Ticket to Ride on iPhone/Touch

Up till now, the mobile version of Days of Wonder's hit train game Ticket to Ride has only be available for iPad, but today DOW is rolling out a tiny version for handheld iOS devices as well.

The new app delivers the original game with the US map, four AI opponents, and various achievements and leaderboards. There is no online mode, but pass-and-play and local multiplayer via Bluetooth or WiFi is included, and functions among all iOS devices.


Sez the Official Press Release: "The distinctive feature set we developed for this Pocket version makes it the definitive way to enjoy Ticket to Ride as a ‘spur-of-the-moment’ mobile gaming experience," said Eric Hautemont, CEO of Days of Wonder. "The new local network play also makes Ticket to Ride Pocket the perfect companion for Ticket to Ride for iPad customers eager to play with family and friends in the comfort of their home or while traveling."

T2R gets a heavy workout here, and remains the bridge game we use to introduce noobs to the world beyond Monopoly. Now Ticket to Ride is in my pocket, and I am glad to see it. I hope to get it soon and post a full review.

Days of Wonder: Memoir '44 Out of Beta & Small World Underground

When I loaded up Days of Wonder's new online version of Memoir '44, I could swear my copy said it was still in beta, and mentioned that in my announcement. It has, in fact, been out of beta since late June, and is humming along quite nicely.Thanks to Christine Goutaland for correcting me.

Also, we got a chance over the weekend to play a warm-up game of Small World Underground, and we're liking it a lot. The new races are clever, the powers are dastardly, and the integration of places and relics puts a nice spin on the play. One caveat, however: don't use this one to introduce new players to Small World. The new additions add a little the learning curve and might put off novices.

Memoir '44: Play Online

Days of Wonder has launched an online version of their best-selling casual war game, Memoir '44. Like many DOW games, Memoir '44 gets a heavy workout here at Casa McD, so this is welcome news. So far, I've just taken the solo mode for a spin, but it's a straight-up computer conversion of the tabletop game. It plays on a single screen, with your cards aligned at the bottom and the board dominating the center of the layout. Mouse click responses seem a little odd: if you double click too fast, it doesn't register the move. Other than that, it's looking good so far.

Right now it's in "open beta," and people who sign up get 50 free "gold ingots." The game uses a pay-to-play model in which you pay ingots to play solo and online games. Ingots can be purchased at a rate of 200 for $8. For $30, you get 1,000 ingots plus the Expert Mode, which allows you to create and upload custom scenarios. For $60, you 2,400 ingots, plus expert mode, plus $30 off any Memoir '44 product. Sessions cost 2-3 ingots each.

It's an interesting model, and I'm not sure how it will work out. It avoids the problems of a subscription-based system, but it's hard, at this point, to determine whether the value-versus-cost balance is quite right. If we calculate about 90 games for 200 ingots, with anywhere from 30-45 minutes for each game, you're looking at maybe 200 hours of gameplay for $8. That doesn't seem unreasonable.

Small World Underground

Designer Phillipe Keyaerts and Days of Wonder are taking Small World subterranean. Small World Underground features new races, new powers, and a whole new underground map. Keyaerts has this to say about the new Small World:

Thoughts of changing the landscape of Small World have been in my head for quite some time. A land filled with Mountains seems to require running water, and so now we have Underground rivers. There is a double impact of the river: being difficult to cross, it can protect your regions... but you can also navigate the river to cross the board quickly. Mountains also begat Volcano regions that can't be conquered, which of course leads us to a race (Flames) that can exploit them!

Another important idea I had in mind were legendary artifacts which can be transferred from generation to generation. While previously powers were specific to a race, now we have new strong powers but that can be claimed by different races. Some of those artifacts didn't need to move on the board so they became magical places which opened up my mind to even more ideas on how they could be used.

Even when a game is finished and published, it's not easy to stop working on the design. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to look back at some ideas and explore the Small World universe even more deeply with Small World Underground.

SWU is now available for preorder. You can check out the official website for photos and rules.

The Toy Fair Recap Part II: Lego! Mayfair! More!

Toy Fair is an annual trade show in which the toy and game industry shows their latest wares, usually in mid-February. I liveblogged my day on Monday, and now I'm writing about everything I saw in a little more detail. The first part of the report can be found here.  

After Hasbro, I cabbed it over to Javits, had a painless check-in, dropped off my coat, and started heading for the show floor. That’s when I noticed that Activision was doing a bit of a demo in a little conference room off in a corner. Thus, I began my day by looking at …

Wappy Dog
Okay, so it wasn’t the most thrilling way to begin Toy Fair, but it’s a cute product that is expected to have a reasonable price point. Wappy Dog is a little robot dog (like the old Tekno toy) that works in tandem with a Nintendo DS game. The package comes with a DS cart and the dog itself. The game is a standard Nintendogs clone, but the twist comes from its ability to interact, wirelessly, with the robot dog. The dog barks, sings, changes color, makes noises, dances, and so on. You can pet it, train it, play with it, and get reactions from it.

