This weekend was the first time in several years that I played the board game Wallenstein. It's oddly war-like for a German board game, but with a very peculiar combat system at the heart of it.The game comes with a small cardboard tower with strange baffles inside. When a conflict between players occurs, you scoop up the small wooden cubes that represent the armies involved, and drop them into the top of the tower. Most of the pieces will tend to fall all the way through the tower and emerge at the bottom. But a few might get caught inside, skewing the outcome of the fight, as you only compare the strengths of the armies that make it all the way through.
I like and dislike the game at the same time. It can be both fun and frustrating. The way you plan your moves is clever, and forces you to make tough choices, but it's very time consuming -- you play what essentially amounts to just six rounds before determining the winner, but this can easily take over two hours. My game this weekend took three, for four players. Is it good for that long?
Well, honestly, not really. But it sure is different. I can't see ever playing the game frequently, but I couldn't bring myself to get rid of it. The game does seem to have fans, though, and was recently re-themed from Germany to Japan and released as Shogun.
I guess I just wish that it could somehow clock in at 90 minutes or less, since it does seem to have that problem Settlers of Catan can often have, where one player can get beat down so hard so early, that he's little more than a spectator for the rest of the game. That might be okay for a quicker game, but for a two to three hour affair?
In any case, I like the game worlds better than designer Dirk Henn's most successful and awarded effort, the fundamentally flawed Alhambra.
5 comments:
I love Wallenstein/Shogun. Yes, it's a two-hour game. Just suck it up. :)
(Although I've got to admit that three hours is a bit too long.)
The combat system is genious. Not only because it's actually FUN to watch a fight unfold (as the cubes tumble down the tower), but also because it acts as an equalizer for later fights. If you lose a couple of fights, most of the time it'll mean you have one heck of a bunch of cubes waiting in the tower. In a lot of games, I've seen players hesitate to attack a player who had the tower "stacked" in his favor like that.
This is one game I'll never say no to (especially the Shogun version, which is more streamlined than Wallenstein).
And yeah, Alhambra sucks big time.
FKL
OOOooo. Snarky's gonna be MAD you played that without him!
What's your beef with Alhambra? I've played it twice and didn't love it, but thought it was a nice game.
Davíd -- It's the "exact change" rule in Alhambra that kills it completely for me. There seems to be no way to strategically access it, and it massively swings the game. Whoever happens to be able to pay most with exact change wins.
Hmm... I never experienced that. I thought there was a decent tension between wanting to pay exact change and wanting to pick up the color you wanted. And similar whether to risk waiting until you had exact change.
I would be curious to check to see if the person who paid exact change more often was the winner.
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