BGI 386 The One About The Good, The Bad, and The Crazy

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It’s the fiftieth post in this Off the Shelf series, where I look at games on my shelf. And today, it’s time for

Park and Shop is a game designed by Donald Miller and first published by Milton Bradley in 1952. You can play with 2-6 players, and the object of the game is that you have a shopping list that you need to complete before you head home. The first player that does wins.

This was my grandparents’ game. When I was a kid and would visit them, I would often pull this out, set it up, and play by myself. There aren’t solo rules and I wasn’t really playing to win, I just wanted to play. I enjoyed walking around the city, shopping, and seeing how fast I could go through every card in the game. I had fun. When they passed, the game was part of my inheritance. It’s still on my shelf. I hardly ever pull it out because, if I’m being honest, it’s not really a very good game. But it scores high on nostalgia.

The game is played on a big square board, but I’m happy to report that it’s NOT a simple Monopoly ripoff. There’s not one track to move around, but rather a bunch of rectangles representing the streets of this town. Each player starts the game with up to 7 yellow shopping list cards, but everytime we would play, we’d use the whole deck.

You start the game at your house, one of the spots around the edge of the map. You can pic your own spot, and usually you’ll be trying to pick on that’s relatively close to a parking lot. You’ll roll a die and move that many spaces until your car ends up in a lot. At this point, you switch to your pedestrian piece and start rolling two dice every time you want to move? Why? Well, it’s obvious – you roll one die in your car because it only has one engine, but you roll two while walking because you have two feet. I’m not even joking, that is the actual rule.

You’ll look at the top card of your shopping cards, then find it on the map. Sometimes, there are several locations scattered around, but other times, it’s just one. You’ll need to walk there. You don’t need to land on a shop by exact count, but landing there does end your turn. Other standard roll and move rules apply – no backtracking, roll doubles and get an extra turn, but roll three doubles and go to jail, that kind of thing.

There are a bunch of gray spots along your route, and if you land on one, you have to draw a pedestrian card. These can be good (take an extra turn, move directly to your next stop, etc.) or horribly bad (lose a turn, add extra stops to your list, etc). There is an extra turn space in the middle of the board, so you can aim for that if you’re in the vicinity.

Once you have completed all your shopping items, head back to your car. But oh no, even though you were parked in a clearly marked lot, you have received a parking ticket! The parking tickets aren’t really penalties, just an extra task you have to do before heading home. So you’ll drive to that stop (using only one die) and drawing motorist cards for landing on those gray spaces.

Once that’s complete, you can head home. But even though you don’t have to land on shops by exact count, you DO have to land on your home by exact count. That means you can be in the space right next to it, but if you can’t roll a one, you’ll just be sitting there suffering until you finally get lucky enough to park in your own garage. The first one to do so wins.

There is a variant of the game I never played with that uses money – you actually have to pay for stuff. You start the game with $150, and every time you buy something or go somewhere that you’d have to pay, you roll dice to see how much it cost you. With this variant, you can go broke before the game is over because there’s no way to make money.

This game has a lot of problems. First, it’s roll and move, which is definitely an out-of-style mechanism these days. One person is rolling 12s and 11s to get next door while another is rolling 3s and 4s to get all the way across the board. There’s no skill, it’s really all just about rolling better and drawing better. The money variant doesn’t add any choice, just adds the possibility of getting randomly eliminated.

Another big problem is that the game is VERY dated. There’s a cool retro look to it, but some of the cards…

But still, I love the IDEA of this game. It’s a big shopping map, and the idea of moving around from store to store to get what you need is fun. It’s a lot better than just endlessly moving around a track, and I think that with some tweaking, this idea has legs today. Maybe set it in a mall with different obstacles around (survey takers, disruptive youths, security, mall walkers, etc), and you have to visit different stores. I don’t know. But the game concept works for me, it just fails in execution.

My enthusiasm for the game has everything to do with nostalgia, I know. If I hadn’t grown up with it, I’d probably laugh it off and never think about it again. But, it is an extremely important game to me – I even listed it in my old list, The Eleven: Games That Turned Me Into A Gamer. Nevertheless, objectively, I have to put it at #49 on my Off the Shelf rankings. (You may notice that it’s still above Apples to Apples. )

Anyway, that does it for this edition of Off the Shelf. Thanks for reading!

