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I've come to an important realization, and I wanted to share it:

I am bored with board games.

That's not entirely true, actually. I am bored with NEW games. I don't want to try every newfangled game that gets published by some fifteen-year-old with a Kickstarter account and a copy of Microsoft Word. I don't want to read convoluted 36-page rule books that would give migraines to normal men. I don't want to have to learn every game I've got every time I want to play. I just want to play the games I already have and enjoy them.

The problem, of course, is that as a game reviewer, new games are where it's at. I am not going to review Risk Legacy every time I play it, but I still want to play it another couple dozen times. But I need to play the games I'm going to write about, even though what I really want to be playing is another round of Mice & Mystics, only I have to play Crap City Bore Dome because I need to write about it to justify my free copy.

The problem gets worse, too. I have a bunch of games I just don't want to play. They might be good games, but it's hard to give them an unbiased opinion when I'm irritated to have to read the rules in the first place. I'm spending every Friday night boning up on rules so I can play the games the next day, and in at least one out of three cases, I try to forget the rules immediately after I'm done writing, because I liked the game so little.

And you know what else? I have too many games. I know there are some of you that would say such a thing is impossible, but I'm telling you, I have too many. I can't store them all - and keep in mind that my game library started over from scratch last Christmas, when I lost them all in a house fire. So nine months later, I have more games than I can fit into my office. If I never got another game, I could be perfectly happy playing the ones I have for the rest of my life.

Plus you don't need me any more. When I started out, there were maybe a dozen reviewers who were actually doing anything. At one time in the not-too-distant past, I was one of six people in the world with more than 100 reviews at BGG. Now there are 39. And that's not counting the people at other sites who don't even put their stuff at BGG. The market is glutted, and since I'm not going to start doing video reviews, I can't really keep up any more.

I got into this racket for free games. I wanted publishers to send me stuff so I could write about it, and get free games for my efforts. At this point, however, I don't want most of the free games that come to my house. And that is making me reconsider a lot of things. Like, why am I writing about games just to get free games when I don't want the free games? OK, maybe I'm only reconsidering that one thing.

Starting tomorrow night, I'm mixing it up a little. From now on, I'll be reviewing whatever the hell I want. If it's a board game, fine. If it's a movie, great. Maybe it'll be a TV show, or a concert, or a camping trip. Tomorrow night, in fact, I'll be reviewing a Lego set. Yeah, I'll review toys, if I want, or comic books, or word processing apps for the iPad (not really that last one, unless it's so insanely cool that I just can't shut up about it).

Of course, this means I'm going to have to redesign some of the site. I'm not doing that tonight, because tonight I'm going to go watch some reruns of Oz on HBO GO, which is awesome, in case you were wondering.

Maybe I'll review it some time.

Buying a swimming pool is like getting a part-time job, except that you have to pay to be there.

My wife and daughter have been pestering me to buy an above-ground pool for our back yard since the beginning of summer. Admittedly, it was a hot summer (though last summer was WAY worse), but I resisted. I know having a pool is a lot of work. I know it's hard to keep it from getting murky. I know it drains money like having a hole in your pocket. So all summer, I avoided buying a pool.

And then, the weekend before Labor Day, we found a huge pool at an insane discount on closeout at Target. And even though I was opposed to owning a pool on general principle, I broke down and bought it, because I have absolutely no will of any kind.

The first awesome part of buying an above-ground pool is having to drive it around until you can unload it. Getting the damned thing out of the car is an incredible amount of work, when you get one that is as big as the one we got. It weighed more than most people, and was ludicrously bulky, so I did what any sane parent does and made my kid get it out of the car. But it was so damned heavy that I had to help, and so managed to drop it on my foot. This was about as much fun as dropping a washing machine on my foot, except that washing machines are not as heavy.

Then we had to put it together. The pool came with an instructional video in which two beautiful people with a beautiful lawn that is perfectly level assemble the pool in three minutes flat and have absolutely no problems of any kind. These people were either magical creatures from a novel written for young adults, or they were lying. It is incredibly hard to assemble an above-ground pool. I recommend you hire someone to do it for you, so that you can drink lemonade on the porch and give life-affirming tips.

I did not do that. Instead, I spent my entire Labor Day weekend digging the yard flat, laying out the tarp, catching the tarp when the wind blew it away, cleaning the dirt out of my underpants where the flying tarp threw it, then placing bricks on the tarp to hold it down. Oh, and I put together the pool. Then I put water in it.

