games have been bought

I picked up the reissue of Wiz-War yesterday on a game store trip. It seems about the same as I remember it from when I played it in the 90s, which is good, because I really liked it then. I have just one nit to pick, and it’s a big one: the spell cards are divided into seven schools. Every game you pick four schools, shuffle only those together for the play deck, then separate them all out again at the end so you can pick a different subset next game. That sounds like a pain in the neck.

Anyway, I hope to give it a spin at Orbus’s next game night.

Game Doctor #0

I was in junior high, I think, when I first found a flawed game. My family was on a car trip and we’d stopped at a highway rest area for lunch at McDonald’s. On the back of the children’s placemats was a board game. It was a race along a simple winding path with special instructions on some spaces. Movement was done by coinflip: heads meant move one space, tails meant two.

Here’s the flaw. A little past halfway were two consecutive penalty spaces. The first said, “Go back 1 square.” The second said, “Go back 3 squares.” It was impossible to progress past them. The game was unwinnable.

A recent board game I played was also pretty bad. It was the Charlie Brown Christmas Board Game, which I played over the holiday break with my nieces. It wasn’t unwinnable, and it was fun enough to keep an eight-year-old interested until the end, but it was clearly thrown together by a company more concerned with capitalizing on a product license than with making a good game.

The object of the game is to be the first player to collect three candy canes, give away three presents, and return to the start. The board has a starting space connected by an inner pathway to a circular outer path. A quarter of the spaces give you a candy cane, a quarter cause a draw from a deck of random events, and the rest are blank. Players move by spinning a spinner that goes from 1 to 5 and moving the resulting number of spaces in any direction.

The presents were the game’s worst rough patch. For one, although each player needs to give out three, everyone starts with four. (The fourth is used to mark your board position if you go to the Lose a Turn space.) Second, when you give a present, you give it to another player of your choice. Mechanically, it doesn’t matter to whom, since receiving a gift has no game effect. As a practical matter, it’s a bother since gifts you’ve received can get mixed with the ones you still need to give away, and that screws up your bookkeeping. Plus, if you’re playing with children — and you probably are, since it’s a kids’ game — giving a gift to any of them is a great way to upset the others. Third, the condition for giving a gift is awkward and arbitrary. To give a gift, you must accumulate six candy canes, then pay three of them.

There are problems with the game board too. There is no inherent difference between the outer ring and the paths to it. Since both areas have the same proportion of special spaces, there’s no reason to go to the outer ring. Everything that can happen out there happens just as often on the road to it. The rules imply that you must move toward the outer path at the start of the game, but they don’t state it outright.

So now the $100 question: How would I fix this game? First, the ground rules:

• Minimize the number of changes.
• Eliminate arbitrary rules.
• Don’t change the difficulty or target age range.
• Use the IP.

This is what I’d change:

1. Remove the candy cane spaces from the interior paths.
2. New gift-giving rules: You start with three gifts. There are three famous Peanuts characters at special spaces on the outer path. You must give each of them one of your gifts. You give a character a gift simply by landing on his or her space. You don’t need an exact spin.
3. Change the “Give a Gift for free” random event card to a “Move to any Gift Character” effect.
4. Remove all explicit and implicit movement restrictions on the interior paths.
5. Remove the rule about temporarily moving your game piece to Snoopy’s Dog House if you lose a turn.

I might need one more change. Traveling the whole board becomes necessary under the new rules. That makes low spins more painful. Simply renumbering the spinner from 2-6 may be enough to resolve that.