Found a Winner

One of my newer board games came (as is often the case) by way of a recommendation from FKL. It's called Founding Fathers, and the subject matter is exactly what you'd expect. In fact, the game is stuffed to bursting with flavor, which prompted two of my friends to say (each without knowing the other had said it): "Am I going to learn something when I play this?"

Well, yes! The deck of 55 cards depicts as many men who helped to shape the original constitution, and is filled with interesting paragraphs that explain their roles in real history, while providing context for the functions they have in the game. What's more, the game also centers on 12 particular articles from the Constitution, and posits an alternate version of history in which any or all of those articles could have been drafted by different factions to read very differently from the way they ended up.

Fortunately, the flavor of the game did not come at the expense of interesting gameplay. While I have thus far only played with three players (and thus can't judge whether it really does account for five as well as it claims), I can say that it is a pretty fun game for three.

Players use delegates to pass votes on behalf of the original colonies. When enough colonies side for or against an issue, it passes (or fails). Meanwhile, you're trying to manipulate your own personal level of influence in four different political factions -- federalist, antifederalist, small state, and large state. The more measures that pass whose alignments match your personal strengths, the better you'll score at the end of the game.

Founding Fathers does bring about those fun decision making dilemmas of the best German board games -- the desire to take many different actions, but the ability to do only one at a time. You have to prioritize, and make the best of the few turns you have. In fact, I wonder if five players would in fact be too many for the game to be as fun; I think too many opponents causing chaos between each of your turns might remove some of the strategy from the game and throw it into a less satisfying randomness.

Also worth mentioning are the solid production values of the game. The material of the cards themselves aren't quite ideal, but the board looks wonderful, and all the other supporting bits are good.

So if you don't mind "learning something," I'd suggest Founding Fathers as a good game if you're up for a refreshingly different twist on the old "worker placement" motif.