The pool promptly sank into the ground. It turns out, 15,000 gallons of water is heavy enough to dig straight down into Texas soil, even with the drought we've been enjoying turning the ground into concrete. And since some parts sank more than others, the pool was so far out of balance that I couldn't swim in it. So I drained it and started over.

After placing bricks under the legs of the pool and filling it again, I was finally able to swim. I love swimming. I grew up in California, and used to spend my entire summer at the beach. I'm having so much fun that I almost don't mind all the money I spent buying my pool, filling my pool, draining my pool, then filling my pool again. Almost, but not quite. Because I had to swim alone.

See, the pool ladder is so rickety that my wife cannot get into the pool. She tore all the ligaments in her leg a few years ago, and can't turn her knee. And since the ladder is so flimsy and narrow, she can't do the acrobatics necessary to flip around at the apex. Sure, she could have just allowed herself to fall into the pool once she was at the top, but that solution would not have worked in the case of exiting the pool, and so once she was in there, I would have had to bring her meals out to her.

So I got to spend more money. This time on lumber, which I used to build a proper wooden staircase level with the top of the pool, complete with broad steps and hand rails. Now my wife and I are enjoying swimming together, and having a lovely time.

Except that now the water is getting a little cloudy. I think I need to add more chlorine, or balance the bromide, or possibly I need a stronger pump. I don't know for sure. If you'll excuse me, I need to go spend more money and time solving yet another problem with my pool.

I'm sure I'll get this right, sooner or later. Of course, by the time I do, it will be winter. Anyone know how you winterize an above-ground pool?

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I hate feeling unprepared to review a game. It doesn't happen very often, because usually if I am not ready to write a review, I just go back and play it again. But in the case of the Mage Knight board game, I've already put five hours into it, and I'm not really of a mind to sink another afternoon into making sure I understand what I'm writing about. So fair warning, some of this will almost certainly be wrong, but since I expect my experience will be pretty close to yours, I'm going to jump in and look like an asshole anyway.

I was incredibly excited to try Mage Knight. It has garnered incredible press, and it's always sold out. It's like the damned thing is made out of gold bullion and coupons for sex. Everybody talks about how it's this incredibly awesome game, and plus it's an adventure game where you wander around and kill stuff and get magic powers, so that's right up my alley.

However, I suspect that some of those reviewers fell into a common trap, one which I studiously attempt to avoid:

1. Read popular reviewer who says he loves the game.
2. Play the game and be confused as to why it's so great.
3. Go back and read the reviews, certain that you missed something.
4. Assume that someone must know something you don't.
5. Question own sanity.
6. Write a positive review because everybody seems to like the game so much.

My main method for avoiding this potential pitfall combines ignorance and arrogance. First, I try not to find out what other people are thinking, and second, I just decide that I am right and all those other people are wrong. It's what works for me. The end result is that my reviews tend to be crassly opinionated, but I warn you of that right at the top of the page, so mea culpa, bitches.

So my review of the Mage Knight board game is NOT going to be overwhelmingly positive, because I am not all that crazy about it, and don't see why everybody loves it. But I am also going to admit that I have only played it once, so I may have missed something.

For my first complaint, I will address the byzantine and monolithic rulebooks. Yes, rulebooks, plural, because there are two. The are written in the smallest font you could possibly use and still be legible to the human eye, and they are brimming with tiny rules that apply to very specific scenarios which may or may not occur during your game. There are two of them because you need an entire starting set of rules to learn how to play your first game, and then once you finish your first game and you are dizzy from absorbing all those rules, you can move on to the full game which incorporates as many rules as you just got through reading, and which left you near-sighted, dizzy, and feeling a little like you just perused the Necronomicon and now you might be insane.

Just to make this point clear, my first game only took three hours. As I mentioned earlier, I have spent five hours in total getting ready for this review. About half an hour was spent setting up our first game, which means it took me more than 90 minutes to get through enough rules that I could play the learning version of this incredibly complicated game. I can usually finish a 16-page rulebook in 20 minutes - less if there are lots of examples and illustrations - so when it takes me an hour and a half to plow through the instruction manual, I feel like I could have spent my time better had I decided to learn Esperanto instead.

My second complaint is closely linked to the first one, and has to do with the fact that the Mage Knight board game has far too many different pieces, and they don't tend to work with each other. And when I say 'too many pieces', I mean both literally and figuratively. There are nine or ten different decks of cards. There are four different monster stacks. There are chits and tokens and markers in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, and it can be dizzying attempting to remember what each of them is supposed to do.

