Sunday, October 24, 2010

Let me guess, you're in the light (Macao, Mr. Jack x3)

It was just Shemp and I this week. I brought a bag of two player compatible games, and ultimately we decided to give Macao another go and revisit Mr. Jack.

Macao

Surely this would be the session where I would manage to break Shemp's 100% win streak, right? Wrong. It was close, though. I had many delivery doublers, and a fantastic card that allowed me to get an additional cube in each colour I drew that round (powerful near the end when everyone else is just drawing 1 cube). My downfall was an inability to connect city spaces, because otherwise I felt like I was doing ok. I lost by 2 points or so, meaning it was tense even through end-game scoring.

The flow of the game was odd: Some numbers weren't coming up so we both were navigating with windroses that had a number of empty spaces. Conversely, this led to turns with large numbers of cubes (we saw a couple of occasions where full player boards were emptied in a single turn).

This is a great game for 2!

Mr. Jack

We played three sessions. In each case, the player playing the cops won, but a few were pretty close. One game was aborted early as Shemp, playing Mr. Jack, moved all but one piece in the light. I remarked sarcastically "Let me guess, you're in the light" and then he slapped his forehead. He answered that he was in the dark. Having been bused so early, we aborted and started again.

Mr. Jack is consistently enjoyable as a two player game. It seems much harder to win as Mr. Jack, but the chase is still a lot of fun!

Monday, October 18, 2010

Midway = Half Way (The Fires of Midway)

The history of games played at WAGS is peppered with the occasional light wargame because Kozure likes to sneak 'em in once in a while to keep us honest. Although I enjoy some wargames, the card based light wargames (like Zero!, Airwar:Pacific, Naval Battles, etc) tend to have a couple of factors that keep me from enjoying them fully. Often they are highly luck driven and/ or seem somewhat unbalanced, but more often than not it's the fact that they are longer and more complicated than the weight of the game warrants. Still, I'm always happy to try a new game out and it's a time honoured tradition to allow the dictator to select that he/she wants so we came together this week to blow up some boats, planes and strategically significant microscopic islands.
That, and you never know because the next one might be a gem!

The Fires of Midway attempts to recreate the titular battle in a simplified card game, featuring arial combat and bombing/ torpedo runs against enemy ships. There is a central board which identifies the location of the American and Japanese boats, since distance is a very important concept of the game. Players each have a force consisting of boats and aircraft, represented by cards. On their turns, players must make a choice between making an aggressive attack, hanging back and repairing the ship or a mix of both. Once the choice is made, the planes fly to their target and a battle takes place. Players earn VPs for damaging or sinking enemy ships and for shooting down a specific number of enemy planes. As the game progresses, managing between the fires and leaks on your ships and the need for pressing the attack becomes more of an issue.

On my first turn, I took a couple of planes out and found BHarmer's ship hiding behind low cloud cover. My middling squadron had apparently eaten their wheaties that morning because they kicked the tar out of them. He spent the rest of the game fighting fires and watched as my partner Shemp came and did a repeat performance on his other ship. Over the course of the game, many of the casualties the americans suffered were the result of sending short range planes beyond their range more than anything! Things evened up a little before the end but overall it was pretty one sided and we won decisively. Kozure tells us the results mirror history relatively closely.

I had fun playing The Fires of Midway. For whatever reason, I got into it more than I often do and the random elements succeeded in making the game exciting. The game complexity and game length criticisms are valid, though. Our 4 player game wasn't over when we ended it 3+ hours later. There are a number of rules which felt like they could be dropped without sacrificing much in the gameplay, such as an elaborate targeting sub-mechanic which involves card play but ultimately only determines who gets to pick between two attack resolution tables.

Friday, October 08, 2010

Wishing for Gold (Pandemic, Beowulf, Dominion: Intrigue)

Still three players.

Pandemic

Since Pandemic was dropped from the lineup last week, I brought it again. Shemp picked it as our first game and we went with the mutation challenge (a.k.a. purple cube expansion). We had the dispatcher, the troubleshooter and the researcher.

Side note: Troubleshooter= awesome.

Things started out pretty leisurely, actually. Red was cured quickly and blue followed. The troubleshooter's ability to see where problems are going to be and then go there is very powerful. Suddenly, things started getting hairy and we were struggling to stay on top. We managed to get the four basic cures done, but purple still eluded us. I had five cards to spend to cure it, but none featured cities infected by purple, so I couldn't finish it. We drew the action card that allowed us to fish into the discard and drew what we needed to finish the game. After we won, I checked the infection cards to see what I would have drawn at the end of my turn... we would have lost the game because of an outbreak of Yellow in Johannesburg.

Close. Fun.

Beowulf

Beowulf made a rare repeat appearance. After last week's experiment to see if it played well with three (it did), it was nice to play it again. I unfortunately was unable to repeat last week's win, however. As the game was coming to a conclusion, I felt confident I would win the "battle with the dragon" episode. Kozure had pulled out, and it was me and Shemp left. I had the "All Iron Shield" (4 swords) and "Sword Hrunting" (3 swords), plus a few others. I lost. We had a good laugh at the odd turn of events, and it cost me a significant amount of points, but Shemp had a commanding lead regardless and it wouldn't have affected the outcome of the game.

As usual, this was a lot of fun. It's a nice mix of card management and luck.

