On review copies...

(And some non-related non-reviews)

I was interested to read an entry on Graham S’s BGG blog this week, about his decision to stop writing game reviews for Zatu, the UK-based games retailer. I’ve always found the small insights that Graham has posted about writing for Zatu — and its little circle of sponsored board-game-writers — to be interesting reading. As somebody who has a fair old bit about boardgames over the years, purely as a hobby thing, I’m always curious to see where other people have taken their writing, and how they’ve got on with their particular journey.

To be honest, it came as a bit of a surprise that Graham was exiting team Zatu; it always seemed to be something that he was very happy doing. But the more I read about it, and the more I considered his words, the more I could relate.

I’ve never considered myself to be any kind of board game “reviewer”. For me, a review requires a bit more than playing a game once, writing a piece that essentially just regurgitates all of the game rules, and then listing off two or three things that you liked or disliked about your one-and-only play of that game. I realise I’m probably out of step with 95% of the board game content-creating community on that one 😉 … but yeah, If I write something about any game that’s been fairly-recently released, it’ll more than likely just be a first impressions sort of piece, rather than any kind of “review”. And I’ve never, ever, actively pursued getting a freebie “review” copy of a game from a publisher. In the first instance, I don’t like being burdoned with the pressure of having to write something about a particular game; I just like jotting down thoughts on whatever takes my fancy at the time that I sit down to write a post. And secondly …well, I have enough trouble getting my friends to play all the shelf-of-shame stuff that I’ve personally acquired and still really, really want to play … never mind any random stuff that is only in my collection because I scored a free copy of it, and which I’d need to prioritise over other games to write a review! 🙄

If I ever need reminding of the trickiness (and awfulness) of accepting review copies, I glance at a particular game that’s sitting on my shelf, unplayed. I’ll not name it … but it was handed to me by its creator at the UK Games Expo a couple of years ago. I was — of course — flattered by the recognition, and I’m not the sort of person to turn down a free game that’s been thrust into my grateful hands. The designer was such a nice bloke; really enthusiastic, and thrilled at the prospect of having a “popular” BGG blogger writing about his work.

I took it home, read the rule book, and very quickly — to my dismay — realised that it was very much NOT my kind of game …nor the kind of game that I could ever pop on a table in front of any of my (discerning!) gaming friends without ruining my reputation for bringing stuff to games night that they would… y’know… actually enjoy playing blindly. Which made things… difficult.

I guess I could’ve offered to send the game back… but he’d signed the box, with a personal dedication … and everything about the situation just felt so very, very awkward.

I just told myself that maybe I’d find the right audience to give it a proper, unbiased play-through one day … and nudged it to the back of my review queue until such an occasion arose (urm… even if my review queue is only one item deep?).

And it’s still on the shelf. Taunting me. Reminding me.

Don’t get me wrong… I’ve had the occasional early play-test copy of a game or absolutely-no-strings-attached “preview” in the years since (and — ironically enough — ended up writing one of my few “proper” reviews after getting hooked up to a pre-release copy of Atiwa, I loved the game so much!). But if you ask me, review copies are — for the most-part — a burdon, not a boon. Maybe if I was making a living from writing this stuff, things would be different. But they’re not.

So, for the avoidance of doubt: if you see me writing about games here, they’re almost certainly things that I’ve bought with my own hard-earned coin 🤑

Which brings me nicely to…

New things that Mr Shep has been playing this week, and absolutely didn’t get for free:

EGO (Extraterrestrial Greeting Organisation)

Remember those recently-acquired Knizia-reworks that I mentioned in my last post? I managed to get some first plays of both of them over the course of the last week… starting with a five-player play of EGO at last week’s Newcastle Gamers.

In EGO, players take the part of intergalactic ambassadors, travelling through a number of different star systems by moving a shared spacecraft down a modular, stylised, comic-strip-style board …and encountering a series of ambassadorial negotiations and decisions on the way. Negotiations are resolved via a variety of auction-based “mini games”, in which you bid cards representing things like “gifts”, “persuasion” and “charisma” … with bonuses and penalties awarded depending on how successful you are in each auction … the ultimate objective being to make it to the end of the board with lots of victory points, having caused the least offence to the various alien species that you’ve encountered along the way.

I’ve never played the game that this “remake” is based upon. It’s predecessor, “Beowulf: The Legend” was apparently a bit divisive, due to the push-your-luck mechanism that it incorporated into its various auctions. The same mechanism persists in this revision, but in a significantly-toned-down way … and it seemed to work well; there’s a VERY strong raising-the-ante / sunk-cost / loss-aversion pressure to the way the auctions run in EGO, and the risk-taking mechanism plays into this nicely; it’s a risk… but it’s a measured risk … and I didn’t feel too sore about risks paying off for others (or failing for me); the rewards always seemed appropriate.

