A tricky act to follow

For me, Uwe Rosenberg has a habit of creating games that fall into one of three categories. First up are the clever, lighter puzzles of games like Patchwork and Nova Luna. Then you get the brain-grinding agony of choice from the likes of A Feast For Odin and Hallertau (review here). My favourites from his stable are the games that sit between the two. Fun puzzles which don’t overwhelm you with choice, but with their roots firmly in the Euro game soil. Nusfjord (review here) remains one of my favourite games ever, but now there’s a new kid on the block, making some noise.

And the noise that the new kid is making is a high-pitched squeaking noise.

You see, Atiwa is a game about bats. I mean, if you want to be pedantic, it’s about developing a small community in the Atiwa Range area of Ghana. But really it’s about bats. Loads and loads of outrageously cute bat meeples. I’m a little bit in love with the bats. As I mentioned above, Atiwa isn’t anything as like as heavy as A Feast For Odin, and while it’s lighter than Hallertau, there are plenty of familial traits passed down through its genes.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Atiwa and Uwe’s previous games is that it does away with cards. You’ll add big, square cards to your tableau, but these are more like tiles than playing cards. If you’ve played the likes of Nusfjord, Hallertau, Caverna, and Agricola, you’ll know that his games traditionally have a lot of cards in them, often with different decks to spice things up. Not so in Atiwa. Other than the tile-card hybrids, there are none.

Thicker than skin-deep

As you might expect, Atiwa is a worker-placement game. Each player only has three workers to place, and there are a lot of things you’ll want to do, so there’s some strategy needed. The bats I mentioned are at the heart of the action. Developing your community’s tiles gives you space to add family buildings, and there’s space for goats and wild animals to flourish (people have got to eat), and areas where trees grow. Trees grow fruit on them, and at the end of each turn if you have three or more bats on your boards you can ‘pay’ a fruit to send them off for the night, leaving your board for the round, but growing a tree elsewhere.

It’s a nice thematic touch which ties right back to the origins of the game, which has its roots in reality. The story goes that the mayor of a nearby town was looking after the fruit bats, giving them shelter. Those bats then flew off at night, looking for fruit, and the seeds that fell in the guano (bat poop) helped to reforest whole swathes of land. This mechanism runs through the core of the game.

Look after the bats > Bats eat the fruit > Bats poop out the fruit seeds > New trees grow.

It’s another great example of Uwe Rosenberg not just leaping on the back of a concept, hoping if he whacks it hard enough it’ll carry him where he needs to get to. Every single thing in the game comes from the real world. At the end of a round when you come to feed your family, if you can’t manage it you draw pollution tiles, which represent the mining in the area. You might turn up gold if you’re lucky, but at the expense of a spot on your boards, and that can be a real hindrance. Untrained families can even eat the bats as bushmeat, but if you train those families, they’ll earn gold during income.

Action stations

At first glance, you might think the board rivals something like A Feast For Odin in terms of action spaces to place your workers. In reality, the choices are much more simple. Many of the actions involve moving something from your supply board (goats, wildlife, trees, families, fruit) to your village spaces, usually by trading something else in return. The game’s economy is really easy to grasp. Above and below the main board are new tiles to add to your tableau, representing wild areas (things like grasslands, lakes, caves), or living areas such as villages and towns. Expanding your tableau with these tiles is essential as the game goes on.

There’s plenty of competition for the available spaces, and it’s another of Uwe’s games that asks you to have at least two or three plans in mind, because sod’s law says someone is going to take the spot you want. I really like the inclusion of the action tiles – vertical tiles which slide to the left each round, both tracking the rounds of the game, and offering different action combinations each time they move. The way the game presents itself means each player is trying to do mostly the same things for most of the game. There’s enough wiggle room as the game progresses for some divergent strategies, but the basics of the game and the things you need to do really help to introduce the game to new players.

