lukebentley

Alcatraz is a game that is cooperative yet competitive, static and changing. It is quite a lot of fun! The game board consists of twelve tiles that can be arranged in any order, in a 3 by 4 grid. These are rooms in the prison, that can provide various tools or other actions that are useful in the game. You and your friends are trying to escape Alcatraz, and in order to do that, you must complete tasks, with letters on them, A through F. Once each task is represented by all players, you can escape…BUT one of you must stay behind! So as opposed to a game with one winner and several losers, this is a game with several winners and one loser. This sets up an individual, frequently the Scapegoat, to possibly hinder escape. Each round, players vote on a Scapegoat, who receives an extra action in his or her turn, and they cannot receive credit for tasks completed that turn! To determine the loser, you look to see which player is the least useful in your escape…meaning you are the least redundant when it comes to tasks completed. For example, if only one player has completed task E, that player will be with the winners, because without her, the team cannot escape. Another player has completed tasks B, D, and F, but those are all tasks that others have completed also. This player is at risk of being left behind.

The game mechanic is very simple, and the game gets quite tense. I highly recommend it!

In this expansion, you are given the option to play team Ticket to Ride. This, I find, really adds a cool twist to the game,secretly suggesting moves to your teammate without giving away explicitly what you are doing. For the tandem game alone, this is worthwhile. The card sharing and ticket sharing mechanic is what essentially makes this into team play, because your communication is very limited, and you are limited by the number of trains each individual player has. This makes it essential to communicate what you can clearly, so that if one player runs out of trains far before the other, your partner can finish your routes. Great fun!

Even though it is essentially a game of modified rock, paper, scissors, Steve Jackson’s Revolution is an eminently playable game of ***************** goodness. In Revolution, players are seeking to gain the greatest amount of influence in town, by way of controlling specific areas of the town- the harbor, the tavern, the cathedral, etc. Influence cubes are placed within squares in each building, shown on the game board, and the player with the most cubes in the building receives victory points, listed next to the building on the table. Influence cubes are distributed by the use of Force, Blackmail, and Gold (Force is stronger than Blackmail and Gold, Blackmail is stronger than Gold). These tokens are earned through a blind auction at the beginning of each turn. You are betting to…’persuade’ prominent members of the town, such as the Admiral, the Printer, the Spy, etc. If you are able to sway these individuals to your side, you receive either influence within a building, raw victory points, Force/Blackmail/Gold, or the ability to shift Influence Cubes throughout the board…be they yours or your opponents.

This mechanic plays out wonderfully with four players (or five to six with the expansion) as players are consistently getting outbid on which town members they are bribing/forcing/blackmailing. If you are playing with three players in your gaming group or household, however, I advocate that you avoid this game. Three is simply too few to play a balanced game, and one person usually ends up dominating by chance. A good, if not great, game for four to six players, though.