Look, I have a daughter, so I’m around a lot of little girls. This kind of stuff is like catnip for them. If it works (the version I saw was prototype) and the price stays reasonable, it could definitely find its market. 

Lego
Although I didn’t make an appointment, I did manage to slip behind the velvet ropes of the Lego showroom and get a tour of their game line. It turns out that last year, Lego nabbed almost 13% of the children’s game market with their new Lego board game line. The first series of games not only had several Reiner Knizia designs, but Knizia had input into the direction of the line.

Lego games will continue in a couple of interesting ways. The new flagship title, following on from Lego Creationary, is Lego Champion, which offers a combination of building challenges and racing.

The new Lego Ninjago line (a popular item with my son) is getting a board game this August, and there’s also a pirate-themed game called Pirate Plank due in March.

More interesting is the Heroica line, which is an entirely new Lego line created exclusively for boardgames. The initial releases will be four build-and-play adventures—Draida Bay, Waldurk Forest, Caverns of Nathuz, and Castle Fortaan—which can be linked together to form an even larger game. All four are due in August, but the art I have is tagged “preliminary” and is thus embargoed. I could probably describe it to you, but I’m afraid Ninjago agents would appear from the shadows and cut me to ribbons with their little Lego weapons.

Oh, and Lego now has the Pirates of the Caribbean license, which explains this stupid photo of Yr Humble Correspondent. 

Man-sized minifig heads:
Gruesome trophies from a tribe of Lego headhunters 

Queen Games

I’ve been trying to score a review copy of Fresco for ages with no luck. Now I understand why: Queen Games is based on in Germany and has no real US PR presence. Plus, their products are big, heavy, and beautifully produced. They had a wide range of items on display—Samarkand, Kairo, Lancaster, Show Manger—but Fresco and its expansions was clearly the highlight.

In Fresco, you manage your Renaissance art studio, buy and mix paints, and slowly restore a fresco for the bishop. The pieces, board, art, and mechanics all look wonderful. I’m going to have to buy this one, so please start shopping through my Amazon store so I can afford it.

Days of Wonder
My first scheduled meeting of the day was with Days of Wonder’s Mark Kaufmann. DOW didn’t have a booth and they were only showing Cargo Noir, which I’d already covered. So we just talked a bit about the games business and some of the interesting reactions Days of Wonder games generate among hardcore gamers. It was nice to sit down and talk with someone who wasn’t trying to flog his new game--Scowling Men With Beards Trading Little Wooden Blocks--as the greatest thing since penicillin. Thanks for the break, Mark.


Mayfair
And then it was on to Mayfair, who are also very matter-of-fact about their product and their audience. When you have the first Eurogame to be sold in a big-box store like Target, you really don’t need to worry about what the hardcore crowd on BoardGameGeek think.

Mayfair's Bob Carty ran me through the brand-spanking-new, straight-from-the-printers copy of Martin Wallace’s new game, Automobile. This one looks good, but it’s a heavy numbers game, with the entire board dominated by research, auction, sales, and production tracks. It lacks the map element that gives Wallace’s train games their life. I think this one will find its audience, but it probably won’t break as a big as Steam (my favorite among Wallace’s train games).

On the other hand, Bob got me all worked up when he mentioned the third part of the Mayfair/Wallace transportation trilogy. The next game will be about air travel, and will return to a map-based design as people fight for dominance of various air hubs.

In some other Mayfair news of interest:

• They’re publishing a new edition of 1830 with a nice-looking board, original rules, and new variants. It’s a slick-looking bit of work for the hardcore 18xxers. 
• Steam is getting a map expansion with three new tracks: Mid-Atlantic US on one side, and Belgium & Luxembourg and Brussels Metro on the other. 
• Rivals for Catan is also getting an expansion, with new lands, resources, and adversaries. 
• I’m not at all sure what to make of First Bull Run: A Test of Fire, a fast-playing Civil War game from … Martin Walace. It’s listed as ages 10 & up with a 30 to 60 minute play time, which sounds a lot like Battle Cry. I’m really curious to see what they do with this one. 
• The final one that caught my eye was Five Points: Bloody Politics in Old New York. Since everyone else is going to be calling this “Gangs of New York: The Boardgame,” I might as well get the ball rolling. Players control factions vying for influence in upcoming elections, using agitators to tip the scales in their favor. It plays in under an hour, so it’s obviously a lighter game. 

I also got my best swag of the trip from Mayfair. I whispered in the ear of a friendly Mayfair lass that my daughter was the biggest Catan fan in the world, and she returned with a bag filled with these:

My daughter always tells me I’m the “best daddy in the world,” but last night she really meant it.

Final part of the Toy Fair recap coming later today.

