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A study in not impulse-buying (reviewing some tabletop games)
Despite the fact that both my husband and I love tabletop games, we actually own surprisingly few of them. Part of it is that we prefer cooperative games, rather than playing against each other, and the majority of games are competitive. The other part is that we've been historically reluctant to spend money on physical games, though I'm not really sure why.
We coincidentally bought a number of games in the two days before the COVID lockdown. We went up to Seattle with a couple of friends because we'd rented an Air BnB with them to attend Emerald City Comic Con but the owner refused to reimburse us when the con got canceled, so we figured we might as well use the apartment we'd paid for. While we were there, we visited Mox Boardinghouse (a game store) multiple times and bought a pile of games, and we found them to be a boon during the next few months of being cooped up in the house.
Much more recently, we finally got our own copy of Marvel Zombies, which we've played at a friend's house, and we've been loving that.
A few weeks ago, we went up to Portland on an ill-fated quest to buy a Squishable I really want (turns out that Squishables closed that store, even though it's still listed on their website and in Google), and so we took the opportunity to visit the Portland Mox Boardinghouse. We bought four games: Kinfire Delve, Timeline Twist, Tesseract, and Buffer Time.
Now, I'm not going to talk too much about Kinfire Delve because we spent some amount of time in the store searching it on our phones and reading reviews and discussions before buying it -- exactly the opposite of the "impulse-buying" I noted in the title here. But I will say that it is a good game. The players each play a character with specific abilities and together, they have to investigate and solve anomalies in the forest, then defeat the big baddie that's causing them. It takes a lot of strategy and cooperation, which is exactly what we enjoy. The next time we go up to Mox, we'll be buying the other versions of Kinfire.
But, the other three, we bought them for various reasons, without much research:
* Timeline Twist: It's a cooperative variant on the original Timeline game, which was competitive. (Everyone gets cards with events on them, and on your turn, you guess where your card fits in the timeline on the table; if you're wrong, you have to draw more cards. The player that runs out of cards first wins.) We thought, hey, we like Timeline, so playing it cooperatively would be awesome!
* Buffer Time: This game is based on Star Trek: Lower Decks, which we love. So, we got the game.
* Tesseract: The main item in this game is a cube made randomly out of 64 dice, set on a spinning platform. Seriously -- go look at the images in the Amazon listing. How could I *not* buy this?
And now we've played them all.
So, the good news is that you can play TT as if it's the original Timeline, in competitive mode, which is good because otherwise we just wasted our money.
In the cooperative mode, you take 36 of the cards in the deck and that's the timeline you want to make. The first two cards are placed with their dates up and start the timeline. For example, you might get "Star Wars comes out", which is 1977, and "Freddy Mercury died", which is 1991. Then, the players take turns trying to place events in the timeline.
The thing is, you can only place cards before or after the cards that are already there, but not between them, so "Final episode of M*A*S*H is broadcast" in 1983 gets stuck in your hand, which can hold a maximum of four cards. There's a mechanism for discarding cards but it's entirely luck-based, and over the five games we've played, we never managed to successfully discard more than three cards between us, entirely due to bad luck.
Thus, our games tended to be about ten turns long (five for each of us), as the cards added to the timeline blocked out more and more time ranges that couldn't be played and our hands filled with cards we couldn't discard. Except one game, in which the first two cards were "1984 was published" (1949) and "Twitter opened" (2006). Nothing in our hands could be played.
There's a point system for figuring out whether or not you won, but we never even got to the point of trying to apply it, because it was obvious that the number of cards still in the draw pile was going to drive us negative.
So, this game is going in the closet and never coming back out.
I'll give props to the box designer: they did a good job making the game sound like it was going to capture the spirit of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Pity the contents of box didn't live up to the hype.
The title comes from a concept in the episode "Temporal Edict". The rascal Mariner explains to the straight-laced Boimler that you should pad your work time estimates a little so that either you have some time to relax and recuperate or, when you finish your work early and report it, you'll be considered a hero, and she calls this "buffer time". In the episode, the captain finds out about this and orders everyone to stop padding in buffer time and be working at all times. This is what the game attempted to capture: you are playing grunt workers on the ship and you're trying to complete your assignments while also doing fun side things, but you get in trouble if any officer catches you.
