FINAL REPORT -- 6th Piecepack Design Contest: Group Projects

["Clark D. Rodeffer" <clark@...>]

Group Projects Judging Report
=============================
Whew! I'm finally finished judging the many fine
entries. It wasn't easy, let me tell you! The design
groups should all be lauded for their efforts,
especially in this age of long distance digital
communication that is somehow rife with physical
isolation. But anyway, I want to share a bit about how
the judging was conducted, as well as give feedback on
all of the contest entries. If you're not interested
in all that, just skip to the bottom for the final
tally.

First, I gathered an intrepid group of players (two of
my usual gaming groups, all of whom were vaguely
familiar with the piecepack, but none of whom were
contestants) and each time we got together (usually
once or twice per week), I handed out the rulesets for
the contest entries we were going to play that
session, along with the evaluation questions listed in
the file included below. After we played each game (a
minimum of two games for every contest entry), each
player then graded that game on a scale of 1 to 10 in
each of the five categories outlined below. Averages
were computed, notes were noted, and this report is
the result.

----- Begin Included File -----
After playing each game, grade it on a scale of one
(low) to ten (high) in each of these five categories.
Here are some sample questions to ask yourself when
rating each category. Note that these are not
exhaustive, but are just suggestions and starting
points.

Rules
-----
Are the rules easy to read and understand? Are they
complete and coherent? Are any diagrams clear and easy
to understand? Are there any places that could use
more explanation or diagrams? Could you get an idea of
how the game played by simply reading the rules? Would
this game be easy to teach to someone else, even
without a written copy of the rules? Is the writing
grammatically correct and stylistically appropriate?
Are there any points of confusion or contradiction? Is
the use of graphics, page layout and fonts helpful?

Appendix
--------
If a game designer can't follow the rules for a design
contest, then how do they expect others to follow the
game rules they write? One of the rules for this
contest was to include an appendix detailing the
contributions of each co-designer. Is the appendix
present? Does it adequately show who did what? How
balanced does the design process seem? Does this
really appear to be a group effort, or does the
documentation seem forced?

Mechanics
---------
Is it a game at all? Is the game mechanically sound?
Is the game comfortable to play, ergonomically
speaking? Are there any additional play aids you would
have liked to have had included? Does it seem fiddly
to play? Are the players given meaningful choices? Is
there a lot of down time, or are most players
constantly involved? Does the game play equally well
over the full range of suggested players? Are the game
time estimates (if given) meaningful? Is there at
least some strategic depth? Does the play feel
excessively random or out-of-control? Is there an
appropriate amount of player interaction? Is it
possible to force a draw? Is there a king maker
problem? Does the game lend itself to analysis
paralysis? Is the game certain to finish? Are the
mechanics innovative or just a rehashing of something
that's been done many times before? Do the mechanics
allow for adequate tactical variation if the game were
to be played many times?

Theme
-----
A theme was not required for this contest, but if one
is present, it will be judged and factored in
appropriately. If, in your opinion, there was no
theme, score this category as N/A. Does the theme make
you want to play the game? Is the theme ever
inappropriate (for certain groups)? Is the theme
appropriate for the perceived target audience? When
playing, do you feel immersed in the setting or theme?
Are the "in-character" thematic choices for your
actions also reasonably good from a tactical
standpoint? Does the theme mesh well with the
mechanics? Is the theme appropriately represented in
the graphics, fonts, layout, play aids, pieces, etc?

Fun
---
Most importantly, is the game fun to play? Is it
challenging? Would you willingly play it again? Would
you suggest it as something you'd like to play when
other choices are available? Would you recommend it to
others? If you didn't already own or have easy access
to a piecepack, would playing this game make you want
to buy one? Relative to the other games in this
contest that you've played, is this one more or less
fun?
----- End Included File -----

So, on with the feedback!

Army Brats
----------
by Don Kirkby & Alan Price

What could be more fun than going to military school
and getting to study cool subjects like Weaponry and
Desert Survival? I guess it wouldn't be much fun after
all. The premise of Army brats is that your parents
sent you to military school, which you hate. So now
you're trying to get expelled by getting caught
collecting useful sets of absentee passes. By useful,
the authors mean two or more passes on a single day
(so you can play hooky) or two or more passes in the
same subject on consecutive days (so you can hold off
doing your homework for a while). So Army Brats is
essentially a light set-collecting game in the same
vein as Mah Jongg or Rummy. As such, Army Brats seems
to fit well with its likely target audience, which
seems to be teens or adults who feel not quite
satisfied in their current situations, and who would
like to burn off some steam by vicarious rebellion.

The rules text is one of the best written among the
contest submissions, and there were no questions of
interpretation in our group. However, clarity could
have been further improved with a few diagrams
(perhaps one showing the initial board set-up and
another showing a sample move after being caught with
useful passes) and a table showing the demerit values
for the various sets of passes. Nevertheless, the
rules are easy to read and understand, and the game
makes good use of almost all of the piecepack
elements. The required appendix is adequate, and the
design appears to be a true group effort, which is
good. Where the game lacks is in the fun department.
Some players said they would have liked more
interaction and more choices. In the group with whom I
played (who are used to counting cards) it seemed
fairly easy to keep track of who had what passes,
which made the optimum trade choices, and therefore
the direction of travel to go to class, fairly
obvious. But Army Brats is intentionally positioned as
a light game, and it would be a wonderful gateway game
for introducing the piecepack to people who are used
to playing card games like Hearts or Euchre. In fact,
with a few renamed classes, Army Brats might best be
played using a piecepack that has playing card suits.
Overall, I think Army Brats meets its own design
goals.

Mechanically, as I may have hinted before, Army Brats
is fairly shallow. It offers players up to three
levels of choice on each turn -- whether to go to
class and get a free pass or trade; if trading, with
whom to trade; and after trading, whether to get
caught with a useful set of passes or to risk waiting
for a better set on a subsequent turn. But most turns,
these choices are fairly obvious, even among casual
players. The result was a hidden information game that
felt a wee bit too predictable. On the one hand, we
really liked the scoring mechanism of using the dice
to count around the outside of the school (tile
array). It harks back to a common score keeping
mechanism found in many modern German games, such as
Torres, King Me! and Medici. On the other hand, maybe
it's just our group, but we didn't feel like Army
Brats was as fun as the theme suggested that it should
be.

