Not quite so masterly

Reiner Knizia's Modern Art is fairly typical for the prolific game designer, with a fairly simple game mechanic, clever scoring system, and a theme that is tacked-on but still makes sense. It's generally a fun game, especially if you're playing with non-gamers who might be turned off by complex game play or a preponderance of elves and goblins.

Where it falls down is on the artwork, which, while clearly intended to poke fun at the 1960s pop-art movement, is also very hard to look at. So it was nice to see the game re-skinned as Masters Gallery, using classic (and copyright-free) paintings by such masters as Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Vermeer.

Players play cards representing masterpieces by the five different artists in the game. At the end of each round, the artist with the most cards in play is worth the most points, and players score based on how many cards by that artists they played during the round. Strategy involves attempting to manipulate the "market" by recognizing as early as possible which artists are going to be worth the most points that round, and trying to play cards by those artists.

The game play actually makes more sense in a game about up-and-coming artists than it does in a game about established masters, but at least you get to look at better artwork while you're playing. Except...the design of the cards is such that a heavy border takes up almost half of the available space on each card, so the actual artwork is very small. The brightly colored borders aren't doing the works of art any favors either.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The clunky graphic design isn't quite enough to kill the game, but it is a pity that, in a game about amazing works of art, the art itself doesn't take center stage like it should.

• Masters Gallery official website
• Masters Gallery on BoardGameGeek

Not conquering any new territory

Samurai is a pretty typical example of a Reiner Knizia game. The game play is abstract and deceptively simple, featuring a complex scoring system that is more than simply adding up points, and the theme is, for the most part, a tacked on afterthought. That said, the game still manages to be fairly engaging.

The game board, which scales based on the number of players, represents the islands of Japan. Cities and villages are marked out on the board, and at the start of the game their spaces are filled with tokens representing religion, commerce and military. Each player has a collection of tiles of varying values and symbols that correspond to the tokens on the board. Players take turns placing on the board, and as soon as a city or village is surrounded by tiles, the player whose surrounding tiles add up to the highest value claims the token or tokens that match their tiles' symbol. Some tiles have special abilities, such as allowing placement of an additional tile, or moving a tile that's already on the board.

As usual with a Reiner Knizia game, there is a little more to it than that. While the primary strategy lies in placing your tiles in such a way that you control when a village gets surrounded, you also need to think about which tokens you're claiming. The final scoring depends on how many of each type of token each player has collected, so you have to make decisions on which tokens you are trying to collect, based on what you have and what your opponents have taken.

The beautiful graphic design in the new edition published by Fantasy Flight Games helps to make up for the fairly inconsequential feudal Japan theme. In any case, there's enough going on to keep the game interesting, if similar to many of Knizia's other games such as Through the Desert and even Ingenious.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A pretty good game when taken on its own merits, but it is very similar to a lot of other games from the same designer.

• Samurai official website
• Samurai on BoardGameGeek

Another look at Mystery Rummy, Lost Cities, and Camelot Legends

For us, the current board game renaissance began in 2005, just as the final collectible card game boom was breathing its last. Prior to 2005 we had spend the vast majority of our time playing seemingly every CCG we could get our hands on, from Aliens Predator to Doomtown, but we had started to take notice of a few of the stand-alone card games that were filling game store space left by departing CCGs.

We may have been suffering from a bit of random booster pack burnout, so the self-contained nature of these games really appealed to us, as did their relative simplicity when compared to the complicated rules that most CCGs of the late 1990s are known for.

I don't recall where or when I picked up Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper, only that the box artwork intrigued me, as did the fact that it was the first of a series of card games about famous crimes and criminals both real and fictional (although I never did pick up any of the other games in the series).

While relatively simple, the game works because it starts with the basic framework of rummy, which has been played in one form or another since at least the 18th century, and has proven its ability to stand up to multiple variants over the years. Mystery Rummy takes the basic rummy mechanic of playing melds of matching cards with an eye towards getting rid of all your cards before your opponents do, and adds a few twists and turns to make the game a little more thematic, reflecting the hunt for Jack the Ripper in 1880s London.

Read the original review.
Original rating: 3 (out of 5)
New rating (pass or fail): PASS

Lost Cities is a card game by prolific designer Reiner Knizia, first published in the US by Rio Grande Games in 1999. It has all the hallmarks of a Knizia game: deceptively simple game mechanics, a complex scoring system, and a theme that fits the game perfectly. In this case, the theme is 1930s-style archaeological exploration, with card plays representing investment in, and then progress on, expeditions to the far corners of the world.