So, each player starts the game with two Side Project cards and two Ability cards in their hand, and there's a big Assignment, with a numerical Work target and Reward points, on the table. A player can either put down a Side Project (to add to the amount of Work needed to do everything but also to the amount of Reward you all get for finishing it), play an Ability, or draw a Shift card from the deck. The Shift deck has a bunch of "work" cards in it (with numbers from 1 to 3 and a couple of 5s), but also has officer cards. The idea is to hit the target Work number -- the assignment plus the side projects -- before getting four points of officers, which ends the round and trashes the Assignment. Once a person adds enough Work to hit that target number, the next player turns in the Assignment: the cards go to the Reward pile, that player gets a new Ability card, each player draws Side Projects to get their hand up to two, and a new Assignment is put on the table.
Okay, yes, I can see that this card game expresses the concept (if not the spirit) of buffer time pretty well. You have to finish an assignment plus some personal things given your allotted work time without getting in trouble. The problem is that this game is NOT FUN.
First, you might notice that we're not playing the ST:LD characters. We're just playing some random pogues. We can imagine that we're playing Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, or Rutherford, but that makes no difference. Why don't we have character cards with a couple of abilities that are unique to the characters?
Second, the point of the game is accumulate a target number of Reward points over five Assignments, but note that the players get a total of two Ability cards at the beginning of the game, and only one person gets a new Ability card each assignment. That means that once you've used up your Ability cards, all you really can do is draw from the Shift pile to hopefully get Work to play on the Assignment. Thus, each game we played devolved to just alternately flipping cards from the Shift pile until either the assignment was done or an officer ended the round. No decision-making, no clever plans. Just flip flip flip yay! or flip flip flip dammit.
Third, we counted and the officer cards consist of 20% of the Shift deck. That means you will on average get an officer once every five rounds. Given that most of assignments + side projects we were attempting required over 20 Work and the Work cards were weighted toward giving one or two points, you'd likely need at least ten cards to win the round and would probably draw two officers before that. Four officer points loses the round, and since Captain Freeman was worth three officer points, drawing her almost always mean you will lose. (And we drew her three times in the seven rounds we played. We only won two of those rounds.)
So, another game that's going in the closet.
We did buy the game because we like the IP, but to be honest, it really was because the last time we bought a game based on an IP, it was good. The last time we were at Mox, a couple of years ago, we saw the Good Omens game in the clearance pile, and of course, David Tennant on the cover with wings is always going to convince me to buy something. We did not expect much out of it except, hopefully, cards with pictures from the show.
We played it in the hotel room that night and we were pleasantly surprised by it. It's not a single game, but a bunch of mini beer-and-pretzel games. I don't remember the details (it's been a while since we played it), but the box comes with like a deck of cards, some dice, and a couple of other generic objects, though branded with GO, and an instruction booklet with rules for about five mini games, each with backstory on who in the show it's about and what they're trying to accomplish. The games weren't deep, but they required some thought and weren't totally chance-based or skill-less. And it called up memories about the show.
That, to me, is a successful IP game.
This is actually the game that we expected was going to be terrible: too complicated, too fragile (I mean, look at that dice cube!), too full of inexplicable rules). But, we played it yesterday for the first time, and we are chomping at the bit to play again.
It was amazing.
The idea behind this game is that an alien artifact called the Tesseract has fallen to Earth and it's starting to arm itself and will destroy the planet if it isn't stopped. The players are scientists that are analyzing the artifact and trying to contain it.
Each player has a lab, and during their turn, takes a bit off the Tesseract -- that is, removes a die -- and analyzes and manipulates the bit in their lab. Once they've collected enough of the right bits (either a "set" of 3 or more of the same number or a "run" of 3 or more numbers, but either way, all the dice have to either be the same color or all different colors), they can "contain" one of the bits and safely remove it from play. Meanwhile, the Tesseract is slowly "priming" bits -- a die is removed from the cube and placed in the primed area, and when certain conditions are met, they cause a breach. You shut down the Tesseract and win the game by containing one of every color and number of die, but if too many breaches occur first, the Earth is consumed and you lose the game.
The game, then, is a careful balance of manipulating dice to contain them quickly while also managing the primed dice to avoid breaches. You have to constantly work with the other players to plan the next few moves and to counteract the Tesseract's actions. There's some amount of chance here (after all, you are working with dice and cards), but game itself is all player skill.
