Every year like clockwork, my crew and I get together for a 4 day super weekend of nothing but BBQ, beer, and board gaming. We call it the “Hassela Weekend”, named after the sleepy little Swedish town where the event takes place. It is always the gaming highlight of every year and this, our 8th year of the event was no different.
Today we talk about all the games that were played, how they landed with everyone, and what I think. Enjoy the article!
Bang The Dice Game
Bang The Dice Game has been a Hassela tradition since 2019 when it was first introduced and has become a group favorite filler, usually played before or after dinner. This year the weekend kicked off with it and as always the game was played several times with the usual chaotic antics and gaming group chemistry that comes naturally for us.
It’s about the most basic hidden identity game around, you have effectively three factions (The Sherrif and his deputies, The Outlaws, and The Renegade(s). The makeup of who’s who depends on how many players you have, but this is a game where the more merrier. It’s more or less a simple guessing game where everyone wants to appear to be whatever they think will keep them safe, long enough to figure out who everyone else actually is. You roll some dice and shoot people and hope you kill the right person who is not on your team.
It’s fun, quick, and quite perfect as an entertaining way to spend a half hour while you nurse a beer. It’s not something you want to take seriously and I would argue it’s only barely a hidden identity game as the revelations/discovery is pretty quick. For more robust hidden identity games that focus more on the hidden identity theme and mechanics, I would probably recommend Coup or One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Still Bang The Dice Game lands well mainly because you don’t have to go through any weird opening phases like you do in One Night Ultimate Werewolf which can suck up a lot of time nor do you need to fully grasp the powers of the hidden identities like you do in Coup. Here hidden identities are clearly just teams and the discovery is mostly just about trying to figure out who is actually on your team. If you get it wrong you are likely to shoot the wrong person and that is the punchline of the hidden joke within the game.
It’s silly and very basic fun, it’s universally loved in our group.
Jabba’s Palace – Love Letter
Love Letter is a staple filler for any gaming collection and has been for a couple of years for us. It’s got a bit more strategy and “umpf” in my opinion than most fillers. This is one you’re going to really want to win as it’s very satisfying when you do. I’m not at all surprised that Love Letter makes so many “favorites” lists out there.
For all intents and purposes, Jabba’s Palace is a standard Love Letter with Star Wars art, a basic game of trying to keep track of what cards are played and using the special abilities of the card you play on your turn and the strength of the card you keep each round to ensure you are as protected as you can manage to outlast all of your opponents.
There is quite a bit of luck involved in successfully navigating any round of play, but over the course of several hands that make up a full game, usually, the most clever player will win, so it’s definitely not just luck of the draw here, there is a reasonable level of skill and strategy involved.
Love Letter is a perfect filler game, find a theme you like and there is a Love Letter version out there just for you. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like the game, it’s one of those card games that works with everyone, gamers and non-gamers alike.
Game of Thrones: The Board Game
Game of Thrones – The Board Game is another Hassela tradition in my gaming group going back all the way to the early years of the event. In fact, I would say for most of us the term “Hassela Weekend” is synonymous with a round of Game of Thrones The Board Game.
It’s a brutally tough game to win with a lot of strategy and politics at its core. It handles the Game of Thrones theme with perfection, with all of the amazing feints and double-crossing you would expect. There are so many trick plays, subtle chess moves with big pushes, and usually big finishes. In particular, if everyone at the table has a firm grasp of the game’s many subtleties. Our game this weekend was no different, it was a struggle all the way to the bitter end with huge ups and downs, massive upsets and ultimately being decided in a single final battle in the last round of the game. It’s exactly how you hope a Game of Thrones game will go down.
The game does have a few lumps that can be both frustrating and can at times spoil the fun. For one, this is a 6 player game, practically unplayable in my opinion with any other player count. I say that with my group having tried and tried on my occasions, it just doesn’t work. It’s 6 players or bust.
It’s also an absurdly long game, your mileage will vary but you can count on a roughly 5-6 hour game like money in the bank, and if you go the full 10 rounds, you may very well exceed 6+ hours.
It also has some very obvious “balancing” flaws that are very difficult to massage out. For one, Lannister’s position on the board, their starting conditions, and early game options are extremely poor and limited. I would say if you can win as the Lannisters in Game of Thrones the Board Game, you are either a freakish master of strategy or playing against incompetence because they stand very little of doing much more than being a fly to swat at worse to kingmakers at best.