Dominion: Intrigue

The closer for the evening was an all-intrigue Dominion. Shemp selected a deck called "Secrets and betrayal" (or something like that). All the cards with names like "Saboteur", "Shanty Town", etc, were in the deck. I won the game, so I hate saying that I played semi-randomly, but that's what happened. There was a memorable round where I drew my wishing well and wished for a "gold" treasure and drew it (remarkable because I only had one). I purchased a province and then immediately had to trash it as Shemp played his saboteur and my newly shuffled deck happened to have it on top. Easy come, easy go, I guess. I narrowly beat Kozure and we had a discussion afterwards about the danger of buying the Harem cards (2 VPs/ 2 treasure) near the end of the game... Duchies are worth 3 VPs for the same price but are dead weight. I had been buying them for some time, thinking the game was ending but it took longer than I thought and my deck was becoming inefficient (Shemp mentioned that the same thing was happening to him).

I've heard good things about the upcoming Prosperity expansion. We'll have to see how that plays out.

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Three's Company

For a variety of reasons, our attendance is most often three players these days. This is unfortunate as a good part of my collection is aimed either at two or four/five. Consequently, I frequently have trouble picking when it's my turn to dictate, because I/we don't have many games that are good with three that are also liked universally by the common triumvirate of Agent East, Shemp and me... or so I thought.

Shemp took the time to cross-index games recommended/best with three at BGG with the games that are in our collective collection. For the record these are (BGG ranking / title / playing time):

Best with Three

Light

140 Through the Desert 45 mins
142 Carcassonne: The City 30 mins
195 China 45 mins
251 Hey! That's My Fish! 20 mins
261 Colossal Arena 60 mins
309 Can't Stop 30 mins

Medium

7 Dominion 30 mins
29 Ra 60 mins
123 Yspahan 60 mins
146 Thunderstone 60 mins
155 Blue Moon City 60 mins

Heavy

2 Agricola 120 mins
4 Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization 240 mins
6 Le Havre 150 mins
9 Caylus 120 mins


Recommended with Three

Light

47 Galaxy Trucker 60 mins
48 Ticket to Ride: Europe 60 mins
57 Ticket to Ride 45 mins
68 Carcassonne 60 mins
87 Ingenious 45 mins
97 Citadels 60 mins
131 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game 90 mins
137 PitchCar 30 mins
141 For Sale 20 mins
154 Nexus Ops 90 mins
160 Bohnanza 45 mins
186 Formula D 60 mins
203 Wits & Wagers 25 mins
204 Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age 30 mins
219 Formula Dé 120 mins
227 Liar's Dice 15 mins
229 Zooloretto 45 mins

Medium

12 Race for the Galaxy 60 mins
22 Stone Age 60 mins
23 Pandemic 60 mins
27 Railroad Tycoon 120 mins
32 Chaos in the Old World 90 mins
38 Small World 80 mins
50 The Settlers of Catan 90 mins
55 Space Alert 30 mins
61 Taj Mahal 90 mins
69 In the Year of the Dragon 75 mins
70 Acquire 90 mins
74 Modern Art 45 mins
78 Tikal 120 mins
80 Cosmic Encounter 60 mins
92 The Pillars of the Earth 120 mins
93 Chicago Express 60 mins
96 Genoa 120 mins
108 Ghost Stories 60 mins
114 RoboRally 120 mins
115 Cyclades 60 mins
120 Glory to Rome 60 mins
121 Fury of Dracula 120 mins
139 Vegas Showdown 75 mins
166 Medici 60 mins
175 Antike 120 mins
180 Macao 90 mins
193 Domaine 90 mins
221 Lowenherz 90 mins
248 Lord of the Rings 60 mins

Heavy

1 Puerto Rico 90 mins
5 Power Grid 120 mins
11 Tigris & Euphrates 90 mins
13 Steam 120 mins
16 Age of Steam 120 mins
18 The Princes of Florence 90 mins
21 Goa 90 mins
25 Shogun 150 mins
30 Imperial 120 mins
51 Arkham Horror 180 mins
128 Maharaja: Palace Building in India 90 mins

Monday, October 04, 2010

An evening with Stephen Feld (Macao, In the Year of the Dragon, Jungle Speed x2)

This is a couple of weeks late, but we've moved recently and I haven't had the time to write. This week we had Bharmer back, making it a foursome.

As Kozure mentioned in his recent post, we played Macao, In the Year of the Dragon and Jungle Speed. I wanted to play both Feld games because I really admire him as a designer, depsite his inability to choose compelling themes. The combination of strategy, interesting mechanisms and ... pain, have produced two games I like very much (I haven't tried any of his other designs).

Macao

Kozure was determined to improve on his past showings in this game, and early on it looked like he would achieve his goal with a win. He had a commanding lead, but as is customary with this game Shemp came from behind and stole the win (this time, beating Kozure by a single point). I don't exactly understand how a game like this can be so dominated by a single player, but so far Shemp's record stands at 100% after +/- 5 plays. Bharmer had just learned the game and therefore came in last, but this is the kind of game where that is expected. Not sure how to explain my poor showing, though!

In the Year of the Dragon

Finally got this second game by Stephan Feld to the table. Another great title, but significantly more compact in it's playtime. This is the epitome of a great euro in my book: short play time, high strategy, low luck. Feld has a hard time coming up with compelling themes, but the gameplay is top notch. I won this one by keeping my end of turn points high and making sure to dominate the fireworks points. For some reason, I tend to do very well at this one contrary to my winless streak at Macao.

Jungle Speed

I had hoped to play Pandemic as the last game of the evening. We didn't have time, and I'll admit I was disappointed at first. That is, I was disappointed until Kozure suggest we play Jungle Speed. We played twice and had a blast as usual. What a fun game.