Ostrakon is a card-based party game produced by daVinci Games and Mayfair.
Players: 5-12
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Ostakon comes with:
Cards: The Ostrakon cards are all well-produced; they're printed full-color on medium-sturdy, linen-textured and coated cardstock with rounded corners. Many of the cards feature full-color artwork that's nicely period appropriate: the artwork all looks like fragments from Greek pottery, mosaics, etc. (Some of the players didn't like this affectation, but I thought it worked very well.)
There are a total of ten different card types: 9 pathway cards, which lay out a (scoring) board for gameplay; 12 philosopher cards, which mark the current location of each player on the pathway; 12 stone cards, which allow each philosopher to vote; one sun, which shows which philosopher is currently going; one calendar card with associated moon card, which together show how many turns are left in the game; two rules of the day cards, which show special rules for the current day; and 24 topic cards (a third of which are blank), which list topics for discussion.
This long listing of cards unfortunately shows the first and biggest problem with the game. It's god-awful complex. Laying out all of those cards into the precise correct setup is a pain. The combination of the sun, the philosopher cards, and the pathway fairly cleverly show who's turn it is at any time, and how they're doing, but it's not intuitive in the least. Many of our players didn't get how it all worked together throughout most of the game (and I wouldn't be surprised if I heard some people didn't get it at the end). The game would have worked much, much better with some simple scoring mechanism and a simple turn order mechanism; the best production decision would have been to include a simple score board, but even if the producers had limited themselves to cards, I think they could have come up with a method for scoring and turn order that was less clever than this method, but much more playable.
Aside from the overall design issue underlying this game, the cards generally were pretty and easy to use (though some players did have issues with finding the current topic on the topic cards and matching up who was playing which philosopher at various times).
The only cards requiring further comment are the topic cards. Each of these cards lists 8 different topics; an arrow on an adjacent card notes which topic should be used. Like daVinci's other current releases, this one has been internationalized into English, Italian, French, and German. To account for this the topic cards are split into four half-cards (two on each side), each of which is in a different language. It's inelegant, but it works. The downside of this is that three-quarters of each card is wasted for any individual play group, and we definitely noticed this, because we had to reshuffle the group of topic cards during play and we ended up with two or three repeats of specific topics as a result. I suspect there will be some repeats in each game unless players fill in the blank cards that came with the set.
Rulebook: There are actually two rulesheets, with each side printing the rules in a different language. They're printed in black and white and well-illustrated with examples, which is a good thing as the setup and play are complex enough that they would have been very hard to figure out without those examples. I still found the rules a bit obtuse and had to read them through a few times to figure out how everything worked. I think my biggest problem was figuring out that the philosophers moved up the pathway rather than down it. The rules simply use the word "advance" without explaining what that means; fortunately a later illo revealed all.
Ostrakon is one of those games who's components I have a bit of trouble assessing, because they alternatively dramatically succeed and fail. On the one hand the quality of the components are top-notch, especially when considering the price point, and they're beautifully produced as well. That'd earn the game a full "5" out of "5" for Style. On the other hand, the game has major usability issues because the designers choose a very complex method for setting up, playing, and scoring the game that really doesn't work (and, worse, is at total odds with the lighter gaming crowd who's likely to be playing this game). That'd earn the game a meager "2" out of "5" for Style.
I'd originally considered averaging the Style for this game out to "3" out of "5", but this is a case where I think that bad usability decisions really overrode any good work that was done in the production quality, thus I've instead stayed with my my lower Style rating of "2" out of "5".
The Gameplay
Because Ostrakon's core gameplay is largely occluded by the specifics of the game system, I've decided to break the discussion of the gameplay down into those two parts: what the gameplay is; and how it specifically works.
The Core Gameplay: Pretty simply, Ostrakon is a game of asking questions. During each "day" (turn) each player is going to get ask one question. The topic of the question is determined by current topic card. It'll be something relatively broad like "nature", "secrets", or the inexplicable "boxes".
The active player must ask a question related to that topic that has exactly two answers; this can be a yes-no question or something else with two choices. Here's some examples of possible and cliched questions: "Is it better to have loved and lost or to never have loved at all?"; and "They say that opposites attract; however, do you believe that opposites can maintain a long-term relationship? And we're not talking about magnetism here."
The general intent is that the question be philosophical, though at least our group held to that only perhaps half the time. There are a few more concrete rules too: the question can't be "obvious", it can't be "incomprehensible", and it can't be "offensive". As you might expect, the choice of questions is very broad, and this caused issues when we tried to play, particularly in relation to the "obvious" criteria. What's obvious for me, since I knew everyone in the group, wasn't necessarily obvious for other people.
