Two is company (Steam x2, Mr. Jack x2, Carcassonne: The City)

We had an unusual two player session this week... just me and Shemp could make it. Other than wargames, my collection is fairly light on two player games, but we did get a chance to play a few games that don't often see the light of day.

Steam: St. Lucia
I bought this Bezier Games expansion map mostly for the single player side (which I like a lot). It's a bit strange because every single space gets a cube at the start of the game, and absolutely no coloured cities exist until somebody urbanizes. IT makes for a map that changes substantially between plays and is quite wide open with opportunity in the first half (though it does get tight before the game ends). Surprisingly, I did get to play the St. Lucia side once before with Luch on New Year's day. In that game, we pretty much had each started on one end of the island and worked down towards the middle. Not so with Shemp. I payed for first player privileges and after I had established my link he immediately built off of it. Unsurprisingly, our relationship was poisonous to both of us. I kept hold of the first player action and urbanized all the towns in the south using up all the coloured cities in the process and ensuring my track was in the way for all his deliveries.

(I'll note that we got a rule wrong... we played that the first player had the option to keep paying to go first until he passed or the 2nd player took the initiative special action. The correct rule is that turn order alternates... much more forgiving on player 2).

Shemp had a great deal of trouble getting in the black with this setup, and in the end I won fairly handily. This was all around a live and learn type of experience for both of us... I'm sure we would play very differently next time. All in all, it's a good two player board that I can see playing again.

Steam: Jamaica

Jamaica is a curious board. It's a small map, and relatively symmetrical. There are just two coloured cities in the middle and a handful of towns on either end. The game does not have a set number of rounds, and instead ends once all goods are exhausted. It didn't take us long to figure out that this was going to be a very barren board very quick. Barren board = brutal game. The only thing that could have made it more difficult is if they introduced terrain that cost more than usual to cross. Oh, yeah. They did that. The middle is mountainous, and those add +3 to track costs.

I urbanized both ends of the board, placing my track so that Shemp would hopefully be forced to ship through my links. Both our debts were spiraling out of control because building our infrastructure was expensive and long deliveries were hard to find. Most of the game was spent making sad 1-3 link deliveries. I faced bankruptcy on numerous occasion, with my income and VPs at -10/0 respectively. At one point, I had t spend 19 dollars (!!!) to develop 4 links of track to keep me from having zero delivering potential for the rest of the game (I had to rebuild 2 sections of track on mountain spaces). Luckily, I managed to scrape together enough points to get me by. Only near the end of the game did we start approaching solvency. If memory serves, Shemp won by a point and our scores were 0 and -1. Good times.

We made the assumption that using a two player map meant that the goods growth placeholders started with only 2 goods cubes (since that's what the rules state for 3 players). Considering the impact it had on the game, it's possible it should have been three. I posted a question on BGG... we'll see.

Mr. Jack

Shemp had never played this game before. It's one of the few two player games (that aren't wargames) that I've bothered to hold on to, because I liked it enough to keep even if it gets played rarely.

I played first as Jack, and almost managed to win. It came down to the last round, where Shemp discovered who I was (the cop) and was *just* able to catch me in time.

Shemp tried his hand at Jack next, and did much better than most in their first play. On the first few rounds, I managed to eliminate all but three suspects, but he successfully eluded further narrowing for quite a while. I believe I caught him in the 7th round, which was approximately 3 rounds more than any other first timer I've seen.

Although it's tough to play Jack, this is a very fun game that hits the right note between ease of play and strategy, luck and control. Good game.

Carcassonne: The City

We ended the evening with a oldie. Carcassonne: The City gets very little play in our group, and I've considered trading it away because of that on many occasions. However, I do like it and... it's just such a nice package! I haven't been able to bring myself to do it. Yet.

I went far too aggressive on "farmers" (I know, wrong terminology for this set, but I can't remember what they actually use). I was short meeples throughout the game and missed out on the guard's scoring opportunities in the end. It was a competitive game, with just a few points separating us, but Shemp did win.

As we were packing up The City, we realized we had played much later than we usually do (12:15am!). Whatever, it was fun.

I sort dead people (Unpublished prototype, Small World)

It was Kozure's pick this week, and Bharmer came by so we were five. He asked that we try out a new game he's working on and we did. As usual, I was surprised at how good his demos are (both from the standpoint of production quality and design quality). For a game that was essentially untested until we played, it worked well. I don't want to say too much about the game in case it's secret, so I'll move onto the next game we played... Small World.

I started out with Commando Trolls. I started out at the top of the board and spread out to the tops of the mountains there. Since trolls keep their lairs after they go into decline, I knew they might be there for a while. Meanwhile, Luch was making a killing on his flying wizards and was deemed the early leader. I switched to Dragon Master Elves and decided I would milk them until my trolls were thinned out. Lucky for me, the others decided they weren't worth the high cost to destroy and nearly all the trolls made it to the end of the game. Kozure's sorcerers suddenly started sweeping across the board and proved to be quite impossible to stop (they are quite powerful in a 5 player game!). Still, my elves made quite a good match with my trolls and I was earning a consistent 15 points or so per turn... somewhat under the radar too thanks to the nasty sorcerers and Giants and orcs running around.

