Let’s Meet the Fighters

Splendor

Splendor is a game all about collecting gems and becoming the best gem merchant in wherever it is set. It is a fairly generic theme, but it works for the game. Splendor, like I said, starts with you collecting gems to buy cheap cards that then give you more gems. However, the gems you get from the cards are permanent and in a tableau in front of you. So you collect more gems, but now you need less to get your next card. And if you can figure it out, you can build up those cheaper cards to then get more expensive cards for cheaper, or for free, and those cards generally give you points.

Century Golem Edition

Another game with gems, but this one is a little bit different. This one gives you a hand of cards that you add more cards to. You are trying to build your most efficient hand play combos of getting gems, and upgrading gems. When you get the right combination of gems, then you can trade those gems in for a Golem. And the golems at the end of the game are worth points. So with Century Golem Edition, you are trying to build up that perfect engine in your hand. Super fast turns and a really fun game.

Homebrewers

Finally, my favorite theme, we have brewing beer in Homebrewers. In this game you are competing to have the best beers in four different categories, ale, stout, porter and IPA. You can brew them and get some base points, but one of the big things in the game is that you can modify your brews. Maybe you have a card with yuzu on it, you can then make a yuzu IPA. That might give you more money, points, or raise you up in another beer. Twice during the year, you are then judged on how good your brews are, player with the most points wins.

Similarities

Al of the games allow you to get better at doing things as the game goes on. In Splendor it is because you have more permanent gems and with Homebrewers you have the ingredients on the beers. Century is a bit different, but you have an improved engine because of the new cards that you’ve add to your hand.

There is also that every game is about points. In Homebrewers you get points for brewing the best beers. Splendor you get points with the cards that you buy. Century Golem Edition, you get points for the golems and coins that you have. They also give the players a chance to catch-up. Though, Splendor is the one where this stands out most. Because the end game in Splendor is triggered by someone reaching a point threshold.

Differences

So, I already kind of talked about one. Century builds up an engine of card play. Homebrewers and Splendor have a tableau. Now even between Splendor and Homebrewers there is a difference. Homebrewers you trigger part of your tableau when you build, Splendor the whole power of the tableau is always available. So the engine building piece itself, while similar that there is one, how they each handle it is different.

And while the theme is an obvious difference, I think it’s worth pointing out that Century Golem Edition and Homebrewers feel like they have more theme than Splendor. If we go back to the clean versus messy games article I wrote this week, Splendor is the cleanest. This isn’t that it is massively more clean in game play than the others, but just that all of them a very neat and tight games, Splendor just removes more theme while doing that.

The Battle

They come out swinging, Splendor gets ahead with some fast and simple moves getting Homebrewers into a corner. But it, like in a button mashing video game, just seems to be doing the same basic moves over and over again. Homebrewers and Century Golem Edition get the upper hand knocking Splendor out of the ring.

Homebrewers and Century Golem Edition keep on duking it out in the middle of the ring. Every time Splendor tries to get back in, they dump it back out. The battle, in the end comes down to the two of them. Century Golem Edition keeping some cards back and changing up their moves. But Homebrewers builds up several solid sets of moves to keep pace… and the winner is…

Homebrewers

Homebrewers just beats out Century Golem Edition, though, it is really close. Both are engine building games and both are a lot of fun. I think that I just like the theme of Homebrewers better. It is fun to sit down and play that game, and it plays fast, and at the end talk about what weird beers you’ve made and if you’d try them. Both are really good games though. And I know a lot of people really like Splendor, but to me, I’m kind of done with that one. It was fun, but I know how it plays out most of the time now, so I don’t need to play it again.

Which do you prefer?

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Both Games:
In both games you are divided into two teams. There’s one person who is the leader of each team who is going to be giving clues. These clues are going to correspond to words or pictures on cards on the table. The goal of the game is to get your team to get all your words or pictures first by giving a one word clue and how many words that relates to. But beware that you don’t get them to guess their opponents or an innocent bystanders card as that will end your turn guessing. And if you get the assassin, that’ll cause your team to lose.

Let’s meet the two competitors:

Codenames
This is the original, older, version of the game. You play with a slightly larger grid of words in this game so each team has more words to guess. The other mechanics are going to be the same, but as the original it’s the one that more people have heard of. All the words are the cards are single word per card, there are some fun things that you can do with using multiple meanings of the same word to try and get people to get two seemingly separate words, but that can be a limit to base Codenames.

Codenames: Pictures
This one is played on a slightly smaller grid, though if you have the cards from original code names, for what is supposed to be guessed for each team, you can use cards either direction. On the cards are going to be weird images, it would be something like a spaceship flying through the hole of a doughnut. The guessing is very similar, but each picture has more than one concept built into it from the start.

Fight!