Speaking of theme, it is a pretty good one. But
unfortunately, the theme sometimes clashes with the
mechanics. For example, why would a student (pawn)
already in a given class (tile) block access to that
class by other students? And why wouldn't both
students involved in a trade already know what passes
(coins) they're getting in return? And why would
students be limited to trading only one pass at a
time, and only the type of pass for the current class,
at that? And how can a student immediately go from a
Tuesday Poetry class to Military History on Monday? So
basically, the multi-player mechanics make for a fine
game, but they don't really fit this theme. Likewise,
the theme is fine, but these mechanics don't give it
justice.

The Canadian Army variant is a nice touch that
revitalizes the mechanics when played with only
two-players. Under the default rules, the shortcomings
of the multi-player game (predictability and obvious
choices) are amplified when Army Brats is played by
only two. Therefore, the Canadian Army variant (which
requires sets of at least four passes instead of the
default two) is strongly recommended when playing with
only two players. The difference in play is analogous
to the difference between Gin and 500 Rummy for two
players.

Conclusion: Army Brats is a light set collecting game
that would be excellent for introducing card players
to the piecepack, or for use as a filler. But it's not
likely to maintain long-term interest, especially with
frequent plays. Score: 20.52

Bid!
----
by Jeb Havens & Ian Schreiber

Take Modern Art, strip off the theme, port it to the
piecepack, and Bid! is pretty much what you get. Well,
almost, anyway. The mechanics are really quite simple.
Everyone starts with a suit of tiles, two coins and a
pawn. The player who won the last auction (or the
piecepack owner for the first auction) rolls all four
piecepack dice to determine how many points are up for
auction and if any special rules will apply. Once
during the game, each player may take a Mulligan and
force all of the auction dice to be rerolled by
spending his or her pawn. After the auction rules have
been determined, every player places a secret
face-down bid (usually a single tile, but depending
upon the auction rules sometimes two tiles are used,
and sometimes coins are needed to break ties). The
highest bid scores points (and sometimes coins) based
upon what was rolled on the four dice. After each
auction, the winning tile passes to the second-place
bidder, the second-place tile passes to the
third-place bidder and so on, with the last-place tile
passing to the auction winner. This way, everyone will
always have exactly six tiles, although their values
may change dramatically over the course of the game.
The first player to accumulate 100 points wins.

The Bid! rules are fairly well-written, and the game
is straightforward enough to play. I would have liked
a cleaner summary table for the effects of rolling
aces, and possibly a score track upon which the pawns
could move. As it is, we used markers to keep track of
the scores instead of pencil and paper, but a Cribbage
board would have also served in a pinch. The required
appendix is somewhat better than average among the
contest submissions, and indicates a good mix of
effort. Mechanically, once we memorized the aces rules
table, the game went rather smoothly, except that some
rules left us wondering why they were included. For
example, no one ever used the pawn sacrifice option to
force a reroll of the auction dice in our games.
Except possibly as a final turn last resort to prevent
a leading player from passing the 100 points mark, the
pawn Mulligan just didn't ever seem worth doing to us.
Thus, we thought the pawns could be better used simply
to keep track of the scores.

But the biggest problem we experienced was a runaway
leader in a three player game. This wasn't especially
fun, even for the leader, who had somehow managed to
acquire a majority of the five tiles. The reason Bid!
is much better for four (or possibly more) players
than for three players is that the losers' bids tie
far too often in a three-player game, meaning they
keep the same low-value tiles they had and the winner
keeps the advantage. A reasonable but untested fix
could be for the tying losers to determine a hierarchy
among themselves using coins (just as tying winners
already do). This would guarantee a tile passing order
and break the runaway leader cycle. Also, if
piecepacks with more than the standard four suits are
available, there's no reason Bid! couldn't be extended
to play with more than four people. In fact, like many
other auction games, Bid! might have a sweet spot when
played with five or six players, and additional types
of auctions could be devised if any additional dice
are added to the mix. More than four dice in a given
auction might break the game, but keeping only four
dice might make the coin economy too tight. Also,
allowing the roller to choose which four dice to roll
might be both a fun addition and a way to reinvigorate
the Mulligan option. These are all topics for future
play testing that I hope the designers will consider.

Conclusion: As submitted, Bid! doesn't work well with
three players, but it works fine with four (and
possibly more) players. The authors would do well to
tweak the tie breaking rules so that auction winners
don't keep the advantage when the losers all tie,
which is really only a problem in the three-player
version of the game. They may also want to rethink the
pawn Mulligan and add a couple of player aids such as
a scoring track and a clean auction reference table.
Score: 23.26

Blockade
--------
by David Boyle, James Kyle & Chris Young

Anyone who's known me for very long knows I'm a sucker
for a good abstract, so after I read the Blockade
ruleset, I was really looking forward to playing.
Blockade is an abstract traversal game of unequal
forces for two players. Our games typically lasted
about 40 minutes. One player (the runner) tries to get
any one of the four pawns from one end of the board to
the other, while the second player (the blocker) tries
to immobilize the pawns by surrounding them or
trapping them against the board edge using coins from
other suits. Coins move like chess kings, only onto
empty spaces, but the blocker may move up to four of
them (one of each suit) on a turn. Pawns move like
chess queens over or onto empty spaces and/or
like-suited coins or over other pawns, but the runner
may (and must) only move one pawn on each turn.

The rules are clearly written, one of the best
text-only rulesets I've seen. Likewise, the appendix
is brief but fully-functional. With 24 coins in play,
Blockade is a real brain burner for the blocker. In
fact, the blocker never won in any of our seven games.
Yet, it was relatively easy to see the runner's best
moves. There were some times when it felt like the
blocker was just about to hem in the last pawn, but
somehow the pawn always managed to escape. I'm not
sure whether or not the authors had this experience
during play testing, but it indicates that there might
be some balance issues with the game, which is not
uncommon in unequal forces games. One possible fix
would be for players to bid for the right to play the
runner by declaring how many moves they think it will
take to get a pawn to the opposite edge of the board.
If that many moves pass without getting a pawn home,
the runner loses. Or maybe require the runner to get
two runners home to win? Or limit the distance a
runner can move to perhaps four spaces?

