Flash Review — Weather Machine

Players: 1-4

Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: [unplayed]
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60-150 min
Complexity: 8.5/10

While Professor Lativ’s wondrous invention is successful in controlling local weather phenomena, the machine also causes extreme “butterfly effect” disruptions elsewhere. There is much to do!

A new game by Vital Lacerda is a yearly cause for celebration within my gaming group. The Lisbon-born (Lisborn?) designer has a knack for coming up with heavy games that play like a massive, well-oiled clock: each element interacts superbly with everything else, and all you need to do is figure out how best to pull the levers at your disposal in order to achieve a resounding success.
Ha.

In Weather Machine, players secure government subsidies, expand their workshops, run experiments using Professor Lativ’s machine, build new prototypes to fix the screw-ups caused by those experiments, publish their findings in academic papers, and build cute little robots to help them do it all. (You can even quote previous papers on the same topic to help get yours published. How about that?)

As you can expect with Lacerda, the design reuses some of his mechanical darlings while injecting novelty in other areas. Overall, the game is not that difficult… but it’s a real challenge to learn, and even worse to teach. (God help me.) Hence my 8.5 complexity rating. All I can say is, don’t give up: the end result is well worth the effort. There’s a special satisfaction to be found in seeing all those intricate mechanics come together and WORK. Plus the little gears (even the cardboard ones—I think the metal upgrades are overkill) are just a joy to play with, and the entire package is gorgeous.

For the Lacerda fans out there, Weather Machine feels to me closest to Kanban out of all his previous designs—if that can help push you off the fence.

Sadly I cannot comment on the solitaire module provided with the game, as I have not had a chance to play it yet. But it’s pretty intricate and not for the faint of heart.

Most easily forgotten rule: When you build the prototype (in the R&D department), all of the gears you use must come from the same row in your workshop.

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Flash Review — Great Western Trail: Argentina

Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Good
Age: 12+
Playtime: 75-150 min
Complexity: 8/10

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a flash review of the excellent second edition of Great Western Trail, the original version of which had earned first prize in my Top 10 for 2016.
Now comes a new setting with slightly modified mechanics, and I’m falling in love all over again.

This time around, you’re driving cattle in Argentina, intent on getting those cows aboard ships bound for Europe. Once again, the board depicts the land players need to traverse on their way to Buenos Aires, with buildings that offer new actions as well as some familiar ones, and farmers instead of bandits. Incidentally, players can help those farmers if they have sufficient strength (a new resource) on their cattle cards and player boards; in return, farmers can be enlisted as workers to help supply the players with grain.

Grain is also a new resource: whereas in GWT you pay money to ship cattle to faraway cities, now you need to pay grain to load them onto ships (placing one of your discs on the ship you selected). At regular intervals, groups of ships depart for Europe, carrying with them player discs they’ll drop in three major ports. From that point on, whenever you’re shipping cows, you can also perform an “extra delivery”—provided you can pay for it in grain—that reuses one of your discs now in Europe, for a juicy bonus in points or pesos.

GWT Argentina is certainly different from its older sibling, but not different enough to warrant owning both versions of the game, unless you’re a GWT maniac. But if you enjoy the original, I can’t imagine you wouldn’t like this new spin on the same robust system. (I just wish the enclosed plastic tray was usable; as it stands you can’t even keep it if you aspire to put everything back in the box at the end of the game.)
The solo module introduces Pedro, a bot with its own cards and little player board who plays against you. Pedro can operate according to three different difficulty settings; either way, you'll soon learn to hate him (in a good way!).

After a few plays, I think Argentina is superior to the classic version, but I’m not ready to get rid of my beloved GWT just yet. What I am ready for, though, is the final title in the trilogy, coming out sometime in 2023—Great Western Trail: New Zealand.

Can’t wait to start herding those wild kiwis. Hee haw!

Most easily forgotten rule: If you have exhaustion cards in your hand when you reach Buenos Aires, you remove them entirely from your deck—you don’t just discard them.

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Flash Review — Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Players: 1-6
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Outstanding
Age: 10+
Playtime: 30-60 min
Complexity: 5/10

It’s Formula 1 racing in the ‘60s, and you’re at the wheel of a powerful machine barrelling down the speedway. Everywhere you look, the track is filled with brightly colored cars. But hey, what’s one more hairpin turn at breakneck speed?

Heat comes with four different race tracks, six cute little cars and a deck of speed cards for every player, with each card showing a different speed—from 0 all the way to 5. The basic game couldn’t be simpler: shift up or down into the gear you want, play that many cards (from 1 to 4), and move your car as far as it’ll go without getting blocked. If you negotiate a corner during your move, check your speed (total value of the cards you played) against the corner’s speed limit, and pay 1 heat card for each speed increment over that limit.
(You’re rounding a 3-corner at speed 7? That just cost you four heat cards.)

