Save the Egg Queen by Johan Forsell

Save the Egg Queen by Johan Forsell

Before I begin, allow me to say that I do not believe that this designer speaks English as his primary language, but that I thought his mastery of it worthy of some praise, although interpreting the rules was, in some minor ways, difficult as a result. Ich spreche ohne ein bischen aus einer andere sprach, und ich sauche aus das… (I speak only a little of another language and I suck at it – I think?)… and so I have great respect for the command of the language shown… but it did detract a bit. I have done my utmost to remove any prejudice this might have caused from our judging. On to it, as it were.

Theme: (10 points)
Save the Egg Queen is the tale of an anthill being slowly drowned in a rising flood, and the players control groups of ants trying their best to save enough of the remnants of their ant civilization to rebuild at another site (sometime AFTER the game takes place). Again, this is definitely doomed… and I do buy that ants can have a civilization. Unfortunately, the aspects of ‘what’s being saved’ have little bearing (although some) on the civilization aspect, and are instead more concerned with barest survival. In the game, a successful ‘escaping group’ of ants should contain a queen egg, and enough food for the ants that are escaping in/with the group. No mention of the accoutrements of civilization (the Holy records! Save the Holy Records! or like items) is made, thus straying from the civilization aspect of the focus. Still, within the inner circle, if not the black (sorry, obscure target reference): 8 points.

Originality: (10 points) This was the second ‘Shrinking Environment Game” that has been submitted in this contest, but again, I find it rather unique for the gaming market. The mechanics were generally based around ‘pick chits out of a cup’, and fairly standard resource management and ‘each unit has different abilities’, base, which is less than original, although well integrated in a structure that would provide this game a fairly unique approach when compared to others in the market.
The gang and I pretty much agreed here, although I’m scoring on the generous side of the average: 8 points

Cohesiveness: (15 points)
This game suffers a bit from over-complexity, although normally that would not affect this aspect of the scoring. When this level of complexity is coupled with a slight language barrier, however, it can become a bit confusing. As mentioned, however, I plan only to ‘score’ what I perceive are either incongruities in the rules, or unclear areas (rules that might be interpreted in more than one way). One good example of this was the ‘digging to the last layer rule’. In the game, certain ants called “Digger Ants [sic]” may return an object discovered while digging to the ‘draw pile’ of items. In addition, one type of item in the draw pile indicates that a void has been uncovered, which might result in water flooding a given hex, and the dropping of all items by ants within the hex that cannot swim. Can the Digger Ant discard the ‘void’ item and thereby suffer no penalty? We decided it could, but were unsure. There were a couple of other examples, although I’m not going to detail them here. They were fairly minor, and we simply made a judgment call, as a group, in each case.
Overall, way too complex… with approximately six rule checks per player per turn on the first game, (although this dropped to five on the second), the ‘works intuitively well together’ (or ‘cohesively’) aspect was a bit lacking.
Not terrible, however, and the mechanics reflected well the chosen topic of the game: 11 points.

Components (5 points): Well done, colorful, and made-us-want-to-play components were watchword of this product. Nicely done, and close to market-ready, although the graphics were a bit low-res.
4 points here.

Fun (25 points):
The gang had a good time, and was convinced that a second go-round (a second playtest game) would prove to be a better time than the first, which it was as the complexity of the rules got in the way less than it did on the first round of play. It was still a bit cumbersome, however, and that was the main factor that cost this otherwise intellectually stimulating entry a fair number of points. Just to back up my expostulation in that regard, allow me to illustrate with some actual numbers on componentry, and the decision-making matrix.

The matrix is composed of:
6 ant types, each specializing in one or more activities…
9 unique object types, each with a separate utility…
7 different major actions that each ‘ant unit’ might perform in a given turn with three of these actions having unique rule subsets
5 portions to the turn sequence
and up to three unique interrupts…

When you do the math - You wind up with a 3 X (averaged) 7 decision-making matrix for each player on each turn… or roughly thrice the complexity of Settlers of Catan… Too much rules ‘lawyering’ required for a strictly enjoyable game. If there were fewer items, actions, and ant types, I think the average player would be better able to calculate the permutations of any given action by any of his units, and the game would be more fun.
I made that sound horrible… it wasn’t. On the whole, it was a fairly good time, although the players also complained about the random aspect of the turn sequence (which player is both next to play, and, on occasion, allowed to play, is determined randomly).
The average from our gang here: 17 points for fun.

Side Note: A re-organization of these rules, with the Turn Sequence as a whole encapsulated before various rules details are explained in depth, would probably help this game a lot by making ‘look ups’ faster, and better organized. A solid edit, with more examples, would also be a good idea in my opinion. Not that either demonstrated a sore point… but that the rules themselves don’t really need the work as much as, in my opinion, the organization thereof does.

Personal Prediction: I’m not sure that any company could afford to produce this (with close to 200 individual pieces… and yes there are some companies, perhaps), but I can think of MANY companies that would take a very serious look at a slightly simplified version. Keep an eye on this one.

Total score: 48 points