"Hanabi" part 2 for real

"Hanabi," the Japanese word for Honeybee,
has to be one of the coolest games I've played. Even moreso than my favorite game from childhood, "Dig hole under the fence."

Honeybee is a cooperative, multiplayer card game. Each card shows a honeybee of a certain color, as well as a number from 1 to five. The point of the purpose of the objective of the goal is to go around in a circle and play cards of the same color in ascending order. You can have multiple stacks of honeybees going at the same time, building all the colors simultaneously. BUT THE FUCKIN AWESOME KICKER is you cant see your cards WHOA WHAT HOLD THE FUCKIN TELEFONO

Here is a red honeybee. Did you know that honeybees cannot see red? Wouldn't THAT suck.

During your turn, you have the option to do one of three things. You can play a card, discard a card and gain more time, or you can give a player a clue, but this costs a timeage token. You are limited in the kinds of clues you can give. You can only provide information, such as "this card are a three" or "deez cards is blue." At this point, the player has to remember / decipher what the clue giver wants you to do - maybe they want you to play it? or discard? HMMM

Despite all the hexes that are so ubiquitous in board games, this honeybee is not making a honeycomb. Instead, this honeybee is exploding.

Cool-ass games like these deserve to win the big ole shpeel daz jars award thingie, which this one did in twothousandthirteen. HANDS DOWN (bahaha get it??) love this game, 12 out of 10 dentists would play this game again. Easy to learn, small, portable, very social deductiony minus the permanent destruction of friendships thing that comes with so many of these games.

I don't think any specific elements from this game would be directly steal-able to use in ours, other than the fact that it's fuckin awesome. so yea, I guess we're gonna steal the awesomeness.

"Hanabi" - hey look at this

"Hanabi," is cool and is a great game -
the end, thanks for reading.

"Splendor" - more like Splenbore

Who cares.
Honest question doe.

Do I not understand the definition of "fun" that these board game designers use? According to the worldwide infobahn, the board game Splendor "war nominiert für das Spiel des Jahres 2014 Rammstein Bratwurst Volkswagen Beetle Wolfenstein 3D," therefore, some people in some place thought this game was good or is fun. Fuck 'em.

Let me stop drinking this hatorade for one second to show you a picture.

One of the many beautiful gems that perfectly rocksonifies the feelings you have when playing this game.

What do the gems even have to do with anything? If you want to be the least shittiest player, the goal is to collect the mostest gems, then use these gems to buy various engines that in turn generates mo gems. Relevance and theme? irrelevant and irthemed. The game might as well be called "splenfork," where each resource is some form of silverware and you can buy silverware factories with your extra spoons. Or maybe "forkdor" where you do the same thing.

Another one of the many ugly rocks that remind me of this game.

Now that I've been on this splendor-shaped toilet for the past few paragraphs, I'm completely out of poo and physically am unable to shit on this game any more. The redeeming elements of this game were few and far between, but were honestly gratifying. This game is a distillation of the Engine Building game mechanic, where you gather resources that can be used to purchase resource generators, some of which are worth points. The fun of building an engine is a truly satisfying experience, as your economy represents the progress that you the player makes as a result of your previous decisions. Halfway through the game, you find yourself picking up low level cards (and victory points) for free. And just like the "missed encounters" section of craigslist, everyone loves that shit.

 Look at this ugly. Also, there's an ugly rock in the background.

To kinda take a step back from the giant pile of dookie, I loved the totally radical chips that represented the gemstones. They feel SO GOOD. Like that perfectly smooth and shiny pebble that you picked up a couple weeks ago and tried to sell on etsy as "art," but it turns out that you don't know how to etsy. Nice game components are so clutch to me. The giant, uncontrollably and unintentionally destructive dice from King of Tokyo, the cute cuddly panda from Takenoko, or these kickass clay chips, these components helps immerse the player into the game world, which is a good thing duh.

Overall, this game deserves to be head-butted and sent to hell. To me, the idea of engine building is entertaining and allows for interesting strategic thinking, but should be a component of another game, not a game itself.    