Conclusion: Blockade is a game that I really want to
like, and I did enjoy playing, but it doesn't seem to
be adequately balanced. Score: 23.12

City Council
------------
by Phillip Lerche, Michael Schoessow & Stephen
Schoessow

City Council is easily the most complex entry for this
contest. Imagine Puerto Rico Rails or Sim City: The
Multi-Player Board Game, and you'll get a pretty good
idea of City Council's scope. The rules are fairly
long and dense, and it definitely helps to have the
necessary materials available to play with while
learning the rules. However, with the exception of
what exactly to do with the investor and speculator,
the rules are fairly easy to keep in mind, once
learned. To some players in my group, this wordiness
indicated that the rules could have been written much
more succinctly, and that more diagrams would have
helped in the explanation of the examples. One of the
key bits of equipment for City Council is a Player Aid
Sheet for each player. This  player aid sheet is the
only place to find the important victory points table
detailing how many points a city zone is worth, as
well as bonuses and penalties associated with its
placement adjacent to other city zones. Unfortunately,
the Player Aid Sheet somehow got detached from the
originally submitted ruleset, but a question to the
authors got them to send another copy. Whew! I'm glad
they did, because despite its complexity, City Council
has quite a bit going for it.

Basically, the game progresses in a series of rounds.
On each round, each player (beginning with the player
who went first in the previous round) bids one coin
for priority in his or her course of action for the
current round. Once the priority sequence is
determined, the highest bidder gets to either choose
to lobby for the favor of a certain city council
member or choose a place in the turn sequence. Then
the second highest bidder does the same, and so on.
This is repeated once through again in the same order,
but this time if the highest bidder has already
selected a city council member to lobby, he or she
must select a place in the turn sequence (or
vice-versa), and so on down the line until everyone
has both a place in the turn sequence and the favor of
one of the city council members. Then the players take
their turns in the order of the determined turn
sequence, each with the favor of one city council
member, which grants that player certain perks. Turns
consist of paying to zone one area (tile) of the city
(large custom play mat), then optionally placing an
investor and/or speculator (they gain some immediate
victory points, and may also gain further victory
points for later city developments) and then
optionally laying rail (pennies or other similar
markers) for the city's mass-transit system. There are
a few restrictions in the placement of zones and rail
that usually don't make things too difficult until
near the end of the game. This escalates the
importance of tactical play as the game progresses,
especially in the three player version. This is a good
thing!

So, how does City Council rate? As I mentioned, the
rules are very dense, and could use some diagrams to
illustrate the examples. But other than that they're
fairly well written. Likewise, the appendix is
slightly better than average among the contest
entries. The political city building theme is
engaging, but the complexity of the mechanics
sometimes gets in the way. In particular, the scoring
is very math-intensive with lots of variables to keep
track of at once. It reminded one player of when he
was learning to play cribbage, where part of the game
is actually seeing all of the points you have. Placing
this zone here gets this number of basic points, but
since it's adjacent to this zone, there's this
penalty, but then since it's adjacent to these two
other zones, there's this other bonus. And since I
built a rail stop that connects to these other four
zones, that's another bonus, plus the points I get
from laying the rail are doubled because I have the
favor of the transit director. Oh! And here your
investor matches this tile's suit, so you also get
points here... You get the idea. The complexity of the
scoring, all by itself, complicates the rest of the
game because knowing what to do to maximize your score
relative to the other players becomes a brain burner.
Perhaps City Council would be better positioned as a
computer game?

Other minor niggles? The number of rail segments is
limited to 50 for the entire game, and that struck
some players as arbitrary rather than a number arrived
at through play testing. Particularly in the three
player game, the rail is usually exhausted well before
the end of the game, which made lobbying the transit
director useless thereafter. If 50 rail segments is
indeed a play-tested limit, then limiting the number
of rail segments that can be laid per round (perhaps
seven in a three player game and nine in a four player
game) would even things out a bit, and possibly give
more importance to going early in the turn order if
you're also lobbying the transit director. Due to its
complexity, gamers (particularly train gamers) are the
intended target audience for City Council. For that
reason, a bit more attention to balancing the various
winning path strategies could elevate City Council
from a good game to a great game. Ergonomically, it
also would have been a nice touch to have had an easy
mechanism for keeping track of who went first on the
last turn, so they have priority in the bidding on the
next turn. We passed a pencil. I had fun playing City
Council, at least when the mechanics didn't get in the
way of the theme. From the feedback I got from the
other players, they had similar experiences.

Conclusion: If you're a train gamer waiting patiently
for a route-building and investment game for the
piecepack, you're in luck; City Council has arrived.
If you like German style games with bidding and
various role-based privileges, but want something
heavier to soak your brain, you're also in luck; City
Council has arrived. But if you're a casual or family
gamer just looking for a way to spend some social time
with others, you're much better off looking elsewhere.
Score: 23.61

Delegate Dash
-------------
by Chrystal Overby & Glenn Overby

In an election year (in the USA), what could be more
appropriate than a game about an election? In Delegate
Dash, four primary candidates (pawns) scurry around
the countryside campaigning for delegate votes
(coins), with a simple majority needed to win the
Piecepack Party nomination. As a nice touch, rules are
provided for robot candidates, so while the game is
touted as being playable by two to four, it's also
well-suited for solitaire play. The primary season
progresses week-by-week in various regions (tiles)
based upon the tile values, with nulls and threes all
together during "Super Tuesday." Candidates' movement
allowance is dictated by die rolls. If there isn't a
clear winner by the end of the five-week primary
season, the nominee will be chosen at a convention in
which the candidates with the lowest number of votes
are successively eliminated and the remaining
candidates inherit their delegate votes by means of
successive dice rolls.

I have to hand it to the designers, one of whom is
brand new to game design. The theme is great.
Likewise, they did a great job keeping track of
individual contributions, and their appendix was one
of the best of the bunch. I can't imagine many
children wanting to play a game about primary party
politics. But unfortunately, if the target audience is
game-playing adults, the game play itself left a lot
to be desired. Namely, meaningful choices. Even if
it's much maligned among contemporary game snobs, the
roll-and-move mechanism is tried and true. So, while I
didn't want to penalize the authors for plugging in a
well-worn mechanism, the fact is that the random dice
roll mechanism really doesn't fit this theme. The
ability to sacrifice a delegate coin (a good use for
null coins) in order to roll and move again does help
a bit, but it doesn't go quite far enough. Some sort
of action point, economic or political momentum system
may have worked better for travel allowances than
roll-and-move. Some sort of debate, bidding, diplomacy
or even bribery system might have provided a richer
convention experience than highest roll+regional
delegates to divvy up the spoils of a losing
candidate. As it is, the "choices" the robot
candidates make are almost always the best ones
possible, so while the theme is great, I felt somewhat
unnecessary as a player, especially after spending 30
minutes to play a game that ended in a roll-off to
decide a 304 to 304 split.

