Tag: card game

Seasons of Rice Review

Anybody who has read even a few reviews on this blog knows that I love Button Shy. I feel like at this point I should be walking the streets in a Button Shy jumpsuit, like a NASCAR driver with a major sponsor. But what can I say? They make great, unique games and I will gladly take the opportunity to evangelize them whenever I can.

If you don’t know what Button Shy is,it’s an independent publisher who specialize in micro games that are released in actual, literal wallets and they have been on fire the past year. They’ve seen some of their most popular and beloved games released in 2018 and 2019. Games like the excellent Circle the Wagons, a two player tile laying game in the Wild West, Sprawlopolis, a cooperative city builder, and Stew, an amazing mix of push your luck, deduction and bluffing, are all proof that Button Shy is in their publishing prime.

As if those titles weren’t enough, Button Shy is also hot off the heels of their most successful Kickstarter project ever: Tussie Mussie. Designed by Elizabeth Hargrave, she of Wingspan fame, Tussie Mussie is an ‘I Cut, You Choose’ card game based around the Victorian era fad of communicating through flowers. Over 4,000 backers were part of the Tussie Mussie campaign, and I had the fortune to review it here on this blog. Check out my review here and, SPOILERS, the game was awesome.

Naturally, the next game in their Kickstarter line up has some massive shoes to fill. Button Shy’s latest offering is Seasons of Rice, a two player tile laying game set in the world of Cambodian rice farming. Just like with Tussie Mussie, I was lucky enough to get a review copy of Seasons of Rice sent to me, courtesy of Button Shy. Is Seasons of Rice another gleaming jewel in the ever-growing crown of Button Shy’s recent hits or is it a disappointing step back? Thankfully, it’s the former.

As I briefly touched upon, Seasons of Rice, designed by Corry Damy is a two player tile laying game and it’s all about trying to create the best rice paddy farms in Cambodia. Like all Button Shy games, it’s just a deck of 18 cards. The cards are double sided: on one side is an Ancestor which provide bonus points or special abilities while the other side is a landscape illustration that you’ll be building your rice paddies with, featuring things like paths, farmers, houses and roaming buffalo.

The game is played over two seasons: the Wet Season and the Dry Season. The Wet Season incorporates a play and pass card drafting mechanic in the style of Sushi Go or 7 Wonders while the Dry Season has players drafting cards from a display left over from the Wet Season.

First, let’s start with the Wet Season. The two players start with a hand of seven cards and on each turn, players simultaneously choose two cards to play. One of those cards go into the player’s personal landscape, which is what you’re trying to build and expand over the course of the game, while the other goes into a row of cards that will be drafted from during the Dry Season. After this is done, players exchange hands and do the same thing. Rinse and repeat till your hands are empty and you move onto the Dry Season, where players simply alternate taking one card from the display formed during the Wet Season.

This drafting system is one of the things I really like about this game. The fact that you must pick two cards, giving one to yourself and giving the other to a communal row for a later round is really unique. It reminds me of games like Biblios and Herbaceous, which feature similar wrinkles on card drafting. You’ll obviously want to take cards that help yourself, but what about the card you’re punting to the Dry Season? Do you choose a card that might come in handy for your landscape later or do you choose something that appears useful to your opponent to block them from using it during the Wet Season? This makes for some real interesting decision making and helps set the tone for the second half of the game.

Of course, the drafting is just small part of the game compared to the actual tile laying. Considering the building of your landscape is what actually nets you the points in the game, you need to be crafty and smart with how you build things out. The rules of placement are pretty typical of the genre. You have to place adjacently and features in one card have to match a feature in the other card. The cool thing about Season of Rice though, is that you can place cards partially adjacent to each other, as long as you’re connecting like features. This is not something I’ve seen before in the genre and it leads to some cool looking landscapes. Being able to stagger the cards also opens things up strategically, allowing you to really get creative with how you form the paddies. This is a very good thing, since I was concerned landscapes would look too similar game to game as a result of the small deck size. Button Shy once again proves that it’s not the size of your deck, but how you use it.

As you build your landscape, you’re working to close paddies up on your farm. Closing paddies means you have a continuous, closed path cordoning off a set of squares in your landscape. You score based on the amount of squares and houses in the paddy as well getting bonuses from the number of farmers and buffaloes toiling away inside of it.

seasons of rice paddy — A paddy farm landscape in progress. An attempt at one, at least.

