Top Ten Lunch Games

I've written on the subject of lunch games many, many times, but probably most completely here. The category of lunch games--games that can be played and in most cases taught in an hour--is near to my heart for several reasons, not least of which is lunch when I am most likely to have time free to play a game. The pressures and responsibilities of home prevent me from attending more than one game night a month. But over lunch? Then I am free.

In my earlier post, I listed several criteria for ideal lunch games. They are:

• Goldilocks playtime (neither too short nor too long)
• Simple rules
• Simultaneous (or near simultaneous) play (in other words, there's always something to do)
• Chaos factor (players have an opportunity to break gameplay conventions)

So which games am I most excited to play over lunch? Here's my list.

News Bits: 10/7/2013

The NEWS:

GAMES magazine announces 2013 award winners [Link] GAMES is known (to me at least) for choosing off-the-beaten-path games for their awards, and this year is no exception. The top honors this year go to Garden Dice (our review here). Congratulations to the winners.

Guide to Gaming: Two's Company, Three's a Crowd--Good Games for Two (and More)

This is a gaming blog. I don't think I need to sell you on the pleasures of gaming. We all know this simple truth: life is hard sometimes, and a good game with good friends is good medicine.

Of course, finding friends to play games isn't always the easiest. There are the occasional (or even weekly) game nights, but the friends most readily at hand are likely found in the home. The friend I play games with the most (and also my favorite gaming partner) is my wife, but finding a good two-player game can be difficult, especially if you want to maximize your gaming dollar. I don't often buy games that don't have a two-player mode (unless they are obvious group games, like The Resistance), and a good two-player mode is often what keeps games hitting the table and off my BGG trade list. Since I've had some false starts and some successes, I thought I'd put together a brief guide for others who might be in the same boat.

What follows is a list (with some commentary) of good multiplayer games that are fun with two to help you get the most out of your gaming dollar. (I've also added a brief list without commentary of some two-player-only games that are worth your time.)

News Bits: 4/8/2013

This week's NEWS:

Steve Jackson asks, "Would you like to be acquired?" [Link] Steve Jackson Games, probably best known for their wildly successful Munchkin franchise (but also for their also wildly successful Ogre Kickstarter campaign), is extending an invitation to established game publishers who might like a little more support and backbone. While I don't much care for Steve Jackson's games (Revolution! excepted), there's no denying their success and know-how. Seems like it could be a golden opportunity for partnership.

Guide to Gaming: Which Games Should I Buy First?

When you’re first discovering the world of tabletop gaming, you will likely run into one of two problems: either difficulty in finding these new designer games, or discovering a good place to get them but getting overwhelmed with the number of choices. I remember discovering the board game section at my first real hobby gaming store. “There are so many!” I said at the time, “some of these HAVE to be great. But which ones?” Fortunately for you, I went through that experience and now I can help you skip the confusion.

So which board games should you buy first? Let’s start with what I like to call The Big Three.

The big three are games that almost every gamer will have in their collection–Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, and Dominion. These aren’t necessarily the favorite games of any collector, but they’re excellent starting points for many reasons. They’re easy to teach; almost universally enjoyable; and they introduce new players to many of the gaming world’s staple elements.  These are the first three games I teach to anyone who visits my house; they go over well almost 100% of the time.

Carcassonne: Traders and Builders

So you’ve mastered building cities and roads, and even a few churches here and there. You’ve even attracted tourists with your beautiful cathedrals, enough to support a number of lakeside inns scattered across the countryside. But now that’s not enough; the name of the game is progress, man! And what better way to speed up progress than to hire more workers to build your cities and roads faster. On top of that, why don’t you build an economy of trade with the outside world?

Carcassonne: Traders and Builders is an expansion for Carcassonne (if that wasn’t clear) that adds new ways to score points, new tiles, and a way to build more tiles more quickly. But is this new era of prosperity worth claiming?

Bullies, Buildings, and Beauty (a review of Carcassonne: Inns and Cathedrals)

What comes in the box

[Editors note: The following is a Nemesis Review, featuring opinions from our in-house eurogamer, @Farmerlenny, and his deadly enemy the thematic space-loving @Futurewolfie.  Make sure to read both opinions to get a better overall picture of the game!]

It's hard to imagine a time when Carcassonne didn't have a million expansions available, but seriously, there was one. There was a time when medieval city-building enthusiasts were drumming their fingers on their gaming tables, waiting for the next Klaus-Jurgen Wrede brainwave. And before Carcassonne jumped the shark, there was Inns & Cathedrals.

So what do I think of this expansion-before-the-others? Find out below!

Brown-Bag Games

Especially now with a new baby in the house, most of my gaming takes place over my lunch hour at work. There's a pool of around six of us to draw from where I work, and usually somewhere between three and six of us are interested over any given lunch hour when a game is proposed.

All of this lunchtime gaming has got me thinking about my favorite lunchtime games, as well as what I value in a lunchtime game. See my thoughts below!

Of Tracts, Sheep, and Strong Drink (a review of Glen More)

[Editors note: The following is a Nemesis Review, featuring opinions from our in-house eurogamer, @Farmerlenny, and his deadly enemy the thematic space-loving @Futurewolfie.  Make sure to read both opinions to get a better overall picture of the game!]

I received Glen More for my birthday last year. Glen More seems like it should have everything that I value in a game: interesting decisions, exciting and novel mechanics, and lots and lots of meeples. It even has tiles a la Carcassonne and takes place in the British Isles. So what did I think of it? Read on, good gamer, and find out!

FDQ: Minis or Cubes

It's an age-old topic of debate. Games come with a variety of parts. Sometimes tokens are relegated to printed cardboard circles; some games resort to classic meeples and cubes to represent various elements of the game board. And then some companies, attempting to pack in as much flavor in the components themselves, fill their boxes with detailed plastic minis.