So… yeah, I enjoyed this one. I don’t think it’s quite in the top-tier of Knizia auction games (Ra… Modern Art… Medici…) . And I don’t think it’s one that you’ll want to bring back to the table continuously, session-after-session … but as a “hey, does anybody fancy playing that wierd old Knizia auctions-in-space thing?”, EGO is very easy to pick up quickly, and definitely has a place in the collection.

S.I.L.O.S. (Secret Interlopers from Outer Space)

Another Knizia retheme! This one started out as Municipium, a game of social-climbing set in a Roman town, circa the second century AD.

SILOS — somewhat unexpectedly — transplants this action to a 21st century setting in which alien invaders (the players) attempt to brainwash various eathlings… but keeps the game mechanisms entirely true to its predecessor. The temple is now a town hall. The Emporium is a shopping mall. And instead of a Praefect strolling around town awarding certificates of favour, a chunky wooden flying saucer hops from location-to-location abducting cow-meeples(!)

I’m not entirely convinced by the new theme; it seems a bit forced and clunkily-applied in places … but the underlying game is sound. It’s a majorities-take-the-rewards sort of a game, which involves having your meeples cued up in the right place at the right time to swing various card-play outcomes to your advantage. I’m not even going to try to explain the finer details (I’m sure there’s a rulebook you can download or a YouTube video you can watch if you’re curious) — but it’s got some pretty solid O.G. euro sensibilities and a high level of player interaction (possibly too high for some audiences!). It perhaps swings more towards tactical (vs strategic) gameplay than I usually enjoy … and I’m less certain that this one will be a long-term keeper. But for a < 60min play time, it’s definitely worth a few goes.

TRND

By some wierd co-incidence, ALL of the new games that I played this week have titles which are weird all-caps wordmarks. Though TRND, unlike the other two, isn’t some kind of desperate half-arsed backronym … it’s just a novelty way of writing “Trend”. Which, I guess, at least stops it getting confused with the other two games of the same name on BGG (which have already claimed the mixed case and all-upper-case variations of the word! 😉)

I picked up this copy of TRND from the Oink booth at the UK Games Expo a few months ago … and then read a couple of lacklustre reviews, and kind of left it on the shelf for a bit. I wish I hadn’t; it might be the most interesting thing that I’ve played all week!

Don’t get me wrong; TRND isn’t a super-sophisticated, deeply-nuanced game. It’s a card-shedding game, ostensibly themed around collecting vintage chairs … but, in practice, just an abstract card game involving cards which all show one of three different colours combined with one of three different shapes. You’re working to make your entire hand show the same shape and the same colour, at which point you can reveal your hand, “go out”, and claim points according to the number of cards that you’ve gathered. There are some simple rules dictating what you can pick up and what you can discard on your turn … but you’re essentially trying to “go out” on a big hand by keeping an eye on what’s going to the discard pile, anticipating what other folks might be collecting, and evaluating what might yet be drawn. Oh… and I should’ve mentioned that the very last-one-standing in each round scores nothing, so there’s a pressure to go out sooner rather than later.

Theme aside …TRND has a very attractive “purity” to it. The rules are simple … it’s easy to play; I’m sure some folks will complain that it can be played on autopilot, or is all a bit too random… but I don’t agree; there’s more than that. There’s something here that makes TRND feel like an out-of-time classic to me; a “proper” card game where you need to keep a sense of how the deck is flowing and which particular cards are interesting your opponents.

Whether simple, timeless, “classic” card games are quite what the modern board gamer is looking for right now …well, that’s a discussion for another day. But TRND may well end up ranking amongst my very favourite Oinks.

We shall see… 🙂

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Away from the board

The DIY project that I told you about back in …gulp… April? Well, that took a slight pause for holidays etc, but I’m chipping away at the “Wall of Ladybird books” once more. The work-in-progress now looks like this:

The principle here is that there’s just enough overlap at the top and bottom of each rail to hook a book in (first at the top, then at the bottom) for it then to be held snugly against the wall with only a tiny sliver of cover art obscured from view.

Possibly not an O.G. Ladybird title. But useful for testing! 🙂

This did involve a fair bit of prototyping … and the wooden strips forming the rails need to be stuck together (and then attached to the wall) with milimeter-level precision for it all to work. Which in turn led to me creating and 3d-printing a whole bunch of jigs and spacers to ensure everything is glued together and mounted just right. It’s kind of slow-going; I’ve got enough jigs to precision-glue three rails together at the same time, but I like to leave them 24 hours to set. However, progress is good… and I only need to make (and mount) another 8 segments to finish the hardest part of the project!

I will, of course, keep you updated! 🔨