Key Designer: Emiliano Sciarra
Distributor: daVinci Editrice

Bang! is a fun, fast-paced card game for small numbers or large crowds. It transports players to the Wild West, where law and order is contested by outlaws, is preserved by the Sheriff and his deputies, and is threatened by the Renegade, who wants to be the new Sheriff in town.

Despite reading Bang!’s instructions, it may be difficult to gain a proper understanding of the game until gameplay begins. If playing for the first time, the first round will be rocky, but players can quickly grow accustomed to the game by referring to the crib sheets included in the card deck. If purchasing the Bang! Bullet, players will receive the original game and its two expansion packs. If you’re playing Bang! for the first time, do yourself a favour and don’t play with the expansion packs right off the bat. Ease into the game first, then ease the expansion packs into your gameplay.

As previously mentioned, Bang! consists of four types of players: The Sheriff, the Sheriff’s deputies, the outlaws, and the renegade. The Sheriff and his deputies aim to kill the outlaws, the outlaws aim to kill the Sheriff, and the Renegade aims to kill everyone.

At the game’s start, each player receives a player type and character card. The character card dictates how much life each player receives and how much ammo (or cards in hand) a user may have. Character cards may also equip players with special, character-specific benefits. Each player begins the game with a Colt .45 – the one gun that each player can never lose. It shoots a limited distance, but can be replaced with better guns as the game progresses.

Turns allow players to draw two cards if allowed in their draw limit and play any number of cards possible for play. Of course, there are some limitations on card play. Players can only play one Bang! card, for example, unless they have special guns or action cards in play. The number of people you can shoot depends on the range your gun has. The better the gun, the more people you can shoot.

All outlaws must die for the Sheriff and his deputies to win. The Sheriff must die for the outlaws to win. And the Renegade must be the last man standing to win.

Bang! is a quick game once you get the hang of it. The Bang! cards are attractive and easily portable. Gameplay ranges from 30 minutes to two hours. As a result of the various character cards and the way cards may interact with each other, gameplay is always varied. There is no sure winner, and the teams of “good” vs. “bad” makes Bang! a fun group game that requires just the right mix of teamwork and cunning.

Bang! is certainly a recommendable game, especially for those who especially enjoy card games. Check it out at your nearby hobby games or comic book store and enjoy!

Distributor: Hasbro

I’ve never been much of a Monopoly fan. I found Monopoly deals often became lengthy, placing games on indefinite hold between each turn. If such deals weren’t made, however, it would be nearly impossible to get a monopoly and start building property. The whole process easily became tedious and not very fun.

Monopoly City introduces a host of improvements to the original game. While the goal of the game remains the same (acquire as many monopolies as possible and have the most money by game end), game mechanics are slightly different. Turns still consist of roll, move, and proceed as necessary, but new concepts greatly improve the new game:

Building:

Thankfully, players no longer have to wait for a monopoly to build – a new rule that jump starts play right away. Players may immediately build on any district they own and can choose between building residential or industrial properties. Industrial buildings are pricier, but aren’t affected by “bonus structures” like dumps or schools. Residential properties are cheaper, but if someone builds a sewage plant or prison on your district, all residential buildings are automatically devalued until the sink is removed. Build a park or water tower, however, and your residences are safe.

Although players may build on every turn, the use of a battery-powered “trading unit” restricts the number of blocks you may build at once. Districts may fit up to a maximum of eight residential and/or industrial blocks, not including bonus buildings or railroads. If dictated by a favorable “roll” of the trading unit, railroads may be built along the edges of the board as portals, allowing users to jump from one railroad property to another, avoiding high-rent locations.

What’s the point of Monopoly if you don’t have to wait to get a monopoly anymore? Once you own two districts of the same colour, you may purchase a stadium, which allows you to collect $1,000,000 more each time you pass Go. Own 3 districts of the same colour? Build a Skyscraper and double the rental value of that colour. Have 2 Monopolies? Be the first to purchase the Monopoly tower and double the rent of all properties you own!

Time:

Monopoly City’s rules state that all deals must be offered and concluded within 50 seconds. If the deal hasn’t been concluded within that time, which is tracked by the nifty trading unit’s timer, the deal is closed and no changes are made. If a player lands on a property that he or she does not want or cannot afford, it must go up for auction. Auctions also last for 50 seconds, after which the property in question goes to the highest bidder.

Timed deals and auctions ensure that the game goes considerably faster than the original Monopoly. The auctioning process also ensures that the first half of the game will not be wasted in disinterested waiting, watching, and hoping to land on valued properties before others.

In addition to keeping track of timed deals and auctions, the trading unit also keeps track of how long you have played. If an hour is up, the timer will beep until it is reset, allowing another hour of play. As a result, players can set a goal of how long they want to play. Time’s up? The player with the most money at the end of the designated hour wins.