And beyond the fact that the game has so many actual pieces, it also has too many elements at play. Defeating a monster, for example, requires you to place a specific amount of attack points - but there are five different kinds of attacks, each generating attack points at a different time and for a different effect. And the monster might do damage to you, requiring you to block, but it might also make a flame attack, which you defend differently, or it might be harder to block, or it might do more damage before it hits. It rivals D&D for sheer complexity, but without all those cleavage shots and half-naked succubi.

Those are just two examples of the copious numbers of things at work in Mage Knight. There are many more examples of exceptions and varying mechanics and random complexity. It feels like the designer had a great idea for a game, and then wanted to add a couple things, and then another thing, and so on and so forth, until the the rules are busier than the graffiti-strewn wall in a public bathroom stall.

Final complaint before I get to the parts I liked (and yes, I did have fun) - the whole thing was just too mechanical. Assuming you can master all the various things you have to remember to play even the basic game, the game is still missing that sense of wonder and adventure that I want to see when I send a wandering knight into the world to explore and conquer. Combat is painfully mathematical, and you will almost always know if you can win before you decide to fight. Even when you dive into battle against a minotaur in a monster spawning pit, Mage Knight makes you feel like you have to analyze an expense report instead of screaming a war cry and charging into the fray.

Other elements were also rather dry. From movement to turn order, recruitment and magical attacks, everything comes down to numbers on cards. The most exciting things, like conquering a city or evading monsters, are so mathematical as to be preordained. There's virtually no mystery or tension or excitement, and that drains all the awesome right out of it.

But it's not fair to simply dismiss the Mage Knight board game, because I have to admit that I did have a good time playing the game. It wasn't as thrilling as I wanted it to be, but if you can master the analysis you need to excel, the game has some very interesting decisions to make. In fact, the elements of a good game are in there - strategy, tactics, timing and decision-making are all huge factors. You have to decide when to grab the first turn and when to hold off for a better payoff. You'll need to evaluate whether you can grab that ally before your opponent, and if it's worth the sacrifice it will cost you to do it. There's a lot to consider in Mage Knight, and even if it's an adventure game without much in the way of adventure, it's engrossing.

And if you want value out of your games, this is one where you're getting what you paid for. The box contains hundreds of cards and chits, eight painted miniatures, and enough tiles to build a world map larger than your kitchen table (assuming you have a very small kitchen table). The box is heavy as hell, which means that if you decide you don't like the game, you can keep it by the front door and use it to whack burglars.

If you do like the game, you can play it over and over before you start seeing the same thing. You can try it solo, you can try it as a race, you can even build up and fight the other guys at the table. You can mix up the land tiles to get to the cool spots faster, or you might just spend the whole game wandering around and killing orcs like fish in a barrel of monkeys. If you do enjoy it, you've got dozens of hours of play time in the box without ever having to wonder if there's an expansion in the works.

So there are upsides to Mage Knight, and I admit that I kind of want to try it again. But I also know I'm not going to try it again, for a variety of reasons. I would have to teach the game to my family, because my regular group didn't really love it enough to try it twice. I could play it solo, but I don't really like solo board games. If you ask me, that's what video games are for. And frankly, I just don't want to read the second rule book. I already had to upgrade the prescription on my glasses, and if I read that second book, I'm going to need bifocals.

If you've got the time and patience to work through Mage Knight, and you're OK with an adventure game that plays like a Euro, you might actually enjoy it. I won't be playing it again, because I just don't have the mental stamina, and when I play an adventure game, I want it to be exciting. And no matter what everyone loves about the Mage Knight board game, it sure is not exciting.

Summary

1-4 players

Pros:
Deeply strategic, extensively tactical, and full of tough decisions
Looks great, and there's a ton of stuff in the box
Countless hours of replay

Cons:
Dry and analytical
Terrifyingly intimidating rulebook
Doesn't feel like an adventure

If you want to play the Mage Knight board game, good luck. It's sold out all over the place. Noble Knight has one, but it's a little pricey:
WOAH, THAT'S STEEP

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You know that scene from The Jerk, where Steve Martin is all excited because the new phone book has arrived at the gas station, and he goes, 'The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!' Remember how he's so far over the top that he is running around with his hands in the air? Well, that was me when Mice & Mystics finally showed up at my house. My copy is a demo that was used at GenCon, and let's just say that it has been lovingly enjoyed, but I didn't care because I was so damned excited to finally play with my family.

Now, first things first, I've already written about this game once. But when I wrote about it last time, I was just playing with the guy who made it. We tried it, had a good time, but I was just enjoying the experience, and not trying to run the damned thing. It's one thing to have Jerry standing there going, 'yeah, now you get this, and you did that so here's one of these, and have some chili because I just made it.' It's another thing entirely to be the guy who reads the rules and has to remember how many different treasures you can have, and when do the rats get a turn, and what does it mean when the roaches are greedy. I assumed it couldn't be too hard, considering the fact that the game is designed to be for families.