Conclusion: The authors should take this wonderful
theme and work on the mechanics to make Delegate Dash
into as good a game as it deserves to be. With some
attention and refinement, Delegate Dash could be
great. Score: 16.60

Elephant Run
------------
by Jim Adams & Amy Enge

Elephant Run is a humorous reworking of traditional
chase games such as Foxes and Geese, with a few new
territorial elements thrown in. One player controls an
elephant (pawn) that travels around a four by six grid
of rice paddies (tiles), eating them as it goes. The
second player controls six rice farmers (coins), and
tries to prevent the elephant from eating rice paddies
and stampeding farmers. The elephant can capture by
stampeding (jumping over) a farmer, provided the space
beyond the farmer is an uneaten rice paddy without a
farmer in it. But an elephant cannot re-enter a rice
paddy that has already been eaten. Farmers, however,
can jump without capture as above or may run freely
across ravaged rice paddies to quickly get into
position to block the elephant from eating more of
their livelihood. The elephant's player wins by
scoring ten or more points (any combination of eating
tiles and/or stampeding farmers), otherwise the
farmers win.

We found Elephant Run to be interesting for the first
few plays, but upon further analysis it seemed like a
full solution to the game was just around the corner.
So the replay value might not be very high for those
who want a deep intellectual challenge. But this isn't
necessarily a bad thing, especially for a game where
the target audience appears to be children or parents
playing with their children. None of our games took
longer than ten minutes to play, which is also good
for kids with short attention spans. There's even a
built-in method of compensating for stronger or weaker
players -- simply change the number of points required
for the elephant to win. For these especially
child-friendly features, Elephant Run comes
recommended, although adults are likely to lose
interest.

With the exception of a few minor flubs, the ruleset
was fairly well written, albeit not very easy to refer
back to when rules questions came up during the first
few plays. The ruleset could be improved by dividing
the text into subsections, or at least by using
shorter paragraphs. The use of graphics was good,
overall, but in the release version I would like to
see one more graphic clarifying when a farmer may or
may not jump or use its special running movement. For
example, when the space beyond another farmer is
empty, a farmer may not both jump and run to the next
available rice paddy. For players of roughly equal
skill, ten points did, in fact, seem to be about right
for a closely balanced game. The appendix was just
adequate, but the flavor text and additional graphics
were nice touches.

Conclusion: Elephant Run is a quick, fun little game,
but it certainly won't appeal to everyone, and is
probably solvable. But those very qualities earn it
the consolation prize of Best Children's Game. Score:
21.93

Gold Rush
---------
by Seth Jaffee & Jason Smulevitch

Gold Rush is an economic building, trading and
resource management game set in the late 19th century,
and might most conveniently be described as Settlers
of the Klondike, or perhaps Yukon Goa. Three or four
players set off to explore and exploit the uncharted
northern wilds in an attempt to find their fortunes.
The piecepack tiles are land claims that can be worked
to produce food, energy, ore and gold (tracked by
poker chips or other convenient tokens), while the
piecepack coins are special features of each land
claim that can independently produce additional, often
different resources. Players start with very meager
means, only a bit of food and energy. But little by
little, everyone stakes more claims (using gaming
stones), and uses their limited resources to both
improve their existing claims and to produce more of
the resources they need. Simply surviving is fairly
straightforward, but getting ahead requires optimizing
the land and features for resource production, savvy
trading with other players, and building and enhancing
structures (kept track of individually using cards) to
both enhance your own land exploitation and protect
your assets. And getting ahead in victory points
requires not wasting time doing things that aren't
worthwhile. The goal of the game is to have the most
points at the end of the game, which lasts nine
rounds. Each of those nine rounds is made up of
several phases, in which each player gets to act in
turn. If you have played any of the popular
phase-driven building games that have come out of
Germany in the past few years, Gold Rush will be easy
to pick up, and finished inside ninety minutes.

There's something to be said for a game author who
takes great care to make sure the rules are presented
in a clean, easy-to-understand way. Unfortunately,
that something cannot be said for Gold Rush. The
ruleset, as I received it, was a nearly unreadable
mess. I thought it very odd that a PDF would come
through so jumbled, and that prompted me to ask some
questions. I mean, a paragraph would start out fine,
then the next line would consist of only one or two
words, followed by blank lines before the sentence
continued. Lather, rinse, repeat. It was a real chore
reading through a ruleset that had been corrupted like
this. As it turns out, this wasn't the fault of the
designers, who originally submitted their ruleset in
the text of an e-mail message. The forensic evidence
suggests that the file mangling came about
accidentally when the e-mail message containing the
original ruleset was copied into a text editor (such
as the notorious Notepad that comes with Microsoft
Windows), the identifying information removed, and
converted to a PDF using a printer driver style
distiller. It was a malfunction of a buggy program
that almost cost the Gold Rush designers extra points.
But my difficulty wading through the Gold Rush ruleset
was ultimately my own fault, mostly for not asking
questions sooner. There's a lesson to learn here,
folks: If you submit your rules as a text file or as
part of an e-mail message, please double check any
sort of formatted output before it goes to a cranky
contest judge or gets posted on a web site. Better
yet, format the document, and include a few diagrams
and play aids to make the ruleset more inviting for
the reader.

OK, now that THAT is out of the way, there are still
some shortcomings with the ruleset itself. While the
game structure can be described fairly simply (setup
followed by nine rounds of production, free trade,
claim staking, development and passing the dice taken
in turns, and ending with a final scoring phase), this
isn't clearly stated in the rules. Fortunately my
gaming group was already familiar with numerous games
having this structure, so figuring it out wasn't hard.
Also, since the game was originally submitted in the
text of an e-mail message, there are no diagrams to
help guide new players through the play process. Even
a simple diagram of the initial setup would have been
helpful. Again, the collective gaming experience of my
playing group was a saving factor, and we muddled
through just fine. This game also cries out for a few
play aids to make life easier. A four-up sheet of
reference cards listing the order of the phases, the
production costs of the different buildings, and a
victory points table would have been ideal. Lesson
number two: It's polishing touches like these that
elevate an already decent game from "I've never played
it because I can't get through the rules," to "Ooh!
Cool! Let's play THIS."

