Over a decade ago, Bruno Faidutti designed the card game Citadels, which received a nomination for the Spiel des Jahres (German Game of the Year). In Citadels, you draft a small pile of “role” cards and use those characters to your benefit in sometimes mean and nasty ways: by assassinating, thieving, and pillaging all over the other players.

One of Faidutti’s trademarks since then has been characters and role selection (Mission: Red Planet, Fist of Dragonstones), but apparently he decided the drafting style of Citadels was worth revisiting. Enter Lost Temple, a game for 2-8 players by White Goblin Games (and distributed in the U.S. by Stronghold Games). Lost Temple is a race game (think Candyland) where your movement along the track is governed by the character you draft to help you, in exactly the same style as Citadels. Citadels was a great game with a few flaws – what’s different this time around? Here’s a reminder of my scoring categories:

Components – Does the game look nice? Are the bits worth the money? Do they add to the game?
Accessibility – How easy is the game to teach, or to feel like you know what you are doing?
Depth – Does the gameplay allow for deeper strategies, or does the game play itself?
Theme – Does the game give a sense of immersion? Can you imagine  the setting described in the game?
Fun – Is the game actually enjoyable? Do you find yourself smiling, laughing, or having some sense of satisfaction when it’s over

Components: Lost Temple is a very basic idea at heart – just a race to get your pawn to the finish line. Therefore there aren’t many components here – the central board with the race track, a few piles of small tokens and plastic gems, the role cards, and a card and pawn for each player. The artwork on the cards and board is fantastic, and I wouldn’t expect any less from Piero (Dice Town, Ghost Stories). The board also has some convenient-but-subtle markings for the important spaces (two circles for a token, orange circle for village, blue circle for temple). The wooden pawns have a strong resemblance to Indiana Jones, and stand up well on the board without falling over, despite being pretty tall. Everything is clear, concise, and functional. My only minor complaint is that the colors on the player cards don’t perfectly match up with the pawns, so that was confusing at first. The game is now available in the U.S. for $35 MSRP, which I think is remarkably fair.

Accessibility: This game is extremely simple to explain, in part because the individual turns after drafting are so straightforward. At the beginning of each round, starting with the player in last, you draft a character face-down from a pile and pass it to the left. Once everyone has a character, the turns are taken in order of the characters (Shaman always goes first, Thief second, and so on). Your actual “turn” takes only a few seconds – take a gem from the bank, and move your pawn according to your character card. The meat of the game is drafting, which is straightforward and easy to understand, although it may not be easy to make a decision.

And that’s the worst issue with the game: it suffers the same analysis paralysis as Citadels. For some reason, many people just cannot process how to pick a character from what’s available, even when they’re down to the last two cards. To make matters worse, players have to do this in succession, and if most of the game is just waiting around for players to pick something already!, it can get really frustrating and boring. If you find the right group, or simply explain to them ahead of time not to take forever, or even use an egg timer, it won’t be an issue. And in Lost Temple’s favor, the quick individual turns are a big change from Citadels, so that you aren’t waiting even longer for your turn in a 6-8 player game.

Depth: You should be able to tell already by its comparison to Candyland that Lost Temple is not a game of complex strategy. That being said, the game still has some very interesting decisions and risk-taking elements. The game is actually mostly played in your head, being almost all psychology and bluff. Only a few characters have real decisions to make during the individual turns, but the card drafting element is what makes the game shine: “Who took the Shaman? What does (s)he think I’m going to pick? What if I pick the Craftsmen, they won’t expect that – but what if they think that I’ll think like that?” and so on. Of course, this is also what causes players to freeze in terror, so it takes the right kind of gamer.

That “right kind of gamer” also has to be okay with some chaos and screwage, because much like Citadels, some of the characters are out for blood. The Shaman trades places with the cursed character (even if the Shaman player was ahead) and the Thief steals all of a character’s gems, and can cause some characters like the Elder or Priest to waste their entire turn. In addition, the game has a strong catch-up ability with the Shaman and also the Child, who lets you catch up to the player in front of you. Some gamers can’t stand when a surefire win is snatched away, but on the other hand, a game where anyone can win up until the very end makes for a tense and exciting bout.

If you think of this as a strategy game, or a gamer’s game, or even a family game like Ticket to Ride, you’ll be disappointed. If you think of it as a party game or a bluffing game like The Resistance or Werewolf / Mafia, you’ll be in the right mindset of what to expect and you’ll find that the game does have some interesting decisions.

