Bitewing has delivered their new trilogy of Knizia titles! I was able to play all three multiple times this week so let’s start with the one that is least changed from its previous incarnation, before tackling the two that are basically all-new.
I always really enjoyed Municipium. In the publisher’s notes in the SILOS rulebook Nick Murray mentions that he thought of it as Reiner Knizia’s El Grande, which I had never considered but thought was an interesting framing. They’re both area control games of course, and while that wouldn’t normally be enough to link them in my mind they’re also both good area control games — which is considerably rarer. Area control is a notoriously difficult mechanic to actually make satisfying. If it’s too fluid, you get a game where you just go around punching whoever you think is winning. If it’s not fluid enough, then it’s boring.
Of the three new games in this pack, I was actually most skeptical of SILOS. It’s not that Municipium wasn’t a very good game, but it’s one that had its chance and never really stuck. I’d play it for sure, but would anyone else? It was unclear. But SILOS has gone over well with people I’ve played with, to me surprisingly well, and that’s made me happy.
Firstly, the underlying game really is good. Your turn is just to take two moves and then flip an event card. Those two moves give you the ability to nudge the game state, but not to make radical adjustments. The locations have special powers that the controller can use to make more radical changes, but the opportunity to use these powers is rarer, and (generally) comes randomly out of the event deck. So you get that nice mix: on most turns you’re just trying to guide the flow of the game, but every so often you can have big, impactful turns. This is the dynamic that COIN misses and which sabotages its engagement; you have very little ability to take powerful turns that truly change the game. SILOS is definitely not a game of just turning the crank. You end up jockeying for position all game long with occasional lunges — not dissimilar to El Grande in that respect. But SILOS is fast, only an hour or so, and doesn’t ask you to make any choices that don’t matter.
The new alien abduction theme has also been surprisingly accessible — kudos to Bitewing on that. I’m very much from the Kenneth Hite “start with Earth” school of game settings; real history is always going to be more intricate and fascinating than whatever fiction you come up with. I didn’t expect much from the switch from Roman history to a generic sci-fi reskin, but shockingly enough it not just seems to work better for most people, it works a lot better for me too. And I actually thought the Roman setting worked well! But fundamentally, and unlike EGO, Municipium/SILOS is a mechanism-first game. The whimsical, goofy, and colorful alien abductions taking place in an 80s town can be massaged into a better fit than the more cerebral Roman setting.
The one thing that I think is truly genius about the new edition though is the slots around the outside of the board for discarding action cards. This removes the need to count cards and makes it trivial to see at-a-glance what the current mix of the event deck is (between repopulating, scoring and building activation) and makes it a lot easier to play intelligently. I think just this little bit of system legibility makes the game vastly more accessible. I’m always going on about how small tweaks in usability can make a huge difference in a game’s playability, and I think this idea should probably now be exhibit A.
As is traditional these days the game has a couple mini-expansions that you can use to vary the experience. I haven’t explored these yet, but I think this is a great way to extend a game’s replayability.
EGO is the rebuild of Beowulf: The Legend, a game that I am on the record as believing to be one of the greatest euro-style games of all time. I had done enough background research to know that EGO was going to have significant changes, but other than that I didn’t quite know what to expect. I mean, it seemed wildly unlikely it would be better. So what was its niche going to be, exactly?
It turns out the EGO is different enough from Beowulf to be, in my opinion, basically a different game. The players are now intergalactic diplomats, going from system to system trying to convince people to join the Federation. Or something. At each negotiation you compete in an auction using cards with different diplomatic skills (persuasion, gifts, intrigue, technology). Each competition has a strong push-your-luck element: you can take a risk to try to add to your bid from the deck, without spending cards from your hand. In Beowulf, if you took a risk and drew at least one matching card you would add it to your bid, otherwise you would get kicked out of the auction and take a scratch for your trouble. In EGO, there are now three possibilities: if all the cards you pull match then you add them and pay no price; if some but not all match you add the matches and take an offense token; and if none match you are kicked out of the auction in shame but pay no other penalty.
This seemingly small change to the risk mechanics dramatically changes the game. In Beowulf the charm of taking risks was that they were absurdly high stakes, which felt true to the epic poem. Every risk was fraught with tension. And there was no limit; as long as you kept succeeding, you could keep risking. The strategy of when to time your risks, and when to play your big cards (double, triple, or quadruple-symbol cards) to try to drive people out, was pretty intense. The new system softens these choices. Because the total success (all the symbols match) is unlikely, every risk does come with a cost. In Beowulf, sometimes the scratch for the failed risk doesn’t really cost you anything, so you can take risks without worrying about the downside too much. In fact a significant element of the strategy is trying to set yourself up to limit the downside of risks in high-stakes events. In EGO, the offense tokens are always worth negative points, although it’s a sliding scale: your first couple and then the 7th and above are incredibly painful, leveling off to a middle ground around 4 or 5 where an additional offense is minor. So there is always a cost. You can’t just stay in forever by risking. And you can’t really start risking if you think you‘ll need to succeed 3 or 4 times to make a difference. Risking in EGO only makes sense if you think that an extra card or two will really make a difference, or if you expect to end the game in that plateau in the middle where an extra offense or two won’t matter that much. It’s never a no-brainer as it occasionally is in Beowulf.