"Takenoko" - the game of being fat and looking cute

Did you know that a grown adult panda
can and will punch the ever living shit out of you? Having pandas around is a common cure for constipation. This is a little known fact that I just made up.

Being a panda is something that no one has ever fantasized about. That insatiable hunger for bamboo, the whole not ever getting sex thing, and the constant desire to punch people makes it one of the least desirable animals to be. It's no wonder that pandas as a species are so tired of being alive. But, I guess for those rare occasions when you feel like living the panda life without the incessant need to punch, this is one-third of a game for you.

As everyone knows, Takenoko is the Japanese word for "Do not Take a Ko." The game puts you in old-ass Japan, where you are trying to collect one of three different sets which are depicted on cards. Panda cards are completed when your panda-stomach is full of different types of bamboo. Farmer cards encourage you to grow stalks of bamboo to some specified height, while the third set requires you to build the world to fit a certain shape. The sets may interact with each others in unique ways, since you may both complete a panda set and farmer set at the same time HOW WEIRD AND WACKY.

What is a ghost panda's favorite food? BamboooooJUST FUCKING KIDDING it's tacos

This game is all about worker placement / set collection, a combination of concepts that seems to be pretty simple to introduce multiple elements of strategic decision making. The balance of randomness from dice rolls or card draws versus what other players do is heavily shifted towards the latter. A real game involves making decisions based off what has happened before your turn. Some would argue that games where your opponents decisions bear no impact on your thought process are not really games at all. Often times in Takenoko, your opponents will nom down all the bamboo that you need to complete one of your sets, and you'll want to make like a panda and punch them until poop goes flying everywhere.

What was so good about THIS particular collection of cardboard pieces?
THE ART. HOLY BUTT SPARKLES! ITS SO GOOD. Everything from the cuteness of the box art to the cuteness of the panda token radiates cuteness beams. The art style is cohesive and fairly minimalist, but seeing this box really sucks you in and before you even realize what the hell is going on, *SHAPOWZ* you're whipping out your massive credit card and flopping it onto the table for everyone to see. Although I really enjoyed the game mechanics overall, particularly the concept of multiple semi-antagonistic gameplay elements, to me the most appealing part of the game was the art.

May mechanics update - representation problem

PROGRESS BITCHES. 
Most of the time we say we're gonna talk about the game but end up thinking about what things we can eat, eating said things, and then having an in-depth discussion about the things we just ate. For the first time, we had a truly super productive discussion about the concepts that we are planning on incorporating into our boardgamething.

One major issue we had was a "Representation problem". We knew that each player would be able to recruit characters into their party, so by the endgame the character would be in control of multiple characters (In my mind I randomly picked 7, because random.) Each character you recruit into your party would give you one more action in the worker placement definition of "action," and each character card have to be represented in the game world by some kind of token. Being able to represent all 7 dudes in your party would be complicated, since each character token would have to be distinct in order to uniquely represent each character card. We figured we had 4 possible options to resolve this issue:

• Have a unique character token for each character card in the deck. This allows the full complement of characters to still be available at any moment. Having recently played Betrayal at House on the Hill, we got slightly frustrated at the need to dig through a pile of small cardboard thingies, just to find a single thingie that we needed. Worse yet would be trying to find and match one out of 50 or 60 different small pictures of the dudes on the character cards. Needless to say, every time a character is recruited, this would result in a frustrating suck fest, and not the fun kind.
• Nix character cards completely, and put all stats on the back of each character token. This is a pared down version of the character system. The biggest sacrifice was having to ditch the flavor text and details on the character themselves, essentially stripping out the theme of the characters and focusing on the mechanics. Having spent the most amount of time on the host of interesting and unique characters, this was not a least preferred option.
• Restrict the party selection to one member of each of 7 "classes." For instance, on each character sheet, there's only one "General Captain Dude," there's one "Flying Wizard Man or Woman", etc. Each character card would have a designation of which class they belong to. This would actually really give a ton of strategic decision making, since each character would be forced to decide which character can fill each slot best. But, it would restrict the decisions in other ways, since each player wouldn't be able to stack their party with their favorite class.
• Have each of the character tokens hold up a number, 1 through 7. This wildly cute idea could work, but it's clearly a cop out solution. It would allow each player to recruit 7 of anythings and build their party however they see fit, but it's not special in the slightest.

