Previously I posted a news article announcing that Chip Theory Games next game is The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, coming to Gamefound in March 2023. Well, I was wrong. It is NOT their next game. Their next game is…
*Drumroll*
20 Strong!
*crickets*
Ok, it is not the most descriptive name, but I can tell you that I am definitely interested.
20 Strong is a solo-only game that is designed to play in 30 minutes or less. It involves 17 dice and a deck of cards. Super high level, you roll dice to overcome challenges presented by the deck of cards. Chip Theory Games is calling this a “game system” as the intention is to create new decks that play differently, providing new challenges in the future. Earlier I said it was solo only—that is true for now. That may change as the game system evolves.
The campaign will be launching on Gamefound on October 18th. As of this writing, a preview page is not yet available, but you can see the announcement here.
The campaign will have two options: • Core box for $30: The core box includes 17 dice and one deck of cards, Solar Sentinels, a new IP in the CTG universe • Core Box + Too Many Bones deck + Victorum deck for $65
The three decks mentioned above will be the only decks available during the campaign. In fact, there will be no other addons for ANY CTG game offered in order to simplify this campaign.
Oh, did I mention that shipping will be free? Well, it will be.
I am really looking forward to this campaign. The idea of a portable, solo-friendly CTG game intrigues me. I hope it succeeds because I would really like to see additional Too Many Bones decks as well as one or two for Burncycle and Elder Scrolls.
Tabletop gaming has no shortage of “save the world” type of cooperative games. From every flavor of pandemic, to games like Flashpoint: Fire Rescue, gamers have been using action points to be heroes for decades. Today we are going to be looking at the newest offering in this genre from publisher Smirk and Dagger Games. You’ll be able to embrace your inner Captain Planet as The Spill tasks you and up to three other players with cleaning up an oil spill in the Ocean.
The Spill, designed by Andy Kim, plays in about 50 minutes and works well at any player count.
Gameplay Overview:
The first thing you’ll do in The Spill is choose your response team. Every game needs at least four characters, so you’ll need to double up if you have less than 4 players. Each character has a unique special power from requiring fewer actions to clean up oil dice to ignoring weather effects to needing fewer actions to save animals. Players will also need to choose a win condition card, there are 9 in total among three levels of difficulty.
On a player’s turn, they first drop a number of dice into the oil tower. Dice will then be placed in the quadrant where they land, on a sector matching its number. If a die lands on an animal, that animal is flipped to its sickly side. If it’s not rescued by the end of that player’s turn, it heads to sickbay. If a sector ever gets its third dice, a spillout occurs and the tracker moves up a level (possibly increasing the dice dropped each turn).
Then the player gets four action points to use. Options include moving your boat up to two sectors, putting an oil die back in the bag, removing an oil die from the game, or rescuing an animal (contaminated or not). A player can gain up to two more action points at the expanse of adding an equal number of dice to drop during the next player’s turn.
When players have rescued a full set of animals (6 in total) or removed 3 dice from the game, they earn a resource cube. These can be used to power up action cards for special abilities (one-time use).
The game ends when players have completed their win condition (usually rescuing X number of animals and removing X number of dice from the game). They lose if there are too many animals in sickbay or too many spillouts.
Game Experience:
If The Spill sounds like a Pandemic-style offshoot, you are not far off the mark. The increasing danger level, special action cards, 4 actions per turn, and even some player abilities will have you thinking of this genre-defining game. Does that mean The Spill can’t stand on its own? Not necessarily. However, whether it’s different enough from Pandemic or one of its many offshoots to own will probably be the deciding factor for you.
Comparisons aside, the main attraction for The Spill has to be the dice tower. Dropping dice down that tower adds a good amount of tension to the game. We’ve had complaints that my gaming table isn’t level enough as one quadrant started getting overloaded with dice (the table was fine for the record). Sometimes that’s just how the dice fall. And, for me, that’s one of the biggest differences between The Spill and Pandemic. The loss of control.
