WIP 2
May 14, 2023 | ≈ 994 words | Kites Behext Eleven: Football Manager Board Game Q.E.
What I Played
another week. another writing in programming. i think i played the best game i’ve played this year so far last week (5/1) so lets get into it.
Kites
on tuesday i played kites. a real time co-op game about playing cards and this game is a prime reason why you cannot ever decide if a game is good just by the genre or mechanic descriptors. it turns out having a game where all you do is flip sand timers when they get low isn’t as exciting a premise as promised on the box itself. though i did get a laugh when someone said that it’s a game about “keeping the kites in the air” which gave me the amazing visual of being 7 years old and constantly plowing kites directly into the ground. even though this game is terrible and preferably played at 1 player, it’s the first game i’ve played in a long time that felt like real-time communication was crucial to aid with multitasking. it felt like being on a team and everyone gets a chance to be the quarterback. a nice quarterback.
Behext
next day’s playlist was behext and eleven, the football manager board game. behext ended up being extremely different from how it was described to me, as the directional attacking was super overplayed and the combat was not nearly as tactical as i imagined it would be. instead, behext plays more like wizard hot potato, where each round is a small puzzle where the player who is unable to play a card on their turn loses points, and each card lets you choose who to pass the turn to. the twist being that every turn you can add a cool card to your ever enlarging deck at the cost of using the very cards that are your effective health for the round. the game was definitely taking a lot longer than i wanted it to as hot potato gives the impression that you don’t want to be taking too long, but the decision to get one of the three available cards seemed to bog the game down more than i would have like, even though adding cards is probably the most interesting part of the game. yes, the noninteractive part of the game was more enjoyable than the throwing of the hot potato.
Eleven: Football Manager Board Game
played Eleven and burying the lede it is the best combat I have seen in a euro board game probably ever. eleven is about the eleven players on the football field playing playing soccer, and you being the euro gamer managing resources to collect special powers and increase numbers on each piece of your equipment to beat each random monster with its own 11 parts of their armor so that you can get ranked for end game points. Somewhere along the lines here the theme of the game pretty much went away and the game just felt like cube pushing with a very very interesting combat system. Your entire round is spent trying to over come the battle card that you get a hint of how they are positioning. On a 3 by 3 grid, you will compare your 9 sections with the battle card’s 9 sections, and the left and right thirds of the grid all count as one section, then the middle three sections are separately compared. To further complicate things there can be up to 5 pieces of equipment attached to each row, split between the 3 sections in the row. Each piece of equipment can simply be increased in its single strength stat, so most of the game is figuring out how to increase your stats of each equipment which can be equipped to one of 9 sections. It’s fiddly but it makes combat that feels like preparation and improvement makes a tangible difference in each battle. The last twist is that some equipment only blocks and some equipment only attacks, and these have to be assigned to each of the 3 rows among the 3 sections in each row. You assign these rows depending on the specific formation you’re running and oops this game is about soccer. Counting up all the combination of player and field section, that’s about a 90 different combinations for fielding your players not counting blocking or attacking. Luckily, you know how the (cardboard) opponent’s formation will be, so do your best to take advantage of that information. This part of the game was the only thing I really wanted to interact with, and the rest of the game was mostly an exercise in managing income and tracks. Don’t get me wrong I love a good track, but actions and money are so limited that the game hamstrings you in a way to keep you from making too many decisions and also from building the Soccer Super Friends in your football simulation. Originally I had Captain Tsubasa and friends as my reference here and I regretted it. A- board game took 3 hours but fun combat.
Q.E.
every other thursday is game night at a friend’s local library so usually that’s the day i play short games that aren’t my style, but a cool guy brought Q.E., the auction game where money is unlimited but you lose if you spent the most. In this game we learned that infinity is not a legal amount of money to spend but you can get real close by just exponentiating exponents ad-(almost)-infinitum. In a game where spending the most money immediately makes you lose, I’ve never seen someone have so much fun losing. Good.
that’s all the games i feel are worth bringing up because i’m already late posting this. fwiw i played FLY and Tinderblox, both great dexterity games. next time I talk about Distilled. a game about learning how to pronounce Lambanóg. also Noli, a bad game that I like that’s about shouting Noli. Noli!