Saturday games for two

Saturday, Dan hosted a game day focusing on two-player games. Sadly, nobody attended besides myself. (Dan and his wife were very gracious hosts.) On the bright side, it did give me a chance to focus on two-player games, which have their own quirks both in terms of playing and designing.

The roll call:

• Lost Cities
  
  
  Designed by the inimitable (and prolific) Reiner Knizia of math and game fame, Lost Cities puts you in the role of financing expeditions to recover the eponymous lost cities. We get this jewel from Rio Grande Games under their "Kronos" imprint. It reminds me of a probabilities dice game for the Palm called Sigma. For each of five cities, the deck has three "investment" cards plus "explore" cards numbered one to ten. Players take turns either investing in a expedition before exploring, or laying down increasingly larger expedition cards. You score based on the cards you lay down, multiplied by investment cards. Here's the kicker: Each expedition you embark upon starts you off with negative points. Both players compete together and each explore card is unique, so card-counting (as in Spades) helps a great deal. Like many of these two-player games, several rounds are played before tallying the final score.
  
  




• Ticket to Ride
  
  
  2004's Spiel des Jahres. There's a lot of this going around. Ticket to Ride (obligatory Beatles joke) is not just another train game. Like many train games, players compete to build rail connections between various cities that they keep secret from each other. But unlike many train games, players don't need to worry about cargo, just building a continuous line of their track from city to city. The routes on the board have various colors, and you must lay your trains by playing X number of like-colored cards at the same time. Most routes require a certain color, but some routes have uncolored spaces. So if you want to connect, say, Oklahoma City to El Paso, you must play five yellow cards. However, Phoenix to El Paso requires three of any color. The deck also has wild cards.
  
  I also appreciate the nearly language-free (How do you say "Las Vegas" or "New York" in say, Portuguese? You don't have to.) board and cards, facilitating the translation to other languages.
  
  There also exists Ticket to Ride: Europe, which I haven't played yet.
  
  



• En Garde!
  
  A new game from Slugfest Games, En Garde! recreates classic swordfighting duels. In my humble opinion, the game has three major things going for it. One, there's no hit points or wounds or whatever- just Poise. A successful strike causes the target to lose poise, and certain cards require you to spend Poise in order to play them. After all, it's all about appearances. Two, attacks are dealt out as a holistic challenge with a semi-rigorous structure to laying out the cards in a challenge: attack - response - press attack - counter attack - fancy move ("You see, I am not Left-Handed!). This structure really presses home the feel of a duel. Three, the cardstock is truly excellent. Heavy and glossy, well-suited to taking punishment. I missed these guys at Dragon*Con. They're also putting out a Kung Fu fighting game, likely using the same mechanics. Now that's the thing to do.
  
  You can buy it direct from the publisher.
  



• Tally ho!
  
  
  Another showing from Kosmos via Rio Grande. In Tally Ho! (subtitled "Who's hunting who?"), in this tile-flipping game one player takes the role of hunters and lumberjacks, and the other player takes the role of foxes and bears. Both can move the bewildered quail or the smug ducks. Foxes can eat quail and ducks; hunters can shoot bears and foxes, but only in the direction they face (they don't rotate!); bears can eat hunters and lumberjacks; and lumberjacks eat trees. Play two rounds, with each player taking both roles, and score points based on your prey.
  
  The art suits the light-hearted game perfectly.
  
  



• The Legend of Landlock
  
  I really have a beef with the art for this game. It's cute. Too cute. Deceptively cute. Disarmingly cute. Cute enough to make you disparage the game and not take it seriously. But then, the underlying strategy leaps out and shakes you, making you realize that this charming little game of gnomes, tussocks, rivers and paths won the Mensa Select award in 2002 and made the Games 100. One player is land, the other is water. Each is trying to connect their pathways to all four corners of what will become a 6x6 grid. You score points for drawing a tussock, the cute little animal tile through which no passage runs, but you also score points for closing off your opponent and building islands or ponds. Landlock costs less than $15 retail, plays in about fifteen minutes, and has a nice undercurrent of strategy.
  
  You can buy it direct from the publisher.
  
  



• Gone Fishing
  
  
  And speaking of currents (rimshot). Gone Fishing, also from Kosmos/Rio Grande, physically resembles Tally Ho- same size box, same nice durable thick pressboard tiles. Even the art seems a little reminiscent of the other. Once again, one player is the humans catching the animals, and once again, both players play both roles. The main board consists of sixteen lake tiles that only the fish player can see- about half are fish and worth points, with the rest is garbage and serves to ridicule. The angler player has a bit of shell game to play, as the fish player will move some of the tiles after each catch. The social aspect must not be ignored, as the fish player has a fair bit of psychological tricks to employ in order to convince the angler to catch the junk and not the fish. Piece by piece, the fish player reveals a tile at a time to the angler player, so memory plays a larger role than initially expected. This game definitely pleasantly surprised me with the depth of strategy.
  
  It's way more fun to be the fish.
  



• Stratego
  
  
  Yep, Stratego. Dan's copy came out of a garage sale and easily dated to the early sixties. I had never played this before, but I had heard a great deal about it. I had rather low expectations, all things considered. After all, Stratego comes from the Milton Bradley generation that put out Candyland, Monopoly, and the Game of Life (forgive the inaccurate dating), right? These games are to be scoffed at by modern game design. But the Wikipedia tells us that Stratego in its modern form was patented circa 1908, and is in fact based off older Chinese games.
  
  At its heart, Stratego is little more than a game of Capture the Flag, with higher-ranking pieces capturing lower ranking ones, except that the single lowest-ranked piece, the Spy, may capture the single highest, the Marshall- and is the only piece that may do so. The six Bombs function as land mines, capturing any piece to move on one, expect the rank-8 Miners. Here's the kicker: all pieces are hidden from the opponent, only revealing when a capture attempt is made.
  
  Very tense, and very tasty. Both memory and psychology play as much a role as initial placement. I'd buy this now, but I'd rather either a nice collector's edition or a vintage one. eBay, here I come!