Cargo Noir: First Impressions

Cargo Noir
Days of Wonder
2-5 players
Ages 8 and above
30-90 minutes
Designed by Serge Laget

 Note: These comments are based on a single play session, which is insufficient for a complete review. It's just meant as a few quick, fresh-out-of-the-box thoughts, along with a more detailed explanation of the gameplay and rules. When I've put in more time, I'll adapt it as a final review.

Goal
Cargo Noir is a set-making game with an auction element and a number of unique characteristics that keep it interesting. The theme is cargo smuggling among exotic ports throughout the world. You play as one of 5 organized crime syndicates, moving a fleet of ships from port to port to collect cargo tokens. These are, in turn, traded for victory spoils, which determine the winner of the game.

Production & Components
The quality of the components is top-notch, as we'd expect from Days of Wonder. The gameboard is created by placing together different ports of call tiles around a large central square representing Macao. The game comes with 25 rubberized ships (5 for each player), 60 plastic cold coins, 131 small cargo tokens on heavy cardboard, 54 victory cards, 5 family sheets, a wooden turn marker, a cardboard ship used to designate the first player, and a cloth bag used for blind drawing of cargo. The main game board is heavy cardboard, while the family sheets are lighter card stock.

The art is wonderful, and the game really embraces its theme throughout every aspect. Even the little boats match the visual style created by Small World's master artist Miguel Coimbra.The art is filled with small, funny details, and loaded with character. No one is doing better game art than Coimbra right now.

Although it's quite possible my brain simply went on vacation last night, I simply was not able to get the pieces back in the box in a satisfactory way. The insert is all carefully sculpted so that I should be able to, but there are so many little cargo tokens, as well as a bulky bag of ships, that I just couldn't make it fit. Am I missing something?

Scalability
We tested the game once with 4 players, but it uses clever board configuration to scale up to 5 or as low as 2. By flipping certain port tiles, you're able to "close" various ports, thus reducing the locations where people can contend for cargo. This seems like a clever solution to the scaling issue, but I haven't yet tested it in practice.

Gameplay

The game is played over 10 or 11 turns depending upon number of players, with each turn featuring 3 phases. The phases are: 1. Resolve ship actions. 2. Trade cargo for victory cards. 3. Place ships.

The goal is to collect as much cargo as you can from various ports. There are 9 different types of cargo and 5 wild cards. These smuggled goods are cigars, cars, weapons, gold, jewels, uranium, ivory, alcohol, and art. You want to collect as many matching sets of cargo as possible, since sets are worth more in the trading phase. For example, 5 unmatched goods are worth 15 points in trade, but 5 matched goods are worth 25 points in trade. Thus, you want to start building sets of, say, ivory or gold, rather than just grabbing as many different goods as possible.

You also want to build sets because your warehouse capacity (located on your family sheet) is initially limited to 6 slots, which can each hold 1 type of cargo. This can be expanded by two slots for each extra Warehouse card you buy. Any cargo you can't store is lost at the end of the trading phase.

Cargo is acquired by sending your ships into various ports. You start with 3 ships, but can expand this up to 5 ships by buying extra Cargo Ship cards.

Each port is loaded with varying amounts of cargo. Cape Town, for instance, only offers 1 piece of cargo, while Rotterdam has 4. Cargo is captured when you are the only player in a port in the "Resolve ships' actions" phase of the game. In order to be that person, you have to place your ship on top of the number of coins you're willing to spend for the cargo. However, other people may place a ship in the same port, as long as they place that ship with 1 more coin than the highest "bid" for that cargo. The coins are thick plastic and stackable, allowing players to quickly compare the size of their bids.

If you are in the same port with another player's ship, you either have to increase the size of your bid to exceed the highest stack, or withdraw it. The person left with the only ship in a port then collects all the goods and pays his coins to the bank. The game thus becomes a matter of oneupmanship, since you can keep adding coins to your stack in order to get a key piece of cargo or keep an opponent from getting one.

The Macao port at the center of the board provides two extra functions. If you place a ship on the top half, you can either trade one good for another that's already in the Macao Black Market, or pull a random cargo piece from the bag. If you place a ship on the bottom half, you collect 2 gold from the Casino.

The point of coins is to increase your buying capacity for cargo, and the point of cargo is to buy victory spoils. These are things like yachts, villas, night clubs, and dive bars, each costing a certain amount of cargo, and each worth the same amount in victory points when you total your score a the end of the game. (A yacht, for example, costs 20 points to buy, and adds 20 points to your total score.) In addition, there are 6 unique cards which have asymmetrical values. These are things like the Showbiz card, which costs 36 but is worth 40 in victory points. Because they have irregular values, the unique cards help prevent ties.

Thoughts
It's too soon to render a full verdict, but we certainly enjoyed our first, 4-person test game, even though I misunderstood one of the rules. The game is actually surprisingly easy to learn and teach. (It's far easier to play than it is to describe.) The theme carries through all the components and design features, adding a great deal of character and flavor to the experience.

