WAGS Chronicles II : The WAGSENING

Two weeks, three games (In the Shadow of the Emperor, Die Burgen Von Burgund, Power Grid: First Sparks)

2012-01-27T10:31:00.001-05:00

Two weeks ago, we pulled out a game that has languished on the shelves for far too long: In the shadow of the Emperor. Before this, it had been 3.5 years since we last played it!

Obviously, a substantial refresher was in order (and Bearbomb had never played). Luckily, once it gets going it's not too difficult. This is a great example of how well themed an otherwise abstract and dry game can be.

Shemp started as emperor, but after a failed coup by Kozure, I succeeded in taking over the throne. A mid-game alliance with Bearbomb allowed me to survive the next coup and after that I managed to fortify my position considerably and hold on through an all out assault by all players to take me down. Being emperor for several turns does not guarantee victory, but it sure makes it easier. There is so much to manage in this game... How to get majorities in order to be elected, but not necessarily keeping them since points are gained by being newly elected somewhere, not staying elected? How to manage and position your nobles as they age, marry and have children? It's quite a good game, and a very interesting and tight design.

It's a shame it only plays well with 4, or it might come out more often.

This week, we played 2 new (to us) games: Die Burgen Von Burgund (The Castles of Burgundy)and Power Grid: First Sparks.

I have been eyeing DBvB for quite some time now. Stephan Feld, the designer of the game, is one of my favorites right now. He consistently puts out games that are mechanically solid and fun (though they typically suffer from being thematically weak).

Well, first off, I think Feld heard to complaints about the weak theming of his previous games and set out to disprove them. Unfortunately, he did so by designing a game SO WEAK thematically, that the previous ones would shine in comparison. Luckily, the game itself is quite good.

Ostensibly, the theme is establishing the estate around your castle. In practice, it's about rolling dice and using the values rolled to either select from an available pool of tiles, place tiles on your player mat, or ship goods. There is a huge variety of tiles, each color coded according to function, and each imparting a specific benefit to the player once placed in the estate. At first, I was very worried that with so much to take in the game would be a chore to play, but as it turns out it makes logical sense and we were able to internalize most of it pretty quickly.

In addition to the selecting and placing of tiles, players are trying to generate victory points by filling colored regions on the board, and trying to do so before other players. The game then becomes a puzzle, trying to maximize combos of tile powers in order to generate the most VPs.

Players are engaged throughout as turns go very quickly. The game itself is longish, though. Our first game took 1.5 - 2hrs for three players, including rules explanation.

I was ahead for much of the early game, then Shemp jumped to the lead, and then we traded first place for most of the second half of the game. Kozure was not far behind, but trailed. Unfortunately for me, once the end game bonus points were tallied, I placed last and Shemp and Kozure tied for first, 2 points ahead of me! (Kozure won the tie breaker, fewest empty spaces).

When I think about it, the bonuses for completing regions make up a large chunk of the points but in some ways they are misleading. If every player completes the same number of regions in the same rounds, and by the end of the game roughly fill in the same number of regions, the points total will Bethesda same (regardless of who scores which regions, when). That may sound self evident, but more than most games i suspect that this is LIKELY to happen. The difference is going to be a few points here and there, generated by shipping and building combos allowing that extra region to be completed. Of course, the yellow "end game bonus" tiles might also swing things, and generate some long term strategy opportunities we haven't taken advantage of yet, so there's that.

Anyway, I very much liked it and Shemp and Kozure seemed positive as well. Feld strikes again.

Last, we played Power Grid: First Sparks. This is a game that, according to the designer, is being released to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the Funkenshlag (the original version of what is now known as Power Grid). Power Grid is a game I enjoy, but it's kind of overlong and extremely mathy. The stated goal of this redesign was to make it shorter and less mathy... How could I not give it a try?!!

In many ways, this is still very much Power Grid despite the re-theming to the stone age. There is still a power plant market, with an available market and a futures market, but now they are called tools and feature such seminal inventions as the basket and the spear. Their purpose is not to generate money but rather food, but in gameplay terms they are analogous. Over time, the baskets get bigger, and the spears pointier, and they allow players to gather food more effectively. To spice things up, "knowledge" cards are intermixed with the tools, giving the player that selects it an advantage in the game (such as fire, speech, etc). Many of the tools are tied to a specific food source, such as bear, fish or mammoth, so it is necessary to make sure that at least one of the player's clansmen are adjacent to the related source of food. The tools are auctioned in a weird, but much faster than regular Power Grid, reverse auction.

And that takes us to the board. This is the biggest change, in my opinion. Instead of having a preset map with various cities and costs to build between them, the board is made up of modular tiles. Spaces that are adjacent to each other can be built to, and the cost only calculated based on the total number of clansmen the player wants to play that turn + the number of clansmen already on the spaces to be occupied. This simplifies the math dramatically. There are no phases to the game limiting how many clansmen can be in which space at which time, it's strictly a function of expansion becoming more expensive as the board gets more crowded. Still, the blocking tactics found in Power Grid are still available here... It can definitely be a good move to build up against someone in an effort to make expansion for them more expensive.