I’ve not seen an absolute runaway winner yet in quite a few games, which speaks volumes about the level of balance in the game. It’s easy to get complacent about such things, but after Hallertau when some players complained that it was just a case of ‘solving’ the puzzle to move the community centre in the game, it’s great to see another game which feels open-ended.

Final thoughts

Atiwa came out of nowhere for a lot of people, and the box art looks goofy as heck. There’s a lot of charm in there though, and the cutesy cover bat is one of the game’s most telling features. Atiwa feels like a much friendlier game than many of its predecessors. For instance, Agricola is commonly called Misery Farm Simulator because it’s so tight and so harsh. Hallertau is almost there with the components and farming board, but the action spaces are so regimented in their plain grid, it looks like a playtest version which slipped through to the printers. Atiwa absolutely nails it, from the box art right down to the board itself. It’s colourful and vibrant, it’s friendly-looking, and the iconography is clear and pronounced.

Ditching the cards was the genius move from Uwe with this game. Without having to manage a hand of cards with various professions, skills, bonuses or what have you, it leaves you free to concentrate on the table in front of you, and in turn it makes it a much more accessible game. I took Atiwa to my local game group and played with three others who’d never even touched an Uwe Rosenberg game before. Within one round, everybody understood what was going on, and how to get what they wanted, more or less. For that reason alone it usurps Nusfjord from the top of my ‘easier Uwe worker-placement game to teach to a group‘ list. It’s a pretty niche list, granted, but that position is a lofty one.

As is often the case with his games, the solo mode is excellent. It leans on many of its forebears and employs the ‘leave workers from a previous round blocking spaces’ mechanism, which works elegantly. Beware the solo challenges in the rulebook – they’re crazy difficult. As a solo game though, it’s a real hit, and among the very best of ‘Beat Your Own Score’ games.

It’ll come as no surprise to you by now that I love Atiwa. I loved it after my first play at Gridcon last year, and that love has only grown. Part of my love is because the components are so adorable, part of it is the ease of play, and part is of how streamlined it is. Solo will take you half an hour, then you can reset in a couple of minutes and go again (steady now!). How many games can you say that about? Time will tell, I’m sure, but as I write this now, Atiwa is my favourite Uwe Rosenberg game, just edging out Nusfjord. I’m sorry my fishy friend, I love you dearly, but these bats are just too much. Atiwa is a wonderful game.

Review copy provided by Kienda.co.uk. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

If you like the look of Atiwa, you can buy it at Punchboard’s retail partner, Kienda. If you sign-up for your account with my link – kienda.co.uk/punchboard – you’ll save 5% off your first purchase totalling £60.

Atiwa (2022)

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Publisher: Lookout Games
Art: Andy Elkerton
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-120 mins

The post Atiwa Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If, like me, you’re a fan of Uwe Rosenberg, you probably find yourself getting excited whenever he announces a new game based on a geographical region. He has some serious form when it comes to Euro games based in real places. Le Havre, Glass Road, Nusfjord, Fields of Arle, Reykholt – not a stinker among them. Hallertau is the latest to continue in this vain, and it’s good.

Cubes, cubes, cubes

You won’t be remotely surprised to learn that Hallertau is a worker-placement game. Uwe is a master of the form, so it’s reassuring to know. Instead of placing meeples or discs though, this time we’re placing little blue cubes as workers. The basic gameplay is what you might expect – place workers in turn order, take them back, get some resources. If you’re the first player to a spot it costs you one worker, the second player uses two, the third has to expend three workers. It’s what you do with those resources where Hallertau gets clever.

Each player has a board which represents their land. Field tiles can be added to the land, into which you can sow your crops. Plant rye in a level three field, you get three rye – who’d have thought. As in real life though, the soil there is not as good to grow crops in again straight away, so the field slides down a level, and would only yield two the next time, and so on. However, if you don’t plant for a season and leave the field fallow, its potency goes up a level. Balancing when to sow and when to leave a field alone is key to getting enough resources to do well in the game.

But what does doing well in Hallertau look like? What are you trying to do in order to score those elusive VPs?