And I was right. It was pretty darn easy. And that meant that instead of having to be the dungeon-mastering head man, I was able to join in the game alongside everyone else and have swashbuckling miniature adventures against cranky house cats, villainous rats and monstrous spiders. We climbed out of sewer drains and up into the kitchen. We slew cockroaches like a can of Raid. We made friends with the castle cook, dodged the vicious crow, and finally escaped from the tunnels, only to find more adventure waiting for us.

All the administrative stuff, and the different rules that actually allow you a fairly wide set of options on any given turn, are made simple through the use of a very cool set of dice. The dice have swords and shields and arrows and numbers and explody marks, and best of all, cheese. When you move, you roll the dice and check the numbers. When you search, you roll the dice and look for explosions. When you fight, you roll the dice and look for swords or shields (and cheese - you'll want a lot of cheese). Special abilities will have you roll and look for cheese, or explosions, or shields, or whatever else, and it means that the game has tons of flexibility without getting complicated.

I've already commented at length at how much the game feels like living out a story, but the thing that impresses me now that I've had to actually be in charge of a game is how well the rules make those stories happen. Mice & Mystics contains an incredible number of customizable components, from double-sided boards and delightful treasures to swappable encounter cards and a flexible timer. With subtle manipulations that appear to be little more than a flick of the wrist, a journey through the castle pipes can be either a frenzied race from an implacable foe to a charge into the face of a powerful enemy.

The story book that you get in Mice & Mystics does an incredible job of showing how flexible this system can be. The various adventures you can play will have you escaping, rescuing, sneaking, sabotaging, and otherwise doing all manner of heroic things made that much more heroic because you're playing a mouse. The adventures string together, and if your mouse learns how to thundersqueak in one thrilling tale, he'll still know how for the next one. This would seemingly create a situation where you'll eventually become too powerful, but happily, the additional abilities are not super powers, they're just a wider array of options.

And those options are beautiful. Now that I've seen the card art, the delightfully sculpted plastic miniatures, the beautifully illustrated tiles and the board shaped like a broken grandfather clock, I can't believe this wasn't made by a much bigger publisher. The components are so high-quality that even though my copy had been played something like 20 times already, it was in surprisingly good shape. Everyone in the family had to stop playing every now and then to gawk at the pictures or examine the minis. Money went into this game, and a lot of talent, but the most obvious thing that went into Mice & Mystics was passion. This isn't just a product. It's a labor of love.

I've heard some concerns about the ability to play this game once you've finished the book. I suppose from one standpoint I can understand it, but at the same time, do you complain about a D&D module because you can't play it twice? Or do you take a look at all the tools at your disposal then do like junior-high kids have been doing since the 70's, and start making your own dungeons with hundreds of demonic seductresses and no bathrooms? Because having read through the rules, played the game and had a look at all the pieces at your disposal, I can promise that if we finish all these adventures before more come out, I'll be writing my own. And it won't even be that hard, because all the pieces are already there.

I think that's one of the things that I really noticed when I was able to hold a copy of the game in my hands - there is so much I can do with this one base set than I imagined. Once my heroes finish with the evil witch and her evil minions, I can use what I already have to build new scenarios that will be just as thrilling and imaginative as the ones I've already played. As more pieces are released for Mice & Mystics, I can add those to my repertoire, and I'll have so many fun things to do with this game that I will have even less time to play all my other games.

Honestly, I really hope Plaid Hat Games releases some mini-expansions that include stuff like new treasures and opponents, because I can see myself having a great time writing my own stories. And the great thing about Mice & Mystics is that unlike every other dungeon crawl I've ever played, the story is the most important part. It's not all about establishing line of sight or managing the combat order. It's not a game where you have to balance your inventory or count your gold. You might look for the weapon that grants the best attack bonus, but you'll do it because you have to save the realm from the clutches of the dark queen, not because you're trying to balance attack speed with defensive bonuses.

I have said for a very long time that my favorite game of all time is Warhammer Quest. I'm not entirely prepared to surrender that position, partly because I've got a few hundred plastic miniatures to paint and I paid 500 bucks to replace the copy I lost in a fire. But I can comfortably say that Mice & Mystics is easily in my top three, sharing the limelight with Risk Legacy. And if I get the tools I need to make Mice & Mystics the game I know it can be, I might have a copy of Warhammer Quest available, cheap.

