What happens when you play Mind Funeral with a Water Crystal in play?
Mind Funeral:
Target opponent reveals cards from the top of their library until four land cards are revealed. That player puts all cards revealed this way into their graveyard.
The relevant part of Water Crystal:
If an opponent would mill one or more cards, they mill that many cards plus four instead.
My job is fun. I don’t mean that I have fun doing my job (although I do), but rather that I am in the business of fun. After a year of working at the Treehouse, I’ve helped hundreds of customers find the games they need at any given moment. It really is the best part of my job, but it’s far from easy.
Thing is, and I’m sure this won’t be a surprise, there are so many games to choose from. Our library is edging its way towards 500 titles, a drop in the ocean compared with the astonishing number in existence (Board Game Geek recently passed the 100,000th game in its database), but more than enough to make deciding what to play a substantial challenge. When you’re so spoilt for choice, who is there to help you navigate the treacherous waters of indecision? Enter the courageous and handsome staff members of The Treehouse! One of our main jobs is recommending games for groups, and we’ve gotten really good at working out what kind of group is going to enjoy what kind of game. It’s part interrogation, part psychological puzzle, and part test of games knowledge.
The Treehouse library
To begin with, we have a lot of old standbys. These are games that we feel confident recommending to a majority of groups, for a variety of purposes. We often recommend a quick game to start people off – Ghost Blitz, a real-time deduction game of grabbing, is a reliably silly time for most sizes of groups, and is both easy to understand and loosens people up. Most of our customers are from outside the gaming community and are understandably a little intimidated by the towering wall of cardboard and rule books that is our library, so games which offer a simple concept that people can’t help but get invested in are invaluable. Tsuro and Timeline fit similar niches, so we find ourselves recommending those a lot.
Things get harder when it comes to the “main course” – the game that customers will spend the majority of their time playing. This depends a lot on the group – it’s not uncommon for customers to come to us sceptical about this whole board gaming thing (I’m with them, it’ll never catch on) so we try to gauge their mood and choose appropriately. A five-player group in the mood for something lightly strategic? Perhaps Colt Express, Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space, or Forbidden Desert. Two customers who look like they might be on a first date? Either something co-operative (Pandemic is always reliable) or hilariously aggressive (Azul), nothing in between. Established couples get either Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective or Fog of Love, if they have enough time. That’s another big factor – do they want to spend two hours on a single game on a night out? More often than not, the answer is no, so we usually shy away from the heaviest games.
By far the easiest group to recommend for is big parties. Seven or eight is the magic number, because games like Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, Codenames, Spyfall, and (if they’re a little tipsy) Dead Last are guaranteed to draw players in . If anything I wish there were more party games at the lower player counts – something like Secrets is close, and works well at four players, but is often too complex. That’s not to say the group who are playing it couldn’t understand it, but that their interest might wane faster than understanding dawns. I always worry a little bit about patronising customers, but we’ve found that a lot of them genuinely want to be reassured, and if they’ve had a good time by the end then I think I’ve done my job okay.
“Somebody’s lying here, and it might be me…” Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
Of course, people do actually have to accept our advice for this to work out. Because this is the UK, it’s more common that we approach befuddled-looking customers at the shelves rather than them coming to us, and sometimes they’ll defer our offer, saying that they’re fine. That’s okay, of course, and it saves us a job, this scenario often ends with the group picking up Monopoly or Scrabble, and then not returning to the cafe because they haven’t gotten anything out of it they couldn’t get at home. That always makes me a little sad, but not as sad as when I’ve recommended and taught a game to see it returned to the shelves five minutes later in favour of Guess Who. Again, that’ll always happen sometimes, and we’re not always going to find the perfect game to engage everyone first time, but it always feels like a missed opportunity.
Heavy gamers rest assured, the big games get their dues too. Last year we had a lot of groups come in specifically to play Scythe – they had read about it online and wanted to give it a try . I always try to recommend TIME Stories to groups of three or four, as it’s perfect for an environment where you can feel good about only playing it once. As the Shut Up & Sit Down review said, that’s a hard game to justify buying at full price, but with a board games cafe you don’t need to! I’m always trying to foist Alchemists onto groups who say they want something weighty, and they always start off looking intimidated by all the actions and are super intensely into it by the end.
