Designer: Paul Peterson
Artists: Dave Allsop, Bruno Balixa, Conceptopolis, Francisco Rico Torres
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45 minutes
Age range: 12+ (can be played by 10+)

(Image courtesy of thatmadgirl@BoardGameGeek)

There are two kinds of classic geek debates: the first is who would win within a single subgenre (e.g. could the Death Star beat the Enterprise); the second is which subgenres could beat the other (e.g. zombies vs. ninjas). Smash Up provides you with a testing group for the second, with an additional twist: you can combine two subgenres together and battle them head to head by trying to take over bases and score victory points.
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Designer: Jean du Poël
Artists: Jean du Poël
Publisher: Ferti
Players: 2-8
Playing time: 30 minutes
Age range: 6+

(Image courtesy of Firepigeon@BoardGameGeek)

Finger flicking games have been around for a while, with the best example being Crokinole, but the most thematic is probably PitchCar (previously released as Carabande). Here the discs you flick represent cars, racing each other along a masonite track.

The rules are as simple as you’d expect. Players start by placing their discs at the start line of the track, and in turn flick the discs forward with one finger. The first trip around the track is a qualifying heat to determine the start order for the finals, then players send their discs around the track three times to determine the winner.
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Designer: Mike Elliot and Eric Lang
Artists: J. Lonnee
Publisher: WizKids Games
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30 minutes
Age range: 14+ (10+ could probably handle it)

(Image courtesy of blueknight7@BoardGameGeek)

The first released expansion to Quarriors! (beyond just promos) was Quarriors! Rise of the Demons. This is a small box expansion with a new basic die, a new spell die and a new creature die. There are also cards for all these dice, and some new cards for the creature dice in the main set. How you add all of these into the game is up to the players — you could shuffle them into the main decks, or deal them out separately first and then fill in the rest with the original cards, or do something in between.
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Designer: Mike Elliot and Eric Lang
Artists: J. Lonnee and Chris Raimo
Publisher: WizKids Games
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30 minutes
Age range: 14+ (10+ could probably handle it)

(Image courtesy of ZoRDoK@BoardGameGeek)

Where Dominion created the idea of the deck-building game, Quarriors! cheerfully took that and applied it almost directly to dice. You start with a basic set of custom 6-sided dice, and draw a “hand” out of a bag every turn and roll them. Depending on what you roll, you can put out creatures to attack your opponents, cast spells to enhance them, and/or buy a new creature or spell from the wilds (much like the supply piles in Dominion). All of these are represented by dice. If you can keep your creatures out for an entire round, you score points; the first player to a certain point value — based on the number of players — wins.
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Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino
Artists: Various
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30 minutes
Age range: 10+

(Image courtesy of endou_kenji@BoardGameGeek)

I first got a chance to play Dominion as a prototype at Origins and even then knew it was going to be something big. I have to say, though, I didn’t realize that it would start off an entirely new genre of games: the deck-building game. Since I’m going to be covering other deck-building games soon, I thought it would be best to start from the very beginning.

For those not familiar with them, deck-building games are related to collectible card games and “living” card games: each player has their own deck of cards with abilities that are reasonably simple, but can be combined together to create much more powerful effects. However, with those other games you pre-build your deck up front, and play from and add to your hand incrementally. The new mechanic that deck-building games bring is that you start with a very simple and small (usually around 10 cards) deck, draw an entire hand each turn, play what you can, and discard the rest. As the game progresses, you buy new cards which are added to your deck, making it progressively more powerful. These cards are limited, so you’d best buy them while you can…
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Designer: Steve Jackson
Artists: Alex Fernandez
Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
Players: 2-99
Playing time: 10 minutes
Age range: 10+

(Image courtesy of mbrna@BoardGameGeek)

I’d first heard of Zombie Dice around the time it came out, but avoided the game because it has two marks against it: a) it’s a zombie game and b) it’s a recent Steve Jackson game. However, I got roped into had a chance to play it at Balticon 2012, and at gaming events since then, and I have to admit I was wrong about it.

The rules are very simple. There are 13 green, red and yellow dice, each with varying amounts of brains, running feet and shotgun symbols on their faces. The green dice have more brains, the red more shotgun blasts, and the yellow are neutral. Your goal is to roll as many brains as possible. First person to collect 13 brains (and survive the shotgun blasts), wins the game.

The turn begins by drawing three dice at random and rolling them. Brains and shotguns are set aside. If you have 3 shotgun blasts, then your turn is over, and you lose any brains you’ve rolled. Assuming you’ve survived, you can choose to re-roll, or you can score the brains you have. If you choose to re-roll, you take any dice with running feet, draw new dice at random to bring your total up to 3, and roll again. You can continue doing this until you get 3 shotgun blasts, or you choose to stop.