Summary

2-4 players (maybe more, depending on the adventure)

Pros:
The most story-driven board game I've ever played
Planning and strategy and tactics are important, too
Absolutely stunning components
Exceptionally good to play with your kids (unless you cuss as much as I do when you win)
One of my favorite games ever

Cons:
Not enough out yet to make it my number one

Mice & Mystics still isn't out yet, which means you've still got time to get in on the awesome preorder. You can save $25 on a $75 game, and get two promos in the process. But time is running out, so hurry your ass up and order.
http://www.plaidhatgames.com/store/18

When you see a game called Starship Merchants in today's market, you are most likely to believe that this is one of those games where you build ships and explore planets and conquer enemies and have political battles in the senate where Jar-Jar Binks is responsible for the fall of the Republic because, unbelievably, somebody took the goofiest dingbat in the entire Star Wars universe and said, 'man, you know what this comic-relief halfwit would do best? Politics!' Maybe they thought he looked like Lyndon LaRouche.

But it's not one of those games. It's an exercise in economics, supply and demand, and business planning. It has more in common with a Euro about a bunch of Spaniards trading across the Atlantic (you know, the ones where we conveniently ignore that slaves were a high-yield crop and pretend all anybody wanted was coffee beans and sugar). You'll hire ships, trick them out with killer upgrades, then mine minerals that look like french fries out of an asteroid belt. It's one of those games where making a bunch of money is the ultimate goal, and where you'll spend all your money every turn so that next turn you can make more money, which you will, in turn, spend all in one turn.

It's a very interesting game with loads of critical decision points. You can blow all your dough on buying a ship outright, or you can buy on credit and pay it back later, along with some rather painful interest. But if you spend everything, you might not have any money left for a pilot or a survey computer, and then the guy with the debt can scoop you for the best space ice cubes. You might buy a refinery, and hope it pays off long-term, and then find out that you can't afford the three extra bucks that would let you pick up a new ship and carry even more purple paintballs.

There's even a little luck, because when you do get out to the asteroid belt and want to see what's available, you're pulling cardboard squares out of a cloth bag. Get the really great squares, and you'll make a ton of money. Get the crappy ones, and you'll make... slightly less money. There is luck, but it's not much luck, and so this is still a game that hinges almost exclusively on making the right decision at the right time.

What it is not is very interactive. Whether you buy the best ship or not is irrelevant to the guy behind you, unless when you bought the best ship, he couldn't get one. He also doesn't care if you get the best space rocks unless he also wanted those exact space rocks. There is some opportunity to mess with the other players, like if you get the new model spaceship and make the old model obsolete, leaving your opponents with ships that aren't worth the paint on the hull. But for the most part, you could play this game solo, except that then you wouldn't know if you won.

I did really enjoy Starship Merchants. Toy Vault is starting to impress me with some pretty decent games - between Abaddon and this one, we've got some pretty darn cool games coming out of this company that used to just make fuzzy Cthulhu stuffed animals, which are perfect if you're a horribly maladjusted parent who tells his kids Lovecraft stories at bedtime. All these successes have me excited for Apparatus, the next game from Toy Vault, and I'm even considering picking up a pair of stuffed zombie-face slippers for my daughter.


If you're a fan of games where people die, Starship Merchants is going to leave you wondering if you couldn't have more fun playing Barbies with your friend's four-year-old niece. There will be the same amount of violence, unless your buddy's niece is a little unhinged. It's very much a game about running a business, making efficient decisions, and spending just the right money at just the right time. If you're bored by games that feel like you're managing a fast-food chain, you're not going to like this one.

But if you're the kind of person who enjoys the kinds of games that come out of Germany, where it is actually illegal to make games where people get killed (unless they die of old age, sleeping peacefully in their beds, and the game abstracts it by saying 'discard one family token from the hovel, because Grandpa was hungry and you couldn't bring yourself to kill the family cow for a couple of flank steaks'), you might really enjoy Starship Merchants. It has a few painful rules oversights, like not mentioning what happens when a player can't buy a new ship and loses his old one because the space fins fall off, but by finding workarounds and making up a few rules while we were playing, we got around these problems and had a very good time.


2-4 players

Pros:
Very smart game with lots of good decisions and planning
Good management without feeling too much like work
Engaging and tricky, and even when you're far behind, there's still fun stuff to do

Cons:
Not much in the way of interaction
Some rather glaring rules oversights

If Starship Merchants sounds like your kind of good time, get yourself over to Noble Knight Games and get a copy, and even save a little money on it:
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