Logic & Lore [Preview]

• What's Eric Playing?

Base price: $XX.
2 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 3

Full disclosure: A preview copy of Logic & Lore was provided by Weird Giraffe Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game. 

Alright! We’re back on the crowdfunding train. Lots to do, lots to talk about, lots to try. I’ll be covering a few games in the upcoming weeks that will be coming in the near future, so I’m excited to tell you more about them. First up is Logic & Lore, coming soon from Weird Giraffe Games! Let’s dive right in.

In Logic & Lore, the constellations have fallen out of alignment! That’s always a rough start. Instead of rolling things up into a ball and using those to replace the stars (always impractical, though, musically, sublime), the dragons and mice have decided to team up! Dragons go and find clues, and the mice figure out what to do. You know, the classic structure of things. So in a classic logic puzzle fashion, you’ll need to learn and then do and then learn again! Do you have what it takes to right what’s wrong with the sky?

Contents

Setup

I’m gonna mostly assume this is not your first logic game. So we’ll start you on the Star Bright difficulty. It’s more complex, and changes setup a bit as a result. To start, drop the 9 Alignment Cards in order between the players:

On Star Bright, they’ll be question-side up, as you see here. Then, each player gets a set of cards:

They shuffle their cards and deal them face-down in front of them. Give them a set of Player Tokens as well.

Set the Memory Tokens nearby:

You should be ready to start!

Gameplay

This one’s not too complicated. On your turn, you’ll do the following:

  1. Move the Heavens (optional): You can move around any of your face-down cards, if you want. You can’t move any face-up cards though.
  2. Align the Stars (optional): You can, if you want, reveal all of your cards from left to right. If they are all in the correct spots, you win! If any of them are out of alignment, you instantly lose. So, you know, be careful with this one.
  3. Divine the Cosmos (Star Bright difficulty only): Place one of your Player Tokens on an Alignment Card. You cannot place on any occupied card, and 1 and 9 are considered occupied by both players. Note that the player taking the first turn skips this action (on the first turn only). If all spots are occupied, swap one of your opponent’s tokens for yours.
  4. Choose Focus: You’ll choose two cards and show them both to your opponent. Don’t look at them.
  5. Search the Sky: Hold the cards and ask your opponent every question you’re considered to be occupying from 1 – 9. If they answer yes to any of them, stop asking questions immediately. This includes them indicating that either or both of your cards are aligned for question 1. Once that happens, remove two of your player tokens from any alignment cards and move to the next step. If they answer no to all of them, they’ll finish up by indicating which card is greater and you’ll move to the next step. You can use Memory Tokens to help you keep track of any or all information you have.
  6. Move the Heavens (still optional): One last Move the Heavens step. Feel free to move your face-down cards around as you like.

The first player to correctly align all of their cards wins! Or, you can win if your opponent tries an Align the Stars action and is incorrect. That’s a less fun way to win, but, you know.

For more difficult games, add one or more Black Hole cards to your cards! These cards are shuffled in and put your line of cards to the left of the 1 and / or the right of the 9. Any questions about a Black Hole is always answered with a no. They’re never aligned, they have no value, and they’re never the greater card (unless you have two Black Holes; then pick the larger one).

Player Count Differences

None! It’s two-player only.

Strategy

  • Be careful about which cards you choose; you don’t want to risk getting information you already know. This is mostly a “keep track of where you moved things to” advice, but also, critically, keep track of what questions you have your tokens on. You can skip questions if you need or want to, but don’t ask a question that’s going to give you unhelpful information or useless / implied information.
  • It’s generally pretty helpful to work inwards, as locking down all numbers on the left or right side means that everything is explicitly greater than or less than the numbers you’ve already unlocked (respectively). I’m positive there’s a sorting algorithm that does this, but either way, if you get the edges in place there’s a lot you can do explicitly sine
  • Be strategic with what questions you block off, as well; you know what your opponent is looking for, so you might be able to deny them the ability to ask questions that would sort information out quickly. If you know your opponent just showed you two cards that would be aligned if they were swapped, maybe you place on the Orbit question next so that they’re not able to find that out themselves. Just be careful! If you’re too obvious or consistent with that, players might start reading into your behavior and acting accordingly.
  • If you find out cards aren’t aligned, you might as well move them elsewhere. I mean, there’s no real point to keeping them where they are. You might find keeping them in the same relative position might be helpful, but as long as you keep track it doesn’t terribly matter either way.
  • Use Memory Tokens! There’s a lot of information to keep track of without the ability to take some notes. I find it near impossible to keep that needle threaded of what I know and don’t know, since the cards all look so similar, but you might be able to succeed where I traditionally haven’t, I guess? Using the Memory Tokens well can inform a lot of what you want to do on subsequent turns (and help you keep track of what you know); sometimes you can even avoid verifying a card until you absolutely have to so that you can save yourself an action.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

