Positive Feedback

I recently picked up Dominion because I played a lot of San Juan.

No, that isn't too clear. Let me try again.

Last game night, I played San Juan three times in a row. That was a bad experience. San Juan is fun for 30 minutes, but 90 is pushing it.

San Juan is the card game based on Puerto Rico. I like San Juan a lot more than Puerto Rico. The randomness of card deals isn't a bad thing for a 30 minute game. It feels more dynamic than waiting for the person with tons of corn to finish shipping their goods while your coffee rots.

So I entered into the three games really liking San Juan. After 3 games, my opinion was somewhat altered. San Juan is still a good game, but not good enough to play three times in a row. Each time I played the game followed roughly the same flow. Same decisions. Same feeling. I ended the last game early by triggering a build because I just wanted the game to be over.

Now back to where I started this post: I recently picked up Dominion because I played a lot of San Juan.

I went to my local game store a few days after the triple San Juan day, and saw a new card game: Dominion. It plays 2-4 players and takes 30 minutes according to the box. Now I'd have something different if I'm ever trapped into 3 thirty minute games.

Opening up the box I found 500 cards (well that's what the box says there are; I didn't count them). And I found out that you only use a sub-set of the cards in each game. If my simple math skills from college are still working 25 pick 10 is 25!/(10!*15!) which is 3,268,760. So there are over 3 million different decks that Dominion can be played with.

Already the replayability of this title seems light years ahead of San Juan. But how does it actually play? Is the game hard to teach? (One of the reasons we played San Juan so many times is that Race for the Galaxy was considered too hard to teach.)

In a miraculous bout of luck we happened to have guests coming over that night and I was hoping to see how it played with 4 newbies. Teaching the rules was easy because there are about 5 of them. Everyone seemed to enjoy the game, but if you are looking for theme (as one person was) then this game will disappoint. There isn't much.

It is a game about buying cards from a common pool to add to your deck. Everyone starts with the same cards. Everyone has access to the same cards. And everyone seems to end up with very different decks.

Dominion feels like a stand up act. You get direct feedback from the game and need to adjust to said feedback to do well. I suppose after a while this adjustment will be unnecessary because the cards you buy will flow better.

You get feedback from the game, but no so much from the other players. This is very close to multiplayer solitaire. I don't mind multiplayer solitaire games, if they are fun. And the feedback loop of building your own deck while you are playing it, is fun for me. The 3 million different possible pools of cards to build your deck seems to solve the San Juan problem.

There are card combos and synergies but since the available card selection changes with each game, part of the fun is finding new combos. What do you do if a favorite card isn't available in this game? Better come up with a plan B.

Probably the most fun I've had playing a Eurogame since Galaxy Trucker. I probably should write something about Galaxy Trucker, but with the expansion out. I'll wait until I've gotten a chance to play with the expansion. Even without the expansion Galaxy Trucker is easily the best Eurogame of 2007, in my opinion.

Here I Offend the Remaining Board Game Readers

Common wisdom says that Aquire is one of the pinnacles of American style design. It is a classic. One of the "few good games" from before the Eurogame period. Deep strategy. Brillant design. Multiple paths to victory (agressive purchases or money conservation). Player interaction.

It is one of those games that I plan to never play again.

The game is like Scrabble. You have six tiles hidden. You play one on the board in a specific place each turn. Each tile has one and only one place where it can be played. And you buy stock.

Most money wins.

Good luck trying long term planning with this game. You only have a hand of 6 tiles (so you know exactly one tile that you'll have 5 turns from now).

If Aquire is a "brain burner" due to the huge range of choices (play 1 of 6 tiles) then you'd probably want to stay away from Puerto Rico. There are eight different roles to chose from each round (in a five player game)!

Moving away from the "incredable depth" that playing 1 tile in a predetermined spot has, you also get to buy up to 3 stocks per round!

There are 7 different companies. Some of them pay out different amounts when they pay out. That's about the only difference between the companies.

So you buy stock in almost identical companies and play tiles in set board positions. 18xx is somewhat similar (stock buying and tile laying), except the tiles you lie in 18xx are train tracks and actually have some concrete connection to the financial sucess of the company that builds them. Come to think of it, 18xx does everything that Aquire tried to do but better and more thematically.

And 18xx games don't have the chance that you'll get a bad tile draw because there is no luck in 18xx (excluding 1829 mainline which I haven't played yet).

I personally would have more fun watching paint dry than being dragged into another game of Aquire.

Confession Time: I Hate Puerto Rico

According to wikipedia Puerto Rico has won the following awards:

• Deutscher Spiele Preis, 2002
• Essen Feather, 2002
• International Gamers Award (General strategy, Multiplayer Category), 2003
• Nominee for the Spiel des Jahres, 2002
• As of January 2007, ranked number 1 in Internet Top 100 Games List
• As of January 2008, ranked number 1 at BoardGameGeek

I understand that a lot of people must like this game for it to win all those awards. I have heard people try to claim that "objectively" it is a good game, but I haven't seen an objective review for this game, but maybe that's because I played before finding out about the hype.

An objective review isn't something that sets up a list of ideals that a game must have, and then tells you that you must like or dislike a game because of how much it conforms to said list. Roger Ebert writes opinions instead of reviews. An objective review should let you know if you'd like what's being reviewed not just if the reviewer liked it.

I dislike Puerto Rico for a lot of reasons, but my number one gripe is that there is no long term planning. If long term planning isn't important to you in a game then you might like Puerto Rico. A long term plan for me is something that you can work toward all game. It is something that you can position yourself for (making small moves which eventually lead to your end goal).

I've heard Puerto Rico fan praise the strategic depth of the game. The difficult choices of role selection. Anticipating the next players's moves. Blocking them from shipping their goods. All these choices exist on a turn to turn basis.

There aren't gradual game shaping choices. If I have a lot of plantations, I'm going for a shipping strategy. No ambiguity there. I might as well pass a note to the player sitting to my left saying, "take Captain, when you can, to block my shipping". I in turn must look at what the players around me are doing and take roles mainly to hinder them.

There are only seven roles in the game. So on your turn you pick one of the remaining roles and that's it. Small decision tree with easy to understand consequences. Also has very little luck (which leads to even easier to predict results).

Puerto Rico reminds me of a Cheapass game included in Change!: Diminishing Returns, but with better components. Diminishing Returns doesn't have 2 major strategies; there's just one. It does play quicker than Puerto Rico though. Same feeling to the decisions: if I play this amount, the players to my left will play this amount, and so on.

You may have noticed that I haven't posted any "reviews" in this blog. I don't pay attention to components or rule clarity when playing, and I know that some people care a lot about those elements. I hope this semi-objective rant let you know why you should avoid Puerto Rico or why you should check out Change!