After the session, we decided to just have less characters available in the party.

"Carcassonne" - whatevs man

"CLASSIC EURO GAME BLAH BLAH" 
WHATEVER lets just say how disappointed I was to find out this game was not about turning your opponents meeples into carcasses. Instead, there was an awful lot of road building and cloistering. If cloistering isn't a euphemism for a dirty word, it really should be.

In many ways, the basic "world building" premise was similar to what we experienced with Betrayal at House on the Hill, except the odds of being chased by cannibals is a lot lower in Carcassonne. Also, you don't really interact with the world you build, the building itself is the game. Like SimCity without disasters, policemen, computers, cheat codes, basically nothing like SimCity. You grab a tile, throw it on the table as long as the roads / buildings connect with each other in a logical manner, and by the end of the game you collectively become the shittiest city planner in all of ancient france. Whenever you drop a tile, you have the option to throw one of your wooden dudes on the tile, either on the road, the city thing, or in the grass. Dudes thrown onto the grass are now farmers, which is offensively denoted by laying them down.

Have you heard of the new expansion, where all the meeples are replaced with dog-meeples? It's called "Barkassonne." 

You are limited in the number of meeples you can throw down, so it benefits you to wrap up whatever structure you're working on, so you can regrab your meeple and score those yummy victory points. Otherwise, your meeple gets stuck in this purgatory, whereby they can no longer earn any mo' points. This was a strategic concept I didn't fully learn until, i dunno, never.

Have you heard of the new expansion, where you can only play at night? It's called "Darkassonne."

Of all the games we have played in our journey into modern board games, this one by far had the greatest number of fluffy sheep and somehwat-above-average-sized trees. Because of this, we found the game really peaceful and relaxing - clearly we didn't understand the finer points of how to fuck your fellow players. Looking back on it, there were many moments where understanding the configurations of the tiles remaining would give one of us a huge advantage. Building useless paths and dead ends could block off another person from finishing a structure, therefore turning their already-placed meeple into a uselesseeple, unable to return to the hand to score more points. I imagine there is a high skill cap to this game, making it a highly competitive game. Once you know all of the tiles and how many of them are in play at any time, you can use this nollij to build offensively, preventing others from finishing their castles. Now ain't that some evil-ass shit.

Have you heard of the new expansion, where all the meeples are named "Mark"? It's called "Why the Fuck would Meeples have Namesassonne"

Hilariously, we all tried to play Carcassonne online later against each other, but turns out Carcassonne Castle is not the same game. Like, at all. First of all, you're blocked in by some dumb walls. The fun part about Carcassonne was the freedom to expand our countryside into some awful sprawl of a city full of incomplete buildings ala EVERY SUBURB IN TEXAS EVER. You can only play 1v1, which is equal parts lame and wack. And no fluffy sheep, so fuck that version. 

Stuff that was cool:

You kept track of score by moving a tracker around the board, but at the end, a whole poop-ton of extra points get distributed among the players based on resolving unfinished buildings and the farmers. There is a way to see who is currently ahead, but at the very end, there's this tense moment when you add up the score from the meeples who are still hanging around on your awful shaped countryside, and then tack these points onto your score. 

SURPRISE BITCH suddenly - you're not the winner anymore. It's got a very blue shell-Mario Kart feel to it. When you're losing, you do desperate things to try to score. Having a "hidden" score counter (which technically isn't hidden, you just gotta be REALLY good at counting.) makes gameplay interesting to me, since those desperate strategies might not ever come out.

To me this game is like your best friend from summer camp. It's cool to see it randomly, because at one point it was the dope hotness. Buuuut you really don't need to see it more than once. LOL SORRY FANBROS COME AT ME BROS.

Can someone send me a casual picture of Tony Stakassonne walking through a city parkassonne?

