Danny Webb

Review

London

Martin Wallace

Treefrog Games

We were unable to get our hands on the limited edition of London, the latest from Treefrog Games, but the new print-run has finally arrived and we have been putting the game through its paces. London appears to be famed game designer Martin Wallace’s take on the card-tableau, economic-engine games like San Juan and Race for the Galaxy—though minus the role-selection mechanism found in those two games.

The first thing that differentiates the game from the other economic-engine card games is that London has a board. The top half of the board features an attractive map of London from just after the great fire as well as a card . The game is themed around re-building the great city and trying to get rich (or at least make a profit) while doing so. The board is divided up into twenty boroughs with the River Thames pretty dividing them in half. The bottom half of the board features the card display, where cards will be placed when expended during the game.

The game play is very simple. During a players turn, he or she must decide between four possible actions:

Playing cards
Running his or her city
Buying Land
Drawing Cards
The cards in the game are mostly structures that can be built. Structures have a variety of different game effects, but mostly they allow the player to earn money, earn victory points, or discard poverty cubes (more on those later). In general cards are paid for by expending a card of the matching color from the player’s hand on to the card display. Expended cards are placed face-up and can be drawn by the other players on later turns.

When a player decides his or her city is ready, they can “run” the city. This allows them to activate any or all of the cards in the city and benefit from their effects. Most cards can only be “ran” once and must be turned face down after the phase. The player must then take poverty cubes based on the number of stacks of cards in his or her city and card in hand. Poverty cubes are worth negative VPs at the end of game and managing them is one of the major elements of the game.

That is where the board comes into play. Each time you compute the poverty cubes after running the city, you can subtract a cube for every borough you occupy in London. The borough are also worth VPs at the end of the game.

When all cards have been drawn and each player has had a final turn, the player who has acquired the least poverty cubes gets to discard all of theirs. All other players then discard the same number. The value of the remaining cubes in subtracted from the victory points earned through cards and land buys. Highest score wins.

So, the game is pretty easy to play, but is it any good? I really like it though I have some reservations. I think making expended cards available for drawing in later turns works brilliantly—making the decision of what to play and how to pay for it more interactive than it would normally be. I’ve heard the game described as multi-player solitaire, but I think this mechanism forces players to pay close attention to the opponent’s strategy and card needs.

I also like the poverty cube mechanic. I love how difficult it makes it to decide when to run your city. I love how it makes each card in hand not only a tool but also a liability. I love how absolutely brutal it is to the person who fails to manage their poverty. If you end up with over ten of the cubes, each additional one is worth a full -3 VPs, which is brutal in a game that seems to consistently feature close scores.

I do dislike the way poverty cubes are handled at the end of the game. The benefit of discarding cubes is a lot more beneficial to the players who are lagging behind than the one who was winning the poverty battle. In our last game, dropping the five cubes to match the leaders discard saved me and a second player fifteen points and her only five. It wasn’t enough to help me, but the other player who was saved the fifteen points won the game. I think I’d rather see the other players get to discard half the number of cubes of the winner, rounded down. That said, I haven’t played enough games to be sure, so I’ll be playing by the actual rules for a while still. It may turn out that I’m wrong. I’ll gladly defer to the award-winning, prolific game designer for now.

The other problem I have with the game is that the board play is pretty uninteresting. You need to buy land to get the poverty bonus and to draw cards. While, you where to build based on the cost of the land, number of victory points, and number of bonus cards, the decision was often forced on you by the game situation.

Despite these misgivings, I’m having a blast with London. It is easy to play and easy to teach but still has the aspects of Martin Wallace games that I find interesting, specifically a punishing economic system that must be carefully managed.

