Category: Games

I had originally written in early August as update to my original review, but I didn’t get around to posting till now in early October. Aside from one predictably disastrous game with my wife, Mottainai’s ease of setup and quickness of play continues to be perfectly suited for life with young children when even self-gaming is a rare and often short lived event.

Damn this is one fine game.

The analogy that floats in my head is that Innovation is a fencing duel, Glory to Rome is a raucous pillow fight, and Mottainai is a knife fight in a dark room.

My opinion of the game had previously hit a high-plateau when I last reviewed it. In the intervening months I’ve made a concerted effort to get better at Crafting and Selling. Neither of these tasks are easily intuitive like to Monking and Smithing, but once I got a handle on those them, the game blossomed yet again. I’ve also developed a fondness for Tailoring since getting two covered tailor helpers is a devastating position, cycling through a sixth of the deck every other turn.

I’d say that most of my games are still won via a quick race to 5 works, however, many more of these plays now assisted by crafting. I also need to work my personal inclination towards building and get better at making early sales. Even though it’s tempting to leave materials in the craft bench for future works, selling a couple items forces the rush-builder opponent reassess their strategy (even though it would usually still be best for them to end the game as quickly as possible since they have already committed to that path).

As an aside, I have not yet tried the extended game with the endgame condition at 6 works on a side. With my big-builder tendency, I understand why people might prefer it, but I think the game is made great because of this fundamental tension of shooting for an quick ending versus selling goods. I should try it at some point, but I suspect it will bloat the play experience.

I am also now much better at playing the individual cards, especially knowing if something is worth holding a couple turns so I can complete the work (very rarely). Most games where I spend such effort to complete a work will result in a loss. The opportunity costs are too high and cycling your hand is so critical that if you can’t shoot the silver bullet immediately, it is invariably better to use its task and move on.

At this point, I’ve developed that ESP feel that comes with card games that I’ve played an ungodly amount of times (such as Tien Len or Ticket to Ride). My brain has wrapped itself around the deck so that I feel the shape of the game just by a few cues here and there.

I might be overly cocky (especially since I’ve only once played another human), but I think it would be virtually impossible to lose a game with a first time player. Extending this completely untested hypothesis, I would conjecture that I would win 9 games out of 10 with a new player, which should be a ridiculous claim for such a high randomness game. The fact I would dare to make such a conjecture shows the level of skill that is embedded in this design. After these initial plays with a hypothetical opponent, I think the the disparity would quickly level out to two thirds of the games until it flattens out to even.

The hard part would be to get a new player to get past the initial introduction to the game. Mottainai is an intricate, counterintuitive duck. Glory to Rome is equally convoluted, but this experience feels counterbalanced by its silliness and patently broken combos. Innovation is a bit more methodical and forgiving than either game. Mottainai uses the insane flow chart of Glory to Rome to recreate Innovation as a sprint. Accelerating the byzantine mechanics of Glory to Rome creates a bewildering experience, hiding the vast opportunities for skilled play.

After 180 plays, I still feel there is room for improvement, though I most likely need to start find opponents who aren’t myself to get there.

Not surprisingly, I now rate this game a 10.

Carl Chudyk is a minor deity in game design. I absolutely love his chaotic, tactical games.

However, my wife doesn’t like games with lots of words, and the kids are still too young for such insanity. So that has left me to play against myself in this time of fatherhood and COVID-19.

I first started playing his games against myself with his second classic Innovation, but a couple weeks into quarantine I received my copy of Mottainai and I’ve played it about fifty hands. Over the past few months, I’ve played it it slightly more often than Innovation, partly because Mottainai new to me, and partly because of its easy setup and quick play.

In my solo games, I play the rules as written, dealing out two hands and just dueling each other. I tried a 3 handed game once, but that was too much chaos for my single brain to handle. (Along with Innovation, this solo-play method also works well for Chudyk’s Impulse.)

After these plays, I feel like I’m finally starting to grok Mottainai and accept the game on its own terms. And I think the most important word is “quickness”. This game is similar to Race for the Galaxy. At first it seems like this game is all about building up a powerful engine, but it is actually about ending the damn game as fast as possible in your favor. It also has a bit of a Donald X Vaccarino (Dominion, Nefarious) feel to it – set your strategy in the first few turns and push that selected strategy as hard as possible. If you try to branch out you’ll be a muddling mess of mediocrity.

In my initial games, grabbing monks as helpers was a dominant strategy. However, I would attribute it to “groupthink”, especially since I have a natural tendency to prefer strategies that revolve around “slow and steady, engine building”. After my first twenty plays, I learned to effectively implement the quick-build strategy to end the game by constructing five works. However, I still need to thoroughly explore a sales strategy, which I suspect will be quite powerful, but will take some practice to master, especially since multi-step processes don’t align well with in my personal playing tendencies.

To be honest, “strategy” is seems overwrought for this game. For a game this short, even the grandest strategy is really just a tactic. With the swingyness of the cards, it really is a tactical game made up of even smaller choices. You can afford a couple half hearted feints, but if you try any more than that, you’re toast.

One key in playing this game well is to be be thoughtful before playing a Task, just pulling a Prayer is often the best choice. It seems paradoxical in a game this short that “passing” may be regularly be the better move, however, it is the only action you can take without sharing it with your opponent, grabbing you a card without feeding their engine. In other games such a dynamic might be a design flaw, but Chudyk has been designing for a while and it is genius.

I should mention that the first couple times I tried Mottainai were an utter disaster. This game is obviously a descendent of Chudyk’s first classic Glory to Rome, but to appreciate Mottainai you need to completely erase its father out of your mind. The even though the mechanics are similar, the dynamics are so different you will be unable to grok Mottainai as long as you have Glory to Rome bouncing around the back of your head.