Takashi Ishida’s Magical Athlete is a quirky game about a cast of misfits in a foot race. First released in 2003 by Z-Man Games, its oddball nature and prototype-level production resulted in a large shrug from audiences. It was the typical Tanga title, dumped on a deep discount website and banished to the shelves of…

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The post Legends of the Arena is a Fast-Paced Brawling Board Game inspired by Super Smash Bros. appeared first on Graphic Policy.

Legends of the Arena is an intense brawling board game for 2-6 players inspired by Super Smash Bros. Knock your opponents out of the Arena and claim victory!

It’s been a long time since I did a Game Buzz post, but when your favorite board game designer is releasing his first original board game in eight years, you post about it. So, here’s my look at

Severton is an upcoming board game to be published by Albi that was designed by none other than Vlaada Chvátil. It’s his first board game since 2017’s That’s a Question – everything since then has been expansions or reskins of existing titles. In fact, I think it’s hist first non-party game since 2013’s Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends. The game is for 1-5 players, and is based in the world of Rychlé šípy, which is a Czech series I know nothing about. It apparently follows a group of young friends who have adventures together. Severton is a cooperative game, where players are taking on the roles of these youths to discover the secrets of Severton, a neighborhood in Prague that is ruled by Vonts.

The game comes with five scenarios, which progressively add new mechanisms. However, the rules do specify that you can replay them as much as you want because you’ll be making different choices each time to create a new experience. Additionally, there will always be five characters in the game, with some people controlling multiple characters in games with fewer players.

The game is played on a board, which the characters will move around. The five characters always start in a particular spot, but where they go from there will be up to the players. Additionally, there are ten progress boards in the game, two for each scenario. These are set up end to end, and you can change the difficulty of the game by flipping them to reveal more stars for a harder game. The left side of the board is reserved for the Vonts cards (group and movement). Some of these will be dealt out facedown, and Vont tokens will start in random spaces on the board. There is also an action deck from which each player will get four cards (some scenarios also give you other cards). The scenario will also direct you to set up a quest deck.

In the upper left corner of the map, there is a dial. This is used to track the phases of play, with a token moving clockwise as each phase is completed. This will continue until you win (or lose). There are seven phases: Actions, Vonts, Quest, Unrest, Vonts Refresh, Players Refresh, and Quest Replenishment.

1. ACTION: During this phase, you’ll be playing action cards to move and explore. Players can take turns in any order throughout the phase, taking a turn whenever it makes sense. There are two types of actions:
   • Move: There are 22 marked spaces on the board, and paths of different colors connecting them. To move along a path, you simply play a card of the matching color. Other characters can move with you by playing any card (color doesn’t matter for this). A character can make a maximum of two moves per action phase.
   • Explore: If you play a card with the flashlight symbol (purple or wild cards), you take an Explore action. You can use this to discover a secret passage, or to investigate Vonts that are within two movements of you. This reveals their Group and Movement cards.
   • Additionally, each character has a special ability which can only be used during this phase.
2. VONTS: During the Vonts phase, you’ll activate each group by first revealing their movement card, move them, and discarding the card. They’ll follow paths just like the characters do. Vonts can’t end on a space with other Vonts (and will regroup if they need to), but they can land in spaces with characters. If this happens, a Vont encounter occurs – reveal their Group card and resolve the encounter by fighting, outwitting, or hiding. Or getting caught, but try not to do that.
3. QUEST: Here, you’ll be looking at any revealed Quests and following their instructions.
4. UNREST: During this phase, the Unrest token advances two spaces. If it reaches the end, the game is over. It may cross certain symbols that trigger different actions, like adding more Vonts or giving players an extra move the next round.
5. VONTS REFRESH: Draw new facedown movement cards for each Vont group and deploy any that have not been sent to the board.
6. PLAYERS REFRESH: Players who were caught come back to the board, and all players draw new action cards.
7. QUEST REPLENISHMENT: Draw new quests to replace any that were completed. This doesn’t happen in Scenarios 1 or 3.

If you complete your objectives, you win! If not, you lose. And that’s pretty much it.

Not really knowing the source material for the game, I don’t think I can really comment too much on the theme. My interest in this game exists solely because of Vlaada Chvátil. And I do think it looks pretty interesting – it’s cooperative and scenario based, which he has done well at in the past. It seems like a game that would be pretty fun to explore, with all the different Vont groups and characters and scenarios. The rules seem fairly straightforward and basic, and with no knowledge of what the scenarios entail, I don’t think I can make a judgment call of how they play out. But, I am a Vlaada fanboy, so I feel like I can trust his designs, even if it has been a while.

