[Boardgames] Ken B.'s Review Round-Up, Feb 8th 2011 Hot

Heck, here's a bonus mini-review I forgot:

Those Pesky Humans: Okay, I didn't hate this as much as Loter did, but seriously, there is some WTF going on in this design, as in, "How is this supposed to be fair?"

It makes the overlord in Doom look like he's taking it easy. Your spawns in TPH almost all have at *least* two health, and each hero can only attack one time per turn barring certain cards. Add in to the fact that many of them move nearly as fast as the fastest hero, and you end up with the heroes trying to make it through legions of foes that can constantly chase them down and surround them.

Give you an idea about how bad the balance is...I was playing against my young stepson, and I wasn't even coming close to playing every card I could. Not even close. I felt so badly for him that I started pulling punches, as he was down to one hero quickly...it was RI-DAMNED-DICULOUS. The ogre just farts out endless waves of foes that don't die easily.

Then you've got this bullshit rogue who can steal the gems the heroes are trying to get away with...I ended up lying to my stepson ("No, the rogue missed, just keep running.")

It's a good production, though. The silly art is okay with me, I dig some of the humor, the cards though are the same cheap-shit crumbly fall apart stuff that plagued Legitimacy, so if you're gonna play TPH, be sure to sleeve the damned cards so they don't fall apart immediately.

I may still tweak this somehow, as my son enjoyed it. Maybe cull out some spawns or something, who knows. But seriously...wtf, man.

God damn you play a lot of games. Good work. Mousquetaires du Roy sounds interesting and it's something I would have completely overlooked. I'm still tempted to buy 7 Wonders but you've cooled me down somewhat so I'll probably hold off for now, that's a good thing.

Puzzlestrike inches close to the "I don't care about the fucking price!" category everytime I read more about it.

Man, I know I was in a hurry to get this done, but did I use the words "Fairy Tale" like seven times when talking about 7 Wonders? Oy.

It's fun, JJ...but seriously, like super fluffy. I don't mind super fluffy in Fairy Tale (D'oh! again!) because the game costs $10 and it's advertised as a filler.

There's more depth to be mined I'm sure, but you can see the system has its limits. The main thing is looking for "free" buildings, that can be huge I guess, but remembering who would benefit from a free building just by glancing over the table? Fuhgetabowdit.

The main thing is that you have to draft and then play immediately instead of drafting a hand and playing from that. Meaning, to deny you a card, I literally have to play it instead, even if it does jack shit for me. I don't like that at all...how are you supposed to effectively hate draft without crippling yourself?

Couple of comments:

Mouseketeers du Roy: The rules are such a train wreck. I do kind of want to try and play the thing at some point. Read the rules, thought I had it, and we burned an hour trying to figure out what to do.

Dog: You kind of have the order wrong, the game is very easy to find in Germany now. The game is actually a public domain game that spawned out of the RV-centric migrant senior citizens of Florida and Arizona. It is in fact a Parchisi variant that was often played on handmade wooden boards with marbles or small clay balls. The original names of the game vary, but Dog and Dirty Balls are common ones. It apparently appeared somewhere in Florida in the early 90's. I did a translation of an early German version that made it to the Geek.

http://files.boardgamegeek.com/file/download/44bw5w3yi/dog.htm?

I want to hear more about Mousquetaires du Roy. MORE DAMNIT!

Well Chasch, to tide you over...

It's an all versus one game, with one side taking on the roles of the four Musketeers, and one side is the vile Milady de Winter. The Musketeers have one way to win but multiple ways to lose. Milady moves in secret each turn, but unlike Fury of Dracula, often she is looking for a confrontation (thanks to her skilled swordsman and bodyguard, Rochefort, who is a formidable duelist.)

The Musketeers have to put out the "fires" that she starts, whether it's making the war effort in La Rochelle go badly, spreading rumors against the Queen in the Louvre, or making her plans against Constance, D'artagnan's beloved. It is easy for them to get distracted overcoming Milady's plots, defeating her henchmen, and overcoming challenges put in front of them...when it's the Quest boards they need to be focused on. If they don't progress on these boards they'll never win, but if they let Milady have free reign elsewhere, she'll achieve one of her many victory conditions.

The dueling mechanic is dice and card based. Milady throws traps and henchmen to slow the Musketeers down and protect her plots.

Anyway...that's the gist of it. Like I said, a full review will follow, I think it definitely deserves it.

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@moofrank: You know, a friend (David Knepper aka Aging One on here) said the same thing--that he was at a con and some people were trying to learn it and gave up in frustration.

