I had a more enjoyable game of Ragemore just now (it has the benefit of being quick to play, so I’m giving it a chance to grow on me). This was largely on account of things going badly and forcing me to make a lot of unwanted plays just in order to stay alive, and so it was quite satisfying to pull out a win at the end.
If more than two cards are “killed” during the game you lose. I had one card dead early on, and was about to play the card that lets you resurrect a dead card, when I realised that I couldn’t play that card (because it matched the top suit of both quests), which meant that… I had to kill that card instead, without using its ability. So instead of the graveyard being back to zero cards, it now had the maximum two, including the only card which could get cards out of the graveyard.
Much of the rest of the game was me trying to avoid the seemingly-endless stream of things which were going to kill a card : )
I had strong cards for “fighting” (which is more “turning enemies into allies” in this game), and so this did let me add most of the would-be “kill a card” enemies to my own party – but this meant that almost no cards were going into the quest piles at all – and the only way to win involves fulfilling quest requirements.
In the end there were just enough cards I could get through into the quests, and the sheer size and variety of my own party allowed me to fulfil quests far more easily than normal (which has a side effect of cycling cards from my party back into the draw pile, which was permanently on the brink of emptying and losing me the game towards the end), and in the end the balance was just on my side.
If the game was always like that, it would be quite good : )
It certainly does look pretty, so I was hoping to hear good things about it. It’s a shame when the art is really nice but the game is disappointing. Oh well.
I’m hoping that Unsurmountable will be good. I think Food Chain Island is neat, so I’m curious to see what else Scott Almes does with the format, and it seems like it might have a similar elegant simplicity about it. (Has anyone played Ugly Gryphon Inn? It’s his other solo wallet game. The cards look kinda busy/fiddly, but my interest is piqued.)
It hasn’t been mentioned here much, but Skulls of Sedlec is one of the best of the wallet games that I’ve played so far. I’ve only played it solo (which requires the “Monstrance” expansion), and I also have the “Castle Guards” and “Executioners” expansions, both of which provide enjoyable variations on the puzzle.
Tom talked about it in his video and I’d recommend checking out the base version via PNP if you’re on the fence.
Oh, I didn’t realise he was so prolific a designer. Along with numerous other things, it looks like he designs the “Tiny Epic” series of games. I guess the Wallet Games series allows him to focus more on the Tiny than the Epic : )
Besides Food Chain Island, Martian Dice is the only game of his that I’ve played (and it’s another tiny thing which punches well above its weight). I’m even more interested in his output for this series now.
After exactly one game of Hierarchy w/ solo Emissary expansion I think it feels quite similar to Food Chain Island. The process is different, but in both games you win by achieving a valid numeric-ish sequence of all the main cards, each of which has some kind of unique ability which affects the basic rules when you use it, and you have a random side-selection of extra cards (“Edicts”) which are something like a combination of the friendly waters and tough skies cards of FCI (they each have their own unique ability which you can employ one time at any point of the game and, depending on difficulty, you must use a certain number of them).
The set-up (with the deck split into two alternating hands of cards) is more complex than FCI, and the game doesn’t have the spatial element and perfect information of FCI (rather than your moves being restricted by card adjacency, this game limits your moves by only having three cards in each of the hands at a time), but the end result and planning feels similar to me.
There are similarities with Elevenses For One as well, which is an even tinier card game about putting a random arrangement of eleven cards into order whilst navigating the unique rules of each one. I guess I quite enjoy this style of puzzle. (My main reason for picking up a bunch of these Wallet Games was because I was permanently carrying EFO in my jacket pocket, and having additional similarly-portable options appealed to me.)
Hierarchy isn’t a dedicated solo game, and you have to read the regular rules as well as the solo rules, so I feel that I was up and running with those other games more quickly than I was with this one; but that’s just relative – as with all the wallet games, it’s a lightweight rule set, and pretty straightforward once you start playing. Tom didn’t particularly like this as a two-player game, but the card design issue he was most vocal about isn’t such a factor in the solo game (the writing remains small, but nothing is ever upside down); and as something to puzzle your way through without having to worry about how long your turn is taking, I think this kind of game works well.
So this has actually grown on me more. Once you get past the fact that it’s a completely abstract game… there’s a bit of a hook here. The speed of set-up and play is a definite factor (it’s extremely easy to fit in a game of this) as is the “train factor” (i.e. having established that I can make this compact enough to play on the train* : )
So I’m still playing this, and I think not moving it to the discard pile after all.
It is one of those games that I almost never lose, though (not quite to the extent of The Maiden In The Forest, but the win ratio is extremely high). Per those earlier comments this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it still seems worth noting.
(*) It’s a bit marginal – but with my laptop to play on top of, and if I hold the completed quest cards in my hand, it’s completely do-able. I think my most compact train game is one of the solo Cribbage variants I play, as my tiny portable crib board isn’t in danger of sliding away, and I only have to deal with a couple of hands of cards at a time.
I don’t see myself ignoring this, so that leaves me… up to 2 games + 2 expansions I could add without bumping up the cost of shipping (and I already know I want Unsurmountable).
Tom takes a quick look at Rove, Moving Pictures, and Death Valley in his new round-up video (from 9:29 onwards).
Rove I’ve been keen on but it was sold out. I rather suspect I’ll be grabbing that at some point in the future. Moving Pictures is a lovely theme for me as a film-lover, but after some reading and pondering I’d decided against including it when placing my Sedlec expansions order. It’s interesting to see that Tom liked Death Valley this much, as I only heard a fairly negative report around these parts.
For these reasons I’ve actually been playing this more than any of the others recently. Not on a train, but it’s really so fast to set up and play that when I don’t have time for anything long this is a shoo-in to fill a few minutes.