I look forward to hearing people’s reactions when the game comes out, which should be at Spiel in October. But that’s it for me today, so thanks for reading!

BGI 385 The One About a LOT of Red Ink for Companies”

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Social media:

Ignacy Trzewiczek / Portal Games: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

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Intro Music: Happy Rock – Bensound.com

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Spooooktacccular. An amusing name to wail? Right-o. Killer movie poster box cover? Absolutely. Asymmetric player powers that inevitably draw a negligent comparison to Root? Hell yeah. Level 99 Games is known for their eccentric lineup. Millennium Blades is totally mad. Argent: The Consortium is likewise ill. Bullet♥︎ and Empyreal and many others fit this unconventional…

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After a somewhat longer break, we’re back with the American Revolution! We had concluded last time with the French entry into the war on the American side. Today, we’ll look at the cooperation between the allies, the British strategic shift to the south, and how these two impulses collided and gave way to peace – as always, with board games.

You can read all posts in this series here:

• Rebellion in the Colonies
• “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!”
• The War of Independence, 1775-1776
• The War of Independence, 1776-1777
• The War of Independence, 1777-1778
• The War of Independence, 1778-1783

American-French Cooperation

Before the Treaty of Alliance and the French declaration of war on Britain, France had supported the American Patriots materially. Now that France was a full belligerent, fighting forces would follow – first, the French fleet.

A naval force under Admiral Charles Henri Hector d’Estaing, carrying a few thousand French land forces, was dispatched to North America in summer 1778. They embarked on an ambitious combined-force scheme together with the Continental Army to take Newport from the British. American-French cooperation (as well as army-navy cooperation) proved difficult, and the operation had to be aborted. In one of the more dubious decisions of the war, the British abandoned Newport, one of the finest natural harbors in New England, voluntarily soon after.

As joint operations had not yielded success, the American and British forces would usually operate separately for the next two years. That meant that the Americans continued to bear the brunt of the struggle for North America. The French navy and army, however, were crucial in tying down British forces in the by now global struggle: British and French forces fought over the economically crucial “sugar islands” of the Caribbean. A French armada, strengthened by Spain which had recently entered the war, threatened to invade Britain itself in 1779. Even in far away India, British forces were challenged by the French and their local allies. Players of Imperial Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games) will recognize these as the four regions in which Britain and France fight for supremacy – with victory going to the player who can balance their interests in the four regions best, taking losses where they must while making bigger gains elsewhere.

The American Patriots had none of this strategic depth. If they were defeated North America, their cause would be lost. And even with French support, it did not seem like they could do more than brace themselves against the military and financial superiority of Britain… if so much. The harsh winter of 1779-80 decimated the Continental Army. Difficulties in paying the troops resulted in the mutiny of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Line regiments. The situation seemed so dire that Benedict Arnold, one of the most distinguished American commanders, betrayed the American cause (but failed to deliver the fort of West Point to Britain), serving in the British army for the remainder of the war.

The Southern Strategy

Part of the American woes was the new British focus. As New England was lost to Britain, and too full of rebels to be retaken, the British turned their attention to the southern colonies which the believed to be populated by many British loyalists.

First, they advanced from Florida (supported by sea) into Georgia and took Savannah on December 29, 1778. A combined American-French land-sea operation failed to retake the city in June 1779. After this second joint operations failure, the French fleet relocated to the Caribbean. British forces under Charles Cornwallis laid siege to Charleston, South Carolina, the following March.

Benjamin Lincoln, who had commanded the American troops in the unsuccessful counter-offensive at Savannah, was put under enormous political pressure not to let Charleston, one of the most important cities in the south, fall into British hands. Retreat was thus impossible. Yet the defense of the city against superior British forces was doomed. Lincoln surrendered in May 1780.

Cornwallis also beat the new American commander in the south, Horatio Gates, at Camden (and thus cut Gates, the hero of Saratoga, back to size again). As the British general was poised to invade North Carolina, Washington dispatched Nathanael Greene to take command in the south.