In any case, once a question is asked, the questioner assigns one answer as the "black stone" answer and one answer as the "white stone" answer. Each philosopher then plays his stone card flipped to one side or the other, making sure that he's made a true answer. The questioner then lays down his stone card, trying to guess which answer at least half of the other players have given. If he guesses right he then gets as many points as the dissenters (meaning he won't get anything if everyone voted the same way, and has the most opportunity for points if he asked a split-down-the-middle question).
That's the core of the game.
The Board, Scoring, and Turn Order: The pathway that's set in the middle of the table is intended as both a scoring track and a turn order listing. As players successfully guess answers they move clockwise on the track.
Meanwhile, each day the "sun" card is placed at the first player's location. All the players on that space ask their questions one by one, and either get points and move clockwise, or else don't get points and are placed under the sun. When there are no longer any players next to the sun, the players under the sun are then restored to their proper place on the track, and the sun then moves counterclockwise to the next space with players, who now get to go.
It's very fiddly, and it makes a simple game way too complex. All this setup does is: mark a score; and ensure that the players go in descending order of points. Though this method is overall clever, it could have been done much more cleanly, and if the need to go in descending order of points was removed, it could have been even simpler.
More Tidbits: There are a few items that add a little additional color to the game: special days and followers.
Special Days. Certain spaces on the scoring track are marked with special icons; if the lead player is on one of these spaces at the start of a day, that day has a special rule, each related to special things the questioner can do after he's asked a question. The days are: corruption (choose some philosophers to change their vote to what you choose after everyone has answered); oracle (see some votes before you select); and treachery (see all the votes before you select).
These are kind of cool, but they're all clumped together so that in lower player number games you have many, many turns in succession with special rules, which is subpar. (Most frustrating is the 5-6 player game, where you start off the game on the first of the special spaces, and will probably never get off of them, because you at best move forward a couple of spaces a day. Overall, this decision largely breaks the game for 5-6 player play, but is correctable.)
Follower. Once per game each player can name himself the follower of someone ahead of him who's just asked a question and score whatever points that player does on his turn. (This rule is the only reason to do the turn order in descending value of points, so who is ahead remains consistent.)
Winning the Game: The game ends after a set number of days or when someone gets to the end of the scoring track. Whomever is the furthest ahead at that point wins.
Relationship to Other Games
Ostrakon (2004) is a party game in the asking personal questions category. It fits into the same general category as The Ungame (1975), Scruples (1986), Loaded Questions (1997), and probably countless others.
The main differences this game has from most of the general category include: the questions are intended to be philosophical, and thus might be less personal than many of the others; the questions are largely freeform; and scoring is based not just on figuring out players' answers, but also asking a good question that will neatly divide the group.
The other big difference is that Ostrakon is produced as a very cheap, but nice, card game.
Ostrakon is also a part of daVinci's line of "Gioconda Pocket Party Games". Though I had some issues with this particular release, I'm still quite excited to see other games in the series because daVinci is putting out a line of very small games for very large numbers of people, something that no one else is doing right now. Upcoming releases in the line, include: Lupus in Tabula (9-25 players), Word Jam (5-12 players), and Oriente (4-12 players). Their recent release, Bang! isn't technically in this line, but it's also not too far removed, because it's fairly casual and supports 4-7 players.
The Game Design
The goal of any game in this category is really to get people talking, and Ostrakon succeeds by this criteria. Several times we stopped to chat more about various questions asked.
Here's the other general game design comments I had:
Overly Clever: This has already been discussed to death, but the cleverness of the scoring and turn order methods hurt the game.
Freeform Questions Possibly Troublesome: As also already discussed, there were some issues with what type of questions could be asked. Beyond that, I know some of our players felt that the freeform questions were a little intimidating. Even I froze up once when I got a "???" topic (anything I wanted) because it was just so broad that I didn't know what to ask. These issues with freeform questions aren't necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, just something that you should be aware of regarding this game.
Scoring Well Considered: Beyond that, I'll comment that the scoring system for the game (getting points for the contrarians) is great, because it added a second level to the game: you suddenly had to worry not just about answers but questions too.
Overall, I didn't think Ostrakon's gameplay was either exceptional or flawed. It had an interesting theme (philosophy) and the aforementioned interesting scoring mechanism, but beyond that was pretty normative for the category. I give it a slightly high "3" out of "5" for Substance.
The Game Design
I feel like Ostrakon has three notable things going for it: a cheap price, a small size, and an interesting theme. Beyond that, it's pretty normative for an asking-questions party game category. If you are excited about the idea of asking freeform questions, and if your party game group is stubborn enough to work through the overly complex method for marking current score and player order, go for it. But for most people, I suspect that other games on the market will be better choices.
Review Summary