Moving house

Each player has a long board with a large, cardboard, community centre building tile on it. Next to it are five craft building tiles, and by using your resources you can improve them and slide them to the right. Once each building has moved along, the big community centre can slide along behind them and fill in the spaces.

Now I know as well as anyone that Euro games don’t always have the tightest theme integrations. So you might be reading that paragraph above and thinking “Hang on, why are we moving entire buildings in 19th century Germany?!“, and It’s a fair question. Underneath the big community centre there’s a nice view of your village. By doing well and uncovering it, you’re increasing the visibility – both figuratively and literally – of your village. Clever eh?

Adaptive puzzling

Hallertau does what all the best Uwe Rosenberg games do. It offers up an efficiency puzzle, one which should always be possible to complete, but there are so many variables thrown your way that solving that puzzle is hard. On the four corners of the main board there are four decks of cards. The bonus and points decks are the same every game, but for both the farmyard and gateway cards there are four different decks of each in the box. Some cards give you short-term rewards for collecting and spending certain things, while others can give you big points if you can factor in their demands while still playing the main game. That’s a lot of variety right there.

Moving the craft buildings needs efficiency and planning too. For each of the six rounds in the game, the number of resources you need to spend to move each building is the same as the round number. Each has a constraint too; for example the brewhouse states that you must spend more barley than hops. In round one, you can move it with just one barley, as you meet that constraint – you paid more barley than hops. In later rounds you get a discount for paying with multiple resource types, and it means that some rounds are more efficient to move buildings in than others. Plan ahead, farmers.

Function over theme?

It’s a Euro, so there’s always going to be that bias towards the mechanisms of the game over the theme. That said, however, Uwe Rosenberg is one of the few Euro designers who really takes theme to heart in his games, and it’s evident all through Hallertau. Yes, the “making your village more visible in the eyes of the world” is stretching things a bit, but everywhere else the theme is solid.

Sheep age, and die. If you can look after them long enough, they’ll give you milk in each production round, but you might want to shear them for wool, or send them to slaughter for the meat. The field rotation mechanism, and fallow fields improving, while over-farmed ones get worse, is inspired. It’s not just a ‘solve this puzzle’ for the sake of it, it’s real-world consideration.

There’s a part of me that worries the puzzle of moving the community centre all the way to the end is solvable. That’s where the big points lie, if you can complete that movement. I haven’t solved it yet, to the point where I can look at the boards and think “Yes, I know exactly what I need to do here“. If that does happen, then I worry a little about whether it becomes a battle of who can manage to complete the most scoring cards, while we all finish the community centre. There feels like there’s maybe too much dependency on that central aim to get a good score, compared to something like Nusfjord or A Feast For Odin, where there are so many ways to win.

Mind you, some people really like that focus, so maybe that’s what would swing Hallertau for you, ahead of any of his other games.

Solo play

Solo players rejoice. Hallertau is another Rosenberg game like Nusfjord, where you chase your best score, and your workers for the previous rounds may block you in later ones. A card is flipped each round which tells you which quadrant of the board to remove the top rows of workers from, but for the rest of the worker spaces there are likely to be workers blocking the cheap spaces. That’s the biggest difference between this and his other games, you’re almost never completely blocked from a space, it’ll just cost you more workers to take the action.

Solo play, spending, and scoring is all identical to playing the multiplayer game, so if you’re happy with a good beat-your-own-score mode, Hallertau is a great option.

Final thoughts

I’ve gushed over Uwe Rosenberg in this review, I realise that. But it’s not just rampant fanboyism, it’s deserved. The genius in his games comes in hiding a very deep, complex game underneath some really simple rules. You don’t have pages and pages of rules and conditions in Hallertau to work your way through. If you have enough blue cubes to fill a space, you can get the thing it gives you. If you can afford the resources to move a craft building, you can move it. That simplicity frees your brain up for the much less-simple task of figuring out which of those worker spaces are going to ultimately give you the resources you need to move those buildings.