Greene’s approach aimed to elude a decisive engagement. Contrary to British assumptions, the south was not rife with British loyalists. The crown was only supported where Britain could enforce loyalty – on the coasts, and wherever Cornwallis’s army was at the moment. And Cornwallis could not be everywhere. Small American forces under guerilla leaders (like “The Gamecock” Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion, on whom the movie The Patriot is based) chipped away at British forces and support. While Cornwallis beat Greene at Guilford Court House and Eutaw Springs in early 1781, he could not reverse the south’s affiliation to the Patriot cause.

Yorktown

Cornwallis lost patience with the indecisive campaign against Greene’s Fabian strategy. In 1781, he boldly struck into Virginia. His supply was to come from sea via the port of Yorktown on Chesapeake Bay. If Virginia, the largest and most populous southern colony was taken and thus the south cut off from the north, Greene would have to surrender – or so Cornwallis thought. Cornwallis’s good strategy rating in Washington’s War makes it likely that the British player will let him pursue similarly active campaigns… and hopes not to get caught by superior force.

Cornwallis’s plan was risky. Virginia was much closer to the American and French main forces than the Carolinas. The French commander Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, urged George Washington to confront Cornwallis. And thus a third joint operation began: Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a French volunteer in the Continental army, marched American and French forces to Virginia.

Cornwallis responded in the typical British manner: He fortified Yorktown and confidently relied on British naval superiority to keep his options open. That confidence was shaken when the French instead of the British navy showed up in Chesapeake Bay. The British sent a fleet of their own, but the resulting naval battle of Chesapeake Bay failed to expel the French fleet (September 5, 1781).

Washington and Rochambeau took command of the combined army and invested Yorktown. As Cornwallis had failed to tenaciously defend the outer defenses, assuming he would be evacuated by the Royal Navy, the sieging forces advanced quickly. Cut off from supplies and under bombardment from the allied artillery, Cornwallis surrendered on October 17, 1781. His entire force of almost 8,000 was captured (with another 156 dead). French and American total casualties (dead and wounded) were barely over 200.

Peace

The war in the colonies had been unpopular in Britain for some years. Parliament was unwilling to expend more money on it, and thus the British forces deployed had never again reached their peak strength from 1776. With one of the two main British forces in the colonies lost, so was the parliamentary base for the government. When the Whig opposition’s motion to end the war in North America carried a majority, Prime Minister Frederick North resigned in March 1782. “North’s Government Falls” is the end of a game of Washington’s War, and can happen anytime between 1779 and 1783 (provided the event is face-up in the respective year).

North’s successors had to make peace with four separate enemies – the United States, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. The American negotiators Benjamin Franklin and John Jay proved most skillful in this complicated multi-sided diplomacy. They secured diplomatic recognition for the United States as well as the western domain all the way to the Mississippi and important fishing rights in the Atlantic. The Peace of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783.

The king of France had little time to enjoy his triumph. The war expenses incurred in the American Revolutionary War contributed to the financial crisis which resulted in the French Revolution (whose protagonists were in turn inspired by the American ideas of liberalism and republicanism) just six years after the Peace of Paris.

Britain, on the other hand, bounced back from the setback in North America. The country’s naval, commercial, and financial strength was still intact. Britain would orchestrate the coalitions against revolutionary and Napoleonic France until the final victory at Waterloo in 1815, ushering in a century of British global dominance.

And the United States? They remained within their own hemisphere for the time being. Only occasionally drawn into conflict with their erstwhile French allies or old British enemies, the United States dealt with their westward expansion and economic development. Despite its unresolved conflict internal conflict about slavery, the American republic remained an inspiration to European liberals and democrats who strove to follow the example begun 250 years ago.

Games Referenced

Liberty or Death (Harold Buchanan, GMT Games)

Imperial Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)

Washington’s War (Mark Herman, GMT Games)

Further Reading

Allison, Robert J.: The American Revolution. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York City, NY 2015 is exactly what it says on the tin.

Higginbotham, Don: The War of American Independence. Military Policies, Attitudes, and Practice, 1763-1789, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 1977 covers not only the campaigns, but also the political, social, and economic dimensions behind them.

BGI 384 The One About De Minimus Becoming De Maximus

Board Games Insider – Join our Guild on Board Game Geek Guild | Like us on FB

Social media:

Ignacy Trzewiczek / Portal Games: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Corey Thompson / Above Board TV:  website | Youtube

Stephen Buonocore / “The Podfather Of Gaming”: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Intro Music: Happy Rock – Bensound.com

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