Even more boardgames!

Another couple of weeks have gone by, so I have had a chance to try out a few more boardgames in the meantime. So in no particular order:

Sentinels of the Multiverse
A fairly complex non-collectible card game, Sentinels of the Multiverse is not at all like the extremely popular deck building games (Dominion, Ascension, etc.) In Sentinels of the Multiverse, each player takes on a role of a superhero, all of which are thinly veiled DC and Marvel heroes. So there is a Batman type, Iron Man type, The Flash, and a few more original ones. The hero is represented by a deck, each card might be an action, a power, a piece of gear. The heroes are working together to defeat the villain, also represented by its own deck which cycles automatically - so it's very much a cooperative game. To complicate matters further, there is also an environment deck that might hinder or help the heroes and the villain. On each turn, a player can play a card, use a power (activate a card that's already in play) and draw two cards. The goal is to destroy the villain, which usually (but not always I believe) involves getting rid of his/her/its hit points. I definitely liked the art of the game, and the way the art and gameplay and card text reinforce the theme of the game - I had a lot of fun just kind of imagining the situations and the plot. On the other hand, it's hard to plan a strategy in this game due to the randomness of card draws, and new players (such as myself) will be uncertain of what their hero is capable of. Furthermore, the unfortunate truth about Sentinels of the Multiverse is that most of the time a player will be either spamming the same power every turn, or will pull off a dizzying chain of actions (some decks have cards that grant extra actions) that takes a while to resolve. It is still a fun game at times, but I'm not convinced that it is a good one.

Smash Up
Another card game we tried is Smash Up. In this game, each player selects two decks and smashes them together. So I played Russian bear cavalry dinosaurs, another player played Ninja Wizards, another player smashes aliens and faeries together - you get the idea. After each player creates his deck, four locations are revealed and the players attack these locations to score victory points, in the process destroying, stunning, or moving around their opponents' cards. The art is hilarious, the premise is silly in a good way, and the game is fairly easy to learn and can be played quickly. Because the maximum hand size is 10 (I think), some planning ahead is possible. However, once again, new players will be at somewhat of a loss as to what their decks can be capable of, and will be unsure of what their opponents' cards do. There is also not a great diversity of cards within each deck, so expect to play the same cards over and over again (I have how many robot velociraptors?!). Finally, it seemed to me that some decks just had an unfair advantage or could consistently outplay other decks - maybe it was just the smashups we tried, I'd need to play it more to be sure.

Archipelago
I love love love this game. It's so incredibly well designed, fun to play, and beautiful, with a great deal of replay value. In a nutshell Archipelago is a bit like a blend of Settlers of Catan, Agricola, Puerto Rico, and Game of Thrones. Phewph, that's a mouthful. What is actually is, is a game of exploration, worker and action placement, resource management and intrigue. Players explore an archipelago by placing huge hexagonal tiles which have resources and native huts on them. Native huts increase surplus population which makes buying workers cheaper, but also increases discontent. Players can use workers to harvest resources from the discovered tiles, or construct towns, ports, markets, and churches. The trick is that they can do so even on tiles that were explored by other players, and the other trick is that EVERYTHING can be traded in this game at any time. It may seem that other players are your competition, but then a crisis card gets drawn (yes, there are also cards) and suddenly everyone is scrambling to work together and trade resources to resolve a crisis, because if you don't then the number of rebels begin to grow. If the number of rebels is ever greater than the number of citizens constructed by the players, then EVERYONE LOSES. So you're working together after all? No! Because each player is given a secret card at the beginning of the game, each card has a condition for a game end and a secret winning objective. So you don't know what other players are trying to achieve, and to make things worse one of the players may secretly be a Sympathizer - if the rebels win, everyone loses EXCEPT the Sympathizer! He wins! The game creators call Archipelago a semi-cooperative game, and it very much is. There is no war, you can't construct armies, and yet the game is filled with tense intrigue, alliances and negotiations, and backstabbing. Plus, there are three different decks of objective cards - short game, medium game, long game. A short game can be completed in under an hour, a medium game can be completed in under two hours, and a long game can last as long as three to four hours. Because of these random secret objectives, no game is ever the same. And I'm just scratching the surface here, because there is so so so much more to this game: progress and character cards, market trend cards, domestic and international markets, wonders, and more! And did I mention how gorgeous the pieces are? Anyway, Archipelago is not a cheap game, but I think it's one of my most favourite board games now.

