It’s quick and enjoyable, but suffers from a poorly chosen theme in my opinion. The cards represent dragons, heroes, treasure, and other fantasy inspired notions. Now, I have no problem with fantasy themed games, but it simply doesn’t fit with Dragonheart. It just doesn’t make sense. This dragon gets treasure, but so does the sorceress, who can be killed by a troll or by a hero, who can also kill the troll. Why does the hero want to kill the sorceress? She looks pretty sweet in the game art. I think he would try and make out with the sorceress and run away from the troll. The troll doesn’t have any treasure anyway, because it was taken by the dragon.

I can already tell that this post is going to ramble a bit, so if you are one of the few folks that reads this blog for game news or reviews alone, you might want to jump out of the plane now.

I was playing a game of Dragonheart online at yucata.de with a friend, who somewhat famously doesn’t like fantasy themed games, and I mentioned my idea of how to retheme the game to something more appropriate. He loved the idea, and I’m working on the specifics of how to do it as I get the time. The specific nature of the theme change isn’t the important point I’m trying to make. The real point is that I can take the game mechanism and repurpose it into a better theme. Hang on to that thought.

I had lunch at a new Asian Restaurant that opened up a few weeks ago. The food was pretty good. I had some chicken pho that was some of the best I’ve had in Fresno. The restaurant decor was pretty strange. It was a clumsy patchwork of stuff that obviously had been pulled from elsewhere. So many businesses have gone under in this economy, I imagine it’s easy to find deals on used fixtures. I couldn’t remember what had been in this location before the Asian restaurant, but I knew I hadn’t been a customer. As far as I knew, I had never set foot in the place in my life. I got up to go to the restroom and while I walked to the back of the restaurant, it occurred to me that I had actually been there many times. I realized it had been over twenty years since I had been in this building. It was a Straw Hat Pizza when I was in college, and I used to go there with my friends fairly often because we had an apartment down the street. It didn’t dawn on me until I walked into the corridor with the restrooms. Everything else was different, but I suppose it takes a major remodel to change the location of the restrooms because of the plumbing.

The building had been repurposed. What was once a Straw Hat Pizza was now an family owned restaurant that made good pho. It hadn’t been torn down. It was still a good building. It just needed a different business. This concept rattled around in my brain for a while, and then met up with my idea for how to modify the Dragonheart theme and settled down in the back of my head. The idea wouldn’t settle down all the way; however, it wandered around in my brain, like a dog that can’t decide where to lie down. It was a restless thought.

Soon after I left the restaurant, I suddenly understood why this thought was sticking with me; I am ready to be repurposed.

The last year or so has been difficult for me. It’s becoming more challenging to deal with my depression. I am extremely dissatisfied with my job, and the thought of another year in this valley weighs on my shoulders like a Yoda that loves cake. I worry that I am too old to start a new career or move. I feel like a building that was once a children’s bookstore, then changed to a Kinko’s that was eventually bought out by FedEx, and would really like to be re-purposed as a cozy internet cafe, but would require so much renovation that it’s not worth the effort.

Honestly, I don’t think my building is so old that it can’t be renovated. I think Dragonheart is good enough for me to repurpose it with another theme. One task is more daunting than the other, but both can be broken down into short steps.

I just have to start walking.

Elder Sign is a cooperative boardgame designed by Kevin Wilson and Richard Launius of Arkham Horror fame and produced by Fantasy Flight Games. The game is recommended for 1 – 8 players ages 13 and over. I’ve only played it with four players, but I think it will scale well from two to eight. I haven’t tried the solo rules, but I rarely like solo versions of boardgames. Solitaire play defeats the purpose of boardgaming, as far as I am concerned.

My buddy Joe described this game as Arkham Horror Yahtzee. Basically, the players work together to investigate arcane mysteries in order to locate items that will prevent an other-dimensional monster from appearing and making everyone’s property value go down even more than this new normal. Each player gets a character card and a special ability, along with some spells or items that will help them investigate an area or defeat a monster. Players roll dice in order to meet the goals that are present on the card. If you succeed, you get the rewards on the location card, but if you fail, you usually lose health or sanity and the horrible elder beast gets a little closer to ruining your day.

While it is a cooperative game, I didn’t see that many opportunities for players to help each other; however, it still felt like we were working together for a common goal. It took less than 30 minutes to learn, and four of us were able to play through the game in a little over an hour.

I think it’s a great game for the Halloween season, and will see a lot of repeat play throughout the year. Pick it up at your friendly neighborhood game store, or you can pick it up from the nice folks at Funagain.com.