This means that it’s not simply about building the biggest paddy. A paddy with just two squares but a buffalo and a farmer in it can net you more points than a paddy with three empty squares. Not only that, but players score one point for every closed paddy they have in their landscape at the end of the game. So that means the player who small balls their way through the game, closing lots of small paddies and getting short bursts of points, will also find themselves with a bigger bonus at the end of the game than the person who patiently waited to complete just a few, large paddies. Of course, a well-built large paddy can net you double digit points and can help overcome the fact that you may end the game with just a mere three or four closed paddies. As like any great game, it’s a tight balancing act and the player who more shrewdly builds their farm with the cards available will end up winning.

The last thing I’ll praise about this game is the Ancestors. I very briefly mentioned them earlier as the opposite side of the landscape cards. At the beginning of the game, players have a choice of two Ancestors. Whichever one they choose will give them some sort of scoring condition or bonus ability to be exploited throughout the game. These Ancestors all provide a nice distinct feel to each game and help formulate the type of rice paddies you’ll want to construct. For example, there is Sovannarith, who gives you 4 points at the end of the game if you have more farmers in your landscape than your opponent, promoting a farmer heavy strategy. Then there is Vivadh, who allows you to increase the amount of points gained from buffaloes when they’re combined with farmers in the same paddy. With 18 possible Ancestors to be randomly selected from every game, chances are good you’ll end up with a different one, making Seasons of Rice very replayable for its diminutive size.

seasons of rice ancestors — They say you can’t choose family, but I guess THEY’VE never played this game.

Unfortunately, every review needs to point out some negatives and this is no exception. I think my biggest issue with the game is that it can be tough to parse and visualize how certain cards can fit in your landscape. The game has lots of angles and zig zags and it isn’t quite as easy to see how things will line up and set up for future turns as, say, the roads in Carcassonne or the different types of colored areas in Kingdomino. In pretty much every playthrough I had of this, there was a lot of taking cards and physically lining them up, apologizing to the other player for taking so long as you tried to figure out how exactly the cards can best be used. It’s entirely possible I’m just dumb, but I do feel like the spatial aspect is a bit trickier and not as intuitive as other tile laying games I’ve played.

If you don’t mind a bit of a learning curve with the spatial puzzle of the game, Seasons of Rice is an enjoyable tile laying game with a wonderful and unique drafting system. At just 10-15 minutes per play, you’ll definitely find yourself playing games of this back to back to back. The Kickstarter for Seasons of Rice launches July 9^th and if you want to experience first hand why Button Shy is one of the hottest independent publishers in the industry, I highly suggest you check it out.

That’s Not Lemonade! Review

Loyal readers of my blog (hi Mom!) will probably know that I am a big fan of push your luck. In fact, I think I’m pretty comfortable saying it is my favorite mechanism in board games. No other game mechanism has created as many memorable moments as push your luck. Whether it’s the entire group cheering and standing up around the table when someone beats the odds or someone groaning and putting their heads in their hands when they realize they’ve gone too far, push your luck exemplifies the best of what board games can be as a shared, social experience. I fell in love with the genre when I first played Incan Gold, a game where you and your opponents try to snag the most treasure from a temple before they succumb to the dangers hidden within the game’s deck. Ever since then, I’ve kept an eye out for any popular or new games that heavily feature the mechanism, my ears perking up like a hunting dog when I hear of one. Which is why when I heard of That’s Not Lemonade! on Kickstarter, I knew I just had to back it.

That’s Not Lemonade! was on Kickstarter earlier in 2018 and I knew it was my type of game right away. Simple, elegant, pure push your luck, and it was a Kickstarter game that didn’t cost $150! This is probably because the game doesn’t include 50 sculpted minis and eight pounds worth of metal coins, but it’s still refreshing to see. I backed it almost instantly and I got my copy towards the end of last year. After playing it quite a few times over the past couple weeks, I’m happy to report that it is a heck of a lot of fun.

(Side note: From here on out, I am referring to the game as TNL because the exclamation point in That’s Not Lemonade! is causing Word to autocorrect and capitalize the next letter in the sentence and, hoo boy, it‘s annoying.)

As mentioned before, TNL is a push your luck game in the same vein of Incan Gold, which was powered by a “stay or go” mechanism. However, while Incan Gold was about plundering a temple of untold riches, this game is about trying to not drink pee.

The genre has come such a long way.