But those groups are few and far between, and we’re cautious to recommend complex games unless people specifically ask for them. The reason why goes back to the experience level of customers – if they’re going to be bored they aren’t going to come back. Yes, sometimes a group comes in knowing exactly what they want to play – we memorably had a stag party last week who spent nine hours playing Twilight Imperium – but this is a small minority of our customers. A larger number have had a go at Catan or Ticket to Ride, and they want to know what’s next. Others are being dragged along by a single enthusiastic colleague/family member, and they don’t know or care to know the first thing about board games. Many of you will have been that enthusiastic hobbyist trying to bring people into the cardboard fold, so a lot of these reactions will be familiar to you. I think that impulse to get people excited about board games is so common because it’s an inherently social activity – you need people to play with you, and the more the better – so it makes sense that evangelism is such a big part of the hobby.
Me in evangelical mode, teaching Two Rooms and a Boom
At work, I try to do it every day – take at least one person who walked into the cafe expecting chess and Monopoly, and send them away enthusing about Sagrada, Flick ‘em Up, or Sheriff of Nottingham. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does it’s like a switch has been flicked . First impressions are so important, and that’s why we spend so much time thinking about how to ease out customers into the hobby. The earlier comparison to libraries is appropriate, because the thing that make libraries great (especially in the modern age) is the staff. People who know their shelves like the back of their hands, and are always willing to help find what you want, even if you don’t know what you want. Yes, machines can do that too, but only to a certain extent. When I was younger I wanted to be a librarian (because of Matilda, obviously), and I seem to have stumbled toward that direction quite by accident. Which really begs the question, where’s my board-game-based telekinesis? Eh Dahl? Eh??
Patrick Lickman
I’m using Zurgo, Thunder's Decree, and my question is about mobilize and the Tokens.
The token gain any ability?
If I have mobilized tokens from past turns, and Zurgo leaves the battlefield, do they stay or they are sacrificed?
After a touching father-son moment, the team sing the praises of Century: Eastern Wonders, interview megagame designer Jon Gracey, and guest game guru (and local astronaut) Joe Bernard brings in the surprisingly sleek Small World.
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I find Memoir 44 very interesting and exciting, but it seems everyone I introduce it to has the same gripe. They (and I) don’t like having a unit getting pummeled by the opposing force without being able to fight back. It doesn’t fit in with the game’s realistic/historical feel, and/or it weakens the game’s element of strategy.
I’m not sure how to fix this issue with a rule modification without undermining some of the basic elements of the game like the luck of the draw.
Even if I did have magical telekinetic board gaming powers, I wouldn’t know how to use them. Sure, I could cheat at games, cause havoc with components, and shuffle every deck of Dominion at the same time, but I wouldn’t make any friends doing it. And without friends, board gaming isn’t much fun.
Board games are intensely social, almost by definition. Solo games do exist, but they’re still fairly niche, and as standard, games require communication between multiple people in the same room. That isn’t true of all hobbies – some can be done solo (fitness, art) and others can be done online (video games, arguing). And while online adaptations of games and applications like Tabletopia are gaining ground, the vast majority of board gaming is still done in person.
This is, by and large, a good thing. This isn’t about to become a society-is-dying-because-internet post, but it’s undeniably pleasant to treat board gaming as a means of bringing people together face-to-face. This is something that as a hobby it does perhaps uniquely well, and a feeling that it’s tough to replicate online. The big downside to this aspect is that it introduces a prerequisite for participation: having a group to play with.
Maybe you just moved to a new city and you don’t know anyone. Maybe your friends are not the board-gaming type (much as I want to convert everyone I know, I’ve come to accept that some people just… don’t like games). Or perhaps the problem is even worse – you do have gaming friends, but you’re all so busy with other things that it’s impossible to get together to play. This is normally Kevin’s fault. Damn it, Kevin.
At The Treehouse, we’ve thought about this quite a bit. People come in semi-regularly to ask if we have a way to find them some players, and over the last year we’ve tried a few different methods of helping them out.
Before The Treehouse opened, owners Ruth & Andy hosted a monthly board games evening called Across the Board at the Showroom Cinema, for exactly this purpose. Each month would have a theme, from “Go Team!” (cooperative games) to “Art & Design” or my personal favourite, “Crime!”.
In Battlestar Galactica, revealed Cylon players can use the Resurrection Ship location to pass their unrevealed loyalty cards to another player at the table. This can be necessary when one player has drawn multiple “You Are A Cylon” cards or can be used to sow confusion by giving “You Are Not A Cylon” cards away.
In the Pegasus expansion, the Resurrection Ship location no longer passes loyalty cards. Instead, when a Cylon player reveals himself, he always passes his unrevealed cards to another player as part of the reveal process.
It’s not clear which situation happened during Pegasus development:
Having just played a game where I happened to be dealt both “You Are A Cylon” cards, I’m starting to think that the base game should use the Pegasus card-passing rules.