You also have some issues like the Grey Joys which opposite to the Lannisters just have outstanding options and starting conditions as well as a stupidly strong character deck. They are beatable so I wouldn’t call them broken as I definitely would the Lannisters, but it’s going to be a group effort to keep them under control. Starks are also very strong and the Baratheons can quite literally win the game in two rounds if people aren’t very attentive and actively invading them from all sides from the very start. They are like a time clock that tests your knowledge of the game, if you don’t know what to do, THEY WILL win.
Some of these things are just nuances of the game and are part of the charm and challenge. I might make a few changes, via some house rules to help out the Lannisters, but warts and all this is a fantastic strategy game even though it’s very tough to get to the table and is definitely a “once in a long while” type of game at best. I would not want to play this game with any regularity but it’s always welcome at Hassela (as long as we have 6!)
Game of Thrones Trivia
When it comes to judging or even speaking about trivia games, my feeling is that they are basically all the same. It’s a game of questions and you try to answer them, you either like that sort of thing or you don’t. Trivia games with a theme like Game of Thrones, challenge your knowledge in a specific area, so if you are into a show, book, movie or whatever and you can find a trivia game on that topic it can be fun.
I’m a bit indifferent to this sort of thing, I mean, I like trivia well enough so I have no issue sitting around a table and trying to test my knowledge for a bit in particular on a subject I enjoy, but I don’t think this sort of thing falls into the realm of “boardgame” in the same sense of the word in which I normally would use it.
Still, this particular trivia game has an area control mechanic, the questions had multiple choice answers, and the difficulty, at least for my gaming crew who are all Game of Thrones fans was relatively easy. I think about 80% of the questions asked were answered correctly so the game played quickly, it was fun to reminisce about the show, and as a group of fans, it went over pretty well.
I don’t know that I have much more to say about it, trivia games are trivia games. They neither surprise nor disappoint, they just do what they do and you either like that sort of thing or you don’t, the specific version or topic of a trivia game isn’t going to change your mind.
Eclipse: Second Dawn For The Galaxy
Eclipse was number 6 on my all-time favorite games list from this year and I was excited to bring it to Hassela for a big 4x game event, showdown. This epic level 4x game is a cross-over game between classic Ameri-Trash war games and modern Euro’s which might seem like a strange combination but is actually the norm for most 4x games in general. Twilight Imperium of course immediately comes to mind which also had classic Euro game mechanics like role-selection and token-based action economy mixed in with rolling handfuls of dice.
Eclipse I always felt should be great at bringing a Twilight Imperium experience to the table in a much more reasonable amount of time with a lot less nuance, but more “core gameplay”. The mechanics of Eclipse are very efficient and streamlined, there is a very quick progression toward conflict and the hope is that you end up with games filled with big battles and tight final moments as players try to squeeze out as many points as they can out of every aspect of the 4x civilization building experience.
Unfortunately, our experience this weekend was considerably less exciting than that in my opinion, in fact I would say it brushed up against being boring.
I think part of the problem with Eclipse is that many of the games mechanics don’t play out like you hope or imagine they should. The game is about controlling space with spaceships, expanding your civilization, building technologies and upgrading your ships and it tries to encourage conflicts between players through generous victory point rewards for fighting. All the mechanics and the play loops are there to encourage exciting games, but typically what ends up happening is just a lot of turtling and build-up to a very anti-climatic end.
There is just no push and pull on the territory control part of the game and because your economy controls your action economy, very often once you have built some ships, did some research and some upgrades, you are out of steam. Since the game is a race to build up and there is a lot of pressure to “keep up”, you end up getting the build-up without the release.
There are 8 rounds in the game and with a 5-6 player game, it can and does still take 5-6 hours to complete, so in the end the main sales pitch “Twilight Imperium – Light” really is very marginal at best. You shave off a couple of hours, but I’m not sure the investment of time is well spent. I think I would much rather play a 7-8 hour game of Twilight Imperium than a 5-6 hour game of Eclipse and after this weekend’s play, I’m seriously questioning Eclipse’s position on my best-of list.