I liked it. The wonderful animeeples, the humorous art on the tools and the addition of "knowledge cards" make the thematic shift work. It's much more accessible and plays in approximately an hour, which is huge. I found the gameplay quite good and still satisfying despite many othe simplifications. My only misgiving is that the modular board seemed less interesting that the various Power Grid maps... I'm hoping it won't get stale because of this. Also, I don't feel like the board positions mattered as much as they should (they did, as far as blocking, but long term positioning seemed somewhat irrelevant).

Falling behind (7 wonders, Robo-rally, I'm the boss!, King of Tokyo, Diamant, El Grande, Cosmic Encounter)

2012-01-15T00:51:00.004-05:00

I haven't been updating this regularly, but for the sake of posterity I'm going to record the games played in the last two weeks.

Honestly, it kills me to let the triumphant return of El Grande to the WAGS table pass without more comment, but so it goes. For the record, Shemp and I tied.

(stealth update)
Just wanted to comment on El Grande. If El Grande shows it's age at all, it's in downtime. Between turns, players are not involved in any way and this is something that more recent games have largely eliminated. Still, the gameplay remains extremely engaging for me. There's a simplicity to the process. Many of today's games,as fun as they are, appear to me to be a) variations on "cards with text that breaks rules" or "creatures with powers", or b) "games with so much going on that optimal play is not possible without AP". In the first case, the gameplay itself is usually not particularly interesting... The fun is in finding and creating combos between cards. In b) for many sessions there is no knowing whether the challenge is just doing better than the other guy at understanding the system. You're not necessarily just playing against other players, you are also just struggling to understand the games space. Many games appear interesting, but it's only an illusion because once you become familiar with what is going on and understand the good and bad moves are, you realize the choices are actually pretty obvious and it becomes dull. Anyway, in my mind El Grande is not one of those games. The interface is easy but the choices are always difficult. Great game.

In Soviet Russia Magic cards look at you!

2012-01-09T13:33:00.003-05:00

So, you remember Magic: The Gathering, right? You've seen the cards? Have you seen the cards with googly eyes?

If you clicked that link, you have now.

2011 in review

2012-01-04T22:52:00.009-05:00

2011 is now history. Here's what we played:

7 plays
7 Wonders

6 plays
Roma/ Roma 2: the arena

5 plays
King of Tokyo
Clans

4 plays
Dominion
Innovation

3 plays
Troyes
Tribune
Panic Station
Civilization (2010 version)
Vikings
Lords of Vegas
High Frontiers
Nightfall
Defenders of the Realm

2 plays
High Society
Maria
Power Grid
Macao
Quarriors
Frag
Go
Alien Frontiers
Ra
Dominant Species
1960: The Making of a President
Yomi
Ra: the dice game

1 play
Urban Sprawl
Last Night on Earth
Galaxy Trucker
China
TransEuropa
Duel of Ages
Android
Power Struggle
Junta: Vive El Presidente
Nexus Ops
Scrabble Slam!
Chaos in the Old World
Steam
Dungeon Twister
Dvonn
Survive!
Acquire
Dixit
Cyclades
Earth Reborn

So, that's 104 plays of 48 different games.

2011 was a lot of fun at WAGS, Perra joined us semi-regularly and Bearbomb looks like he might become a regular as well. We did spend a lot of time with just three players, though, and that has really impacted the choice of games this year. Unlike last year, I acquired quite a few games as the stream of interesting looking games (mostly on the war gaming and American style game side of things) seemed nearly endless. As is often the case with Wargames, I haven't played them much of them if at all (conflict of heroes: price of honor, Sekigahara, A few Acres of Snow), and with the American style games I find them fun but rarely great (Wrath of Ashardalon, Quarriors, Summoner Wars). This has been a really weak year for pure euros in my opinion, or maybe we've played enough that they all look too samey now. Stephan Feld seems to be one of the few designers still able to pique my interest in that field, but due to lack of availability I haven't tried any of his latest games. A few hybrid or otherwise "oddball" titles proved fun, and I think this is the direction the euros will have to go if I'm going to be interested these days (innovation, High Frontier, Nightfall, etc)

Game of the Year
Hard to pick this year. Nothing stands out as a really great, innovative strategy game... Which is the type of game I usually prefer to choose for this slot. I'm going to to pick King of Tokyo, since it does what it sets out to do about as well as it could have. It's not aiming very high, as far as that goes, but the gameplay is fun and the production is great.

I quite enjoyed Tribune, which was new to us this year, but it's actually a few years old. Troyes would likely be the top contender for strategy games, but it's not quite there as a game (not sure... Needs editing I think). Nightfall I also quite enjoyed, but the art and card design bothers me enough that it's not a contender (but that chaining mechanic is quite cool!).