And honestly, Gold Rush really is a decent game.
Several mechanics are recognizable from other games,
but their re-assembly into Gold Rush breaks some new
ground that is, on the whole, at least as much as the
sum of its parts. One mechanical niggle we had was
that a warehouse magnate strategy appears to be the
one best way to maximize victory points. To make it
work, build farms, windmills and ore mines, and get
one warehouse as early as possible to hedge against
loss. Hoard food, energy and ore until the last round,
then replace as many buildings as you can with
warehouses. Why warehouses? Because they are the
cheapest and most useful non-production building, and
they are worth eight victory points each. This is
clearly the surest way to maximize victory points.
Consequently the costs for and/or the number of
victory points awarded for the various buildings needs
to be adjusted to make the game more interesting.
Perhaps varying numbers of victory points could be
awarded for production buildings as well as
non-production buildings? Or maybe limit the
availability of non-production buildings? If there
were only one warehouse available in the game, other
players might be given the option of donating the
energy required to prevent spoiled food. The
possibilities are great.

The authors may also want make gold more useful within
the game, possibly by allowing a one-for-one purchase
of any other resource using gold as a means to get
past food and energy shortages. Otherwise, purchasing
a gold mine after, say, turn seven, is of only
marginal value. These two flaws, the unrealistic
warehouse magnate strategy and the unrealistic idea
that gold mines aren't very valuable if purchased late
in the game, detract from the theme quite a bit. We
also found that there was relatively little
interaction during the free trade phase, which was
somewhat disappointing. This was especially true
during the early rounds of the game when resources are
scarce, no one wants to trade anything.

The mechanical predictability isn't necessarily a bad
thing, as many games have standardized paths to
victory. But I think they usually take longer to
discover. On the other hand, the fact that the optimum
victory path is fairly obvious also fits well with the
theme. The Klondike is an excellent setting, but there
were a few things that everyone had to do before
digging for gold, including finding sources of food
and warmth. So the thematic and mechanical integration
is unusually good for Gold Rush, and the theme
receives high marks. As far as the fun factor, Gold
Rush is slightly better than average, despite its
mechanical problems. There's a lot going on in a
relatively simple system. Unfortunately, unless some
tweaks are made, its predictability may hurt Gold
Rush's long term replay value.

Conclusion: The Gold Rush rules are in need of
revision to get the victory points within a more
realistic range if multiple victory paths is the
design goal. The ruleset is also in desperate need of
editing. The writing needs to be cleaned up and
formatted, and a few diagrams and play aids wouldn't
hurt. But the game itself has tons of potential to
become a solid family game in the contemporary German
style. Score: 17.84

K'Dak's Tower of Confusion and Camel Wash
-----------------------------------------
by Jim Adams & Amy Enge

K'Dak's Tower is a simple dungeon crawl memory game
wherein two friends (pawns) gather gold (collected
according to hidden tile values as tiles are landed
upon and exposed) that was left as trap bait in a
six-level tower (each level is two tiles by two tiles
square) that begins crumbling as soon as someone
reaches its highest level. Ostensibly, the gold will
be pooled to pay for a camel wash, but the competition
is strictly for bragging rights. The friends enter on
the lowest level of the tower and may move
orthogonally in any direction, exposing tiles and
collecting points according to their values. (Moving
onto a previously exposed tile is worth nothing.) The
only other movement restrictions are that to move up a
level requires at least two tiles on the current level
already be exposed, and to exit the tower requires
that someone has reached the top level. Once someone
reaches the top, all the tiles flip face-down again,
and a die is thrown on every turn to see what level of
the tower starts crumbling, with higher levels falling
down to fill the void. Whoever escapes with the most
gold wins.

K'Dak's Tower is really easy to learn and play, and
the graphics and story are quite humorous. A fairly
handy scoring track is included with coin-sized
spaces. The ruleset is clearly written, if somewhat
wordy at times. But long paragraphs make it difficult
to refer back to the rules when a question arises. The
appendix is adequate, as well. Unfortunately, there's
not really very much interesting here, in terms of
game play, other than the memory element of trying to
get the most points on the way down out of the
crumbling tower. Amazingly, the crumbling tower is not
dangerous at all, and the players are assured of
escaping with at least some gold. This crashed my
suspension of disbelief for the game, somewhat. Why
hadn't the gold been retrieved earlier?

K'Dak's Tower is clearly positioned as a children's
game, and the games we played were all under 20
minutes, which fits that target audience well.
However, one play tester commented that the tower
crumbling mechanism is somewhat fiddly, and might not
hold the attention of children playing. Since the
points you get while climbing the tower are completely
random, there might be quite a large inequity of
points by the time the trap is triggered. As a result,
the game turned out not to have many meaningful
choices, even with the Talisman variant. One
suggestion for improvement is to increase the
importance of the memory aspect by increasing (perhaps
doubling) the value of gold found on the way out of
the tower. Or maybe increasing the value of gold found
on higher levels? Another minor niggle is that a
fully-enumerated and serpentine scoring track would be
more ergonomic for use in play than the contest
version.

Conclusion: Our group didn't much care for K'Dak's
Tower. As is, the crumbling tower mechanism is fiddly
and the game play itself is fairly shallow. But
there's room for improvement, and we encourage the
authors to give it some more work. Score: 19.69

Magistratum
-----------
by Brad Johnson & Phillip Lerche

The first time I read the rules for Magistratum, I had
no idea what was going on. Honestly, I couldn't even
finish them in one sitting, but that may also have
been because I was tired. But I did know that
Magistratum was a massive game. The second time I read
the Magistratum ruleset, I still didn't have much of
an idea of what was going on. But I knew that it was
an economics game set in the political background of
old Rome, and that it was even bigger than I thought
during the first reading. The third time I read the
rules, I first gathered all the required bits, found
myself a quiet table, and hunkered down to see just
what's going on here. What I found was a very complex
game that had clearly been through the ringer to
balance things. I was ready to teach it to the group.
Then during the first group game, I found out that I
didn't really know the game at all, so we all kept
referring back to the rules. The constant hunt for
interpretations made the game drag on for about five
hours, which is well beyond the estimated time.
However, once we all finally "got it," things went
much more smoothly. So there is something here. A huge
something. But the learning curve is extremely steep,
and conquering it felt like finally coming to the end
of a long political campaign. Oddly enough, that form
fits the theme perfectly!