Sending out your ships to collect cargo, not knowing if someone is going to try to snatch them away from you with a higher bid, creates a good deal of tension and player interaction. Balancing ship distribution among cargo purchase, money acquisition, and black market trading adds a nice level of strategy to each turn.

Some house rules can be added to mix things up a bit, such as player-to-player trading for cargo. My son even starting coming up with rules that would allow you to steal or sabotage to increase the player interaction and tension.

Cargo Noir, however, doesn't really need any extra layers to make it work. Quick impression: this is a good game: entertaining, light enough for younger gamers, but with enough meat to allow for some interesting strategic play. I need to put in more time to get a real sense of it, but so far it seems like another winner for Days of Wonder.

Cargo Noir, Coming From Days of Wonder This March

The next game from Days of Wonder is Cargo Noir, designed by Serge Laget, co-designer of Mystery Express and Shadows Over Camelot.  I'll let the official press release fill in the details:

Cargo Noir is a game of illicit trading in which players run "families" who traffic in smuggled goods. The game takes place in the thrilling and evocative setting of 1950's film noir.

Game play in Cargo Noir revolves around a changing set of notorious smuggling ports – Hong Kong, Bombay, Rotterdam, Panama, Tanger, Rio, Cape Town, New York and Macao – that are filled with various types and quantities of contraband. Players dispatch cargo ships loaded with gold to the ports that hold cargo they desire – hoping that it will be enough to snatch the goods away from any opponents. The acquired goods are then stored in the player’s warehouses until enough is accumulated to create valuable combinations to trade away for Victory Spoils.

"Everything in Cargo Noir grew from a core auction mechanism that is simple and trivial to explain - you can only bid up, and the last bidder standing gets the goods," says designer Serge Laget. "After that game development focused on three areas: fine-tuning the balance so there were always multiple paths to victory; making sure the game shines with two players as well as with five; and finding a theme that would be evocative with a feel that is very different from most other auction or trading games – a Sheep for two Woods it ain’t!"

More pictures after the jump:

Ticket to Ride and .... Monsters?

I'm glad I can still be surprised, because if you asked me to come up with my top 20 guesses about the next Ticket to Ride expansion from Days of Wonder, "giant plastic city-stomping monsters" would not have made the list. I'll let the official press release fill in the details:

The two finely detailed monster figures of Alvin & Dexter turn any location they occupy into a City in Chaos– blocking routes from being built into or out of the city; and at game's end making any Destination Ticket to a city inhabited by either of them worth only half its normal point value. Players may move a single monster to a different city anytime during their turn by turning in 1 or 2 Locomotive wild cards and moving the monster up to 3 cities away for each card they discard. The player who moves Alvin (or Dexter) the most during the game will also earn a bonus. 

"Alvin the Alien and Dexter the Dino bring a lot of wacky fun to Ticket to Ride, making it the perfect post-Christmas gift for Ticket to Ride lovers", says the game's author, Alan R. Moon. "They also introduce a devious new tactical layer to the game that forces players to think about how to best use them and when to defend against them. Those who ignore Alvin and Dexter do so at their peril."

The Alvin & Dexter Monster expansion includes: 2 detailed plastic monster figures; 20 Monster cards; 2 Bonus cards; rules in 11 different languages; and comes packaged with a transparent window box displaying the 2 figures. Alvin & Dexter can be played with any complete stand-alone board game from the Ticket to Ride family. It will be available through game retailers worldwide beginning in February 2011. Suggested retail price is $13.

More pictures after the jump.

Coming From Days of Wonder: Cargo Noir

Days of Wonder is starting to tease their forthcoming title, Cargo Noir. Everything I know about the game comes from this 53 second clip, so I'll get out of the way and let you watch.

REVIEW: Small World: Be Not Afraid . . .

Grade: A
Price: $20

I've been on a Small World kick lately, so along with testing out the new Necromancer Island expansion, I've been putting some time into Be Not Afraid. It adds 5 news races and 5 new powers, as well as a nifty new tray to store all the expansions to date.

Here's how the additions shake out:

Races
Barbarians
The good news: they get 9 troops before they even add troops from their special powers. The bad news: They can't redeploy at the end of a turn. The idea is that they make up in numbers what they lack in tactical finesse, and I found this to be a pretty good tradeoff.

Homunculi
Although they have my favorite art to date, I'm not that smitten with the Homunculi. Their bonus is kind of weak: every time they are bypassed, you add a Homunculi token as well as a coin to the race banner. These tokens become bonus forces when you draw your troops. In larger games of 5 or 6 people, I can see this maybe being appealing if players allow a lot of tokens to accumulate on the race banner.

Leprechauns
We already know they're magically delicious, but they also place a pot o' gold token worth 1 coin on each conquered region. If the Leprechaun player still golds that token at the end of their next turn, they take it. If someone else conquers them before that, the conquerer takes it. This is a nice addition, and creates some interesting tension on the board as people have to consider how to conquer and defend using their Leprechauns. The deploy 6 tokens.