Game Master List

How We Doin

Played Games: 

• Betrayal at House on the Hill
• Alchemists
• Carcassonne
• King of Tokyo
• Takenoko
• Settlers of Catan
• Splendor
• Hanabi
• Killer Bunnies
• Ra
• The Resistance

Games "On Deck" (ha, get it?):

• Puerto Rico
• Ticket to Ride
• Dominion
• Pandemic
• Princes of Florence
• One Night Ultimate Werewolf
• Sherriff of Nottingham

 

Old-School Games/Misc-Maybe-Not-Board-Games-But-So-What:

• Clue
• Monopoly
• Chess
• Checkers
• Mahjong
• Mastermind
• Dominos
• Guess Who
• Mancala
• Jenga
• Scrabble 
• Uno
• Spoons

"King of Tokyo" - The more interesting sequel to "Majority Elected Prime Monster of Tokyo"

"King of Tokyo" puts you in the role of a Kaiju, 
which roughly translates from Japanese into "sweaty rubber suit." Without ever using the word Godzilla, "King of Tokyo" makes you feel like a giant lizard thing slowly lumbering around Tokyo, occasionally being cast in terrible movie remakes in a desperate attempt to revive a boring franchise with no personality. OOP WHO SAID THAT

 

 Look at this dumb pile of trypophobic shit

We found this game simple to get into, both rules and strategy wise. There were two different ways to win. Either collect victory points, which you can get from hanging out in Tokyo as much as you can or rolling combinations on dice, or by knocking the poop out of the other players. Both the scoring track and health-iness meter are built into the sweet character cards that represent your hilariously cliched monster dude. To determine the actions you can take, you roll dice using a Press your luck mechanism, where you can keep the dice you want and reroll the others. Each die has 6 sides, three of them reward you victory points, one for energy collection, one for slapping the other monsters, and the last one for healing yourself.

Did the writers of Godzilla not have any friends? If I made some bullshit monster like this, I would hope my friends would tell me that I sucked

THE GAME PIECES ARE SWEET. It's Yahtzee with truly BADASS dice. That alone is enough to make you feel like a giant monster as you chuck a handful of boulders across the table. Score trackers are built into game pieces. The small green jello cubes that represent energy? Looks straight up like delicious sour apple / lime gummies. SPOILER ALERT: they have the texture of hard candy and taste like dirty people's hands.

  

OK so not all Power Rangers villains were cool.

I mean, everyone wanted to either be the giant bad guys from Power Rangers when they were a kid, but then you get stuck either being the yellow ranger or black ranger just because you were asian or black. 

Wut we learnt

That we both abhor the phrase "Victory points." With all the creativity in the board game / dice game industry, why can't anyone think of anything better than "Victory point"? It physically angers me now when games use this contrived scoring system. I can promise in our game, there will be no mention of "victory points" unless to ironically mock the ubiquity of the phrase.

"Alchemists" - aka Work

BOARD GAMES MIMIC LIFE 
way too often. At least if you're a scientist. And if you drink potions. Alchemists is basically a medieval version of my career as a research scientist, where I do two things very well: mixing shit together, and being wrong. 

The theme of the game was super strong - we got drawn right into mixing a bunch of bs ingredients and sucking down Rennaissance-ass potions.

Oh did I mention the purpose of the game is to win? It is.

For us, the game was pretty heavy, but the manual was really helpful. Examples of what you learn from each potion gave us a good starting place for figuring out the alchemical formulae of each ingredient. Since we were eager to start doing things, we ignored a couple mechanics, particularly selling potions, undercutting each other on potion selling, or buying equipment. We barely published theories until nearly the last turn when we realized that's one of the few ways you get winnage points. BUT HOLY COW PIES filling out our deduction charts was so satisfying. 

 "goddammit Charles, stop pissing into my potions."

I felt like the equipment was hella strong. Not only do they just give you victory points for owning them, but the special abilities let you get an extra action (of which you have only a few to begin with) or save one of your ingredients when you make a potion. The moral of the story is to buy things all the time.