Galaxy Truckers
This is a game I really really want to like, and maybe I will eventually. A lot of other reviewers and players rave about how fun this game is. The premise is that each player builds a haphazard spaceship out of spare parts and then races around the galaxy trying to collect and deliver cargo while pieces of the ship are being blown off by pirates, asteroids and whatnot. The game has three rounds. In each round the players will build progressively bigger and more complicated ships, by quickly looking through a huge pile of face-down tiles that represent engines, crew quarters, weapons, shields, cargo holds, etc. The catch is that they have a limited time to do so, and they're competing with other players for tiles. After the ship is constructed, players criticize each other's ships, trying to find flaws and mistakes - so your ship might lose parts before you even launch it! After all players agree on each other's ships, they are launched. Events are drawn from a pile of cards, these events might give cargo, or slow down the ship, or simulate attacks on the ship. After there are no more events, the players score their cargo (and other victory point conditions), and then start anew, by building a bigger, better ship. I can see how it can be silly fun - it's very much a 'beer and pretzels' game - and the randomization of events adds to the replay value, but it is also strangely unforgiving. Build your ship wrong, draw a particularly nasty event, have an unlucky dice roll, and you're screwed for the rest of the game. Maybe you can make it back in the next round, but it's unlikely. Unlike Archipelago where you never feel like you're falling behind everyone else and where you are constantly doing something and having fun, Galaxy Truckers can quickly turn boring and frustrating if luck and rules go against you. A lot of people really like this game, but I would not recommend it.

Well, that's that. As I am returning to Toronto next week, I will be trying out new games at Snakes and Lattes instead, so hopefully I'll have time to do more mini-reviews soon!

Some boardgame reviews

Last couple of weeks I've been going to Monopolatte - a boardgame cafe that recently opened up in Ottawa (summer vacation is awesome that way!). We've tried several games, all but one of which was new for me, so I just wanted to throw out a brief review of each.

Lords of Waterdeep
Although produced by Wizards of the Coast, and using their Dungeons and Dragons and Forgotten Realms brands, it was not at all the expected derivative adventurers-on-a-quest kind of game (like Talisman, Descent or Hero's Quest). Instead it is a surprisingly deep and fun resource management game. Each player assumes control of a faction and a leader (whose identity and goals are kept secret until the end of the game) trying to manipulate the city of Waterdeep and amass more victory points than the other players. At its heart it's a resource management and action management game that is quite close to Agricola in spirit and mechanics (but has much prettier art). Each player has a limited number of actions per turn, with these actions the player has to acquire resources (in the form of adventurers), intrigue against other players (by using special intrigue cards), construct buildings in the city that provide additional types of actions (Agricola style) for all players, acquire quests from a tavern, and then send out teams of adventurers (in other words spending resources) to complete the quests. There are a lot of pieces, and the setup takes a little while, but once we started playing it was very easy to understand and very fun. I would definitely play it again in a heartbeat. It worked quite well with 3 players, but would work even better with 4 or 5.

Ticket to Ride: Scandinavian Edition
I've played Ticket to Ride before a bunch of times, so I knew what to expect. Players draw multicolored cards from a common deck (either face-down or from a pool of 5 face-up cards) that they then use to lay down cute little railroad wagons in an effort to complete railway routes from one city to another. Meanwhile each player has a number of secret goals to complete (link the following destinations together: Helsinki to Oslo, Konigsberg to Stockholm, etc.) that reap victory points at the end. It's a fun and easy and quick game. What Scandinavian edition does differently is that it adds the concepts of tunnels and ferries. Ferries require special locomotive cards to complete, while tunnels may end up being much more expensive to complete than they seem if the player constructing a tunnel happens to be unlucky. I can't say that either addition made the game more enjoyable than the standard version of the game, but it was fun enough. I would not recommend this version of the game, however, because it only supports 3 players. Get the standard edition of Ticket to Ride (U.S. or Europe).

7 Wonders
Here's a game I really wanted to like, but doesn't quite deliver. Each player gets a random great wonder of the ancient world at the start of the game, and tries to complete the wonder and build his city (which will generate the resources to complete the wonder as well as earn bonus victory points in the process). There are three ages - each age has a different deck of buildings - and during each age the players will be able to play 6 cards from their hand. They can use these cards to generate gold, to complete stages of their wonder, or construct buildings. The trick is that after each player plays a card he then passes his remaining hand to one of his neighbours, so you can purposefully build a building you don't need in order to deny it to your enemy. To construct buildings and wonder stages players buy resources from their neighbours (i.e. other players), or have the resources generated by their existing buildings. At the end of each age there is also a special military conflict stage, which allows conquest-minded players to reap additional victory points by constructing military buildings that help during conquests but do not provide any other resources or victory points otherwise. All of this should be quite fun, except it just ends up not feeling like it at all. The game felt too random, with the constant passing of card hands back and forth it didn't seem like there is much room for deep strategy or planning, and it was easy to get completely stuck because a particular resource was unavailable. The production value is quite high (it's sooooooooooooooooooooo pretty), and maybe it's more fun with a larger group of players (it supports up to 7 players), but I'll give this one a pass in the future.

