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This past weekend, I played a few games that gave me thinky thoughts.
Distilled is actually a pretty solid strategy/set collection game with a theme around running a distillery. You buy recipes and ingredients, distill products, package and sell them, and attempt to economically outmaneuver your opponents over a fixed game length. It’s a bit of a point salad, but not to the extent of, say, A Feast for Odin.
However, it’s one of the most ridiculously overproduced games I have ever played in my life. It has a shitload of small fiddly components (like high-res liquor label chits that form part of the scoring), it takes up a ton of space, and it has a huge-ass box - all for a game that, frankly, isn’t complex enough to warrant all those components.
It really embodies the Kickstarter Game phenomenon to me - it feels like a game designed by a pile of stretch goals, with a primary aim of getting a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign. And sure, it worked, but I find it incredibly egregious. I like some space-taking bit-fiddling games, but man, I found myself thinking “does it need this much stuff” pretty much every turn.
The game itself is fun! But I would never in my life buy it, because no way do I want to fuck with all that stuff. We’re talking Eclipse or Twilight Imperium levels of Stuff, but without the game to really back it up.
On the other side of the spectrum, I continue my quest to understand Guns in the Pacific. This is that experimental one-off Chudyk game that virtually nobody owns and even fewer people have actually played. I’m reasonably convinced that I have played this game more times than anyone else on the planet except probably Carl Chudyk and his one playtester.
I have re-rewritten the rules once again, because the layout of the rulebook is just really really bad. It explains a turn in order and explains concepts in full the first time they become relevant, but it really wants a hierarchal information flow instead. It’s really inexplicable and I have no idea how a person can even follow this layout, unless they’re a designer who already has the entire game in their head.
This game is de facto evidence that everyone needs an editor.
But one thing I’ve also come to think about it is that this is a game that would benefit from some more production. Like all Chudyk things it’s a card-driven game, but this one adds dice and counters and tokens. Its decision space forms a map, but the game doesn’t actually give you a useful map as a visual aid. You need to make a tableau, but it doesn’t give you a player mat.
And so, as a result, a significant portion of your time is spent keeping the damn thing organized. There’s some needless overhead that really could be offloaded to some visual aids, and IMO, the game would be improved for it.
And finally, for the first time ever, I was able to finish a game of A Few Acres of Snow. This one is semi-famous for having a strategy set (the “Halifax Hammer”) that results in an outsized win rate for one of the sides (although this was largely neutered by a couple of rules updates), and as a result some people dismissed it as “broken.”
Personally, I find it brilliant and thematic. It’s an asymmetrical game with a fixed set of components, so of course it’s going to be imbalanced. That’s fine. It’s more about the feel and the play for me, and this one executes it superbly.
I feel like AFAoS sits nicely in between the previous two games - it has exactly enough components to do its thing, without getting too deep in the weeds. It accomplishes a historical wargaming feel - your empire is cumbersome, you can’t do nearly as much as you want, unchecked ambition will probably lead to ruin, and you have to go to war with what you have on hand instead of what you want - but does so without needless excess. It’s pretty efficient and elegant in the way it goes about things.
My takeaway from this weekend is that while making a component-efficient game is desirable (a la Chudyk, who makes a Lot Of Game in a small box), there are diminishing returns in pursuing efficiency. Nobody is well-served by component bloat, but I think more people interested in creating a rich thematic experience in their games would do well to study AFAoS and see why it works the way it does. Use components to offload game management, but don’t use them just to add shiny things.
Also, hire an actual editor for your rulebooks. What the fuck, Carl?
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Was so great to see superbunnyhop again, and he did a really great job in this video too!
It appears the old tabletop show has a spiritual successor.
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Dropout is the perfect place to do something like that.
I got my copy of Innovation: Ultimate Edition and then sat on it but got to play some games a week or so ago. The newly designed card artwork is great and I haven’t had a chance to play with any expansions but I do like the changes they made to the core game cards which helps move you through Ages 1-5 much faster than the previous version of the game.
The new rulebook is written really well with great examples and the box insert is great with plenty of space to be able to store all the cards while sleeved. I’ve never been a sleeving guy, but I splurged and got card sleeves coming this week to sleeve every single card.
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Glad to know I’m not the only one who got Innovation Ultimate and has had a hard time getting around to opening it up!
I literally spent almost 2 hours sleeving every single card on Saturday, but its done now. The addition of the 11th age deck now lets you cleanly make a full 12 hour clock face with the Age achievement cards at the noon position down into the center which feels way nicer than you would think now.
Now that its sleeved I’m much more up for bring it anywhere/everywhere without worrying about cards getting scratched/spilled on so I look forward to playing it at local brewpubs etc. in the near future.
I am really excited to dig into the expansions but I want to play a couple more base only games to really get a feel for the quicker tempo in earlier ages and also feel out the Age 11 deck a bit. The Self-Execute & Super-Execute rules text seems to specifically come into play in those Age 11 cards (maybe age 10 too now)