Pus n' brains! (Chaos in the Old World, Unpublished Prototype)

Pablo joined us once more, so we took advantage of the occasion to play our first four player game of Chaos in the Old World. We also played another of Kozure's game creations... this one being a zombie dice game (which, as usual, I won't describe here in any detail).

Chaos in the Old World

Finally! A four player game. We gave Pablo Khorne since he is, on the surface, the easiest to play (and so best for newbies). I drew Nurgle, Shemp Tzeentch and Kozure Slaanesh.

I decided to concentrate on ruining one or two of the populous regions on the Board. Since warpstones were seeded to the north at the start, Shemp spent most of the game there (magicking and such). Khorne started in the high value central regions and Kozure's Slaanesh was busy sexing it up in the south. This arrangement squeezed me between Khorne's axe and Tzeetch's spells.
The Empire and Kislev were my targets and I focussed on getting lots of cultists there in order to rapidly corrupt them. I also added a single token to Troll Country and Bretonnia. Kozure looked like he was running away with it in VPs, but Shemp was doing quite well in the "Dial ticks" category. I was a close third, but I was banking on the ruination points putting me in front. On the fourth or fifth turn, three regions corrupted at the same time. Since I was in first place for two of them, I netted over 30 points and won the game.

I hadn't really realized how powerful ruining regions could be as a strategy. We haven't done much of this in the past, but after this game I expect to see it again. Pablo had difficulty keeping up with us since it was his first time, but by the second half he was doing quite well (with Khorne, it's almost a waste of time trying to win on VPs... better to get dial ticks and beat others down). The game play is a great mix of the euro and american style. The placement rules and action points make for a very strategic game, but the card effects and dice rolls keep things interesting. I look forward to playing this again with four experienced players.

L7+L7=L14 (Louis XIV, Glory to Rome)

Kozure dug into the back catalogue for his selection this week... two oldies but goodies: Louis XIV and Glory to Rome.

A quick search on the blog reveals that it has been almost exactly 3 years since we've last played Louis (November 2009 for Glory to Rome). As you might imagine, a rules refresher was in order.

Louis XIV

It's always interesting going back to an older game after a little while. I always felt like Louis XIV was a solid and interesting design, but during this session I had the distinct feeling that I was playing a somewhat convoluted version of El Grande meets... something with hidden missions (Princes of Florence? Traders of Genoa?). Still very enjoyable, and nice and short for this type of game. For a game that depends on the deal of the cards, I felt like there was a good amount of control available, too. It's not a game that I feel I need to play often, but it deserves to come out more than it does.

I had a very good game. I was able to complete my four missions every round, as well as accumulating a number of extra tokens which gave me shields at the end. This is not a game that lends itself to session reports, so I won't go into detail. I won by a significant margin, though. HA!

Glory to Rome

It was the return of the least broken "broken game" there is. Every session, everyone points the finger at a new card or combo and says that it's hopelessly unbalanced. What was it this time? I built the Colosseum, which allows me to take from other player's clientele when I use the legionnaire AND PLACE THE CLIENT IN MY VAULT. It's very powerful if none of the other players have built palisades. I was simultaneously filling my vault and reducing the other player's ability to play multiple actions in a turn. In all honesty, I felt my chances and a second landslide win in a single evening were pretty good when the draw deck ran out. Kozure surprised me with a rather rich vault that he was sneakily filling the whole game, but it wasn't enough... I did win but it was a much narrower victory than anticipated.

Those sneaky Kozurians.

Hannibal, you still there? (Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage)

We tried to play another session of Hannibal. People say it can be played in two hours, but we would be happy if we could just get it down to three. This time we made it further into the game than ever before, but after four hours our time was up.

I took the role of Hannibal for the second time, and so Kozure was Rome. Early naval advantages (Allied with Syracuse, allied with Macedonians) allowed me to enter into Sicily right away. Hannibal went north as always, and made it through the Alps relatively unscathed. Kozure met me in the north and the result was a bloodbath; Hannibal died after a couple of combats (I unfortunately was not able to pull off any "hail Mary" unlikely wins like I did last game). I would have to find out if a Carthage win without Hannibal was possible...

