Board Game Review: The Island of El Dorado

The Island of El Dorado (by Daniel Aronson) is a tile-laying exploration board game for 2-4 players (60-90 minutes) in which players are 16th century explorers discovering the island of El Dorado and competing to be the first to lay claim to all four shrines, which is said to grant the explorer access to untold wealth and power. A typical turn goes through a two-step process of first rolling two dice to determine how many spaces you can move your explorer as well as how many resources you produce at the beginning of your turn, and then going through your “explore phase” in which you move your explorer and/or villagers (who serve double-duty as both army units for combat as well as workers for resource-production) and spend resources to build structures, recruit more villagers, or give offerings to shrines. Players may also confront each other in direct combat by moving their explorer or army figures onto another player's space, rolling dice based on each player's total strength in the battle to determine a victor. Three of the shrines can be found scattered around the island, but the fourth is hidden inside a cave that must be explored separately, and which also houses assorted monsters and dangerous encounters. The first player to control all four shrines wins the game.

In practice, The Island of El Dorado plays like a cross between The Settlers of Catan and Risk, with a tile-laying exploration element like Betrayal at House on the Hill or Escape: Curse of the Temple where you build the map as you play. As a game with relatively light, simple rules and a high degree of luck, it's intended to be more of a family-weight game for families and more casual gamers, though the designer has since published rules for a "Hardcore Mode" intended for more strategic gamers who dislike how much of a factor luck plays in the standard rules. I backed the first Kickstarter because I hoped it would serve as a more pleasant alternative to Catan, since it fits in the same weight class and has so many superficial similarities (plus, I'm a sucker for exploration games) but I find that I just don't like it very much, or at least not with any of the current rules. Even for a family-weight game, the luck element is just too prevalent in this game, and I feel like it runs too long for such a simple, luck-dependent game. The "Hardcore Mode" rules help, but I have some issues with those, too. The bulk of this review will deal with the standard rules, and then I'll discuss the "Hardcore Mode" rules separately.

Armello Review: A Poorly-Designed Board Game Dressed Up Like a Video Game

Most digital board games are merely adaptations of actual, physical board games; they keep all the same gameplay elements and components of the physical game and simply add a digital interface so that you can interact with the components, and therefore actually play the game. Platforms like Board Game Simulator and Tabletopia are just physics engines with digital versions of board game components that play virtually identically to the real thing, with you picking up and moving your pieces across the board and dragging cards into the play area, substituting your hands for a mouse cursor. Armello -- successfully Kickstarted in May 2014 and released on Steam in September 2015 -- may be the only digital board game without a physical counterpart, since it was designed from the ground up to be digital. As such, it's basically a hybrid game with the design concepts of board games and the functional feeling of a video game.

Armello is a fantasy-themed turn-based strategy game for up to four players, in which everyone plays as different anthropomorphic animal clans (represented by their hero) vying for control of the animal kingdom after a dark poison known as the Rot has overtaken the land and driven the lion King mad. The game lasts up to 20 rounds, with the king -- positioned in the palace at the center of the hex-based board -- losing one health from Rot poisoning every other round, at dawn, until he eventually dies. If it comes to that, the player with the most Prestige (ie, victory points) wins the game by being the most worthy successor to the throne. However, players can also end the game early by breaching the palace and assassinating the weakened king, or by collecting four spirit stones and bringing them to the palace to cure the king. A player who kills or cures the king wins, regardless of prestige.

You'll be rolling dice based on your stats to complete quests, survive perils, and to fight monsters and other players, while using limited action points to move across the board towards specific objectives and to maneuver past obstacles. You'll also be managing a hand of cards, drawing up to your hand limit every turn. These cards consist of different types of equipment, spells, and trickery cards, all of which have some type of cost to use. Equipment cards can be permanently equipped to your hero for various benefits, while spells and trickery cards can be played at any time (even when it's not your turn) on enemies, tiles, or other players. You'll complete quests to increase your stats, claim settlements to increase your income, defeat monsters to earn prestige, explore dungeons for random rewards, and play your spells and trickeries on other players to influence and control the board.

I play a lot of video games, obviously, but I'm also an avid board gamer. I've actually spent more money on board games over the last three years than I have on video games (which includes money spent upgrading my computer), and I've even reviewed a few board games on this blog. It's safe to say that I'm exactly the kind of person this game is intended for, and yet I just don't like it very much. Perhaps that's in large part because this just maybe isn't my type of game (I'm not a huge fan of dice-chuckers, although many of my favorite games use dice and I do enjoy games like Run Fight or Die and Cosmic Run), but Armello features several rules and gameplay features that I and a lot of gamers consider to be objectively bad. While I can tolerate or even embrace some of these things in the right context or in small doses, Armello takes some of them to the extreme, with too much prevalence in a game that's a little too long and serious for what it ultimately is.

