We Got Too Much (AquaSphere)

Point salad brain burnin’ metaphor mixin’ bad mother$%@#! 

A first impression.

AquaSphere (2014)

Designed by Stefan Feld

Art by Dennis Lohausen

Published by Tasty Minstrel Games (in the US)

Asleep in the Desert (Some Background Information)

Stefan Feld, for being one of the preeminent Eurogame designers of the day, still often finds himself the target of attacks from tabletop gamers who prefer more than a skin-deep theme. He may have games about such varied and exciting things like jockeying for the attentions of a moon priestess, currying favor and fulfilling tasks handed down to you from Greek deities by a soothsayer, or leading your people through a brutally bad year in ancient China, but Stefan Feld’s games are generally held up as the pinnacle of The Dry Euro. A more generous opinion would probably be that Feld’s designs emphasize substance over style, but rare is this case made on his behalf.

In this house, at least, we certainly don’t mind how bone dry some of these games are. And yes, make no mistake they are dry. In fact, my first Feld purchase wasn’t solely driven by its bargain basement price–what a deal, but rather in an effort to really see what people meant when they talked about a dry Euro. We’d played lots of dice-rollers and card games, as well as a handful of more modern mashups of mechanics–games that bridged Ameritrash conflict and randomness with crunchier strategy. We had not, however, really played a straight up Euro, which is what lead me to purchase arguably one of Feld’s first bonafide classics, Notre Dame (2007).

Very soon, it was apparent what we’d been missing.

Swimming in Your Ocean (The Feld Design)

Board games are built from mechanics (or mechanisms, if you prefer). A fairly comprehensive list can be found here, but just a few examples are worker placement, rondel, negotiation, dice rolling, area majority/influence, or racing. As I said, these are functionally the building blocks from which games emerge. An effective game is some amalgamation of a small number of these, tied together by a theme and aimed at a common goal or victory condition for the players to pursue. 

Feld’s designs are notoriously busy. While he rarely designs games that are considered “heavy,” he’s often criticized for games that appear as though everything but the kitchen sink was included in the design. For example, in Feld’s Trajan (2011), Board Game Geek lists the included mechanics as area movement, card drafting, hand management, mancala, rondel, and set collection. There are a multitude of excellent games that are designed using any one of these mechanics only.

While, on paper, the kitchen sink may be thrown into his games, in actuality the gameplay is a different beast. In general, we take a minute to learn how to play a Feld game, but this is usually due more to the wide variety of options and ways in which you can gain points rather than how complex the overall experience is. More often than not, Stefan Feld’s games offer players a wide variety of methods with which points can be earned, explaining the creation of the very Feldian term “points salad.” There are points to be had everywhere, and the question is no longer how to get points, but how to get points efficiently.

The combination of many mechanics, many methods of gaining points, and skinny theme have combined to make Feld games easy targets for criticism. Ultimately, it depends on where you’re coming from. If you like games that offer options, variable strategies, and myriad choices, Feld games are for you. If you prefer streamlined and thematic games, the odds are strong that you’ll have a hard time connecting with these games. More often than not, while I find the designs fascinating in how the multiple mechanisms interact, it still does feel mechanical. Rare is it that the individual game mechanics will “fade away” into the experience of playing or narrative presented by theme. You’ll always feel the mechanical nature of his games. But that’s okay. The satisfaction here comes from the puzzle of working the machine.

Six Four Days at the Bottom of the Ocean (AquaSphere as Feld)

For a frame of reference, we own five Stefan Feld designs: In the Year of the Dragon (2007), Notre Dame (2007), Bora Bora (2013), AquaSphere (2014), and Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game (2016). Before you ask, we purchased the Castles card game because it is significantly cheaper than the board game and, by all accounts, provides a very similar experience. Of these five designs, they all can be described as both a kitchen sink of mechanisms and point salad. At the same time, they all have a certain polished feel. My above description of Feld seems to read as “his games are Frankensteined abominations of mechanics!” but that’s misleading. Yes, they are hammered together, but that polish is still unmistakable. We’ve played plenty of other games that feel like Feld, but they usually get a little lost in some labyrinth of rules exceptions often missing from Feld’s generally clean designs.

That being said, AquaSphere is the heaviest of our Feld games, complete with its fair share of exceptions, and strategically this may be one of the heaviest games I can think of. I want to reemphasize that word “strategically,” because while teaching this intimidated me, Kathleen was not actually intimidated learning it. For some reason, the circular board (seen up above) feels like a lot to take it, but it’s really just six pods made up of seven rooms repeated in varying arrangements.