Pixies
Yoinks! Pixies deploy a whopping 11 units from their race banner alone. On the other hand, they withdraw all but one of these units during redeployment, leaving conquered territories vulnerable. This creates an entirely new kind of swarming strategy, with quick conquests and equally quick defeats. It takes some skill to manage the Pixies, but their sheer force of numbers can force opponents to adopt new strategies.

Pygmies
For each Pygmy unit lost, you roll the reinforcement die and take a number of units equal to the number rolled. This creates some chaotic force fluctuations that should appeal to players who like to think on their feet. They start with 9 tokens.

Powers
Barricade
This a good money pump, providing 3 bonus coins every time your troops occupy fewer than 4 regions at once.

Catapult
The Catapult token is deployed in one of your regions, making it impervious to attack as well as to race or special powers. In addition, you can use it to reduce the conquest cost of any region that is 1 region away from the catapult. That region can be conquered with 1 less token. The strength of the catapult lies primarily in  its ability to create an impregnable region which can be used as to provide support for further conquest. In this way, it's just powerful enough to be useful without unbalancing the game.

Corrupt
Turn those losses into cash! Each time someone conquers one of your regions, they have to pay you 1 coin. Match this with Pixies and watch everyone squirm.

Imperial
Imperial races get 1 bonus coin for having 4 or more regions, and 2 coins for having 5 or more. This power plays well with anything that allows or fast conquests.

Mercenary
In the right hands, the Mercenary power can be pretty useful, since it allows you to pay 1 coin to reduce your conquest cost by 2 tokens. Since you'll get that coin back by the end of the turn, that's not a bad deal.

Summary
We're enjoying this set a lot. Some of the units can really mix up a game. To date, we haven't had any combinations that appear to be "spoilers," meaning they're unbalanced enough to ruin a game. Some of them are better than others, but those variations are built into the design: they're precisely what makes Small World so much fun.

REVIEW: Small World: Necromancer Island

Publisher: Days of Wonder

Grade: A
Price: free with purchase

I made a serious mistake when I first started playing the Necromancer Island scenario for Small World. I assumed it just added a unit with a very special kind of power. It took a few turns to realize that it’s a complete game-changer.

Necromancer Island isn’t for sale, but is being given away with purchase of the Small World game or expansions, online or from authorized retailers. (Days of Wonder automatically adds it to orders for the Be Not Afraid expansion, which I'll write about soon.) It demands a significant shift in strategy that requires some experience with the way the nuances of the game.

In the scenario, one player becomes the Necromancer, who sends forth Ghosts from his impregnable island redoubt at the center of the board. The Necromancer begins the game with 1 Ghost on his island, 13 Ghosts in reserve, a Well of Souls marker, and 6 random Powers. (Cursed, Spirit, and Stout Powers cannot be used by the Necromancer.) He chooses 1 of these 6 Powers at the start of the game, and leaves the rest in reserve.

The Necromancer builds his army from the bodies of the fallen. Each time a Lost Tribe or Race token is defeated in battle, it goes to the Well of Souls. The Necromancer can exchange 4 of these tokens for 1 Ghost token, which is then put into play.

A Necromancer may also spend coin to buy a Ghost or to buy an additional Power from his reserve. The cost either of this is equal to the number of Powers he has in play plus the number of Ghosts deployed on the board. For example, if the player has 2 Powers and 6 Ghosts, an extra Ghost or an additional Power would cost 8 coins.

The creates some vital shifts for the players in the game. For starters, I cannot imagine how a Necromancer can win a money game unless it’s through stacked powers that generate quantities of coin. The problem with the Necromancer is that he gets off to a very slow start. He has an ideal spot at the center of the board, but it takes time to even deploy a single unit, and the game may be half over before he starts sending out Ghosts in any quantities.

And Ghosts don’t die. When a Ghost region is conquered, one Ghost goes into the Well of Souls and all the others go back into the player’s hand for redeployment.

Because of this, the Necromancer has a special victory condition. Once he deploys all 13 of his Ghosts, he wins. This forces the other players to weigh carefully any attack they make, because every unit killed in conflict makes the Necromancer that much more powerful.

The ability to stack powers creates some potent combinations, and I imagine some of them are probably unstoppable. The cost for powers goes up steadily, and their benefits seem well balanced against the limitations of the Necromancer rules.

Meanwhile, those playing with standard races must weigh expansion and conquest against any benefit it might give the Necromancer. Is it worth taking an extra territory if it put another Ghost into play? Late in the game, players nervously watch as the Ghosts in reserve are steadily depleted, and gauge their moves accordingly.

It's a terrific twist on the usual gameplay, and it will definitely force experienced Small Worlders to rethink their strategies. Because of its unique dynamics, it's playable by up 6 people, which is nice. 

