First Play: Copycat....

The hobby gaming obsession has exploded so much so over the past decade that many games have come out with themes and mechanics that reflect humourously on hobby gaming itself.  And there's so many of us suckers now that these games are even finding a market - The Boardgamegeek Game and Cleopatra's Caboose are prime examples.  Copycat, by the brilliant and weird Friedemann Friese of Power Grid and Black Friday fame, is another prime example of this.  Friese decided he wanted to steal mechanics from the top-rated games on BGG and put 'em together to create something new.  Of course, this is a not-so-subtle commentary on the endless variations of modern game mechanics that we're seeing over and over - worker placement, deck-building, you name it.  So Copycat steals the worker-placement/action card reveal from Agricola, the deck-building and coins for buying from Dominion, increasing values of unused actions from Puerto Rico, and the sliding card row from Through the Ages as well as tossing a few more clever ideas into the mix.

Red cards are useless, you know, like licenses and degrees and stuff

And I daresay that my first play of this was rather magnificent!  Once the fog had lifted from trying to parse yet another confusing Friese and Rio Grande ruleset, we really started to get into the game.  Not knowing what I was doing and not knowing that money would be really hard to come by later, I tried my classic "Chapel" strategy from Dominion of burning down my deck and then building it back up.  Unfortunately I used more actions burning my deck then building it and so had to play catch up in the end game.  But man was this fun.  Long-term strategy from the deck-building and deep challenging tactical play every round from the action spaces and the cards on hand.  And a devious decision every round for turn order - which card to give up from a hand of only 5?  Delicious.  I'm looking forward to my next play of this, I must say, and seriously considering owning a copy myself.  Highly recommended, especially if Agricola and Dominion float your boat.

And you don't have to feed your family!!!!

Action spaces and "campaign workers"

UPDATE:  2-player game is way too easy.  Fun but devoid of tension.  4-player is excellent and illustrates the many ways to scoop points.  But for length of play I think 3 players is just right. 

T. G. I. F. - a micro-review of Friday....

In Canada, we have a long weekend in May to celebrate Victoria Day and this past one I spent out on the shores of Lake Huron at my wonderful in-law's cottage, drinking some delicious micro-brews from Toronto's great Mill St. Brewery and learning a new juggling trick, the 2-Hand Weave (which you can see me doing here).  When I wasn't outdoors, I was inside glued to the kitchen table playing solitaire.  Yes, solitaire.  But not any kind of solitaire - I was playing Friedemann Friese's brilliant and challenging Friday.  Over and over and over and over.....

Final two pirates to battle

Now I feel like I could thoroughly describe the mechanics of this fun little 1-player deck-building card game but I think it would sound rather confusing.  The game isn't complicated but it does take a few rounds to get the hang of the rules and then a few more rounds to actually learn how to not die almost immediately. 

Hazards which flip to fighting cards

At a high-level, you are fighting a bunch of hazards of ever increasing difficulty and every time you defeat one, you add the defeated card to your deck.  However, when you lose to a hazard you lose life points but you also get the opportunity to remove cards from your deck.  And you start with a lot of bad cards.  And unfortunately, every time you reshuffle your deck you add another REALLY bad card.  So basically you're struggling to prune your deck and build it up at the same time, all the while not losing all your life, only to face two monster pirate battles right at the end.  If you survive till then.

Hazard battle in action

I've won the game only once in the near 20 times I've played it on the easiest possible level (yes, you can amp up the difficulty to insane levels) but I've seen a continuous improvement in my skill.  I've gotten a feel for the cards and the hazards and started planning ahead I'm now choosy about which battles to fight to balance my deck as certain cards give you very distinct skills.  In short, I've gotten smarter and more strategic and I feel like I have control over whether I win or lose the game.  And I almost always lose.  Yet I keep playing. 

I think that's the sign of a great addicting little card game.

The final pirate battle in the only game I've won!

On The Horizon: the latest Friedemann Friese project...

The ever-strange and creative inventor of Power Grid and Black Friday has decided to create a board game using mechanics from the top ten board games of all time on BGG.  That would include the worker placement from Agricola, the card purchase from Through The Ages, deck-building from Dominion, the card-drafting from 7 Wonders, turn-order from (you guessed it!) Power Grid, and the action selection from Puerto Rico.  Huh.  Okay, I'll bite.  I'm interested to see how all this comes together....

You can see him talk about his schizophrenic design here.

A review of Fauna...

