Christmas has come and gone, and with it came an armload of cool new games. However, my good friend Matt has just unexpectedly lost his job. I've been there myself, and I remember that on the day it happened, getting a friend over and playing Last Night on Earth really helped me take my mind off things. So it seems appropriate that I got to pay that forward this week, getting in a two day stint of gaming with Matt and bringing some of those new games to the table. The first game of the Christmas run was Matt's copy of Article 27.
We played a five player game which consisted of our friends Jeff, Greg, Matt's wife, Trish, Matt and myself. Article 27 is a negotiation game, where players are members of the UN, fighting and bribing each other to get certain agendas to pass. Every turn, one person plays as the Secretary General, who gets to put certain topics on the table up to vote. Everyone has exactly five minutes to discuss which topics should stay in the proposal and which ones should be taken out. Only the Secretary General has the final say on what's in and what's out. When the negotiation time is up, everyone votes on whether the proposal passes or not. If the majority of players vote yes, the proposal passes, points are scored (or lost,in some cases), and the Secretary General takes a little bonus to wet his beak with. Players also have the option to veto a proposal, which will deduct from their score, but it only takes one veto to cause a vote to fail.
I love negotiation games. They get right down to the heart of why I pick the tabletop over the internet to play games on: Pure, face-to-face interaction. I'll have to tell the infamous Intrigue story some day on here, but for now we'll just say that it's one of my all-time favorite gaming moments (though I'm sure that it's a least favorite for one other person who was in on that game). The rules for these games, while certainly "there," tend to feel a bit loose, and the tension around the table often runs extremely high. Certainly not an environment everyone is going to enjoy, but I revel in it. While we had a very agreeable game of Article 27, I can see where future plays will really bring the goods.
We all really liked how the threat of a veto seems to have more weight than actually playing one (which didn't happen in our game). Jeff and I got into this thing where if I wanted something, he'd threaten to veto it simply because I wanted it. The only way to talk him out of it was to bribe him, which of course gives him more points. Other times someone would threaten a veto if a certain topic didn't get put into the proposal. A veto is pretty costly, but you find yourself wondering if you want to take the chance on someone being serious about actually going through with it.
The end game scoring was a bit difficult to explain, but after a couple turns, everyone was able to understand where it was going. I'd also like to say that the white symbols on the bright yellow tokens was not a good choice. It brought to mind Survive: Escape From Atlantis, a game that, like Article 27, was also put out by Stronghold Games. The first printing of Survive that Stronghold did had black numbers on navy blue pieces, which as you would imagine is not easy to make out. The president and owner of Stronghold, Stephen Buonocore, is a great guy, super fun to hang out with, but c'mon, Steve, get your colors together.
As the days since playing Article 27 have passed, I've found myself wanting to play it again. I do think that Intrigue is still the game to beat in the negotiation genre, but I will say that this has the capacity to be a friendlier game than Intrigue is. Screwing people over is a possibility, but it's not baked into the design to do so. I can't wait to get it to a con, since as Jeff put it, "It's a good 2:15 in the afternoon kind of game."
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