Board Game Review: King of Tokyo

King of Tokyo is a dice-chucking game designed by Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering), originally published by IELLO Games in 2011, in which players take the role of epic Godzilla-sized monsters battling for supremacy over Tokyo. Players roll a handful of dice each turn, picking which results to keep and re-rolling any unwanted dice two more times, Yahtzee-style, for a total of three rolls. The dice results determine your actions for that turn: each claw rolled deals a point of damage to other monsters, each heart heals you by one point, each lightning bolt gives you energy to spend on upgrade cards (which can grant you permanent bonuses or one-time benefits), and rolling three or more of the same number grants you that many star points.

At the heart of the game is Tokyo city, where monsters vie for control via a king of the hill type of mechanism -- only one monster can be in Tokyo at a time (two if playing with five or six players), and you get star points for going into and staying in Tokyo. While in Tokyo, your attacks hit every monster outside of Tokyo, but you can't heal unless you cede the city and flee to the outskirts, allowing someone else to swoop in and lay claim to Tokyo. Meanwhile, every monster outside of Tokyo attacks inwards, hitting whomever's in Tokyo. You win the game by being the first to reach 20 star points, or by being the last monster standing.

The relatively light rules, short playtime (30 minutes, according to the box), and whimsical nature of the game, what with its cartoon monsters punching each other and evolving over the course of the game to gain jet packs and fire breathing abilities, among countless other possibilities, all combine to make King of Tokyo a consensus "gateway" or "family" game. This is the type of game you buy when you're first getting into the hobby, or when you want a game to play with people who aren't interested in heavy strategy games with lots of rules and complexities. Its esteemed reputation among board game enthusiasts on BoardGameGeek and r/boardgames gave me enough confidence to buy King of Tokyo two years ago, when I was first starting my board game collection, and indeed, it was a lot of fun early on. But now, two years later, I just don't enjoy it very much.

Board Game Review - Shadowrun: Crossfire

Shadowrun: Crossfire is a cooperative deck-building card game for 1-4 players. Set in the "fantasy meets cyberpunk" world of the Shadowrun tabletop role-playing game, players take the role of shadowrunners (aka, mercenaries for hire) attempting to complete dangerous "gray ops" missions for the megacorporations that control all of society in the Sixth World. Missions offer different objectives and challenges while altering the game's structure, but the core gameplay mechanisms remain the same from mission to mission: draw cards from your deck, play them against obstacles, earn money for defeating obstacles, and improve your deck by buying stronger cards from the black market.

Taking its cue from the tabletop RPG, Shadowrun: Crossfire provides a campaign-style gaming experience, allowing players to create their own character who will gain experience and earn permanent upgrades over multiple playthroughs. Players can choose from one of five races (human, elf, dwarf, ork, or troll), which have different health caps, starting money, and starting hand sizes, and can pick one of four roles that each comes with its own specialized deck of starter cards. There's the street samurai who uses guns and melee weapons to control the battlefield, the mage who casts spells to deal high spike damage to single targets, the face who uses social skills to influence the black market and support his allies, and the decker who uses technology to manipulate his discard pile.

Players earn experience points (known as karma in Shadowrun lore) for completing missions, and, in the case of the "Crossfire" mission, for successfully aborting it after a runner's health goes critical, but before anyone dies. In addition to marking your character's name on the character sheets, you can also mark his or her earned karma, which can be spent on stickers that you permanently attach to the character sheet, thus permanently upgrading that character. Upgrades can be purchased in five-karma (5K) increments, ranging from 5K to 50K in cost. Basic 5K upgrades will let you start the game with an extra card in your hand, or increase your maximum health by one; for 50K, you can take an upgrade that will let you deal bonus wild damage, or double the value of basic cards that match your role.

Board Game Review: The X-Files

In The X-Files, a board game by IDWGames and Kevin Wilson, one to four players take the role of FBI agents Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, Walter Skinner, and Alex Krycek moving across the continental United States solving X-Files cases as they appear, in order to collect enough evidence to unravel the shadow government agency known as the Syndicate. One player takes the role of the Cigarette Smoking Man, who is working against the other players to cover up evidence and delay them long enough to eventually win through attrition and shut down the X-Files department for good. 

