It's just a silly name that I came up with on the bus!
July 10, 2020 7:55 AM Subscribe
Despite its tagline of "A Heartless Card Game", Abandon All Artichokes is a cute game with a twist on the deck-building mechanic -- you are given a pile of 10 artichoke cards, and the winner is the first player to draw a five-card hand with no remaining 'chokes. Game designer Emma Larkins takes us through the entire process of creating the game, from idly writing down goofy titles on the bus to getting a shout-out as a "brilliant game" [Forbes] at the New York Toy Fair.
Looks good, can anyone recommend similar type deck builder games that are simple, family friendly and fun?
posted by roaring beast at 12:05 PM on July 10, 2020
posted by roaring beast at 12:05 PM on July 10, 2020
Looks good, can anyone recommend similar type deck builder games that are simple, family friendly and fun?
The problem with this question is that "simple" and "fun" are very qualified words. Abandon All Artichokes is a very straightforward deckbuilder from a rules perspective, so it's a good introduction to the mechanic, but I question if it has long-term play value once people master their understanding of the rules or if in that scenario it just becomes a race for people to play the best cards the fastest.
If you want a reasonably easy to understand deck building game, Paperback has straightforward rules, but it does have the problem of all word games, which is that some people are just going to be straight-up better at it than others, which can make people more reluctant to play it.
Ascension (and its numerous imitators, including Shards of Infinity and many of the various licensed deckbuilders published by companies like Cryptozoic, like their DC Comics one) is a very straightforward deckbuilding game, but it's also moderately luck-heavy in that whether good cards show are available for you to buy on your turn determines a lot of the strategy.
Dominion is the granddaddy of the deckbuilding genre, and it's fine. It does suffer, though, from being a "turn zero" game, in that it is a game where all of the elements are known at the outset of each game and the person who wins is usually the one who identifies the optimal play strategy for that game's randomized set of cards the quickest: Dominion can be an interactive game, but it sometimes just isn't, and then for experienced players it's just a race with a bunch of luck factors.
My general recommendations for deckbuilders these days are twofold. Dale of Merchants is relatively easy to learn, has an intuitive racing mechanic and easy-to-understand cards, and it is also a game about cute animal people, which most people like. Valley of the Kings has a fun Egyptian theme, isn't too hard to learn, and has really deep replay value.
Finally, if you're willing to consider a game which uses deckbuilding as a core mechanic but is also about more than just building and manipulating a deck of cards, Clank! takes deckbuilding and applies it to a dungeon exploration boardgame, and it's very good.
posted by mightygodking at 12:21 PM on July 10, 2020 [12 favorites]
The problem with this question is that "simple" and "fun" are very qualified words. Abandon All Artichokes is a very straightforward deckbuilder from a rules perspective, so it's a good introduction to the mechanic, but I question if it has long-term play value once people master their understanding of the rules or if in that scenario it just becomes a race for people to play the best cards the fastest.
If you want a reasonably easy to understand deck building game, Paperback has straightforward rules, but it does have the problem of all word games, which is that some people are just going to be straight-up better at it than others, which can make people more reluctant to play it.
Ascension (and its numerous imitators, including Shards of Infinity and many of the various licensed deckbuilders published by companies like Cryptozoic, like their DC Comics one) is a very straightforward deckbuilding game, but it's also moderately luck-heavy in that whether good cards show are available for you to buy on your turn determines a lot of the strategy.
Dominion is the granddaddy of the deckbuilding genre, and it's fine. It does suffer, though, from being a "turn zero" game, in that it is a game where all of the elements are known at the outset of each game and the person who wins is usually the one who identifies the optimal play strategy for that game's randomized set of cards the quickest: Dominion can be an interactive game, but it sometimes just isn't, and then for experienced players it's just a race with a bunch of luck factors.
My general recommendations for deckbuilders these days are twofold. Dale of Merchants is relatively easy to learn, has an intuitive racing mechanic and easy-to-understand cards, and it is also a game about cute animal people, which most people like. Valley of the Kings has a fun Egyptian theme, isn't too hard to learn, and has really deep replay value.