That simplicity in design carries over into the rule book. By splitting every round into 10 discrete phases, there’s no ambiguity, and each of those phases is simple in its execution. I can honestly say that other than for setup if I haven’t played in a while, or checking the details of a card in the (excellent) glossary, I haven’t needed the rule book after my first game. Hallertau has a community-voted 3.30/5 weight on BGG at the time of writing, how many of your games at a similar weight can you say you never need the rule book for? The included player aids are excellent and double-sided: one side with symbols, the other with short explanations.

As I mentioned above, my only real worry is around how solvable the community centre puzzle may be. Other than that, there’s nothing I don’t like about Hallertau. It’s a fantastic worker-placement game with a unique way of handling agriculture, huge variety in cards, and great component quality. If you’re a Rosenberg fan it’s a must-have, and different enough from his previous games to warrant shelf space. A proper, old-school Euro about farming in historical Europe, I love it.

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Publisher: Lookout Games
Art: Lukas Siegmon, Klemens Franz
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 minutes

The post Hallertau Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Solo gaming is nothing new. Our parents and grandparents spent countless hours playing various card and tile games on their own. Confused? Think about it – Solitaire, Mahjong, Freecell, Spades. While these are still great games (and free to play with those links above), things have moved on. During this, and the next couple of blog posts, I’m going to take a look at the options available for the solitaire gamer, the systems used, the games that do it well, and those that don’t.

In the next post, I’ll be looking at AI and automa opponents in games, but for now let’s get stuck in with the first part: solo games where the aim is to…

Beat your own score

Ever since the early coin-op cabinets like Space Invaders, chasing the elusive high score has been a goal for game players the world over. The majority of modern board games use a scoring concept in one form or another, usually named Victory Points (VPs), so it seems like a natural fit to create a solo mode which has you try to beat your own best score.

Board games with this option usually have one common feature. More accurately, they have one common omission – an opponent. Beat your own score solo modes normally build in some kind of round or turn limitation. Without this, it would be very difficult to make a balanced game, as one play might see you take more turns than another, giving you a better chance of getting a better score.

Let’s look at some examples.

The good

In my opinion, the best designer of beat-your-own-score modes is Uwe Rosenberg. The brain behind seminal classics like Agricola and Caverna, right through to modern hits like Nusfjord and Hallertau. He has a signature way of creating his solo modes.

There’s no automa opponent, but you take extra workers (his games are often worker placement games). You alternate between placing your two sets of workers on alternate rounds, but the previous set of workers remain on the board, blocking spaces and limiting your options. In Nusfjord for example, this means you have plan building fishing boats carefully, as there’s only one place to do it on the board. Use it this round, and you can’t use next round, because your worker will be left there. Of course, there’s always the ‘copy an action’ action space, but what if you wanted to use that for something else? Arrrgh! Darn you, me!

It’s clever, because it feels like you’re playing against an opponent, but you aren’t. That annoying git who’s blocking the spot you want, is you, from a round ago. For some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I really like his approach. It’s a bit like being given a puzzle to do, but being told that you can make up most of the rules. I find Uwe’s games compulsive, and chasing a score doesn’t feel like a tacked-on option. It feels like a good enough reason to buy the games, knowing that you’ll only play it solo most of the time. In fact, I would rather play the solo campaign mode of Nusfjord than play the normal game with more people. High praise indeed.

Terraforming Mars by Jacob Fryxelius is an example of a designer realising that their usual game wouldn’t work by making the player just play the base game with no changes. Instead, they introduced a solo challenge mode, which revises the rules for setup and starting conditions, and challenges the player to complete the terraforming in 14 turns. If you don’t manage it, you lose, but if you do, then you’re aiming for the highest score you can manage. Now let’s have a look at what happens when a designer doesn’t make the necessary changes to the game.

The… not-so-good

‘Bad’ would have been the wrong word to use. I’ve yet to play a truly bad solo mode. But there are a few which don’t do beat-your-own-score as well as the others. One such game, is actually a game I really, really like, and reviewed here recently – Praga Caput Regni. I love Vladimir Suchy’s games, his designs are brilliant, but the solo for this one was disappointing.

