Wednesday, June 22, 2005

All about the Benjamins

Short one this week:

With JayWowser with us for another visit, we played a few games he hadn't yet tried... Traders of Genoa and Pirate's Cove.

Traders was good fun... the stinginess of our last game wasn't quite as apparent and the session felt more fun for it (in my opinion). It lasted a bit longer than most... 2 1/2 hours. Not sure why, other than we didn't lose a single round to the market place, whereas we normally lose at least one (and, to be fair, it WAS a 5 player game). I tried to go for a "Privilege" strategy, with a plan to collect 1 for 1 tokens and random goods and then trade them in one shot for a pile of privilege cards (since I knew that no one would ever give me any once they knew I was going for it). It didn't quite work out because the five player game left very few privileges on the board, and the ones I did manage to get didn't work togehter that well. I think I played okay, but in the end Luch's ownership tokens brought hima pile of money which no one could touch.

Alas, I came in last!

One thing which frustrates me a little about this game is the limitations put on trading. I bought this one because it was described as "the german answer to negotiation/ trading games such as monopoly". In this game, Shemp was trying to get a few privileges in order to extort a pile of money out of me. this should have been a good move (and in Monopoly, it might have worked), but in ToG, the trading is forced into revolving around small immediate trades (who wants THIS action). There is no opportunity to shift things around by trading outside those confines. There is no real opportunity for a move like Shemp was attempting, and that is a shortcoming in my book. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

In the end, we only had time for a half game of Pirate's Cove. Not sure what Jeff thought of this one, but if he didn't like it, I would hope he'd give it another chance... we were really rushing through it and much of the flavour didn't come through.

Still, I had a great time as usual. Until next time...

Easy

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