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Board game review - Barony, Marc André's magnum opus

In 2014 french designer Marc André released his most commercially successfull game, Splendor, an elegant tableau builder. It quickly became a massive hit, winning a double digit of awards and being nominated for the highly prestigious Spiel des Jahres, even managing to become one of the few designer games to break out of the hobby and is today loved by gamers and non-gamers alike. The year after, in 2015, Marc André released his greatest game to date. The comparatively unnoticed Barony.

CORE GAMEPLAY

After having randomized a map to play on and chosen your start positions, the expansion of your dominion over the land starts. Though there are six actions to chose from in the game, three of them tower over the rest as the most important. Recruiting knights, moving knights/attacking villages and removing knights to establish villages. Using these three simple mechanics you'll slowly but surely spread over the map, taking control of territory. Establishing a village has two functions. It's a defensive move, allowing you to create borders and section off a part of the map that is yours to rule. Secondly it nets you point-tokens, though acquiring these tokens are not enough to get the points. If you have 15 points worth of tokens you may spend spend a turn taking the fourth action in the game: cashing them in and moving up one rank. Reach the highest rank of king, and the game ends. Usually the player who ends the game also wins it. This leads me marvelously into my next point:

TEMPO

The tempo considerations come in two forms for this game. Firstly: whenever you take an action, you always have the option of doing more than one thing. You always recruit at least two knights, you always move two knights and when you establish villages, you may establish any amount of villages you want. This gives a feeling that you can always either do an action or DO an action. You're always pushing to be just a tad bit more efficient, but if you spread yourself too thin you will be severely punished by the other players.

For the second point I'd like to loan some terminology from the classic game "go" as Barony shares quite a few similarities with it. The concept of "sente" is ever present in this game; sente being a move that demands an answer from another player. It's taking the initiative and forcing someone else into a corner, for example, staging an attack for the sole reason of forcing your opponent to spend their valuable time defending.

The earlier mentioned concept of having to take time to cash in your points works wonderfully here. If you do it to early you might be giving up opportunities to play sente, or worse, having a sente move played on you. But the longer you take to score your points, the higher is the risk that someone will find an opportunity to rob those points from you by attacking you.

STRUCTURE

These tempo considerations gives the game a wonderfully structure. The first half of the game is merciless, as everyone does a mad scramble to establish their borders and get territory. In the second half of the game you're doing one if two things based on how you fared in the first half: Either you're playing defensively, constantly making decisions between taking time to exploit your territory or keeping up your defense. If you're one of those left poor by the first act however, you will instead play the role as the aggressor. Pushing borders back to claim territory for your own and, if your opponent neglects their duty to defend, maybe even stealing a tile or two from them.

TURN OFFS

Barony is entirely and proudly a deterministic abstract. Based on that sentence alone you will probably have some idea if this game isn't for you. And that is honestly the only turn off this game has in my opinion.

CONCLUSION

Barony is a fantastic, simple and short game, thought it's depth feels almost endless. The randomization of the board every time you play will drastically change how the game flows and how you have to approach it, leaving you with a game that feels fresh and exciting every single time you play. Few abstracts come close to this level of quality decision making and if this game sounds appealing to you, you should definitely check it out.

Music pairing:

For this game I would recommend the album "The Sims Medieval, Vol 1" and "The Sims Medieval, Vol 2" both by John Debney.

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Board game review - Remember our Trip

As both American style and European Style games a becoming every larger, longer and more complex, there has opened up room for a new style of game to take foothold in the hobby. Japanese Style games distinguishing themselves by returning to basics and focusing on simple yet unique system that, when done correct, allow players the same depth that you would find in an European style game, with only a fraction of the rules overhead.

Japanese style games have been on the rise for quite a while, with the smash 2012 hits Love Letter (by designer Seiji Kanai) and Trains (by designer Hisashy Hayashi) marking the start of a slow and steady growth ultimatley ending up where we are today, with Japanese games being such a huge and defined genre that I would dare to say it should be one of the "styles" up there with American and European. With great designers like Shinzawa and Sasaki (of Oink fame) there is no wonder why. Among these great designers sit Saashi, originally becoming popular of their push-your-luck game Coffee Roaster (2015). Today ill be reviewing on of their games; Remeber our Trip; a game about collectivelt trying to remember a trip.

CORE GAMEPLAY

Remeber Our Trip is a sort of odd polyomino game where you are allowed a large amount of flexibility, as the tokens you draft cover only a single square. Though it is not until you've put enough matching tokens next to eachother you may claim them as a "polyomino". When you do so you get a base amount of points (larger polyominoes giving more points) and then you check the shared map. If there is already a polyomino in the location matching where you just constructed a polyomino on your map, you score points if your tokens match that polyomino; one point per token that matches. If there is no polyomino though, you're in luck! You get to place a new polyomino and then score points for all your tokens, as they will match the newly placed polyomino.

So far so good! You draft tiles, race to construct polyominoes or try to match the ones already made. Here's the twist that's going to throw a spanner into your works: every turn you're only allowed to place your tiles within a very specific area, greatly restricting how you can place. Often, come late-game, you'll find yourself throwing away quite a few of your precious drafted tiles. They do not fit into this turns pattern on your already overcrowded tiny board.

COMPONENTS

I love Saashi's visual style. It's stylish in an incredibly charming way and it's simplicity leads to a board that is beautifull, yet incredibly easy to parse; making sure that you never lose because you missed a detail.

The cardboard is good quality, and while the strips of paper you use to cover up the board in the hard mode can be a bit flimsy, the thinness of them almost makes the component seem to dissapear as you play the game (a good thing). The box is also about as big as it needs to be, so it won't take too much shelf space and is easy to transport.

FLOW

The structure of this game is a work of art itself, starting hopefull. You'll place tokens willy nilley all over the place, making a mental note that you'll come back and finish that polyomino eventually. But as the short (12 rounds) game inches ever closer to the end you slowly but surely start to panic. Plans get ruined as you are forced to place suboptimally, always doing ever larger tradeoffs to try and at least squeeze some out of this terrible system before the game abruptly ends. It flows so well, both round to round and game to game.

TURN-OFFS

Spoiler alert: I adore this game. These are things that aren't necessarily bad, but if some of these turn you off it could be an indication this game isn't for you:

The game is hard and punishing. Small mistakes may cascade into huge problems later in the game, if not fixed carefully early.

The game can be somewhat counter-intuitive. It's by no means a rules heavy game, but it can still be somewhat difficult to teach; especially to non-gamers.

CONCLUSION

As already stated, I adore this game. I think it's pretty damn perfect in just about every way. Witty and innovative gameplay, a charming and unique theme (complimented wonderfully by amazing artwork). This is absolutely one to get if you like short, relatively abstract, difficult games.

Music pairing:

For this game I would reccomend the album "Good Morning" by No. 9.