Board Game Review - Chaotic Connections

I have said over and over that I will review anything that anyone sends me. And it's true, because it's almost always a win-win for me. If they're really fun games, I get to play really fun games, which is great all by itself. If they're mediocre games, well, at least I have review fodder and something I can trade for something I might actually enjoy. And if they're just plain awful - well, then I get to tell you how much they're like ugly babies that should have been left to die, and that is just plain fun (not leaving babies to die - that would be horrible, unless they were little lizard babies and ate mice and stuff like that show where the aliens come to the world pretending to be peaceful and end up trying to eat everybody).

One example of a game that will be much more fun to review than it was to play is Chaotic Connections. It really should be subtitled, 'Ticket to Slide Down Chutes and Ladders,' but I don't think that would have sold many copies. It's a game with a map of the United States and you have to build track - er, build connections between all these major cities. You do this by playing cards that say stuff like 'put down some ugly cardboard squares and pretend they mean you actually drove your car through Arizona.' No, they don't say that. That would just be silly. Obviously, I am paraphrasing.

Chaotic Connections is an example of a game created by someone who A) doesn't play very many games, and B) has no idea what they're doing. These people parted with an ungodly amount of money to hire a patent attorney (the game is patented - I am not making that up) and a PR firm (the people who sent me the game) and yet decided to save a couple bucks on the art by using clip art that probably came with their copy of Windows 98. They didn't have the sense to hire a professional graphic designer or a talented illustrator. It kind of looks like they did the art themselves, using a Rand McNally atlas and the drawing tool in PowerPoint.

It is impossible not to have misgivings about a game when you look at the box and think, 'this looks like a junior-high art class project.' And when you see the poorly perforated cardboard squares, the intensely cheap generic pawns and the little plastic holders used by anyone who puts cardboard standups in their games, it seems like a foregone conclusion that the game is just plain horrible.

And this is one time where you would be perfectly safe judging a book by its cover (incidentally, there are also many books that you can accurately judge by their covers, making this one of the least meaningful phrases ever employed, right behind 'it is what it is' and 'elegant mechanics'). Chaotic Connections is, quite predictably, crap. There is virtually no strategy or tactical thinking involved in playing this game.

You set up the game by getting yourself four cities that you have to connect. You can connect your cities using your opponents' roads, which is nice, because otherwise the game would take an unbearable amount of time. As it is, you can finish rather quickly, making the game more like having sand in your underpants, rather than live lobsters. Your turn consists of drawing a card and then playing one of the four you're holding. About a third of the cards tell you that you must play them regardless of whether you want to use them, rendering your decision-making process about as relevant as that of a mollusk with a tennis racket.

If the cards were somehow interesting, and the best possible card not immediately obvious to anyone with an IQ high enough to prevent their drooling into their sippy cups, there may have been something here worth playing. But the cards are not interesting, and even a brain-damaged badger could tell which card to play, so it's just plain dumb. You'll spend ten minutes going through the motions of playing cards and placing chits in their most obvious locations, and then you'll realize that you hate the game enough to help anyone win if it will make the damned thing go away.

I would worry that someone with multiple brain cells would actually purchase a copy of Chaotic Connections, but given the ridiculous art and pathetic attempts at production value, no game nerd with any amount of common sense would invest good money in this horrible game. This is not some public service where I warn potential game geeks of the dangers found within the box. This is one of those cases where just about anyone can take one glance and know without a doubt that they would be better served spending their money on pre-scratched losing lottery tickets. If you want to have fun playing a game, try - well, try anything else at all.

Summary

2-6 players who really ought to have made better decisions

Pros:
Ugly enough that nobody should be fooled into buying it

Cons:
Holy God, there are just too many

Why on Earth anyone would think they were going to turn a profit with a game this horrible is a mystery to me. Suffice to say that you should not reward this poor judgment with your money.

Board Game Review - Canal Mania

Here's yet another review from my old man. It's starting to become a habit. It's a good thing his last name is also Drake, or I would have to rename the site.

First off, just to get this off my chest, how did anyone imagine that a game with the title “Canal Mania” would sell? From the title you’d think it was in the same genre as “Party Mania” or “Monkey Mania.” May I forever be exempted from playing games with the word “Mania” in their title! But my friend has wanted to play this game for quite a while, and he defers to me at times, so I acquiesced. Good call – “Canal Mania” is actually a very good game.

Theme: I love history and have studied it since I was kid. Well, my knowledge is stunted in the period this game covers. Seems that in the late 18th century in England there was a rash of canal building. (Who ever heard of that?!?) So players build canals to towns and cities, and then move goods along the canals. Does this sound familiar? Think “Age of Steam” and “Railroad Tycoon” with canals instead of tracks.

Game Play: Just as you do in AoS and RRT with track, in CM you build canals between points. But CM has a twist of its own reminiscent of “Ticket to Ride”. Instead of destination cards, in CM you have a stack of cards that are contracts from Parliament to build canals between specific towns and cities. Now here’s one of the MAJOR differences between track-laying games and CM. In CM you don’t have any money, nor do you have stocks. You never know where the money to dig these canals comes from. You just have a contract and you “get ‘er done.” To build a canal, you draw cards that allow you to build locks, aqueducts, and even tunnels. (A canal through a tunnel?!? REALLY?? My historical knowledge is feeling threatened.).