Luch was responsible for handing out the races throughout the game and also returning the defeated tokens. He sorted dead people.

I thought I had it in the bag, but when the scores were counted the spread was quite narrow. I did win, but only by a few points. I guess my slow start nearly caught up with me!

Corn is red ! (Chaos in the Old World x2)

I'm often on the lookout for games that manage to blend the elegance of euro games with the thematic gameplay of american style games. Although I like the clever mechanics, the streamlined gameplay, etc of the euros there is also a part of me that likes the miniatures and cards and *fun* that the thematically superior american games offer. Unfortunately, I've tried lots of the themey games and have usually been disappointed. They are either too long, too random, too fiddly or they have too much downtime (even some I like, like Fury of Dracula, have these problems).

Chaos in the Old World is a game that was getting a good amount of buzz because it apparently did a great job of providing a thematic experience within the framework of a solid and compelling game system. The length of the game was apparently just 90 minutes, the mechanics were supposed to be a blend of area control and combat. Sounded interesting.

The theme. Players play evil gods (from the Warhammer universe, apparently. I know nothing of it), bent on the ruination of the world. Each represents a specific vice, and uses a combination of magical powers and a variety of demonic creatures to bring about their personal brand of corruption into the world. The game goes to great lengths to bring out the theme in the art (the board is a depiction of stretched skin, for example). The cards back it up with explicit names and illustrations, like the disease god's "Rain of Pus" for example. Kozure wrote a separate post about how some aspects of the theme bothers him, how impersonating a character engaging in acts of such depravity felt wrong to him. Personally, I just find it corny. The surface theme of evils gods doing evil things doesn't strike me as better or worse than any other theme, but I find the specific references to pus, torture, disease and depravity very adolescent (comparable to teenage vampire movies, or just about anything else goth). It almost put me off buying it, but with Christmas gift certificate in hand and many people at BGG talking about it as game of the year, I decided to go for it.

The game does get points for naming one of the gods Khorne (Corn!), and making that god the red one.

Mechanically, the gameplay works with the theme but isn't particularly suggestive of it. Turns start with the revelation of an event card which has an effect on the game for that turn (such as announcing the arrival of elvish corsairs that will do battle with units present in certain spaces). Following this, the turn consists mostly of placing influence on the board (cards and units) and resolving combat between the creatures that have been unleashed there. After the combat has been resolved, VPs are awarded and "ruination" tokens are added to the board based on a kind of area control mechanic.

One of the defining characteristics of the game is that each god has the potential to improve his position by fulfilling a certain condition. Khorne does it by killing opposing creatures, Nurgle does it by corrupting populous areas, etc. At the end of each round, if a god has fulfilled this condition at least once they get to turn a dial on the board one step and receive the reward listed on the dial. If they fulfilled their condition more times than any other god, they can rotate it twice. If the god manages to reach the end of his dial, he wins.

This means that there are a few different path to victory... VPs or dial clicks. Each god has apparently been balanced a little differently. Each god has a different deck of chaos cards (magical powers that are used as effects on the board), different creatures with different stats, etc. The end result is that playing a different god should lead to a different experience.

I'll preface the session reports by saying that there is a small but extremely significant error on the card for one of the gods, Slannesh, which incorrectly describes the condition for dial click advancement. We didn't know about it and that god ended up being extremely unbalanced and won handily both games because of it.

I played Khorne in both sessions. Shemp played Slannesh in both sessions, but Kozure switched from Nurgle to Tzeentch in his second game. In both games, Shemp managed to get a number of noble tokens on the board in hard to get places and was generating dial clicks and corruption like it was going out of style. There were a number of entertaining battles and swings of events, but ultimately it was impossible to stop Slannesh from winning. It was impossible even to come close. Now that we know the correct rules, it will be fun to see how it plays when things are balanced. The god's personalities definitely come through with their abilities, and each player's gameplay is definitely affected by that. I was pure combat, but Shemp was very strong defensively. When Kozure played Tzeentch, he was creating chaos on the board with teleportations and other unexpected magical effects.

Despite the balance problems and some aspects of the theme, I quite enjoyed the game. The theme of gods trying to exert influence on the world through combat and magic comes through well, and the various moving parts do a good job of giving the game a sense of progression and variability without ever feeling fiddly (I'm talking about the hero, noble and skaven tokens, the Old World start of round cards, the god's upgrade abilities, etc). There appears to be more repetition than I'd like in the various card decks, but hopefully there will be enough combinations that will keep things feeling fresh. I also really like having alternate victory conditions in a game (another recent game, Power Struggle, has caught my eye for the same reason). I wouldn't say Chaos in the Old World blew me away, but does a good job at scratching the american style game itch in a euro timeframe and level of complexity.

Buckets of Blood and Showers of... Other... Bodily... Fluids

WARNING: This review contains concepts of a graphic nature which may be unsuitable for younger readers. It also contains unfettered waxing philosophical. Reader discretion advised.