Score 8/10

This review with photos is available on http://www.nerdbloggers.com

Thunderstone is an entry into the relatively new sub-genre of card game currently being referred to as a “deck building” game. The central mechanic in these games has the players gradually building a deck from a pool of cards that is randomly determined at the beginning of each game. This mechanic, first seen in the mega-hit Dominion, has a lot to recommend it, but it also has a built-in weakness—it is anti-thematic. Maximizing the efficiency of a deck will nearly always become a mathematical exercise. In Dominion, the mechanic dominated the theme to the point that I never felt I was doing anything other than trying to build a better card engine than my opponents, and I was wary of Thunderstone which presents itself as a deck-building, dungeon crawler. Dungeon crawlers are among the most thematic of board games, and card game versions of dungeon crawls (even those that used some of the cards as dungeon tiles) have always seemed unsuccessful in capturing the theme. Thunderstone was not just a card game, but one with a central mechanic that is known to obscure theme. My hopes that the game could pull me in to the theme and be otherwise a successful game were, admittedly, pretty low. The good news: I was wrong. The better news: not only does the game feel like a dungeon crawler, it is one of the better dungeon crawlers of the past few years—despite being worlds away from the classic miniatures plus tile games like Hero Quest, Warhammer Quest, and the recent smash, Descent.

Players begin the game by randomly selecting the following: monsters for the dungeon, heroes, and items for the village marketplace. The monster deck is pretty self-explanatory: it consists of the monsters that the players will have to fight during the game. Similarly, the heroes will be available to fight monsters during the game. The village cards consist of everything from weapons and spells to food and tools. The heroes and the items are set out in stacks to form the village. The monsters are shuffled together and place above the village to form the dungeon. The top three monsters are flipped up and placed beside the deck to form levels one, two, and three of the dungeon.

Each turn the player draws six cards from his deck and, after evaluating his hand, decides whether to go to the village to make a purchase or hire a hero, or to go fight in the dungeon. Nearly all of the cards, including some heroes, have a gold value for use if the player goes to the village. The cards may also have a positive or negative effect according to which location they are used in. If a player goes to the village, they can either hire a hero or make a single purchase from the available cards in the village. Hired heroes and purchased cards are immediately discarded along with all of the cards from the player’s hand whether they were used to make the purchase or not.

If the player decides to go to the dungeon, he picks a creature to fight and adds up all of the attack values in his hand. If his attack value is higher than the monster’s toughness, the creature is defeated and goes into the player’s discard pile (That’s right, defeated monsters become part of the player’s deck. Some even have dungeon effects when they are in the player’s hand). Of course, things aren’t quite so simple. Before attacking, the player must account for the lack of light in the level of the dungeon he is attacking. This part is a bit clumsy: first you subtract any light source in the players hand from the dungeon level, then, you multiply the result by two to get the light penalty So, if you are attacking in the third level and have only one point worth of light source the penalty will be (-4). As a result, it would take eleven points of damage to kill a creature with a toughness of seven. If that same creature had been in the second level, it would take nine damage to kill it instead. It is important to note that the player could work out all of this math before deciding to go to the dungeon or village. As such, the only time a player really loses a combat is when he chooses to. The only penalty for losing a combat is that the attacked monster is removed from the dungeon. This means a player can purposely attack a monster to remove it from the dungeon in order to keep an opponent from defeating it and collection the experience and victory points. A player could also decide to do this just to accelerate the end game if he or she were ahead.

That is basically the game. When the Thunderstone which has been randomly inserted in the last few cards is flipped up in the dungeon and advances to the first level, the game is over. Players score points for all of the VP values on cards in their deck. The player who killed the monster that allowed the Thunderstone to move to the front (assuming that happened) gets points for the Thunderstone (3 pts). The highest score wins.

I have really enjoyed my games of Thunderstone so far. The light and level mechanism really adds to the immersion in the theme. I have the ability to immerse myself in a theme even when it is pasted on, but Thunderstone legitimately feels like a dungeon crawl. I have to assume many people will disagree with me on that, but, I’m pretty confident in saying this is a fun game for players who enjoy the dungeon crawl theme and like card games to boot.

Final Score: 9/10—Excellent