Boardgame

I have previously made much of A Journey Through Europe, published in 1759, and the first boardgame in the English language to which we can ascribe an individual designer; I called it "the first designed game," and Rob Rossney quite rightly pointed out that the card game of Cribbage was designed sometime around 1630 by Sir John Suckling. But at least until now, Journey was the first designed boardgame of which I know.

Somewhere out there, there is a list of tabletop games that everyone should play. On this list, I suspect, is Carcassonne. Themed after the French-walled city of the same name, this German-designed tile-laying game consists of just under 100 tiles and tasks players with building castles, roads, and farms. Players score points for staking a claim in and completing various things like castles or surrounding a cloister with tiles. At the end of the game, incomplete projects as well as farms -- tracts of land that serve one or more completed cities -- are scored, and a winner is crowned.

Höyük is a freely-downloadable boardgame, with nice graphics provided by Orlando Ramirez, a fan of the game, and inspired by murals at Catal Huyuk, the ancient Anatolian city, and the largest and best-preserved Neolithic settlement yet excavated.

(Assembling a playable set does take some work; I suggest printing the components onto full-sheet labels, mounting onto cardstock, and then cutting them apart carefully.)

During the game, you place houses in the central playing area, with a set of rules to determine when and how houses can be placed adjoining to each other; animal pens can be placed adjoining to houses, and ovens and shrines can be placed atop them. A group of connected houses belonging to one player is termed a "family," and a group of connected houses and pens is termed a "block" (a block can consist of multiple families owned by multiple players).

During a round of play, a player will construct four houses, and two other items -- additional houses, pens, ovens, and/or shrines. What "additional items" you can build is semi-random, and depends on how construction cards are dealt out during the round.

At the end of each round, each block is inspected, and up to three "aspect" cards are awarded to the players: one each for the player with the most pens, most ovens, and most shrines within the block. Ties are broken by house heights--basically, houses can be built atop the rubble of other houses, subject to certain restrictions. Aspect cards can later be used either to build additional items -- or cashed in for victory points.

In addition, on every turn except for the first, a catastrophe will occur. There are basically only two types: in one, half the houses in the largest block are ruined, and in the other, half the houses in the block with the smallest number of ovens, pens, and shrines are ruined. While the type of catastrophe is at random, there are only two types, and planning for catastrophes is therefore feasible.

When a player builds his 25th house, the last turn is in progress, though players may continue building through the end of the round.

Höyük is thus a fairly intricate strategy game, reminiscent in some ways of Alhambra and Carcassonne, which does what games of this type must do: require a handful of choices each turn, but make those choices difficult and interesting. In particular, the moment at which to switch from using aspect cards for construction and using them to garner victory points requires considerable thought.

Höyük is a game that could easily be professionally published successfully -- and despite its existence as a free download, perhaps someone should. I wouldn't mind paying for nicely-executed components.

Acquire is the best-known game by the immortal Sid Sackson, the preeminent American boardgame designer of the mid-20th century. First published in 1962 as part of the 3M line of games, it remained in print when 3M got out of the game business and sold their line to Avalon Hill. Unfortunately, as with most Avalon Hill games, it went out of print when Hasbro took over the company, though they republished a version in 1999, in a huge box with expensive plastic pieces (and changing the hotel theme of the original for an Internet corporation theme, which was somewhat irritating).

The new version reverts to the hotel theme, and also appears to use cardboard counters rather than plastic pieces, which may not be elegant, but means the new version is $24, a very reasonable price these days.

Created by Iikka Keranen and Rich Carlson of Digital Eel) (developers of, among others, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, Plasmaworm and Dr. Blob's Organism -- all computer games), Goblin Slayer is an asymmetric boardgame in which one player controls a dwarf entering a cavern infested with goblins to retrieve an artifact.

If you were in one of a handful of places in 1995 in the United States, you knew that a revolution was starting. It's been going on quietly ever since, even though most people are still blissfully ignorant of it. This game, Settlers of Catan, was the opening shot.

The location: 14th century France. The objective: to develop the most valuable district of Paris. The story: irrelevant. This is a German game, after all, so it's all about the gameplay.

This is primarily a game of resource management. You have three resources: gold, cubes and rats. Cubes let you take your normal actions each turn, as long as you don't run out of them. Gold lets you take a special action at the end of each turn, as long as you don't run out of it. Rats accumulate each turn and do nothing, as long as you don't have too many... but if you collect more than 9 of them, really bad things start happening to you. Most game actions involve gaining more Gold, gaining more Cubes or reducing your Rat population. And if you concentrate entirely on managing your resources, you should have no problem keeping them all under control.

Naturally, the object of the game is to score Victory Points, and most actions that get you VP don't do jack squat for your Cubes, Gold or Rats. It's a constant balancing act of how far you can push your resources without everything breaking.

Player interaction comes in the form of a CCG-sealed-booster-like "draft" at the start of each round. You draw three cards (representing three of the nine possible actions in the game), keep one, and pass two to the left. You then receive your right-hand opponent's two passed cards, keep one, pass one to the left, and receive the discard from your right. Each turn you choose two of the three actions to take. So, you never know exactly what actions will be available, and much of the strategy comes from balancing your need to keep actions that are useful to you with your desire to not pass actions that the players to your left desperately need.

There are several more nuances to the game, but all in all it's a game where you have lots of good options at every decision point but you can't do everything, so every time you gain something you know you're also giving up something else. The level of complexity is similar to Puerto Rico, so if you like that game you'll probably enjoy Notre Dame as well.

This game does have one advantage over other games in its class. Most games of this complexity, due to their strategic depth, take about 90 minutes to play. Notre Dame takes half that, allowing it to fit in shorter play sessions.

This game you cannot play, I'm afraid -- at least, not unless you possess a time machine, and can travel to the premises of Carrington Bowles in mid-18th century London to purchase it, or you are among the handful of people lucky enough to own one of the few extant copies of the game. Lacking that, you will have to be satisfied with the image at left (a more detailed one here). It's a scan of the board as it appears in Table Games of Georgian and Victorian Days, which is my primary source on the subject.

Four terrible diseases have broken out all over the world, and they're spreading fast. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking, and your small team of health professionals has to find a cure to all four diseases before time runs out, or before infection spreads so far that it's just too late to save the human race. There goes Kinshasa! There goes Mumbai! There goes Tokyo! You'd better hurry.

You see, senor, in the beautiful Republica de los Bananas, life is cheap and times are hard. Each player controls one of the great families of the nation, and the important government jobs -- El Presidente, Minister of Internal Security, and the leadership of the three army brigades, air force, and navy -- are shared out among them. The ultimate objective of the game is to have the biggest Swiss bank account at the end; each turn, El Presidente draws a fixed number of bills from the money deck, and announces a budget for the coming year.