When we’re looking at which one is more popular, and looking around the crowd, there’s clearly more shirts for Codenames in there than there is for Codenames Pictures which might be the motivation for this fight. It starts out with them mirroring the moves of each other, which you’d expect from siblings who play basically the same way. As the fight goes on though, Codenames Picutres is starting to show off some more creative moves. They’ve managed to combo together several moves. Codenames is struggling to keep up with the moves. It’s slower plodding offense is not getting through to Codenames Pictures. Codenames looks like it has more endurance though and is able to kickout from an early finisher by Codenames Pictures. But using a move from it’s siblings playbook, Codenames Pictures is able to hit a big move and end it.

Winner: Codenames Pictures

When it comes down to it, what Codenames lacks in excitement, Codenames Pictures can make up for. Codenames can take a while if the words and the card just don’t chain together well, but in Codenames Pictures, because the pictures are more abstract you’re able to create more interesting one word clues that allow for cool moments of getting several cards at once instead of maybe two. That makes the game feel more like a party game and something that can be pulled out with any group. It’s also not language dependent like Codenames is, so if you have a group of people who might not know all the words in English on the cards but can understand well enough, they can join in on a game of Codenames Pictures.

I think that Codenames is okay but as I’ve played the two different games, I don’t know that I really care to play Codenames again if Codenames Pictures is an option. There’s certainly no reason to have both in your collection, and Pictures just feels like more of a party game and more of a fun time which is what a light game like both of them is really meant to feel like.

Which of these two do you prefer? Do you agree with my choice for winner or do you prefer regular Codenames, if so, why?

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What this means for all these games is that you don’t need to have someone playing the bad guys. Too often in a pseudo dungeon crawl you can have a situation where it feels like the one person running the monsters is up against everyone else and more facilitating their fun than having as much fun themselves. There are then games like Gloomhaven where no one has to run the monsters, but everyone still has to do stuff on the monsters turn. In these games, you get an app that does that, it tells you the rules for moving the monsters and what you have to deal with them. Or where to place tiles and what the puzzles are.

Let’s meet the contenders.

Imperial Assault
Imperial Assault is a Star Wars game where you are playing adjacent to the main characters, since you wouldn’t want to play as Luke and have him die before he can blow up the first Death Star. You, instead, play around the edges of the Star Wars world and the big stories that are happening in the original trilogy. It uses it’s app to help you know when to activate storm troopers and other troops out there, but you still have to go through, when someone activates and see which of the moves that they need to do.

The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth
JiME, as I’ll shorten it to, takes place between the movies, I believe, and it gives you an interesting combination of characters to play with. You can play as Gimli, Legolas, Bilbo, or Aragorn from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but they also have created two separate characters for the story as well whom you can play as. In my opinion, I get why they picked some main characters, but I’d have preferred if all the characters were side characters who no one has heard of because they aren’t in the books, and you run across characters like Gimli, Legolas, Bilbo, and Aragorn. The app, in this case, runs a ton for you. You build your board, you put down markers, and you have you cards and character information in front of you, but when you’re interacting with a marker or fighting a bad guy, the app helps walk you through what you need to know. With the map, it also will be unique each time.

Mansions of Madness
Welcome to the world of HP Lovecraft. It’s almost impossible to a Fantasy Flight Board Game battle without mentioning something to do with Lovecraft. In this one, you take on a role of an investigator and you try and find your way through a mystery as you’ve been called to a mansion or somewhere else where something mysterious to do with the elder gods is happening. The app helps create a unique setting every time you play through the game or at least a few different ones, for each scenario. It also gives you those tokens to interact with that you place on your unique board and as you delve into the story being told. It also controls the monsters, letting you know what they can do or whom they will go after. It also keeps track of when the end game is coming up for you.

The Match
I should point out that all of these borrow from each other, though, Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth, borrows a lot from both of them. You can kind of tell the order that Fantasy Flight put them out because of that. JiME works well, and I like the campaign aspect to it, which you get in Imperial Assault, but you don’t get in Mansions of Madness. I also like the combat in JiME, it works well, and comes directly from Mansions of Madness. It’s simple and clean and lets you know what to do, whereas with Imperial Assault there’s more that you have to dig through to make the combat work.

I do think what separates them the most is the story. Now, I like all the worlds that they are set in. Lord of the Rings is a great fantasy setting. Star Wars is an iconic Sci-Fi . Lovecraft is synonymous with horror. So Fantasy Flight has basically everything covered that I like. I would say that JiME, thus far, seems to have the weakest story. Now, I don’t think it’s all that week, I guess I should say, JiME feels like you should be playing something more epic than you are because you have Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn, and to a lesser Bilbo, you want to play through the trilogy or The Hobbit, but instead you’re off dealing with bandits. Imperial Assault would have had that feel, but you get to see moments with Vader, you are playing through parts of the movies, but because you’re the E-Team (not even good enough to be the B-Team), it doesn’t matter if you die, and it doesn’t matter if you orbit out from the main Star Wars story for a while. And with Mansions of Madness, you’re playing a single story at a time, and there isn’t a particular story that people really expect when they are getting something from Lovecraft, they just know Cthulhu.