Games can be made or broken by the rolls of the dice. If the same numbers come up in the same quadrants often enough, you might lose just by being overloaded. However, if you are lucky and they spread out evenly in that quadrant, you can send ships to that area, ignoring the others, and cruise to an easy victory. Yet if the tower sends the dice where your ships are not, that’s a quick recipe for a spillout. One of the reasons is that moving ships is slow. For 1 ap, you can move your ship 2 sectors. That means if you want to move to the other side of the board, you’ll need to spend 6 action points (or have the Sea Captain role).
So the dice are a double edge sword for me. They add both tensions and variety to the game, but can sometimes destroy the best-laid plans. In a game like Pandemic, you know the cards in the discard pile, and once shuffled back in, you have an idea of what will be coming up soon. In The Spill, you have no idea what numbers are coming up next. That makes it hard to plan. You are more reacting on your turn than executing a long-term strategy.
One thing I really liked about The Spill was the resource cards, which get powered up by saving animals and removing dice. Some of those powers can be really beneficial at the right time. I also liked that you didn’t have to use them right away, so you can leave those cubes on there and trigger the power when it will be most effective. Some cards are more situational than others, but at the right time, they might save your bacon.
Finally, let’s talk about components. While I love the dice tower, I hate that I have to break it down after every game. It comes in about 10 pieces in various parts, so I really wish there was a way to store it assembled. You also will need to set up the dice catching walls at the start of every game, which also makes it difficult to see the dice once they are rolled. Clear plastic, while more expensive, would have been much easier to use. And it’s a minor gripe, but the stickers for the tower weren’t sized correctly during production and are too big. You’ll need to trim those with an XACTO knife.
Final Thoughts:
The Spill is an interesting game. It somewhat rides on Pandemic’s coattails, but then shoots off in its own direction. The game can feel somewhat random at times due to the minimal ways to affect the fall of the dice, but that’s also a little bit of its charm. It’s the feeling of having your back up against the wall as you try and keep the oil contained as you seek to rescue animals. From a thematic side, it’s pretty on point. And it definitely has a nice table presence. I only wish that the setup time wasn’t so dreadful. From assembling the tower and dice catcher to having to place 30+ animals on the board, it’s just a bit much. But once going, the gameplay is solid and enjoyable.
Final Score: 3.5 Stars – A great theme with some solid gameplay, just wish setup time wasn’t such a bear.
Hits:
• Unique theme
• Multiple victory conditions, player roles, and resource cards
• High amount of tension
Misses:
• Setup time is way too long
• Tower can’t be stored assembled
• Stickers don’t fit the tower
When I think about the life of early humans I picture a challenging life full of hardship and danger where day-to-day survival was their only goal. Compared to now where completing Wordle before your morning cup of coffee feels like an achievement and I get the sense that we’ve gotten soft as a species. Like my biggest hurdle to this introduction has been the graphic design of the title. Is this game called “Tusk! Surviving the Ice Age” or “Tusk: Surviving the Ice Age”? These are the small things that keep board game reviewers up at night. Likewise, the editors may be equally frustrated when I write Tusk! and then the next word isn’t capitalized.
And in case anyone is interested; it’s Tusk! according to page 2 of the rulebook.
Gameplay Overview:
Tusk! is a semi-cooperative game that starts with a small collection of tiles, possibly loaded with resources, and the player meeples placed around the board. Each player has a card giving them unique end game scoring conditions and a single Tribe Member on the board.
Each turn is comprised of three phases—The tribe phase, the hunt phase, and the season phase.
The Tribe phase is broken into three steps:
1. Grow the tribe – spend tasty food tokens to add workers
2. Send out Hunters – Commit tribe members to the hunt
3. Send out Gatherers
The gatherer step, weirdly the meatiest part of your turn, gives each Tribe Member two actions which are move, gather, recover, and fight. Moving allows you to move up to two tiles. Gather allows you to collect one resource from the space you’re in, recover allows you to recover from injuries, and fight allows you to fight another player’s tribesman on your space.