Theme: I have a friend who has a few favorite board games (Twilight Struggle, Cosmic Encounter) and hates everything else. When we played this, he actually piped up and said he liked it a lot more than Citadels, which surprised me, because Citadels has a lot more decision-making. I asked him why, and his answer was that “building districts are boring; races are not.” I’d agree with him on that. The fact that the finish line is right there in front of everyone creates a lot of tension and excitement – if I could just get to that spot! I’m not sure thematically why these 9 people are hanging around the jungle and arbitrarily deciding who to help along in the journey, but that’s a thematic oversight I’m willing to forgive. The art really draws you in and and the mechanics really make it feel like a race. In fact, it’s the only “race” game I own, in the sense that it’s literally a race to get your guy along a track, and it does a great job of capturing that unique feeling.

One gripe about the theme though – the cards are named after characters: Child, Shaman, Thief, Village, Elder… Canoe? Really? A canoe appears from nowhere to help me? How hard would it have been to write “Canoer”?

Fun: As I mentioned in the Depth section, if you think of this more as a bluffing-style party game, you’re going to have a lot more fun. If that style of shouting and yelling and screwing each other over isn’t your style of game, you’re probably going to have a terrible time with this one. Also, when you think of it as a party game, it becomes more clear that this is a game that is meant for more players, much unlike Citadels, which slows to a crawl with 6-8 players. Playing Lost Temple with 7 or 8 players doesn’t take that much more time than with fewer because of the short actions, and a clogged board with all of the characters in play is far more interesting. A race along a track with only 2 or 3 pawns is fairly boring – with fewer than 4 or 5 players, I would instead play Citadels or something else. My only other complaint about the “fun” of the game is that the ending can be a bit anticlimactic when a player is able to pick a character that guarantees him the win, but this happens rarely, and in fact happens more often with fewer players. The game really shines with 6-8 players, as long as you can get that many players to play quickly during the draft.

If you’re the right kind of gamer for the right kind of mindset, Lost Temple is a lot of fun. If you dislike chaos, confrontation, and bluffing, stay far away from this one. It’s not for everyone, but for its target audience, it’s great: you get to feel like you’re playing a party game and a strategy board game at the same time, and that’s a unique, awesome experience.

Rating:

3 out of 5

When I previously interviewed Antoine Bauza, he mentioned that long before he worked on hits Ghost Stories and 7 Wonders, he had worked on a design about a giant panda eating bamboo in a Japanese garden. That game, Takenoko, is now available via publisher Matagot (and distributed in the U.S. by Asmodee). The theme is unique and the graphics are good, but how is the gameplay? Here’s a reminder of my scoring categories:

Components – Does the game look nice? Are the bits worth the money? Do they add to the game?
Accessibility – How easy is the game to teach, or to feel like you know what you are doing?
Depth – Does the gameplay allow for deeper strategies, or does the game play itself?
Theme – Does the game give a sense of immersion? Can you imagine  the setting described in the game?
Fun – Is the game actually enjoyable? Do you find yourself smiling, laughing, or having some sense of satisfaction when it’s over?

Components: Even when I first played the prototype of Takenoko at GenCon, the first thing I noticed were that the components are adorable. The hexes and wooden pieces (irrigation channels, action tokens) are all serviceable, but the art really shines on the cards and player mats. The panda and gardener are drawn in a cute, bright style and the included figurines match it well. The most enjoyable component, though, is the set of bamboo pieces, which come in green, pink, and yellow. As you play, you stack them (they hook in to each other) to show the bamboo growing on the fields. The instruction book even includes a short comic, explaining the premise of the game. The components are top-notch, and the primary reason I found myself initially so enamored with the game. My only complaint is that the game was bumped to $50 MSRP after being announced at $45, and I don’t think the amount of material quite justifies it.

Accessibility: The idea of the game is straightforward enough. You have “task” cards that you earn points for doing, and take actions to accomplish them. You can add hexes or irrigation channels to the board, grow bamboo by moving the gardener, eat bamboo by moving the panda, or look at more task cards. The problem, though, is that a lot of nuances in the rules were ambiguously worded or left out, so much so that it didn’t take long for the game to have a FAQ online. A game so clearly aimed at young kids and families should not need a FAQ – many of those types of buyers may not even know where to look for it (although admittedly in the U.S., buying this game at all requires a bit of internet savvy). Once these things are ironed out, though, the gameplay is fairly straightforward and not hard to comprehend, but it’s very fiddly. There are a lot of little rules to remember, and though for many gamers that’s not an issue, there are too many for the intended audience. That said, it’s easy the first time through to get a basic assessment of how well you are doing, which is something I value highly.

