THOUGHTS: The Ten Commandments of Boardgaming

I've posted this elsewhere, but I thought maybe it might be interesting for you folks too.  A long time ago I came up with this list of rules I try to follow when I play boardgames.  I know not everyone agrees with every point on this list, but it works pretty well for me.  Over the next few weeks I'll go into depth with each commandment and explain what it means to me, and why I think it's important to keep in mind.  Enjoy!

I. Thou shalt have fun.

II. Thou shalt strive to be friendly and polite to other players so they might have fun as well.

III. Thou shalt keep thy mouth firmly shut when tempted to comment on other players' moves unless asked specifically for help.  Presume not to know better than other players, regardless of thy experience in the game.

IV. Thou shalt not hold grudges against any player from game to game, regardless of perceived slights, persecutions, and other misfortunes.

V. Thou shalt be mindful of a game owner's concerns and treat their property with the utmost respect and care at all times.

VI. Thou shalt always play to win, regardless of the the hopelessness of thy situation in a game.

VII. Thou shalt attempt to introduce others to thy hobby by being a patient and friendly teacher.

VIII. Thou shalt not refuse to play a game unless thou hast played said game at least twice.

IX. Thou shalt always be gracious in both victory and defeat at the conclusion of a game, regardless of the game's final outcome.

X. Thou shalt strive to seek out new games to learn and play.  Be not content to just play thy favorite games... expand thy horizons and help others to grow as well.

REVIEW: Eminent Domain

EMINENT DOMAIN

GAME DESCRIPTION

Designed by Seth Jaffee

Published by Arclight and Tasty Minstrel Games in 2011, still in print

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68425/eminent-domain

COMPONENTS, PACKAGING & PRESENTATION (20% of overall rating)

Eminent domain is primarily a deck-building card game, and as such the cards take center stage here.  There are five decks of cards used in the game: the Action/Role cards that make up the majority of a player’s deck, Planet cards that the player acquires over the span of the game and places in his tableau in front of him, and three Technology decks that players may purchase cards from to add to their decks or, less frequently, their tableau in front of them.  The cards are all beautiful to look at and extremely functional.  However, the quality of the cards leaves something to be desired.  They are very thin and prone to creasing, and after a few plays some of my cards already had obvious signs of wear at the corners.  When opening my copy of the game for the first time, two of my cards were irreparably creased merely by my attempt to get the cards out of the shrink-wrap they came in.  TMG was gracious enough to send me a replacement for one of the cards free of charge (I hadn’t noticed I had two creased cards when I emailed them for the replacement for the first one), but I wish I hadn’t needed to take that step in the first place.  Also, I am not much of a fan of sleeving cards, especially in deckbuilding games where constant shuffling is the norm, and so the wearing edges of the cards are a serious problem for me.

On to the rest of the components, though.  There is a central board that most of the Action/Role cards are placed on at the beginning of the game, and it is well designed and of excellent quality.  I suspect that if you decide to sleeve your cards, they might not stack well on this board, although I have not done so myself… this is just a suspicion.  The box that the game comes in is very good quality, although the insert included is unnecessary and almost totally useless (I threw mine out almost immediately).  Once you get rid of the insert, the game fits easily back into the box, and there’s enough extra room that “baggie junkies” (of which I am occasionally accused of being) will have lots of room to nerd out their copies to their hearts’ content. 

The game also comes with a number of plastic ships, which are essentially a form of currency and are massive overkill.  They could’ve just as easily been die-cut counters and been just as functional, but there’s no denying how neat they look when you have a bunch of them sitting in front of you.  They’re of three different sizes, which I understand comes from repurposing an older mold, and they look really cool, although they’re a bit hard to pick up at times.  There are also some die-cut victory point tokens that are functional (think Race For The Galaxy here), some very high quality painted wooden disks to represent the goods planets may produce, die-cut starting planet cards and player reference cards (I’ll get back to these in a minute). All of these other components are of very high quality.

The graphic design of the game overall is superb.  The game is easy on the eyes, and although the typeface on some of the cards could be a bit bigger, the cards have so little variation in general that it’s a non-issue.  The rulebook is well produced, of good paper quality and easy to read.

Overall, the component quality is decent, but unless you’re a card sleeving maniac, you’re going to get frustrated with the quality of the cards after a few plays.  I wish the publishers had spent a little more money on the cards and a bit less on plastic ships.  It’s unfortunate that the low card quality offsets the overall wonderful look of this game.