Those heat cards start on your player board and represent your engine’s capabilities to “give a little more.” You begin the game with six, and gradually move them (“spend” them) to your discard pile to move faster or reach a gear you couldn’t normally shift into, in addition to overshooting corners as described above.
You’ll want to rid your deck of heat cards for two reasons: because those become clutter in your hand (possibly causing an overheat situation where your car doesn’t move at all for a turn) but also because if you no longer have heat cards on your player board, you can’t ask your engine for that extra kick you just needed to pass that green bastard on the straightaway. So make sure you shift down to gear 1 or 2 once in a while: those let you discard heat cards back to your player board. (And if you can time that with slowing down for a difficult corner, all the better!)

The game also features a solo mode where the flip of a single card drives all of the pilotless cars (from one to all 6, which means you could just watch the race unfold if you feel particularly lazy one evening). And they’re competitive, too! So much so that there’s no reason not to use a full complement of cars on the track, no matter the number of human players. Even the solo races are proving fun and tense, which is no small achievement.

And there are more options to explore: the garage module (customize your car!), the weather module (you afraid of a little snow at 290 km/h?), and the championship system (one race isn’t the whole story…).

I’m a big racing game fan, and Heat just might make it all the way to the top of my list. It manages to strike a death-defying balance between simplicity, meaningful decisions and excitement, all the while making the whole thing feel like a race. I can’t recommend it enough.

Most easily forgotten rule: You can decide to use adrenaline before or after you boost.

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Lucas Land: Stag Night

 (Previous chapter: It's in the Cards)

“Hey, wanna go see Raiders of the Lost Ark on Friday night?”

Standing tall behind an actual vineyard, Skywalker Sound is a big winery-looking, red brick building that’s home to everything and anything that has to do with sound within Skywalker Ranch. Recording studios (large enough to hold an orchestra), foley studios (footsteps and slamming doors), mixing studios, editing suites, plus a litany of actual offices... you name it, it’s all in there.

And there’s one more thing you can find here: a private screening room called the Stag Theater. With its 300-soul capacity, it’s about the size of your average multiplex theater. And it’s not especially luxurious either, instead coming across as a very nice room, but nothing spectacular. The truth is, you can’t see what’s mind-blowingly incredible about the Stag.
But you sure as hell can hear it.

Back in 1983, Lucasfilm deployed the THX system to ensure that showings of Return of the Jedi would conform to certain audio standards. So in high-end theaters, the movie soundtrack sounded exactly the way the mixing engineer intended—or as close to it as technical limitations and architectural concerns allowed. The system took its name from George Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138, but also from its inventor’s namesake, hence the Tomlinson Holman Xperiment.

(During my orientation day at Lucasfilm, a sweet HR lady asked my small group of new employees if anyone knew how the THX system got its name. A few hands went up, and when one of them was selected to offer an answer—THX 1138—all the others fell back down, deflated. The cocky, 25-year-old me had been waiting for just that moment to raise my own hand, and mention Tomlinson Holman when called upon. Our HR lady was quick to congratulate me on my erudite answer, but a quick look around the room sufficed to confirm that I had just marked my territory with the smell of absolute dorkness.)

THX went on to certify more than theaters: home sound systems, computer sound cards, physical movie releases (VHS, Laserdiscs, DVDs...) and so on. But its original intent had always been the theater experience. And so the Stag was built around THX.

Think of the Stag Theater as the king of THX: it’s the reference theater, built according to the exact specifications the THX system requires. Its equipment not only provides the greatest surround sound you can experience at the movies, but it also perfectly reproduces what the mixing engineer heard in his or her studio. In other words, the Stag is what every other movie theater around the world tries to be. And if they come close enough, they get the THX certification.
So you can imagine what it sounds like when you step into that sonic temple. The room is neither too muffled, nor too echoey; neither too velvety, nor too wooden. It’s just a perfect balance between liquid and solid. Pure aural bliss.

When I walked in there for the first time—with permission to take a quick peek on my way to lunch—the whole thing felt like a religious experience. My own breathing sounded like the most expertly mixed gust of wind in the history of cinema, my own footsteps altogether like the start of something wondrous and the end of everything. It brought tears to my eyes and I never wanted to leave.
(Those who know me and my hyper-acute hearing will tell you I don’t exaggerate about that stuff: nowhere else have I heard such perfect acoustics, even when the room was empty and no sound was playing. It was beauty at a level that causes pain.)

About a month into my Lucasfilm tenure, a coworker asked me if I wanted to go see Raiders of the Lost Ark with him at the end of the week. He proceeded to explain that, once in a while, Lucasfilm held screenings for employees... at the Stag Theater. Not usually LFL productions, either: it just happened that this time around they were showing Raiders, one of my favorite movies.