Like Mystery Rummy, Lost Cities has its roots in a classic card game; in this case, double solitaire. The game play feels familiar enough that it is instinctively easy to play, but there is enough going on in terms of game mechanics and theme to give players a fair amount to think about while playing.

Read the original review.
Original rating: 3 (out of 5)
New rating (pass or fail): PASS

Camelot Legends was introduced to us by none other than Zev Shlasinger, founder of Z-Man Games, when we met him at a convention in Denver in 2004. The game's stunning artwork (and Mr. Shlasinger's charming sales pitch) may have blinded us to its ultimately bland game play, but I think it is more likely that the game was okay for the time. However, it doesn't hold up when compared to the current standard of board and card games, which may explain why Z-Man has never republished it.

Read the original review.
Original rating: 3 (out of 5)
New rating (pass or fail): FAIL

Another look at Star Trek: Expeditions

With its generic game board and easily replaceable plot cards, Star Trek: Expeditions was clearly designed to be expandable with new missions and challenges for the Enterprise crew. But so far, the only expansion for the game has been a little box containing three new crew member miniatures and their corresponding character cards -- no new mission cards, which is what the game really needs. My suspicion is that the game failed to sell particularly well, and the double-whammy of the license for the Star Trek reboot film and game designer Reiner Knizia's no doubt higher-than-average royalties have made the game's continuation too expensive for the publisher to consider.

We dug the game out recently for a replay, and we enjoyed our game quite a bit, perhaps even more than we were expecting to given the noncommittal rating we originally gave it. We enjoyed everything you are supposed to enjoy about a cooperative game: working together to make decisions, dividing up the game's resources and challenges based on whose characters were best suited, and the feeling that we were struggling against difficult (but not impossible) story-driven game mechanics.

I can still see that my original assessment of this game holds true, in that the thing that will get old after repeated plays is the repetitiveness of the plot cards. While there are incidental side-plots that are randomized for each game, the core plot cards that move the game forward (and determine the players' score at the end) are always the same. Other co-op games like Arkham Horror or A Touch of Evil give players a variety of different enemies to fight, in order to add variety and increase replay value.

However, I honestly don't think the repetitive game play is too much of a problem for us since we only seem to play it every seven months or so, and we always have a good time when we do.

Read the original review.

Original rating: 3 (out of 5)

New rating (pass or fail): PASS

The theme's the thing

I imagine that most of designer Reiner Knizia's games begin as abstract concepts before having a theme grafted on to them. With a few modifications, Through the Desert could be played with the symbol and color based tiles from Ingenious, and its game play is similar in that it is about placing tiles (or in this case, little plastic camels) in rows on a hex grid, in an attempt to create the largest groups of adjacent matching pieces.

But rather than being a criticism of the common features many of Knizia's games have, I think this example is an excellent illustration of why theme is so important in tabletop games. While some gamers may reduce all the games they play to their core mechanics and strategy, I believe that this is the exception rather than the rule, and the majority of these types of gamers tend to gravitate toward games like poker or chess, where they can explore pure strategy.

Most gamers (us included) play games in order to be immersed in another world. It doesn't matter whether it's a world of elves and goblins or real estate brokers, the point is that we get transported to a world different from our own, and the game mechanics merely provide a useful way to frame the experience in terms of strategy and competition (or cooperation, in may cases).

In Through the Desert, players take on the roles of caravan leaders. The game is played on an irregular hexagonal grid, with several spaces marked out as oases, and many more marked as watering holes with various point values. There are five piles of different colored camels, and the game starts with each player placing one of each color on the board, marked with a rider identifying whose camel it is.

After this setup, players take turns placing camels of the various colors, which must be placed adjacent to a camel of the same color connected to the one with that player's rider on it, and cannot be adjacent to another player's camel of the same color. The goal is to earn points create lines of camels that connect to the oasis spaces and through the watering hole spaces, and also to enclose areas of desert, cutting them off from opponent's pieces.

It's a little hard to describe without having the game in front of you, but it makes perfect sense once you start playing. There is almost no random chance involved, other than the point value of the watering holes when they are first placed. The game consists entirely of the strategy involved in choosing what color of camel to place, and where to place it, adjusting your plans based on what your opponents are doing.

Sure, Through the Desert could be played with abstract pieces on an abstract board, but then it wouldn't be a game about caravan leaders guiding their lines of camels across the barren wastes in search of the best routes between watering holes. It would just be about putting markers on a board, and that wouldn't transport you anywhere.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) a solid strategy game whose mechanics fit the theme very well, even if that theme isn't overly compelling.