The net result of this is that EGO does feel “damped”, compared to Beowulf. You’re just not going to get those thrilling showdowns where two players are risking like crazy over some high-stakes rewards and everyone else is rooting for them to deplete themselves of as many cards as possible. That’s a bummer. On the other hand, the auctions do feel less tactical and more strategic. Hope plus the capacity to risk is no longer a plan. If your hand is badly depleted you can’t just risk to try to stay in knowing the downside is somewhat limited (one scratch); you’ve got to be much more careful. It’s just a totally different flavor.
The new adventure path is built from 5 randomizable boards, so you have a ton of variety. It’s also much shorter. If you ignore the gold events, Beowulf has 7 riskable bidding events to EGOs 3 or 4. Beowulf has 4 simultaneous bidding events; EGO has 1 or 2. Add a few more blind bids if you add in the credit events, plus 1 or 2 riskable bids. EGO is just really, really tight. While Beowulf was a 90 minute game, EGO cracks along and can be done in an hour. Beowulf takes you on an epic journey. EGO is a tightly-executed euro.
What to say about the generic 50s sci-fi setting? As I mention, in general Bitewing’s rethemes have worked for me. I was skeptical of deciding to move both SILOS and Zoo Vadis away from concrete historical settings and into fanciful ones, but to my surprise both of those really worked. By comparison the EGO retheme is … fine. Like Ra, the theme here is just deep enough to give some narrative life to the evocative and high-tension mechanics. I mean ok, but compared to the epic and evocative Beowulf: The Legend, or other similarly evocative Knizia games like Modern Art, Lord of the Rings, or Huang, it’s … fine.
EGO was always very unlikely to replace Beowulf: The Legend. And it does not. But for me, it compliments it nicely. The closest comparable to Beowulf was always Knizia’s Taj Mahal. They’re not that close, but they shared many features: the game-long hand management over a known series of events, the cutthroat auctions where multiple disjoint rewards are on offer, the complex scoring. EGO is in the same family, and I almost feel like it splits the difference between the two games. It’s got the risks and rewards and variety of events from Beowulf, but it’s got the more controlled, but variable, structural feel of Taj Mahal.
I think the other thing worth mentioning is that EGO is far more accessible than either of those games. The rules are easier to teach. It’s easier to grapple with as a player. The randomized and streamlined setup means players with a lot of experience with the game won’t have a big built-in edge over newbies. It’s really easy to trim out the credit events to cut the game down to its most compact form (this was always awkward in Beowulf). Plus the fact that the game moves fast and has a short playing time; without the credit events it might only be 45 minutes. While I mostly play with serious hobbyists these days, I think this improved accessibility is a big deal in terms of widening the audience. On the downside the loss of connection to an important piece of English literary history counts against it, but I think the advantages far outweigh the negatives.
Finally, back to ORBIT. We’ve actually played this a bunch as the most generally accessible of the new games. You could absolutely play this with the same people you’d play Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne or Free Ride with and they’ll have more fun I think.
All three of the new games come with a few pluggable mini-expansions. Since ORBIT is the easiest game, we’ve started adding things with the Nebula module. It’s pretty minor, but it does up the difficulty/strategy a touch by accelerating the movement of the planets over time, which I think benefits the game. Next we’ll probably add PRISM. And there are some team play rules that I’m intrigued by.
Given my taste in games, ORBIT was never really going to be in my sweet spot; it’s a bit light and the setting is generic. That said, I’ve still quite enjoyed it and like several other Knizia games (Blue Moon City, Quest for El Dorado, My City/Island) I’d much rather play this than any of the games traditionally used as “gateways”.
Coda
Something more straightforwardly classical/romantic this week … Mendelßohn’s wonderful Konzertstück #1 for clarinet, basset horn, and piano (there is also a version with orchestra).
I’m working this piece up with a friend now (I’m playing the basset horn part — somewhat hilariously the most fiendishly difficult couple bars in the whole piece are an accompaniment to the piano part and are barely audible). One of the occasional frustrations about classical music is that there is a deep catalog of great music like this which basically never gets performed, in deference to playing a handful of classics endlessly. This is starting to change! I heard Jeff Anderle playing Jonn Russell’s Concerto for bass clarinet and orchestra recently. But if I hear yet another clarinetist playing Weber or Mozart while the two wonderful Mendelßohn Konzertstücke are just sitting there …
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, consider becoming a paid subscriber if you value this newsletter, and see you next week!