Depth: Despite the game being beautiful, and fairly easy to learn, the game is frustratingly random. The “task” cards work like tickets in Ticket to Ride, though you aren’t punished for incomplete ones. However, you have no idea how easily you might complete a new task, and you draw them one at a time. You might already be done with it and just earn free points, though an “advanced rule” says that in this case you must draw a new card instead. Or, you might be mostly done with it and be able to keep it. Or, it might be nearly impossible. You have no way of knowing, whereas in Ticket to Ride you are able to gauge your probability of finding something useful in the ticket deck by your current network. There’s no analogous gauge in Takenoko - just luck.

Furthermore, each turn is begun with a die roll, offering you a bonus action – but these vary wildly in power, and one important action (improvement tokens) can only be attained this way (although some hexes already have the improvements). It is very frustrating to have a task that requires a certain improvement, when you can only find a hex with that improvement by a very lucky hex draw or a very lucky die roll (and then you have to actually do the task). It was impossible to have a long-term strategy in the game, even if you drew a lot of tasks at the start. I never felt in control of what I was doing.

With two players, we were able to accomplish enough around the water hex and with what few improvements we had that we rarely ever wanted to take the irrigation channel action, and that seemed odd. There are so many mechanical quirks and imbalances in the game that it feels unfinished more than anything else.

Theme: The theme of the game is fun and unique and it works well. The movements of the panda and gardener on the board humorously simulate a mental image of the gardener wildly running around while being harassed by the panda and his appetite. What doesn’t really fit the theme are the tasks and who the players actually are, along with the building of the board. However, if you don’t take the theme too seriously and just take it for what it is, there’s a lot there to appreciate – it’s cute, and fun both to watch on the board and to imagine in your mind. Building and tearing down the bamboo is an especially fun part of the theme, and the components and mechanics mesh well to bring it to life.

Fun: I was ecstatic when I played this game months ago at GenCon. It seemed to strike all the right notes for me and my wife, and the other girls in our playgroup – it had a cute, fun theme, indirect interaction, simple rules… and the possibility of strategy. That possibility was an illusion, and in fact mechanically this is a pretty terrible game. “Lipstick on a pig is still a pig,” even if the lipstick makes the pig look like a really cute panda.

I’ve played other games with this level of randomness and enjoyed them more, and it’s really about the expectations that the game brings to the table. When I reviewed The Dwarf King, I felt like the rules and “image” of the game made it clear that it was meant to be zany, and therefore a bit random. Takenoko wants to be a family strategy game in the vein of Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne, but the clumsiness of the rules and complete lack of long-term strategy kept it from being actually fun to play. I’d rather watch people play this than play it, and that’s not exactly high praise.

Takenoko clearly advertises itself as a family-oriented, cutely-themed strategy game, but the “strategy” part isn’t really there. If you don’t mind that, Takenoko may be worth your time, but I strongly recommend you check out a different game instead.

Rating:

2 out of 5

Which came first, glasses or electricity? These are the kinds of questions players need to answer in Timeline, a historical trivia game. Timeline was designed by Frédéric Henry and was recently published in the U.S. by Asmodée Éditions. While just called “Timeline” in the U.S., this is actually Timeline: Inventions, the first of several “packs” of the same game that can be played alone or mixed together. Whether you’re a history buff or not, is this game worth checking out? Here’s a reminder of my scoring categories:

Components – Does the game look nice? Are the bits worth the money? Do they add to the game?
Accessibility – How easy is the game to teach, or to feel like you know what you are doing?
Depth – Does the gameplay allow for deeper strategies, or does the game play itself?
Theme – Does the game give a sense of immersion? Can you imagine  the setting described in the game?
Fun – Is the game actually enjoyable? Do you find yourself smiling, laughing, or having some sense of satisfaction when it’s over?

Components: There’s not much to say here – Timeline is essentially a pack of small cards in a tin, with a tiny rulebook insert. The artwork is very well done and evokes the the inventions and periods of history well. The tin is nicer than the cardboard box you usually get for card games of this size and price. $15 MSRP isn’t a steal, but it’s about average for games of this size. You won’t be especially impressed with the components, but you won’t be disappointed either.