• Through the Desert official website
• Through the Desert on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: October 19, 2014

An expression of Risk

As I mentioned in my reviews for Seven Card Samurai and Shitenno, we're always on the lookout for a good samurai game, especially one that isn't a Risk clone as many games about feudal Japan tend to be. It may be a bit ironic, then, that I was drawn to Age of War, which started life as Risk Express, a Risk-themed dice game designed by Reiner Knizia and published by Parker Brothers in 2006.

Apparently, Risk Express didn't stay in print for very long, and for whatever reason, Fantasy Flight Games decided to give the game a samurai makeover, complete with new artwork for the proprietary dice and tiles that represent the different provinces of feudal Japan.

Each starts in the center of the table and is printed with one or more rows of symbols representing infantry, cavalry, archers, and generals, that must be rolled on the dice in order to conquer that province. The rows of symbols have to be matched one at a time, so it will take several rolls in order to conquer the province. If a roll fails to produce the symbols needed, the dice can be re-rolled, but each re-roll of a failed roll requires the player to remove one of the dice, until eventually the roll matches all the symbols needed and the province is taken, or the player runs out of dice.

In addition to conquering tiles from the center of the table, players can also attempt to take over their opponent's tiles, although it requires an extra "general" to be rolled. The tiles are matched by color in a group of four, two groups of three, three groups of two, and one single tile. If a player conquers all the tiles in a color group, they are worth more points and safe from attack, so an important element of the game is strategically choosing which tiles to go after, while keeping an eye on your opponents and preventing them from completing their sets.

If this sounds a little familiar, it's because it is very similar to Elder Sign, a Lovecraft-themed dice game also published by Fantasy Flight Games. Elder Sign adds a lot of elements to the game, giving it a more elaborate structure and adding cards that can be played to influence the dice rolls, but the core dice mechanic is the same.

I think that's all right though. Lovecraftian games need to be more complicated in order to fit the theme, and while I like Elder Sign, I also enjoyed the simplicity of Age of War.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Age of War is far too simple to be really compelling, but it's a nice simple game that can be played in a short amount of time, and the small box makes it a good travel game.

• Age of War official website
• Age of War on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: October 14, 2014

To boldly clix, part 1

After years of using their patented clix dial system almost exclusively for tactical combat games, Wizkids Games finally decided to try it out on some board games. For their first, they paired what should have been a winning combination: the venerable Star Trek license, and renowned game designer Reiner Knizia.

Star Trek: Expeditions is theoretically based on the 2009 film that rebooted the franchise, but it clearly has its roots in the structure and tropes of the original series, to such an extent that one wonders if Dr. Knizia has even seen any Star Trek material made after 1969. It's fine if he hasn't, because it allowed him to get down to the essence of a classic Star Trek story, without getting distracted by the world building and technobabble of the later television shows, or the empty Hollywood action of the more recent films.

It's a cooperative game in which each player takes on the role of one of the Enterprise crew, represented by a nicely detailed miniature with a patented clix base. The majority of the board is split up into areas, each containing a face-down plot card, and the idea is for the characters to beam down to the planet and uncover the cards that will move the plot forward and gain the group the most points in the process. Along the way, players will face tests using the standard clix system of rolling dice and adding whatever ability is appropriate (in this case: command, science or support) in an attempt to beat a target number. Failed tests can cause the character to click down their dial, reducing their abilities and making future tests more difficult.

There is also a track along the top of the board where miniatures of the Enterprise and a Klingon ship do battle, with each failure pushing the Enterprise backwards along the track and losing the players points from their final score.

The clix dials seem a bit shoehorned in, but that's probably to be expected, especially with a designer like Reiner Knizia who is perfectly capable of creating a game without a weird plastic gimmick. In spite of that, it's a pretty neat game. I really like the way it gets all the classic Star Trek elements in: characters get involved with the unfolding plot on the planet, with their choices leading to greater or lesser degrees of success, while at the same time there are things to do on the ship in orbit, fighting the Klingons to a standstill but also performing various support tasks such as repairing the ship and scanning the surface. It's very difficult to win, but that's to be expected for a cooperative game.