Appearance:

Monopoly City’s vamped up appearance definitely provides a sense of novelty and change from the age old game. Instead of building along the edges of the board, buildings of varying sizes and colours are constructed in the board’s centre, creating a miniature Monopoly metropolis. As mentioned above, users are also given the opportunity to construct other bonus buildings: parks, water towers, wind farms, and schools or prisons, landfills and sewage dumps. As a result, the action occurring at the centre of the board looks and feels more interactive since you can witness buildings of different colours and sizes grow and you can watch as players’ fates are thwarted or enhanced by additional construction.

Drawbacks:

Unfortunately, no game is perfect. Monopoly City’s colour choices are a bit off-putting. The industrial buildings are attractive blue skyscrapers and art-deco huts, but the bonus buildings are a garish red or black and the residential buildings are boring beige.

Furthermore, as in the original game, as the game draws on and monopolies are established, players may still often fall into a rut of waiting and watching to see who lands on a mega-monopoly and hits broke first. After awhile, if players are evenly matched in skill, only so many deals may be made and skyscrapers may be built before the real game becomes one of chance rolls. To avoid this situation, the timed game of an hour or two is probably most ideal, although there are still many players who’d like to play the game to its end.

Despite these drawbacks, the game’s speed, enhanced appearance, and fast-paced interaction combine to make Monopoly City one of my best-loved versions of this traditional board game. Now all Hasbro has to do is make “Monopoly City: Toronto”, complete with our Entertainment District, Financial District, Distillery District, suburbs (Markham, please!) and the CN Tower in place of the Monopoly Tower. After that, I’ll be perfectly content.

Key Designer: Sid Sackson
Distributor: Avalon Hill

After my Settlers of Catan post, I realized I should make my gaming preferences clear if I were to continue writing game reviews. What one enjoys depends largely on what he or she values in a game. For the sake of clarity, I will outline exactly what makes a great game for me:

I believe great games are attractive and fast to play while creating or conveying a story for the player. Furthermore, great games generate player interaction (but not too much that it overpowers the game) and engage everyone (not just one or two players at a time depending on whose turn it is or who is trading at the moment). Finally, great games give players a sense of achievement in either winning the game or in investing their time enjoyably – a feeling that usually results from the aforementioned factors.

The above standards are those with which I judge all games, and Sid Sackson’s Acquire is no exception. Due to Acquire’s first two, early-in-the-alphabet letters, it is the first game reviewed in Hobby Games: The 100 Best – a great book recommended to me by Jesse Scoble, my co-worker and a contributor to the book.

Players of Acquire assume the roles of real estate tycoons vying against others to manipulate hotel construction and capitalize on mergers. Players buy, trade, and sell stocks to get the greatest return on investments. The player with the most money at the end of the game wins.

A turn in Acquire consists of three parts: (1) placing a tile on the board, (2) buying stocks (and, if a merger occurs, receiving bonuses and trading/selling stocks), and (3) drawing a new tile. A new hotel is created when two tiles connect on the board. Players may purchase stocks for any hotel in play and become primary or secondary shareholders if they own the majority of a hotel’s stocks, receiving bonuses when hotels pay out at the game’s end or are acquired during a merger.

Acquire’s play time is relatively long (about 2 hours) and a lot of math is required (calculating how much stocks cost). I’m not the biggest fan of calculating stock prices or even counting each tile on the board to assess a hotel’s size. These processes are especially tedious when hotels grow to 41 tiles or more.

That being said, Acquire still manages to be fast-paced and engaging. Turns fly by because they are limited to the three straightforward actions mentioned above and the game only pauses when hotels are acquired and bonuses are paid – an excusable interruption because all players are on alert, wondering who will earn what and how it will affect their claims on existing chains. The game never falls into long-winded negotiations (though players could easily tweak the rules if this interaction is desired). Since foresight and technique is displayed through investment decisions, players are never pitched against each another in the direct, vocalized conflict that often bogs down game play. Instead, they subversively scheme against targeted opponents by buying into prized hotels – a welcome form of opposition to a player who easily tires of trade discussions and resource debates.

Taking all this into consideration, Acquire’s design and quick, turn-based play makes it one of the more enjoyable games I’ve encountered. Despite the two-hour investment required, Acquire somehow still feels like a “quick” game. To top it all off, the game is attractively designed. Despite the end-of-game mess hotels sometimes become, Acquire’s money and stock cards are simple yet attractive and its tiles conjure up the nice, official feel of game-specific pieces. There’s also something satisfying in the fact that hotels and shares pay out at the end of the game. Even if you’re not winning, the feel of “money” in your hand is always pleasing, especially since stocks often pay out more than expected when hotels become unwieldy beasts to track. So, stock options? Bonuses? Payouts? The likeliness of “having” at least $30,000-40,000 by the end of one game? If it can’t be so in real life, why not experience it in a game at the very least? Great! Count me in!

Key Designer: Klaus Teuber
Distributor: Mayfair Games

As I mentioned earlier, Catan was one of the first games that helped me recognize the beauty of gaming and game night. My first encounter with Settlers of Catan was a prolonged affair, attended by the ceremony of clearing our dining room table for play space and fishing out snacks from the kitchen cabinet. My brother, opening the board game with much care, presented it along with a set of simplified rules for each of us to read and refer to throughout our first game. Catan was the first resource management game I encountered.