The bottom line is two terrible games and one amazing game. Luckily, the expensive one was the amazing game; I would have hated to throw out the $60 game. But, that should teach us to not buy games on a whim.
We coincidentally bought a number of games in the two days before the COVID lockdown. We went up to Seattle with a couple of friends because we'd rented an Air BnB with them to attend Emerald City Comic Con but the owner refused to reimburse us when the con got canceled, so we figured we might as well use the apartment we'd paid for. While we were there, we visited Mox Boardinghouse (a game store) multiple times and bought a pile of games, and we found them to be a boon during the next few months of being cooped up in the house.
Much more recently, we finally got our own copy of Marvel Zombies, which we've played at a friend's house, and we've been loving that.
A few weeks ago, we went up to Portland on an ill-fated quest to buy a Squishable I really want (turns out that Squishables closed that store, even though it's still listed on their website and in Google), and so we took the opportunity to visit the Portland Mox Boardinghouse. We bought four games: Kinfire Delve, Timeline Twist, Tesseract, and Buffer Time.
Now, I'm not going to talk too much about Kinfire Delve because we spent some amount of time in the store searching it on our phones and reading reviews and discussions before buying it -- exactly the opposite of the "impulse-buying" I noted in the title here. But I will say that it is a good game. The players each play a character with specific abilities and together, they have to investigate and solve anomalies in the forest, then defeat the big baddie that's causing them. It takes a lot of strategy and cooperation, which is exactly what we enjoy. The next time we go up to Mox, we'll be buying the other versions of Kinfire.
But, the other three, we bought them for various reasons, without much research:
* Timeline Twist: It's a cooperative variant on the original Timeline game, which was competitive. (Everyone gets cards with events on them, and on your turn, you guess where your card fits in the timeline on the table; if you're wrong, you have to draw more cards. The player that runs out of cards first wins.) We thought, hey, we like Timeline, so playing it cooperatively would be awesome!
* Buffer Time: This game is based on Star Trek: Lower Decks, which we love. So, we got the game.
* Tesseract: The main item in this game is a cube made randomly out of 64 dice, set on a spinning platform. Seriously -- go look at the images in the Amazon listing. How could I *not* buy this?
And now we've played them all.
So, the good news is that you can play TT as if it's the original Timeline, in competitive mode, which is good because otherwise we just wasted our money.
In the cooperative mode, you take 36 of the cards in the deck and that's the timeline you want to make. The first two cards are placed with their dates up and start the timeline. For example, you might get "Star Wars comes out", which is 1977, and "Freddy Mercury died", which is 1991. Then, the players take turns trying to place events in the timeline.
The thing is, you can only place cards before or after the cards that are already there, but not between them, so "Final episode of M*A*S*H is broadcast" in 1983 gets stuck in your hand, which can hold a maximum of four cards. There's a mechanism for discarding cards but it's entirely luck-based, and over the five games we've played, we never managed to successfully discard more than three cards between us, entirely due to bad luck.
Thus, our games tended to be about ten turns long (five for each of us), as the cards added to the timeline blocked out more and more time ranges that couldn't be played and our hands filled with cards we couldn't discard. Except one game, in which the first two cards were "1984 was published" (1949) and "Twitter opened" (2006). Nothing in our hands could be played.
There's a point system for figuring out whether or not you won, but we never even got to the point of trying to apply it, because it was obvious that the number of cards still in the draw pile was going to drive us negative.
So, this game is going in the closet and never coming back out.
I'll give props to the box designer: they did a good job making the game sound like it was going to capture the spirit of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Pity the contents of box didn't live up to the hype.
The title comes from a concept in the episode "Temporal Edict". The rascal Mariner explains to the straight-laced Boimler that you should pad your work time estimates a little so that either you have some time to relax and recuperate or, when you finish your work early and report it, you'll be considered a hero, and she calls this "buffer time". In the episode, the captain finds out about this and orders everyone to stop padding in buffer time and be working at all times. This is what the game attempted to capture: you are playing grunt workers on the ship and you're trying to complete your assignments while also doing fun side things, but you get in trouble if any officer catches you.