Played over four rounds, AquaSphere is about, you guessed it: scientists working in an underwater aqua sphere. On your turn, you’ll do one of two things: program a bot or use a programmed bot. Using a bot is essentially the same thing as “taking an action,” meaning it will take at least two turns to simply do an action. That two-turn process of taking an action is merely one way in which the game’s strategy handcuffs you. Often in points salad games, there is a limiting factor in what you can do (eg dice placement’s reliance on what your dice facings are), but in AquaSphere, there are many handcuffs. Not only are all actions two steps, but the game is based around a programming board, dictating which sequence of actions you’ll be able to do. As you progress forward on this board, your path will cut you off from certain actions. The board looks like this (image courtesy of BGG user lordalatar):

As you program bots and then deploy them across the station, you’ll be using them to fight for control over each of the six pods. At the same time, you’re working to add new lab sections to your own personal lab area, deploy submarines, and fight off the growing hoard of octopods that threaten to take over the whole joint.

I can’t even begin to really teach this game via writing without getting totally derailed, so I absolutely recommend watching Rodney Smith’s Watch It Played for AquaSphere. At the end of each round, one of four total intermediate scorings will take place. Check out the individual player board:

Scoring aids are listed on the right side. The top spiral notepad is intermediate scoring, and the bottom clipboard is end-game scoring. Those lightbulbs are the symbol for POINTS. See? point salad. Plenty of ways to bring those points in.

Again, I’m not going to go in-depth on how to play, nor will I talk about strategy, as this is merely a first impressions post, but I have to say that of Feld’s designs, this was the hardest to get my hands around. At first, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing when we first started. I had to get to an end-of-round intermediate scoring to even see what I should be focusing on. Area control is very important here, but as you grown your influence, those pesky octopods will become a real problem. Should you fight them off or build your lab? Or, perhaps more importantly, get those subs out? But without working on picking up time markers, you won’t be able to get the high cost submarines out.

Many of Feld’s designs revolve around the idea that, on your turn, you need to do 10 things, but you only have the ability to do two or three. AquaSphere presents players with this dilemma in spades. Perhaps because of this game’s baked-in difficulties, AquaSphere seems to have struggled very much to find an audience. 

Beyond the Sea (Our Bottom Line on Feld & AquaSphere)

Where Castles of Burgundy is one of the most popular games on Board Game Geek, AquaSphere seems to be known as Feld’s “bargain bin” game. After Tasty Minstrel’s lovely US release and The Dice Tower’s subsequent negative review, it seems many players passed on this, which is rough, but unfortunately understandable. This game manages to be both complicated and complex in play. Additionally, forcing players to plan very far ahead tends to alienate the idea of “casual play,” and AquaSphere absolutely requires long term planning. I waved at so many points as they passed me by during our first play. At one point, Kathleen had written her entire strategy for a round out on a nearby legal pad.

Feld’s popularity in the hobby is unmistakable, but his design philosophy and aesthetic seem to be polarizing. And when you introduce a game that is overly demanding of its players, a design can take another step in the direction of alienating players who don’t live for the puzzle. There’s a reason that Castles of Burgundy is his most popular game. As Feld’s games get heavier, they become much more niche, but that same logic can be applied to any designer, right?

For the record, I think Stefan Feld’s games are remarkable. There is a polish here that you don’t even notice until it’s missing. So many Euro designers build complex, mechanically heavy games, and unfortunately, the smoothed edges of Feld’s designs become so much more evident when you play a game that’s all sharp edges.

That being said, I am of two minds on AquaSphere. In one hand, I think this game is a bit much. too many options, too many handcuffs, and too many variables. At the same time, I love the challenge of this game. For each handcuff or unexpected wrinkle, I remain undaunted, and instead desire only to do better next turn.

AquaSphere is a hell of a puzzle, and if you get a chance to play it, I think it’s worth it. I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to lose handily.

AquaSphere
by Stefan Feld

My Feld love cannot overcome the feeling that, despite AquaSphere’s challenging puzzle, this may be the perennial Euro designer’s muddiest design. AquaSphere has a few too many options, a few too many moving parts, and a few too many rules to track when you can get an equally satisfying experience from a handful of other Feld designs.

This is not a bad game, but I would recommend it for Feld completionists only.

Player One

Eric