I won't go into the details of how Magistratum is
played. You can curl up with this ruleset beside a
cozy fire and delve into that yourself. But briefly,
the players are patriarchs of influential Roman
families vying for political control of the Roman
offices (the Magistratum) and newly acquired
provinces. Players win victory points by campaigning
for control of the provinces and bribing their way to
the top of the political pyramid. Rounds happen in
phases, and phases happen in turns, usually beginning
with the player who bribed his way into the Prefecture
for that round. The various political offices provide
different powers, such as gaining more income,
increasing, shifting or decreasing provincial
influence, kicking lower-ranking magistrates or
governors out of office, fixing elections, and so on,
and so forth. The player with the most victory points
after all of the provincial elections have been
decided wins.

Despite my initial troubles with actually reading
through the ruleset, I believe that the reward
(playing a really good game) was well worth the
effort. The rules are rather well written (if dense),
and had several examples throughout. We did have
several questions, which is probably to be expected in
a game of this magnitude and complexity. But an e-mail
to the authors quickly helped us sort things out. One
complaint about this game is that it's nearly
impossible to hold all these rules in mind at once,
and during the game, it's very hard to refer back to
them without disrupting the mood. That's a pity,
because the theme is excellent and well-integrated
with the mechanics, which are also very good. I would
imagine that this game will only get better with
practice and repeated play. A summary sheet was
provided as a reminder for what to do and when to do
it, and we were thankful to have it. But the summary
sheet lacked sufficient detail to carry us through,
and was really only referred to when we needed to
remember the various powers of the officers. This is
one ruleset that could really use more diagrams to
show how the examples work. The brief appendix was
adequate. After playing, we all felt exhausted, but a
good time was had by all, nonetheless.

One thing you should be aware of before trying
Magistratum is that it plays somewhat differently with
three players than it does with four. With four, there
are significantly fewer rounds of play because the
provincial elections are won more quickly and spread
out among more players. This tends to make players
want to invest more in provincial influence than in
the offices, and makes income harder to come by if
everyone is trying to get the same provinces. Lower
income means fewer high-ranking magistrates. In fact,
in one of our four player games, the Dictator and
Censor offices remained vacant the entire game. With
three players, there are fewer contested provinces in
play at once, and therefore more rounds of play. This
increases income somewhat, and the offices become more
important. I actually prefer the three player version,
because with fewer players the rounds move more
quickly, and this increases tension.

Conclusion: Magistratum is a great big game with an
excellent theme, lots of flavor and a bit of
role-playing thrown in for good measure. Magistratum
reminded me somewhat of Quo Vadis, so if you like that
game, or other similar political games, you'll
probably like Magistratum. But it will take dedication
and commitment to learn and play. Magistratum also
gets the Best Use of Theme consolation prize. Score:
23.14

Shaman Island
-------------
by Randy Cox & Jason Totten

Shaman Island is an area control game in which
warriors (coins) and shamans (pawns) of different
tribes compete for control of a land mass that gets
magically transformed over the course of the game. A
shaman can move over land like a chess queen
(unimpeded by friendly pieces), magically sink or move
sections of land around (with some restrictions), or
in a special two-turn process, exchange places with a
distant warrior tribe member via spirit movement.
Warriors move over land like a chess rook (again,
unimpeded by friendly pieces). Both warriors and
shamans may also hitch a ride to travel with another
shaman's spirit movement. The game begins with
building the island, then placing shamans and
warriors. The game then proceeds with a series of
turns in which players jockey for position and control
of land areas, and then ends when there is one more
island than there are players in the game. At the end
of the game, the locations of shamans and the (until
this point, hidden) warrior values are used to
determine control of the islands.

Our group found the rules to be generally
well-written, with especially nice-looking diagrams
showing many different examples of how sections of
land may be moved. There were a couple of land
movements that came up during our games that weren't
covered in the rules, but it would be nearly
impossible to explain and diagram every possible
scenario. A quick question to the authors resolved our
questions. The key mis-interpretation is that, if a
land mass is moving, it has to be in contact with at
least half of one face at the beginning, middle and
end of its movement. If at any of these three points
during the movement, the land is only in contact by a
corner, the move is either not allowed or that
half-move is not yet complete. It would have been nice
also to have had a diagram showing shaman spirit
movement and hitching a ride, but these were easy
enough to figure out.

This is quite a good game, both mechanically and
thematically, but it's more interesting with four
players than with three players. The smaller number of
islands in the three-player game can dramatically
shorten the game and make it feel more random,
especially if one player tries to hurry the game along
by making one long peninsula during the setup phase
and then sinking tiles quickly. More turns and more
land and piece movement in the four-player game gives
everyone more time to form opinions about the hidden
warrior values. This adds a layer of richness to the
game. Our three player games clocked in around 15 to
20 minutes, but four players extended that to 30 to 40
minutes. Incredibly (and unfortunately), Shaman Island
was submitted without the required appendix! The
judges didn't want to immediately disqualify the game,
after all it was pretty good. So after a follow-up
e-mail to the authors, this requirement was fulfilled,
but we still had to mark points off for not including
it in the original submission.

Conclusion: Certainly give Shaman Island a try when
you have a foursome, especially if your gaming group
is fond of games in the style of Leo Colovini, such as
Clans or the Bridges of Shangri-La. The Shaman Island
mechanics (once fully understood) are elegant, the
theme is engaging, and the game is light, yet
satisfying. Shaman Island also works OK as a
three-player filler, but isn't quite as interesting.
Score: 21.97

Ship It!
--------
by Michael Schoessow & Stephen Schoessow

The Group Projects piecepack game design contest
seemed to attract a larger than normal number of big
games among its entries, and Ship It! falls in that
group. Set in the late industrial revolution, Ship It!
is a pickup and deliver game with route building and
blocking aspects. As such, it's related to many
railroad games covering the same time period,
especially those set in a relatively small, densely
populated geographic area. Cities are randomly laid
out at the beginning of the game, built from sets of
tiles separated by gaps. Freight (non-null coins) are
then distributed throughout the region. A set of
double six dominos are transportation links that
players can purchase, randomly draw from a face-down
pool and then build to connect the cities. Piecepack
dice are corrupt commerce officials that help their
favorite teamsters while blocking shipments by other
groups via an area control mechanism. Null coins and
pawn saucers (or other suitable tokens) are used to
monitor scoring on a simple score track included with
the ruleset. The goal of the game is to ship your
freight to distribution centers (tiles marked with
pawns) in such a manner as to maximize your profits
when freight from that center is distributed.

