, fire (in complementary hues, of course). Fortunately, the whole thing comes across less pornographic than juvenile. To quote Abraham Lincoln (and why not?), "people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like." Overall, I find it impressive and enjoyable. I just wish it was a bit less obviously geared toward adolescent males.

Once past the superficialities, each player takes a deck of 30 cards, draws a hand of six, and then one person leads. The other player responds, and the players go back and forth until one cannot or will not continue and loses the duel. The winner earns dragons (points), and the loser gets to begin the next duel. Repeat until one player wins enough dragons to end the game, or (more likely) someone runs out of cards. A single game takes 30 minutes or so, and of course more when you're learning.

A slight majority of the cards in each deck are Characters, with the balance being made up of Leadership, Support, and Booster cards. Characters are rated in two attributes, Fire and Earth, and may also have other characteristics (some common ones being represented by icons, and others by special text). Nothing terribly new here, but it's all done well, with little ambiguity. Leadership cards provide some overarching benefit at the outset of each turn. Support cards confer a benefit that lasts until the end of a particular duel, while Boosters, well, boost a Character, but only for one round of card play. You see, in order to stay in a duel, you must play a Character each round, possibly followed by either a Support or a Booster (but not both). The power of that Character must at least match the current level shown by your opponent in Fire or Earth (the element does not change during a duel, and is announced when the opening Character is played). Most significantly, each new Character that comes into play covers up the prior one (if any). Each round of the duel, then, you're starting mostly from scratch, but with a typically increased level of power that you must meet or beat. At the end of each round, you refresh your hand to six again.

The victory conditions in the game have that nice Knizia touch, seeming straightforward at first, but then proving to have layers of subtlety. The most common way for the game to end is for one player to run out of cards. This may be by intent, as at the beginning of each duel you may forfeit your ability to start a duel and instead may discard up to three cards and replace them. When you win a duel, you "attract dragons" to your cause (usually one, but two if you've played six or more cards in your victory). First dragons defect from the other player to the middle, and then from the middle to you. Thus only one player (at most) will ever have dragons on their side. If you ever get all three dragons on your side, and then win one more duel, the game ends instantly. At the end of the game, victory goes to the player with dragons in front of them. If all dragons are in the middle, the player who ran out of cards first loses.

These victory conditions produce some interesting decisions. One can attract dragons early on by spending a ton of cards and then end the game before their opponent can recoup. Alternately, one can try for a balanced match and force the enemy to run out of cards first. This may be risky, but some decks are suited for this. In addition, there is another option for longer, multi-game duels that allow luck to balance out. Players vie for "crystals" in this version, and at the end of each game, one point is granted for victory, and another for each dragon held. The first player to five wins, so a full match will last at least two games, and likely more.

It becomes quite apparent after a few plays that each race has a very different feel, and demands different skills to play well. The Vulca is a fairly straightforward deck, with a lot of power. They are easier to play than the other base game race, The Hoax. Hoax Characters tend to be weaker, but they have clever ways of drawing their opponent's strength out and then altering the playing field, so that what was once an advantage turns into an overuse of resources. These differences in style are also present in the Flit expansion, which has an enormous advantage in reusing their typically weak cards, and the Mimix expansion, which are very powerful but burn through their deck quickly.

An important point to note is that this is not a collectible card game (CCG). There are no rarities, no de facto obsolescence, no advantage in owning ten of a particular card. It is expandable, certainly, but that is a very different thing. Each set contains a few cards from other races (though the sets are clearly marked in terms of their origin for ease of reassembly--a nice touch), and there are rules for deckbuilding if you wish to go that route. You needn't, though, as it's apparent that great care went into constructing and balancing the out-of-the-box decks. Each card's relative power is shown by a number of moons (from zero to four). Decks always consist of 30 unique cards from the deck's race, and then allow the substitution of up to 10 moons worth of cards from other decks. The constraints ensure that decks won't ever entirely lose their racial flavor, but a wide variety is possible.

As in most CCGs, though, playing well (as opposed to merely playing) does require a thorough knowledge of both decks in play. This is often trumpeted as a flaw of CCGs, as the play environment is so large that total knowledge becomes more like doctoral research than gameplay. It's certainly a factor here, but each deck consists of only 30 cards, many of which are likely to be present even in a constructed deck due to the limits mentioned above. It's a potential environment of 240 cards (currently only 120), which is extremely manageable in CCG terms, but may be a bit much if you don't go for that sort of thing.