  • The art is quite nice! I really like both the colors and the swirl effects of it all. Even the Black Hole cards are quite striking.
  • Pretty portable. You probably need a fair bit of space to play the game, but the box is small and there are only about 35 cards, give or take, though the Memory Tokens need to come with you as well as the other tokens.
  • I really like the challenge around how you pick where to place your Player Tokens and how that influences the questions you ask and get answered. Having to develop a strategy around it is extremely interesting, especially since you can also try and block your opponent asking certain questions if you know what you’re doing. A very neat component of the game.
  • Logic games hit a very particular sweet spot for me. I just really like them! They’re one of my favorite genres; pretty much any form of deduction will do. I like getting to try and solve a puzzle.
  • Not too difficult to pick up and learn, either. A nice introductory logic game. I think especially the easier mode will land well with players, but nonetheless, there’s a lot to like.
  • I wonder if it’s possible to expand the game somewhat with other question cards to let you tune difficulty levels. This just seems interesting, as then you could build out a set of question cards that you particularly like for solving the puzzle. Seems difficult to balance, but definitely a “would be cool”.

Mehs

  • I always find making games part of a series where the actual gameplay is different across games can be hit or miss. It just seems strange when they’re kind of unrelated. For instance, I’m covering Cascadia: Rolling Rivers this week, and part of one of the more complex maps uses Cascadia’s placement and scoring rules to great effect, so it makes sense that it translates to the roll-and-write genre. This doesn’t quite have the same effect, so I worry it muddies the brand a bit. But this isn’t the first time someone has ever done this, either; marketing isn’t my schtick, clearly.
  • I almost wonder if there’s an opportunity for cooperative play where both players try to get all 18 cards aligned together? This is mostly a nice-to-have; whenever I play Turing Machine, for instance, we communicate when we’re ready to solve the puzzle and let the other player figure it out, too. The first player to “solve” it correctly wins by the game rules, but the game doesn’t end so the other player gets to still have some fun. I’d love for a similar thing for this game.
  • There’s a certain element of luck to this (as is the case with some of these games) where a random shuffle may be more or less aligned than your opponents, which can lead to some player frustrations. I did play a rather unfortunate game where I think five or seven of my cards were already aligned at the start of the game. Hey, any combination of card orderings is technically random. Just a strange one. But that may lead to some player frustration if the first two cards you happen to pick are correctly aligned.

Cons

  • This is the kind of game where I wish some information was tracked for me, or that the backs of the cards were dry-erase or something. I can never remember which cards I’ve already checked for alignment against certain positions, so I almost certainly mix a few cards back into spots that, if I had tracked it better, I’d already know they didn’t belong. I generally bristle a bit when my performance in a game would be better if I had simply taken better notes.
  • Similarly, I wish there were also a lot more Memory Tokens. We kept running out, especially for the greater / lesser tokens. It almost feels like double the number we got would have been a good place.

Overall: 7.5 / 10

Overall, I think Logic & Lore is pretty great! I do generally really enjoy logic puzzles, though, and this is a nice compact one that has a similar energy to Turing Machine but stands on its own as a purely two-player experience. It’s a bit less complex, in that regard, but it has its own charms. One thing that I wonder from playing Logic & Lore is how fixed the questions are. They offer a wide variety of information and utility, but I wonder if it’s possible to substitute in additional questions for expansions or to fine-tune the difficulty? Mostly out of curiosity. There’s a bit of a frustration with these logic games that I also experience with Turing Machine, which is, most of the players I play with just want to solve the puzzle; they don’t care about winning. As a result, the game ending as soon as one player wins is kind of uninteresting for them. For one, it incentivizes guessing (if you se your opponent will win next turn, you might guess rather than try to spend another turn figuring out the puzzle and then losing), and for another, even if they lose, they sometimes just want to figure it out. I almost wish there was an explicit cooperative mode to let players solve their puzzles together or something to keep things going. There’s a lot of information, which I like, though I think the preview copies could stand to have more Memory Tokens for the sheer volume of information I’d like to track (or making the card backs dry-erase could work). I’d like to note things like this card wasn’t aligned when I looked at the 9 spot, even. Would help a lot. Again, a big fan of logic games. That all said, I think Logic & Lore hits a great spot for me where I’m excited to have it as part of my deduction game offerings, and if you’re a fan of logic, you enjoy puzzles, or you just want to fix the constellations in the sky, you’ll probably enjoy it as well!

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