Sci-fi tourism in Space Park

Space Park is the type of game that tends to appeal to me right away: great looking illustration and graphic design, at a low enough price point that I can afford to take a chance and buy the game on impulse. These impulse purchases can be a mixed bag, sometimes resulting in great looking games whose novelty wears off quickly (Grimslingers), or games that sounded more interesting than they actually are (Deadline), but every once in a while we end up with an entertaining game that, while simple, bears out repeated plays and earns a place in our collection.

First let's talk about the artwork. The game board is made up of a series of large tiles, each intended to look like a tourism advertisement for a location in outer space. The illustrations are gorgeous: any one of them would look great at poster size, framed on a wall somewhere. The rest of the game's printed components use snippets from these pieces of artwork along with some considered and sophisticated typography and graphic design.

Okay, so the game is pretty, but is it any fun to play? Yes it is. Space Park is an interesting marriage of familiar game mechanics with a few unusual ideas. At its core it's a resource collection game: players move around on a board made up of the aforementioned tiles, each representing a location where various different resources can be picked up, exchanged, or spent in various combinations to purchase victory points and game advantages.

What sets the game apart is the way players move around the board. Regardless of the number of players, there are three silver rocket ships, each starting at a different location. On a player's turn, they perform the action at a location where there is a ship (usually collecting a resource), then move that ship to the next empty location. This is interesting for several reasons, the most obvious being that each player doesn't have their own playing piece, they always have a choice of three pieces to move. More strategically, it means that every time a player takes their turn, they need to think about where the piece will be moving and what advantage they're giving the next player by moving it there.

It's one of those rare games with simple rules but a lot to think about that's great for when you want a lighter game with a reasonable amount of strategic depth. And it's very pretty to look at.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Not necessarily an immersive "play all day" type game, but excellent for what it is: lightweight and fun.

• Space Park official website
• Space Park on Boardgamegeek

CIA: Collect it All -- We need more information

The story behind CIA: Collect it All is a fascinating one. Last year several games designed by the CIA for use as training simulations were declassified by the U. S. government. Since they were designed by a government employee in the course of his work they are automatically in the public domain in the U. S., so an enterprising game publisher got to work designing a commercial version which was funded using Kickstarter and delivered to backers in December of 2018.

The game uses cards to represent intelligence collection techniques such as media analysis, satellite imaging, and data hacking. Players use those cards to solve global crises like foreign missile testing or election interference, by matching the correct types of intelligence to the crises they will be effective against. Opponents can interfere by playing "reality check" cards which represent the idea that nothing ever goes as planned.

As a training tool, an important part of the game was the inclusion of "manager challenge" cards, which forced the CIA trainees to justify the plays they made, explaining how, for example, "document and media exploitation" would be effective against "European crime and corruption" in the real world. These are included in the game as an optional variant, but the rules suggest only using them if all the players have a "firm understanding of intelligence techniques."

In theory the idea of this game is very compelling, but without the manager challenge cards, it's really just a symbol matching game, with each player trying to match the symbols on their collection cards to the ones on the crisis cards. It might have worked a lot better if there were more background information on the cards, to give players more information they could use to at least bluff their way through a manager challenge. I think the designers really missed an opportunity to create a game that would be informational and intellectually stimulating as well as entertaining.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) not a terrible game but a huge missed opportunity.

• CIA: Collect it All official website
• CIA: Collect it All on BoardGameGeek

Marvel Strike Teams: a superhero dungeon crawl

On first glance, Marvel Strike Teams looks like another variant in Wizkids' Heroclix line of games. It has many similarities, both thematic and mechanical, but a number of differences that make it an interesting game in its own right.

Like Heroclix, Marvel Strike Teams is a tactical superhero battle game. It uses a grid system for movement and range, and characters find their powers and abilities decreasing in effectiveness as they take on damage, which is a hallmark of the Heroclix system.

Unlike Heroclix, Strike Teams is a one vs. many style game, with one player taking on the role of a supervillain and his minions, and the others each controlling a single hero and working cooperatively to foil the villain's dastardly plans. It's also much more mission oriented, with victory centered on accomplishing certain in-game goals (such as rescuing hostages or finding macguffins rather than just trying to obliterate your opponent's forces. In spite of the superhero theme, the game structure is that of a classic "dungeon crawl," with heroes creeping through rooms and corridors in search of treasure and a quick exit.