So, would I go?
A few expletives later, we had a date.

Friday night couldn’t swing by fast enough. When it finally did, I showed up early to make sure I could sit in the exact center of the Stag Theater, grabbing the sweet spot to end all sweet spots. The room filled up quickly, sometimes with faces whose owners I’d had a chance to meet, but usually with friendly strangers I hoped I would get to know. (It would soon dawn on me that my role as internal reporter meant that I could meet whomever I wanted on Skywalker Ranch—though I did infiltrate ILM a few times—but I hadn’t yet made that realization.)

Right before the movie started, I looked ahead and noticed I was sitting behind George Lucas. (I would later hear that Steven Spielberg was supposed to join him for the showing, but couldn’t make it at the last minute.) He was actually one seat over on my left, which meant that during the entire evening, I watched Raiders with one eye on the screen, and one eye on George. I saw him smile, nod his head, then press his lips together and furrow his brow, in sync with what I assumed were scenes he was still enjoying—almost 20 years down the line—and others he wished had turned out better. (He reacted strongly to the end sequence where Nazi heads melt and explode, but whether his body language expressed revulsion or pride, I’ll never know.) He would sometimes lean over to laugh or whisper something in producer Rick McCallum’s ear, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

Remember we were watching this thunderous adventure in the Stag Theater, where the soundtrack was LOUD yet perfectly defined. I had frankly never heard a movie sound like that, and I fear I might there and then have forever damaged my aural enjoyment of cinema: it would all be downhill going forward. From the rumble of that giant boulder bearing down on Indiana Jones, all the way to the hissing of snakes (so many snakes!) and the crack of our archaeologist’s whip, every frequency was just right, everything mixed together into the perfect mélange. I felt enthralled, as if some alchemical process had transmuted sound into a hypnotic compound delivered straight into my brain.

There was a round of applause at the conclusion of the movie—on that ominous shot of an endless warehouse where the titular ark is re-buried, this time amongst a million anonymous crates—and every single spectator remained in their seat until the last note of the end credits had died down. (Which it did with perfect grace.)
As the lights came on, we all stood, George turned around while putting on his sports jacket—it was a chilly evening—and we nodded a greeting to each other. I blinked hard: George Lucas had gestured a “hello” at me after a showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I said something—I like to tell myself it was “Still a great movie!” or some other enthusiastic compliment, but to tell the truth I can’t remember what crawled out from between my lips. It might not even have been intelligible: George smiled politely and we all ambled towards the exit.

The hallway between the actual theater and the exterior door only took a moment to cross, but for that brief swatch of eternity, I forgot where I stood: I was just one moviegoer amongst many, walking out after an entertaining evening. So when I stepped outside and looked around, the realization that I was at Skywalker Ranch hit me like a road sign flung around by a tornado.
Wonders within wonders.

I would soon find exciting new reasons to go back to the Stag, but as a first introduction, it left a mark I don't think will ever wash away.

 

(Next chapter: ID Please)

(Full series here)

 

 

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Flash Review — Brothers at War: 1862

Players: 2
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60-240 min
Complexity: 8.5/10

Over the years, I played a lot of games covering the American Civil War. Many were excellent, but most proved too difficult to crack for the average boardgamer out there. (Hence my ongoing silence about those games in my flash reviews.) Brothers at War stands out in that crowd: not only does it run on an intuitive and exception-free engine, but it also features a host of short scenarios that will make newcomers feel welcome instead of sending them screaming into the night.

Those scenarios—there are 13 of them in total—pit Union and Confederate brigades against each other on four different maps: Antietam, South Mountain, Mill Springs and Valverde. The hexes are big, the counters on the map are few, and the whole thing is powered by a chit-pull activation system. This means that a cardboard chit is selected at random, and the identity of that chit determines which brigade gets to act. That brigade’s various units might move, fire at the enemy, or assault an adjacent hex—a dangerous proposition, but you know, desperate times call for crazy fools who get the job done.

One of the game’s innovations concerns that chit-pull mechanic. In classic chit-pull designs, each used chit is set aside before moving on to the next one, and once two Time chits (out of two or three in the pool) make an appearance, the turn is over. In Brothers at War, however, a turn starts with just one Time chit in the pool, and each chit drawn from the pool is placed on the next space of the activation track. Many of those spaces are blank, but some will grant players additional strategy cards (useful to surprise your opponent with a twist they were hoping wouldn’t come), while other spaces will throw an additional Time chit into the pool, increasing the odds of the turn screeching to a halt next time a chit gets fished out of the pool.
And the fact that each map comes with its own activation track really helps give each battle a unique vibe, with a distinctive ebb and flow. Have Time chits added lazily to the pool, and you get a drawn out engagement; but make sure the Time chits get thrown in at a furious pace, and you end up with that snowball feeling of a battle, where the end is always around the next corner—and will your artillery cross that river in time? (I’m looking at you, Valverde!)