Mago had been sent to accompany Hasdrubal in Sicily early on. As reinforcements accumulated in New Carthage, the seaworthy general ferried back and sailed to eastern Italy with a full 10 point army. Scipio Africanus soon arrived in Rome with his force of 5. I thought if Mago could confront him my numerical advantage might beat him. Instead, I chose to do a quick rampage along the eastern coast, dropping off soldiers as I went with an eye to converting political power, winning two provinces in the process just before winter. It was reckless and stupid, though. Kozure played a minor campaign and brought Scipio to me overrunning all the units I left behind and then hit me on both flanks with his consul (don't remember the name). Mago and his army were decimated, along with Carthage's hopes of winning the game. Oh well.

We had to call it, but given another turn or so Rome's win was all but inevitable..

Pretty close to a full game, yet a real complete game eludes us. I plan to keep trying. I am very much enjoying the game, and I like how it feels both like a war game and unlike one. The flow of events has a distinct impact on the game, and the best course of action changes along with them. The balance between using the cards as events vs action points is often a difficult choice. Fun, fun, fun.

Ra, Ra, Mexica! (Ra: The dice game, Mexica, Ra)

My sister's husband, Pablo, recently immigrated to Canada and since he enjoys boardgames we invited him to join us. Although he isn't familiar with many of our games, he had previously played and enjoyed Tikal and Memoir '44 so I felt he'd have no problem. Four players at WAGS? Fantastic!

Ra: The Dice Game

This was my second time playing this game, but for Shemp and Pablo it was a first. Still a fun game, but this is definitely a shallower experience than the original. I won on the strength of a game long dominance of Pharaohs and a huge score from pyramids.

Mexica

The first half of this session saw a far more structured development pattern than we've seen in recent games. The two extremities of the island where being planned with southern Ontario like regularity (rectangular zones, each stacked side by side). When the second stage began, good planning fell by the wayside... strange and impractical districts popped up and made movement very difficult. There was a large unfounded area on one side of the island that I seeded with a number of buildings, hoping for a points grab as other players would enclose them for me (i.e. the Shemp tactic). Unfortunately, my placement left much of the area undevelopable so the game ended with unplaced Calpuli tiles... a first for us. Shemp won by a significant margin, with Kozure in second place.

Ra

For the sake of compare and contrast, we ended with Ra. I often go for a quick grab of anything that looks valuable when playing with more than 3 players, so I found myself with a decent haul quickly in the first era. This left me with no bidding tiles before most had even spent one, but it worked... the other players did not manage to get much in the remaining time before the Ra tiles ended the era. I had a similarly successful second era and despite a weak third I won the game.

Pablo says he preferred the dice game. Personally, I feel the original has a lot more going for it and probably has much longer legs. That said, the dice version is certainly more accessible since auction games are typically not forgiving to new players who don't yet know how to evaluate the worth of each tile.

Ships & Shipping (Cyclades, Macao)

Very late on this one.

We played Cyclades and Macao.

Cyclades

I take back everything I said about Cyclades and Risk. I hope no one actually read this and used that comparison to make a purchasing decision (highly unlikely, I know). I was trying to communicate that it was an approachable and simple conquest game but I took the comparison too far. The game is simple enough, there is rolling of dice and the theme is conquest, but the gameplay is all about auctions, timing and combos.

We've now played three times, and have each tried the three different starting positions. They seem balanced enough. Kozure surprised us all and was within one round of winning quite quickly (having built a metropolis and owning three philosopher cards). He won the bid for Athena and built the last metropolis... but could he make it to the end of the round intact?

No.

Shemp won Mars and swept in to steal one of Kozure's metropolises. In a subsequent turn, I stole the other (leaving Kozure with none). I was able to sneak in and build my last building for the win.. Since I was last, no one could stop me and won.

This is a great game. For the first half, players are trying to get their income going and get into position. Then, suddenly everyone is on the verge of winning and all players must carefully keep an eye on each other, the order that the gods are coming up and the creatures which are available. Some pretty crafty sequences can be pulled off, and much of the fun I have with the game is derived from this aspect. As an example, this is how I played my last turn for the win (more or less, it's been a while):

I had no metropolises, and only three buildings. I bid on Aries. I purchased the Griffon to steal half of Shemp's gold (which was a lot), I then used Polyphemus to "scare" my boats away from an island, allowing me to create a chain of ships to an island containing a metropolis. I purchased a number of units, crossed to the other island and conquered it. I purchased the red building, but it was not the one I needed to get my second metropolis so I used the Chimera to activate Cyclops's ability to change a building's colour, giving me the second metropolis for the win. That was fun.