In TNL, players are enterprising individuals trying to run an honest business of selling lemonade. Problem is there’s only one street corner, so what are we to do? Battle to the death? Nah, this isn’t an area control game. Build our lemonade empire from the ground up, hoping to create an economic engine that outpaces the rest of the players? What is this, a Vital Lacerda game? Nope, we’re going to drink our faces off and see who can drink the most. I’m talking about lemonade, of course. Well, unless it’s pee. Because I forgot to mention, there’s a rascal going around the neighborhood just peeing in EVERYTHING and now some of us might end up accidentally taking a big swig of it. Hey, as long as it doesn’t have aspartame, right?

Already this game has more backstory and theme than most Reiner Knizia games, so that’s nice. But how does it play? Very simply. There is a deck of cards that goes around the table and everybody has a decision on their turn: Draw from the deck or pass it to the next player?. If you pass, you simply forgo drawing a card and give the deck to the next person, leaving the decision up to them.

Draw from the deck and you’re hoping for either lemon cards, which determine who wins the round, or ice cards, which help break ties. If you get one of these cards, you place it face down in front of you, without showing the others, and pass the deck on.

What you DON’T want is the “That’s Not Lemonade!” card, which very subtly dances around the subject of pee by having a sickly green lemon pictured on it. If you draw one of these, you reveal it and you have busted out of the round.

TNL Lemon — This lemon definitely looks like it drank either urine or a La Croix.

At the end of the round, everyone who hasn’t busted reveals the cards they have in front of them. Whoever has the most lemons wins the round and gains a point, taking one of their lemon cards and keeping it in front of them. This not only helps keeps track of everyone’s score, but alters the game going forward. Now the risk of busting has gotten slightly higher, making every pull of the card a dramatic, tense endeavor. By round 5 or 6? There’s so few lemons and so much pee in the deck that you’d think you were watching a video handed over by the Russians starring Donald Trump.

TNL Trump — Hey, that explains why he’s in the game!

This all culminates in a devious little game that can be explained in two minutes and played over and over again for two hours, packing laughs, cheers and groans throughout. The design decision to keep lemon and ice cards facedown confused me at first. “How can we know the odds if we don’t know how many of the cards our opponents have are lemons or ice?” I thought stupidly, because I’m stupid. I thought of Blackjack, THE quintessential push your luck game, and in that game you can clearly see who has what and calculate the odds from there. In this game you simply see how many cards someone has face down in front of them and I wasn’t sure how satisfying that would be. This is, of course, why I don’t have any designed games published, because not revealing your hand helps making the simple decision of draw or pass devilishly tough.

You see someone with a whole pile of cards in front of them, but what if they’re mostly ice? There have been moments where I pushed too far because I felt threatened by the amount of cards my opponents have only to find out had I just passed, I would have won with the hand I had. Conversely, I’ve sat on a measly two lemons, hoping everyone else would bust or have a handful of ice and discovered I lost very badly. This element of mystery not only helps ratchet up the suspense but even adds a dash of bluffing to the proceedings. Stuck with three ice cubes? Start passing every turn and see the panic in the other players’ eyes, forcing them to take risks and hopefully bust. I’m not claiming there are Skull levels of deception in this game, but there is more strategy than meets the eye.

The only real criticism I can level at this game is less a criticism and more a concern. As you can tell this game is light. Like, Christian Bale in The Machinist light. Obviously, that’s not a flaw but it does create the concern of staying power. I don’t know how many plays this game will have before it starts to feel stale or same-y. I have plenty of light games that still get played on a regular basis, like the aforementioned Skull or Cockroach Poker or Stew (hey, I reviewed that game!). Will TNL hold up over the next year and enter the pantheon of those filler classics? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep on enjoying TNL. I always love to have a quick filler in the rotation, especially for nights that involve ‘adult’ beverages. And no, not talking about pee this time.

Biblios Review

Board games, like any great medium, provide a form of escapism. The best board games can create an immersive experience on par with a great book or movie. Take for example, a game such as Captain Sonar, which casts you and up to seven friends as crew members on competing submarines. It’s 45 minutes of heart pounding excitement as you and the rival team fire torpedoes, lay mines and do lots and lots of shouting.

Or how about The Resistance, the ostensible grandfather of social deduction. You and your friends find yourself in the shoes of a resistance group in a dystopian future. BUT there are spies among your ranks, trying to undercut you at every corner, and you need to weed them out. The good guys need to complete a certain amount of missions while the spies want to make sure most of those missions fail. It creates agonizingly suspenseful moments as your friends ruthlessly accuse one another, desperately try to exonerate themselves, and do lots and lots of shouting.