So, each player starts the game with two Side Project cards and two Ability cards in their hand, and there's a big Assignment, with a numerical Work target and Reward points, on the table. A player can either put down a Side Project (to add to the amount of Work needed to do everything but also to the amount of Reward you all get for finishing it), play an Ability, or draw a Shift card from the deck. The Shift deck has a bunch of "work" cards in it (with numbers from 1 to 3 and a couple of 5s), but also has officer cards. The idea is to hit the target Work number -- the assignment plus the side projects -- before getting four points of officers, which ends the round and trashes the Assignment. Once a person adds enough Work to hit that target number, the next player turns in the Assignment: the cards go to the Reward pile, that player gets a new Ability card, each player draws Side Projects to get their hand up to two, and a new Assignment is put on the table.
Okay, yes, I can see that this card game expresses the concept (if not the spirit) of buffer time pretty well. You have to finish an assignment plus some personal things given your allotted work time without getting in trouble. The problem is that this game is NOT FUN.
First, you might notice that we're not playing the ST:LD characters. We're just playing some random pogues. We can imagine that we're playing Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, or Rutherford, but that makes no difference. Why don't we have character cards with a couple of abilities that are unique to the characters?
Second, the point of the game is accumulate a target number of Reward points over five Assignments, but note that the players get a total of two Ability cards at the beginning of the game, and only one person gets a new Ability card each assignment. That means that once you've used up your Ability cards, all you really can do is draw from the Shift pile to hopefully get Work to play on the Assignment. Thus, each game we played devolved to just alternately flipping cards from the Shift pile until either the assignment was done or an officer ended the round. No decision-making, no clever plans. Just flip flip flip yay! or flip flip flip dammit.
Third, we counted and the officer cards consist of 20% of the Shift deck. That means you will on average get an officer once every five rounds. Given that most of assignments + side projects we were attempting required over 20 Work and the Work cards were weighted toward giving one or two points, you'd likely need at least ten cards to win the round and would probably draw two officers before that. Four officer points loses the round, and since Captain Freeman was worth three officer points, drawing her almost always mean you will lose. (And we drew her three times in the seven rounds we played. We only won two of those rounds.)
So, another game that's going in the closet.
We did buy the game because we like the IP, but to be honest, it really was because the last time we bought a game based on an IP, it was good. The last time we were at Mox, a couple of years ago, we saw the Good Omens game in the clearance pile, and of course, David Tennant on the cover with wings is always going to convince me to buy something. We did not expect much out of it except, hopefully, cards with pictures from the show.
We played it in the hotel room that night and we were pleasantly surprised by it. It's not a single game, but a bunch of mini beer-and-pretzel games. I don't remember the details (it's been a while since we played it), but the box comes with like a deck of cards, some dice, and a couple of other generic objects, though branded with GO, and an instruction booklet with rules for about five mini games, each with backstory on who in the show it's about and what they're trying to accomplish. The games weren't deep, but they required some thought and weren't totally chance-based or skill-less. And it called up memories about the show.
That, to me, is a successful IP game.
This is actually the game that we expected was going to be terrible: too complicated, too fragile (I mean, look at that dice cube!), too full of inexplicable rules). But, we played it yesterday for the first time, and we are chomping at the bit to play again.
It was amazing.
The idea behind this game is that an alien artifact called the Tesseract has fallen to Earth and it's starting to arm itself and will destroy the planet if it isn't stopped. The players are scientists that are analyzing the artifact and trying to contain it.
Each player has a lab, and during their turn, takes a bit off the Tesseract -- that is, removes a die -- and analyzes and manipulates the bit in their lab. Once they've collected enough of the right bits (either a "set" of 3 or more of the same number or a "run" of 3 or more numbers, but either way, all the dice have to either be the same color or all different colors), they can "contain" one of the bits and safely remove it from play. Meanwhile, the Tesseract is slowly "priming" bits -- a die is removed from the cube and placed in the primed area, and when certain conditions are met, they cause a breach. You shut down the Tesseract and win the game by containing one of every color and number of die, but if too many breaches occur first, the Earth is consumed and you lose the game.
The game, then, is a careful balance of manipulating dice to contain them quickly while also managing the primed dice to avoid breaches. You have to constantly work with the other players to plan the next few moves and to counteract the Tesseract's actions. There's some amount of chance here (after all, you are working with dice and cards), but game itself is all player skill.
The bottom line is two terrible games and one amazing game. Luckily, the expensive one was the amazing game; I would have hated to throw out the $60 game. But, that should teach us to not buy games on a whim.