I think it’s a game with a lot of potential, but this last playthrough was disappointing, there just wasn’t any fire, and no memorable moments. It played like a stale and very uninspired cube pusher. It was a bit of a bummer because this was the game I think I was most excited to get to the table this year and ended up being the biggest disappointment of the weekend for me.
Red Rising
Red Rising was introduced to the crew at the event for the first time. It’s a relatively simple game of hand management and building combinations of cards to create a victory-scoring bonus at the end.
This was a tricky game because, in addition to the scoring points on the cards and the combo bonuses, you also had some secondary resources and tracks to manage which also scored points and were key to triggering the end game. It kind of made the game a race to build up your hand, but you had to keep up on the tracks because your hand was not going to be sufficient to win on its own.
One of the key features of the game is of course the setting and having read the first book (Red Rising), I had a connection to the game that not all the players shared, but as a whole, it was a very abstract card game that really focused on mechanics more then bringing the setting to the forefront. If you are looking to play a game in this Dystopian future, know that besides some familiar names and setting concepts like Hellium and The Institute, the representation here is pretty light.
There is a lot of timing and manipulation in the game that determines your decisions but the moves boil down to play a card and pick up a card from four different tracks. The “player choices” are fairly slim as is the impact of any single play. I would put this into the “light” game category, even though it takes about 45-60 minutes to play, it sort of felt like a fun little filler that went on a bit longer than most fillers would.
I thought it was a competent game mechanic but there really was no twist to the game, it kind of had limited energy that was mostly spent after the first play. I can’t see myself getting excited to have repeat plays of this one, though I would not object to either. It was a fine, middle-of-the-road card game. I will say, I thought the art style was great, it was very easy to learn and there was something very intuitive about how it played. It didn’t require anyone to explain the strategy of the game to me, it unfolded in front of you very quickly and obviously. There are many different routes to victory and I’m not sure I uncovered anything specifically that I could point to and say “do that and you can win”, but it was very clear which cards went with which cards and how you could combo them. The issue wasn’t understanding what cards you wanted into your hand, but manipulating the game to ensure that you got what you wanted.
Tapestry
Tapestry is one of those games that is difficult to define, you just know you like it and you want to play. In our gaming group, this one has shown up in the Hassela weekend lineup several times over the years and is one of the very few games that ever see’s repeat plays at the same event. We ended up playing it twice this year again.
I think if push comes to shove, the only thing I can say about it is, play it at least 3 times before you decide if you like it or not. It may seem strange but this is a game of subtlety and nuance, there is so much genius built into this very simple mechanic of moving cubes up a track. It’s absolutely fascinating to see the kind of growth and expansion you can create from such humble beginnings as the starting conditions of this game. 4 resources turn into a massive, sprawling empire!
There are no “big moves” in this game (usually). It’s a slow and methodical manipulation of resources to squeeze every last ounce of juice out of them. It’s a game about optimization of your actions and efficiency.
Frankly, it’s addictive, I play this game a lot on BoardGameArena and even though I have probably played it more than 30 times just this year, I still feel drawn to it.
To play it in person has its own charm because this is also one of the most beautiful games you could ever put on the table, the production quality is extreme. It’s Kickstarter magic and we are lucky that a member of our group is a super fan and has purchased all of the expansions.
If there is any drawback to the game is that experience = points. When you play with people who have taken the time to unravel the puzzle that is Tapestry, you can have very tight and competitive games, but new players, no matter how competent they are as gamers are going to struggle for quite a few games before they hit those 300-400 point scores that are pretty standard finishes for experienced players. I recall the first game I ever played of Tapestry I barely managed to score 60 points, these days I consider any score under 250 a complete failure. The road to experience is filled with brain-busting analysis and acquisition of micro experiences which for a gamer is basically “the juice” that keeps them coming back.
I love this game, I think it’s one of the finest examples of original and modern game design.
Dumber Than A Box Of Rocks
It’s a silly trivia game, we play it, we like it, and no one knows why. It’s the board game equivalent of a youtube video of a guy taking a golf ball to the balls, I don’t care who you are, that shit is funny and so is competing in a trivia game in which a literal rock can outsmart you.
Valor and Villany: Minions of Mordak
When we played this one, I was ready right then and there to call this “The Best of Hassela 2024”. It was so good.
