Most of my issues with word games stem from the fact that they usually rely on having a dictionary for a brain. Most people, though, are usually incapable of basic motor functions like breathing or eating if you replace their grey matter with a copy of the Official Scrabble Book of Words. For those people, we need a different type of word game. With that in mind, I should probably review the game that my wife and played pretty much non-stop for a week after getting it.

Both players think of a six letter word. The official rules try to make sure the word is as generic as possible and it wasn’t until I was sitting there looking at SH _ _ TY that I probably should have emphasized to my friend (and new player) that slang is probably also not a good idea.

Players take turns coming up with words that they think might contain letters in their opponent’s words. At first, you’re each guessing with two and three letter words, with each subsequent guess shifted to the left or right and/or higher in letter count. Like this:

Your opponent then compares your guess to their word and calculates the score for that guess. For each letter in the guess word that lines up perfectly with the secret word, then that’s 1000 points. Otherwise the letter only scores 250. The guesser writes down their score for that guess, and then the roles flip. Back and forth it goes, with each player using logic and their in-depth knowledge of two, three and four-letter words (no slang, remember!) to deduce their opponents secret word. The final guess always gives you a chance to take a shot at what the word is, with tons of points awarded to you if you get it right.

Technically, you play one round with a six letter word and the one with a seven letter word and add up the points, but as we segue into my thoughts on the game, I’ll say that points as anything other than as feedback for guesswords is silly. Why? Because this game is HARD. You’ll feel like a champ if you come even close to getting the secret word right, let alone scoring any kind of points.

It’s difficult because you have so few guesses to really feel like you’ve narrowed anything down. Your first guess out of the gate is a two letter word that lines up with the first two letters of the secret word followed by a three letter word. Then you don’t come back to that very first letter for another SIX GUESSES. Since you have so few guesses, you spend most of your time trying different combinations of letters you’ve had success with, like “dog”, “god”, “good”, “goo”, and so on. By the time you’ve locked one letter into place, you’re almost out of guesses. Good luck with that final guess when the only thing you know is that the first letter is an “S” and that there’s an “O” in there somewhere.

But maybe the game is supposed to be hard. Maybe the points do matter as a way of determining the winner (or in most of my games, the one who sucked the least). But if we focus on points, then it becomes less about actually guessing the word and more about trying to come up with as many combinations of words with the known letters as possible. To me, that’s the equivalent of playing Human Tetris by smashing through the oddly-shaped moving wall rather than trying to fit into it. Yeah, you’ll be left standing, but that’s not really a lot of fun.

Why’d we stop playing it? I’m not sure, actually. I think we just got tired of never being able to guess each other’s word. Or maybe I got tired of never being able to guess her word. One of those things is almost certainly true. But I think we might break it out again. I’ve ground up a couple of Meriam-Webster’s and added them to my diet so I think I might be ready to take on her big brain again.

But despite my whining, I actually think this game is a great time. It’s portable, it’s got wide appeal, and it’s easy to explain. Twenty bucks is a bit pricey for what you get, and I’m not sure how much replacement pads cost. But if that doesn’t bother you or you can get it cheaper, then I’d consider it worth it. If you want to play with points, go for it. If you just want to focus on guessing the other person’s word, then it still makes for a fun game. It’s definitely fun little game to play with a grandparent or other elderly person who enjoys crosswords and/or Sudoku puzzles. Because that’s all people that age enjoy, right? That and applesauce.

If you ask me how many board games I have, up to a year ago I would have said “Not that many”. But in my current state of non-game-playing, it’s starting to feel a bit like “more than I’d like”. So I’m getting the urge to really dig in and make my game collection more potent. The first game up in my new collection re-examination is one that was sent to me by Clever Mojo Games called Alien Frontiers. I’m always wary of games from lesser known publishers and/or designers. You really have no idea what you’re going to get. But I’ll play anything once, and my wife and I are glad we did.