The process of revealing is purposely built so that the Cylon player doesn’t get to do any “Cylon actions” until the round after he reveals – for one thing, this prevents a player from revealing and immediately playing his Super Crisis card.
A Cylon dealt both Cylon cards, however, ends up having to wait 2 full rounds to get all the stuff he needs to do done:
Now, he won’t always NEED to play the Super Crisis, but in most cases that will probably be true, particularly since there has been only one Cylon player sabotaging things to this point. Whichever order the Cylon chooses, it’s not great for him. If he passes loyalty cards first, it probably looks pretty suspicious that he didn’t play the Super Crisis, but prioritized card-passing more. The humans are likely to assume the card recipient is now also a Cylon. On the other hand, if he plays the Super Crisis first, there is one more human available to help against it for a round until the card is finally passed.
This two-turn latency to get all his ducks in a row seems like a harsh penalty, especially on top of the minor penalty that he’s been the sole Cylon to this point. Automatically passing as part of the reveal gets things back to the more “normal” setup – 2 Cylons, and a 1 turn delay before Super Crisis can be played. It also makes the passing of the loyalty cards something that is not inherently suspicious, since it always happens.
If this had come about in Pegasus through just a rule change listed in the instructions, it would be a no-brainer to apply it to the core game. But since it involves changes to the board that are affected by other Pegasus-specific stuff, it’s not clear how applicable this should be.
Since I haven’t played Pegasus, it made me wonder: is there a reason why it would be bad to apply this rule change to the core game?
After a tour through victory, the team discuss strategy and lasers in Khet, recall their experiences with escape rooms, and guests Ruth and Andy Haigh bring us deep underground in Sub Terra.
Links:
Except when it isn’t. Because Reddit as a whole incorporates some less-than-inclusive viewpoints, it’s generally rare that I like what I see on the site. /r/boardgames suffers less from this than other areas, since board gaming isn’t the most politically charged subject, but it’s still an unfortunate feature of the website. On top of that, while Reddit’s news is comprehensive, it’s also ephemeral – it doesn’t serve as a really source of information much older than a couple of days. The threads are all archived, of course, but Reddit doesn’t make it easy to find them.
There are a ton of different board game review websites out there, so I thought I’d call out a few of the most popular and my personal favourites. The best reviewers in board gaming tend to follow the same rules as in other media – they clearly state their own view with the benefits of experience and authority, transparently admit their own blind spots (because everyone has them), and above all entertain their audiences.
Shut Up & Sit Down are the kings, no question. Their videos are sheer delights of whimsy, mixed in with loveable personalities, maddeningly dumb running gags, and startling good insights into board gaming. Not everyone agrees with their reviews (they more often appeal to the newer gamer than the hardcore, particularly in their choice of game) but nobody can deny that the craft they put into their work is without equal.
The Dice Tower, on the other hand, are certainly the reviewers closest to global recognition in gaming. Since 2005 Tom Vasel and co. have been a respected voice in the community, with their seals of approval and excellence gracing the cover of many modern games. In fact, publishers Arcane Wonders have released a line of games partnered with The Dice Tower called Dice Tower Essentials, games considered necessary for any collection. Their ideas are generally well-reasoned, and the sheer quantity of content they have produced makes for an enticing catalogue.
No Pun Included follow more in the vein of Shut Up & Sit Down, with witty and likeable hosts at the fore of reviews and sketches. They’re also very willing to play with the form, meaning you never quite know what you’re going to get from an NPI review.
Meeple Like Us do primarily written reviews, of mostly older games, but have a special focus on accessibility. Every week, as well as a typical review, they publish an “accessibility teardown”, detailing the various ways in which the game helps or hinders players with disabilities such as vision impairment, communication barriers, cognitive difficulties, and so on. The teardowns are remarkably detailed, and make for fascinating reading. When thinking of board gaming as a cohesive community, Meeple Like Us ought to be a pillar – or at least get more recognition than they currently do.
This list could keep going, of course. There are no shortage of great content creators out there, as well as organisations and services dedicated to teaching people about gaming. But if I did this article would be a million words long. There’s a whole world out there to explore, but hopefully this gives you a place to start. And as always, the friendly staff of The Treehouse are always around to answer your questions. After all, it’s just our job!
by Patrick Lickman
Is it possible to play a quicker game of monopoly that lasts under one hour on average with only two players? If so, how? I am not looking for anything that specific, but I need house rules that will speed the game up. By the way, I lost my Speed Die.
