Week of 1/20/25

Cooperative Thunderstone Quest, Watergate, Tribune, Up Front, and the challenges of filler.

So, welcome to my SubStack! It feels good to move here after many years doing work on a platform that was both wildly inappropriate for what I was doing and also deeply problematic in so many ways. If anyone has any tips for how I might extract my content from there and repackage it, let me know.

Games from This Week

We revisited the cooperative mode of Thunderstone Quest (“Barricades Mode”) for the first time in years. We had bounced off of it the one time we tried it, it just didn’t feel that interesting, but we’ve been playing the standard competitive game a fair amount of late and it’s grown in my mind from a solid game to a great game, so it seemed worth giving co-op another try. I also realized that it really wants more players — 3 or 4 — to give it some range and more meaningful opportunities for real cooperative play, so we played with 4. And it did win me over. We played the Leaves Fall scenario from the Nature’s Wrath set, and decided to use the “first game” mode. So, it turns out for 4 players who have a bunch of credits on published co-operative games, this was way too easy. Although the village ended up taking some damage, it was not close. Nonetheless, it did win me over just because it had lots of interesting planning and difficult trade-offs (the Prestige classes are a great addition) which gave the players a lot of latitude to strategize and cooperate. It was quite fun. Obviously we just need to find a more appropriate difficulty level. The challenge here is that the difficulty will likely be extremely variable and hard to predict. In competitive the balance between the power of the player cards and the monster groups more or less comes out in the wash, but in cooperative getting that balance at least close is obviously somewhat important. So to me, the core competitive mode is always going to be the main game. But it’s nice to know that the cooperative mode is quite solid and offers a different kind of fun. Will definitely play again.

Tribune, 5-player. We had a crazy-close game. I was one laurel away from winning, but Kim pulled it out in only 3 turns (a single additional laurel would have given me my fourth victory condition and I would have easily won the tie-breaker. I don’t think anyone else had more than 1). I always tell people, this game is much faster than you think. I think the big mistake a lot of players make is to severely undervalue the start player/chariot auction at the end of the round. Getting to go first and lock down a faction is extremely powerful, it makes it fairly easy to grab a tribune in 2 turns and with that plus 4 faction markers, you only need two more objectives and Favor of the Gods, Refugium, and Laurels are all fairly quick to do, as is the Favor of the Emperor or the Christians if they show up early. With 5 players, neither Quid Est Veritatis or Sic Transit Gloria Mundi are going to go more than 4 turns. It does make me wonder if requiring one extra victory condition might give the game a little more room to breathe and be less of an all-out sprint. Not sure. Might try it next time. As it is, the game can be very unforgiving — people who know the fast routes through the game will have a big advantage. Still, we continue to enjoy it quite a bit. But I think we’ll try playing to an extra victory condition next time we have 5 (or 6) players.

I passed on Matthias Cramer’s Watergate when it came out in 2019, because I hadn’t had great experiences with Cramer’s games (which I mostly found workmanlike) and the topic was not super-appealing. But when it showed up in Alpha a bit ago on Board Game Arena, I gave it a try. And I found it very cool! So I tracked down a used copy, because I wanted to play it and digital games are not real games 🙂. It’s very much inspired by American games like Churchill and Twilight Struggle, but it’s wisely simplified to avoid several design dead-ends those games pursued and just focus on an almost auction-like game of deciding what you value - initiative, momentum, research. And those choices are tense and definitely non-obvious! The tactical game has enough nuance to give you lots of tough choices, and there is a very clever deck-management aspect. It really highlights the value of European professional design rigor when compared to various similar games in the US. I expect it will have a lot of replayability, and it’s now my favorite in this category of lighter games that are still serious about history.

Up Front! Teaching a new player on my classic copy. So, I don’t think of Up Front as a super-complicated game, and unlike almost any similar game, I think it’s actually easier to teach than it is to learn from the rules. So when a friend was interested in learning I didn’t push him to read them, I just talked our way through scenarios A and B. It did remind me that for as elegant as Up Front is at doing what it’s trying to do, and for how exceptionally it succeeds, there are still a few rules where you can only say “well, it was the ‘80s”. The rules for Wire and Minefields are particularly finicky and inconsistent, there is some fiddly natural flanking fire and encirclement stuff that almost never comes up, and while the Malfunction rules aren’t terrible, that paragraph is crazy to parse. For what the game is, I have no complaints. But for better or for worse, you couldn’t do it today. I played this game endlessly in the mid-‘80s, it was almost certainly my most-played game, but left it behind in about 1988 and really didn’t return to it until about 5 years ago. But it’s reclaimed its spot as a game that I could probably play all the time, virtually the last game in my collection that I would sell if I had to do a major liquidation. The replay value is just insane. Anyway, the teach was successful; you can totally onboard people without putting them through the rulebook. They’ll probably want to read it at some point, but it’s easier after someone talks you through A & B (and probably N).