The core decision of every turn is whether to stay in, or--in poker terms--fold. Most of the time, the more cards you spend, the greater your chance of victory. However, getting out early is sometimes the best course of action if you get your opponent to overcommit. But you must not let your opponent get an unassailable lead, as even if he runs out of cards, it's meaningless if he holds dragons at the end. Complicating things, once a duel becomes an investment of six cards or more, the consequences become much higher (remember, at this point you get two dragons for winning, not just one). Finding the proper balance is tricky, and enjoyable. In addition (and quite naturally), the best special powers tend to be associated with the low-powered Characters, providing a strong incentive to play them, but making it unlikely (due to their power being covered by the next Character) that they'll provide the good you hoped for.

In the end, I find I'm enjoying this game more than I thought I would at first. It grows on you, and as you become more familiar with the intricacies, the game reveals a surprising amount of depth. There are nits to pick, of course. In the same way that a Boris Vallejo wall calendar is out of place in a professional office or above the family dining table, the game's artwork may be off-putting or inappropriate. It's not a juvenile game, by any means; but from the outside looking in, it comes off that way. I also wish, as I often do with games that are intended to be asymmetric, that it was comprehensively asymmetric. Instead, many cards from each race are functionally identical. A minor gripe, but it detracts from both the theme (is one individual exactly like another?) and the gameplay (shouldn't each race feel completely, not mostly, different?). Another minor gripe is card balance; a few are just plain better than others with the same number of moons. Because of deck restrictions, you can't stack up all the "best" cards, but it's annoying nonetheless to always avoid a card in deck construction in favor of its big brother.

On balance, though, the positives outweigh the negatives. It manages to be a strongly themed game, in part because of the artwork, but also because each race does play differently. It has tactical and even some strategic depth, as determining one's best course of action is difficult, and requires not only some understanding of the card environment, but also your opponent's psychology. Knizia has been rightly accused in past of games which feel like math equations, but Blue Moon is not of that ilk. It's more about timing and proper management than it is about juggling numbers in your head. Luck is certainly present, but I feel at this point that it's much less than it seems when you play your first game. There are undoubtedly times when you will suffer through no fault of your own, but due in part to the small size of the deck, it often works out that a disadvantage in one stage of the game is balanced by an advantage in another. Measuring the extent of each, and learning how to ride out poor draws, is a large part of the fun and skill in the game. For those on the fence because this looks and smells a bit too much like a CCG, I think it's appropriate to look at this as a deeper, more complex evolution of one of Knizia's simpler duelling games (such as Attacke/Ivanhoe or the card play in Taj Mahal). Knizia is a master at wringing the most out of seemingly simple mechanics, and while this game is admittedly a bit more complex than many of his games, it's yet another example of the good Doctor's mastery of game design.

Jon Waddington still lives in the Denver area. Thanks for the second review this month Jon!

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San Juan
a review by M. Barnes

I love Puerto Rico as much as, well, everyone else who plays board games does but nonetheless I greeted the announcement that San Juan would be Andreas Seyfarth's follow-up to his 2002 tour de force with rolled eyes and a groan. Was Seyfarth copping out on the challenge to meet or exceed PR's success, popularity, and innovation? Or was this just another example of the commercial trend for successful games to develop in lines of repackaged or rethemed games such as the Settlers and Carcassonne franchises? I was disappointed that such a talented designer wasn't doing something new, particularly in light of recent releases such as Attika and the last several Leo Colovini games. I wanted something new, not just a Puerto Rico card game.

San Juan is indeed a simplified, reworked version of its bigger brother. Almost all of the core mechanics and clever innovations have been rehashed into the card game format appended by the luck element intrinsic to card games. The art is largely the same, the roles are more or less the same, and the flow of the game is the same. The governor starts the round, picks a role and performs it with a special privilege and the other players follow suit. The goal is to develop your plantation with production and violet buildings; the game ends when someone builds 12 and the victory points are counted. Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before.

Simplified? Reworked? Rehashed? Allow me to rephrase that. Streamlined. Lean. Perfected. And it's something fairly new.