Game mechanic recaps in text form are always mind-numbingly boring, but I’ll do my best to give you an idea of the game using the power of your MIND. Close your eyes and see if you can pick up what I’m putting down.

So, you’ve got this alien planet that’s ripe for the colonizing. Surrounding the planet are a bunch of orbital facilities that do different things whenever a player uses them. Three of these orbital facilities involve creating and dropping colony pods onto the planet below, and the rest of them involve making it easier to create these pods in some way. You use these facilities by docking some combination of your ships at them, and in this game your ships are dice. I know – that’s not very aerodynamic. But the Borg do it… why can’t we?

Anyway, each player’s turn consists of them rolling their available ships (players start the game with three out of six total), and then deciding where to put them. For example, one spot will give you a half of any single ship’s die face worth of energy (rounded down) that you stick there. If you have two dice with the same number X on them, you can plug those two dice into the spot that converts X amount of energy into 1 ore each. Another spot lets you plug in two of the same dice along with one/two/three energy and one/two/three ore for your fourth/fifth/sixth die. Those extra dice can be used to open up your options on the board, or you can burn any of them that come up six (along with an energy and an ore) for a colony pod that you can drop on the planet.

Colony pods are important for a couple of reasons. You get one point for every pod you put on the planet as well as for every region in which you have more than your opponents. Control a region like this gives you access to that region’s bonus power. Each region’s bonus is linked to one of the orbital facilities, making it awesomer for you by lowering resource requirements or giving you more resources back when using them. The region int he middle of the board will sell you an extra ship that you can use as long as you don’t lose control of the region.

Scores in the game are updated in real time like Settlers of Catan, rather than a running tally. So at any given point during the game, you should be able to tally up your colony pods, controlled regions and a few other things to get your total. Whoever has the highest score around the time someone drops their final colony pod is the winner. Nice and simple.

My wife and I played this three or four times in a row this weekend, and we had ourselves quite a fun little time with it. The interaction with your neighbors is in the “you totally went where I wanted to go” vein, but fortunately there seems to be no shortage of useful things to do if you find your destination otherwise occupied. You might think that analysis paralysis would be an issue, but with only three dice to start and seven at maximum, there’s really only one or two decisions per turn to be made – and those are usually between only two or three places that are going to help you at all this round. But because the turns come so fast, though, this doesn’t feel limiting.

If Caylus sounds overwhleming and the theme of Pillars puts you off, then look into this one. With an easy to explain rule set and quick, non-agonizing decisions, I could easily recommend this to someone looking to branch out from Ticket To Ride, Settlers or Carcassonne. It’s no Die Macher, but it’s a nice lateral movement into the worker-placement zone that you can’t really go wrong giving a shot.

OK, that’s kind of a lie. You probably should fear a little.

The UFBRT was a product of way too much free time at work and nobody to talk to about board gaming. The problem is that I’ve taken a new job which eats up a good chunk of the time that I used to spend trying to look busy. That’s not really the case anymore. Combine that with the disappearance of regular gaming nights with my friends, this leaves me in a spot where I have really little time to review games that I’m not actually playing. I don’t want to do that, and I’m sure you don’t want to see that.

So while I’m not really willing to say the words that signal the end of the Untitled Flash-Based Review Thing, I am willing to say that until one of the above conditions is heavily modified then I just don’t have what’s required to create worthwhile material anymore these days. And that sucks.

But, if I never get a chance to make another video again, I think 30+ videos and 812 subscribers in about a year is a pretty decent run. You’ve all made it totally worth the effort, and I sincerely thank you all for following along.

Party on.

But just as importantly, I’ve tried my hand at modeling a board game in computer form! Here’s the Michael Schadt game Richelieu rendered as a C# program. You’ll need the .Net Framework installed on your Windows machine for it to work. Sorry, Mac users. Java’s on my plate for The Future, though!

http://richelieu.codeplex.com/

Get the rules from BGG, and if you want you can file bug reports and feature requests and all that stuff over at CodePlex. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to have another video up soon.

Excelsior!