Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Author: Nephilium

  • You are nobody ’til somebody beats you in a game

    This installment, let’s assume that you don’t have a handy gaming group, and you don’t want to go to a meetup and play with a bunch of random players.  We will assume that you have at least a significant other or friend who’s willing to indulge you at least once to try these silly board games out (if you don’t, wait until next installment).  So here’s some two player games, ranging from fairly simple, to a little deeper.  None of these should be overwhelming, but they have enough depth to allow for some replayability.

     

    Game 1: 3 card poker with goals  Schotten Totten (AKA Battle Lines)

    Schotten Totten
    Battle Line

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    This game is another game that was designed by Dr. Reiner Kinizia, the current printing is named Schotten Totten and has a pasted on Scottish clan theme.  Battle Lines is now out of print, is the same game, with a pasted on army theme (generally medieval/ancient).  The game is fairly simple, there are nine cards that have pictures of stones on them.  You line these up between the two players, and the goal is to either capture any five of the stones, or three stones that are adjacent to each other.  Each player has a hand of cards from a common deck.  On your turn you play a card to one of the stones from your hand and draw a new card.  The cards are in 6 different colors, with numbers ranging from 1 to 9.  You can have a maximum of three cards on your side of a stone.  Claiming a stone can be done at the end of your turn if you either beat your opponent’s three card hand, or (using the cards in play) can prove that your hand will beat any possible one that your opponent could have.  The hands work like poker, so a color run (matching color in numeric order), beats a 3 of a kind, beats matching color, beats a run, beats three random cards.  If you get tired of the base game, the game also comes with a Tactics expansion which allows you to take actions to move cards around instead of playing a card.  This is light and relatively simple, and plays in about 20 minutes.

     

    Game 2: Trading and Monopolization with Camels Jaipur

    Jaipur

    This is a game which is played over three rounds.  To set up, each player gets dealt a hand of five cards, which represent either goods (leather, tea, silk, silver, gold, diamonds) or camels.  All of the camels get put down in a pile in front of you, and your goods cards remain in your hand, hidden from your opponent.  Then, five cards are turned over for a communal market.  On your turn, you have four options:

     

    1. You can sell goods.  By selling goods, you take any number of the same good from your hand, and sell them to a discard pile.  After this you take good tokens (there are different amounts for each good, and different values) and if you sell between 3-5 goods, you get a bonus token.
    2. You can take a single good from the communal market.  You pick up any single card from the communal market and place it in your hand.  Each player has a maximum hand size of seven.
    3. You can take all of the camels from the communal market.  As long as there is at least one camel in the communal market, you can take all of the camels and put them in your camel pile.
    4. You can trade goods from the market.  You can trade any number of camels and goods from your hand for goods in the communal market.  You cannot take and return the same good to the communal market at the same time.

     

    The round ends when either three goods tokens have run out, or the deck runs out.  At this point the player with the most camels in front of them gets a camel token which is worth 5 bonus points.  Both players then add up the points on all of their tokens, and the higher score wins the round.  The game ends when one player wins two rounds.  It plays at about 10 minutes a round.

    [THIS GAME RECEIVES THE SWISS SERVATOR THUMBS UP!]

     

    Game 3: Tetris… with quilts?  Patchwork

    Patchwork

    This is the first game on this list by designer Uwe Rosenberg, who is another prolific German designer of board games.  This game is a matter of managing three different items: Board Space, Buttons (in game currency), and Time.  Each player gets a 9 x 9 board, a marker, and 5 buttons to start the game.  The pieces are randomly arranged around the central tracking board and a wooden pawn is placed next to a specific piece, to show where in the circle you can purchase from.  Each player has two options on their turn:

     

    1. Pass.  Take their marker and move it to the space directly in front of their opponent’s marker.  They then get 1 button for every space they moved in this manner
    2. Purchase a piece.  You may purchase any of the three pieces on the clockwise side of the wooden marker.  Each piece has a cost in buttons, and a cost in time.  To purchase a piece, you must pay its cost in button, and then move their marker forward a number of spaces equal to the cost in time.  Then the wooden marker moves up to where the purchased piece was.

