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viktor_haagFeeling under the weather today, so may have more cogent comments to add to this post later. However, this weekend, I played one and a half games of Twilight Struggle, almost one game of Caylus (didn't need to finish it), and finished of Alan Furst's Kingdom Of Shadows.
Twilight Struggle
This game is fun. That's all you need to know. Even if you're not really into wargames, or 20th century politics, if you have lots of opportunity to play two-player games with someone who doesn't mind a certain amount of crunch, then you should definitely add this game to your collection. In short: if you've bought Memoir '44, BattleLore, or Commands & Colors: Ancients, then this game will probably go over well with you.
It's essentially a two-player majority-control game with chrome. That in and of itself doesn't make it sound all that great. However, the genius of this game is the intricate weaving of the theme into the game. It's filled with tense "auugh" and "oh no" moments, nasty plotting, and brinksmanship that really hooks you into the cold war theme.
Highly, highly recommended.
Caylus
This is not a bad game. It even has aspects of good game in it. However, what it is, is under-developed. It sprawls. It is too long. I marvel at folks who say, "Oh yes, in our group, we can finish a game of Caylus in between 60 and 90 minutes!"
Bah. I have played five or six times now, and I have never had a game under three hours. I've played with three, four, and five players. All games were three plus hours. And I don't think we're particularly slow players, but I suppose that, relatively, we are.
Like Die Macher, I never really feel any downtime in Caylus -- the game moves along at a bit of a clip, and all the action is nicely interleaved to prevent downtime. However, it doesn't quite have the same breadth of accomplishment offered with Die Macher either. Die Macher is long, but it feels justifiably long. Caylus just feels like it could have used an extra round of playtesting and development.
I'm not sure that I'll ever suggest playing Caylus again. There's just so many other games that are equally good that take up a more convenient time slot. However, it's not a bad game, and is, in fact, a rather enjoyable game. Like other games that have lots of little controls, the game leads to immediate musing about how one could have done better. Caylus might see the table when certain conditions are met, like a perfect storm: three or four players with precisely three to four hours to kill and everyone in the mood not to play more than one game. But then it would also have to compete with all those other three to four hour games that are good with three or four players (like Indonesia, for example).
Caylus is good, but it could have been so much better.
Kingdom Of Shadows
And, oddly enough, that's rather how I feel about this book by Alan Furst. The blurbs on it assured me that it was considered his finest work, but frankly, after reading three others, I think of this as the weakest of the four. It meanders; the protagonist is kept in the dark and the reader also, so many questions arise, and none are answered; some of the characters are well drawn and some are not (quirky features or a few well-described features do not a well-rounded character make).
Furst is readable, and his descriptions of the time and place are compelling if you're predisposed to like thriller/espionage tells from the pre-, during-, and post-WWII years (and I am). But this particular exemplar, more than anything else, made me look at the members of my Ambler collection on my shelf and wonder why I wasn't spending the time reading one of them instead.
Cautious thumb up. Not required reading, but if you've read all of Ambler, and you like WWII-era noir thrillers, and you haven't already discovered Furst, then I can recommend it to you. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one to start with. (Or maybe I should, since any of the others I've read of his could, in my opinion, be an improvement over this one.)
Twilight Struggle
This game is fun. That's all you need to know. Even if you're not really into wargames, or 20th century politics, if you have lots of opportunity to play two-player games with someone who doesn't mind a certain amount of crunch, then you should definitely add this game to your collection. In short: if you've bought Memoir '44, BattleLore, or Commands & Colors: Ancients, then this game will probably go over well with you.
It's essentially a two-player majority-control game with chrome. That in and of itself doesn't make it sound all that great. However, the genius of this game is the intricate weaving of the theme into the game. It's filled with tense "auugh" and "oh no" moments, nasty plotting, and brinksmanship that really hooks you into the cold war theme.
Highly, highly recommended.
