Tile Laying Game-Carcassone

Carcassone is a bit different than most games.  Instead of the game supplying a set board for you to play on, you and the other players create the board.  Half of your turn is picking a random tile and deciding where to put it in association with the other tiles on the board.  It's impossible to have the same board twice.  The other half of your turn is deciding if you want to put a person on the tile, but your choices are limited by what terrain is on the tile.(castles, roads, intersections, monasteries, etc.)  The players try to gain points by completing castles, thieving roads, farming, and.... having people be monks. (Monking around?) 

There isn't a whole lot of nastiness you can send at other people; you decide if that's good or bad.  In the basic game, once you have your "meeples" (the technical name for the little wooden men) on the board, there isn't anything your opponents can do about it.  The expansions (oh, don't get me started on the expansions!) add the ability to eat meeples with a dragon, use "towers" (a nice way of saying a medieval biker gang throws your meeples into a filthy dungeon until you can pay the ransom.),and anything else you can think of.  I only mentioned the expansions we own here, because there are so many of them.
Sheesh, there's probably a Carcassone: Insurance Salesmen by now.

We own the Inns and Cathedrals, River, Princess and Dragon, and Tower expansions.  River adds some more creative depth to the game, but, as I've said before, my family just isn't ruthless enough to use the Dragon or Tower.  Inns and Cathedrals "ups the ante" on some of your buildings, making them triple points if completed or nothing.  Each expansion (duh!) adds more tiles, which adds to game length.

Carcassone scales well with different amounts of players, but with smaller numbers you have to conserve meeples more.

I've played Carcassone so frequently for so long it's turned into a poorly written sci-fi villain, those ones with the "unison voices".  We are Carcassone.  The universe is us and we are it. Bow to our awesome omniscience or be blown away by our pathetically weak minions.
What I'm trying to say, is that I've played it so much it has become black-and-white.  There is no good or bad, there is It.  But trying to look past that, it's a good, simple-but-complex-enough game to play, especially if you're tired of always having your plans ruined by your younger brother.

If you've noticed that most of the games I've been reviewing are simple-but-complex-enough and I haven't rated any game badly, that's because:
a) I play these simple-but-complex-enough games the most, some members of my group can't handle anything more complex.
b) I'm reviewing the games I enjoy first.

Pros
-Simple-but-complex-enough, like several of the other games I've reviewed
-Board is never the same twice
-Lots of expansions

Neutral
-Not a whole lot you can do to your opponents if you don't have the expansions

I'm giving it an 8.5.

Card Game Review-Citadels

Sorry 'bout the late post, college precal has been trying to grind me into an imaginary number.  On to Citadels!

You've finally been able to amass enough gold for an insanely expensive building, but you're looking at the character cards and the thief is missing! Which means either Uncle Bob or Mom has him, and will try to take your hard-earned treasure.  Or the thief could be lying face-down in the middle of the table, out of reach of those potential..uh..thieves.  But you can't take that risk! What character will they think you'll pick? Should you pick the Magician, because no one would ever think you'd pick the Magician. Or would they think you thought they'd think that, and steal from the Magician anyway? The game's afoot!


Citadels is a deceivingly simple card game of city building, gold, and power.  Play revolves around 8 characters with unique powers, which players shuffle and choose from every round.  You hoard gold in order to build districts, using the characters to boost your income or hinder your opponents.  The real meat comes when a player is attempting to hurt another.  Assassins or thieves must state a character(not a person) to attack, but no one knows for sure who is playing what character.  You can make educated guesses off of what characters you saw when you were picking yours, or other small details, but there's almost always the chance of attacking a unused character or the wrong person.
Aside from character intrigue the game is simple: On your turn you can take two gold or two cards and keep one(these are city district you can build). You can build one district if you wish, and use your character special.  That's it, and play continues until someone builds 8 districts and you tally up points, which is largely the cost of all your districts.
The art is great but has a slight grisly feel, depending on the different cards.(Ex.The prison has a very different feel than the ball room) But it's nothing a sharpie can't fix, My brother turned a falling guy into a bird with the power of Sharpie.
The game is very compact.  In fact, I've been carrying it to school hoping I can fit in a game during one of my hour breaks.
Picking characters is a little slow, especially when first learning and no one knows what the characters do.
The edition that I have comes with the Dark City expansion, which adds new characters you can replace old ones with as well as more special "purple" district, both of which boost replayability.
One of it's main good points is that anyone can play it, but the game rewards those who think deep about the possibilities of who has what character.  What's fun is when the deep thinkers are so wrapped up in competing against each other that they don't notice when the "lesser threat" wins the game by being completely unhindered.

11/2/2010 Edit: The character cards can get rather frayed after a lot of games, I recommend getting some plastic card sleeves.  It makes them harder to fit in the box (there's enough room) but eliminates the possibility of "He's got the thief since the thief has a ripped corner!" Which takes 60% of the fun out of the game.  If I can't spend my board game time stealing my friends' money, what's the point of playing? :)

4/15/2011 EDIT: I made an article about Citadels for small groups of people here.
Summary
Publishers: Fantasy Flight Games
Players: 2-7, but it's built more for 5+
Ages: 10+
Game Length: 40-60 min.

Pros:
-Very well designed
-Simple
-Bonus cards help replayability
-Great art
-Very compact

Cons:
-If you don't like intrigue, a fair bit of back-stabbing and deep thinking, this is definitely not your cup of oatmeal
-Some card art is disturbing, keep your kids in mind. Sharpie Time!

I give it a 8.9, a little bit better than Castle Panic.

Photo from Board Game Geek User Shadow Dragon

Ratings System

Here you go! A nice, orderly numbers rating system that the people at Board to Death TV agreed to let me use. I'll be retconning Blink and castle Panic to a 6.2 and a 8.5.