Zombie Dice is a nice little push-your-luck game, another one of those good fillers to have around. Admittedly the decisions aren’t all that difficult: prefer to re-roll green dice over red dice; stop if you have two shotgun blasts unless you’re behind. But it scales well to many players and it’s a good filler or beer-and-pretzel game. And if you prefer to drink alone, there’s also an iOS app for Zombie Dice, which is initially free for a 1-on-1 single player version, but only $.99 to upgrade to 10-player multiplayer. It’s fairly low frills but it gets the job done.

Verdict: Buy

Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Artists: Oliver Freudenreich and Marco Morte
Publisher: Hans im Glück/Rio Grande Games
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45 minutes
Age range: 10+

(Image courtesy of blakstar@BoardGameGeek)

In 2004, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede created another standalone game in the Carcassonne universe, this time called Carcassonne: The City. As you might expect, this time the theme is building a single walled city, rather than multiple cities and surrounding countryside.

The overall rules for Carcassonne: The City are again very similar to the original game (see yesterday’s post for a more detailed overview): place tiles, place meeples on features (if not already controlled), score and remove them for completed features and and score any remaining meeples at the end of the game. Components are simple and again mostly familiar: each player starts with 8 meeples and 3 towers, and there are shared piles of city tiles and wall segments.

The features in the city are familiar, yet different. Markets, designated by a green area on a tile, are similar to the cities in the original game. One difference is that you don’t need to match the edges of markets exactly — you can put a side with a market up against a side with a residential area. The second difference is that each market area has a colored good in it: the more different kinds of goods in the market, the greater score you get (there’s a similar mechanic in the Traders and Builders expansion, but these goods are printed on the tiles).

Streets wind through the residential areas, and any tile with a street on it must match a street on any tile it’s placed next to. Streets of length 1-3 tiles are 1 point per tile like the original game; streets longer than that get 2 points per tile.

The final feature on the tiles are residential areas (marked as brown areas), which act like farms in the original game, and score 2 points for every market (completed or not) adjacent to them at the end.

And then there are the walls. The game has three stages, controlled by breaking the tile set into three piles. Once the first pile is used up, the first player who completes a controlled feature (i.e. so it scores) after that point gets to place the city gate. Then all the other players in turn go around and place a wall segment, extending the city wall in either direction. At this time players can also place a meeple on top of their wall segment to act as a guard, as long as there isn’t another meeple on an opposite wall. Once all the walls are placed, the player who completed the feature now has the choice whether to add a tower. This will score 1 point for every wall segment up to the next tower or the city gate. This will happen every time a feature is scored until the second pile of tiles is used up, after which any placed tile that leads to a score will allow the placement of 2 wall segments by each player.

The game ends when you run out of tiles, or out of wall segments, or the ends of the wall are close enough together. At this point you score the residential areas. In addition, each guard scores points for each grey building in a line from its wall — unnamed ones are 1 point and named ones are 2 points. Again, the player with the most points wins.

Once again, just by tweaking a few rules, Wrede has a created a completely different feel for his signature game. The guards may be a borrowed mechanic from Knizia’s Carcassonne: The Castle (it’s unclear as they’re both listed as designers) — but whereas in The Castle they didn’t quite work, here they just feel right. By allowing the market edges to not have to match, you get a more compact board, which allows the walls a chance to surround it. And this one ends up being more of a brain-burner as well — do you place the tile that allows another player to score, so you have the opportunity to place the first wall and hence a tower, or do you try to improve the scoring potential for your guards? Or do you add that extra good that gives your big market just a little more value? Lots of tough decisions, and a lot more long-term strategy than the original game.

If that’s not enough, the real reason to get this (and the main reason I bought it when it first came out) is just because it’s just so darn pretty. In the original printing, the tiles are made of thick foamboard instead of cardboard, the walls and towers are nice wooden pieces, and the gameboard when you’re done really looks like a miniature walled city. And the whole thing comes in a big wooden box which looks great on the shelf. Even if you can’t find the original version, my understanding is that while you lose the foamboard and the wooden box, you do get the wooden wall pieces and towers, so it still looks pretty sweet on the table.

I can’t recommend Carcassonne: The City enough — it addresses many of the issues with the original game, adds some new elements that provide new challenges, and is absolutely gorgeous to boot. . It is, unfortunately, out of print (which I suppose makes it a Vintage Game), but you can find copies of it on eBay and BoardGameGeek for reasonable prices. It’s well worth tracking down.