The Winner?
JiME gets the early advantage because it takes mechanics from both and it’s able to counter the moves. However, it ends up throwing some predictable moves when it comes with the characters that it has. It gets bounced, but puts up a good showing. We get down to Imperial Assault which throws some strong nostalgia haymakers but eventually tries a complicated move with it’s bad guys and gets caught.

1…. 2…. 3….

Mansions of Madness

The champion of the app companion Fantasy Flight games is Mansions of Madness which has done so much creative with it’s game and it isn’t just in Mansions.

Now, I will say, I’d always be glad to sit down and play any of these games. These are three of the top contenders out there to take down Gloomhaven, Gloomhaven is just too good, but I’m going to be getting these to the table coming up here on Malts and Meeples.

Have you played these games? Which one is your favorite?

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Pandemic Legacy

As I have talked about it before, it’s the first to enter the ring for the board game throw down. Pandemic Legacy is a strong contender as it works in a great story line with nice cooperative play. Season 1 is very similar to regular Pandemic where each person takes on the role of a CDC member and you are fighting various outbreaks. However, soon after you’ve started, you get a lot of twists and turns. The second season is much the same continuing after the first game by a little ways and able to be played without having played the first, but you’ll appreciate it more if you have played the first season.

Seafall

Now, I’ve written about this game as well, and I will say that I haven’t played through whole game, and likely never will. SeaFall is an exploring sea faring game where you take on different tribes and try and expand explore the unknown. There is a story running through the game, though, it can be a bit tricky to find all of the story in the correct order or to feel like there is a ton of story to it.

Risk Legacy

This variation on classic Risk takes you to an alien planet, that somehow looks exactly like Earth, except that all the borders are made up of short straight  lines. At that start of every game you pick your group of people and where you want to start, but instead of it being a slog to total world domination, it’s a race to see who can be the first to the victory point total. This move cuts the game time down a long long ways and makes the game much easier to get to the table than regular risk.

Charterstone

The final game in the battle is a worker placement game where you are competing against others to win the favor of the king as you work and build up a town for him. You build buildings, use what comes out of them to build more buildings, and you can explore crates which open up more opportunities to build and develop your section of the town into something unique. The game board evolves as the buildings you place are stickers, so everyone’s game is going to be unique.

Let’s talk about the tale of the tape with these games:

Time: Seafall games are by far the longest of any of these games. I don’t think that any others come close, in fact, Risk Legacy, the next longest game time, is probably about half the length of a single game of Seafall. Charterstone and Pandemic Legacy both generally clock in at under an hour, and Risk Legacy is just over an hour, whereas Seafall is probably three hours per game.

Story: Only in one of these legacy games would I say that there is a ton of story. Pandemic Legacy is full of story and twists and turns. I might get some disagreement, but Seafall has the next most story. While the story isn’t told the best, and you can get story out of order, there is definitely story in Seafall, it just isn’t presented or paced all that well. Risk Legacy and Charterstone basically have no story. Charterstone has a story slapped on the game, but the game wouldn’t play any different without the story, so I consider it completely optional, though it does pace out better than Seafalls, seeing as the story doesn’t really make a difference, it goes lower on the tape.

Ease of Play: Risk Legacy is probably the easiest out of all of them to play because it is just Risk with victory points. There’s plenty of familiarity with Risk out there in the world, and while not everyone might like it, they can probably pick it up easily. Charterstone is the next easiest as the mechanics of the game, while they do grow more complicated, still basically always remain, place a worker, or pick your workers up, so turns go by quickly. Pandemic Legacy is next, while at the start of the game it might be easier to grasp than Charterstone, Pandemic Legacy quickly adds in a lot of rules that you have to remember. Finally, Seafall, to no surprise, is a beast when ti comes to play, you have a lot of hard decisions to make every turn, and there is a decent amount of luck involved. Add in a poorly written rule book, and Seafall is not a game to pull out with beginners.

Now, I think that all of these games can be okay games. I have plenty of issues with Seafall, mainly a horrible rule book, and a poorly paced story, there are some solid mechanics behind it, and a lot of interesting and tough choices to make. However, it’s also the only one that is prone to a ton of analysis paralysis. So it’s the first out of the match, which is a shame, because I had high expectations for the game, which is some of the problem, because the game didn’t align with those expectations at all. Next out of the match is actually a double count out, so we’re getting to the winner which is Pandemic Legacy. No surprise there, but Pandemic Legacy has the story element and thematic ties that I look for in games. I will say this, though, about Charterstone and Risk Legacy, if your group is going to play a couple of games of it every other month, they are going to be better games to play, because you aren’t going to add in rules that vastly change the game between plays. However, the speed of play of Pandemic Legacy, the cooperative nature, and the great story telling makes it the winner.

On the horizon I’m hoping to play Rise of Queensdale and Betrayal Legacy. And I have yet again massive expectations for a Legacy game with Betrayal Legacy.

How many legacy games have you played, are there some that you haven’t that look interesting to you?

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