Alhambra
This one's a classic boardgame, but I've only now tried it. It's quite similar in spirit and mechanics to another classic boardgame - Carcasonne. Players draw tiles and then try to assemble the most awesome palace complex (Alhambra). There are four types of money cards denoted by their colours that the players compete to gain, that they then will use to purchase tiles from a common pool. On each turn a player might buy a tile and put it into play, put a tile away from his board and into his reserve to use it later, put a tile from his reserve into play, or take money. It's very much about planning your actions in advance. There is also an element of a jigsaw puzzle and city optimization because the way you construct your palace has its own special rules, and it matters how the tiles are placed and fit together. Players score points depending one how many buildings they constructed of each type (there are pavilions, towers, gardens, arcades, etc.), who has the longest city wall, if anyone constructed a fully walled-in city, and so on and so forth. The set-up takes a while, but it's easy to understand and play, even though there are many paths to victory and quite a bit of depth to it. I can definitely see why it's a classic and many people would find it very fun, but it's not a game for me - I can't say I enjoyed Carcasonne, and I can't say I enjoyed Alhambra either.

So there it is! Next time I hope I'll have a chance to play a few more games from my to-do list: Cosmic Encounters, Galaxy Truckers, and maybe even Twilight Imperium!

Incidentally, if you live or visit Ottawa go check out Monopolatte - it's a very friendly and reasonably priced boardgame cafe, and they have a good variety of games. They're not quite as big as Snakes and Lattes in Toronto yet, but I hope they'll continue expanding! The staff is very friendly, and the food is cheap and tasty.

A Depressing Reading

Not that long ago I got into a spat over Harry Potter books. The argument was over the axiom that "Harry Potter books are great because they got kids to read again." There are at least three things wrong with view:
1. It presumes that kids were not reading before.
2. It presumes that the kids have continued to read after they've finished Harry Potter series.
3. Therefore, the unspoken conclusion goes - thanks to Harry Potter children's literacy rates have gone up.
On the surface, the ever-expanding Kids/Teens/Young Adult sections of your local book store seem to support this conclusion. But from where I am sitting, even this YA boom is more of a desperate attempt to recapture the Harry Potter phenomenon, rather than an indication of a massive surge of reading among the young people. And then there is this NPR article titled "What Kids Are Reading, In School And Out." Please read it.

OK, done? Or did you just read the first paragraph? Did you just scroll to the end, hoping to find the talking points? If you read it through, then you are ahead of most young people I know. "But wait, the conclusion of the article directly contradicts you! The man said 'reading leads to reading' so reading Harry Potter must have led to more reading!" Not so fast, there is no guarantee that a young person will, upon finishing a beloved series, desperately seek out a new series. And even if s/he do, it will likely be on the same reading level, not a more complex one. Thus "Hunger Games", thus "Twilight", thus "I am Number Four", etc. etc. etc. The NPR article above seems to support the conclusion that American young people are reading below expected grade level when they bother to read at all.

Lest you say "Well, it's American public education system! Of course that's the case!", the situation in Canada isn't much better. Here's the conclusions of the International Adult Literacy Survey for Canada, conducted in 1994. This stands out: "[It] is particularly disturbing that a substantial number of Canadian adults scored in the bottom two levels on all three literacy scales. Although over 20% achieved Levels 4 and 5, over 40% were rated at the lower end of the scale at Levels 1 and 2, and of these, nearly 20% were at Level 1. These adults with low literacy skills are likely to see their future economic opportunities further eroded. Canada’s overall literacy ratings were comparable to the United States; however, a high
proportion of our population achieved the lowest level of literacy in all three domains." (by the way, Singapore, Sweden and Finland are consistently the most literate countries in the world) 1994 is three years before the first Harry Potter book hit the stores. Let's suppose that in 1997, the kid reading (or more likely being read to) Harry Potter is 6-10 years old. In 2007, s/he would be 16-20 and would therefore be a potential participant in the International Adult Literacy Survey (people 16 and up are eligible). However, the next IAL survey was administered in 2003, and the next one is due either this year or the next one. However, comparing the 1994 and 2003 IAL survey, a very worrying pattern emerges. Some highlights (find the full report here):
- Nationally, 48 percent of the adult population – 12 million Canadians aged 16 and over– perform below Level 3 on the prose and document literacy scales (about 9 million or 42 percent of Canadians aged 16 to 65). Level 3 proficiency is considered to be the “desired level” of competence for coping with the increasing skill demands of the emerging knowledge and information economy.
- Overall, there has been little change in literacy performance between 1994 and 2003.
- Contrary to expectation, the report finds little improvement in literacy proficiency since 1994. The new survey shows almost nine million Canadians aged 16 to 65 (12 million if Canadians over 65 are included) score below the desirable threshold of prose literacy performance.
- The established patterns of literacy proficiency continue to prevail, with higher performance among the young and the educated.