Or how about Biblios, the featured game of this review where you and up to three players are rival monks, trying to complete…the best library? Like, just a library? With just scrolls and those big books that you see in movies where the main character slams them on a table and a bunch of dust flies up in the air? I mean, they’re monks, so surely the libraries have booze, right?

(checks the rules, components and double checks with the designer)

No? Huh.

Okay, maybe all board games aren’t exactly prime examples of escapism and palpable themes that create cinematic moments with your friends that you’ll never forget. I mean, this is a hobby where a quarter of the games are about buying stocks in trains and another quarter of the games are about farming. When Uwe Rosenberg comes out with a new game, it’s rarely a question of whether it will be about farming, but about what type of farming it will be (“Hey, did you hear about Uwe Rosenberg’s new game? It’s about pumpkin farming in Minnesota! Instant buy for me.”)

But you know what? That’s okay. Games don’t need themes that can also double as a Wikipedia synopsis for a Steven Segal movie. And Biblios is the poster child for this. Because even though its theme is as dry as the century old scrolls the game shows in its artwork, Biblios manages to be one of the most ass clenchingly tense twenty minutes you can find in the hobby. And I am aware clenchingly is not a word, but that’s how good Biblios is. It demands new words to describe it.

Designed by Steven Finn, who has a reputation for making great filler games, and published by Iello, Biblios is a card game that, as mentioned, has you taking the role of a Middle Ages monk trying to make their monastery’s library the talk of the town. During a time period when the most fun activities were ‘don’t die of the plague’ and ‘don’t die, kind of in general’, you can argue that Biblios is actually trying to capture the more lighthearted aspects of its source material.

The deck of cards that comprises Biblios has different types of scrolls and books, all of which are associated with a color. These essentially make up the five ‘suits’ in the game. In addition to these cards are five colored dice, one for each of those suits. These dice control the points awarded at the end of the game. At game’s end, however many pips are on the die are the amount of points given to the person who holds the majority in that die’s color. So if the blue die is showing four, whoever holds the highest combined value in blue cards gets four points.

So at its core, Biblios is basically just a set collection game. Try to get the most cards in the sets worth the most, right? This game’s easy.

Weeellllll, it’s actually not quite as simple as that.

What separates Biblios from your normal run of the mill set collection game is its two round structure. The first round is called the gifting round, where players take cards from the deck and evenly distribute them between themselves, their opponent(s) and a new deck called the auction deck. Which leads me to the next round, the auction round. In this round, players, unsurprisingly, arm wrestle to gain control of new cards as they’re revealed.

Just kidding, it’s an auction, duh. Though never rule out arm wrestling for an expansion, Dr. Steve Finn, if you’re reading this.

First, let’s begin with the gifting round. Thematically speaking, people from town are coming to your monastery to bestow you with gifts. Mechanically speaking, you’re basically drafting cards from the deck. On your turn, you draw a number of cards equal to the number of players plus one. So in a two player game, you draw three cards from the deck and you must do these three things: give one to yourself, give one to your opponent and put one face down in the auction pile to be auctioned (or arm wrestled, with the inevitable expansion variant) off in the next round. These cards include the aforementioned different suits/colors, but there are also cards with gold (which give you buying power in the auction round) and church cards, where (thematically) you get to gain favor of the head priest allowing you to manipulate the pips on the dice. Which the inclusion of this during this round makes me chuckle, as if the townsfolk are coming to your monastery and just dropping off priests, like they’re parents dropping off their kids at daycare.

“Hi, this is Timmy, he has a peanut allergy and don’t let him have more than three hours of screen time, okay, I’ll be back at four.”

But here’s the catch. Those cards are being drawn one at a time, and you must decide at that instant what to do with it. If it’s a good card, do you keep it for yourself and hope nothing better comes along? Or do you give it to the auction and gamble that you’ll draw something better? And then there is the eternally annoying fact that you have to give something to your opponent. This usually means that the moment you get a low valued card in an any suit, you immediately hand it over to them, making it seem like you are the world’s most passive aggressive monk, giving things because you’re expected to not because you want to. You’re the Middle Ages equivalent of that uncle on Christmas who gives you scratch off lottery tickets as a gift and snidely tells you to not ‘spend it all in one place’.

