I thought the review was really interesting, because it was a good case study of how nebulous the level of enjoyment of a game can be. Many of Quinns’ criticisms could easily be leveled at other games SUSD has recommended (RftG can easily have runaway leaders, Pipeline’s pipe mechanics are entirely divorced from its theme, Azul’s scoring is completely inscrutable for its first game or two), but they get by simply because he enjoys them more. And I don’t mean that statement as a criticism–all of the points he made were completely fair and reasonable, and I could see any of them turning off someone on this game–but I think it’s interesting how hard it can be to describe what makes a game resonate or not. It reminds me of the gang’s thoughts on Marco Polo, Clans of Caledonia, or Teotihuacan, where they could appreciate the quality of the game, but couldn’t muster any real enthusiasm for it.
That said, I do have a disagreement with the review, and it’s with Quinns’ assertion that point salad games aren’t good as introductory games. To a certain extent, this is true; if you toss someone into a viscous miasma of rules soup without a life preserver, they’ll probably flounder a bit before they learn to swim. However, I think a hidden strength of point salad-y games is that they allow for a wide variety of play styles without punishing any of them. In a lot of board games, even gateway games, it’s very possible to make a strictly bad decision; you don’t cluster your tiles in Azul, you frivolously place all your meeples in Carcassonne, you focus too much on movement in El Dorado, et cetera. And these easily noticeable and accessible errors do give the game an easy handle to grasp on to, but they also punish players for not thinking exactly how the game wants them to think. When I put Wingspan in front of players, on the other hand, there’s not really a “wrong” way to go about things. My grandmother’s strategy is to just play as many bird cards as possible, without regard to the other aspects of the game. And she probably won’t win, but she won’t just be knocked out of the game because she didn’t know the basic strategies, and it’ll feel like a fun, tight race the entire time. It’s one of the reasons why drafting games are so good as introductory games–when there are so many varied paths to victory, it’s easy for someone to just do what they want to, and still be rewarded for it. And yes, these kinds of games do take one or two plays to reveal their intricacies, but during those one or two plays, any new players aren’t just going to get beaten around by their lack of understanding that “this is how you’re supposed to play”.
Overall, I think games with this kind of freedom can be excellent for introducing people into the gaming hobby, especially people who don’t have a strong competitive streak. It can be a bit awkward when someone asks “How do you win?” and you have to give a noncommittal shrug, but it means new people can explore the mechanics at their own pace, even as the experienced players fiddle with all the knobs and levers of the Rules Machine.