San Juan is awesome. Most will undoubtedly prefer Puerto Rico because it is far and away the meatier, richer game. But San Juan is so lithe and agile you'll be amazed at the quality of gaming it provides in such a compact package.

Seyfarth has basically done to his own Puerto Rico what German games have done for the old guard of gamer's games. He's cut out all the inessential, detailed bits. He's abstracted his own abstraction of colonizing Puerto Rico, sacrificing some of the specificity of PR without losing too much of the richness and depth of the original game . Broken down to its atomic structure, there really isn't much to San Juan but what's there is so ferociously stripped down it's like listening to the Sex Pistols after hearing any given Rush song.

The San Juan system is essentially the skeleton of Puerto Rico with the muscle and tissue of a multi-tiered card game system whereby the cards represent not only your building potential but also your currency and your goods produced at production buildings. Drawing cards not only provides you with a larger range of possible buildings but also fills your coffers. There's some really nice decision making at times- use the Silver Smelter to pay for the lower-yield but cheaper Sugar Mill to produce something next round or wait to build the more lucrative building? Producing goods and trading them (the good old Producer and Trader phases modified by a very simple market value system that replaces the Trading House and the Capitain phase) is one way to get more cards, but there's also a new Councilor role which lets you select from a number of drawn cards so you can mititgate the luck factor when you just can't find that Library. The buildings themselves provide victory points and special abilities for different phases such as earning cards for producing more than one good at a time, reducing building costs, giving bonus points at the end of the game (like the large buildings in PR). Of course, there are many great combinations of cards to be discovered as the role selection privilege is cumulative with card effects - it's always a joy building a 6 building for only two cards and then getting to draw a card due to the effect of another building. Or producing four goods on one round and drawing 6 cards on the next trader phase.

There are many ways to play San Juan successfully, and this is surely testament to the game's depth and lasting appeal. You can try to produce as much as possible to maximize your ability to build high-value buildings or monuments. You can race to build the inexpensive buildings to rush the game to a premature end for the other players. You can focus on denying your opponents the ability to do anything, prospecting at key times or building while they're empty-handed. As I've stated, there is definitely an element of luck but if you're skilled with the various available approaches to winning, it doesn't matter. The key is that there is an absolute demand for flexibility, particularly in the opening. The game just gets better when you know what cards to look for and what combinations are the best for what you're trying to do.

The genius of the system is that you'll never draw a worthless card. Even if your strategy doesn't call for the building of monuments, you can still spend the cards on something else or stow them away at a Chapel for points at the end of the game. This makes all the difference in the world to me- there are few things I hate in gaming more than drawing worthless cards that either can't be used for anything worthwhile or require some special condition to be useful. Simply put, the San Juan system is a model of how strategic card games should be designed to mitigate (but not eliminate) the effects of luck.

The Gold Mine sucks. That's my only complaint. Its inclusion in a relatively well balanced set of cards is mysterious to me. It's the only card that can actually be detrimental to you as it can result in a wasted prospector phase. Some have said the Library is overpowered (it doubles the role selection privilege) but I've seen Library-centric strategies beaten time and time again by skilled play.

Be warned that this is not an interactive or social game, just like its predecessor. You cant directly effect what your opponents are doing but I think that's absolutely fine as both games are much more about exploiting opportunities and working through the mechanics to win. It plays tremendously well with two - veterans can tear through a game in 20 minutes - and it is a good option for 3 and 4 player groups that want the PR experience without the length. It's also very easy to teach. It's very portable and comes with its own real wooden pencil and scorepad, which I find charming in an old-timey sort of way.

So maybe Seyfarth will leave Puerto Rico behind next time; or will he open the floodgates for endless expansions and religious themed variants? It matters not; San Juan is a must-have for the gamer of dignity and refined taste.

This is the second of M. Barnes' triptych of reviews this month.

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Finstere Flure
a review by Michael W.

Friedman Friese is as well known for his freaky hair colour and F fetish as he is for his funky games. Coming off his successful, yet odd, Fische, Fruppen, Frikadellen (Fish, Hamburgers, Cigarettes), Finstere Flure (Sinister Corridors or Fiendish Floors depending on your translation preferences) is a light-weight racing game with a very fun theme.