What is probably the biggest difference between Canal Mania and most railroad games is in moving goods. In many railroad games the players place blocks on cities during game set-up, and move the goods as the cities are connected by tracks. In Canal Mania no goods blocks are set on the board during set-up. Players have to take a card with a goods icon and place a good in the appropriate city. This is radically different! The rules dictate where the goods are to be placed – and there are only “goods,” all one color, with no differentiation on which city they GO TO. No, in this game, the rules dictate where the goods START, and you score points according to the number of cities and towns the goods cube goes through until it reaches its destination. When I first saw this mechanic, I didn’t like it. It was a conservative knee-jerk reaction. But there are some very real weak links in the way the goods are placed in the rail games (no pun initially intended, but then I liked it), and as I played Canal Mania I began to appreciate this new way of placing and delivering goods. After one game play, my mind is pondering this and wondering if there isn’t a way to combine the ideas to come up with an even superior goods mechanic. Well, point is, this does radically change the game strategy over rail games. At the beginning of the game I was building canals like crazy, as I would in RRT. But then goods began to move between cities and I found I hadn’t built my canals strategically, and I wasn’t moving any goods. In games that will follow I’ll know to build FROM cities and not just connect towns.

For what is a smaller version of a rail game, Canal Mania does take a while to play. After a few plays you might be able to get it down to 90 minutes, but the three of us, all veteran gamers, took over two hours for our game. Actually, I love long games, but to a lot of gamers this can be an issue.

Components: Canal Mania is not a slick production, like RRT or other Euros. Don’t let that deter you. The components are of good quality, but on the small side. The game board is absolutely functional, but it doesn’t show any attempt at artistry and you won’t need a table the size you’d use for RRT. The pieces are also perfect for game play, but again they don’t show any panache. The canal pieces are small, but they work great for playing the game. The cards, as well, don’t show much of an attempt to be works of art, but again (broken record here?) they’re great for playing the game. If you’ve been spoiled by the Euros on the market, you might be a tad disappointed, but don’t let that put you off. It’s a great game.

Final thoughts: This is a Euro, so that means luck is at a minimum. Three of us played the game, and there were times when we were each in the lead, and other times we were each dragging the tail end. We ended in a close pack, though I’ll admit I came in last, due to the fact of my rush to build canals between towns and wasn’t starting from cities. I’m looking forward to playing it again, and I have some definite strategic ideas that should let me accumulate a lot more victory points.

Summary

Pros:
A fun, lite game.
Components are of sturdy quality.
Allows for different strategies.

Cons
Not up to the component quality of most Euros.
Game length could be an issue for some.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'man, where can I get that game?' Unless you're thinking, 'I do not want to play that at all,' in which case, I did not actually know what you were thinking. OK, to be perfectly honest, I don't have any idea what you're thinking. You could be thinking about dolphin farts (and if you weren't before, I'll bet you are now). But in case you were thinking what I thought you were thinking, here's a very handy link to my good friends at Noble Knight Games:
LAY SOME PIPE... ER, CANALS

Internet TV Review - The Booth at the End

There are not very many good things about having your house catch fire. Really, I cannot recommend it to anyone at all. However, through a convoluted series of coincidental annoyances, I discovered something that is absolutely awesome - Hulu.

Of course, saying that I discovered Hulu is a little like saying that Christopher Columbus discovered America (how do you discover a place that other people have already visited, and that is already occupied when you get there?) I knew about it, and just hadn't ever bothered with it. It was too much trouble to watch TV on my laptop. But when our rat-trap rent house wasn't cable-ready, we bought a Roku and decided to just watch what we could stream.

And I'm glad I did, because otherwise I never would have seen The Booth at the End. Yes, I could have watched it on my computer, but I hate watching TV on my computer. I can barely stand to watch a YouTube video on my computer. But give me Internet shows on my television and let me sit on my sofa, and I'm in.

The Booth at the End is an artsy morality play about a guy who sits in a diner all day and gives people what they want, as long as they pay his price. His price is always a task, and it's almost always morally repugnant. The guy who wants to save his son from cancer has to kill a little girl. The girl who wants to be prettier has to rob banks. The old lady who wants her husband to get over his brain pain has to blow up a cafe. (Don't worry, I didn't spoil anything - you'll get all that before you're halfway through the first episode.)

The whole show takes place in the diner. There are shootouts and murders, romance and drama - but you never see any of it, you just hear about it when the perpetrators come back to report their misdeeds to the man in the booth. And yet you can't wait to find out what happens, even though you're only going to get the action second-hand. Will the old lady detonate her bomb? Will the fat guy nail the stripper? Will the man in the booth ever use the bathroom?

So many elements intertwine to make The Booth at the End a riveting piece of television. The show asks you what you would do to get what you want, but it does it without judging you for answering incorrectly. You'll sit there, watching the father struggle with having to take a life to save his son, and wonder what you would do in his shoes. You don't hate anyone for their decisions. The show doesn't have any villains.

In fact, while you might think that the dude in the booth is a bad guy, he really isn't. People keep asking him, 'Why are you making me do this?' and he always responds, 'the choice is always yours. I'm not making you do anything.' And in the end, he's not a bad guy. He's not a good guy. He's more like an instrument of fate, a guide on the path of free will. More than one of the people who come to see him will thank him for what he's done, and some of the grateful customers will surprise you.

Many Internet-only shows rely on what are quickly becoming irritating tropes, like dumb comedy, over-the-top CGI, or stupid stunts. For The Booth at the End to do so much with so very little is a fantastic indicator of the strength of the writing. You'll be glued to your seat through more than 90 minutes of a guy having conversations in a diner, and when you're done, you'll be disappointed that it's over.

The story isn't the only things riveting, either. The characters in this show are dynamic, three-dimensional and interesting. Even the shallow losers are capable of surprising you, and they'll change as the show progresses. The man in the booth seems to be little more than a plot device at first, but with the help of an inquisitive waitress, he, too, shows that he is human (even though he may not actually be human).

I could talk for a lot longer about all the reasons you should watch The Booth at the End, but I really don't want to spoil it for you. Plus if I go on too long, I'll build up all these expectations and then you'll be desperately disappointed. So here's a link. Check it out:

http://theboothattheend.com/