     

    Unlike most games, turns do not alternate in this game.  After the first move of the game, whoever’s marker is behind goes next.  If both pieces are in the same space, the player on top gets to go again.  There are two different icons on the tracking board that indicate something special happens:

     

    1. A button.  Whenever a player marker passes this spot, collect buttons equal to the number of buttons visible on their quilt.
    2. A patch.  These are 1 x 1 squares. Whoever passes these first gets to take the patch and put it into their quilt.

     

    The game ends when both player markers have completed the tracking board.  At this point, your final score is the number of buttons you have minus 2 points for every uncovered spot on your quilt board.  It’s also possible to grab a 7 point bonus if you were the first to cover a 7 x 7 area of your quilt.  It takes a couple playthroughs before the elegance of the design can be seen, and you start playing it in a cutthroat manner.  A game of this can be played in about 15 minutes.

     

    Game 4: A 2 Player drafting game?  7 Wonders – Duel

    7 Wonders Duel

    There is a drafting game that is very well known amongst gamers called 7 Wonders.  It plays best with 7 players, and is tolerable at a player count of 5.  Below that it’s… playable?  So there was quite a bit of skepticism in the board game world when a 2 player version was announced.  However, it turns out that it works, and works well.  The key to the design is that the cards to be drafted are placed in a specific pattern, with some face up, others face down.  On your turn, you must select one of the face up cards, and any face down card that has no card layered on it now gets turned face up.  When you select a card, you can do several different things with it:

     

    1. Build it into your civilization by paying the cost on the card in materials.
    2. Discard the card for coins.
    3. Use it to build one of your wonder cards (assuming you have the materials needed to build it).

     

    The game has two conditions that trigger an immediate win.  If a player acquires six different science icon, or if a player moves the conflict token across the military board then the game ends and the player who ended the game wins.  Otherwise the game is played over three ages, and at the end of the game scores are totaled up.  Buildings can be worth victory points, tokens can be worth victory points, and cash can be worth victory points.  The player with the most points wins.  Your civilizations will take about 30 minutes to be built and see which is superior.

     

    I can hear some of you complaining now, “Well that’s all well and good, but I don’t have anyone who wants to play these stupid games with me.  What am I supposed to do?”  So next time, I’ll be discussing some of the websites that allow for online play of games, and going over some of the games available on them.

     

    Special Bonus Game Review (by Trials and Trippelations)

     

    Raptor

    A quickie has become a necessity in my sex life since my son was born. It’s a part of board game life as well.  Raptor, a 2 player game with an easy set up, takes about 20-30 minutes to play, and fits the quickie description.  In Raptor, one player plays a group of scientists complete with flame throwers, knock out gas, and jeeps. The other player handles a Momma raptor and her five babies.

     

    Each player begins the game with a deck of 9 cards that are numbered 1 through 9 with a special action noted on each card, from those 9 cards the player has a hand of 3 cards. On a turn the players choose one hard from their hand and places it face down. When both players have made their choice the cards are revealed simultaneously.  This is where Raptor differs from other games with a similar mechanic, only the player that played the lower value card gets to use the special action. The other player is allocated action points equal to the difference of the two cards values, but cannot utilize the special action. Used cards remain face up on the table, so card counting can be attempted. That rule really adds to the victorious highs of playing your cards right to the groans when you do not.

    The game ends when the raptor player leads 3 babies to escape or when all the scientists are eaten, or the scientists capture 3 babies or totally knock out the momma with 5 tranquilizer hits.

     

    Raptor is a bit asymmetrical, the scientists are the stronger side. But there is something quite gratifying in munching up Muldeenean hunters and wide eyed Hammondian scientists.

    My wife and I really enjoy the game. We’ve focused on only playing the raptors or scientist to hone our skills before switching.

     

  • Who Are You Calling A Lightweight?!

    So we’ve already talked about the board game renaissance, but you don’t want to drop $50 and spend an hour each time you want to play them.  There’s a solution to that, today we’ll talk about lightweight games.  Lightweight games are games that generally take less than 10 minutes to explain, and under half an hour to play.  Once again, I’ll be sticking to games that are in print, and generally available.

