Issue 30: Three great roll-and-writes — plus, Asmodee sale price and more
Recapping the latest in board games, the implications of a potential 2B EUR Asmodee sale, and a look at three great roll-and-write games.
Hello, and a happy Monday to you all. I hope you’re enjoying a nice morning, afternoon, evening or night — whenever you happen to be reading this, I hope it’s a nice period of time for you.
I’m trying out a new segment this week, and we’ll start there — I’m looking at five great things in board games that I’ve read about or encountered recently. After that, we’ll hit the photo of the week, then I’ll introduce you to three of my favorite roll-and-write games, and we’ll end on a look at the potential implications of a massive sale of Asmodee Group.
Let’s hop to it!
Five great things in board games this week
Plan B Games (owned by Asmodee Group) announced a new Azul game, Azul: Queen’s Garden. It’s got hexes and tiles, and as usual, it’s been designed by Michael Kiesling. I bet it’ll be great. [Dicebreaker]
Both Shut Up & Sit Down and No Pun Included released reviews of Railroad Ink: Challenge Edition and its many expansions, and I really enjoyed the take from both gaming heavyweights. (The SUSD video is a bit older — a couple months — but I hadn’t watched it until Saturday, so you’re getting it now. See, it’s not all Cult of the New here. It’s also Cult of the Recent.) [YouTube/No Pun Included] [YouTube/Shut Up & Sit Down]
One of the greatest resources in board games has been, for me, the Ludology podcast and the universe that encircles it. That definitely includes Geoff Engelstein’s GameTek newsletter, which is just on Issue 8. This issue asks some really interesting questions about how to model historic events in gaming, among other things. [Engelstein/GameTek #8] [Ludology]
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the Gen Con 2021 post-mortem by W. Eric Martin over at Board Game Geek, and not all of it should be encouraging to us as board game enthusiasts. He discusses some industry trends, especially around the cost of shipping games across the Pacific Ocean on container ships. If the trend continues, there’s no way game prices stay at the relatively favorable rate they’re at now. A quote from his article follows. [BoardGameGeek/Gen Con 2021: A Post Mortem of Sorts]
Now it's time to increase prices to better represent a game's components, but more for survival's sake than anything else. Few people want to increase prices as they don't want their games to compare unfavorably on the market, but given the choice of working for nothing or maintaining a functioning business with positive cash flow, the latter seems like a no-brainer.
My final thing this week is the latest video from Paula Deming’s Things Get Dicey series. It’s just fantastic stuff, and I think you’ll enjoy watching it. [YouTube/Paula Deming]
Photo of the Week: Kabuto Sumo
I talked about Kabuto Sumo last week, and this week, it gets the photo of the week tag. Lovely game, lovely design, and lovely pieces. (And, as a bonus, it’s from a small publisher, BoardGameTables.com.)
BoardGameTables.com, $34/$49 with expansion
Three great roll-and-write games
Way back in Issue 2, I wrote about some of my favorite roll-and-write games. I stand by that list completely, but it’s anything but exhaustive. With that in mind, here are three more great roll-and-write games for your consideration.
Floor Plan
Roll-and-write games come in a variety of forms, and the planning-for-goals sort is definitely a good one. In Floor Plan, you’re given goals to fulfill that earn you varying levels of points. Success looks like meeting those goals and building a cohesive floor plan. Failure looks like focusing on planning a house that makes real-world sense. (Most of the time, at least.)
Floor Plan takes your desire to build something that makes sense and turns it on its head. You’ll laugh when you line your living room walls with windows into bedrooms, but you’ll do it, because you either have nothing better to do, or it’ll earn you points. It’s delightful.
Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade
As a child, I played hours upon hours of the classic Space Cadet Pinball on Windows 95. It was a game that introduced me to pinball in an official capacity, and if you’d put me in front of a pinball table, I would maybe have understood the basic concepts, but probably not much beyond that. Further explorations in pinball gave me better grounding in the genre, but I wasn’t any good at it in arcades, and it never went anywhere for me.
Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade, designed by Geoff Engelstein (a name you’ll recognize from above,) is the first time that I’ve really felt like I can accomplish my goals in pinball, even if there’s still a fair degree of luck involved. It’s such a clever design, and I know I’ve talked about it in this newsletter before, but you know what? You’re stuck with me, and I love this game.
Cartographers
Maps are fun. Creating maps is fun. Roll-and-write games are fun. It follows quite naturally that Cartographers is fun. In all seriousness, this is a flip-and-write game that really captures the imagination. You’ll aim to fulfill two seasonal goals, and each goal is repeated during the game — so you’ll get a more-or-less early-game opportunity to earn points, and a late-game opportunity to earn points. It’s very clever that way, and it’s the system that really makes the game hum.
It’s also a game that can be quite beautiful, if you put the time into it. The one-player mode is relaxing enough that I’d highly recommend it as an hour-long endeavor, even though you could realistically play the game in a fraction of that time.
What could a potential Asmodee sale mean for gaming enthusiasts?
One of the big news items in gaming this week was the news that Asmodee Group is set to be put up for sale — and their owners, PAI Partners, have reportedly set an asking price of two billion Euros. Quite a princely sum, if you ask me. [Board Game Quest]
There is, of course, a lot of discussion about what this means for the board gaming industry. That hefty valuation seems out of this world, and maybe it is. If somebody does pay that cost for Asmodee Group, what will they be getting in return? Obviously the gaming catalog is extensive and includes many — if not most — of the smash hits, from Catan, Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne to 7 Wonders, Pandemic and Azul.
The weight and power of Asmodee has enabled the company to gobble up smaller publishers with near-reckless abandon, and one does wonder if a sale would see that trend continue. While I am not intensely worried about the future of the industry — at least as far as enthusiasts are concerned — I do think it’s clear that there are potential problems to be had here, aside from the obvious customer service complaints that pepper Reddit any time Asmodee is mentioned.
The possibility that Asmodee is bought and gutted for cash is a big concern for me. Would it be a net loss for the industry? I think there’s enough uncertainty that we don’t know, but the risk is there, especially because they do control large swathes distribution across Europe and the U.S. — should they adopt predatory practices there, it would certainly impact more than just the Asmodee catalog. There are also major concerns about the impact it could have on individuals — mass layoffs, for example, are a net negative, no matter how you shake it.
Then again, maybe we’ll just see more $300 3D editions of games. 3D Carcassonne, anyone? Carcassonne Disneyland? Lifesize Azul? Hmm. The opportunities are boundless but roundly unexciting. One worst case could see the demise of some classic games and a potential rights-tying-up of modern classics, and that’s a net loss for gamers. (This is not a prediction, mind you — just rank speculation.)
All that said, I remain optimistic that board gaming enthusiasts will continue to have access to innovative, exciting designs. The cost to entry is not so cost-prohibitive to rule one-person operations out, and as long as that’s feasible, I think we’ve got a shot. The bigger issue is probably the one noted above about shipping concerns, and that’s an issue that’s far greater than just one industry.
Thanks for reading Don't Eat the Meeples. You can find me on Instagram and on Twitter. I even started a podcast this year, Vintage Sci-Fi Shorts, in which I read old science fiction short stories from the pages of old sci-fi magazines.
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