The Ship It! rules are generally well written, with
only a few minor reservations. For example, there are
several game-play examples and rules clarifications
written right in the rules text (much like this
self-referential example), which increases the
paragraph lengths in some places, which in turn makes
it difficult to refer back to the rules when a
question comes up during play. The scoring track is
also somewhat clunky in that it requires two
suit-matched pieces in a ones digit plus tens digit
system. But the included diagrams are clear and useful
for explaining the examples. The use of bold and
italics to emphasize certain points was also helpful,
even though I sometimes found myself underlining
additional passages for my own reference. The brief
appendix is adequate, barely, but it is certainly not
outstanding.

Mechanically, Ship It! is quite interesting. The
economics of buying and building transportation links
and moving commerce officials and freight is
abstracted to an action point system in lieu of a
money and income system. For Ship It! which is
complicated enough as it is, this was a good design
decision. Scoring can be tricky with all the potential
bonuses. Occasionally, situations arise where there is
a chain reaction of distributions and scoring, and
these are usually a huge boon for the player who
triggered the scoring. We thought the wild swings in
points might break the game, but fortunately, since
distribution centers are moved to the next higher tile
after each shipment, scoring values increase over the
course of the game, which builds tension and somewhat
mitigates the chance of a runaway leader. These are
unusually tight mechanics, and the authors should be
commended on their play test efforts. The industrial
revolution era teamsters theme has been used many
times before, but there's a reason why it's so
popular: it's a good theme. Ship It! felt a lot like
Age of Steam set several decades later, which is a
fairly high compliment regarding its fun factor. It
certainly didn't feel like a two hour game.

One more thing I should highlight about Ship It! is
that the three-player and four-player games are a lot
different. In the three player game, anyone can move
the freight from the extra suit, using it to trigger
distribution at inopportune times or to cover
high-valued half dominos to make shipping less
expensive in certain areas. In the four-player game,
the freight coins from each suit are exclusively
controlled by only one player, and there is an
additional commerce official in play. As a result, the
three-player game is usually shorter and more
vindictive, while the four-player game is more
strategic and competitive. I prefer the four-player
game. Seemingly as an afterthought, the authors tried
to stretch Ship It! into a two-player game by having
each player control two sets of pieces. This version
is a bit of a hack, and Ship It! should really only be
played with three or four players.

Conclusion: For a semi-abstract delivery game, Ship
It! should appeal to serious rail gamers looking for
something a bit lighter with which to pass a couple of
hours. Ship It! should also appeal to German style
gamers wanting to explore transport games without a
huge time or money investment. Score: 25.28

The Fallacy of Rank
-------------------
by Keith Lacey, Will Schneeberger & Joshua Tempkin

Stratego was one of my favorite games when I was
young, but the problem I eventually ran into was that
game play became predictable. Soon thereafter, I lost
interest. Still, I've often wished that the basic
Stratego mechanic could be improved upon. Well, now it
has! The Fallacy of Rank is, at heart, Stratego
reworked for the piecepack, and souped-up with action
tiles that are used to cause special effects. In that
respect, it's not too unlike Lord of the Rings: The
Confrontation or some of the "block" war games such as
Hammer of the Scots. A whopping three piecepacks are
required to play, but they were readily available and
this fact did not affect the judging.

Two to four players command armies (18 coins and two
pawns, all of one suit) trying to destroy one another
on a big field of tiles. As in Stratego, soldiers
(coins) are deployed with their values hidden, but
here the locations of the commanders (pawns) are
always known to all players. Initially, both
commanders and only 14 soldiers are deployed, with the
remaining four soldiers kept in-hand as reserve units.
Each turn, players may either move one deployed piece
one space orthogonally or take a tile action. If a
piece moves onto a space occupied by an enemy piece,
both pieces are revealed. Then, both players
simultaneously reveal die values to declare any
"boosting" which is enabled by discarding non-null
coins or tiles from the hand. A brief lookup table is
consulted to determine the results. Tile actions are
invoked by discarding a tile. The last player with a
commander still standing wins.

The rules are concise, well diagramed and fairly
well-written, although there were a few minor points
of confusion. These were all easily resolved with
questions to the authors. The Fallacy of Rank theme is
a classic battle with elements of surprise and the fog
of war. Excellent, if somewhat hackneyed.
Mechanically, the game is also quite good, and the
time estimate was right on. Others in my gaming group
especially liked the option to discard coins or tiles
to boost the values of coins already engaged in
battle. Remember the Alamo! The only real complaint we
had was that there is a relatively minor king maker
problem in the multi-player versions. If two or more
players decide to arbitrarily gang up on someone else,
it's not fun to be that one player under the gun. But
the hidden information does moderate that a bit. Some
players didn't like having to look at their coins
repeatedly, and others found memorizing what coins and
tiles had been discarded a bit of a chore, but those
are really just matters of taste. Setup and tear-down
also takes a bit longer than most piecepack games, but
with three times as many pieces, that's understandable
and acceptable. Play did not seem fiddly at all, and I
was able to get into character thematically, which was
fun.

Unfortunately, the original appendix that came with
The Fallacy of Rank was far from adequate. It listed
several different aspects of the design followed by
"all three authors" on every point. That seemed a bit
forced to the judges, and I asked for clarification.
What I got back was a rough estimate of contributions
for the same categories, which did fulfill the
requirement to keep the game in the contest. But we
still had to take off points for the original
version's inadequate appendix.

Conclusion: If you like Stratego but find it lacking
depth, you'll probably like The Fallacy of Rank as the
next step up. Alternatively, if you like traditional
war games, but want something that plays in less than
an hour, The Fallacy of Rank will fit the bill nicely.
Score: 22.66

The "In" Crowd
--------------
by Jeb Havens & Ian Schreiber

How does one get ahead in life? Obviously, at the
expense of other, less important people. The "In"
Crowd is a ruthless popularity contest where social
promotion occurs when alpha personalities emerge from
cliques of three or five people (coins). Once an elite
clique is formed, the player who managed to somehow
promote the highest number and/or the least popular
people into that highest-tier social group wins.
Here's how it works:

Two players take turns placing posse members (face
down coins in their two suits) on the lowest rank of a
pyramid structure formed out of 14 tiles. Every so
often, instead of placing a new posse member, one
player will call for a popularity vote among a small
group. The values of all the posse members are
revealed, and the highest-valued coin among those
controlled by the player whose posse members have the
highest total advances to the next step on the social
pyramid. All the other posse members, now leaderless,
slink back to the players' hands. This continues until
four posse members reach the top of the pyramid. Then
the game ends and the players score based on the
values of those inner circle members. More points are
awarded for getting lower-valued coins (less popular
posse members) to the top.

