Writing your first review for the ‘Geek is a daunting experience.
First, there are some wonderful reviewers out there. From Endersgame to UvulaBob, it’s impossible to match them for content or style.
Second, many of the specialist review approaches have been covered in a variety of very good series: “What’s not to like?” “Every 100 game series”, etc.
Nevertheless, I have been struck recently by the number of requests on these pages which asks the question “How does X play with two?” Being largely a 2-player person myself – my gaming budding is my 16 year old son – I also find myself asking the same question when considering new games.
In perhaps what may be a vain attempts to help others in a similar boat to myself, I thought I would start repaying some of my debt to the Geek by seeing if I could write helpful reviews of games principally designed for 3 or more players, but that have 2-player "possibilities".
Homesteaders
Homesteaders is an auction/worker placement game set in the American West by <PERSON> (BGG user <PERSON>), who has also put the 2-player rules on BGG.
Excellent reviews of the 3 and 4 player game can be found in More Than Meets The Eyeand Thoroughly Enjoyable.
Briefly, Homesteaders consists of ten rounds. Each round, players bid money for the right to construct a single building in Minstreltown of certain type (residential, commercial, industrial) and then use resources (steel, wood, copper, gold, etc) to construct a selected building (from copper mines to circuses) of the type successfully bid for in the auction.
Resources are obtained via worker placement (everyone starts with one worker) on existing buildings, trading other resources on passing in auctions. Money is obtained for building income at the start of each round, and by taking on debt.
The winner is decided on victory points, that are largely obtained from buildings and trading.
For the 3-4player game, each round the N players get to bid for a single item in N-1 simultaneous auctions. For the 2 player game, 2 auctions still occur, but the restriction on availability is deftly handled by a dummy bid in one auction for a fixed amount.
At round 1 the dummy bid is $5 dollars and decreases/increases by $1 (or one bidding unit) each round based on whether one or both player successfully won an auction. There are limits to how high/low the dummy bid can go.
The start player and subsequent winner of auction 1 gets to choose which auction the dummy bid goes on. This may confer a mild advantage to the start player. In a few games, I have played the start player has retained control of the dummy bid for a number of turns. 118
But this a relatively minor quibble given how well the dummy bid appears to work.
Being relatively ‘dumb’, the dummy bid is relatively simple to operate and doesn’t have the overhead ‘playing the dummy’ has in other games.
Despite its ‘dumbness’, the dummy does increase the competition in auctions to the point where tense decisions are forced on both players on whether to bid or pass. After 10 rounds, I have typically found that both players have won between 6 and 8 auctions. To me, this seems about the right level for ‘restriction on supply’.
This is, in part, driven by how tight money is in the game. In the 2 player game, money remains in short supply. Taking on debt is essential in this game. Homesteaders makes the money flow in a <PERSON> game look positively philanthropic.
In the 2-player game, with some notable exceptions, most buildings are restricted to one of each type. Although both players tend to follow different building strategies, this limited availability further enhances the tension on occasions.
2-player Homesteaders has the feel of a clever balance between the mechanisms of two notably playable 2-player games; Race for the Galaxy and Stone Age. The auction element adds player interaction to the development of a portfolio for victory points (as in Race for the Galaxy – although perhaps not with the depth of RfTG), while the resource management is satisfyingly more sophisticated and challenging than that in Stone Age. And money remains too tight to mention.
All in all 2-player Homesteaders is a tight, interactive and challenging game, with lots of strategies to explore, without the clunkiness of many 2-player variant games.
Thoroughly recommended (8/10) as a 2-player game. 118