by lacxox
I have some favorite Eurogame designers (especially Kramer, Dorn and Knizia). I am a fan of each of them. I must admit Knizia has a special place in my heart as even his weaker designs have a common special feature: more or less hard decisions, taking risk. Do I choose to do this for this (possible) reward and allow others get those other advantages or I do that for a smaller reward, but more probably stopping them get those advantages…? etc.
You do have this decision-making even in his later designs that are not too well-received here (I like many of them, especially Municipium and the Keltis expansion are truly fine designs). In almost all his games (well not the games he designed for the smallest children like Nino Conillo) you have this tricky question to answer almost each time it’s your turn. I just love it. This makes his games so entertaining for me: it adds tension to the game and I just love tension in games.
In Neuron this ascpect is missing.
What’s this game about?
Neuron is a pretty standard abstract tile-laying game. It comes with two sets of tiles (25 tiles in each set; actually the not-too-large box is still too large for the contents).
The hexagonal tiles are for beginners, the square tiles is for the advanced and the expert version (more about that later). The tiles show colored lines of 4 colors (yellow, red, green and purple); these are called ‘roads’ and (unlike in most abstract tile-laying games) you don’t have only lines, you have road ends as well on these tiles.
The rules are pretty simple. There is a randomly selected starting tile placed on the board. Players take turns placing their tiles next to this tile. Just like in the basic rules of Carcassonne, you have always only one tile to place: you place it and then pick up the next tile for your next turn (it’s just to speed up the game a bit – it’s not really a fast game even with a relatively short playing time).
Unlike in most abstract tile-laying games, tiles don’t have to fit perfectly. But the better they fit, the more they can score. For each road that fittingly connects to the tile you have placed (has the same color) you score points. And a road scores as many points as many sections of it you have just connected to the newly placed tile. So a long road is going to score a lot, and with a tile you can score several roads as you have several roads on your tile.
And that’s it about the rules: you take turns placing the tiles, then you run out of tiles. As there is a small advantage of being not the first player, now the start player is the player sitting next to the start player – you play as many rounds of the game as the number of players (finally each player is going to place 24 tiles during the game). In the end of the last round, highest score wins. (I just don’t know who thought placing a black score marker on a black score table is a good idea.)
Tactics/strategy?
Neuron is listed as an “abstract strategy” game which it isn’t. And I don’t want to start the usual debate about what the term “abstract strategy” means to some (perfect-information, no luck involved etc.) as I do think an abstract game that has strategy involved should be called an abstract strategy as well. But I don’t think you can have any strategy at all in Neuron. Even the tactics department seems to be quite weak here.
What do I mean? You don’t have any control over what tiles you happen to get. In most cases you have to make only one decision: where can I get the most points from the board? It’s actually more like solving a puzzle each turn than anything else. The rule that makes it work is that you can’t keep trying to place the tile to the already placed tiles until you find the perfect solution with the most points: you have to do all this in your head so there might be some surprises waiting. Maybe you didn’t take another road end into consideration, or you thought placing a tile there does continue that long road but actually it doesn’t. See this example: here the long red road is not continued – actually this pic shows the care that was put into the graphic design: the design clearly shows that the two tiles connected diagonally don’t connect the roads.
Okay, so that’s about solving the puzzle but what about having an effect on others’ score or your future score? Maybe you can have some advantage by the time you learn all the tiles, but until then it’s very little to nothing. You don’t know your next tile and you don’t know your opponents’ tiles. Even decision-making (puzzle-solving) can get very simple sometimes: if there is a long network of a color being built then everyone tries to take part of building it. All you can do is finish the network with an appropriate tile that e.g. has a road end so you score a lot but your opponent can’t – or make sure that they won’t be able to close that network either so you are going to be able to score more again in the next round. But all for these actions you need to have appropriate tiles – and sometimes you will, sometimes you won’t. Maybe if you are way ahead of your opponent you can even choose to end the long network with another color without scoring anything from that network (before your opponent closes it, scoring a lot) but sometimes you don’t have tiles even for that.
So, after a few games played, it still seems to me your tactical decisions are quite limited and a lot depends on luck. Not really a game for abstract strategy lovers.
Beginner – Advanced – Expert
So what’s the difference between the three ‘versions’? It’s not the rules, as the rules stay the same. It’s just that there are more options, more road connections to take into consideration before you place your tiles. In the beginner version you have only 6 road connection possibilities on the hexagonal tiles.
In the advanced and expert versions you have 8 road connections – which makes it a bit less luck-dependent as the 8 connections consist of 2 of each color. At the same time, it means only 4 connections in the corners and 4 connections in the middle of the tiles in the advanced version so I’m not sure if it’s not more luck-dependent than the beginner version. In the expert version the tiles can be ‘shifted’: placed in a way that a tile has only the half of its side next to another tile. While this way you have the most options to take into consideration before placing your tile, this is also the one that lets you have the most ‘control’ in the game.
As I said the most important (or only?) tool you are given to block your opponent from scoring a lot is when you end a long network. In the beginner game a road can be finished with 2 tiles, no less, no more.
In the advanced version, if the open end of the network is at the middle of the side of a tile, it can be ended with one (lucky) tile. But if it’s in the corner of a tile, you might need 3 tiles to close it.
In the expert version, however, it can be done with less tiles. You can even have some very creative ways to end a network.
This way to me it feels the expert version is the closest to what BGGers call a ‘game’, but if you start right with the expert version, not being familiar with the tiles and the game, your head can blow while you are trying to find the perfect fit for your tile.
So… Is it fun?
It… depends. If you expect a usual Knizia game you’ll be disappointed. If you expect an abstract strategy game you might be disappointed too. I just don’t think Neuron is going to have very high ratings at BGG.
But actually I like it. And the more I play the more I like it. I can’t really tell why. It’s not because it’s a Knizia game – it really doesn’t feel like a Knizia game. Also most of what I like in board games is missing here. Still I like this puzzle-solving and it’s not bad that a little competition is attached to it, also with the randomizing factor of the other player. (But I think Neuron might be the best when played 2-player; with more even the smallest portion of control is lost)
Also Neuron can be played solo. I haven’t tried it but for some strange reason I really like playing Ingenious solo – and that’s also played in a way that you always have only one tile in hand.
What about others? Some non-gamers saw what I play, others saw my Hungarian review in my blog and said they really want it (although I wrote it there how it lacks a lot of the usual features of board games).
I have played it with my wife and she likes it as well. I guess it helps that both of us like enjoying the games. We are not the AP players who keep thinking for ten minutes when it’s our turn – it’s good to be thinking for half a minute or so but not much longer. Enjoying the game is more important for us than over-analyzing a given situation just for score optimization. This way the challenge the ‘puzzles’ of Neuron provide is right up in our valley, as we can compare our skills while playing, even with the luck involved (and we end up with scores like 140:139 so our skills are a good match).
But rating this game is quite hard to me. I don’t think it’s a really good board game. But I think it’s a great brain-burner.
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