In a feeble attempt to keep the storyline from Fische going, Friese this time has the players each representing a faction, trying to escape Count Furst Fieso's dungeon, all while being stalked by the fearsome Furunkulus. The Fiesto tie-in is tenuous at best though, and players who haven't played Fische will have no problems picking up Finstere Flure's theme and flavour. In actuality, the theme owes much more to the pulp comics of the 50's published by EC (Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt) than it does to Friese's previous work, and will likely be a hit with any horror buff.

The dungeon is represented by a large, gridded board with appropriate bones and stains thrown in for good measure. The players start on one corner, and over the course of the game, attempt to elude the monster (an entertaining 'do it yourself' aspect as the game comes with a collection of parts with which you fashion your own) while making their way to the exit. To make things more interesting along the way, the dungeon is littered with blocks (to hide behind), blood slicks (to slide quickly over) and teleporters (only for the use of Furunkulus!).

Game play works as follows:

Each player controls 3-4 character tokens (depending on the number of players), charmingly themed to such things as the Addams Family, the FBI, and Geeks, each with a total movement value of 7 over the course of two turns. On one side of the character, for instance, a token might allow a big movement of 6 spaces, but on the flip side, which dictates movement for the following turn, it will only be able to move 1 space!

During each turn the players alternate moving tokens, until everyone has had the opportunity to move all of their pieces. Then one of the monster's movement tiles (conveniently shaped like tombstones) is flipped over indicating how far it will move during the turn. Numbers range from the low (5) to the potentially very high (Two Kills, with a maximum move of 20 (!!) to accomplish it).

The monster then moves based on what it can see. It starts by looking left, right, and then forward. If it sees no one, then it takes a step forward and repeats the process. If it sees someone, it will immediately turn toward them, and take a step. If it sees two or more tokens it will head toward the nearest one, while two equally distant characters serve to confuse it, and make it take a step forward rather than changing direction.

This simple 'program' makes it fairly easy to predict where the monster will go, but it also makes devious 'monster leading' possible, often to disastrous results.

Of course, the dungeon is large, so the monster is given some advantages to get around. Firstly, all of the walls are marked with letters of the alphabet. If the monster runs into a wall, it will then be teleported across the board to the matching letter. This can make for some very nasty surprises if the players aren't prepared for it!

Additionally in the advanced game (the only version of the rules I'd recommend playing for regular gamers) 2 sets of additional teleporter tiles exist, which are set up in the dungeon itself. Like the wall teleportation, these are off limits to the players, but offer some interesting ways to make the monster appear, seemingly out of nowhere, to wreck havoc on unsuspecting victims.

The entire game consists of two rounds of 7 turns each. At the conclusion of the first round any 'eaten' character tokens are returned to their owner and can be used again. The winner is the first person to get 3 (assuming a 2-4 player game) of their tokens out of the dungeon. If no one is able to get that many free, then the winner is the person with the most out at the conclusion of the game with ties being broken by escape order.

The end product is a light-hearted, light-weight race game. Players regularly are tempted to woo the monster toward foes, only to have their carefully laid plans backfire at the last moment by an unfortunate (for them) tile draw, or a nasty last ditch manuever by an opponent.

The balance between getting out quickly and interfering with one's foes is also well done. Many games I've seen a player grab an early lead by getting two of their tokens out, only to have their remaining two mauled as the other players conspire against them. Having fewer tokens on the board is actually a liability in this game, as you have less control over where the monster is heading, and have fewer opportunities to lure it away when one of your tokens is about to be turned into dinner.

Are there problems with the game?

Undoubtedly.

First, if the players are intent upon it, they can completely avoid the monster with a large degree of success. This is entirely due to the movement system, which makes the distance travelled random, but the destination crystal clear. If the group plays FF with avoidance as a goal then the fun factor slips down several notches.

Secondly, it really needs to be played quickly for the system to work. If players overanalyze things, then the game turns into a drab, almost clinical puzzle, and there are no surprises. This kind of pure strategy option works well for heavier games, but for FF, which is clearly meant to be on the lighter end of the spectrum, it can really bring the game down. For this reason I advocate making a conscious effort to play quickly, even utilizing a timer if necessary to keep the pace up.