     

    Game 1: Press Your Luck – Incan Gold (3-8 players)

     

    This game has a theme about raiding ancient temples, and attempting to retrieve treasure.  Each player has a small tent, an explore card, and an escape card.  There are five rounds, with each round lasting until either everyone retreats from an expedition, or disaster strikes.  The way the game is played is simple.  There’s a deck with treasure cards, artifact cards, and danger cards.  Each turn is played by flipping over the top card of the deck.  If the card is a treasure card, it will have a number of gems on it, these gems are evenly divided amongst the players still exploring the temple with any remainders being put on the card.  If it’s an artifact the card is simply placed down in the temple.  Any danger cards are also placed into the temple, there are 5 different hazards and 3 copies of each in the deck.  A single danger card doesn’t do any harm, but if the danger card matches one already in the temple, anyone still exploring is trapped in the dungeon (disaster strikes), and one of the copies of that hazard is removed from the deck.  As for the artifacts and gems placed on cards, those sit there for the players who decide to escape the dungeon.  If only one player decides to escape, they get to pick up any artifacts on their way out, as well as any gems sitting on the cards.  If multiple players decide to escape, they leave the artifacts where they are and divvy up any gems on their way out.  Once the players have escaped, they get to place any gems they’ve picked up into their tent, where they will count for end game scoring.  Deciding to continue can be advantageous if you’re the only one exploring, as a single card can provide as many as 15 gems.  Depending on the players, this game can be played in 15-40 minutes.

     

    Game 2: Drafting Dominoes – Kingdomino (2-4 players)

    If you’re familiar with dominoes, this game is a breeze to explain.  There are 48 tiles in the game with numbers on the back from 1 to 48.  Each player starts with a single tile, a little 3-d castle, and a meeple (or two for the two player version) of their player color.  To start with, you randomly pull out 4 tiles, and place them in order based on their number.  You then randomize the selection process for the first round.  After that, you pull out the next four tiles, sort them by the numbers, flip them over, and each player gets to select one in order of the numbers of the tiles they were already on.  So, if the first four tiles were 4, 10, 17, and 25 the player who selected 4 gets their first pick of the next batch of tiles, the player assigned 10 gets the second pick and so on.  If the second batch of tiles were 1, 14, 30, and 45 and the player who picked 4 in the first round selected tile 45, this means that they’ll be picking last in the next round.  When placing tiles, there are 6 different types of territory: desert, forest, water, wasteland, grassland, and mines.  Each tile you place must match at least one territory that you place it adjacent to.  The beginning tile (with the little castle on it) is considered wild.  Some of the territory squares have a number of crowns on them, ranging from one to three.  At the end of the game, scoring is done by scoring each type of contiguous (next to each other) territory by counting the number of squares, and multiplying them by the number of crowns in the area.  So if you have a 7 square water territory that has 3 crowns total in it, that would score you 21 points.  There are also advanced rules that provide bonus points for a 5 x 5 grid at the end, as well as one for having your castle in the middle of the kingdom.  For a lightweight game, there’s a nice bit of strategy in this one, and it still plays a game in about 15 minutes.

     

    Game 3: Cute Modular Drafting – Sushi Go Party! (2-8 players)

    This game is a new version of an older game, Sushi Go.  This version adds more variety, a scoreboard, and some minor tweaks in the rules, while allowing more variable player counts.  In this game, you’re drafting cards over a number of rounds to score the best meal.  During the setup, everyone agrees on a menu for the game (or you can use one of the pre-built menus included in the manual).  This menu will have appetizers, main courses, special items, and dessert.  Cards are dealt out to all of the players, with each player then drafting a card and passing the remaining cards to the player on their left.  All of the selected cards are revealed, special powers may trigger, and then you pick up the cards the player to your right handed you and repeat.  Once all of the cards have been selected, you score the round.  Scoring is variable based on the cards selected, some give you a set number of points, others are worth no points unless you have 2 of them, others are worth points unless you have more than 3 of them, etc.  After scoring the round, all of the selected cards (with the exception of desserts, which score at the end of the game) are shuffled with the deck and a set number of additional dessert cards are added.  The scoreboard helpfully includes slots for tiles that illustrate how each item will score in the round, making it easy to keep track of what the options are.  Like most drafting games, play time will be about the same regardless of players, in this case about 30 minutes.