When it comes to these “you get a character, let’s fight monsters” games, I’m usually not a fan and I have played a lot of them. The main logic is almost always the same for me…. Why are we playing this? Why not just play a role-playing game like D&D?
Valor & Villainy separates itself from the pack of “adventures fighting monsters” games in so many ways. I think its charm above all else is that it doesn’t take itself seriously, in fact, the game is, itself from the instruction book, to the spells, to the monsters, just a series of fantasy genre-driven gags that fit neatly into a well-executed combat mechanic. This is a game where you draw a loot card, read it and laugh, because whoever created that card, has clearly played a lot of D&D. They know the inside jokes and the silliness of the fantasy genre and just leans right into it.
Valor & Villainy is about as close as you can get to watching a comedy cartoon as a board game. Beyond silliness, however, you have very smooth mechanics with a ton of strategy and challenge. It doesn’t punish you for failure as so many of these games often do and so the game never pumps the breaks, it’s always full-force action sequences.
The combat mechanics in this game are perfectly tuned to the theme, the flow of the game is quick and the results are always fun. Right now if you asked me what the best fantasy adventure board game I have ever played was, even after a single play I would instantly point you to Valor and Villainy. It was just perfect.
The core premise of the game is simple, one player is the main villain and for the first 5-6 rounds, they are spreading “evil” in the land in the form of monsters and curses that the player characters, aka, the heroes have to deal with. The main purpose of these early encounters is the same for both the villains and the heroes. For the villain, it’s to try to kill the adventurers so the villain can gain power in preparation for the big fight and for the players it’s to kill monsters and find loot, for the same reason.
After a few rounds, the villain arrives on the battlefield and you have a big fight for the win. There are exploration mechanics, spell mechanics, and several distinctively different characters to choose from. Everything you want out of a fantasy adventure game.
So why is it not “The Best Game of Hassela 2024”? Well, the competition was pretty stiff, more on that later.
Suffice it to say if you love fantasy adventure board games, whip out the credit card, this one is worth every penny!
Condottiere
This 1995 classic filler shows up to the big Hassela weekend event every year like clockwork and this year was no different.
This trick-taking game with an area control element is all about trying to get the most out of your hand so that you can either win the battle, or exit it with sufficient strength to win the next one. You stretch your hand but you have to be careful about overcommitting because you might find yourself winning one hand, but then not even able to functionally participate in the next.
The decisions about which fights are important are driven by the area control mechanic which defines the lands you fight over and you need to pick your battles carefully. It’s not about winning every trick you can, it’s about winning the trick that matters.
It’s a straight shooter kind of a trick-taking game, no big bells and whistles, just play your cards right and know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em and know when to run.
Fun game, I think it’s a staple game that belongs in everyone’s collection.
Factory Funner
I’m a bit hesitant on this one, which is not to say I didn’t like it, in fact, I liked it quite a bit but…. there was something off about the sequence of the play that spoiled it a bit.
In Factory Funner you get some tiles that represent machines that produce things, requiring a couple of inputs of “fluid” of different colors and producing some kind of “fluid” output of different colors. As you lay out tiles and build connections between machines you score points for your efficiency. The fewer pipes and connectors you put down the more points you earn. It is effectively a puzzle game you have to solve on the fly without knowing what all of the pieces you will need to put down will be.
It’s a bit strange, but the factory building part and the stress of trying to make things fit and figuring out the puzzle was fantastic, I loved it right out of the gate. However, the method of how you get the tiles you are actually using has this live-action “grab it quickly or miss out” part, which sort of lacked fluidity and ended up kind of roughing up an otherwise good game.
I can see what they are going for here. You have to build a factory from a limited selection of tiles and you have to decide which tile you are going to take quickly to add extra stress to that key decision. I think that is fine, I actually like it, it reminds me a bit of Galaxy Truckers. I just don’t think they got the sequence of play right.
I would have preferred a drafting mechanic, or some sort of draw 3 tiles, you have 5 seconds to pick one, or some sort of turn-based thing. Anything but the “how fast can you grab the stuff you want before the other players do” thing which works fine in Galaxy Trucker but it’s because you have tons of tiles to pick from in Galaxy Trucker. Here you have as many tiles as there are players and you end up picking your own tiles most of the time just because you at least have some semblance of control that way.