How satisfying that the next store worthy of review is just a few miles away. The Crazy Squirrel Game Store, or the squirrel, as we are fond of calling it, is the result of a great deal of hard work and intelligent planning by its owners, Scott Martin and Jennifer Ward. In less than a year, they have managed to not only provide a good inventory of games, but have also become the center of the local gaming community. I think that’s really important. A good game store will have a copy of that game you might want, but a great game store also provides you a with place to sit down and play that game, or try out some new games and maybe make some new friends in the process.

The squirrel has a weekly calendar of events that range from tactical minis to RPGs to boardgames. I tend to go to the boardgame meetups on Thursday evenings, when I can manage it. I had a great time last week on Free RPG Day. I once brought my kids in for a bit while my wife was at a doctor’s appointment nearby. We sat and played one of the many games available in the store library. Great job Scott and Jennifer!

The store is located a couple of blocks from the 12th Street BART station, near the Oakland Convention Center in what I guess must be the Swans building. The original building was built almost a century ago, but I think was renovated around the time that Endgame moved to this location from a previous one in Lakeshore. The space is just gorgeous. I didn’t take any pictures of the interior since they have a great gallery of pics on Picasa.

I had the opportunity to chat a bit with one of the owners, Chris Hanrahan, and we talked for a while about the history of the store and some of their guiding principles. I made a comment regarding the layout of the store and how the merchandise is displayed, and he said that they tried to create a style of presentation similar to a Pottery Barn. How cool is that? A Pottery Barn for gamers. You can actually see all the product. It’s not stacked in corners or crammed into tiny shelves. I also mentioned that I was impressed with the amount of imported stock that they had and he said that was one of the ways they try and set themselves apart from some of the other games stores in the area, that and their commitment to stocking games from small independent press designers. Smart retailers = great game store.

Here are some of the things that I thought really made Endgame special:

• Each section of the store is easily identified by these great little signs. Now you might say, “Jeff, that’s stupid. What’s the big deal? Can’t you just look around, dork?” You might say that, but I would tell you how much time I spent looking through the crammed dusty shelves in a game store in Burbank for an RPG book and was told by the owner, “It would be over there somewhere.” I enter the RPG area at Endgame and can walk right over to the neatly arranged section for the Savage Worlds RPG and check what’s there. Easy as key lime pie. (Which I just recently tried for the first time, and it’s awesome!)
• They have a Haba/kids games section that would impress even Mark Jackson. They had a copy of Geisterwäldchen that I almost bought but I didn’t because I would have had to carry it around all day. Now I wish I had picked that up. Lazy Jeff!
• There is a lounge area with big comfy chairs and a place to buy snacks and drinks. Why? Because upstairs there’s a…
• … giant game loft broken into two sections connected by a short walkway. The larger of the two areas has these giant gaming tables for terrain pieces for miniatures gaming. Check out some of the pics from their Flames of War Megabattle they held in January. The smaller side of the loft area has tables so patrons can try some of the open Eurogames in the store’s game library. All game stores should be like this one, right?
• They hold regular events like minicons and have special annual events like their anniversary party and Endgame Auction.

Endgame is pretty much everything I want in a game store, too bad it’s over three hours away.

Battle Line is actually a re-themed version of the game, Schotten-Totten, which was published in 1999. You can play a game of Battle Line in about 30 minutes and while the publisher recommends the game for ages 12 and older, I think you could go younger than that, especially if the younger player is somewhat familiar with the idea of ranked sets of cards, like you find in poker style games.

In Battle Line, players attempt to gain control of a series of nine red wooden flags, which are actually just red wooden pawns. I guess calling them flags makes it fit the ancient military theme a bit more. Whatever blows your hair back, I suppose. Anyway, you line up these nine red flags between you and your opponent, and through the course of the game, you attempt to gain control of the flags by playing a higher ranking set of cards on your side of the flag. If you can gain control of three adjacent flags, then you can claim victory, because you have punched a hole through the battle line. You can also win by gaining control of five total flags. In this case, you have won by just overwhelming your opponent.

The cards are made up of six colors or suits of troop cards numbered from one to ten. Players start the game with a hand of seven cards and on your turn, you must first play a card to one of your available zones and then draw a card from either the troop deck or the tactics deck. I’ll talk more about the tactics cards in a bit. An available zone is an unclaimed flag that contains two cards or less. Once you have played a third card in a particular zone, you may at the start of your next turn, claim that particular flag, if you can show that your ranked set cannot be beaten.

