Vegas Showdown

Overall score:

Vegas Showdown is the newest board game from Avalon Hill—a hybrid tile and bidding game in which the players compete to build the best hotel/casino on the strip. It’s a fun game with a lot of cool ideas and smooth, easy rules, but you can’t help but feel that something’s missing. In the end it will leave you wanting more, in both the good and bad meanings of the phrase.

The premise is simple: each player is a billionaire with a brand new piece of Las Vegas real estate. You have a certain amount of income (expressed, of course, in poker chips), and each turn you save it up or use it to buy new rooms for your hotel/casino. Each room produces a certain type of resource, either income, population, fame, or a combination of two or three, and the idea is to build up a balanced resource base that will help you buy and place what you need later in the game. There’s a nice balance of basic tiles, premiere tiles, and flashy super-tiles, and the deck of event cards keeps each turn interesting. The winner at the end is the player who has built up the most fame, but you’ll need a good combination of income and population to get there, as well as a solid plan and a good eye for tile placement.

All buying is done with bidding; each tile has a base price that constitutes the lowest possible bid, though if other players are after the same one on the same turn the price can rise pretty quickly. Base prices for premiere tiles drop each turn they aren’t purchased, which adds some nice tension as you watch the price on a coveted tile—you want to get it as cheaply as possible, but not cheap enough that you lose it to another player.

The only truly random element of gameplay is the event deck, which helps keep things lively—maybe the lounge builders are on strike this turn, so no one can buy lounges, or maybe there’s a huge convention in town and everybody gains money based on their population instead of their income. Aside from these cards, the game is surprisingly non-random: your resources are set, and the game is a strategic exercise in who can use them most wisely, make the best decisions, and plan ahead. The game rewards skill and planning without being complex or overwhelming, in league with the best European board games.

This brings us, however, to the first major complaint about the game: you play almost entirely within a closed system, and despite having to bid against other players you really don’t interact with them very much. It’s almost like each player is playing their own little game, and there are very few chances for the other players to affect your game at all. It feels social, and there’s a lot of table conversation, but this is not reflected in the mechanics—there are no victories over other players, or opportunities to mess them up. You’ll find that most of the time you just bid on what you need, and bidding wars are rare. There is an event card that gives each player one fame every time they outbid another player that turn, and this tends to spark off an exciting war of bids and threats and interaction that makes the rest of the game look slow and stilted. It comes down to the subtle difference between building “the best casino in the game,” and just “the best casino you can,” but the truth is you could play the game by yourself and have almost the same experience.

Our second big complaint about the game is that it feels so bland. Vegas, and the strip especially, is famous because it is flashy, over-the-top, and full of crazy themes and needless extravagance. Vegas recreates this environment only in the sparest terms, tossing out all flavor in lieu of a stark, bare-bones approach that makes it easy to understand, but very empty. For starters, where are the hotel names? Even Acquire, an even more abstract hotel game, at least bothered to name the hotel chains; Vegas Showdown leaves them aggressively non-descript. It would add so much to the game if you could open the box, grab your pieces, and say “I’ll be Ali Baba's Desert Paradise,” instead of “I’ll be red;” it would add life and flavor that would really help draw you in. In the same vein, unique names for the premiere tiles would have been a lot more fun than generic descriptors. No hotel advertises “We have a theater,” they advertise “Come see Siegfried and Roy and their amazing White Tigers!” I can see the point of calling all the restaurants just “Restaurant,” because they’re basic tiles, but couldn’t they do something clever with the four or five premiere Buffet tiles? “Captain Blackbeard’s Pirate Feast?” They don’t have to be good names, just fun ones—as it is, the game is so deliberately flavorless that it fails to evoke Las Vegas in feel, style, or anything else. By reducing everything down to its skele

tal, mechanical form, they’ve excised a lot of the potential fun.

None of those elements are strictly necessary, of course, because the game is very fun and well-balanced as it is, but they would keep it interesting and provide more of an emotional investment to keep players coming back. More than anything else, this game screams for a second edition to jazz it up and add some life—the structure is already there, but it needs a coat of paint and some flashy lights (and maybe a roller coaster and a volcano). I recommend Vegas Showdown as a fairly fun little game, but without some juicy flavor on top and a strong foundation of player interaction underneath, it’s only a shadow of the game it wants to be.

Discuss it in our forums. Buy Vegas Showdown at Amazon

Written by Fellfrosch on January 17th, 2006