The game is designed to be played campaign style over multiple game sessions, with both the heroes and the villains gaining experience and improving their abilities between games, another thing that sets it apart from the one-off battles of Heroclix and makes it seem more like a D&D-style dungeon crawler.

But the really innovative thing about Strike Teams is that it uses a diceless system for combat. Players instead use resource management and damage control to accomplish their side's goals during the game.

Each round, characters are given a certain number of action points, which can be spent to move, heal damage, use special powers, and most importantly, attack and defend. Action points can be saved up from round to round (up to a pre-set maximum), so game play is a balancing act between moving, attacking, and saving aside points to defend your character against attacks.

It's very different from most battle games (including Heroclix), which use random dice rolls to determine the outcome of combat. Sure, most of those games will include game mechanics to mitigate the randomness such as rerolls, bonuses, and extra dice, but there is always the chance that an attack will go badly due to random chance that is outside the player's control.

Monolith's Conan game is probably a closer comparison in terms of the level of strategic resource management and focus on scenario goals over outright fighting, but even it uses dice to resolve combat.

With only a handful of characters to choose from in the base game an one small expansion, Strike Teams lacks the epic scope of what Heroclix can offer with its thousands of different figures over multiple franchises. It's a pity there aren't more expansions planned for Strike Teams, because mechanically it's a much more interesting game.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A terrific alternative to battle games like Heroclix, but unfortunately its lack of commercial success will limit this game to only a handful of characters and limited replayability.

• Marvel Strike Teams official website
• Marvel Strike Teams on BoardGameGeek

Pandemic: Fall of Rome -- a disease of invaders

Pandemic has taken Settlers of Catan's place as the foremost gateway into hobby gaming, and with its simple yet challenging design, engaging cooperative theme, and deep market penetration, it's earned it. In an effort to get the game to even more tables, Pandemic's publisher has re-skinned the game in a plethora of different flavors, changing the threat to a flood in Rising Tide or Lovecraftian horrors in Pandemic Cthulhu.

We've only played Pandemic once or twice, and never got around to buying a copy for our game library, so we decided to pick up the Fall of Rome version, which replaces spreading disease vectors with invading armies of barbarians intent on sacking ancient Rome. Since we have little experience with the original Pandemic we can't really compare the two, but that might be better as we can look at this version of the game on its own merits.

It's easy to see why Pandemic has been such a successful game. The rules are simple but allow for a good amount of meaningful decision making, and watching the board fill up with counters representing the barbarian hordes gives the game a great sense of drama. Players can command Roman legions to fight off the barbarians, but the real strategy is in collecting sets of cards that can be turned in to make peace with individual barbarian tribes. This doesn't stop them from attacking, but it makes it possible to convert barbarians into Roman soldiers to help fight off their former allies.

Players are also given a handful of special cards that offer great advantages in the game, but at a price. Each time one of these cards is spent for its more powerful effect, it moves the decline marker closer to the eventual collapse of Roman society from within, which gives the game another clock to race against.

The engaging game play is coupled with some terrific artwork that helps sell the idea that these are cultured Roman citizens fighting off invading armies and their own decline, rather than just colored cubes on a piece of cardboard.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A robust and well-designed game that we will play often, and it's usually an easy sell to our non-gamer friends and family too.

• Pandemic: Fall of Rome official website
• Pandemic: Fall of Rome on BoardGameGeek

Tortuga 1667: a pirate's life, maybe not for me

We've had Tortuga 1667 for nearly a year, and we've only played it twice. That's not entirely uncommon given how many games we have, but I find myself wondering why we haven't gotten it to the table more often.

A big part of it is that Tortuga 1667 wants to be a social deduction game, a genre of game that generally requires a large number of players to be interesting, and most of our non-RPG gaming tends to be done in groups of 2-4 players. Plus I don't really like social deduction games. I find them to be too abstract and lacking in interesting game mechanics or compelling adventure, the two things I tend to look for in a game.

So how did we end up with this game in the first place? Well, it is absolutely beautiful too look at, and it was offered as an add-on in Facade Games' Kickstarter campaign for Deadwood 1876. Plus the player official player count is 2-9, so we figured we might be able to make it work for smaller groups.

At the start of the game, each player is given a secret affiliation, either French or English. The game then involves jockeying for the positions on the board that allow you to either move the other players around, or allocate treasure chests to one side or the other. The trick is that you don't know which players are on your side, and every part of the game relies on anticipating whether or not you think the other players will help or hinder you.