On agents' turns, they perform some combination of moving from region to region across the board, trading cards with fellow agents in the same region, collecting influence (which serve basically as action points), and playing cards from their hand -- usually to "investigate" an active X-File case in their region. Each X-File requires a certain amount of "progress" to solve; if an agent plays a card that says "investigate 3," they place three "progress tokens" on the case, and continue playing cards (one at a time, in turn order) until the number of progress tokens matches or exceeds the required amount on the card. For each solved X-File, agents collect a certain amount of "evidence tokens" from a bag, which are used as currency to buy one of nine puzzle pieces that the agents have to acquire and assemble to win the game.

Board Game Review: The Cave

The Cave is a game in which two-to-five players take the role of speleologists competing to earn the most prestige for exploring a newly-discovered cave system. The board begins with only a single tile at the cave's entrance and then progressively fills itself out as players explore beyond the starting point, laying new tiles for each section of the cave that they choose to explore. Along the way, players will face perilous drops, tight crevices, flooded chambers, and underground wonders. To get the credit for these discoveries, players will need to be well-prepared with the right gear for the job, and will have to use their limited actions and resources wisely before returning to base camp to resupply. Whoever manages their resources best and explores the most of the cave wins the game. 

I was drawn to The Cave for a lot of reasons, but the primary factor was that I liked the idea of an easy-going, tile-laying exploration game that I could play with a variety of people. Seeing your cave expand the longer you play, shaping itself into its own unique configuration each time you play is very appealing, and the theme of scientists exploring a cave is something that I think everyone can enjoy. More importantly, the rules are simple enough to learn that this game could be played by just about anyone. The Cave is therefore a pretty good game to play with friends and family members who aren't very big gamers, but I find it a little disappointing to play in any other context besides that. 

Board Game Review: Forbidden Desert

Do you like cooperative games? Are you interested in a game that will appeal to your extended family, your children, and your serious gaming buddies? Do you like dying miserably in a hostile, unforgiving desert? If you said yes to any of these questions, then you might be interested in Forbidden Desert, a cooperative survival game designed by Matt Leacock (of Pandemic and Forbidden Island fame). 

In Forbidden Desert, two-to-five players team up as a group of scientists on a mission to excavate a fabled ancient city that's been lost to the desert sands. When they arrive at the site of the buried city, a powerful storm wrecks their helicopter, stranding them at the mercy of the blazing sun and a raging sand storm. To survive, the group will have to work together to unearth the city in search of ancient technologies and, in the process, rebuild a legendary flying machine before succumbing to dehydration or being swept away by the storm. 

Forbidden Desert is a deceptively simple game -- so simple that kids and non-gaming adults will be able to grasp its mechanisms and quickly contribute to the welfare of the group. Beneath that first layer of sand, however, lies a fiercely difficult game that will challenge even the most veteran of gamers. It's a game that strongly promotes teamwork and careful strategizing, and its theme shines through the gameplay so strongly that you'll feel genuine tension and desperation as you attempt to escape the forbidden desert.

Board Game Review: Eldritch Horror

For the second time ever, I'd like to talk about something other than video games. The last time I diverged from the chosen topic of this blog was to complain about that one really disappointing Batman movie; this time I'll at least be sticking to the general topic of gaming while I review my recent purchase of the narrative-driven, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Eldritch Horror board game by Fantasy Flight Games.

My friends and I all enjoy playing video games, and whenever we get together there's a strong tendency for us to setup a multiplayer game to pass a couple of hours. After a few years of playing the same games over and over again, I was getting a little tired of it and made the radical suggestion that we try playing a board game instead. Being completely unfamiliar with board games, the difficult part of that suggestion was narrowing such a wide selection of interesting games down to one. After reading through lists of popular games, I decided to go with Eldritch Horror because of its Lovecraftian subject matter and its blend of strategy and role-playing elements.

In Eldritch Horror, players assume the roles of up to eight investigators as they attempt to solve mysteries across the globe in order to prevent one of four "ancient ones" from awakening and ravaging the earth. Each investigator has their own unique stats and abilities; during encounters, investigators draw a random card from the deck, which describes each scenario as the story progresses, and resolve skill checks by rolling dice. As they travel the globe, investigators acquire arcane spells and artifacts, battle other-worldly monsters, close gates to other dimensions, and deal with horrifying supernatural encounters.