Besides being mean to each other, players can also trade and gift resources at any time. The resources in the game are Tasty Food (used to buy more workers and are scored as points at the end of the game), Pointy Sticks (+1 to hit for fight and hunt actions), Lumpy Rock (+1 wound if you hit during an attack), and Clump of Grass (+1 defense during fights and hunts).
The hunt phase has players working together to take down a mammoth. Each hit (rolls of 6+) do one point of damage (and granting one food). After it’s defeated the hunt leader gets four more pieces of food to distribute as they see fit—even to people not contributing or keeping it all for themselves. If you don’t take the mammoth down, it gets a go at attacking everyone and it hits on rolls of 4+ (or 5+ if you are using Clumps of Grass). This repeats until the mammoth is defeated, all the hunters are wounded, or everyone still standing bails out on the hunt to presumably watch cave paintings and chill.
The season phase starts with drawing a season card which has some effects for the next turn. Some examples of these effects are adding resources, removing resources, making tiles easier or harder to traverse. Then the mammoth roams moving the direction rolled on one die and moving based on what the symbol on the card says (0-2 spaces). Any tribe members in the path are wounded and moved out of the way.
The first two seasons have tiles added making the world a bigger place and puts more resources into play. Then the tiles start to get flipped over (rolling the dice to see where it starts) and the snow starts to spread across the board like a slow avalanche advancing between zero and two spaces depending on what the season card says removing any tokens in its path. When the snow covers the whole board, the game ends.
Gameplay Experience:
This is a game that starts feeling cramped and then opens up only to get claustrophobic again as the world turns into Hoth. Player interaction tends to go up with higher player counts, especially after all the resources are depleted.
In my plays there seemed to be a predictable progression to this game as we’d collect resources, add tribe members, and then fight the mammoth. Not having resources to fight the mammoth gives little room for error as you hit on a six and it hits on a four through six. Likewise, joining the hunt before there are enough people to be successful just takes your gatherers out of play. This interaction between the players, including deceiving others, is part of the experience. Bribing others to join the hunt and then either taking part, or not, could have downstream ramifications. There’s a victory card that rewards fighting other players so this game can range from cooperative with a winner to full on competitive where you actively antagonize each other.
Overall, this is a fairly straightforward action selection and resource management game that hides a mean streak behind the cartoony art and silly names for resources. Basically, once tiles start being flipped over, you’re racing away from the ice collecting what resources you can as you approach the end game. And in the event there’s nothing left to gather, hunting the mammoth or fighting each other become your only pathways to gaining more food. And that brings up the question players may ask themselves—do you spend the resources you need for end game scoring or try to do more damage to the mammoth and hope you get the lion’s share of the meat?
Depending on the starting tiles and the order of player actions, it’s possible for one or more players to start out with an advantage. Gathering a food token allows you to add a tribe member and the earlier you can add a tribe member the more actions you get to take over the length of the game.
The scoring windows are generally tight but the hunt leader could try and cheat their partners which could have an effect on end-game scoring. And if someone gets extra Tribe Members early and makes progress on their end scoring goal, there can be a bit of a runaway leader problem as one of my games had one player more than triple the second and third place players’ scores.
Final Thoughts:
Tusk! Surviving the Ice Age is a relatively quick-playing action selection game with variable scoring and provides players with a nice decision space for their activations and encourages player interaction. But this decision space shrinks down as the ice age approaches leaving little room for maneuvering. This semi-coop/semi-competitive game may work great for some but I didn’t enjoy attacking the other players at the table. However, leaving that out could leave the game a little flat as you either haphazardly attack the mammoth empty handed or patiently wait for the world to freeze over.
