Games of the Moment 55 | The Ramble Repository (2024)

GAMES AHOY

It had been too long since we'd played Greedy Kingdoms. Revisiting it confirmed that it's still a solid 2p design that uses role declaration in a very unique way. It's telling that our play looked one-sided in my favor for much of its duration and yet my opponent was 1 turn away from victory herself. The game often hinges on one or two critical turns and that keeps it exciting.

What I like about GK is the line you have to ride to play optimally. Assuming you're unblocked, snagging an early card or two is all you need to effortlessly grab the resources necessary to win. But crucially, no opponent with more than two brain cells is ever going to let you take the shortest road. So you pay for role upgrades, buildings that act as insurance, and one-shots that guarantee results because they're safe. But do you NEED them? If you can mentally shatter your opponent and obfuscate your goals you could just walk right through without any of that. It's conniving in a Netrunner-adjacent way while still being eminently approachable.

Haven is a game I'd meant to play for some time. We actually have a physical copy of it that we picked up on a lark a while back and just...never played, which is strange for us. Fortunately when I mentioned this on Twitter my pal Dan stepped in and taught it over TTS and it left quite the first impression.

There were three things that stood out to me in our play. The first was the game's regimented pace and how it constantly threatens to break it. Generally speaking the players control when and which fights start in the game's three "lanes". However, each player also has mandatory cards that are auto-played on draw lurking in their decks which speed the game up, forcing players to be constantly alert. This provides good tension without ever feeling unnecessarily random. Sometimes a fight just breaks out, y'know? War's like that. Gotta be ready.

The second was how it manages to work in special power cards that don't dominate the entire experience. Normally a game is either all about that kind of thing or it only has a handful, and in the latter case they often end up feeling disproportionately important due to scarcity and their exceptional nature. Haven, shockingly, never felt defined by their text. That isn't to say they aren't significant as they often decided fights, but critically it was always something that we chose to do and it came at a cost. If you're drawing lore cards you aren't taking units or elements (I'm ignoring the game's terms here bc I don't want to look them up right now, sorry) and those are, generally speaking, more important more often. Going out of your way to get lore means you're going to use it, and being gifted lore due to getting beaten is a potentially significant consolation prize, but the lore cards manage to add to the core loop of lane management instead of distracting from it. That's rare to see. I like it.

Finally, the third is that I f*cking shellacked Dan. Sorry dude. This isn't intended to be a brag though you can feel free to read it that way. Instead it demonstrated that despite the numerous ways the game helps the losing player of any given conflict it refuses to implement a full-on rubberbanding effect. I don't know if the game has a tendency to snowball because again, one play, but I do know that a lot of modern games equate maintaining/gaining a strong position to a negative player experience and that's bullsh*t. Artificial closeness and catchup mechanisms often rob games their tension and the satisfaction of plays well made. I'm glad to see Haven isn't one of those modern games. Hopefully this is an uncommon result though because hoo BOY I should not have done that well.

So yeah, I dug Haven quite a bit. Needs more plays to really unpack how I feel about it on the whole as a single learning game doesn't provide nearly enough insight on this kind of design. But I'm enthusiastic to get those plays in, and that's a good sign!

People who spend time on BGG benefit from a lot of industry/design knowledge, but sometimes it cuts the other way. Blind faith or interest as a result of pedigree is never the way. I was reminded of this after playing Waddle purely because of who made it, not for what it was. This one's on me, folks.

Let me make myself clear from the outset - I'm not here to roast penguins. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Waddle. My problem is that despite it being designed by Raph Koster (of Ultima fame!) and Isaac Shalev (Seikatsu!) it still wasn't something I should have played. Waddle is - and if I took the work Wizkids put into its theming into account I would have realized this - for young children and their families. In our plays Cindy said it felt like an edutainment game and I'm inclined to agree. The scoring cards are never more complex than counting to 5, odds/evens, color grouping, etc.