I don’t know, for me the whole “grab a tile quickly” thing spoiled a pretty fascinating puzzle game of building factories. With this mechanic, I put it in the “ok” category without it, meaning the puzzly bit alone, I thought it was very good.
Hunt For The Ring
A hidden movement game based on the classic Lord Of The Rings story where Frodo (one of the players) and his companions make their way from The Shire to Rivendell while trying to avoid the pursuit of Nazgul represented by the rest of the players.
There are not very many hidden movement games out there and even fewer good ones. I’m reminded of another game on my shelf collecting dust with a similar premise called Fury of Dracula which I used to favor but have found over the years is just a bit overcooked in certain places.
Hunt For The Ring succeeds where Fury of Dracula fails in that they really focus on the “searching for them” part of the game and don’t try to overcomplicate the “finding them part”. In Fury of Dracula when you finally locate Dracula you have to fight him using one of the most convoluted combat mechanics I have ever seen put into a game. The result is this weird anti-climatic ending to this great first part of the game where you play hide and go seek with a pointlessly complex combat mechanic to resolve the winner of the game.
Hunt For The Ring keeps that “we found him” part of the game simple using a familiar corruption mechanic from War of The Ring (a game made by the same designer). The result is very satisfying and Hunt For The Ring ended up being one of the highlights of the Hassela weekend as a result for me.
They nailed the hide-and-go-seek part of the game, they did a great job keeping the rules simple and interruption shinanigans to a minimum. It’s a straightforward game of trying to find and trap the fellowship.
I like this one, I would happily play it again. The great thing about hidden movement games like Hunt For The Ring is that they are generally very simple, Hunt For The Ring did have some complexity to it but most of it was there to serve the hide-and-go-seek game which is exactly where the focus should be in a game like this.
A+ from me on this one.
Hegemony
Last but certainly not least is Hegemony, the game I would put as the firm winner of the 4-day weekend and even a contender for my pick for game of the year.
Holy shit my mind was blown by this one. I don’t even know exactly how to put it into words, but this was without question one of the most unique games I have played in a long time. It’s fair to say the game is pretty complex, in fact, I know we did several important things incorrectly on our first playthrough, but even with that, it was abundantly clear that this game was going to be hitting the table in the future. There is a lot of juice to explore here and right now, I’m completely fascinated by the possibilities.
Essentially the game is about navigating the very real feeling issues of social economics from the perspective of one of the four asymmetrical classes (factions in the game) of society (Working Class, Middle Class, Capitalists, and The State). A concept so thematically executed in these mechanics, that it’s almost uncomfortable.
In the game each player has to navigate their social class to success by scoring victory points related to the class’s core function in society. The catch is that the requirements for success aren’t always crystal clear in the sense that there are many combined causes and effects that are not always in your control or fully predictable. The game has a lot of complex interactions in which you are trying to adjust society to serve you, while making sure your competitors are also served, because they are ultimately responsible for serving you in many regards as well (their success is often your success), even though by serving you they are also screwing you most of the time. I don’t know if that makes sense, it shouldn’t, but it’s how it works and the weirdest thing about it is that you end up feeling both the connection to the real world and a sense of compassion for the class you’re representing whether you agree with the abstracted political implications or not.
There is a kind of rhythm to the game that feels very personal in a way. You are hitched up to a mode of thinking depending on your faction and there are basic instincts and an almost belligerent-like execution of actions sometimes where you forget that you’re playing a game and your brain gets wrapped up in the abstracted politics of the fictitious world your playing in. Emotions can run quite high.
For example, the tax rate, a critical policy in the game has a wide sweeping impact on everyone, but there are both benefits and consequences for having a high or a low tax rate for everyone. Meaning it’s never exclusively good or bad. Make the tax rate too high and suddenly businesses start shutting down and creating unemployment, make the tax rate too low and the state might fail resulting in massive penalties for everyone including wage reductions, tax hikes, and potentially mass unemployment.
There are various policies like this each with their own very global impact, but managing these isn’t the only social issue to contend with. The economics of an always-growing population create all manner of issues for everyone and the working class in particular has a core reliance on everyone else’s ability to manage their faction. More to the point, if players fail to manage the society well enough the working class can create stiff consequences which include strikes and demonstrations that can cost everyone both production, money, and victory points.