     

    Game 4: Everyone Has the Same Options – Karuba (2-4 players)

    This game is a hidden gem.  The theme is explorers trying to find their way to temples, while picking up gems along the path.  To set up the game, all of the players take a player board, a set of four temples (each a different color), a set of four explorers (same colors as the temples), and then a stack of numbered jungle tiles.  All of the players but one then sorts all of their jungle tiles by the number on them.  A player then selects a location for either a temple or an explorer (with the caveat that temples and explorers of the same color must be a certain distance apart from each other as a minimum), and all of the other players place the same temple/explorer on the same numbered space.  This continues until all 8 of the temples and explorers are placed.  Now, we’re ready to start the game.  The player who did not sort his jungle tiles now mixes them up, and selects one.  They then announce the number and the other players all pick up that same tile.  All of the players now have an option, they either place the tile somewhere on their play board, or discard it for movement points for their explorers.  The number of path entrances on the tile will determine the amount of movement points the tile provides (so a tile with just a single path going straight across gives 2 movement points, while a crossroads provides 4).  When placing a tile in the jungle, if the tile has a picture of a diamond or a gold nugget, you place the appropriate stone on the tile, these can be picked up if an explorer stops on the tile.  Explorers cannot move through each other, or share a space.  As players get their explorers to the temples, they acquire a scoring tile (the points awarded is determined by player count).  The game ends when all of the jungle tiles have been used.  At this point, players add up their points from diamonds, gold nuggets, and temple score tiles.  The high score wins.  What’s really nice about the game is that everyone is given exactly the same options, with the same starting positions, so it is completely fair.  You can also see what tiles remain, so you have some idea as to what’s going to be coming up.  This game will take about 45 minutes to complete.

     

    Hopefully these lighter games may help ease you into the hobby, or for those with stacks of cardboard and meeples, work as a nice filler on a game day.  Feel free to point out other lightweight games that I missed in the comments.  Next time, I’m planning on going over some of the 2 player games that are on the market.

  • Shall We Play A Game?

    Board games… the very name makes most adults cringe.  We’ve seen the family fight over Monopoly (and how so-and-so always cheats), we’ve been bored to tears playing Chutes and Ladders and Candyland with kids, and most of us have dealt with the one lone Risk army that holds off a much larger force all by itself.  You’d be forgiven if you weren’t aware that there has been a renaissance of games going back to the late 90’s, and from Germany of all places (you know what else came from Germany?)..  

     

    This influx of new games (with a little help from Kickstarter) has brought about the modern board game culture.  There are games for all tastes: light party games, games heavy with math, press your luck games, games that test your dexterity, and cooperative games.  I’m hoping that by writing this up, I can introduce some new players to some great games, and get more players involved in the hobby.

     

    Inspiration for this comes from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education), who did a write-up on one of my favorite games: Chinatown.  Instead of repeating what’s in that article, I’m going to focus on a couple of other games that would work well for different groups of people.  I’ll be focusing on games that are available for purchase (at a reasonable price), and here I’m going to focus on some entry level games that play in about an hour.

     

    Game 1: An Auction Game – Modern Art (3-5 players)

    You vill haff fun!