COMPONENTS, PACKAGING & PRESENTATION: 5.0/10

RULES & PLAYABILITY (30% of overall rating)

Once you crack the rulebook, most of the game starts to make sense immediately.  The rules are very well written and easy to understand, and the mechanics all work together seamlessly.  This is a well designed game that plays smoothly and requires very little reference to the rulebook once the first few turns have been played.  I love game designs that have few mechanics to remember but lots of player options and this is one of them.  The player aids are a brief moment of sheer brilliance: not only do you have all the information you need to play the game on them, but they serve as an unobtrusive method of determining the start player of the game.  How this has not been thought of before is beyond me, but I hope it’s used in other game designs in the future.

The iconography on the cards is very good, although there are a couple of game concepts that are occasionally difficult for new players to grasp.  For example, “+1 colony” usually means placing the card underneath a specific planet, but because that particular mechanic appears nowhere else in the game, it can be tough for new players to remember exactly what that means.

The game has a reasonably low learning curve.  There are really only two or three concepts that a player has to wrap his brain around before he’s off and running, and it usually only takes a few minutes to make sure that happens.  Learning the game straight out of the box is relatively easy, and so it’s an accessible game for new players.

RULES & PLAYABILITY: 8.0/10

GAME EXPERIENCE (40% of overall rating)

This game is an absolute joy to play.  It moves extremely quickly with almost no downtime… sometimes it moves almost too quickly.  In the games I’ve played, it’s not uncommon for a player to finish his turn, the next player to start his, and the previous guy is still trying to figure out what he’s doing in response to the last one.

There is very little potential for analysis paralysis in this game.  Usually the hand of cards you’ve got will indicate which action and role you will be taking on any given turn.  This does not mean, however, that the game is devoid of meaningful choices.  On the contrary, how your deck is built over the span of the game is half the game itself.  Unlike many other deckbuilders I’ve played, customizing and streamlining your deck to the particular strategy you’re pursuing is a basic tactic rather than an afterthought, which means each turn you’re building your engine toward future turns in a very efficient way.  This makes the play of the game very rewarding: you get to see your engine ticking along (or sputtering, if you’ve failed), and you just know you actually accomplished something, win or lose.

If there’s one flaw in Eminent Domain’s play experience, it’s that there is very little social interaction in this game.  That’s not to say this is a “multiplayer solitaire” game… one of the key strategies of the game is watching what the other players are doing so you can piggyback on their deck strategies at crucial moments.  Just blindly following a tried and true deck concept might work, but it won’t work as well as an alert player’s deck that can capitalize on the opportunities given by the other players around the table.  It does create a rather quiet gaming experience though, which some folks might find a bit off-putting.

As much as I like this game, I do have to admit that there seems to be very little originality in the design.  It works well, but anyone who’s ever played Glory To Rome or Race For The Galaxy is going to recognize some mechanics that have been lifted directly from those games and plopped into this one.  While that’s going to turn off some people, to me it seems more like a refinement of those mechanics into a better-functioning game overall.  This game just works.

GAME EXPERIENCE: 8.5/10

REPLAY/OWNERSHIP VALUE (10% of overall rating)

The first time I played Eminent Domain, I got my butt handed to me.  Instead of turning me off to the game, I immediately wanted to play again… and again, and again.  This game has an addictive quality to it: each game you see something else that looks like it might work, and you instantly want to give it a go and see if you’re right.  Because the game moves so quickly, and because there are many different options to pursue each game, this one’s got a ton of replayability.  It’s too bad the cards will look so worn after a few plays, and that definitely hurts the game in the “bang for the buck category”… but hey, maybe you can try to think of that like some people think of dog-eared pages of a well-loved book.  If you don’t mind sleeving cards, you’ll be fine.

The game definitely has a few good strategies that will become easily apparent once you’ve played a few times, but because there can be so much variation in what the other players are doing, the game doesn’t feel solvable.  It scales well with two, three or four players, and so I see this being a game you won’t have a hard time getting to the table.

REPLAY/OWNERSHIP VALUE: 9.0/10

OVERALL RATING: 76/100

FINAL THOUGHTS

I really like this game.  It feels like the next step in the evolution of the deckbuilding genre of games, has a ton of depth, looks nice on the table, plays fast enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and is satisfying once the game is over.  I just wish the component quality was better.  Making a deckbuilder with low-quality cards is a bad idea, no matter how smooth the game design is, and you shouldn’t expect players to sleeve cards.  Overall, though, this game replaces Race For The Galaxy and Glory To Rome for me… it’s that good.