REVIEW: Small World

In preparation for reviewing the new Small World expansions, I decided to do a full review of the original game. As I’ve said, age is irrelevant in determining what I’ll write about. Any game you haven’t played is new to you, and my goal is to get more people thinking of good games. Only time can reveal just what games have lasting qualities. 

Publisher: Days of Wonder

List Price:  $50

Grade: A

When I first sat down with Small World, I thought I detected a whiff of eau de Risk. It’s an understandable mistake. Both have maps divided into regions, are driven by cross-border conquest, and use a “stack-and-attack” mechanic. But whereas Risk was belched forth from the fifth circle of hell, wherein the sullen and wrathful boil beneath the stagnant surface of a black pool of rancid water without hope or joy, Small World comes from Belgium. (If you thought I’d use this opportunity to make some cheap joke about Belgians, well … I’m better than that. Fortunately, Monty Python isn't.)

Small World is the work of designer Phillipe Keyaerts. It’s really just a great redesign and re-theming of a Keyaerts game called Vinci, but thanks to the changes and the superb production job by Days of Wonder, it’s now a far better game with a much wider appeal. It was so good, in fact, that we awarded it the Game of the Year medal for 2010 at Games Magazine. (My personal pick for that year would probably have been Dominion, with Small World as a close runner-up.)

The Elements
As usual, Days of Wonder does a bangup job on the production. The art is terrific, with a combination of whimsy and expressiveness that just makes you want to pick it up and examine all the little details. I’d go so far as to say that the illustrations by Miguel Coimbra are a large factor in the success of the game. Any number of games can (and do) tackle this kind of territorial conquest, but none draw in the player as effectively as Small World, and much of that is thanks to the art.

The 14 races in the game (with more added in multiple expansions) are all stock fantasy characters: elves, halflings, humans, orcs, trolls, wizards, giants, dwarves, amazons, ghouls, ratmen, skeletons, sorcerers and tritons (sea creatures). It takes a lot of skill for an artist to make these feel fresh and fun, but Coimbra does it. Look closely at some of the tiles to find funny touches, such as a man controlling a giant dragon by dangling a little person (rather than a carrot) from a stick.

There are a lot of bits in the box. Races are depicted on banners, while special powers are depicted on badges. Each time you play, you randomly fit a race banner together with a power badge, thus creating a unique kind of unit for each session. For instance, Dwarves may be matched to the Flying power to create Flying Dwarves. Or Ghouls may be matched to the Merchant power to create Merchant Ghouls. We’ll talk more about just what this means in the next section. 

Each race is represented on the board by small, square tokens. There are 168 of these, distributed unevenly among the races. In addition, the game comes with victory coins, geographical features (mountains, fortresses, etc), and other special tokens. There’s just a lot of stuff in the box.

Finally, there are the boards. There are two, and each is double sided in order to create a balanced experience for 2, 3, 4, and 5 players. The boards are colorful and sturdy, and pack in a lot of detail without becoming confusing.

The Play 
In this Small World, space is limited. Territories are crowded together, and they simply can’t accommodate all the races. Your goal is to build and expand your territory, earning victory coins by holding land as long as possible.

To accomplish this, you begin with a race with its own special power. Six race/power combos are laid out in column next to the board, with each player selecting a starting force. Each race/power combo gets a total number of tokens to represent their forces, as well as some starting coin and any other power bonuses. These bonuses may be extra units, more cash, movement benefits, special attacks, or more. The huge array of powers and races, which are randomized for each game, is one of the main appeals of Small World, and keeps the game feeling fresh each time out.

Once everyone has their race and forces, they simply start claiming territory by placing and moving unit tokens. It’s a simple mechanic, with the player who has more units conquering the player who has less. There other factors and modifiers having to do with terrain, power, and lost races, but the basic mechanism is like a diceless version of Risk. Each turn, you collect one coin for each region you hold.

But that’s not where it ends. After grabbing and expanding your territory, you may find that your current race is stretched too thin. At this point, you can put a race into “decline.” You flip the banners and tokens, choose a new race/power combo, and continue the conquest with a new force. Your old race continues generating coin until it’s overrun, but now it’s weaker and you no longer control it directly.

In this way, you ride a sequence of races to victory, finding different ways to exploit the powers and weaknesses of each. In the end, the game is won by the person who collects the most coins.

The Verdict 
Small World is a blast. It plays very fast, and has a loose feel that’s very appealing. It doesn’t require a lot of high-level strategy and military finesse to get ahead. Instead, you find particular ways to use each race to capture and hold a certain part of the map for as long as you can, and then use another race to keep that momentum going.

The appeal lies in the combination of races and powers, which makes every game different. There are a lot of ways to uses these combos to go for the coin. Some units can capture water tiles, while others are better in the mountains. One player may be able to ride a dragon into an enemy region, while another conquers with sheer force of numbers. Some race/power combos allow a player emphasize the monetary aspect or use a sneaky bit of magic, while others let you work the brute force or fast attack approach.