The disconnects with the theme are still ludicrous (there surely must be a potential retheme where things would actually make some kind of sense), but in the end this one is a keeper for me.
Thematic hilarity in Ragemore…
The card art is dramatic good-vs-evil fantasy fare, and in the gameplay you have three actions: (1) Recruit; (2) Quest; (3) Fight.
Recruiting allows one of your characters to convert one or more enemy characters to your side. Having successfully recruited from the enemy, your character then joins the enemy side. I guess it’s more of an exchange programme…
Questing allows one of your characters to fulfil objectives for one of the two quests and, having succeeded in furthering your cause towards victory, your character then has a change of heart and… you guessed it… joins the enemy side.
Fighting pits either one or two of your characters against a single enemy. If you are stronger than them, the enemy says “woah” and simply joins your side. If they are stronger than you, your character dies and… the enemy joins your side?! If the two strengths are equally matched then everyone fights for so long that they forget about what was happening (and then your character joins the enemy side).
You win the game by doing well at quests. You lose the game if:
You run out of characters (fair)
Too many of your characters died (sure)
There are too many quest objective (ok)
There are too few quest objectives (um)
You have no enemies (…?!)
Mechanically there are reasons for all this – the cards are double-sided, and as an 18-card game you need the cards you’ve used to cycle back into the draw deck of enemies to prevent it from running out; and flipping the cards from side to side exposes and hides different abilities for your cards and the enemy cards, which is important; but thematically it’s absolutely bonkers.
(All of that aside, it’s a nifty little abstract game about matching icons and collecting sets, while maintaining the delicate balance of several different groups of cards which need to never get too big or too small, and dealing with the special abilities of the enemy cards. It’s not amazing or very exciting, but it does fill a niche and I’ve come to quite appreciate that about it. Also I now have a silly voice with which all characters announce their intentions of going on a quest.)
Haven’t seen the latest video yet… negative views on Death Valley must have been me. I don’t get on with the whole format very well, with the exception of Sprawlopolis.
Death Valley is very pretty and I adore the color scheme, yet I sold it on after playing it a few times with my partner. Maybe it just didn’t work for us. I remember it felt a bit samy despite different scoring objectives on the cards and the push-your-luck element just didn’t happen at all. The only reason one would go “over” on one of the symbols was if the other player got hold of the one or two cards that allowed them to manipulate the other player’s cards. As such we felt this card in particular was a game winner. It just promised more than it could deliver in the small format.
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And I measure all these by Sprawlopolis standards which is a bit harsh maybe.
Sprawlopolis: one game to rule them all!
Agropolis: fine, played once or twice because it’s just Sprawlopolis but I know the goals less well and need to concentrate on it more. Still a keeper for the unlikely event that I get bored of Sprawlopolis
Tussie Mussie: holding on to it to finally try out the expansions. Enjoyed previous plays, always take on trips then don’t play. Flowers are pretty.
Food Chain Island: lovely puzzle, if a little too easy. But games feel more same-y than Sprawlopolis games so can only play rarely.
Seasons of Rice: pretty good and interesting tile laying but needs two players and I have yet to convince my partner to “small games night”
Death Valley: pretty color scheme, big promise/good premise but felt unbalanced and same after a few games (sold)
Circle the Wagons: what if Sprawlopolis wasn’t a coop game? Kind of… something with laying cards in a circle and drafting. Not bad, but didn’t feel like playing again (Sold)
Antinomy: bought before I realized how much 2 player doesn’t work for us and I actively do not want to even try this game -.- (on the sell stack)
Liberation: took one look at the cards and it felt sooo fiddly. Also falls into the smaller version of a big game trap (on the sell stack)
One more thing. The German version of Food Chain Island has the best name:
“Die Schmatzinsel”
Schatz = Treasure
Schmatzen = to eat with gusto while also making loud noises (official translation is “smacking your lips”… yeah but more than that obviously because normally there is eating involved. The word is mostly used to tell children “Hör auf zu Schmatzen!” —close your mouth while eating)
To a German ear the title sounds somewhat silly which fits the art.
My copy of Unsurmountable finally arrived (with the new Skulls of Sedlec expansions), and I had a few games the other day.
It’s nice. If you enjoy Food Chain Island (by the same designer) then I think you’ll likely enjoy this one as well, as it’s a similar kind of puzzle where you are trying to plan a sequence of card positions and special abilities to order to reach the desired outcome (in this case, an unbroken path from the base of the mountain to the top).
It has 5 difficulty levels with increasingly-stringent constraints to be satisfied, making it harder and harder to get suitable cards into each position on the mountain. I won at level 1 and 2 and lost a game at level 3. Levels 4 and 5 do not look like they would be easy to achieve.
It has one fiddly element in needing to constantly shift your remaining “base camp” row of cards sideways to collapse gaps (as you always add new cards on the right-hand side), but otherwise it’s pretty smooth. Nothing mind-blowing, but another solid little solo puzzle game.
Numbsters is the newest crowd-funding campaign in the wallet game series, and is interesting to me immediately because it’s a solo game designed to be playable in-hand with no table, which means you really can play it anywhere. I backed Palm Laboratory for this reason a while back – I have a few games that I know I can play with very small amounts of table space (I consider these my “train games” as in “I can play them whilst on a train”); but that usually entails at least a little creativity with holding cards – I don’t currently have anything that is designed to be playable without a table.
The gameplay seems somewhat like a simplified version of Food Chain Island, which makes it less interesting on the one hand, but with that really minimal space advantage on the other, which definitely has an appeal for me.
It also reminded me of The Shipwreck Arcana, so much so I had to check the designer. But it is not the same one. I had not realized from the page it was playing in hand… interesting. I am still considering it. I have recently played Food Chain Island quite a bit.