Accessibility: I don’t usually go into rules completely, but this game is so simple that I will. Everyone is dealt a hand of cards, and each has some sort of historic event/invention/discovery/etc. Your cards are laid face-up on the table in front of you, and on the reverse side (hidden from you), the same item is shown together with the year it happened. The game begins with one card in the middle of the table with its year showing. Whoever goes first plays a card to the right or left of that initial card, and then turns it over. If this keeps the timeline correct – i.e., you placed a later item after the initial item, or an earlier one before – it stays there, and your turn is over. If it was incorrect, you discard the card and draw a new one. After that, players keep trying to fit cards into the timeline, whether on the edges or between already-placed events. The first player to get rid of all of their cards wins. Yes, it’s that simple. This is one of the simplest non-trivial games I have ever played.

Depth: Considering that Timeline is basically a trivia game, “depth” has to take a slightly different meaning. Certainly trivia buffs are going to have an advantage, but there is more to the game than simply knowing the dates. A typical player isn’t going to know the dates for every single card, but maybe just the broader period in which it happened. As the timeline fills, inserting cards into it becomes more and more difficult, so one part of the strategy would be getting rid of your lesser-known cards when the timeline is smaller. (It especially becomes crowded around the 19th century.) In addition, since you can see everyone else’s cards, if you know the general time of their items as well, you can try and crowd the area around their cards and make it more difficult to guess. The main problem with the depth of the game is that after repeated plays, some of the dates are going to stick in your brain – not that education is by any means bad, but it will make the game a bit more rote. However, for a trivia/party game that only takes about 20-30 minutes, there’s more to consider than it may seem.

Theme: Trivia games aren’t known for their thematic immersion, either, but I feel like Timeline does all that it can. Most important to this feat is the artwork – although the cards are quite small, the artwork is excellent, and does much to bring to mind not only the inventions but the time periods in which they were created. As the timeline fills in the center of the table, you get a broad sense of history, and an idea of what life might have been like at certain times, seeing what technological progress they had made at the time. In addition, the game is very educational – some of the dates will really surprise you, and have you thinking about the implications of what you learn after the fact. That’s what I usually want a great theme in a “standard” board game to accomplish – to suck me into the theme during the game and leave me thinking about it afterwards.

Fun: A lot of effort has been made in recent years to streamline trivia games and make them more fun (Wits & Wagers comes to mind), so that you’re not always associating trivia with the terrible pace and frustration of Trivial Pursuit. I would say that Timeline does a great job of streamlining the idea of a trivia game, making it more focused on the trivia and less on the awkwardness of piling board game mechanics on top of it. That being said, this is a trivia game through and through – some people become embarrassed or frustrated when they don’t know something, and unlike Wits & Wagers, where you can win without knowing any of the answers, Timeline puts the pressure on you to have an idea of where your cards fit, even if you don’t have to know it specifically. Trivia-haters won’t like this any better than any other trivia game, and it’s more thinking and trying to display your historical knowledge than craziness and laughter. Personally, I’m awfully bad at trivia, but always willing to lose and learn some things. If you’re like that – or you happen to be quite good with history and want a chance to flex your muscle – Timeline is something you will enjoy.

If you like trivia – specifically, if you like history – and want your trivia to be simple, pretty, and a little thematic, Timeline gives a great return on a minimal investment. I wouldn’t recommend it to trivia-haters, but I would recommend it without hesitation to absolutely anyone else.

Rating:

4 out of 5

Quite a while ago, I interviewed Bruno Faidutti for this very site about Isla Dorada and other upcoming projects, one of which was the recently released trick-taking game The Dwarf King. Published in both the USA and Europe by IELLO, The Dwarf King is a very typical “chaotic fun” Faidutti game which has players enjoying some crazy twists on the classic trick-taking genre of Hearts, Spades, Euchre, et al. Here’s a reminder of my scoring categories:

Components – Does the game look nice? Are the bits worth the money? Do they add to the game?
Accessibility – How easy is the game to teach, or to feel like you know what you are doing?
Depth – Does the gameplay allow for deeper strategies, or does the game play itself?
Theme – Does the game give a sense of immersion? Can you imagine  the setting described in the game?
Fun – Is the game actually enjoyable? Do you find yourself smiling, laughing, or having some sense of satisfaction when it’s over?