For example, a player in the Captain position can call for an attack, which adds more treasure to his ship. But the attack is resolved by each whose pawn is currently on that ship secretly playing a card that will either help or hinder the attack, so an attack will only be successful if the majority of players on the ship think the Captain is on their side.

In our games we found that, due to this voting mechanic, it was very difficult for a player to actually accomplish anything on their turn. Attacks would get voted down, treasure would get moved back and forth, and the social deduction part of the game wasn't very interesting, and more aggravating than fun.

It's possible that this game just needs more players than we normally have on hand (we played one game with 3 and one with 5), but honestly, if we ever have a table of 6 or more players we're more likely to play a meatier game like Battlestar Galactica, which makes more interesting use of the "secret betrayer" idea, or Dune, which allows players to decide how much "shifting alliances" they want in the game.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) This game just isn't compelling enough at low player counts, and not worth the effort of getting a large group together.

• Tortuga 1667 official website
• Tortuga 1667 on BoardGameGeek

Deadwood 1876: small things come in good packages

I was drawn to the Kickstarter campaign for Deadwood 1876 by its terrific artwork and simple, elegant graphic design, so let's talk about that first.

It is a great looking game. It comes packaged (like all of the games in the "dark city" series from Facade Games) in a box designed to look like an old leather bound book with a magnetic lid. All the game components other than the cards are made of wood (no plastic) and beautifully designed, especially the three engraved discs that represent the locations in the game. The artwork on the cards is very well-rendered, in a style that is just cartoony enough to be expressive but without looking silly.

The game's design is also very minimal, which appeals to me as a respite from the current trend towards overproduced Kickstarter games with hundreds of plastic miniatures and overdone, hard to read boards and rulebooks. Finally something simple and (hopefully) easy to play.

Or is it?

The rules and mechanics of the game are simple enough. The game consists of Safe cards, Deadwood cards, and three locations at the center of the table. Each player starts with two face down safe cards in front of them, and there is a stack of three more in the center; Safe cards consist mainly of gold in various denominations, with a few guns and other items sprinkled in.

Players also start with a hand of Deadwood cards that represent items used to perform actions: guns for fighting, horses for movement, and various bits of leatherwork such as hats and holsters for manipulating the cards in various ways. Player pawns are randomly distributed among the three locations (more on this in a moment).

The goal of the game is to be in the location whose occupants collectively have the most gold (depicted on their face down Safe cards) at the end of the game. Once the winning location has been determined, the occupants of that location use their remaining weapon cards to fight it out to see who the final winner is.

Play consists of each player playing one Deadwood card from their hand. A card can be played as a weapon to attack another player, in order to either take one of their safes, or to switch places with another player's pawn or force them to leave your location. Weapons have variable strengths but use dice to determine the outcome of combat, so a lower card isn't necessarily a lost cause. Or, it can be played for another effect such as moving between locations (if there's room, each location is limited to a certain number of player pawns), peeking at face down Safe cards, or drawing extra Deadwood cards from the deck.

After each player has had a turn to play a card, there is a heist round, where players use weapon cards to fight it out for one of the safes in the middle of the table. Then another round of play begins, and so on, until all the safes in the center have been claimed. At that point there is one final round, and then the winning location is determined and the final showdown happens.

It sounds like there's a lot going on, and there is, but there is one critical problem. A key strategy to the game is figuring out who has the high value safes, so you can either steal them or make sure you're at the location with the most gold at the end. It's supposed to be a "game of shifting alliances" where you side with the others in your location to make sure you collectively have the most gold, and then backstab them in the final showdown. The problem is that with only four turns per player before the final showdown, you just don't have enough time for the amount of social deduction or level of strategy that the game calls for.

Because of the amount of bluffing and secret information involved, the game relies on all the players having a roughly equal understanding of the rules and especially the strategy, which makes it very difficult to teach. This is a major problem for a game that, like any "shifting alliances" game, needs a large number of players to be interesting.

On the other hand, I think there is a fun game here somewhere, and the gorgeous design and components make me want to keep trying to make it work.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Too much social deduction for a board game, or perhaps too much structure for a social deduction game, but the game is beautiful to look at.

• Deadwood 1876 official website
• Deadwood 1876 on Board Game Geek