Where the game fails is in the repetitiveness of the plot cards. They are semi-random: the same basic cards that move the game forward are combined with a selection of random "side-missions" that can give the players advantages upon success, but have no real bearing on the main story. It's a problem that could be solved with expansions introducing  new storylines, but that's really just a band-aid for a structural flaw in an otherwise terrific Star Trek game.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The Star Trek theme is spot-on, but unnecessary clix dials and somewhat repetitive game play stop this from being a truly great game.

• Star Trek: Expeditions official website
• Star Trek: Expeditions on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: August 17, 2014

UPDATE May 12, 2015: Another look at Star Trek: Expeditions

Finding the score

If you've read my reviews of Fortune and Glory or the Indiana Jones DVD Adventure Game, you'll know that I am a great fan of the pulp adventure genre, especially the Indiana Jones series. That theme is what initially attracted me to Lost Cities when I first picked it up way back in 1999.

The theme is certainly rooted in the search for the relics of lost civilizations, but it takes its inspiration from the ponderous nature of an archaeological expedition rather than the fast-paced thrill ride of an Indiana Jones movie. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as the game play is interesting, and the slow pace gives players time to look at the beautiful artwork on the cards.

Lost Cities was our introduction to the games of German mathematician and game designer Reiner Knizia. Knizia has created over 400 games, and in many cases he doesn't design games so much as he designs elaborate scoring systems. The actual game is often just a way for the players to interact with the scoring system, but to me, Knizia's genius is in finding the right theme for each system he comes up with, and I think he does that pretty well with Lost Cities.

It's a two-player card game that consists of five different sets of cards numbered 2-10, each set representing a different expedition to find a lost city. Each set of cards also includes three "investment" cards, which represent the various universities and governments that might back an expedition.

Players play cards from their hands to different stacks in front of them, one for each expedition. There are discard for piles each expedition in the center of the table, and players have the option to discard to these stacks or take the top card from one of them instead of drawing from the deck. At the end of the game, players score points based on the numerical values of the cards they've played into each of their expeditions, and any investment cards played into a stack will double, triple, or quadruple the score for that stack, depending on how many investment cards were played.

But there's a catch. Actually, there are several:

• Each player deducts 20 from their score for each stack. So if you can't score at least 20 points from a stack, your score will quickly go into negative numbers.
• Investment cards must be played before any cards with numerical value. So you have to decide whether you're going to try to multiply your score before you really know whether you're going to make it out of the 20 point hole. The multiplier is applied after the 20 points are deducted, so if you have 2 investment cards on an expedition that only scored 10 points, you are looking at a final score of -30.
• Numbered cards must be played into expeditions in numerical order, from lowest to highest. So if you draw a 7 for the desert expedition after you played the 8, you are out of luck and have to decide whether to discard the 7 or hold it in your hand to keep it away from your opponent. This is where the game's theme really shines: each card illustrates a progression on the path to one of the lost cities, so as you play each successive card, it is as if you are moving farther into the jungle, deeper into the ocean, or higher into the snow-capped mountains.

Meanwhile, your opponent is playing cards into his own expedition stacks, so you have to be careful about which cards you discard. Each player is required to either play or discard a card every turn, so a good deal of the strategy is in anticipating what your opponent is doing, so you don't give him too many cards he can use.

It's a simple game, but with a lot of strategic decisions to make. The random nature of the cards means that every game is different, so it has a lot of replay value. Plus, it comes in a relatively small box and doesn't have any tiny, easy-to-lose pieces, so it makes a great travel game, which is appropriate for a game about exploring lost ruins.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Not an overly compelling game, but easy to play with enough strategy to keep it interesting.

• Lost Cities at BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: May 3, 2014

UPDATE July 20, 2015: Another look at Mystery Rummy, Lost Cities, and Camelot Legends

An ingenious solution

It should be readily apparent that we love playing games, and we're not going to stop just because we're travelling. However, traditional travel games don't really hold much appeal for us, and you can't really play Arkham Horror on your airplane tray tables (not even in first class). The solution for us is the unfortunately out of print travel edition of Reiner Knizia's Ingenious, a clever little tile laying game with Knizia's usual flair for creative mathematics and unusual score-keeping.

The game consists of a bag of double-hexagonal tiles, each printed with two colored symbols. The object of the game is to lay your tiles on the board in such a way that they create unbroken rows of the same color. When you place a new tile, you score points in each color based on the rows of that color that radiate out from the tile you placed. But, as usual with a Reiner Knizia game, there's a catch: at the end of the game, the color with your lowest score is the only one that counts, so you have to be careful to build up all your scores as evenly as possible.