This drip feed card draft is one of my favorite things about Biblios. It takes the idea of card drafting and turns it into a harrowing game of press your luck. Press your luck is maybe my favorite mechanism in games, so any game that incorporates it is instantly elevated in my eyes. And here, the press your luck is exquisite, a game of chicken where your opponent stares across from you with an expectant grin, just waiting for you to mess up, leaving you no choice but to hand over a high value card into their hand. It creates huge moments of tension, akin to other card game classics such as Lost Cities and Schotten Totten. And after that first ten minutes, you wipe the sweat off your brow, and breathe a sigh of relief as you unclench your buttocks. Then a feeling of terror will envelop you as realize that there’s still a second round to play.

And I mean that in the best possible way. Because as scary as that first round is, the second round-the auction round- is perhaps even more horrifying. Your hand is crafted and you have an idea of what colors you should probably look for, but that doesn’t make what is about to happen any easier. In this round, you shuffle the auction deck that you and your opponents had made and then begin flipping them over, auctioning them off one at a time. The auction then proceeds in turn order, with each player either raising the bid or opting out of the auction. To pay for the cards, you’re bidding the gold you squirreled away in the first round. Umm, you did make sure to keep some gold? Right?

biblios gold — Uhh, I sure hope there is a dollar store in this Medieval village.

The auction creeps along and you are constantly over analyzing and regretting every purchase, meaning Biblios may as well have been called “Buyer’s Remorse: The Game”. By the time you buy two or three cards, you realize your gold is almost depleted and you’re wondering how you are going to stretch out what you have for the rest of the auction. Luckily, there are gold cards in the deck (well, providing you and your opponents were prudent enough to put them in there), which are bought by discarding your other cards, in a clever twist. So that means if you’re short on gold and a 3 value gold (the highest value) pops up in the auction, you can trash cards of colors that you’re fairly certain you’re not going to win. But even that is a risk, because you’re making assumptions on the sets your opponents have built. Educated assumptions, yes, but not perfect. There have been a few games where I trashed cards of a certain color, only to discover I would have won that color if I kept them.

While the gifting round is a white knuckle push your luck drafting system, the auction round is an impossibly tight game of money management. Pay too much for a card, and you lose all leverage for the rest of the round, allowing your opponents to get things for cheap. Don’t be aggressive, though, and you may find yourself waiting for the perfect price for a card that just won’t ever come, especially if you’re playing against savvy bidders that prey on your Scrooge-like skinflint tendencies. I have lost games falling into both traps, and I’ve won games against opponents who have done the same. It’s all about balancing your gold supply with getting the cards you really need. And don’t get me started on the church cards during this round. Those things become so valuable at this stage of the game you and your friends will be clawing each other apart for them like they’re the last Furby on the Toys ‘R Us shelf and not some old white dude in a funny hat.

Furby is still a thing, right? I dunno what Toys ‘R Us sells these days, I haven’t been outside in a while.

By game’s end, after the bidding bloodbath subsides and the dust clears over everyone’s monasteries, you reveal your hands and show who truly has the most of what color. Naturally, this creates lots of groans and cheers, as you see that your opponent managed to get just one more blue than you did even though you wasted all that gold on blue and oh look blue is worth six points and oh hey, they also managed to win red with a measly two cards which I would have beat if I hadn’t discarded them to grab that one gold that I didn’t even spend and ahhhh

Of course, there’s plenty of times where you’ll be the one wearing a smug grin as your opponents regret every decision they’ve ever made in their lives and it’s times like this that reveal just what a devilishly brilliant game Biblios is. Using two very distinct rounds and threading them together in a cohesive and nerve-wracking package, Biblios manages to pack more thoughtful decisions in its lean twenty minute length than some hour long games I’ve played. The fact that it’s done with just a deck of cards and colored dice makes it all the more impressive. Since I’ve entered the hobby a couple years ago, Biblios remains one of my all time favorite card games and almost definitely my favorite set collection game. If you’re looking for a filler with a pair of monk shaped fangs, Biblios is just the game for you.

(Also, I know I’ve been taking the piss (I’m not British, but I love that term, I’m sorry) out of the theme, but I actually like it a lot. For whatever reason, I’ve always liked the imagery of monks in monasteries and the atmosphere that evokes. Combine that with listening to Gregorian chant (yes, really) while my friends and I play this and it really is a theme that I love engrossing myself in).