Overall however, I consider Finstere Flure to be a fun, replayable and very accessable game. The variable set up of the blocks, slicks, and teleporters serve to keep things fresh, and it works very well as an opener or closer for an evening of gaming, as it has a very short set-up time. The game system has a low enough amount of luck to reward good play, yet enough inherent chaos to keep things interesting, and for that reason I'd also consider it a good 'bridge' game between the casual set and the more hardcore. If the theme doesn't make you squeamish I'd also recommend it as a good family game. It's certainly not a brain burner (perhaps a brain eater) by any stretch, but sometimes a little light-hearted fun is what I'm looking for, and Finstere Flure fills that niche admirably.

Michael W. is currently studying European History in Michigan. Between Toronto Maple Leaf games he likes to fit in a few rounds of Princes of Florence.

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Dwarven Dig!
a review by Damon Asher

If there’s one thing I knows about dwarves it’s this: Dwarves love to dig! So it’s only appropriate that this is the topic of Kenzer & Company’s DungeonQuesty game Dwarven Dig! In this game for 2 to 4 players, your goal is to use your party of four Dwarven specialists to tunnel to the vault at the center of the mountain and escape with the treasure. There is always less treasure available than players, so at some point, there’s going to be a conflict, probably quite a few of them. That’s another thing I knows about dwarves: They love to fight!

When you dig into the game box you’ll find you’re getting some fine bits for your money. The game pawns are all detailed metal figures, brightly painted a solid color. A more artistically inclined gamer can buy extra dwarves from the publisher’s website that can be painted up as fancy as you please. The Grit stones that keep track of the game’s currency are also metal. The hexagonal tiles that make up the game board are nice and thick, and the cards, while the stock is a little thin, are oversized. On the other hand, the six-sided die included is wee. You may want to sub in a larger die. A nice large marbleized d6 would fit the theme nicely. Overall, it is a quality production.

The game begins with a fairly involved building process whereby you combine hexagonal tiles to form the game board. You do your best to give yourself an easy route while making life hard for your opponents. Unless someone’s asleep, this usually balances out, giving everyone a moderately tough road to hoe. The board adjusts in size depending on the number of players. The treasure vault sits in the middle of the board while a spoke radiates out to an entrance for each player. To win, you need to dig to the center, grab the treasure, then exit by way of any entrance.

The gameplay is broken up into ordered phases that make up each complete round. Each phase is taken by each player before the next phase. All players take a digging and movement turn, then all players get their combat phase, followed by an optional extra turn, then finally a phase where earned Grit is collected. Your dwarves progress through the mountain by digging into adjacent tiles. Each tile edge is blocked by a dirt, granite, or basalt wall. The types of rock on the edge of the hexes you are digging from and to determine your chance of successfully breaking through. Dirt to dirt is the easiest while basalt to basalt is pretty tough. Once you successfully dig, you place a passage tile between the hexes and that way will (usually) be open for the rest of the game.

The essential currency in the game is Grit. Grit symbolically represents hard-earned experience, and is physically represented by little silver stones. Think Nerds candy but less delicious. An innovative game mechanic is that you earn Grit not through success but by failure. The more your dwarves flounder, the more determined they become to succeed next time. Can’t dig through that basalt wall? That’s worth a Grit stone. Lose a dwarf to a monster? Be comforted that you’ll earn a few Grit for that as well. Think of those Grit stones as petrified tears and you’ll get the general idea.

Grit is used for a variety of things. You can add to most skill rolls for a price of one Grit per point, but you’ll need to spend your Grit before you roll. Grit can buy you an extra movement or combat phase each round. Grit can also be used to purchase Quarry cards. These are generally very useful and let you do things like automatically plow through walls, sic monsters and hazards on your opponents, and even teleport around the mine. One of my favorite moves is to go through a previously dug basalt-to-basalt passage, then use the cave-in Quarry card to collapse the passage behind me, forcing a pursuing party to make a very difficult dig or go around before they can follow. The more powerful cards require you to spend additional Grit to enact them; this prevents a lucky card draw from unbalancing the game.

