Zombie Dice Review

Rule Summary

The game comes with a cup full of dice.  On your turn you will draw three of them and roll them.  You keep the brains, which are points.  You also keep the shotgun blasts.  The footprints, which are "runners" you reroll once you've drawn back up to three dice from the cup.  If you ever have three shotgun blasts, your turn is over and you lose the points you earned this turn.  You can choose to stop whenever you want and bank your points.  Once a player gets 13 brains, every other player gets an equal number of turns, and then the game ends.  The player with the most brains wins.  That was easy.

Timelapse of play

How Should You Reward Success?

Rewarding success in board games is a tricky proposition.  Reward players too much and the game can cease to be competitive past a certain point.  Lagging players can be easily alienated and become bored.  Fail to reward successful play enough and the game takes on a feeling of being too artificially balanced.  It feels like no matter what you do, you do about as well as everyone else, and the winner comes down to whatever random variance is built into the game.  Today I'd like to look at numerous games, what they do well, what they don't do well, and try to come to some sort of conclusion about what makes a good reward system.

The Dice Post

Balance is a tricky issue.  If you start both players off with the exact same starting position and capabilities, it is likely true that your game rewards skill and experience.  Even in the best of games of this type, it results in a somewhat dry game.  Incredibly deep and fun games, but typically quite dry.  Sadly, many games also fall far short of their depth mark.  Depth in a purely deterministic game is hard to pull off.  It typically requires there to be some sort of emergent quality to the rules.  And emergence is difficult to purposely accomplish.

So most games take a different path, and introduce a variety of mechanics to liven up gameplay, but maintain balance.  Randomness, asymmetry, variable set ups, and so on.  So today I'm going to be taking a long hard look at dice.  How dice effect the gameplay, the depth of the dilemmas in the game, and the nature of the player interaction.

7 Wonders Review

7 Wonders was released in 2010 by Asmodee Games, and was designed by Antoine Bauza.  It is a game I've frequently been rather hot or cold about.  I'll go through periods where I desperately want to play it more.  Then I'll get bored of it rather quickly again.  A part of me wonders if this is because the game doesn't have enough meat on it's bones for me, or because I haven't delved deeply enough into it?

Ingenious Review

Ingenious is probably one of Reiner Knizia's more accessible games.  Published in 2004, it was an immediate hit.  On a personal level, it was one of the few abstract games I enjoyed at the time.  Many abstract games seemed overly complicated and obtuse at the time I was first getting into board gaming as a more serious hobby.  So, years later, here are my thoughts on it.

Battle Line Review

Battle Line was released in 2000 by the ever fantastic GMT Games.  It was designed by the illustrious Reiner Knizia, although it was a retheming of a game called Schotten-Totten.

Battle Line is a very quick two player card game.  It falls in the same category as Lost Cities and Dragonheart among others.  In theory it is set during Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire, but you'd only know it because two of the special cards in the game are Alexander and Darius, and they cannot be played by the same person.  So here is what I think of it.

Kingdom Builder Review

Kingdom Builder was released in 2011 and was designed by Donald X Vaccarino of Dominion fame.  It won a few awards, and has been received by people either quite well, or quite poorly.  Since it came from the same wellspring as Dominion, expectations may have been running a bit high.  That said, I've found it to be a very enjoyable light to medium abstract game.