    This is a game created by Dr. Reiner Knizia, one of the most prolific board game designers of all time.  The premise of the game is simple, each player is running a modern art museum.  Everyone is dealt a hand of cards, which all feature a different piece of art by a selection of modern artists.  There’s also a symbol in the upper right corner of each of the cards indicating how they will be auctioned off.  On each player’s turn, they play a card and it is auctioned off as indicated.  These auctions can be a fixed price, hidden money, traditional open auction, one around, or a double auction (which allows a second card from the same artist to be played).  The player who played the card is the auctioneer, and is also allowed to bid on the card themselves.  If the auctioneer wins, they pay the winning bid to the bank, if any other player wins the auction they pay the auctioneer.  Then the next player selects a card to play, and this continues until the fifth card of any one artist is played.  At that time, the round is over and each player sells their paintings to the bank at a price determined by the popularity of the artist.  The artist who ended the round will have all of their paintings be worth 30, the artist who came in second has their works valued at 20, the third place artist has works valued at only 10, and every other artist’s paintings are worthless at the end of the round.  Each player gets a couple more cards, and another round begins.  This is where things get interesting, as the valuations from earlier rounds add on to the current round as long as the artist is one of the three most popular.  If you have paintings from an artist who was the most popular in the first three rounds, but is the fourth most popular in the fourth round, that painting is worthless.  The game plays over four rounds, and playtime is around 30-60 minutes.

     

    Game 2: A family take that game – Survive: Escape from Atlantis (2-4 players, up to 6 with an expansion)

    Nobody escapes. The island sinks. Everyone dies.  🙁

    This is an old game, and originally was released by Parker Brothers in 1982.  If you want a different theme, there is a space version as well, but I much prefer the classic.  In this game, there’s an island built up in the middle of hex tiles that are beaches, forests, and mountains.  Players then put meeples (little pieces shaped like people) on the island (each of these meeples has a number on the bottom between 1 and 6), and scatter boats around the island.  Once the meeples are placed, you are not allowed to look at the numbers again.  Each turn, players move their meeples or controlled boats up to three spaces total, then select a portion of the island to sink (beaches sink first, then forests, and finally the mountains).  The back of the island tile will either be an instant effect (such as a boat or a shark appearing), or a tile you can hold onto to play on a later turn (such as a dolphin dragging a swimmer up to 3 spaces).  Then the part that gets everyone excited, you roll a monster die to see which of various sea creatures you get to control.  There’s three, and an equal chance for you to roll any of them.  They are:

     

    • The Sea Monster – 5 of these start on the board.  There’s no defense against them, they kill any meeple they touch, and destroy any boat they touch.  Thankfully, they can only move one space
    • The Sharks – None of these start on the board, but will get added as the island tiles get flipped over (which means you get to make people fall into sharks).  Sharks kill any meeple they touch, but leave boats alone.  They have the ability to move up to two spaces.
    • The Whales – These also are absent from the board at the beginning, and get added later.  Whales don’t hurt people at all, but they destroy any boat they touch, throwing the people in the boat into the water.  They are the fastest of all of the monsters, being able to move three spaces.

     

    Few things cause as much cheering and groaning around the table as a Sea Monster eating a boat full of meeples.  The goal is to get your meeples to the safe spaces in the four corners of the board.  The game ends when the mountain tile that has the volcano on the back is flipped, so you never know exactly when the game will end.  At the end of the game you score points based on the numbers on the bottom of the meeples you rescued.  The most points wins, and the game is over in about 45 minutes.

     

    Game 3 – Do we all really need to know the rules? Between Two Cities (1-7 players; best with 5-7)

    This one is a Swiss Servator Pick to Click!

    This one has a bit of a twist, it’s a tile drafting game that is semi-cooperative.  Each player is working to build two cities, one with the player on their left, one with the player on their right.  For the first round, everyone draws 7 tiles, and keeps two of them.  The others will be passed along to the player on their left.  Of the two tiles that everyone has drafted, one must go into the city on their left, and the other in the city on their right.  At this point, players will negotiate and discuss what works best for all three of the players.  Why would you work with both players?  Because at the end of the game, you score all of the cities, and each player’s final score is the city they are sitting between with the lowest score.  So if the city on your right is worth 78 points, and one on your left is worth 30, your final score is 30.  The game will rarely have ties for the winner, but the losing score is always shared between (at least) two players.  In the second round of the game is where things get tricky.  Each player receives 3 duplex tiles (each duplex tile is the size of two standard tiles, and has two buildings on it), and must select 2 of them (once again, one for the city on their left, and one for the city on their right).  These tiles cannot be rotated, some are vertical, others horizontal, and must fit into the final city grid (a 4 x 4 square).  After this, there’s a final round of 7 tiles (this time passed to the right), and the cities are scored.  The really nice thing about this game is you don’t have to go through strategies or deep plans with new players, just explain the scoring, and make sure they’re sitting between two players who know the game, as it’s in all of their best interests to make sure the new player’s cities do well.  Since this is a drafting game, the play time stays steady at 30-45 minutes.