Courtisans. I semi-regularly attend a boardgaming Meetup group in San Jose which has been an interesting experience - I haven’t regularly attended an open-to-the-public gaming group in well over a decade. The hobby is so all over the place now, with so many games, that agreeing on stuff can be challenging. There were two guys who showed up specifically and only to play Dune Imperium: Uprising, and I’d rather go home than play that game, so I did (Uprising is not awful; I find it basically playable which for me the original was not. But it’s pretty boring). But before that we played some light stuff including this, Cat Blues, and Circus Flochati. Courtisans is pretty dumb and I have no need to ever play it again; it’s unbalanced and basically just chaos. Cat Blues is good of course. Circus Flochati is a fine game for playing with family or kids or random friends, but it’s not a game to drive into downtown San Jose for. So, eh. I have generally enjoyed the group but it’s a curious group — there are half a dozen regulars and then a ton of turnover from week to week. It’s pretty frequently all-new people, which is a dynamic I’ve never experienced in a game group. Often in my groups, my niche is to understand what everyone’s tastes are — this is a highly nontrivial skill — and come up with game rotations that have the best chance of success while making sure people get to play stuff they rate highly. With so much turnover, it’s almost impossible to do that job, and so stuff can get weird as most younger gamers are not that sensitive to the tastes of others. For me personally, this super-light, very random stuff has basically zero appeal. Cat Blues is as light as I want too go. Figuring out how to manage the dynamics of this group is a work in progress.

Next Time …

I finally have a game of Weimar: The Fight for Democracy scheduled, which I’m looking forward to. After decades of wishing for a spiritual successor to The Republic of Rome, it appears that just in the last couple of years we now have two (Weimar and John Company 2nd). We’ll see how it goes, but I’m optimistic.

Also scheduled is Congress of Vienna. Less optimism there, but it should be interesting to try once.

Miscellaneous Boardgame News

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship (a Pandemic system game) was announced. I was a playtester on this, and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s very good. And I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to Lord of the Rings games.

Boardgamegeek had a Hall of Fame induction ceremony of sorts. It was so unbelievably dumb I’m not even going to link to it.

AllPlay has a new version of Merchants of Amsterdam coming to Kickstarter soon. It looks pretty cool.

MMP put the long rumored Slaughter at Ponyri up for preorder. No designer is credited, interestingly. I’m obviously a long-time ASL player, but recent products from MMP have been very uneven. This is first big ASL product I think I’ll pass on. It’s likely too big for me in practice, and I feel like I need to make sure it’ll be any good. Because a few recent products haven’t been.

GMT put a few new products on their P500 list, including Tsar. Every year GMT has been relentlessly releasing fewer and fewer games I have any interest in, which I find slightly sad. They’ve always been a wildly unreliable label, but their games have been a staple on my gaming table (for better or for worse) for over two decades. Right now I think I have just one of their games that’s solidly on their calendar on my radar for this year, and it’s an expansion (North Africa ‘40). Anyway, Tsar piqued my curiosity, it seemed like an interesting premise. Then I noticed it’s related to Prime Minister, ouch. And I was reminded, as Behind the Bastards fans know, that Tsar Nicky was a truly terrible person in charge of one the period’s most inept regimes. So, no.

What I’m Listening To

The Égide Duo (Stefanie and Joshua Gardner) is pretty amazing. I have multiple connections to this performance, as I know Stefanie from the Bass Clarinet Intensive at SFCM last year, and I’ve worked with the composer John Steinmetz at workshops at UCSB. Stefanie and Joshua are amazing performers and have a wide range of recordings on their YouTube channel. Check them out!

Baffle is a new bass clarinet trio featuring bass clarinet legends Jeff Anderle, Jon Russell, and Michael Lowenstern. I saw them perform live at Low Clarinet Fest in Arizona a couple weeks ago. This is a YouTube link, but listen to them on Apple Music (preferred) or Spotify where the streaming rates for artists are way better. Vol Two is their initial release. Where is volume one? I have no idea.