• 10 – Outstanding. Always want to play and expect this will never change.
• 9 - Excellent game. Always want to play it.
• 8 - Very good game. We like to play it. Probably I’ll suggest it and will never turn down a game.
• 7 - Good game, usually willing to play.
• 6 - Ok game, some fun or challenge at least, will play sporadically if in the right mood.
• 5 - Average game, slightly boring, take it or leave it.
• 4 - Not so good, we don’t really like it.
• 3 - Likely won’t play again. Bad.
• 2 - Extremely annoying game, won’t play this ever again.
• 1 - Defies description of a game. You won’t catch us dead playing this.

Board Game Review-Castle Panic

So far, the only game made from Fireside Games. Let's look at the theme-setting writing everyone scrawls on the box.
"The forest is filled with all sorts of Monsters. They watched and waited as you built your Castle and trained your soldiers, but now they’ve gathered their army and are marching out of the woods." No, not all at once.  They form into polite little pairs and run at your castle 2 at a time, so that a tiny stone hut of a castle with absolutely no allies will be able to wipe out an entire orc army.


But those are problems with the plot of Defend Your Castle genre of game, not with Castle Panic.  In fact, Castle Panic catches the most invigorating feeling from DYC games. That is, complete and Utter Panic as wave after wave of evil baddies fling themselves at(and somehow manage to destroy) your defenses.


There are 3 modes of play:
Standard, all the players defend the castle, and, assuming the castle survives, the player with the most points(kills) wins.
Co-op, the players win or lose as a team.
Overlord, one player controls the monsters.


In Standard it seems like the company tried to put in some player spite(or player interaction, a rose by any other name...)(Example: No, I'm not gonna trade you my knight, you'll kill that troll and win!) but, at least with my family, the defenders are so focused providing the optimum protection for the castle that whoever wins is a matter of who's lucky. I guess my family isn't competitive enough.


It's well done in terms of difficulty. Despite my previous comments, a group's first game is well balanced, with either the players heaping curses on that last orc or symbolically crawling from the single remaining tower of their base, ecstatic to be alive. So the first game leaves you with a little more breathing room than Pandemic, which will grind your delusions of how awesome you are into dust the 1st go around. As you get better it's necessary to add twists to the main game to make it harder.  In detail: The game starts off throwing punches, surrounding your castle at the start,  and keeps sending a steady stream of monsters, and mixing up the basic systems with Giant Boulders, moving certain monsters closer, and Boss Monsters.

Player interaction while co-operating is still good, as players must trade cards and plan together to hold off the hordes.

As with all co-op games, you run the risk of having one player become self-proclaimed Head Politician and telling everyone what to do. The fact that 80% of a person's hands changes each turn helps curb that, though, and usually keeps advice to within the pleasantly helpful level.

Meh. The art could have been better, but you don't look for good art from a small publisher's first game.


Fireside Games has released some more Alternate Rules here! I haven't played with 'em yet, but they look great!


This is what I call a moddable game, because, while it's a good, self-contained game, it's gameplay mechanics makes it easy for user made content to fit in.


Summary
Players: 1-6 (or 7 if using Overlord)
Ages: 10+
Game Length: Appr. 1 hour


Pros:
-Co-op
-Has many variants to the game made by Fireside, which boosts the replayability-Simple enough to grasp easily, but still be complex enough to be engaging to "serious" gamers
-Anyone can pick it up and play for an hour, without thinking the game is personally insulting their intelligence


Cons:
-Art could be better/more varied


Neutral:
-Doesn't have difficulty levels, just ways you can tweak the game away from Standard


I'd give this a solid 8.5 out of 10.
Photo lifted from Fireside Games section, here.

Card Game Review-Blink

This is an uber-simple match 'n slap. Because I'm reviewing a simple game first, people might assume my focus is simple games. It's not. I'll be getting into the serious games soon enough.

Blink is short and fairly sweet. It's designed for 2 players, but can be played with 3 or using it as a single-elimination tournament.(This is right off the wrapper, you could probably tweak it for even more simultaneous players with very little imagination)


For adults/parents: This is a game to get if you have kids. The box says 7 and up, but I don't trust wrappers. And that's what a box is, a flashy, tougher wrapper. It's a good enough game that after watching your kids frantically fling cards(or flinging cards with your kids) you might fling a round or two with your spouse.  When playin' strict adults(teens and up) its a nice 2-minute-a-game distraction, but I lost interest fairly quickly when my mother beat me 3 games to 1. She has the reflexes of a walrus, and she creamed me. Ugh.

How it's played:
It's Set with easier, quicker play and fewer players. The deck of cards has five shapes, five colors, and cards with five different numbers of shapes, as you can tell if you squint at the illustrious photo I've provided you with. You split the deck between the players, each player lays one card face-down in the middle of your play area. Everyone draws three cards from their pile, and simultaneously flip their center card.  There are no turns, each person tries to play their cards on one of the stacks, and you can only play a card if it matches color, number, or shape.  First guy with no cards wins!

Pros:
Quick and simple
Good for kids
You can pick it up at Kmart or other general stores for $6. No board game store necessary.

Cons:
Too shallow to hold adults in its spell for long.

I'd give it a 6.2 out of 10. It really depends on whether you have young whipper-snappers or not.

I was going to write a post about how I would review things but decided I should just go ahead and review a game instead of telling you how I'm going to review a game.
Any ways I can improve? Liked my review? Think I'm a bag of hot air? If you're viewing this on the main page you can leave a comment by clicking on the (Some number) comments thing below.
Photo taken from Out of the Box Productions' resource download page.