Finally, if you're willing to consider a game which uses deckbuilding as a core mechanic but is also about more than just building and manipulating a deck of cards, Clank! takes deckbuilding and applies it to a dungeon exploration boardgame, and it's very good.
posted by mightygodking at 12:21 PM on July 10, 2020 [12 favorites]
It's interesting comparing Abandon All Artichokes' victory condition to Dominion's. In the former game, each player starts with a deck full of artichokes -- useless cards that do nothing -- and you win if you can remove enough of them from your deck so that you draw a hand with no artichokes. In Dominion (roughly) you need to buy different kinds of useless but valuable victory cards to add to your deck, and when the game ends, the player who has the largest total value of victory cards in their deck wins.
In Dominion, as a player starts adding victory cards to their deck, these victory cards reduce the quality of their deck (as you can't play victory cards, they bog your hands down and only count for anything once the game is over), which acts as a negative feedback loop, creating an opportunity for other players to catch up with whoever may have taken an early lead.
In Abandon All Artichokes, if a player is able to improve their deck early on by getting a higher ratio of useful cards to artichokes, this should accelerate the rate they are able to remove more artichokes in future turns -- so it seems like a positive feedback loop where winners will get further ahead. That said, some of the cards seem designed so that you can only play them if you have 2 or 3 or more artichokes in your hand, so the closer you are to winning, the less useful these cards will be.
posted by are-coral-made at 4:03 PM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
In Dominion, as a player starts adding victory cards to their deck, these victory cards reduce the quality of their deck (as you can't play victory cards, they bog your hands down and only count for anything once the game is over), which acts as a negative feedback loop, creating an opportunity for other players to catch up with whoever may have taken an early lead.
In Abandon All Artichokes, if a player is able to improve their deck early on by getting a higher ratio of useful cards to artichokes, this should accelerate the rate they are able to remove more artichokes in future turns -- so it seems like a positive feedback loop where winners will get further ahead. That said, some of the cards seem designed so that you can only play them if you have 2 or 3 or more artichokes in your hand, so the closer you are to winning, the less useful these cards will be.
posted by are-coral-made at 4:03 PM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
> Another garden variety deck builder?
posted by pwnguin at 9:59 AM on July 10 [6 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]
go ahead have a favorite. you earned it. ... you monster.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 4:37 PM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by pwnguin at 9:59 AM on July 10 [6 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]
go ahead have a favorite. you earned it. ... you monster.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 4:37 PM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
Valley of the Kings has already been mentioned, but I thought I would share a couple more of my favorites from this genre.
The Quest for El Dorado is a great racing game powered by deck building. It is fantastic and family weight, though setup is a little longer than some others. It's getting a beautiful-looking reprint soon, but the first edition has very nice art.
Paperback has been mentioned, and I'll add Hardback to that, a prequel from the same designer. It's somewhat more complex, but it mitigates the problem mentioned above with inherent advantage in word games.
Cousins to deck building that deserve more love are Kashgar and Mystic Vale.
posted by glunsforddavis at 11:38 AM on July 12, 2020 [1 favorite]
The Quest for El Dorado is a great racing game powered by deck building. It is fantastic and family weight, though setup is a little longer than some others. It's getting a beautiful-looking reprint soon, but the first edition has very nice art.
Paperback has been mentioned, and I'll add Hardback to that, a prequel from the same designer. It's somewhat more complex, but it mitigates the problem mentioned above with inherent advantage in word games.
Cousins to deck building that deserve more love are Kashgar and Mystic Vale.
posted by glunsforddavis at 11:38 AM on July 12, 2020 [1 favorite]
One nice thing about El Dorado is that if your family, like mine, has one person who is amazingly talented at all games and especially deck-building games, that person can be made to run to El Dorado and then home again while everyone else just has to get to El Dorado.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:12 PM on July 12, 2020
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:12 PM on July 12, 2020
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posted by pwnguin at 9:59 AM on July 10, 2020 [7 favorites]