Caylus
This is not a bad game. It even has aspects of good game in it. However, what it is, is under-developed. It sprawls. It is too long. I marvel at folks who say, "Oh yes, in our group, we can finish a game of Caylus in between 60 and 90 minutes!"
Bah. I have played five or six times now, and I have never had a game under three hours. I've played with three, four, and five players. All games were three plus hours. And I don't think we're particularly slow players, but I suppose that, relatively, we are.
Like Die Macher, I never really feel any downtime in Caylus -- the game moves along at a bit of a clip, and all the action is nicely interleaved to prevent downtime. However, it doesn't quite have the same breadth of accomplishment offered with Die Macher either. Die Macher is long, but it feels justifiably long. Caylus just feels like it could have used an extra round of playtesting and development.
I'm not sure that I'll ever suggest playing Caylus again. There's just so many other games that are equally good that take up a more convenient time slot. However, it's not a bad game, and is, in fact, a rather enjoyable game. Like other games that have lots of little controls, the game leads to immediate musing about how one could have done better. Caylus might see the table when certain conditions are met, like a perfect storm: three or four players with precisely three to four hours to kill and everyone in the mood not to play more than one game. But then it would also have to compete with all those other three to four hour games that are good with three or four players (like Indonesia, for example).
Caylus is good, but it could have been so much better.
Kingdom Of Shadows
And, oddly enough, that's rather how I feel about this book by Alan Furst. The blurbs on it assured me that it was considered his finest work, but frankly, after reading three others, I think of this as the weakest of the four. It meanders; the protagonist is kept in the dark and the reader also, so many questions arise, and none are answered; some of the characters are well drawn and some are not (quirky features or a few well-described features do not a well-rounded character make).
Furst is readable, and his descriptions of the time and place are compelling if you're predisposed to like thriller/espionage tells from the pre-, during-, and post-WWII years (and I am). But this particular exemplar, more than anything else, made me look at the members of my Ambler collection on my shelf and wonder why I wasn't spending the time reading one of them instead.
Cautious thumb up. Not required reading, but if you've read all of Ambler, and you like WWII-era noir thrillers, and you haven't already discovered Furst, then I can recommend it to you. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one to start with. (Or maybe I should, since any of the others I've read of his could, in my opinion, be an improvement over this one.)
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-06 01:59 (UTC)I seem to recall an upcoming 2nd edition of Caylus is either out or in the works. Any idea if your qualms would be improved with the new edition rules?
::B::
P.S. But I did learn to play 2-player Blokus this weekend! Really I did!
no subject
Date: 2007-02-06 13:46 (UTC)I'm not convinced that Green buildings are required: add one or two Blue "Apartment Building" tiles instead, make one more marketplace brown tile, and remove both architects replacing them with one more lawyer; change the lawyer power letting you build blue buildings on top of any building you own or any of the starting red buildings. I suspect this would compress the game without breaking its balance.
I suspect also that the King's Favour track could (a) lose the victory points row, and (b) get shortened by one column for all rows.
Finally, I might also be tempted to hand out 1 Gold or one Favour whenever a player is eligible for a Favour (i.e. when building a castle building, or working the tourney field).
I suspect that these changes would speed up the game without much in the way of loss.
But I haven't played it enough to really have a feel for the engines. And I'm not really willing currently to play it enough to acquire a feel for the engines. Plus, I hope my qualms aren't improved with the new edition rules unless they're rules changes that I could effect on my copy of the game without having to buy a whole new box... 8)
PPS -- I've played Blokus once or twice, and rather liked it. However, I'm not a big fan of completely abstract games. I like theme in my boardgames and actually favour games with more theme over games with finely tuned and craft systems. Ergo, I don't own Blokus. I do own Einfach Genial (Ingenious), and I'm glad that I do own that - it occupies the slot on my shelf that would otherwise go to Blokus or Gemblo, or similar.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-08 12:29 (UTC)http://www.gmtgames.com/gmt0c3i.htm
::B::
no subject
Date: 2007-02-09 20:38 (UTC)