    If there’s a good response to this, I have several other groupings of games to talk about.  Let me know if you would rather see brief write-ups to steer you towards games, or in-depth reviews about a single game at a time.  I own more than enough games to keep this going for a long time, and that’s not even going into the games that I’ve played.

  • Let’s Go Toe-to-Toe on Beer Law

    To begin, I’m as much a lawyer as Charlie Kelly is; I just prefer to focus on beer law instead of bird law. The after effect of the terrible experiment in alcohol prohibition in the United States is the cause of most of these bizarre and strange laws. Before prohibition, the peak number of breweries in the US was over 4,100 (1873). While consolidation was already happening previous to the 18th amendment being ratified, once it was passed it started forcing breweries to close. By the time the 21st amendment was ratified, less than 750 breweries remained active. The number of breweries continued to decline as consolidation continued until we reached the nadir of less than 100 breweries in the 1970’s.

    Thankfully, Jimmy Carter did something great, and he legalized homebrewing on the national level in 1978 (although it was not legal on the state level in all states until 2013). Once homebrewing became legal, it allowed for experimentation with styles and techniques that led to small independent breweries opening up (at the time called micro-breweries, now referred to as craft beer). It took until 1994 for craft beer to even make up 1% of the US market in volume. Two years later, the US had over 1,000 active breweries, and then it took until 2011 for the US to pass 2,000 active breweries. After that, growth exploded, reaching 3,000 active breweries in 2014 and reaching over 4,100 in 2015 (while now making up 10% of the US market).

    If you are unaware, after prohibition a three tier system was put into place to extract taxes and still allow regulation of alcohol production and distribution. These tiers are regulated on the state level, meaning that we have a rare opportunity to look at each of the states, and compare the results of their regulations over the 30 years since small breweries started opening. Thankfully, the Mercatus Center has done this, with a focus on two factors:

    1. Self-distribution – Allowing breweries to sell their beer directly to retailers instead of going through a distributor
    2. Beer franchise laws – Which determine when a brewery can terminate their deal with a distributor

    The study finds that allowing breweries to self-distribute and to get out of contracts with distributors they are having issue with leads to more breweries and a higher volume of production. This leads to more jobs, more options for consumers, and more taxes for the state (they’ll always take their cut).

    It’s a common refrain that drugs should be legalized and treated like alcohol. If we want to regulate drugs like alcohol, the study by the Mercatus Center shows us that we should have less regulation if we want people to have more options. These options do not always need to be for stronger and more potent items. Two of the current fads in the craft beer world are session beers and sour beers. Both of which are generally lower in alcohol than your average beer.

    Of course, we’ll also want to try to avoid some of the more terrible laws that exist currently in some states. People are generally used to the alcohol laws in their state: they know if they have to go to a special store to buy some things, or if they need to make sure to stock up on Saturday; however, they generally don’t know the laws in the states around them. These laws vary wildly state to state, with some states being relatively good (California and Oregon come to mind) and some states just bad (Utah and Pennsylvania, I’m looking at you)

    Some of the more bizarre laws from the more moderate locations include:

    Thankfully, in this area things are getting better. In doing the research for this, I ran across several laws that have already been repealed/updated. Last year included quite a few sweeping changes to alcohol laws through the states. Almost every one of those laws was opposed by the various groups who had profited by the regulations that were in place (liquor stores, distributors, and AB InBev/SABMiller), and yet the changes continue. It helps that craft beer is still a growing industry. In my home state of Ohio, there are currently 57 active applications for new brewery licenses, and there have been only a handful of breweries that closed their doors in the past year.

    If you’re interested in keeping up with the current laws and changes that are being proposed the Brewers Association is a good start, as is your local brewery.