1817 is to 18xx what 18xx is to Ticket to Ride cube rails (?).
Its popularity, I believe, is due to a self-selection bias (moreso than BGG rankings in general)
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I see… SO OFTEN, the comment - I don’t agree with SU&SD, but I appreciate their analysis and find them entertaining. Not sure I expected to hear it here on their own (unofficial) forums.
Classify me, then, as someone who has found them delightfully corellated to my own tastes. I’d say, I’m not sure I like everything they like, but it’s rare that they’ve bagged on a game I do enjoy.
Deviations? I don’t think the Monikers box is worth it. So much better to make your own, as the Monikers cards seem pretty niche and tailored to some other community’s inside jokes. That said, the game is superb.
I’ve never gotten the joy out of Arctic Scavengers that I expected. I also don’t think I’ve played it with the right group. I’m keeping it around to give it a fair shake but don’t think it will make the eventual cut.
I don’t like Welcome To - but I already knew I don’t like Roll and Writes. I should have known. Tried it out because I thought it might be different this time…
Barenpark has yet to thrill me. Way too simple. I have not yet played with goals, but I think that one goes out the door as soon as my girls age out of it.
But here’s the meat of this post - first a defense. I think they were spot spot on on Terraforming Mars. islaythedragon captured it even better. This game is somehow, dirtily, FUN, while having so little merit. Turns are repetitive. The ostensible variety of the cards disappears when you look closer and find that they mostly sub for each other. The solitaire gameplay and take that interaction mix together to be the worst of both worlds. The game overstays its welcome. The whole thing is clumsy and unpolished.
That said, it is satisfying. It somehow manages to be fun despite the flaws. I found my limit at around 5 games when the irritation kept rising and the fun got repetitive. I’d like to play this about once a year, but I maintain the opinion that it is not a good game. I have an emotional reaction when I see it where it is on the BGG rankings.
Through the Ages is similar. I’ve only played on the app, where it is at least quick. Like TF Mars, the ostensible variety of cards boils down into a few archetypes that feel incredibly same-y. Turns feel same-y. The game feels same-y from beginning to end, doing the same thing over and over with larger and larger numbers. TtA, unlike TFMars, is at least a polished and well assembled game. Like Les MIserables, though, it could have used a good editor. Nations took me a few plays to really grok the gameflow, but having played (and understood) Nations, TtA is very hard to ever pick up again. I’d rate it a solid Mediocre.
People say that after 10 plays or so some nuance comes out of TtA and the game really shines. That’s like a 40 hour commitment to start getting value.
Turning it around now - Gaia Project. This is the one that insults me. I can go on at length if people want, but Gaia Project scrutinized an excellent game (Terra Mystica) and literally patched up every hole. The race powers, the game flow, the costs and currencies - no stone left unturned. SU&SD (and BGG) rates it as more complex, but it isn’t. Every aspect of the game ties together. Terra Mystica may be teachable in 75% of the time, but you’ll spend 20 minutes reteaching the game during play - because all pieces are disjointed and disconnected. Gaia Project, once its taught, is taught.
Gaia Project. So good. It’s hard for me to really understand how anyone could prefer Terra Mystica.
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I’ve always liked SU&SD’s output because they put a game in context. They try to explain who might like it based on where the fun/puzzle/decisions are; and they tend to point out things people might not like.
I feel as though Quinns still does a very good job of this (and always has). Paul was really good at it. Matt, less so? Though, I do love when Matt adores a game despite all the ways it’s not good. I haven’t seen enough from Tom or Ava to know how good they are at contextualizing a game within their reviews, but so far it’s been: not enough (how many pocket games do you need in your pocket the next time you’re at a pub?)
I feel like Ava’s is a struggle of the transition from written to audio/video; I feel like they are capable of putting a game in context, but get distracted by the, unsurprising, challenges of realtime delivery.
That said, I think Tom and Ava have bright futures.