The rules of Catan were easy to understand within a few turns. The board consists of hexagonally-shaped resource pieces (brick, lumber, wool, grain, and ore) numbered from 2-12 with token counters. At the beginning of the game, each player sets up two settlements and four roads. A player’s turn consists of three parts: rolling the dice, collecting resources, then trading resources and/or purchasing settlements, cities, roads and/or development cards. The dice roll determines which resources are rewarded. If the dice roll amounts to 12, for example, the resource with the corresponding number is awarded to players with connecting settlements. Victory Points are awarded for settlements, cities, roads, certain development cards, and achievements (i.e. largest army or longest road). The first player with 10 VP wins the game.

Catan requires a combination of skill, cooperation and luck. It takes a knowledgeable player to position settlements and ration resources, a good negotiator to obtain needed resources from others, and a bit of luck with the dice to gather the rest of the resources (during one game, for example, I monopolized ore in my position between the usually rare numbers 11 and 10. For the entire game, 11 and 10 seemed to be the only numbers rolled and I won the game based on this lucky streak). The game allows for a variety of techniques to obtain VP.

As my review has shown, Catan is a good game. Unfortunately for me, game play can run kind of long. When you sit down to a game of Catan, be ready to spend about two hours on it (sometimes even three!). I know that by most standards this wouldn’t be considered long, but I played Catan shortly after playing Gloom and found Catan to be painfully slow in comparison. As with all games, gather the right mix of players who jibe well with your play personality and you’re sure to have fun. Combine a deliberate thinker with a game like Catan, which allows so many options, and impatient players like me could have a torturously long experience ahead of them.

That being said, Catan is a good game, but not a great game in my books. I have to be in a specific mood to play Catan: ready for a relatively long game with long turns of negotiations. These things may signify an amazing game for others, but I enjoy a game that’s fast-paced and allows one to lose oneself – if not in the other players then at least in the play experience itself. Personally, I think Catan has great mechanics, but doesn’t do enough to push me beyond the realm of participating in the game to actually living the game and becoming seriously invested in it. Mere resource gathering and distribution does not do enough to attract me. Instead, I enjoy a game that presents an entire package, and this package includes, not just its end aim (the point of winning), but its design and the story it creates too. Unfortunately, I feel Catan is lacking in the latter two criteria; it doesn’t do enough to create a story and it’s not the most attractive game either. I know I’m not expressing the predominant opinion (almost all reviews are unanimously in favor of Catan), but I am expressing it honestly from the point of view of a generally impatient, very demanding gamer and hope it may benefit others with similar tastes out there too.

Key Designer: Keith Baker
Art: Scott Reeves
Distributor: Atlas Games

As I mentioned earlier, my first bout with Gloom was fast. My co-worker busted out his pack in the lunchroom and we finished a condensed game within a half hour. Much of what appealed to me in that first half hour is what still attracts me to Gloom now: it boasts an innovative game design, captivating art, and quick game play.

The rules are easy: Each player has a family of five misfits, which they strive to make as miserable as possible while blessing other players’ families with with happy occasions. The game ends when one player’s entire family is dead. The player with the most miserable family wins.

A player’s turn consists of two parts: drawing cards up to the draw limit and playing two cards. The Gloom pack contains four different card types: characters, events, modifiers and death cards. Modifiers bestow either positive or negative points on characters and are often accompanied by rule modifications that can alter a player’s game play for a while, death cards are used on characters to end their miserable lives (relatively straightforward there), and event cards mix up game play (e.g. blocking deaths or removing all of a character’s modifiers). Cards may be played on any character in the game – your own or another player’s.

Cards are transparent with beautifully drawn images by Scott Reeves. The transparencies allow players to layer modifiers on characters while keeping them visible underneath and providing a “face” for the misfortune all throughout the game. Although the game’s objective sounds morbid, its content is wryly humorous, encouraging whacky storytelling as a great addition to game play. Exactly HOW did Lord Slogar fall into that well and how did he marvelously marry so soon afterwards?

Best of all, Gloom is easy to learn and easy to play, though not too easy to preclude experienced players from exercising skill and technique. Everything you need is completely accessible – sans a momentous learning curve to access it. Just feel like throwing cards around for a while? Gloom would be a great game for you. Or do you feel like engaging in a cunning game of misfortune? Gather the right players, and Gloom is good for that too. To top it all off, the play time is also short– 20 min to an hour – so you can play a quick game to kill time or multiple games in one night for an entire gaming event.

Gloom is, thus far, my favorite card game. I’m a sucker for things that look nice, feel nice, and play nice and Gloom does all of those things. It has the added bonus of being the exciting first addition to my newly founded game collection and of showing me that games can be enchanting, off-the-wall excursions from those vanilla days of dictionary-thumping Scrabble. It’s not bad in my books.