Lanterns

There is a great scene in the Andy Griffith show with Andy sitting in the Mayberry Mayor's office and they are trying to decide on using Japanese Lanterns or balloons for the Apricot Festival. One councilman says that Japanese Lanterns are so doggone commonplace at Apricot festivals and he wanted to use balloons. At first glance Lanterns may seem like another commonplace game in the tired tile laying genre. I put the game through some heavy play this past weekend and I have one word for it, TIGHT.

You can tell this game was designed by someone who knew what they were doing. Each game I won was done so by only one or two points. I love that in a game. The greatness of games like Star Wars The Queens Gambit are that they are always close nail biters and so is this game. Nail Biting may be rare in a game like this that is far more abstract than Star Wars Queens Gambit but nevertheless I enjoyed it.

The game has several features that make it slightly more interesting than Carcassonne. Tile placement is critical because you end up giving a lantern card of a specific color to the player based on the edge he is facing. Lots of Delicious Decisions for the gamer to enjoy. Placing special tiles with platforms allow you to take a wooden Fate token. These fate tokens can be traded for a card of your choice to fill in what you need to make a dedication and take a point scoring tile.

This game was getting a lot of play at BGG FAM and I didn't get a chance to play it. But I did play Splendor and I didn't see what the big deal was about the game. Nice pieces but bland. Lanterns wins against the two. Lanterns is not Ameritrash and while the ages say 8 to adult there is something very adult and sophisticated about this game, it doesn't go into the geek realm. This game if it could get proper exposure could really take the Bridge crowd by storm. I see it as an adult game to be played with martinis. This is not a game for basement dwellers, grunge babies, or worshipers of plastic figures. Ward Cleaver would play this game and that is good news for gaming whose focus has been on the Man Child Still in Middle School for far too long!

The balance in the game is beautiful! Just enough to do to keep it interesting, simple yet deep, nice components and the tight scoring make it a big winner!

This is exactly the kind of review I want to see on the F:AT front page.

The*Mad*Gamer wrote:

Each game I won was done so by only one or two points. I love that in a game. The greatness of games like Star Wars The Queens Gambit are that they are always close nail biters and so is this game. Nail Biting may be rare in a game like this that is far more abstract than Star Wars Queens Gambit but nevertheless I enjoyed it.

The balance in the game is beautiful! Just enough to do to keep it interesting, simple yet deep, nice components and the tight scoring make it a big winner!

I had a conversation wit Richard Launius at Origins that really was kind of a "epiphanal" moment for me. We were talking about Defenders of the Realm and how there was a lot of initial pushback to the idea of taking a game with Pandemic-like design and injecting luck. During that conversation he said (paraphrasing), "A guy said Defenders was not designed well, and he was a fan of Pillars of the Earth, so I challenged him that I could prove that Euro-style games are not as 'serious' and 'smart' as people want to believe. We played Pillars and I took the EXACT same action every turn. I won by 2 points. He was very angry and (sold or traded) the game. Euros are designed to be close so noboy feels too bad about losing, and feel like they were close. This is a design flaw."

I started thinking about that idea, and how many Euros I've played that have a catch-up mechanic. That IS a design flaw from the "game for gamers" standpoint. I should be able to play smartly and stomp the mud out of you if you don't play smart. I think the idea of Euro-Style family games is to design games where all players finish closlely to one another so that younger to middle-aged kids do not become discouraged or upset.

Designing a game so that people don't have hurt feelings is a noble concept when discussing games for families, but for "gamers", or rather, people who play games as a major hobby, its ridiculously stupid. Games should reward smart play.

I played Urbanization and we were only 4 points apart from the winner to the loser. All three of us had different strategies. All of us played a distinctly different style. In the end, Imshould've lost by 10+ points because I played very poorly and my daughter played very smartly,

so, I disagree that being a close game means its a good design,

I think the idea of Euro-Style family games is to design games where all players finish closlely to one another so that younger to middle-aged kids do not become discouraged or upset.

That's an interesting idea and it did cross my mind. While it may be a flaw in Pillars it would not work here. You could not take the same action because each tile you hold in your hand is different. You have many option for placement and while there is luck in the draw of the tiles I think the more skilled player will win more often and if the scoring system is setup to be close to spare feelings so be it. I prefer not to analyze a game to death and just enjoy the experience. For example when I played this we went WOW, that was close!

We didn't go into a spreadsheet analysis of scoring systems. The experience trumps "design flaws"

I'm not saying anything particular about Lanterns, I have no idea about the game. I just read what you said (the quoted bits) and after deliberating, I think that you love games that are "nail biters" because they're designed to be "nail biters". To me, that translates into, "The design is such that while your actions matter, the final value of the actions are only a degree of separation away from one another".

If you play a game of Risk and it's a nail-biter, THAT'S a real nail biter, not a premanufactured one.

I've only played Lanterns once but right off the bat it looked like there was some bullshit with the scoring. There are three ways to score, and scoring tiles for each way. The tiles are stacked from highest value to lowest, and the values are close. I don't have the game in front of me, but something like one stack may have tiles "10, 9, 9, 8, 8, 8, 7, 7, etc" and one may have "9, 8, 8, 7, 7,etc". The different scoring ways are not particularly differentiated. One may require more cards than another, but since you're usually getting multiple cards before your turn to score comes around, that's not really much of an issue.

In short, you're almost always going to score as often as you can, and take whatever the highest available tile is. Sometimes you might not be able to grab that '8' when you score, so instead you'll get a '7' off another stack. It seemed to me, from not only how our game went but how the game is designed, that you're almost always going to get close scores every time, unless you just completely nosedive.

It's not a bad game, but there's nothing special going on in it. I don't think it would last multiple plays, but I don't think there's much reason to give it multiple plays.

It's not a bad game, but there's nothing special going on in it. I don't think it would last multiple plays, but I don't think there's much reason to give it multiple plays.

The game has lasted multiple plays for me so far. Will check in a year later and see if I am still playing it. The real beauty about the game is that each tile you lay not only entitles you to a card but all the other players get a card as well based on where they are sitting. That adds a whole new layer to your decision process of where and how to play the tile. Almost always another player will benefit from your placement and this is a kick in the gut sometimes as it is a race to a higher scoring dedication tile.

Another point is that the cards a not unlimited in supply and ingeniously limited so that a smart player can grab a color that another player was going for before he grabs the dedication tile. This game is really well thought out...they did their homework here.

It won the MENSA award for a reason.