Fresco, the debut design by Marco Ruskowski and Marcel SüBelbeck published by Queen Games, is at its core a worker-placement game with some interesting twists.

From two to four players represent Master Painters charged by the bishop with restoring the great fresco in the cathedral. In order to accomplish this task, the masters will have to send apprentices to various locations in order to assemble the paints and cash necessary to get the job done. And a little morale-boosting trip to the theater might not hurt either, especially if you wake up early.

The first action each player must decide is wake-up time. Waking up earlier in the morning gives you first pick of the paints in the market (albeit at higher prices) and generally first shot at all of the other locations. The trade-off to rising early is that your apprentices will be unhappy and you will probably have less of them at your disposal than your more lazy counterparts. It’s a careful balance, and really what gives Fresco a lot of its unique charm.

The other actions are more straightforward. After start time is chosen and the number of apprentices for each player determined (usually five each, plus or minus one depending on Mood), the players secretly assign their apprentices to their tasks. Up to three apprentices can be sent to a given location. The first location is the Market, where a number of stalls contain randomly-drawn quantities and colors of paints available. Each apprentice sent allows a player to purchase one tile (representing from one  to three cubes of paint) at that player’s wake-up price in wake-up order; the remaining tiles at that stall are abandoned, making “trashing” a stall with a single apprentice but not purchasing anything a viable tactic. 

The second location is the Cathedral. Players here may restore one section of the fresco per apprentice, earning the victory points indicated on the specific section, as well as bonus points depending on the presence of the bishop pawn (which can be moved a single space by spending a thaler). Optionally, a player may instead restore the altar by spending paint cubes, but this is typically a less-valuable option than a piece of the fresco that requires the same combination of colors and generally only an end-game option. Like the Market, the players visit the Cathedral in wake-up order.

The last three locations are generally visited by each player simultaneously, regardless of wake-up time. The Portrait Studio earns three thalers per apprentice assigned, the Workshop allows each apprentice to blend up to two colors of paints (which is the only way to obtain purple cubes), and the Theater increases the player’s mood two spaces per apprentice. At the end of the round, each player earns an income based on how many pieces of the fresco (s)he has restored, and then a new round begins with new wake-up times. Since wake-up times are selected from last to first place, it is important to note that scoring pawns can’t share the same score; if a player’s scoring marker would occupy the same place as another’s, that player has to decide to either earn one less point or one more point. 

These rounds continue until there are six or less fresco tiles remaining. For the final round, players do not have the option to visit the theater (because there’d be no point to it), but instead have a second opportunity to visit the Cathedral — and importantly, this second chance comes after mixing colors at the Workshop. Whoever has the most points at the end of this round is the winner, with every two remaining thalers earning a point each (there is no income for the final round); final points are assigned in wake-up order, and the “no two players can have the same score” rule still applies — although at this point you obviously take the extra point.

A game of Fresco clocks in at around an hour, although the set-up time can add to that depending on how the pieces have been stored. The board itself has two sides, one for four players and the other for two or three. Two players alternate using a “dummy” player (“Leonardo”) that uses slightly different rules. The game also includes three optional modules to enhance replayability, which makes the entire box a decent bargain at $40ish. It’s not a game I want to play every week, but it is unique enough to warrant some attention from time to time.

Richard Garfield is best known for being the creator of Magic: the Gathering, the first collectible card game. Dr. Garfield’s first official game design, however, was the madcap strategy boardgame RoboRally,which was finally published not long after Magic‘s initial success back in the mid-90s.  The game has undergone a couple of cosmetic revisions in the decade or so since, but lost none of the entertaining frenzy.

The basic premise is that each player represents a supercomputer tasked with maneuvering its own factory robot from checkpoint to checkpoint. The track, as it were, is comprised of one or more boards representing different areas of the factory floor. Like any industrial factory, these areas are strewn with conveyor belts, gears, pits, and other obstacles that will push, pull, spin, and otherwise harm a careless robot that might find itself at the wrong place at the wrong time. And then, of course, there are the other competitors.

Each player is dealt up to nine program cards at the beginning of a round. These cards allow robots to move forward (from one to three spaces), backwards (one space only), or to make left, right, or U-turns. Players must program five of these cards in sequence, and then their robots will follow that program for the round. At the end of each phase (card), the factory elements usually reposition robots according to a set sequence, the final step of which is each robot’s forward-mounted laser firing and hitting the first object in its path. Once all five phases are complete, the program cards are discarded and a new round begins. That is, unless one or more phases have become locked.