Final Score: 3 Stars – Tusk! provides a quick playing resource management game that simultaneously encourages cooperation and fighting each other for resources.
Hits:
• High variability with game length, season and victory cards
• Thematic gameplay centered around hunting and gathering
• Lots of choices mid-game before the world freezes
Misses:
• Fighting or cheating other players may not be for everyone
• Decision space shrinks as the ice age approaches
• Runaway leaders are possible
Euro games stand out from more pedestrian board games because Euros tend to have a lot less luck involved, and even when Euros do feature luck, they usually offer some way to hedge against a bad outcome. When I reviewed Khora, I lauded how nicely that game provided you with a way to buy your way out of bad dice luck. Plutocracy takes things one step further, eliminating all luck. The game features no chance whatsoever—no dice, no cards, etc…—the closest you can get to the luck of the draw is if you choose the optional starting conditions that randomize prices and players’ starting planets.
Games with zero luck in them tend to be dry and themeless—think Chess as the Urspiel here—but from the moment you open the box, Plutocracy’s board (a colorful solar system on the black background of deep space) makes the game pop with intrigue: ooh, what is this game?
Gameplay Overview
The Tagline for the game is “Space is Time is Money is Power” and that does a pretty good job of summarizing what Plutocracy turns out to be: a fancy Pick-up-and-Deliver game with some interesting wrinkles.
Each player represents an interplanetary corporation headquartered on the planets beyond Earth’s orbit, each vying to control the Plutocratic Council (“The PC”) on Pluto. You get control by old-fashioned bribery (along with a bonus based on what you have in your inventory if you pay timely visits to Mother Earth) and you get money from carefully planning space flights to maximize commercial opportunities across the five productive outer planets (Mars through Neptune). Get the most Power by getting the most Money by using Time most efficiently as your travel through Space and you’ll probably win Plutocracy. Luck certainly won’t be an issue.
Game Experience
Over the course of the game, you fly your spaceship through the solar system, buying and selling goods and choosing the right moment to siphon off some of your working capital to buy seats in the parliaments of the five outer planets, which increases your chances of getting votes in The PC. It might sound a little like an old-school Hanseatic League trading game, but Plutocracy has two super-cool twists that definitely put the game into outer space, thematically, and also give it a unique and intriguing mix of mechanics.
The first is how Plutocracy uses a Time Track. If you’ve played Uwe Rosenberg’s Patchwork, for example, you’ve encountered the Time Track concept. Players move their tokens forward on a track or perhaps a rondel, and whoever is last in line takes the next turn. If that player is frugal in her use of time, so she is still last in line after spending the next time increment, she can take another turn, and keep going until she finally uses up so much time that she passes someone; the turn then passes to whoever is now at the back of the line. Players must choose whether to take the best available action, even if it would consume so much time they have to wait (seemingly forever) for their next turn, or instead to take a potentially lesser action so they can take another turn right away. Ah, the sweet tension of tough choices.
The first modern Euro game to introduce this neat mechanic seems to have been Peter Prinz’s “Jenseits von Theben” (Beyond Thebes), released in 2004 by Queen Games. Many games have used it since because it’s a nice mechanic generally, but Claudio Bierig, Plutocracy’s designer, has innovated on this mechanic by adding three neutral action tokens onto the time track, and each one triggers when all players have passed it on the track, as if they were players themselves. After this, each moves a certain number of time spaces forward, ready to trigger again in the future. This lets the players control when the prices will reset, when the planetary parliaments hold elections for The PC, and when the entire board rotates. When the WHAT?
Yes, that’s the other cool feature of Plutocracy that sets it apart from run-of-the-mill Hanseatic League simulators, and really takes advantage of being set in space. Because the game takes place in a rotating solar system, every piece on the board is transiting around the sun at a different speed. The clever Time Lord will take advantage and travel 6 “time” to where Jupiter will be when the rotation occurs, saving 6 time over traveling 12 “time” away to where it is now and then sitting idly while the next rotation brings you half the way back. Manipulating these celestial orbits becomes the key to distinguishing yourself from the other Monarchs of the Supply & Demand Curve.