The mechanics are different from anything most mainstream American gamers have seen before, and this might make it seem like a very difficult game to learn at first. Don’t be fooled by that. It is, in fact, a very simple game and plays well across all age and skill levels. My wife and I can play with my son (age 12) and daughter (age 9) on an equal level. (In fact, the kids usually win.) You just have to understand a few key concepts such as race benefits, earning money from territories, and placing a race into decline. It’s actually a lot easier to learn than a quick read of the manual might suggest.

This is just a fun game. It’s not particularly deep, but it still manages to be rewarding thanks to all the variables and interactions among elements. If you know someone who insists on dragging out Risk, and that particular person cannot be sold off as cheap labor to Venusian slime farmers, then try to nudge them toward Small World.

Review: Memoir '44

In preparation for reviewing the new Memoir 44 add-on, Winter Wars, I decided to do a full review of the original game. As I’ve said, age is irrelevant in determining what I’ll write about. Any game you haven’t played is new to you, and my goal is to get more people thinking of good games. Only time can reveal just what games have lasting qualities.

When Memoir ’44 came on the scene about 6 years ago, I gave it a pass. I’m an old grognard, which means a hardcore wargamer with a bookcase stuffed with high-complexity wargames from Avalon Hill, TSR, SSG, GMT, and The Gamers. A low-complexity historical wargame wasn’t to my taste.

Well, that was then. As I tried to nudge my son into historical wargaming, I used some standard introductory games, such as Gettysburg and Across Five Aprils, to introduce the concepts, but they failed to grip. He’d had a taste of Axis & Allies and various miniatures systems, and, being ten years old, he liked his bits and pieces.

So, I finally took a plunge into the wonderful world of Richard Borg, who has been refining an approachable system for wargaming for the past decade. What began with Battle Cry (Avalon Hill, 2000) has since grown into Memoir ’44 (Days of Wonder, 2004), Commands & Colors (GMT, 2006), and BattleLore (Fantasy Flight, 2006), offering combat gaming in, respectively, the Civil War, World War II, the ancient world, and a fantasy setting.

Memoir ’44 would prove to be the perfect gateway for historical gaming. It’s not a design that purists would recognize as a true “wargame,” because it doesn’t simulate combat with depth and accuracy, and it doesn’t always reward real-world tactics. That wasn't Borg's goal. It is, instead, a strategy game that uses the elements of wargames and history to provide a unique, completely entertaining, and very appealing experience.

The Elements
Memoir ’44 (Days of Wonder, about $40) stands out for its high level of production design, which is what you’d expect of a product from Days of Wonder. This is just a game you want to open, fiddle with, play, and collect.

The components break down into a few elements that provide a foundation for an incredible range of gameplay. The board depicts a grassy expanse on one side, and a beachhead on the other. Both side are marked with a hexagonal grid. The gameplay surface is created by placing tiles on this board to create a unique battlefield. Tiles may depict towns, roads, forests, water, bridges, and obstacles, thus allowing you to build any kind of battlefield you like. (Other surfaces and tiles, featuring desert and snow terrains, are available separately.)

The most striking element of the Memoir series is its miniatures, which make the experience akin to playing a wargame with little plastic army guys. There’s infantry, artillery, and armor, as well as hedgehogs, barbed wire, and sandbags to use as obstacles and defenses.

Players activate and move these figures by using command cards, which allow them to maneuver within certain limitations, and provide different bonuses.

The Play
The rules provide 16 scenarios, complete with unit setups, victory conditions, and historical background for 2 players. The focus is on D-Day and the battles that followed, with Axis and Allies forces clashing across a variety of terrain configurations. If you have two sets of the game, or 1 set of the game plus the Operation Overlord add-on, you can play gigantic battles with two teams of multiple gamers controlling various portions of the battlefield.

The gameplay is simplicity itself. Each player gets a certain number of cards (usually 5) based on the scenario. Most of these effect unit activation, allowing a player to move and fight with the units in a certain area of the board (left, center, or right). Units are placed on the board in groups: 4 pieces to represent an infantry unit, 3 for armor, and 2 for artillery.

Combat results are determined with a simple roll of the dice based on the kind of unit that’s attacking and its range from the target. For instance, artillery can attack up to 6 spaces away. For the 2 closest spaces, it rolls 3 dice; 2 dice for the next two spaces, and 1 die for the spaces furthest away. If any of the dice are a hit, the unit being attacking removes 1 figure per hit. When all the figures are removed, that unit is considered destroyed. Modifiers, such as terrain, obstacles, and cards, can effect the outcome in various ways.

The Verdict
Using these simple rules, Richard Borg has created an immensely satisfying gameplay experience. Much of this has to do with the tactile element: it’s just a fun game to set up and play.

But the gameplay itself is also appealing. It’s fast, flexible, and provides plenty of opportunity for smart tactics and decision making.

