Thoughts on some new (to me) games (Dungeon Twister, Hey! That's my Fish!, San Juan, Blue Moon City, Goa)

I won a gift certificate at Thought Hammer recently, and purchased a pile of game as a result. Very few of these are likely to see much play at WAGS, since they are all 2-4 player games, but I think friends and family will enjoy many of them. Luckily, I was able to play all of them with some high school friends which came to visit, and I'm glad to say there isn't a bad game in the bunch.

Dungeon Twister

The idea:
A twisted wizard has created a dungeon and pitted two teams of characters against each other. The first team to escape out of the opposite end of the dungeon, or to eliminate enough enemy characters, wins.

The mechanics
8 tiles, each depicting a section of a maze (complete with walls, doors, traps and miscellaneous other features) is layed out in a 2x4 grid. Each player starts the game with 8 characters and a number of items (rope, speed potion, treasure, etc). Some are chosen as starting characters, and the rest are layed face down on the dungeon tiles and are revealed later. Players are also given 3 "jump" tokens (allowing 3 jumps over pit traps over the course of the game), a set of action cards and a set of combat cards. Every round, a player must choose an action card to play which will determine how many actions he will get that round (2-5). The trick is that the player will only get his cards back once he has played them all, so choosing when to play the high value cards vs the low value cards becomes a a critical aspect of the game. When characters engage in combat, players must choose a combat card from their hand (value 0-6) to add to the combat value of the creature. The highest total wins, but the catch in this instance is that all cards except the "0" can only be used ONCE in the game (if you've played Lord of the Rings: Confrontation, you've seen this system before). The "Twister" gimmick referred to in the title of the game is that each dungeon tile has a "twister mechanism" space which allows a character standing there to rotate the dungeon tile (or a second matching tile elsewhere in the dungeon).

Thoughts:
I was intrigued by this title the moment I heard about it. As an ex-Dungeons and Dragons player, the theme has obvious appeal. However, I have not really been interested in other games of this type (such as Descent, etc) for whatever reason. I think it's because those games are about the dungeon crawl/ combat aspect of rpgs, and have often resulted in long fiddly hack n' slash fests. Dungeon Twister, on the other hand, uses the theme to liven up what is essentially an elaborate game of chess. A player needs to plan ahead to either meet his opponent's characters on his own terms or to successfully escape out of the dungeon. He must therefore carefully manage his resources and create synergy between his characters, items and dungeon tiles. Obviously, this type of game would be horrible to play against analysis paralysis prone players, but barring that I really enjoyed the game. As an added benefit, the game publisher (Asmodee) is releasing a stream of expansions ensuring a wide variety of dungeon tiles, characters and scenarios to keep the game fresh. In fact, one of the expansions is a 3-4 player expansion (which I've purchased, but I haven't yet played a game with more than 2 players). Anyway, I really enjoy this game.

As an aside, I used to rate Duel of Ages in my top 10 games, but it was mostly because I hadn't yet played a better game of that type (team of characters, variable terrain, missions, equipment). Problem is, Duel of Ages has it's fair share of issues. I still enjoy it, and it's wargame-lite character makes it different enough to warrant keeping both, but Dungeon Twister is shorter, looks better and plays cleaner. Looks like Duel of Ages lost it's spot.

Hey! That's my Fish!

The idea:
There penguins on ice floes looking to gather as much fish as they can before the ice dissapears.

The mechanics
Players get 3 or 4 penguins (depending on the number of players) and place them on a modular board (+/- 75 tiles). Each tile shows 1-3 fish. Basically, when you move your penguin you pick up the tile you were standing on, so the board gets smaller with every move. A penguin can go as far as it wants in a straight line, as long as it doesn't go over empty spaces. When all the penguins are unable to move, the game ends and the player who picked up the most fish wins.

Thoughts:
This is a simple and fast abstract game which benefits greatly from it's theme. The exact same game could have belonged to the GIPF series and not been nearly so approachable. Easy to teach, fun to play and supports up to 4 players. Very good game.

San Juan

The idea:
Players are developping the city of San Juan in this card game variation on Puerto Rico.

The mechanics
Much like Puerto Rico, the heart of the game involves choosing from a set of roles every round. Each role is associated with a specific action, such as building, that every player gets to do (though the choosing player gets some type of advantage, such as a reduced cost, etc). However, since this is a card game much of the mechanics have been streamlined and simplified. Building costs are payed by spending cards from your hand. Production buildings produce goods, represented by a face down card, and that card can be sold to draw a number of cards into your hand. The buildings' special powers are similarly all repurposed to be hand management related. The game ends once someone builds his 12th building, at which point everyone counts up their victory points to determine the winner.