Macao

Another game about timing and combos, Macao has seen a lot of table time recently (which is fine by me). I snagged a couple of ware doublers early on and made it my goal to gain the lion's share of my points this way. I was a distant first place for much of the game, but I suffered a late game stall as I ran out of things to deliver. I only had a few other activated buildings, a couple of baronesses, so I was not sure what to do. Shemp was coming on strong and on my last turn I simply took a quick delivery and the game was over. As bonus points were tallied, Shemp overtook me by +/- 10 points for the win (AGAIN). He then pointed out that a different move would have won me the game! (I could have built a different building, thus given me a different ware, which would have truncated his chain in the city and robbed him of some points in his last delivery. I guess he got me back for pointing out a similar missed opportunity in Cyclades a few months ago!

Another great game. This and Cyclades could very well be my picks for best games this year.

Try the left flank (Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage)

Years after I purchased the edition of Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, I still haven't played a full game. I've tried a few times, but each time we run long and abort. I even received the fabled pre-order bonus, the general miniatures (all off their bases, but otherwise intact)... and haven't played since.

I was therefore surprised and thrilled when Kozure called me up on saturday and suggested that he drop by and we give the game another try.

We set up and I drew Carthage (in our previous games I've always played Rome). It's obviously a whole different ballgame playing this faction: The Carthaginians receive all their generals up front, including the formidable Hannibal, whereas the Romans only have 2-3 generals at a time (and the quality of these varies considerably). When I played Rome, I felt that I had to wait for Carthage to act first, since it seemed to easy for them to overwhelm me if I struck first. I therefore played it safe and spent my time converting the tribe markers as I waited. Carthage, on the other hand, feels more "wide open" strategically... though obviously their restrictions on sea movement and sieging create their own kinds of limits.

Early on, Kozure played an event which prevented me from moving any units out of Africa. Slightly hobbled, I took Mago to Sicily and Hannibal north. Kozure landed a beachhead at Massilia. Things started to go badly for Kozure as Hannibal won several battles against the Romans there. My secret was attacking Kozure's left flank. No matter his hand size, I would go left and penetrate his defense before long (shouldn't have worked, but hey). Further disaster struck as Kozure holed up a significant force in Syracuse and I played the event that hands Cathage that city and destroys everyone in it...

Other fortuitous draws on my part and a dearth of 3 OP cards for Kozure meant that I was making steady ground. We did call the game before it was over, but at that time Sicily was almost entirely in Carthaginian control and Hannibal had brought a rag-tag band across the alps and was busy converting political control across the north and east of Italy.

It was looking good for me, but Kozure was not out yet. All my forces were paper thin by this point. I would have been unable to do much further damage, except for more political conversion. In the next turn, the Romans could take their reinforcements at Rome and potentially steamroll over me. There was still another game turn before Scipio Africanus was destined to arrive on the scene.

We promised ourselves that we would play again within a few weeks and actually finish a game. Here's hoping.

N.D.A. (unplublished prototype, Ra: The dice game)

This week, we played a game that Kozure designed. Since it's for a competition I won't talk about the details.

We ended the evening with a few rounds of Ra: The dice game... a father's day gift Kozure had recently received.

Ra: The dice game

From the recent craze that saw a number of boardgames get dice versions, we've previously played and enjoyed Roll through the ages. Ra is one of my favorite games, so how did I like the dice game? In short, I thought it was quite good. It's funny, though... the game goes through great lengths to replicate many aspects of the original, from the elements to the scoring, and yet it doesn't feel anything like it. That shouldn't be surprising, though; the original is a pure auction game and this has none. Anyway, the game feels closer to traditional dice games than Roll through the Ages does because the scoring is really based on getting certain set combinations (ex: If you are accumulating rivers, you need to get a triple river on a turn to "flood" it, you need at least three "civilization" results to satisfy the civ. requirement, etc). There are some board elements, and of course every time RA comes up the era is nearing it's close. Anyway, it works well and is quite fun for a 10-15 minute dice game.