Even though Mottainai is noticeably shorter, the more apt experiential comparison is to Innovation. Like Innovation, several opportunities for nifty cardplay will spring up in front of you during the course of the game that will give you an undue advantage. However, when such an opportunity arises in Mottainai, it is critical that you take that advantage and immediately end the game in your favor.

Even though Mottainai is a short game, it is much too complex to be called a filler. For something that can be played in 7 minutes this is a meaty little card game which has not yet gotten stale after fifty plays (or more than a hundred since I’ve always been my own oppopnent).

Not that my faith has ever waivered, but I am happy to attest that my devotion to Carl Chudyk has been renewed afresh. I strongly recommend this game, which is available with free shipping on the publisher’s website.

I consider Carl Chudyk a minor diety in gaming. Of all his games, the one I have come to love the most is Innovation.

I had a rotten introduction to the game, a 2v2 team game where it just seemed utterly uncontrolled random and chaotic.

Which as any Chudyk enthusiast would recognize is pretty standard impression by the uninitiated.

The second time wasn’t much better, a 5 player game with one of the expansions. Even now I couldn’t recommend such an experience.

So I just ignored the game for a few years until I listened to an in-depth podcast extolling its virtues. I also had come to know too many respected gamers who spoke highly of the game. And by then, I had also finally come around to enjoying his other classic, Glory to Rome.

So I bought myself a copy and the third time was indeed the charm.

Chudyk excels at creating games with tight tactical play masked in a sea of seeming chaos. His games can require high skill to consistently play well, but the outrageousness of his card combos result the appearance of blind randomness.

There are a lot of moving part to keep track of. It is cards, but it isn’t random. Chudyk gives you a lot of levers to dance with the crazy. All this takes a moment to grok.

And when you do, it becomes beautiful.

Once you know the landscape, moments of brilliant tactical play reveal themselves. Surprise and delight await you around the corner.

Or sometimes you draw badly, and frustration gurgles in your chest as the draw hinder your progress.

But experienced Chudyk fans would note, somehow it is the n00bs who always end up in an extended run of useless cards.

There’s an awful lot of game here. You just need to learn to go with the flow. Of course, you will plan ahead. But the beauty of the game is found when you’re forced to change your plans. The fun starts when your well laid plan falls apart one turn later.

It is not easy to thrive in this chaos. But if you enjoy such a challenge, Innovation gives you both in spades.

This morning I slammed together a DIY set of MaNiKi (also called Jungle Smart and Crazy Circus) using Duplo Blocks.

I made three different colored cars (green, blue, and yellow) and put them on red and orange Duplo Houses. I wrote up a cheat sheet using the MaNiKi commands.

So the only thing that didn’t match the published game was determining the goal for the round. Instead of having the 24 cards as in the published game, I took 5 pieces and put them in a bag, green, blue, yellow for each car with red and orange for each of the houses.

To set the goal, I draw one piece at a time. All of the car color tiles are stacked in order and then placed on the first house tile that came up. After the second house tile comes up, any further car tiles (if any) are placed on that second house.

This system worked well enough, though the cards in the published game make for better gameplay, since the goal is immediately revealed and the game can proceed without the drawing process.

That said, this makeshift set worked quite well in teaching my five year old the game. She’s not ready to play competitively since she can’t work out the order of operations in her head, but she caught on surprisingly fast.

It’s definitely a sharp little game, one worth trying, and possibly buying as well!

One last note. In the photo, you will see a little tower to the right. I used that tower to keep track of the starting setup for a round. If there were any mistakes we could easily go back to the beginning to work out the correct answer. It’s not necessary for the rules as written, but a nice accessory for beginner games.

With the two little ones, I haven’t been gaming much. In this time away, I’ve allowed theories kind of harden into preferences, and one of my favorite things to hate is multi-player solitaire.

So let’s say you make a game of four people building their own little board with zero interaction outside of drafting tiles.

Yeah f’ that…and the committee who gave this game THE award.

But Kingdomino is an SDJ and it was being sold at half off at Target.

So I picked it up.

And damn, it’s a nifty little game.

I still doubt I would enjoy its more complicated sibling Queendomino, but the committee still knows what it’s doing.

I was asked on a photography forum to say a little more about the boardgaming hobby. Here was my response:

How do I start? Well, one could go to the website boardgamegeek.com, but that place is UI disaster until you get used it (totally designed by engineers!)

The best way to describe modern boardgaming is that it is an outgrowth of a lot of European (especially German) boardgame design from the 90’s and 00’s. Key features include a limited time length, no player elimination, and controlled interaction. In a word, anti-Monopoly (especially Monopoly as with its common house rules).

The top standard of German family boardgaming is a prize called the Spiel Des Jahres (SDJ) and which judges games at a medium light weight level of complexity. Unfortunately the crowd in hobby sites (like Boardgamegeek) tends to favor niche stuff so their database rankings favor heavy complicated stuff (similar to how photographers lust over L glass even though most other humans would be more interested in the latest bedazzled iphone 6s case).

Even though I consider myself a “serious” boardgamer, I personally don’t enjoy complicated fare. I grok the joy of a good brain burning puzzle, but I prefer the elegance of a pared down game where the interaction is the emergent outgrowth of an carefully curated set of simple rules.

Modern classics for people looking to get into the hobby would be Settlers of Catan (the big hit kickstarted this whole eurogame trend), Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride (which got me back into the boardgaming hobby after a decade long hiatus). I would also want to point out Pandemic and Hanabi which are both excellent cooperative games (where everyone plays together as a team to beat the game system).