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For full clarity, and not meaning to jump on you: this is a forum I was already running when the SU&SD forums closed down, and I (as one of the people affected by it) invited people who liked the Discourse discussion model (as distinct from Disqus, Discord, etc., lots of things starting with Dis—) to come over here. I.e. it’s really unofficial. SU&SD staff and others are obviously welcome here as is anyone who’s willing not to cause disruption, but they don’t contribute anything to running costs or board admin and I don’t ask them to.
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Additionally, the last thing any content creator needs on the Internet is another echo chamber.
Everything I write about the SU&SD crew, here and elsewhere, is in hopes that they stumble across it at some point (however unlikely that may be).
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@RogerBW - interesting! I learned about this when the official forums died, I didn’t know we were squatting on a pre-existing settlement.
One other comment on topic - Paul did such an incredibly poor job communicating Isle of Skye that I immediately wrote it off. It is one of my top 5 games. Thank goodness the app went on sale and my resulting thought was “why not.”
I’m now two expansions and an insert in, never looking back.
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Yes, I think Paul undersold Isle of Skye. But, I think it’s from a position of being in the hobby for a long time and not seeing they key points of IoS that makes it different and, in my opinion, better than Carcassonne (a game that Paul loves a lot more than I do).
Isle of Skye is in my Top 10. Carcassonne is in my collection of “Games that other people may have heard about and might feel more comfortable playing than learning something new”
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I think Paul’s problem on that video was not making clear what could be liked by other kind of players. His sort of “cold” approach, or unenthusiastic, at least for me, could be a bit misleading when he doesn’t fancy a game. But I love most of his reviews. I think that non-enthused approach he has can be helpful with my pocket, and I am grateful for it.
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For my part, I still don’t get the Carcassonne comparisons at all. Square pastoral tiles - are they the only two games with that? Glen More? In a minority of games you will get a scoring tile that awards points for finishing water or mountains, and that will also overlap.
I tell people that Isle of Skye is the perfection of a spectrum running Suburbia → Castles of Mad King Ludwig → Isle of Skye.
Suburbia was too isolated and numerical, and the market awarded people unevenly.
Ludwig introduced a stack-ranked auction that often didn’t match the value of the tiles and forced you into situations that didn’t make sense. Too often none of them were really useful.
Isle of Skye (like Gaia Project) took these elements and both polished the ideas and interlinked them so that the game comes together as a cohesive whole. Little touches like forcing you to buy any tiles no one else buys ties the players together better in the auction, and the separation of shared scoring goals and individual scrolls makes sure players are watching everyone’s board and bouncing off each other while still creating uneven value across the table allowing for tile exchanges.
So yeah - Isle of Skye. Everything just works. And if you play King Ludwig you’ll see a ton of shared DNA, which Carcassonne completely lacks. I just don’t get the comparison at all.
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With both Isle of Skye and Feast for Odin I left baffled with how the game actually worked. Those two stand out as his “off” reviews in my mind.
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I still have no interest in this game, likely due to how unhooked I was after watching the SUSD review. It still astounds me how many people rank this as their top 1 or 2 Rosenbergs.
Definitely agree that Paul didn’t sell it in his review (but, perhaps, it accurately portrayed a game that I, in fact, won’t like? Jury is still out because I don’t know anyone who has it to borrow)
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Feast for Odin is great. I’m awful at it
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Feast for Odin is the Sunday Afternoon game. It’s just so lovely putting things on a board. Rosenberg is always a lot of busy work, but FfO is so damn satisfying.
I can see how it was bamboozling when it first came out - all anyone could talk about was how many spaces that board had. I’m glad Quinns has come around to the game finally.
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I eventually got it based on SU&SD’s constant allusion to it (e.g., end of Lowlands), my confidence in Rosenburg, and a good price. After reading the instructions I was worried I’d made a huge mistake.
