Sampling Summer Board Games
Harmonies, MonsDRAWSity, and Queen By Midnight: Quarter Past
I had ambitions to round up not three but five board games in a review article published on WBUR.org today. Baby prep time got in the way. This newsletter’s regularity may be disrupted by the infant’s impending arrival, but I still plan to keep it going as I try to 100 percent the Fatherhood achievement.
One of the games cut for time today was Catan: 6th Edition. I struggled to justify bloating the article’s wordcount for a game that needs no introduction. Reviewing a new iteration of an icon like Settlers of Catan hinges on subtle, mostly cosmetic changes. I like the new art, though the friends I foisted it on found it too characterless, too sleek. The designers made a valiant effort to minimize plastic, but the new cardboard boxes provided to sort pieces into feature pull-tabs that are way too easy to tear. I was warmest on the new Cities and Knights, which presented the tech-tree through a simplified board and rationalized its wooden tokens into instantly-understandable shapes. Seafarers, on the other hand, confounded us. My friends fundamentally misinterpreted a trade route rule that caused them to cruise ahead while I paddled in the shallows.
Ultimately, Catan will never be my cup of tea. It promises a tight game of resource extraction and negotiation, but always ends up a bit too random and much too slow. But I’ll always be grateful for the legions it’s brought into tabletop gaming. It deserves my respect, if not my admiration.
That’s Catan dispatched with — read on for my WBUR reviews of three other recent games! I don’t love the first but quite like the other two:
From Darrington Press, the design house from the sprawling Critical Role media empire, Queen By Midnight is nothing if not indulgent. […] Indeed, the game resembles Villainous, a long-running licensed game from Ravensburger headlined by big bads like Maleficent and Ursula. Queen by Midnight packs more style (at greater expense), but follows a similar card-slinging philosophy.
The game innovates by layering in some social deduction. Before the brawl begins, each player secretly chooses an opponent to support should they be eliminated. Once you’re knocked out, you’ll reveal your choice and team up with your rival (if they themselves haven’t been eliminated before you, that is.) This creates a bizarre incentive, however. If you suss out that an opponent secretly supports you, you’ll want to push them out first because the “Inner Circle” powers they bring can turn the tide — they’ve swung every game I’ve played.
But despite its glamor and maximalist design, I can’t recommend Queen By Midnight wholeheartedly; if you’re interested, try the cheaper, more compact Quarter Past first. The game’s intricate aesthetic can override usability — icons for each character are so subtle that it’s easy to mix their cards up. The game is also not balanced — some characters are far easier to pilot than others. But the evocative setting really encourages you to role-play. Even while my games of Queen By Midnight could drag on, their best moments put us in the bloody shoes of ruthless would-be royals, cackling at our enemy’s misfortunes as we schemed for the crown.
MonsDRAWsity: My Lil’ Monsters (and more)
Meanwhile, if you want a short party game with a much wider player count (with expansions, you can take it up to 10), I can unreservedly recommend the MonsDRAWsity series. My Lil’ Monsters is the franchise’s latest standalone entry, geared towards young kids but accessible to all.
Here’s the pitch: Each turn, one player peeks at a card featuring a bizarre creature, designed to confound easy explanation. That player will then put the card away after 20 seconds and describe it from memory to the rest of the group, who’ll illustrate it on dry-erase boards. After three minutes elapse, these forensic artists reveal their work and the original “witness” secretly chooses which image best matches their memory. Then the original card is finally revealed, and each player guesses who they think the witness chose. Points go to the artist who won the vote — the witness gets a point if they chose the same artist as the majority.
MonsDRAWsity rewards keen communication skills as much as precise doodling. It’s also a great icebreaker, since it’s hard to be self-conscious when you’re tasked to illustrate a wild prompt. […]
Harmonies
A mellow strategy game for one to four players, Harmonies has you build little habitats for a diverse array of critters that you’ll recruit from a common deck. Each turn, you’ll draft color-coded tokens from a central board and place them on a hex-grid in front of you. Certain arrangements — like a grassland piece next to a forest piece or two water pieces in line with a mountain — attract different animals, represented by clear plastic cubes, which sit atop tokens and score you points. The game ends once players have emptied the central bag of tokens.
Beautifully produced and easy to teach, Harmonies surprised me with its mechanical elegance. You’ll have to carefully pick between animal cards — if you saddle yourself with a difficult creature, then you may not score many points! Animals push you to specialize in certain kinds of terrain, but the token drafting system forces you to accommodate pieces you might not have planned for. Finally, you’ll also have to plan ahead — you can stack certain kinds of tokens on top of each other, but no more than one animal cube can occupy a space. You’ll have to find complementary animals to stay ahead as available real estate shrinks.
Harmonies may not have much direct player competition, but I still had to pay attention to opponents who might scoop up tokens I desperately needed to satisfy my parrots, butterflies, and otters. With games that rarely exceeded half an hour, Harmonies impressed me the more I played it and left me in awe of its wondrous illustrations.
Other Mastromarino Productions
'Superman' movie debuts this weekend after right-wing commentators denounce its themes
Mexican volunteers cross the border to help Texas community devastated by floods
Death toll climbs in Texas as teams continue to search for flood survivors
How heavier rainfall is contributing to flooding — helped put this together after NPR all-star Rebecca Hersher rushed to the show’s aid on short notice!