The idea of minis excites many gamers, but some just wish the parts were simpler and the games were cheaper. So, fellow gamerites, what do you think? What is your preferred style of game component?

@Futurewolfie says:
I know that @Farmerlenny will probably hate on the minis, but honestly, I love 'em. I love theme and flavor in games, and detailed plastic minis just add a whole lot to that. Starships in Twilight Imperium? Awesome!  Knights in Shadows over Camelot? Sweet! Zombies and heroes in Last Night on Earth? Dude!

I realize there are drawbacks, and I can certainly understand why someone might prefer wooden parts; the colors are more distinct and easy to check at a glance, and minis definitely add to the cost of a game. Not every game needs minis—in Carcassonne, for example, it would be pointless to have minis instead of meeples (which are sort of like wooden minis anyway; they have such personality!)  Ascending Empires, while we love starship minis, just wouldn't work—the disks are needed for flicking. Fortunately, detailed stickers fill in some of the flavor so we're not stuck with plain colorized cylinders.

But you know what? Last Night on Earth would just not be the same without the minis. The crowds of zombies help the story and enhance the flavor. Battlestar Galactica's Viper and Raider minis may not be entirely necessary, but the ship designs are visually distinct and again, it adds to that Galactica feel. Twilight Imperium just wouldn't have the same feel if you have different sizes or shapes of cubies to represent the different types of ships in your fleet.

And over time, I think the cost difference between meeples and minis will shrink. As the board game hobby overall grows, more and more games will be purchased, and games will get bigger print runs. Bigger print runs means smaller cost per game—and the costly part of detailed minis is creating the original mold. Heck, even wooden tokens are getting more detailed and unique, with animeeples, vegemeeples, fruitimeeples—all sorts of meeples coming in various shapes and sizes. Woohoo! I love this stuff!

@Farmerlenny says:
@Futurewolfie only gets it half right (which is half more than normal, by the way) when he says I will hate on minis. I don't hate on minis. Minis are kind of cool...when they aren't used as a mask for shoddy game design. That I don't like most games that include minis isn't a judgment on minis themselves but on a certain type of theme-rich gameplay that ignores the more important aspects of game design: decisions, downtime, and a preference for simplicity over convolution.

To me, cubes are serviceable, and most of the time that's enough. I opted not to upgrade my copy of Agricola, being perfectly content with discs and cubes. I don't need sheep that look like sheep. I make my living by reading: I can imagine a story overlaying drab bits if I want to. But most of the time, my games don't need the extra layer. What's the story in Ticket to Ride? I don't care. The decisions are interesting enough that I'm not thinking about it. If I want a good story, I'll read a book. I play games for different reasons. I'm so boring that I came this close to not applying the included stickers in my copy of Belfort. But then I realized that @Futurewolfie cares about such things, and since he is the person I'm most likely to play it with...

All of this being said, however, I am not immune to the draw of fancy components when they are paired with a good game. Show me a beautiful game (with beautiful mechanics to match), and I will likely be putty in your hand. I'm sure this is nine-tenths of the reason I purchased Troyes, and one-half the reason I haven't traded away Fresco. It was also what kept me on the fence about El Grande and what keeps Stone Age hitting the table again and again. I have a soft spot for beautiful games and components, whether made of wood, plastic, marble, or glass.

But I'm also plenty happy with my original Director's Cut edition of Kill Doctor Lucky, which I taped together myself.

Consistency, consistency, consistency!

One of many things I've learned about grammar and editing is that there aren't as many hard-and-fast rules as your high school English teacher might lead you to believe. But while many things are permissible, that is not a license to abandon all rules. The key is consistency. If Webster has "mind-set" and you want to spell it "mindset," most people won't question you—so long as you are consistent.

This example may seem silly, but the same principle, I've found, applies when teaching board games and especially while writing rules for a game. Consistency is key, and there are few things more infuriating when you're trying to learn a game than inconsistency.

To build a city (A Review of Carcassonne)

[Editors note: The following is a Nemesis Review, featuring opinions from our in-house thematic-loving @futurewolfie and his ferocious opponent, the stodgy euro-loving @Farmerlenny. Make sure to read both opinions to get a better overall picture of the game!]

A lot of American games are based entirely on luck (or weird knowledge of an obscure subject). Mechanics such as "roll the dice and move that many spaces forward" are simple and easy to learn, but don't have any lasting value. In fact, it doesn't take long to realize that these games just... aren't very fun. Fortunately, there exists a number of games that are close equivalents to those weakly designed games that are still simple and easy to learn, but add some choices and elements of strategy that give the gameplay lasting value. To put it simply, they are fun.

Gaming Gestalt

This is one of my favorite games--but what an
unappealing package!

I appreciated this post by John Garcia on telling newbies about hobby board games. He says that sometimes it's hard for new players to grasp the fun of a game just hearing what it's about. "So...you settle an island? Why would you want to collect resources? Who cares if you have the longest road?" He suggests just jumping in—that many times a game is greater than its explanation or what's contained in the box.

I find this is true for the most part. If a game has an unappealing package (El Grande); an unappealing (Pandemic), boring-sounding (Agricola), or abstract (Carcassonne) theme; or an appearance of complexity (Dominion), it doesn't matter how awesome the game is, it's much harder to get uninitiated players to try it. And the bigger the box, paired with these frightening traits, the less likely a person is to be willing to play the game. Ugly art and a big box tells non-geeks that they are about to enter a stifling realm of B.O. and arcana—more components, more to keep track of, greater chance of immersion, less chance of coming up for air. Best to come up with an excuse why you need to leave and cut your losses.