Hey, that last point is great, right? Young people are continuing to perform higher! Not so fast. The young people growing up in 1994 scored higher that year than the older people that year. But those people who were young in 1994 grew up in time for 2003, so shouldn't their earlier successes carry over into mature adulthood? Apparently not. Huh, that's strange. What it suggests to me is that this pattern will reemerge in the 2013/2014 IALS, and will not show any marked improvement in literacy despite the young people supposedly "reading again". While we are waiting for that survey to be administered and results compiled, evaluated and revealed, we can turn our attention to ALL - Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey. The last one was in 2008, and it uses identical questionnaires, data collection and statistical methodology as IALS, so the results are pretty much comparable. You can find the full report here (scroll to pages 45-46 for the interesting stuff). You'll find Canada lagging only behind Norway and Bermuda for prose reading (so basically reading news and creative writing) and only behind Norway and Netherlands for document literacy rates. That's good news right? Nope, because unlike IALS which is administered on a truly global scale, ALL is administered only in select countries, and when stacked against other countries in the survey Canada is looking pretty good. The problem is that Norway has the lowest literacy rate among Scandinavian countries, and Netherlands isn't doing so hot compared to many of its European neighbours either.

Clearly there has been no progress on the literacy front between 1994 and 2008, Harry Potter or no. Maybe education is to blame? Perhaps, except that since the devastating findings of the 2003 IALS more money, time and effort in education has gone towards raising the reading and literacy levels than anything else, save perhaps various technology-related courses. It's not matter of mismanagement either. There are specialized qualification courses for teaching reading and literacy that many teachers now take. There are many truly talented and intelligent teachers and academics studying and working on the problem. Reading is one of the overall curriculum goals across Canada, fostering reading and literacy is priority number one in most subjects. School libraries have never looked so good. Bookstores are brimming with books for young people. Heck, there are so many books available for free through regular libraries, ebooks, on tablets and phones. So why aren't kids reading more? Didn't they read Harry Potter? Didn't they get the memo that they're supposed to love reading now?!

(OK, sorry I keep ragging on Harry Potter. It's nothing personal, it's just that this is the go-to book that people bring up when arguing that kids are reading again. Back in 1960s it was Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street. Same difference really.)

On to anecdotal evidence and to come back full circle to the NPR article. This year I was blessed with many intelligent, hard-working and genuinely curious students. Vast majority admitted that they do not read books outside of the ones they have to read for school. One student, a pretty intelligent guy, admitted that he did not read any books in the last 3 years, including the ones assigned at school - he relied on Sparknotes, Yahoo Answers, wikipedia, and movies. I have two Grade 12 students, one Grade 11 student, maybe two Grade 9 and 10 students, who I see regularly reading unassigned books for enjoyment, or asking my advice on what would be a good book to read. With one exception they are reading books that are technically below their reading level, but at least they are reading! The rest grumble. Assigning 40 pages to read over the course of a week is a huge challenge. Lord of the Flies proved very challenging to a Grade 9/10 class. Catcher in the Rye was at best skimmed-through by a Grade 11 class. Great Gatsby was challenging to a Grade 12 class. For shits and giggles, after introducing the book I divided the class in groups and asked them to paraphrase and explain in their own words the first three paragraphs of the book (yes, it's the one with the convoluted 'secrets of wild and young men' passage). They couldn't, even though it wasn't written in German or Elizabethan English. Over the last three years I've taught (not counting Shakespeare obviously): Brave New World, Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, 1984, Handmaiden's Tale, Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Frankenstein, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Wars, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, parts of the Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, Ender's Game, and more. With most students and most of these books I saw the same story. Skim reading at best, heavy reliance on copied notes and Internet, complaints about the book being too challenging, incomprehension of vocabulary (sometimes really frightening gaps!), insistence on constant hand-holding through the book, lack of original thoughts about the book at all. Every year (or semester as the case may be) I conduct a little survey, asking students what they've read last year, what they've read during the summer, how much they read each week, what is their favourite book, and - what did they read when they were 6-10 years old. To that last question the answer is in 90% of the cases - Harry Potter. The answers to the rest of the questions are just depressing.