See, each point of damage a robot suffers (usually from lasers) causes that player to receive one less card in subsequent rounds. Once a robot has suffered its fifth point of damage, that player would only receive four cards with which they need to program five phases of actions; this problem is “solved” (also read: “made worse”) by the last programming slot becoming “locked” and the last card assigned there being stuck until either that damage is repaired or the robot destroyed. A robot is destroyed either by its tenth point of damage or falling down a pit, and at the beginning of the next round may restore at its most recent archive location (either a checkpoint or repair station) with two points of damage up to three times. In addition to progressing a robot through the race and creating a new archive location, checkpoints and repair stations will heal one point of damage if you end the round (not phase) on them. Certain repair stations can also outfit robots with Options, which are special cards that grant various abilities (or can soak up a laser hit if necessary). After programming cards but before revealing them, a player may announce that his robot will “power down” on the next turn, which means that it will fully heal but receive no cards, spending the net round as an inert lump — a lump at the mercy of the board and everyone else.

If damage, floor elements, and an essentially randomly-assigned set of programming options were the only obstacles to overcome, RoboRally would be a difficult game. But what makes it downright devious are unexpected changes to your plans that might be caused by your opponents. Normally, all robot movement is simultaneous. However, if two robots would ever enter the same space on the same action, one of them will probably be in a world of trouble. Each action card has a priority number printed on it; in the event of a conflict, the higher priority number moves first. Robots can push each other freely in such cases, and an unexpected shove can — and probably will — send you careening wildly off your initially planned course. If you’re lucky, you can survive such a catastrophe; if not… hope you have some archives stored up. 

Besides its challenge, RoboRally‘s greatest strength is its modularity. The game supports from two to eight players, alone or in teams, and the ways in which boards and checkpoints can be combined to form a given course is all but limitless, not to mention optional rules (like “no power downs”). The simplest courses can take under an hour to complete; more intricate floor plans can consume several hours. The instruction booklet includes several suggested layouts along with their estimated difficulty level and time requirements, but the real fun for experienced players comes from creating their own. On the longer tracks it can be impossible to catch up if you fall behind, but fortunately tagging the checkpoints in order isn’t the only win condition. A player can also claim victory by being the last robot standing, and games in which that becomes a viable option for a player (or more…) are interesting to say the least.

RoboRally should be available at any retailer that stocks Avalon Hill products, usually for around $50 or less. It is also available for play via GameTableOnline.com, as a premium game (free for solo play vs. AI, one-time pay for play vs. other humans). Due to the advanced strategy and forward thinking required it is recommended for players 12 and up, although there is little actual in-game reading or math required (barring Option cards).

Parade is another entry in the series of $10 Z-Man games that provide quality filler games with little more than a deck of specialized cards. In this case, 66 cards are divided into values 0 through 10 in six different colors; all players (from two to six) are dealt five cards, then six face-up cards are laid out to form the “parade” with the empty box is used to indicate which end is the front. The remaining cards are the draw deck. 

Each player in turn places a card from his or her hand to the end of the parade, then checks to see if any of the cards currently in the parade leave. Not counting the just-played card of value X, the next X cards are safe from elimination; every card after that leaves the parade if it meets one of two conditions: 1) it shares its color with the new card, or 2) its value is less than or equal to X. Playing a card of higher value than the total number of cards in the parade is therefore a “safe” play, as is playing a low-value card with no matching colors present (depending on the actual value, of course). Cards that leave the parade are collected by the current player, organized into face-up piles in front of him or her. Then that player draws a card and the turn passes to the next. This process continues until either the draw deck is exhausted or one player has collected at least one card from each color. When one of those conditions is met, all players play one more card without drawing (concluding with the player who triggered the end condition) and then scores are tallied.

Players lose the face value of all face-up collected cards, so the object is to score the closest to zero. However there are two additional factors that add to the game’s strategy. The first is that whoever has the majority of cards in a given color (which can be more than one player if tied) turns those cards face-down and only loses one point per such card; in a two-player game, majority must be by two cards rather than one. The second curve ball comes from the remaining four cards in each player’s hand; before scoring, each player selects two of those cards to discard and two to add to his or her scoring tableau. These last two cards will often either steal majority or be two largely meaningless (0 or 1-value) cards — sometimes both.

Parade is fast-playing once everyone has figured out how removing cards from the parade works, which can be difficult to explain (but easier to demonstrate). The game’s dynamics change a little when playing with only two players, as it is much easier to avoid collecting penalties with more players to take them first, but the game scales well and is fun with any number. Don’t be distracted by the Alice in Wonderland theme (each color is represented by a different character from the stories); Parade is more than just a lot of nonsense. It deserves to be kept alongside similar Z-Man games like Escalation! and No Thanks! as solid fillers that will see repeated plays.