Chaos in the Old World, far from being a game about monkeys running the European Union (*rimshot*), is a area-influence / mild wargame with variable player powers, card-based spells / effects and an action point (in this case "power point") mechanic. Underneath the blood-spattered chrome, this is actually a pretty clever little game.

I don't have time for a thorough review of mechanics and play - I'll leave that to the esteemed Agent Easy should he so wish, but I did want to record for posterity my thoughts on the theme and feel of this thing.

I'm not a squeamish person - I've attended (and remained entirely lucid through) two drug-free births and treated a few pretty bloody wounds in my time. I've watched my share of Tarantino films and various splatter-filled gorefests of movies. One would think I'd be "desensitized" by this point. Be that as it may, Chaos in the Old World makes me feel like I should be handling it with latex gloves and a haz-mat suit to avoid the ichor dripping out of its suppurating infectious wounds.

Once again, the game itself is not bad - I want to be clear - but the idea of drenching an entire continent in blood, pestilence, dark magics and perverted sexual frenzy as a game theme somehow turns my stomach in a way that playing wargames (which, to be quite honest, depict similar, if not quite as exaggerated, forms and degrees of pain and suffering) doesn't.

Board games and video games are, for me, ways of exploring alternate realities and possibilities of existence which (for a multitude of reasons) are impractical, impossible, undesirable, unachievable or sometimes just inconvenient. Quite aside from their mental challenge (and their sense of competition) - the theme of games allow me to stretch my imagination and play with perception and reality.

It's fun to imagine oneself a fighter pilot, business tycoon or even a lowly pre-industrial German farmer. To play at being a god dedicated to chaos and destruction... well, it just feels... wrong to me.

To simultaneously invoke Godwin's Law (yes, yes, I automatically lose) and use gobs of mega-hyperbole, I have a icky sense about this game that I'd imagine I'd feel playing a game about rounding up hidden Jews in France, playing a serial killer in1977 New York, scheduling various sexual escapades in a Caligula-esque court, or distributing smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans.

This is a game where the theme specifically invokes (and revels in) rape, murder, disease, torture, slaughter of peasants, blood sacrifice, insanity, corruption and a host of other unpleasant concepts.

"But it's just a game," you say.

True. Completely true.

Playing Devil's Advocate (almost literally, in this case), I've often felt that understanding what is attractive about evil helps one to know how to combat it. The concept of unbridled lust, wrath, violence, manipulation, random change and the like, represents for me a kind of personal freedom which is incredibly seductive. The idea of giving into all of these impulses of a carnal nature - to kill and torture without remorse, to have frequent and consequence-free sex, to scheme to give oneself power by trickery lies and deceit - appeals to the primeval urges of the amygdala and the crocodile-brain cerebellum and medulla oblongata.

To live as a god - without sin or fear of retribution - is attractive. It's certainly one of the appeals of Existentialism. I'm sure Shemp and I could have all sorts of interesting debate on its ramifications for society and individuals given his and my opposing views on religion and selflessness. In any case, I can see why some people might enjoy the sense of power and freedom that one might derive from playing this game (theme-wise)... I guess I just want to say that I'm a wee bit uncomfortable with it.

We're being evil in this game, kids, and it's not the usual hand-wringing, mad-scientist cackling cartoony-evil. We are trying to literally corrupt and reduce to ruin an entire continent. Capital "E" evil. Is that different that being a cutesy imp-commanding overlord in Dungeon Lords or corrupt government officials keeping down the populace in Junta? Or playing SS troops in Squad Leader? (I love those games, by the way).

Yeah, it's a game. No, I'm not asking that it be banned or people run screaming for the hills or shout "for Heaven's sakem won't someone think of the children?!". I'm not thumping a Bible and saying this offends God.

I do think that people should occasionally stop and think about what's going on in this game, what it says about the fictional world it represents and the real world it... parodies? satirizes?

What we think about good and evil, in short.

Heaven knows there's enough suffering in this world - in Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Phillipines - to want to invent more in our fantasies.

Play this game, if you're interested in it. It's pretty good. But like reading Lolita, The Story of O or Blood Meridian, there are imagined acts and events contained within which are pretty unsettling and world-view challenging.

To quote the internet meme "What is seen cannot be unseen."

Or you can just shrug it off and say "It's just a game."

Let the people speak (Die Macher)

I shouldn't have been surprised, but Luch picked Die Macher once again.

What did surprise me, however, is that in the absence of the cheat sheet Bharmer uses there are a number of finer points in the rules that are really hard to keep straight. Die Macher is the definition of a game with many moving parts, and each one has it's own peculiarities that had us spending much of the game combing through the rulebook. The end result was that the pacing suffered and I enjoyed myself a little less than I usually do. I wouldn't rate Die Macher anywhere near my favorite games, but the times I've played have been fun... but we were definitely off our game this week.

Throughout the game Kozure and I had very similar... everything. Points, party membership, platform, etc. By the last quarter of the game, we were all extremely similar and efforts to use media influence to screw other players were hard to pull off because of it. Anyway, Luch won an unusually tight points race (maybe 20 points spread between the 4 of us)

Something funny happened that I was supposed to record, but I've forgotten now. Sorry.