I have had an opportunity to try a number of games in the last few weeks and I think it’s time for some quick reviews.

Jamaica by Asmodee 2007
Score: (2.9) 

I have played this one a couple of times now, my first exposure was years ago but It recently found its way to the table at board game night at my gaming club and I think I’m ready to put a score to it.
Jamaica is essentially a racing game with some fun & quirky card mechanics and resource management to make things go. It’s a simple game, but there is a cleverness to how the race is manipulate, a kind of combination of some dice and card play decisions. It’s a very streamlined, easy to teach, easy to learn mechanic that makes Jamaica a very relaxed game to get to the table. I think the one really memorable take away from this game is its visual appeal, it’s a very colorful, very pretty game with sturdy components and very firm stylized art. While there is strong theme here from the art work, for how simple the mechanic is, it has a very good connection to that theme for Caribbean pirate racing mechanically as well. Jamaica falls into the “light-casual” category of board games mechanically, though I found that there was enough interesting decisions and strategy in the game to sufficiently entertain a veteran gamer for a quick run through.

It’s nothing I would rush out to add to my collection and I definitely felt that it’s a bit overhyped for what it is. Much like Small World, it takes the light-casual element a bit too far and wanders into that “for kids” category which is typically a type of game I don’t mind playing but it’s nothing I want to own, nor would I suggest it even as an entry level game for someone. This is at its heart a family game with young children in mind sufficiently entertaining for adults to not get bored on family game night but for a gaming group I found the game too simple to make the table. If you have kids between the ages of 6-12 I think this might be a good pick, but for gamers I think there are considerably better racing games with more umpf than Jamaica offers to fill a game night with.

Le Havre by Lookout Games 2008
Score (3.25)

I used to own this game and ended up giving it away to some friends, but now that it was back in print I snatched it up. Le Havre is an economic simulation game where players take on the roles of business men working in the city of Le Havre, trading, manufacturing and selling goods. It sounds complicated but the true beauty of Le Havre is precisely the fact that the game is super simple. You can effectively write the core rules on a napkin and while it has the appearance of a complex, busy Euro with lots of moving parts, it plays more like a casual game, yet boasts a fairly advanced level of strategic options. You could say it’s one of those easy to learn impossible to master type of games, something that is often said about great Euro’s and this Euro is no different.

Now it is a Euro game and it does have a rather flat theme, though I personally love great economic games and I often give Euro’s considerably more room to breathe with the themes as they tend to make up for it in the area of gameplay and replay ability. If you’re looking for a game to wow you visually or with its theme this isn’t going to be that game. La Havre’s strength is in its gameplay and re-playability, exactly where you would expect it for a euro. It plays great with 2-3 players, which is a great niche unfilled in my personal collection I was happy to see plugged up. This is a classic, it’s not going to blow you out of your seat by modern game design standards, but I it’s held up considerably better than most old school Euros have. You will definitely appreciate a game you can pull out and just start playing without a lot of rules explanation while still getting a quality, thinky strategy game.

Roll Through The Ages: The Bronze Age
Score: (1.65)

Ok I’m a huge fan of Through The Ages, it ranks as one of my all-time favorites at this point so I thought, hey why not a short dice based version of this game. In fact I had considerably higher hopes for this one then one might presume about a dice game, it is after all a Matt Leacock designed game, a man I hold in the highest regard as a game designer.

Unfortunately Matt really missed the mark here. I should not judge this game too harshly it is after all a quickie dice chucker, but dice chucker or not there where some key decisions in this design that really broke it apart for me. It was quirky with odd and unnecessarily complex rules for resource management while simultaneously being too slow for a dice game. At the start the game it just feels like you don’t have enough dice to do anything and because of how the odds are shaped, getting more dice just makes the whole thing more swingy thanks to negative effects on the dice. It’s actually this precise effect (negative dice results) where the game kind of falls apart.

I think the negative effect on dice (the dreaded skull) was an unnecessary addition. Just a simple golden rule for designers out there; When making a dice chucker, don’t put negative effects on the dice, make negative impacting effects be part of player decision instead. Blanks are ok but a dice chucker should be about using your dice results (resources) and trying to find clever ways to extend the results(resources) as far as you can take them, it should not be a judge and jury result, aka, roll the dice and see what horrible things happen to you. This sort of negative dice mechanic takes a game already largely driven by luck and just overemphasizes that fact, making any decisions you make in response largely irrelevant compared to the smack down you get from just rolling badly.

I wasn’t fond of the components either, the whole wooden pegs thing was just very unthematic and unnecessarily fiddly, not to mention ugly. This was a 2008 released game so I suppose we should be a bit more lenient here but all and all Roll Through The Ages was a hard pass for me.