As such there is a need to cooperate to a certain degree even between the most obvious competitors like the working class and the capitalists, but how do you cooperate with someone who wants the exact opposite thing as you do and neither side can win the game if the other gets what they want.
The whole game falls firmly into the “impossible to resolve” category and so the trick to the whole thing becomes one of maneuvering and clever and well-timed strategic moves in an attempt to simply out-pace everyone else on the victory point track as society is catapulted towards inevitable disaster. Failure in a word is imminent, but from the ashes, one of these classes will emerge to claim victory.
A big part of the game that sort of “breaks the rules” is in the action cards each player has, which are also asymmetrical decks unique for each class. These cards allow you to do things the basic actions don’t and it’s in the smart use of these cards that most players will find their victory. As a general rule, each time you are forced to take a basic action instead of leveraging the effects of a card, it is a step towards defeat as it’s only through the use of these cards you can get ahead. Basic actions are a recovery or corrective measure, not a plan. Playing these cards however, is tricky because you have to create just the right conditions in most cases to really get the most out of them. If you are constantly forced to take corrective measures by discarding cards for basic actions rather than focusing on the execution of a plan that involves the effects of your cards, your chances of success dwindle in the very esoteric and hard-to-see math behind how victory point acquisition works.
There is a natural rhythm to the game that creates inevitable hostility. Basically in a status-quo environment in which everyone cooperates and the game simply plays out at a “medium” give and take, the state is the automatic winner, this is by design as the state essentially wants to keep everyone at an even keel. No one can keep up on points with the state if they are simply collecting medium salaries, paying medium prices for goods, at a medium tax rate with the population growing at a medium level. For each class, there has to be some major advantage in the policies in their favor for them to get an edge in the victory point acrobatics.
Each class has its Achilles heel sort of speak, a single policy that when it’s in their favor to an extreme will guarantee that they will continually outscore everyone else during the scoring round. Manipulating circumstances to get that in place is difficult, usually unlikely as long as all the players are aware of the impact, but inevitably there are short-term gains to be had sometimes by siding with someone to give them what they want.
For example, having a low tax rate can help the working class to expand a little quicker and have some reserve cash so that they can react a little better to a constantly changing game state, but low tax causes problems for the state and the reserves of affordable resources dries up opening an opportunity for the capitalist to capitalize on a starving market. The result is a working class that goes plus-minus, a failed state while the capitalist and middle class score obscene amounts of points.
Often you have to make unfavorable decisions to keep a particular class from failing outright because each class has a failsafe response that screws everyone when they are pushed too hard. The working class can demonstrate and protest shutting down production, the state can fail and do a hard reset causing high taxation and the capitalists and middle class can sell off companies and cut deeply into everyone’s bottom line sending them to the unemployment line. The results are always pretty devastating to everyone when any class fails to remain stable and most often the person least affected is the person’s faction that failed, which is key to the balance of the game. It forces others to worry about your success to some extent. You don’t want to be too helpful, but you also don’t want to outright crush anyone either.
There is so much more to say about this game and its many nuances if you can imagine that all the above is from a single play of the game.
If there is a negative to Hegemony, it’s that the rules are quite intricate and it’s very easy to get them wrong and when you do, even if it’s just a small rule, it has a huge impact. For example in our first play-through, we did the check IMF test after paying taxes, but you actually do the IMF check first and the taxes second. This completely changes the game, yet there is only one line in the entire rulebook that mentions it despite it being a very critical rule. The rulebook however is well written and the cheat sheets that come with the game are very helpful, so once you learn to play the game properly, that initial difficulty of the game which coincidently adds a lot to the length, goes away. Our first game took the better part of 7 hours, but I’m 100% certain we will cut that time in half quite easily for our next playthrough.
Hands one of the best games I have played this year!
Conclusion
All I can ever say about our Hassela weekends each year is that it’s the gaming highlight of the year for me. A fantastic weekend of pure and uninterrupted fun time in the company of the best group of guys I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. It is pure bliss!
Every year I hope that when I return from the weekend I have made a new discovery and most years that ends up being true. This year Hegemony blew the doors off, but I think a big nod of approval has to go out to both Hunt For The Ring and Valor and Villany, two absolute gems.
Can’t wait for next year!
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