Verdict: Buy.

Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Artist: Johann Rüttinger
Publisher: Hans im Glück/Rio Grande Games
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 45 minutes
Age range: 8+

(Image courtesy of Firepigeon@BoardGameGeek)

When Carcassonne came out in 2000 it took the gaming world by storm, quickly followed by its Spiel des Jahres win in 2001. After the expected expansion (now known as Inns & Cathedrals), Wrede came out with a redesign set in the Stone Age: Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers.

For those not familiar with Carcassonne, players draw one tile on their turn and lay it on the board, laying it next to any already placed tiles and matching all edges. They can then, if they like, place a meeple on a feature indicated on the tile, as long as there is no other meeple on another tile connected to that feature. If a feature is completed, any meeples placed on that feature will be removed and scored. Finally, after placing all tiles, any remaining meeples will be scored. The player with the high score wins.

In the original Carcassonne, the features are cities, roads, cloisters and farms. In Hunters and Gatherers, these have been changed to forests, rivers, meadows and river systems (the meadows and river systems act like farms; there’s no equivalent to the cloister).

If a tile is placed that completes a forest, the scoring is equivalent to the original: the player with the most meeples in that forest (i.e. controls that forest) gets 2 points per tile. However, if there is a gold nugget in that forest, the player who placed the tile gets to draw one more tile and play again. At the end of the game, uncompleted forests do not score.

If a tile is placed that completes a river, the scoring is similar to before: the player controlling the river gets 1 point per river tile — but this time also scores 1 point for each fish in any lakes at either end of the river. With the standard meeples, there is no score at the end of the game for uncompleted rivers; however, you can place huts on the river instead, which are explained below.

At the end of the game, there are two ways you can get points. First, any meeples that control their meadows score 2 points for any game animals in the meadow, but cancelling out one deer for every sabre tooth tiger the meadow contains. Second, you score 1 point for each fish in any river systems (connected sets of rivers and lakes) that you control with your huts.

The end result has a very different feel from standard Carcassonne. The scoring of the meadows and the river systems is much simpler than the farms in the original game, and the way you fight over them is different as well. You might try to sabotage someone’s meadow by placing tigers in it, or you might ignore their meadows and focus on river systems instead. And rather than trying to place meeples on partially built features just to get cheap points at the end of the game, you really try to complete those features, just to make sure you get any points at all. The end result is more of a back and forth scramble for points — perhaps a little more fiddly than the original but still fun.

The art on the tiles is done by the same artist as Carcassonne, and is quite lovely. Whereas when you complete a Carcassonne game you get a bucolic French countryside with little walled towns and roads connecting them, this gives you more of a wilderness feel, but attractive in its own way.

But when all is said and done, do you need this game and Carcassonne? In my opinion, no. Part of that might be that we are not as Carcassonne-crazy as we were back in 2002. We played our fair share of it, and don’t see any need for any other versions other than original plus some expansions, and maybe Carcassonne: The City. But if you do like Carcassonne and are looking for something slightly different, you really can’t go wrong with this (it’s particularly good for two players). So for my purposes I’d give it a Borrow, but in your case, feel free to upgrade to a Buy.

Verdict: Borrow

Designer: Jeffrey Neil Bellinger
Publisher: Playroom Entertainment
Players: 2-8
Playing time: 90 minutes
Age range: 10+

(Image courtesy of Howitzer_120mm@BoardGameGeek)

During That Board Gaming Thing, there was a flea market. I brought about 25 games, and I figured I could continue my reviews by looking at some of them, just to explain why I’m paring them from our collection.

The first of these is Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot. The name pretty much describes it all — you play bunnies in front of you on the table, arm them, and try to kill your opponents’ bunnies. As the game progresses you will collect carrots. At the end of the game, whoever still has a bunny out and has collected the eponymous Magic Carrot wins the game.

The one interesting wrinkle of the game is that you start the game by playing two cards face down. Then, on your turn, you reveal the first card, push the second card up to the first slot, draw a new card, and play a new card from your hand to the second slot. So you’re always pre-playing your cards a turn behind.

Killer Bunnies is certainly an amusing game, with the humorous bunnies and the ridiculous weapons. But humor is not enough to carry a game that pretty much boils down to collecting lottery tickets. You could spend the entire game eliminating your opponents’ bunnies, and in the end the person who was completely ineffective but just happened to collect one card that’s the Magic Carrot could win. It also, like other games of its ilk such as Munchkin, tends to drag on far longer than anyone really wants it to. As far as I’m concerned, if I never play it again, it’ll be too soon.

Verdict: Avoid