No, it is not a “real” wargame. There's too much luck involved, the combat results are too generic and the mechanics too abstract for any Memoir scenario to function as a historical simulation.

And so what? I was a wargaming snob to bypass this one when it first came out. It took playing it with my son and viewing it through fresh eyes to see its merits. My rules for what make a good game have grown simpler as I get more experienced. (“Experienced” is a euphemism for “old” in case you’re wondering). My basic rule for determining a good game is this: a good game is one you play. Faced with a choice between setting up Terrible Swift Sword and banging out a couple of Memoir scenarios, I’ll choose Memoir every time. When you continually return to a game, that’s a pretty good indication of its quality.

Memoir is fun, and as I’ve refined my reviewing criteria over the years, that’s become one of my baseline quantifiers. I know that "Fun" should seem obvious obvious element in a game, but “Good” and “Fun” aren’t always found in the same package. There are plenty of games with rock-solid design that I find about as much fun as gargling ground glass. On the other hand, some games have obvious flaws that I’m willing to overlook because the net experience is entertaining. Maybe my brain is getting softer or my time is just getting shorter, but I find myself liking simpler things.

I don't have to make such allowances with Memoir '44: the design is rock solid. This is a keeper, and it’s great from both adults and kids as young as 10. If you have a son and you want to introduce him to tabletop World War II gaming, this is the place to start. Forget Axis & Allies. It’s a good game, but it focuses on sprawling, high-level strategies. (It’s really just a jumped-up version of Risk.) Memoir is closer to the action, and has a more immediate feel to it. It also plays faster, has more flexibility and better components, and is easier to set up.

Thanks to the continued success of the Memoir system, Days of Wonder has been able to keep up a steady stream of products, with new maps, scenarios, units, and add-ons. They even make a campaign bag to store everything. (I gotta get me one of them.)

I plan take a look at the new Winter Wars add-on as soon as I get some table-time with it.

In the mail...

Small World: Be Not Afraid: An add-on from Days of Wonder Games Magazine's Game of the Year, 2010. Be Not Afraid adds 5 new races (Barbarians, Homonculi, Leprechauns, Pixies, and Pygmies ... hmmm, one of these things is not like the other) and 5 new powers (Barricade, Catapult, Corrupt, Imperial, and Mercenary).  

Small World: Necromancer's Island: This a free, limited-edition scenario available to people who buy the base game from various retailers or the Days of Wonder web store during November and December 2010, while supplies last. One player becomes the Necromancer, who turns dead units into an army of Ghosts. This is sure to become a collectible, so keep an out for it.

Memoir 44: Winter Wars--The Ardennes Offensive: I already discussed it here. I'm planning to do a review of the base game, and then follow-up with a review of this add-on.

Halo: Reach: I didn't have any time to spend with it until this weekend. (I'm long past being excited about a new Halo game. A new Arkham Asylum or Bioshock or Civilization? Yes. A new Halo or Call of Duty? Eh, no. Been there, done that, passed the t-shirt on to my son.) It's exactly what we expected: a very polished, very good continuation without a whole lot of surprises. Multiplayer has gotten almost absurdly over-stuffed with modes and variations: there's about 4 or 5 games worth of content in there.The differences between this and previous Halo games are merely of degree, not of kind. It's an excellent game, and like StarCraft II, it sticks to the formula that made it huge.

MySims SkyHeroes: The most I could get out of Daughter was "It's fun and cool," which means nothing considering that 2 years ago Winnie the Pooh's Rumbly Tumbly Adventure was described that same way. I'll have to put some actual time in if I plan on covering it.  (IF....)

I'll write some more about the new Days of Wonder stuff as I get them to the game table this week.

Memoir '44: Winter Wars

If you haven't played Memoir '44 yet, you're missing one of the real treats of board gaming. It's easy to learn, fun, and incredibly flexible. I just got word from Days of Wonder that a new expansion is due in November. Called Winter Wars--The Ardennes Offensive, it covers the last major German offensive on the western front.

Here's what DoW has to say about it:

Packing a big punch, the Winter Wars expansion includes: 88 Winter terrain tiles; 20 Winter Combat cards; and most significantly in terms of game play – 80 new Command cards designed specifically for Breakthrough battles. This expansion also introduces new Winter Combat rules and new Troop badges representing the all new Tank Destroyer and Heavy Anti-Tank Gun units, and late war versions of an Anti-Tank Gun, Mortar and Machine Gun.

These will all be critical to fighting the ten scenarios contained in Winter Wars, all focused on those crucial two weeks in December 1944 in the Ardennes. The first six scenarios included are standard scenarios, playable with a single base game and this expansion. Deployment on a Winter/Desert board, while optional, creates a more accurate visual effect. The other four scenarios are gigantic Breakthrough renditions of the Battle of the Bulge. These scenarios will also require a single copy of the already released Eastern Front expansion and Breakthrough Kit board maps.

Winter Wars lists for $30.