A few months ago we played a new game called Fresco, which unfortunately ended up disappointing all of us. It had a nice, tight theme of painting pieces of the fresco with different colors that you buy and mix together. The calculation of whether to mix yellow, red, and blue paints together or save them as distinct colors was an interesting mechanic I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else.
There was also a fun track where you had to balance how early your painter wakes up with how happy you are. Too many early mornings in a row would eventually make you cranky and reduce your ability to take actions.
Unfortunately, it had two serious flaws:
- The starting player each turn had an absolutely enormous efficiency advantage over all the other players, because he could take the “buy paint” action and buy up to three-quarters of the paint on the board, denying all the other players any way to get paint whatsoever. This meant that on average we had to wait 4 turns to get resources to do basically anything at all. All the other actions the other players could take were decidedly lame in comparison. Having 3 “off” turns for every “on” turn felt so boring that we all assumed we must have read the rules wrong, but apparently not.
- The player who was last in points each turn got first move on the “wake-up time” track, which meant that whoever was in last place could force their way into starting player and buy all the paint. The result was that we all “slingshotted” for the entire game – whenever anyone got ahead on the point track, they would then be unable to do anything for a few turns until the other players caught up. It seemed the only way to win was to be efficient right at the end of the game, and get fairly lucky with the timing of your turns.
The idea of a “slingshotting” mechanic is, I think, fairly distinctive among games. I can’t recall seeing such a blatant leveling effect anywhere else, even though some other games have minor boosts for players who are trailing. Many of the resource gathering board games even have the opposite “snowballing” effect where being a little bit ahead economically can give you the ability to get even further ahead, and they don’t seem to suffer for it. While I appreciate the idea of helping trailing players stay in the game and not feel eliminated, making the boost so big that it forces all the players to try to do worse in the early parts of the game is frustrating and detracted substantially from the game.