I love Agricola. Part of that is the engine building. You start off scrabbling for a wheat seed, but as time goes on, your animals auto-breed and your plantations spill crops on you and your oven multiplies your food, etc. AFFO didn’t really have that… it was more “collect things and organize them on a grid.”
Now I’ve only played it solo (thanks newborn and pandemic), but it turns out it does have momentum /escalation. One key piece is that different actions require more or fewer vikings, and you get more vikings each turn. So on turn one you have, say, 5 vikings. Yes, there are 1 viking actions, but you’ll quickly want to get into the 2 or 3 viking actions which pack more of a punch. The result is that on turn 1 you are doing maybe 2-4 things and barely eking by, while by the end of the game you’ll be throwing 12 vikings around, accomplishing more and larger tasks to have a huge turn.
Second is income. As you collect things and put them into your longhouses, you don’t have the usual polyomino challenge since most things are just rectangles. Rather, you are trying to surround certain spaces on your boards - once surrounded, you get the pictured objects for free at the start of each subsequent round. And, as with vikings, the more stuff you HAVE, the more you can DO. There’s a complex system of item upgrading where things go from red (least valuable) to blue (most valuable), and you’ve got this puzzle of trying to get and then upgrade goods so you can use them, either as action inputs or as polyomino storage.
I… liked it. I like Agricola better (best). I like Le Havre a touch less. Patchwork is just incredible.
That said, I’ve only played it alone and I’m generally not a solo-er. People say the Norwegians expansion is necessary to complete/perfect the game (via a streamlined action board) and I haven’t done that. I’d rank it between a 7 and a 10 (with Norwegians), and I need more exposure to pin it down.
Tying a bow on this, and what probably pushed me over the line, was Quinns’s statement in a podcast. Along the lines of - you get your friends, you brew a big pot of tea, and you just spend a leisurely Sunday afternoon pushing your vikings around. That sounded nice, and I think one day it will deliver.
(edit: and I now remember I was looking for a low-stess Uwe. I love Agricola, but until you’ve gotten 10 games under your belt and found the zen of subsistence farming, people just aren’t up for it every session. Caverna was the old default for low-stress-Gric, but Odin is more different and so it got the nod.)
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Ahh, I think I see the gap now: I already have “Sunday afternoon” games with themes I prefer more than Vikings (which, as nicely as they are portrayed in aFfO, are played out).
Additionally, I have very good spatial reasoning and people tend to not want to play against me in games with polyominos… and I tend to not find polyomino-based puzzles that interesting in general (probably because I have good spatial reasoning).
EDIT: also, I have no “Sunday afternoons” to sit and enjoy games; instead, I have toddlers and exhaustion.
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Does anyone buy FfO for the Vikings? It has even less theme than Caverna!
The spatial reasoning one is an odd one in FfO. It’s more of a resource management type game than spatial reasoning. Everyone can see the tiles they want, but it’s getting them that’s the difficulty.
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So true.
So wonderfully worth it.
And one day they’ll be little gamers, so help me.
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I am utterly dreadful at tile laying. To demonstrate this I once played FFO for 90 minutes and scored 2 points!
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For the one time I have played FfO, the theme is an excuse, more than a base or a source. At least in my opinion. Obviously there are tasks like whaling, raiding, the jewelry or colonizing Greenland that are more on point, but you take those away, and it could be a worker placement game for any tribal/medieval culture you fancy, plus the polyomino side of things. But it does something really well, the feeling of expansion, and the feeling of accomplishment that you get. You are filling the board, getting bonuses, and expanding while you feed the village. I think that is the main hook of it.
Cannot wait to play it again, and lose.
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This is one of SUSD’s “recommended” games that caused me to roll my eyes the hardest when Quinns was talking about whether a game “might not be for everyone” (or however he phrased it) as a criticism.
Not only are the boards scary-looking, but AFfO has the better part of one thousand components with which to fill them (I counted 950 from the BGG page).
Plonk that monster down in front of any random group of people, and watch half of them run for the hills…
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