Concepts we definitely want:

The companion app for this game is mufuggin sweet. Since each of the 8 ingredients have a unique "alchemical trait", playing the game without the app requires an additional non-player dude to serve as a gamemaster. They have the unenviable job of using a deduction chart hidden from all players to determine what type of potion each player brews when they concoct up a concoction. The app makes it so you can play the game with one less friend, and who doesn't like a little spring cleaning anyway?

Aim your phone's camera-hole at a pair of cards, and *SHABLAZZ!!* suddenly your $500 text-sending-machine tells you what kind of potion you made. Each set of formulae and alchemical compositions are attached to a unique room code, so every player can use their own cellular device. HOW. FUCKIN. NEAT.

I'm thinking that a download-worthy app will either simplify the complexity of menial / unfun game tasks or add something to increase the entertainment value of the game by utilizing outside media. Having a written description of in-game characters has served tabletop gamers well for years, but being able to incorporate living, realistic characters who are talking words at you? WELCOME TO THE FUTURE. 

"Betrayal at House on the Hill" - A horror themed "board" game?

HOW CAN THIS BE CALLED A BOARD GAME
when there's not even a board?

what. The concept of building a board with tiles was absolutely mind blowing to me. All my life, "The Board" was the defining characteristic of board games - an immutable world in which your character lives, navigates, eats, and poops. As a long time video gamer, Monopoly and other linear board games felt like the original NES Mario Brothers, a limited one dimensional world where you can go up, down, and forward.

You could imagine how confused I was when I started playing Betrayal. It was Super Mario 64, where we the players could move in any direction we wanted to. We were taken off the rails of the roller coaster, free to fly around. It was a completely open world for these random-ass explorers to chill in a giant, obviously haunted mansion (Why would a small Japanese child be hanging out with old priests and a professor? .... probably best not to answer that.)

Oh, also, it was Mario 64 where the land was different EVERY TIME you booted up the game. Fuckin neat-o.


The concept of a randomly-generated board game was so unique to me. One of my favorite genres of video games is the infamous roguelike (with Rogue Legacy and Crypt of the Necrodancer being two of my absolute favorites.) These games, with their brutal, uncompromising gameplay, do not encourage grinding for levels - they encourage getting better. The kicker: When you die (and you will die), the next playthrough will be a new procedurally generated dungeon. Sure, a handful of elements remain constant everytime you play. But the two most important elements of a game, the win condition (exit of the level) and loss condition (layout of the baddies) are both random.

And lets talk about the second half of the game. Some rooms of the mansion contain an Omen. The player revealing the omen room performs a haunt roll, and for each omen room on the table, the difficulty of the "Haunt roll" increases. When a character fails a haunt roll, someone is declared the betrayer via an arbitrary decision described in the rule book. Then, a random horror themed scenario takes place: A giant two headed worm trying to take over the house, a horde of cannibals running around being assholes, your friends eating all your girl scout cookies when you thought you had a whole nother box but you don't, etc.

Except for these, these suck, you can have them all.

Apparently, this is a board game concept called Tile Laying. The randomness introduced by playing tiles from a stack adds tremendous replay value, but also the possibility for shitty, unplayable situations. There's tons of room for random events to happen - you could, theoretically, fail the haunt roll on the first omen room. Basically, you get lured into a giant haunted house to get mauled by a werewolf immediately after entering the front fuckin door. On the other hand, the random tile placement could lead to unplayable situations. A hideous powerful spider queen trapped in the godforsaken basement with no way back up? GODDAMN TERRIFYING in real life, but boring in real game.

What things would we steal from this game??

Games need to be a combination of strategic skill and random luck. Dice rolls or card drawing add the replayability to keep a game fresh long after you tear off that obnoxious plastic wrap, but excessive random elements negate skill. The challenge we have to address is to develop a way to toe the line between a luck based game and a skill based game. This is where inordinate amounts of playtesting is going to pay off. However, a well designed amount of random elements will give losing players a chance to catch up, and the possibility for winning players to lose. Most importantly, randomness emulates real life.