The default solo mode in the box has you playing the game without any other players, which the mechanisms allow. The problem though, is that without any other players, some actions become all but pointless. For example, placing buildings around a plaza in the town rewards bonuses when a plaza is surrounded. When multiple players are placing the buildings, that’s great, as there are lots of buildings going around lots of plazas. In the default solo game, if you place the buildings yourself it’s very difficult to surround even just one good plaza. So why would you bother?

There’s a downloadable opponent for the game (I made a digital version here), which is both good and bad. Good, because it places buildings down, so you can score with plazas, but bad because it feels like it’s an automa opponent, but it isn’t. It doesn’t score points, and you don’t compete with it for a win or loss, which is a shame. Don’t get me wrong, Praga Caput Regni is a brilliant game, and I love it, it’s just the solo mode which is disappointing. It’s an example of where beating your own score isn’t as simple as the designer saying ‘Play the game as normal and see what you can score’, because the loss of an opponent means you can’t play the game as normal.

The others

There are some games which don’t really fit into the two areas above, and that’s because they’re designed for either one player, or loads of players.

When it comes to games made for one player, you’d do well to find a better example than Nemo’s War: 2nd Edition, which I reviewed last year. It does have a win/lose condition, whereby you have to make it to the finale card and complete it, but if you manage that, then there’s a score to compute. Scores are based on the motivation you picked at the start of the game, and multipliers are used to score the things that thematically match that motivation higher than those that don’t. This is taken one step further by giving you an epilogue book in the box. When you finish the game, you find the section in the book that matches your score, and it finishes off the story you’ve created over the last hour or two. It’s a great example of solo scoring done well.

Maybe surprisingly, there’s a whole heap of games that can be played with huge player counts, which work perfectly for solo, beat-your-own-score play. Many of them are roll and write games. The reason they work so well is because the game is played identically in most cases, whether you’re playing by yourself or with ten others. I’m talking about games like the Clever series (all players playing the solo mode, copying the communal dice) which include Ganz Schön Clever (review here) and others like Metro X, Railroad Ink, Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade. There are a few others in this vein that don’t automatically work, because the game involves interaction between players. Cartographers is a great example of this, but overcomes it by introducing a solo mode with modified rules.

Would you enjoy beat-your-own-score?

I’ve heard quite a few people say they won’t play this type of solo mode in a game. That’s fair enough, it’s not going to be for everyone. However, there’s a chance some of you have just had a disappointing experience with the ones you’ve tried so far, and some of you who wouldn’t even consider it. My advice would be:

1. Try an Uwe Rosenberg game. Specifically, Nusfjord if you can get hold of it. This time last year, you could have picked it up for less than £20 in the UK (I know, because I did), so you should be able to buy it for less than the bigger games like Hallertau or A Feast For Odin. Play a game or two to get the hang of it, then play the campaign mode from the back of the rule book. It’s a really chilled-out game, the boards are completely modular, so you can get it on just about any table, and it’s a great game in its own right.
   
   
2. Try Ganz Schön Clever. You can get it for less than £15, it’s simple enough that you could get your parents playing with you after dinner one night, and it’s a tiny box that won’t take up too much precious shelf space. The wooden dice, little pens, tear-off score sheets – everything about the game is just really charming.
   
   
3. Go digital. There some great apps for computers and phones & tablets, which are digital adaptations of some of the games I’ve talked about. If you’re not sure whether you want to buy Terraforming Mars, spend a few pounds on the digital version and you can try the solo mode. You’ll also be able to play it online with your friends, or experience the normal game against some AI players. The same goes for the Clever games, and Cartographers, the apps are great implementations that let you try the game without paying for the full physical version first. If you enjoy them, I’d still recommend getting the physical versions, so that when we can meet actual human beings again soon, you can share the enjoyment with them.
   