Okay, everyone, who wants to play a trivia game about guessing the weight, height, length, and natural habitats of various wildly obscure species of animals? Oh. No one? Right. Well, what if I said this animal trivia game was invented by Friedemann Friesse, the brilliant man behind Power Grid, Black Friday, and other modern classics of Euro-gaming. And maybe I should also mention the gameplay bears some similarities to that other great trivia game Wits and Wagers. Would that convince you? Still no? Perhaps you should read on and learn more about what I think is one of the most enjoyable trivia games to ever be published.  And it just happens to learn you tons about animals while you play it.

The version of Fauna we have been lucky enough to play is the latest from Montreal game company FoxMind and is the English-language version of the original German game from 2 years ago. The components are simple, excellently produced, and do exactly what they need to do. The board and cards are well-illustrated and I really can't complain about anything. This is a high-quality production of the kind you'd expect from Days of Wonder or Queen. The rules booklet, too, is quite well-done and covers a lot considering how simple the game really is.

This is an easy card?!?!?

So how does it work? Well, players have six betting cubes and play a series of rounds until someone reaches a pre-determined amount of points dependent on the number of players. Every round starts with a new player and an animal card is revealed by that player. Well, really only partially revealed as the top half of the card shows a picture of the animal and states how many areas on the board are the natural habitat for the animal and whether you can bet on it's weight, height, length, and/or tail length. The bottom half contains all the answers to these questions and so stays hidden until the end of the round. Once players know what they're betting on, each person in turn places a cube either on the map where they think the animal resides or on one of the squares corresponding to wight, height/length, or tail length. This goes on until all players do not want to play any more betting cubes and have passed. And then the answers are revealed and this is where the real cleverness begins. 

Every player who placed a cube in the correct natural habitats of the animal score points (more or less depending on how rare the animals habitats are) and the players who are in a region adjacent to one of the natural habitats almost always score points as well.  Similarly, players who guessed the right characteristics score big points and those adjacent to the correct answers on the scales also score some points.  So it seems like you should just throw down all 6 of your cubes in as many spots as possible, right?  But here's the tricky part - any cubes which don't score (on or next to a correct answer) get taken away temporarily and you only get one back at the beginning of every round, given that you'll always have a minimum of 3 to bet with.  Oh, nasty.  So now one wants to be a bit more careful with their betting cubes as they could lose half their cubes on a rather obscure animal on one turn and then not have the cubes to bet when they know all the correct habitats of the animal in the next round. 

So what seems like a rather childish game of animal trivia ends up turning into a tight little game of pushing-your-luck, betting wisely, and still knowing a bit about animal biology.  It's not deep but with 4 or 5 players (the sweet spot, in my mind) a player has to decide the most important places to bet before the spots get taken by other players.  The tension in choice can almost feel a bit like during the worker placement phase in Caylus, although much, much less painful.  So there is some strategy to the placing of the bets but knowledge plays a factor as well.  The game has the same lovely feeling that Wits and Wagers gives, of not needing to know every answer to be able to play well.  In fact, you can often bet cubes close to the "smart" player and score at least for adjacency points.  Of course this backfired in our last game when the world traveller amongst us had us all convinced that jaguars roam the savannahs of Africa and we all ended up losing our cubes (they reside mainly in South America, dontcha know!)  She was thinking of cheetahs.

Honey badger don't give a #@%$!

I can't say enough about this game.  I've played it a few times now and every game has been a lot of fun.  The rules are simple, the betting and revealing of answers is suspenseful, and you end up learning more then you ever needed to about the common garden snake.  There are two levels of difficulty (obscure vs. RIDICULOUSLY obscure animals) although we haven't bothered with the tough ones yet nor will we anytime soon.  I have had one or two people not so impressed with the game due to the trivia aspect so this may not be a hit for everyone.  But if you like Wits & Wagers or random trivia or even just the occasional episode of Planet Earth, I think you will love this game.  It only takes about 45 minutes, plays great with up to 6 players, and it's a total joy and if I had my way, it would be in every classroom across the country.  It's the type of game with major mass-market appeal that actually deserves to be flying off the shelves of every department store because it's so good.  And it's definitely one of my top games so far this year.

On The Horizon: Fauna (in English!)

Friedemann Friese has become one of the most prolific (and eccentric) game designers alive today.  Luckily for us, his games, whose German titles always start with the letter 'F', tend to be extremely good designs and have become some of my favourites - Power Grid (Funkenschlag), Black Friday (Freitag), and Famiglia are just a few. 

Well, a couple years ago Friese made a trivia game Fauna about betting on facts about animals, specifically on where they live and how big they are.  Like Wits & Wagers before, in Fauna you can win without knowing the exact answers but scoring for playing strategically and guessing close to the answer.  Fauna has been quite well-received but suffered from a bit of a translation issue (who wants to play a trivia game in a language they don't know?)  The great news is that FoxMind, a Canadian game company based out of Montreal, is bringing the English version to us.  Looking forward to it.