It's great fun for two players, and it travels well, packed in a box not much larger than a paperback book, and taking up very little in the way of table space. In the travel edition, the tiles even lock to the board so you don't have to worry about them sliding around. You could probably even play this game in a car, as long as neither of you is driving...

Ingenious Challenges is a follow up to Ingenious which presents three different games based on the same idea of color matching and managing your score in the different colors as evenly as possible. It includes a Card Challenge, a Dice Challenge, and a Tile Challenge: all use the same colored symbols and a variation on the same scoring system, but they are subtly different enough that they don't seem like the same game with dice instead of cards or tiles.

Ingenious Challenges is also a great travel game, but for a different reason. Its relatively easy rules, bright colors, and complete lack of elves, space marines or Cthuloid monsters make it a nice game to play with the non-gamer friends and family you may be travelling to visit. And it comes in a very small box.

Rating: Ingenious 4 (out of 5), Ingenious Challenges 3 (out of 5) Both are great games, but the original is a bit more elegant.

• Ingenious official website
• Ingenious Travel Edition on BoardGameGeek.com
• Ingenious Challenges official website
• Ingenious Challenges on BoardGameGeek.com

Dates played: February 18 and March 8, 2014

Return to Blue Moon

As I mentioned in the review for Aladdin's Dragons, we tend to favor adventure games, and adventure games are frequently fairly violent, with players competing to outrace or just annihilate one another, or cooperating to avoid being crushed by hoards of aliens or a power-hungry tentacled horror. While all this action and death can lead to some thrilling gaming, sometimes it's nice to build something for a change. And this leads us to Blue Moon City.

Set in the same universe (and ingeniously using much of the same artwork) as Blue Moon, Blue Moon City takes place after the conflict depicted in the previous game, as the citizens of Blue Moon work together to rebuild their capital city. A grid of tiles representing the buildings of Blue Moon City is laid out, and players travel from tile to tile using spending cards to place resources on the tiles. When a tile fills up, the building gets built, and players are rewarded with crystals, dragon scales, and cards, based on how much they contributed.

In addition to buying spaces on the building tiles, cards can be played for game effects, the most important of which is moving the three dragons around the board. If a player places a resource on a building tile while a dragon is there, that player is rewarded with a dragon scale. When the supply of scales is exhausted, they are traded in for crystals; the player with the most scales gets more crystals than the other players, and all the scales are returned to the supply.

Players spend their crystals to buy spaces on an obelisk board; the first player to buy a certain number of spaces (determined by the number of players) wins the game. Like most games by renowned designer Reiner Knizia, the gameplay is deceptively simple and gives players a lot to think about during the game.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) This game plays just as well with two as it does with three or four, which is rare for a board game. It's also a great game to introduce non-gamers to, with relatively simple rules and good-looking, high quality components.

• Blue Moon City on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: December 1, 2013

Beautiful artwork, good enough game

The thing that initially attracted me to Blue Moon was the artwork.

The game was designed by the world-renowned Reiner Knizia, whose games I usually enjoy, and it's his first attempt at a customizable card game, which is an intriguing notion. It's a two-player game, which we're always on the lookout for, and it was published by Fantasy Flight Games, the publisher we probably own the most games from.

But really, it was the artwork, which is absolutely stunning.

The cards are quite a bit larger than standard playing cards, and they don't have much game information on them, leaving more room for the images. And with nine expansion packs, that's a lot of pretty cards to look at.

Imagine what a relief it was to discover that the game is pretty fun to play, too.

Each player chooses a faction to play and builds a deck based on that faction's leader card. Players can use the decks included in the base set and expansions right out of the box, or they can mix and match cards as they like, much like any collectible card game but without the rewards and frustrations that come with collecting rare cards.

Games are played in a series of battles, wherein players play out characters, aided by support cards. Each new character played replaces the last, and must match the strength of the opponent's most recent character. If it cannot, the opponent wins that battle and attracts one of the three dragon miniatures from the middle of the table to their side, or back to the middle from the opponent's side. Then the cards are cleared and a new battle begins. A player wins as soon as they have attracted all three dragons to their side.

As usual for Reiner Knizia, the game is based on the manipulation of numbers in a way that is interesting, but is a little too simple and generic, and it stops short of being truly immersive. It really is the artwork that holds your attention.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A visually stunning game, and the deck customization and number of factions means it has a lot of replay value, but the game play is just a little on the simple side.

• Fantasy Flight will soon be re-releasing this in a single boxed set as Blue Moon Legends
• Blue Moon on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: November 30, 2013