Brothers at War doesn’t get talked about much, and it deserves a much better fate.
I heartily recommend it, whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a wet-behind-the-ears recruit still struggling to load their musket rifle.

Most easily forgotten rule: An attacked unit gets one additional save roll if its attacker moved before firing at it.

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Flash Review — Great Western Trail (2nd edition)

Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Good
Age: 12+
Playtime: 75-150 min
Complexity: 8/10

You’re a cowboy driving cattle through the old west, hoping to reach Kansas City with a great herd you can turn into a tidy profit. But the road to riches is rife with hazards, bandits, and difficult decisions at every turn.

The main board depicts the territory players need to cross in order to deliver their cattle; different paths offer different options and challenges, ultimately all leading to Kansas City. Players also have their own boards, used to track their evolving capabilities throughout the game. As for the herd itself, it’s represented by a deck of cards – one cow to a card – that players will manipulate and refine to yield the most bucks come delivery time.

Great Western Trail is both a deck-building game (where you add to and tweak your stack of cow cards) and a worker placement game, albeit with only one worker per player: that worker moves forward along the chosen path and activates one or more of the actions available on the spot it reaches. You can purchase more cattle, hire helpers, move your train forward (to deliver to cities that are further away and more lucrative), build buildings (that help you and/or hinder your opponents), upgrade train stations to earn precious bonuses, and more.
When time runs out, the player who’s amassed the most points – through a variety of means – is declared winner.

Great Western Trail was my game of the year back in 2016, and it’s still one of my favorites. The new edition rebalances a few things that are almost enough to make me want to buy it a second time, but the original remains excellent, and should serve my wrangling needs for another good long while.
The two main changes introduced here are the orange cows (cards you can upgrade to a higher value each time you deliver them to Kansas City) and the solo module, driven by a deck of cards that let Sam the bot go about its business and get in your way.

Whatever edition you decide to play, the game is great (it’s in the title!) and fun, it moves at a brisk pace and never feels quite the same from one session to the next. Saddle up!

Most easily forgotten rule: While purchasing cattle, you can use one of your cowboys to add two new cattle cards to the market.

Flash Review — Cosmic Encounter

Players: 3-5
Age: 12+
Playtime: 60-120 min
Complexity: 5/10

You’ve heard of it, you might even have played it: the game’s been around forever in various incarnations, starting with Eons Publishing back in 1977. The current edition is from Fantasy Flight Games (illustrated above), which is not only still in print – 12 years down the line! – but just got a seventh expansion in the form of Cosmic Odyssey.

With the right crowd, Cosmic Encounter is an absolute riot; there’s a reason it’s been reprinted and refreshed countless times since its inception. And whereas the original could overstay its welcome, the modern version makes it possible for five experienced players to get it all done in less than an hour.
(Of course, if you start piling various optional modules on top of the base game, your cosmic mileage may vary.)

The base game’s overview is ludicrously simple, to the point of sounding almost asinine.

• Each player represents an alien race vying for cosmic supremacy.
• On your turn, you’re told which opponent to attack; you then pick one of their four planets as your target.
• You commit 1 to 4 ships to the attack and invite some players (or all, or none) to join you, while the defender does the same.
• You and your opponent each play an attack card: each participant adds their card’s value to the number of ships on their side, and the higher total wins. Losing ships are sent to the trash, while a victorious attacker earns one colony on the target planet (and so do their allies!).
• First player to establish five colonies wins the game.

Simple, right?
Except that the game throws every monkey wrench it can in its own cogs, which – again, given the right crowd – turns Cosmic Encounter into something that feels like a hilarious, semi-tactical party game.

For starters, each player gets to use their own, personal alien power, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM BREAKS THE GAME. (Really: When players read out loud what their powers do, heads start shaking around the table, because the powers are clearly out of whack. All of them.)
Also, the deck is littered with crazy cards that do all sorts of things, such as canceling another player’s power, making the lower total win, adding trashed ships to the fight, switching out dying ships with an opponent’s… And many of those cards you can play when you’re not even involved in the current encounter.
(“I thought you said you wanted to remain neutral here?!”
“I say a lot of things.”)

Backstabbing is so rampant and expected that you can’t help but feel disappointed when nothing of the sort happens. And of all the times I’ve played this – a lot of sessions – only a handful of games did not end in an upset. Those were the boring ones.

If you can handle chaos and a few sharp knives between your shoulder blades, give Cosmic Encounter a shot. I doubt it’ll be your last.

Most easily forgotten rule: If you fail your first encounter, you don’t get a second one.

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