I agree the rules aren't organized very well, but I think that the individual subsystems aren't that hard to grasp--there are just a lot of them. Rules for La Rochelle, rules for how Rochefort behaves, how Milady moves, rules for how Paris plots work, how to overcome challenges, how duels work (and by extension, Special Maneuvers in duels)...but all of it is pretty simple. I'll go over it in my review, for sure, but besides some potentially badly organized rules--likely due to the fact it wasn't originally written in English--I don't think the game is that difficult to grasp.

The rules for Mousquetaires are a bit rough, but not really any worse than many FFG rulebooks. I read through a couple of times and then explained the game with rulebook in hand and we only made a couple of mistakes that we clarified during the first game. By the end of the game everyone had it down because ultimately the game is pretty simple and all of the subsystems make sense.

I think this is the best game Rio Grande has published in a long time. It's extremely well themed, and yet I just had the thought... this could be a FFG game if it was "Captain Scary Looking Monster" vs "Big Muscled and Big Titted Fantasy Heroes" using the same mechanics.

I like Dominion and Thunderstone, but Puzzle Strike leaves me cold. I wanted to like this game, but it's got some big flaws. It's ok as a 2-player game, but in a 3 or 4 player game, you can only crash gems towards the player whose turn is next, meaning you cannot target specific opponents - you're stuck attacking the same person every round (or you use attacks that target everyone indiscriminately). In a 4-player game, you will rarely directly interact with the person across from you, stuck to being attacked from the player on your right and attacking the player on your left.

Sirlin Games also needs to do some work on their rule books. One of the most important concepts in Puzzle Strike - counter-crashing - isn't even explained in full in the rulebook, as it's written. Nowhere does it state what happens to the gems when you counter-crash, which led me to play the game wrong for a few sessions until I looked up the addendums to the rules online. Yomi is similarly vague, with abbreviated rules that don't fully explain many of the concepts either. You can pick up the gist of it in a few plays, but for the cost of the decks and all the talk about how carefully it's been playtested and balanced, the lack of clear explanations is bothersome.

We played some mega drunk Beep Beep at WBC and I don't really remember what happened exactly but I know that King Putt ended up wresting with Uba's man and things going flying and then Uba delivering a tray of shots. I think I had a fantastic time.

Yeah, it's one of those that's goofy enough to be a con drunk staple...the squeaky car definitely sends it over the top.

I suspect the Mouseketeers rules are all there. But they are still utter crap. FFG knows to put a sidebar with an example to help explain the flow of a hard-to-understand bit.

Here is my worst case. On my turn, I move to Paris. What Happens? The answer to this question are found:

1. In the Paris section, where whenever M. places a new card, she also places Adversaries and Traps.
2. Back in the Paris section where it says that some cards require 6 successes to defeat. That starts a debate on which cards do that because THEY DON'T SAY SO ON THE CARD!!!
3. In the little combat section near the front which explains how you roll the dice against an opponent.
4. But you still haven't figured out what to do about the opponent until you notice that the Action list for a player turn includes attacking an adversary. Then you notice that dealing with the card is NOT listed as an action, so you have to look back at the card to see that it says "As an Action...."
5. It never actually says anywhere whether you have to defeat the adversary before or after the Paris card.
6. If M. is present, then the effect is on the...in the rules for...The Paris section. That leads to a combat with her bodyguard which....Is that an Action? I think it says so in one of the other sections.

You might as well just write every sentence in the rules on a jigsaw piece and throw them in a box....And then set the box on fire.

LOL. Valid points, Frank. I did write my own rules summary to help teach it, and it was likely organized better than the base game rules. So for Paris, I culled all the relative rules into that summary section.

Does that make the game bad? I don't think so. The rules need help? Yeah, definitely. They're there, just like you say they are all over the place.

Agreed. After I got over my initial BURN IT, HATE, DESTROY, and Sandi's request if she could be allowed to just "bleed from the eyes" instead of continuing to try and play, I did sit down with the rules.

It looks a lot like Shadows over Camelot with dice-based combat, more twists to the mission system and unique missions, equipment for your heroes, and an obvious traitor. Which kind of mean that Eurogame stalwarts Ys and Rio Grande are out AT-ing traditionally fluffy Days of Wonder.

Great stuff Ken, thanks!!

7 Wonders biggest feature is definitely that it accommodates seven players with no real downtime. Its second biggest feature is the Manneken Pis promo because its funny and adds a beer rule.