The rules, aside from one question about what to do in
tie votes (everyone slinks away), are otherwise
well-written, concise and well-diagramed. Just reading
through them gave a good sense of how this game might
play out, and that clarity speaks well of the ruleset
as a whole. Setup and play was a breeze. Our games
typically finished a bit short of the estimated time,
but the players in my group are generally faster than
most, so this was to be expected. We played such that
looking at already placed posse members was not
allowed, because we felt that could slow down the
game. The authors did address this in the rules.
Kudos! The appendix was nicely written, and indicated
that the authors, while working together on many
aspects of the design, also did a good job of keeping
track of their individual contributions.

Essentially, The "In" Crowd is a trick-taking card
game played on a board having a built-in scoring
mechanism. Mechanically, the method of calling for
votes costing the opportunity to place another posse
member is ingenious and obviously well play-tested.
Our only niggle on the mechanics was that the default
resolution of tie votes could lead to repetition,
which could then stall the game. This seemed not-quite
satisfying. We would recommend the authors do further
play-testing with an alternative mechanic: if the
totals of the posse member values involved in a
coolness vote are tied, the player who controlled the
least number of posse members wins the vote. Or, if a
wilder, more radical game is your taste, try it the
opposite way: if the totals of the posse member values
involved in a coolness vote are tied, the player who
controlled the highest number of posse members wins
the vote. We played a few times using this latter
mechanism, and it made for some very interesting games
with lower-valued pieces advancing by virtue of having
more supporters.

Another thing we noted about The "In" Crowd was that
it's very well suited for expansion as a four player
partnership game with opposite players each
controlling one suit of coins. Of course, table talk
should not be allowed in such a game. For optimum
ergonomics, we recommend either using one of the
alternative two-color piecepacks or two suits of coins
from two identical piecepacks. One of the playing card
piecepacks with only two colors is ideal for both the
two-player and four-player partnership versions.

Thematically, The "In" Crowd is somewhat dry, but
remembering the social climate of youthful school days
was fun enough to keep us interested. To use a cliche,
the theme seems painted on. Fortunately, the "In"
Crowd could easily be rethemed. For example, if it
were about a hierarchy of Mayan priests vying for
supremacy, that would have been an interesting tie-in
to the pyramidal board structure. Now there's a game
that could sell!

Conclusion: The "In" Crowd clearly stands out as the
best game in the Group Projects contest. It's very
well-written, suitable for play by two or four players
having a wide range of gaming experiences and
preferences, and it's well-suited for either two
players as individuals or for four players as
partners. Whether you like games with bidding, trick
taking, some memory elements, dramatic psychology, or
simultaneous tests of both tactical and strategic
skill, The "In" Crowd has it all, and is highly
recommended. Score: 29.97

Triactor: A Day at the Piecepack Downs
--------------------------------------
by Jonathan Dietrich, Ken MacKeigan & Julie Taylor

Triactor is essentially Turf Horse Racing (republished
as Royal Turf) ported to the piecepack and tweaked for
somewhat more strategic play. It's a betting game in
which the players have some limited control over the
outcome of the horse races that everyone is betting
upon. Each race has three phases. First, players place
bets on the various horses. Second comes the race
itself, which takes most of the play time. Third, any
winning bets pay off. A game is a series of races,
which may easily be spread out across days or weeks by
keeping a running tally of winnings. Each race takes
roughly 30 minutes to complete, or sometimes longer if
there are many distractions or if some players are
prone to excessive analysis. We highly recommend using
a timer to limit thinking time on each turn to, say,
15 seconds. This is a race, after all, and if a race
moves too slowly, it isn't much fun. More on that
later....

In the betting phase, everyone has three betting
credits to use. In addition to placing bets on various
horses to win, place, show or finish in a given order,
players may spend betting credits to gather inside
information about certain horses. All along the race
track are coins that affect the movement of the horses
matching their suits, for better or for worse. These
coins, which are intended to simulate sudden bursts of
speed, tripping, and the like, can have a huge impact
upon the results of a race. Once bets are placed, all
of the players participate in the movement of the
horses (pawns) around the track, which is made up of
face-down tiles in the straights and face-up tiles in
the corners. Most "steps" along the track have room
for up to two horses, with the exception of the
corners, which have room for four. Horses advance via
a shared dice pool mechanic in which the active player
rolls all of the active dice, then chooses one horse
to move according to the roll on the matching suit
die. Null equals zero (no movement) and ace equals
one, but on any movement other than an ace, the chosen
die then becomes inactive until all of the rest of the
dice have been used, at which point all are recycled.
If a horse can't move as far forward as the die would
allow (due to the target step already being full of
other horses), it moves as far as it can. This dice
pool mechanic is an enhancement of a related
card-based mechanic used in games such as Yucata and
Sunken City, or predetermined dice pool mechanics such
as Domino Backgammon. In practice, the Triactor dice
pool mechanic generally works well at keeping the race
fair while giving each player a limited selection of
options to influence the relative positions of the
individual horses. After three horses cross the finish
line, bets pay out according to a reference table,
with odds determined by how many players bet on a
given horse.

Let me begin by saying that the Triactor ruleset is
very well-written. The layout was clear, and the
graphics were outstanding. There were only a couple of
very minor points of confusion regarding the payout of
bets, but I trust those will be cleaned-up in the
released version. Triactor requires a piecepack with
eight suits to play, preferably with different colors
for each suit or clear icons on each pawn. Included
with the rules is an illustrated play mat for the race
track infield. This was a very nice touch, but we felt
it would better fit the rest of the layout if it were
either two pages long or formatted for legal size
paper. The play mat, while it's great so far, could be
further improved by adding a winner's circle to keep
track of the pawns as they cross the finish line and a
short cost / payout table along with the already
present betting reference. These are really only minor
niggles, and the Triactor ruleset is among the very
best I've seen anywhere. Other piecepack authors could
learn a lot from the Triactor authors' example. The
appendix, while brief, served its purpose adequately.

Mechanically, I've already noted that the dice pool
mechanic generally works well. In this case, both the
dice pool and the event coins are particularly
well-matched to the horse racing theme, which in
itself is a classic. However, and this is a big
reservation, over analysis can really slow down the
game to the point where the race feels like torture.
The game is much mor
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