Let me know what your favourite beat-your-own-score game is in the comments below, it might be a new favourite for me. I’ll be back with part two soon, where I’ll be taking a look at automa / AI opponents.

The post Solo Modes In Board Games – Part One appeared first on Punchboard.

Nusfjord sees players running a fishing village of the same name in Norway, and the aim of the game is to amass victory points through growing your fishing fleet, adding buildings to your village, winning the favour of the village elders, and earning some lovely, shiny gold. They do this through liberal use of my own personal favourite board game mechanic: worker placement. Players vie to claim action spots on the main boards (plural, I’ll come back to that) which let them do various things, such as build a building, chop down their forests, feed the elders, and so on.

Each round consists of each player placing one of their three workers, then the next player, then the next, until everyone has placed all their discs. Then the round ends, the workers come back to your supply, and the next player gets to place first. In two of the rounds, some new buildings become available and there’s plenty of 2ooh, now I could do that…”, but otherwise play continues like this for seven rounds, and then scores are tallied and a winner crowned.

What’s In The Box?

Nusfjord comes in a smaller box than most of the big games, but there’s a lot of game in there, and it will definitely fill up your table. “But how? You just said it was a small box!” I hear you say. It’s because this game is like designer Uwe Rosenberg’s other recent game, A Feast For Odin, in so much that it has modular boards. So while the instruction manual shows you how to set it up in a configuration which is over one metre/three feet across, you can move things around to suit.

And you might need to, there are a lot of boards. There’s a main action board, a small copy-an-action board, an elder board, an ‘A’ buildings board, a ‘B’ buildings board, and a plates board for serving fish. On top of that every player has their own player board, an elders board, and finally, a small personal supply board. Phew, that’s a lot of cardboard.

It’s made of really nice cardstock, and the components are nicely made wooden pieces, including some gorgeous little fish.

How Does It Play?

Nusfjord is a great worker placement game in my opinion. I’d put it at the higher end of medium in terms of weight, as it’s quite simple to play, but developing a strategy is quite hard, but essential for a good score. The synergies between the buildings available, your resources, and the various elders are what make good scores possible. There are lots of tricky decisions to make as resources are hard to earn. You very rarely have a surplus of things to spend.

Each round is broken into a few discrete phases. First you bring your catch back, and the more boats you have, the more fish you get. These get distributed in a certain order, so you give them to your elders first, then the share holders (you can buy and sell shares in each others’ businesses)and then you get to keep what’s left over. Those fish along with wood gained primarily by cutting down trees on your board, and any gold you’ve earned, are what you can spend on buildings and boats. Players then do the action phase and use their workers to gain elders, build buildings and boats, buy and sell share, chop down or add forests, or use the powers on their claimed elders. Once everyone’s played all their workers they reclaim them all, move the first player marker around, and in rounds four and six add some ‘C’ buildings to the table, which usually cost more but can be worth a lot of victory points at the end.

You’ll have constant conversations with yourself in your head like “Now, I could spend this wood on that bigger boat, which means I’ll have more fish next round, and I could serve them to the elders and get one gold each time. Or should I get that building which rewards me for more workers at the end. Oh but look, that player has a load of shares available and a large haul size, I could buy those for more VPs at the end and free fish, hmmmmmm”.

Final Thoughts

I love this game. In each game you only use half of each of the type of buildings, drawn at random, and in the box there are three different decks, so the replayability is really good, and you can’t go into the game with a strategy before you see what’s available. Every game is different and resources are really tight, so I probably wouldn’t introduce someone to the genre with this one though, I’d always pick Stone Age for that.

If you like Eurogames though, and you like worker placement and resource management, I really recommend Nusfjord. The theme is gorgeous, the game plays smoothly with minimal interaction, and it’s always interesting to see how all the different strategies play out when it comes to final scoring.

On top of all of that, it has an excellent solo mode out-of-the box, with a full ‘campaign’ mode which really tests your strategy.

The post Nusfjord Review appeared first on Punchboard.