Waddle isn't a chin-stroking abstract and that's OK. It's a simple card game that loosely borrows from Mancala in that you place pieces in and out of pits, but there's no tricky movement rules to manage or benefits for placement beyond scoring at that moment and trying to set up your next play. Simply play a card, try to score at least 3 points because anything less is bad, repeat. It is a very easy game to play well, both in the base ruleset and the shuffled variant detailed in the back of the manual. That said, it could be very successful at teaching younger players to identify the strongest opportunity available to them and then act on it. More than anything else, I'm glad I played Waddle because it reminded me to not pay quite so much attention to the names attached to any given project and focus more on the game itself.

Do you remember when you first got into hobby games? I do, or at least I remember how it felt when I played something that felt innovative. There was novelty for sure, there always is, but there's a feeling of electricity that comes with playing something that feels like it's breaking new ground in exciting ways. A jolt of excitement, like you've found something special. I don't get a lot of those these days, probably because I've played so many games at this point that it's harder than ever to find things that stand out. Do you see where I'm going with this?

JvH manages something that I didn't think was possible - thematically grounded 2p trick taking. OK so the actual tricks themselves aren't necessarily tied to anything, but the scoring sure is. One player is Jekyll and the other is Hyde. Jekyll is trying to score a middling number of tricks (with optimal being 5/10) while Hyde is trying to create a huge delta by either taking or losing as many as possible. At the end of each hand a marker is moved as far as the difference between the scores. Repeat 3 times, and if the marker is yanked all the way to the Hyde side of the board at any point Hyde wins. Otherwise Jekyll gets to keep control of his noggin.

It's kind of beautiful, isn't it? And I don't mean the art, though that looks fantastic too because Dutrait always delivers. It's a straightforward telling of the internal struggle resolved over a few quick, decisive conflicts. And there are more touches too, like how each suit plays off the wild potion cards, but I'll spare you a rules overview. Point being, few small box games manage to perfectly encapsulate the setting they use. Say Bye to the Villains is one example, Innovation is another, etc. JvH does the same and it does it in a genre that normally doesn't even bother with set dressing beyond the cover. It's kind of incredible.

All of this isn't even touching on the quality of the game, which I think is way up there. At least very good, possibly great depending on how more plays go. There's a lot of tactical room here. Which cards to pass, which suits to prioritize when, which potion effects to use, how to establish the hierarchical trump suits, lots to think about. Yet it's never overwhelming thanks to its almost featherlight trick taking core. Lead, follow, someone takes the trick. That's 90% of the plays. That it achieves so much with so little is worthy of commendation.

Let's end with the opposite of the last entry, but in a good way. Rumble Nation is proof that we'll never run out of new ways to use established ideas, and that established ideas don't stop a game from feeling new. In this case we've got Catan's number tile setup fueling a wonderfully short dice allocation/area control hybrid with an immensely satisfying ending.

There's a lot of recognizable DNA in RN but it doesn't really matter. What matters is how the game feels, and it feels as fresh as it is spicy. You'd think that 15-20 mins for an area control game would render it with minimal investment or meaning, but RN dodges that bullet by not having a single area be determined until the resolution phase, when everyone's troops are deployed and you get to see how much smarter your friends are at cascading troops around the board.

It's an odd thing calling that ending a "phase" because it could easily be automated. There are no choices. Yet I wouldn't want it any other way. There is something consistently entertaining about watching reinforcements move from area to area, bouncing around like ping pong balls in a feudal Japanese dryer. Areas resolve in number order and are worth as many points as their number. Win an area and any adjacent ones where you have already have troops get reinforced, which lends the low value territories more weight as their reinforcements will influence more battles in the high-value ones. It's simple to teach but consistently interesting to see in motion, in large part thanks to the areas being numbered randomly during setup.

RN was actually a consideration for a CDC game early last year, but I passed on it as imports were a bit shaky. Now I've played it and I can confidently say it would've placed in the upper half of that set. There aren't a lot of games doing what this does and it does those things very well.

THE LAST BIT

I wasn't lying about short intros/outros, got a lot to do today and don't have time. Thanks so much for reading! See you in 14.