Beyond those two hooks, Plutocracy is very simple: each planet sells one good and demands a different one. Each purchase raises prices for everyone else; each sale lowers prices, but another one of the neutral events (triggered on the Time Track) will offset the impact of player sales, raising potential profits three times per game.
You can plow your profits back into the next commodity and travel to the next planet, but eventually, you need to turn Money into Power. Seats on each Planetary Parliament translate into votes in The PC, with an election three times during the game, again based on a time token. So do you buy one more Plant on Neptune and sell it for more profit on Uranus, or spend that money instead to buy a seat in Neptune’s Parliament, in hopes of winning Neptune’s vote on The PC in the upcoming Solar Elections? Ah, the dilemmas of modern space corporate management.
The game adds in some other elements to encourage you not to just buy/sell/bribe the whole game. You can swing by Earth and get as many as 12 votes in The PC based on meeting certain goals, but only the first two players to meet each (and get to Earth) will get those benefits.
As each player’s time token approaches the end of the time track, you really need to get your money and goods converted into votes on The PC before the final vote, which can often mean planning ahead to land on Earth just prior to the final token triggering THE END so you can claim enough of the bonus seats on the Council to tip the scales in your favor. Mess up, and you’ll be cursing Hades himself. Time it right and it’s heavenly.
I desperately wanted to love Plutocracy because it is so darn clever. I adore the way the board rotates and the extremely cool mechanism for having the game’s events triggered by the player’s own choices of how far to travel along the time track. As a small-time designer myself, I wish I could come up with cool concepts like these for my games. But despite these, I found the game itself was good but not… wait for it… stellar. Perhaps because there was no luck involved, no dice, no cards, etc., it almost felt to me like Plutocracy was the engine of a bigger game, but the bigger game had been stripped away, and all that had shipped in the box was the extremely cool timing function of some larger grandiose game by a designer like Alexander Pfister or Vital Lacerda. I wanted to draw a card when I landed on Neptune to trigger an event or gain a randomly assigned specialty that let me fly faster or trade Oxygen cheaper, or just give the game a little more texture. Instead, it was like playing the inside of a Swiss Watch. So pretty, so elegant, but ultimately a little cold to the touch.
Final Thoughts
Upon reflection, I realize what I wanted from Plutocracy was to be able to play it against other people but also when I was alone. If something is going to be an extreme exercise in efficiency, it’s not what I necessarily want to invite my neighbors over for, for Sunday afternoon gaming. But by myself, say, via an online, turn-based gaming system like Yucata.com, where I can plan out each move taking as long as I want, Plutocracy could be an enjoyable exercise in Vulcan logic, where I can let my inner Mr. Spock out.
Rare are the times when I’ve managed to lure someone else to play games with me in person, and when I do, I want our games to have more spice to them. Plutocracy offers the joy of a perfectly planned move, but it seems like a dish better served when everyone is playing from their respective planetary bases and/or households. I’d encourage the folks at Doppeldenkspiele to develop an online outlet to connect their gamers together this way.
Final Score: 3.5 Stars (Though if you happen to be a Vulcan, consider it a 4!) – This is a beautiful clockwork robot, amazing to see in action, but less fun to play with than it would seem on first blush.
Hits:
• I love the innovations on the Time Track Plutocracy brings to the table.
• The rotating board is extremely cool.
• Everyone who saw it thought the board was awesome.
Misses:
• The game’s perfect information and lack of luck made for a cold experience as a face-to-face game.
• Intellectually more interesting than fun.
• Perhaps designer Claudio Bierig could bolt additional game onto Plutocracy to make something warmer and more fun, adding some flesh and blood to the extremely cool mechanical skeleton of Plutocracy.