Components: This is one gorgeous game. The box is an extremely nice “book” style case with a magnetic seal, and the artwork on both the cover and the cards is fabulous. The cardstock seems strong, but the cards are easy to bend because they are very tall and thin – one of the strangest card sizes I’ve personally seen, but their large size means they are easy to read and leave a lot of room for illustrations without looking busy. Apart from the cards and the rulebook, the only other components are a stack of thick, square tiles that provide the scoring rules for each round. Although very nice, they could have easily been cards to bring the price down a little. $20 MSRP is a drop in the bucket compared to most games, but I’ve also seen games of similar weight and length that still look nice for as little as $10-12 MSRP (Famiglia comes to mind). In addition to the price being a little higher than I’d like, I have a few other complaints. The box lid doesn’t really “cover” the bottom of the box on the top and bottom – the seal only goes along the sides – so cards have slipped out of the box while shut. My other complaint is that one of the tiles and one of the cards both have typos on them, which is something I find infuriating, as it immediately destroys any sense of escapism or wonder. You also need pencil and paper to keep score, and some sort of scoring marker or just a pad of paper and a pencil would have been a nice gesture. These quibbles keep me from giving it perfect marks here, but you’ll still enjoy the art and design immensely – it’s bright, colorful, fantastical, and fun. 

Accessibility: How simple this game is really depends on how familiar you are with trick-taking games. Where I live, everyone has played either Euchre or Hearts at least once. The Dwarf King is actually simpler than those – there’s no trump, and no strange rules about what can be played when. In fact, one of the best parts of the production is that the rules for the special cards are printed right on the card, which may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s wonderful to have (anyone know where I can find a Tichu deck like that?). The scoring rule changes in each round, but you will have the scoring tile right in front of you to remember the goals, and the lack of a trump suit makes things simpler as well. The only challenges are that a few of the special cards give the person who played them points even if they don’t win the trick, and remembering that a new special card is in the deck each round in lieu of the previous card – during early plays you may find yourself playing around a card that isn’t there anymore. Even if you’ve never played a trick-taking game, though, this one is arguably the easiest I’ve ever played. 

Depth: In my interview, I called Faidutti’s trademark “chaotic fun” and he said that The Dwarf King was an example of that, and I agree. There are some tough decisions to make, but I feel like the decisions made in the game aren’t so much trying to outplay the other players as they are “betting” on who has which card. So the game gives a good sense of tension, but not a good sense of control. There are certainly small ways to bait other players by which card you play when you follow suit, but without a trump suit there are fewer opportunities to capitalize on that. In many trick-taking games, some sort of bidding system allows you to take advantage of a bad hand, but in The Dwarf King you are largely at the mercy of what you’re dealt. It’s not as bad as something like a game of Fluxx – you’ll understand where you stand during a round. The problem is that right from the beginning of a round, when you understand that by luck of the draw you’re already pretty far behind, there’s not much to be done about it. 

Theme: By nature of the mechanic, trick-taking games have little room for thematic play, but I feel like The Dwarf King makes use of every little inch of space available. The character cards have funny abilities that match their names well, and the art is not only beautiful but also gives off an appropriate “silly” vibe that matches the chaotic gameplay. I also think something as simple as the names of the scoring rules add a lot, and play off the idea that the characters in each trick are fighting each other. It doesn’t transcend – you still feel like you’re sitting there throwing down some numbers, not fighting in front of a cartoon castle – but the  goofiness of the theme really rises to the surface and makes you feel comfortable with the chaotic nature of the game. 

Fun: When we sat down for our first play of The Dwarf King, I described the rules but didn’t really mention anything about the nature of the gameplay or how it would feel, because I didn’t know – all I knew was my experience with Faidutti’s other games. Opinions were quite split – some appreciated the game for its zaniness, and some were so frustrated by the randomness that they never wanted to play again. If you like to feel in control during a game and hate losing “to the game” instead of to the other players, this is not the game for you. But if you’re willing to loosen the reins and be a passenger while the game takes the wheel, it can be a wild, chaotic, enjoyable ride. The problem is that you might be the “backseat driver” kind of passenger.

Before you consider purchasing The Dwarf King, ask yourself why you would want to play it, or why you play games in general. If you want to play because you want to win (and I often do), or to have a challenging battle of skill against other players, look elsewhere. If you play games because you want to socialize, and can separate yourself from needing to feel in control of the game, The Dwarf King is a gorgeous, inexpensive game that could give you plenty of laughs and conversation.

Rating:

 3 out of 5