The sets of cards are ranked in the following manner, from highest to lowest rank:

• Wedge – Three cards of the same color with consecutive values.
• Phalanx – Three cards of the same value.
• Battalion Order – Three cards of the same color.
• Skirmish Line – Three cards with consecutive values.
• Host – Any other three cards.

Both sides of a flag need not have a complete set of three cards before it can be claimed. For example, if I have a set of three nines on my side of the flag and my opponent has a red seven and a red two on his side, then I can claim that flag. There is no card that my opponent can play that will outrank my set. This is one of my favorite aspects of Battle Line, because as the game develops, the cards that you don’t play are as important as the cards you do play. I may play a particular card into a zone that I know I will not win, just because by having that card on the table, I can later claim victory in another zone. I may also not play a certain card that I know will allow my opponent to claim victory in a zone I know I will eventually lose.

The tactic cards add another level of interest to the game. The tactic cards are special cards that can act as wild cards, move or remove cards from a particular zone, or can even modify the requirements for victory in a certain zone. The first couple of times I played Battle Line, I missed an essential rule involving the tactic cards. A player may never play more than one tactics card above his opponent. If my opponent has played two tactics cards and I’ve played only one, then I can essentially prevent him from playing any other tactics cards simply by not playing any myself. This is great if you find that your opponent has a couple of tactic cards in his hand and you do not. By not playing any tactic cards yourself, you effectively reduce his hand size and limit his options.

I’ve never played Schotten-Totten, so I’m not going to compare the two games, but the tactics cards are not present in Schotten-Totten. I have a feeling that the folks who have played Schotten-Totten for years will prefer it to Battle Line, just because that’s what they are used to playing, and the same can be said for the folks who started with Battle Line.

The more I play this game, the more I enjoy it. It’s great game to play during your lunchtime. It doesn’t take up a huge amount of table space and can fit in your coat pocket if you take it out of the box. I say coat pocket because you’re going to look like a dork if you’ve got a big deck of cards in the pocket of your pants. The game retails for around $20, but you can find it for less online. I think it’s worth $20, so if you see it, buy it.

You used to be able to play the game online, but Knizia seems to have pulled most of his games from the free sites in order to develop them into mobile apps. That’s fine with me. I would rather play Battle Line in person.

Go play a game with someone you like. I promise you will feel better.

Disclaimer: I have recieved no review copies of this game. I have included links to funagain.com, an online retailer that I support by including affiliate links to games. If you purchase something from Funagain, and include my affiliate code, P2RX, then I get a few pennies of store credit so I can buy more games.

TransEuropa will play from two to six players, although I’ve never played with more than four. The entry for TransEuropa on Board Game Geek suggests that the game is best with five or six.

TransEuropa was designed by Franz-Benno Delonge and first published in 2005. The recommended age is eight and older, which is about right, but I think you could go a bit younger with some kids.

TransEuropa plays pretty quickly and the rules are extremely simple, which is exactly why I chose this particular game. Players draw cards from five different regions across Europe. On your turn, you can lay down one or two pieces of track. The board is a map of Europe with major cities connected by a triangular grid. Most of the grid lines are a single line [ - ] but some are double lines [ = ], which represent an area where it is more difficult to lay track.

You start by placing a marker of your color in a particular city and then on your turn you can start building track from that location. Once your track is connected with another player’s track, your network of travel then expands to include all of their track, and they have access to yours as well. A round ends when a player has managed to connect all five of their cities. That player will score no points, but all of the other players will lose points equal to the number of tracks they would have to lay down to connect all of their cities. [ = ] Double track lines count as two tracks when making this determination. Those players then move their locomotive up on the scoring track accordingly.

I also have the expansion Vexation, which I’m pretty sure is now included as part of the base game. The expansion gives each player three special tracks of their color that allow them to make connections that can only be used by them, so if the rail networks are linked other players may only use the combined rails up to the point that they reach a rail of an opposing player’s color. No particular intersection of the grid can have more than two colored rails adjoining it, which prevents a player from being locked out of a region. We almost always play with this expansion, but I think it’s important to teach the game without it, especially when playing with younger children.

TransEuropa is actually a re-implemented version of TransAmerica, which is the same game but is played on a map of the United States. TransAmerica was first published in 2001, and was a Spiel des Jahres Nominee in 2002.

You can check out a terrific video about these games created by Scott Nicholson over at Board Games with Scott. Yay Scott!

Disclaimer: I have recieved no review copies of this game. I have included links to funagain.com, an online retailer that I support by including affiliate links to games. If you purchase something from Funagain, and include my affiliate code, P2RX, then I get a few pennies of store credit so I can buy more games.