Your initial four-member party comprises a Miner, an Engineer, a Warrior, and an Elder. These dwarves can stick together in a single party or split off in different directions any way you like. Each specialist has a unique ability. The Engineer can Force March, granting your party an extra move at the cost of some Grit. The Miner can set off a Shockwave that can blow up dwarves in any other tile on the board. This ability comes with the troubling consequence that it is just as likely to kill the dwarves setting off the shockwave as the target. The Warrior can pick a single opposing dwarf to Duel rather than having to engage the entire party. Finally, the Elder, if he can manage to sit quietly by himself for a turn, will generate a variable amount of Grit for your team with his Commune ability.

Digging into the next space, safe navigation through tiles with hazards on them, and combat depend on making skills checks. Usually, two of your four dwarf specialists can help you make your skill roll by adding +1 each. For example, the Miner and Engineer will help you dig through walls. The strength of the Warrior and the wisdom of the Elder will help you avoid being trapped by the Pit Roach. Consequently, a four-dwarf party is best prepared to face any challenges that come their way. However, there are also good reasons to split up your team. Sometimes you need to cover multiple escape routes to intercept a party trying to sneak out with the treasure. Also, the special abilities are best used by solo dwarves. You’ll need to leave the Elder behind at some point so he can meditate up some Grit. The Warrior’s duel and the Miner’s shockwave attacks are safest to use if those dwarves go at it singly. Similarly, the Engineer’s forced march doesn’t cost any Grit if only the Engineer takes the extra move. However, if you ever want to engage in straight-up party-to-party combat, sheer numbers are your best ally. Determining the time and place to peel dwarves out of the party and re-partner them is a key strategy for the game. There are numerous tactics to explore to find the best ways to split and combine dwarf parties in response to fluid situations. This aspect adds a lot of interest and replayability to the game.

The main thing I admire about the game is its balance. The progression through the various trapped tiles is reminiscent of DungeonQuest, but this game is much fairer to the players. In DQ and many other games of this type, there’s a lot of random, sudden death. In Dwarven Dig, this problem is solved somewhat by the fact that all tiles are exposed. You usually have the option of going the long way around a dangerous tile at the cost of time. While there is a lot of dice-rolling, you are able to evaluate the perils and rewards for each potential action; you know your odds of success, and can plan your tactics according to how much risk you are willing to take. You can mitigate your risk if you have and are willing to spend Grit. Play will most likely be fairly conservative at the beginning of the game, with players keeping their parties together and going the long way around traps. However, once someone gets to the treasure, the race is on and you’ll be willing to imperil some dwarves in order to steal or hold onto the booty. This
gives the game a nice escalating pace that leads to an exciting conclusion.

For this reason, it is fortunate that the rules are designed to make it likely that most players who are not overly reckless will still have some dwarves on the board until the end of the game. Whenever you fail a skill check, you get to make a Luck roll to avoid the nasty consequences. This is essentially an unmodifiable saving throw for you old-school gamers. As you start to lose party members, the remaining dwarves become luckier so there’s less chance of getting knocked out entirely. A full party of four needs to roll a 6, three or two get lucky at 5+, while a lone dwarf makes his saving throw on a roll of 4+. This means your last dwarf has a 50% chance of surviving no matter how hard he gets thumped. This also has implications for splitting up your party; smaller groups and solo dwarves will have a harder time with skill checks, but a better chance of escaping scot-free should they miss the roll.

The Grit mechanic is also a clever way to keep a player that has fallen on hard times from dropping out of contention. Beat-up dwarves earn a pile of Grit to help them reverse their fortunes in the next turn. While the player who manages to keep all their dwarves alive will definitely have an advantage, the luck and Grit rules synergize to make losing parties more resilient as they take damage. Consequently, usually most players stay alive to enjoy the typically exciting endgame.

Another thing that sets Dwarven Dig apart from other games of this type is that it is more directly competitive than most. You are definitely battling the other players more than the dungeon itself. Someone will always be trying the beat you to the vault or steal your treasure from you by whatever means possible. Encountering hazardous mountain spaces usually only occurs when you decide you need to take a shortcut to save time on your way to snatch some gold or to administer a bashing. The other player, of course, will try to force you to brave as many of these hazards as possible.

Whether or not you like this game is going to depend on how much you enjoy the theme and the competition. I’m at a loss to find any faults with the game mechanics. There’s no character advancement here; if anything you get weaker as the game continues and you start to lose dwarves. However, this also keep