Thoughts:
Puerto Rico is a very good game which has always bothered me due to the needlessly tedious setup and finicky rules. Honestly, the game requires me to count out two stacks of tokens which are up to 70-100 pieces EACH, on top of sorting out a large supply of counters and chits. And you can't prepare in advance, because it's all very different according to the number of players! I like it, but if I'm choosing I'll likely go elsewhere. Along comes this neat little card game, and it seems like I might not need to play it's big brother any more. My only worry is that in Puerto Rico, I felt I had more opportunity to passive-aggressively affect the other players. In San Juan, my first few games have not felt very interactive. Time will tell.

Blue Moon City

The idea:
Players are rebuilding Blue Moon City following a great war between the various races of the Blue Moon universe.

The mechanics
This is a hand management game. The cards come in various suits, and each can be played two ways: they have a numbered value which can be used to make donations, and most of them have a special power that can be used instead (the 1 point cards have powers, the 2s have weaker powers and the 3s have none). Essentially, the game is designed so that your hand can almost always be used to do something useful, if not exactly what you had planned. The "board" consists of 16 tiles depicting the blueprints of key buildings semi-randomly distributed in a "+" shape. Each building has 1-4 spaces for "contributions" of different colours. Players move around the board making such contributions, and the building are flipped to show that they are complete once all the "contribution" spaces are filled. When this happens, the player who made the most donations gets a reward, and everyone else who made at least a single donation gets a smaller one. The "twist" here is that neighboring completed buildings give bonus rewards as well, so making a very small donation to the right building in a built up district can yield big rewards. The most common payout is crystals, and these are accumulated and ultimately sacrificed to the obelisk in the center of the board. The first player to make a certain number of offerings is the winner.

Thoughts:
As with many recent Knizia middleweight games, opinions on this one were mixed. I was happy to discover that I really enjoyed it! Once you get a handle on the various special powers of the cards, gameplay is very straightforward (unlike the mindbending Tower of Babel). Coming up with clever uses for your cards is very satisfying, and the game moves pretty quickly. If I had to knock it, I'd say that it could have been livened up a bit with building powers, or something along those lines, to reinforce that it's a city the players are rebuilding. It might have been interesting if the game rules were altered every time a building was constructed, or that the biggest contributer received a new ability related to the building when it is completed. Maybe these are opportunities for expansions...

Goa

The idea:
Trader barons are setting up shop in Goa. By efficiently aquiring goods, making money, founding colonies, etc, players hope to establish themselves as the winner.

The mechanics
The game has 8 turns, and each one starts with an auction. Following the auction, each player has a series of "actions" where they can either found colonies, build ships, tax, produce goods or draw development cards (one last option is to improve an attribute of the colony, allowing to build more ships, make more money taxing, etc). At the end of the game, points are awarded for the number of founded colonies, the level of advancements, etc.

Thoughts:
Goa is a complex game. It's been compared to Princes of Florence by many people, because of the auction/ action game structure (that, and the fact that it's also a "multi-player solitaire" experience. Far moreso than PoF, in fact). I find that the game has a lot in common with Traders of Genoa (also by the same designer). Superficially, there is the trademark "tower". I've only played three Dorn games (Traders of Genoa, Goa and Louis XIV), but they all have used this mechanic! Here it's used to define which items among the grid of available items will be auctioned off. From a gameplay perspective, players must successfully orchestrate lots of disparate elements in order to succeed (plantations and new colonies must be founded in order to produce/ store goods, ships and population must be accumulated to pay for advancements, money must be raised for the auction, etc, etc, etc. ). more than anything, though, I find the games focus on additional actions, game-modifying powers, etc to be right up Dorn's alley. It also makes for a very different experience than PoF, as the powers and cards make for a lot more variety in play.

One thing I found dissapointing was the extreme dullness of the presentation. Unlike most games of this type, the mechanics translate pretty well thematically. If the boards had looked different, I bet the game would be a whole lot "friendlier" (as it is, it looks like accounting). The auctions occur at the shipping yards, money changes hands as the buyers walk amonsgt the crates. Players plant fields for resources, but also go to sea and found colonies (an inherently risky proposition). Boards depicting these scenarios would have been simple to produce, and would have served to ground the game. It's especially a shame since this game brings out a feeling of "civ-building" which few of these types of game can pull off.

Supposedly, this game works very well with 2,3 or 4. Since PoF effectively bottoms out at 4, it's great to have a heavy euro which can be played with fewer players. I really enjoyed my single playing so far.