Most innovative/ Interesting game of the Year
Hear I'm going to give it to Innovation. Sure, it's just a card game but it's weird in a wonderful sort of way. I like that the powers become so powerful if certain combos come out, just like Glory to Rome but the games are quite different.

Catacombs became more widely available this year, and I picked it up along with both expansions. We have had lots of fun playing this at home. This is clearly a very innovative game, meshing the dungeon crawl with crokinole... And it works! Not a game for WAGS, but If my oldest son was picking a game of the year, I'm convinced it would be this (well, Summoner Wars might give it a run for it's money I guess).

Wrath of Ashardalon, although not really a great game, is also quite innovative in how it manages to capture a fun dungeon crawl in roughly 1 hour. I doubt this category of game, the short thematic dungeon crawl, is likely to see a better entry.

Lastly, RISK Legacy appears to be a very innovative game but we haven't played it yet, so we'll have to wait until next year to see if it works in practice. Who would of thought that a game that asked you to write on the board and tear up cards would be seen as a good thing?

On an even more personal note, gaming with the kids continues to be great fun. Catacombs, Wrath of Ashardalon, Quarriors!, King of Tokyo, Summoner Wars, Fauna, Zooloretto, Jamaica, Dice Town, Agricola, etc, are all games that have seen much table time with my oldest son even if they don't always show up at WAGS. Although my second son shows much less interest, he will still occasionally play Dice Town, Jamaica or Sorry Sliders. My third appears to have more in common with the oldest. Haba games such as Animal upon Animal, Gold Donkey and Orchard get played a lot (alongside other trusty favorites, such as Chicken Cha Cha Cha, Gulo Gulo, etc, etc).

Being the father of three awesome boys is a really fantastic privilege!

It takes a village (Urban Sprawl)

2011-12-19T21:37:00.004-05:00

Chad Jensen is a designer of many games that lots of people like. Mostly, the Combat Commander series and Dominant Species. Although Kozure and Bearbomb are fans of CC, I prefer Conflict of Heroes. We've played Dominant Species a few times, and although I recognize that it's a good game it seems too long by a turn or two, and in my opinion El Grande does a very similar thing in a much tighter package. Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying that although I looked forward to playing Urban Sprawl, i didn't expect to love it.

Kozure and I were once again accompanied by Bearbomb, but this time he brought along a friend. 4 is the maximum number of players for US, so I was a little worried that a long game would go even longer.

Let's start at the beginning. Urban Sprawl is a game about city building. The board is a grid representing a town, and it starts with some buildings built. Over the course of the game, players will take out permits to allow them to build buildings in different parts of the city. Various buildings are randomly made available for construction, depending on the stage of the game. A host of random events come up throughout, giving bonuses or allowing a player to change the landscape in some way. Finally, in the second stage of the game onwards, certain roles are handed out, such as mayor or union boss, based on specific criteria (such as the player controlling the most valuable factory building).

The placement scoring rules encourage players to play similar buildings adjacent to each other, but other rules will motivate players to play elsewhere. The end result is that the city organically grows with some semblance of zoning intact (industrial zones, residential zones, etc), but it's not at all rigid so the final city is realistically diverse and quirky in it's layout... Just like real cities are. That part was pretty cool and well realized. The various building powers are interesting and working out good combos of buildings to play and clever placements of said buildings is definitely fun.

But. But.

Wow, it's long. and the events are really frequent and random. And don't even think that your money or board position will look anything like it does now on your next turn, because it won't.

The main decision a player will have to make revolves around working out the best placement for the buildings he wants to build. It isn't a simple or easy decision, as it requires some calculation and analysis of a fairly busy board, but it's not bad and certainly reasonable and enjoyable. Unfortunately, for me, the sheer number of random events that happen at the end of each turn felt excessive. They often have a significant impact on the game, but more than anything they just added too much time.

From his earlier designs, I know that the designer likes a heavy dose of chaos in his games. Similarly, length almost seems likes a preference. In my opinion, what worked in combat commander didn't really work here as well. It was a fun game, but after nearly 4 hours we still had over an hour to go... That kind of play time isn't justified by the mechanics. I realize that removing the events entirely would kill some of the flavor that the designer intended but a reduction would certainly help.

Anyway, there was quite a bit of movement in points throughout the game, though generally Bearbomb and I exchanged first and second place throughout most of the game. I had concentrated on civic buildings, And gathered the media marker early after Bearbomb had said a number of events gave bonuses for it. He wasn't kidding! It seemed like I was getting an endless supply of 1 dollar + 1 vp awards from all the events.
Bearbomb and Dale seemed to be very good judges of how to place on the board to reap majority bonuses.

At the end of the game, the roles give bonuses to the players that happen to have them. Like Dominant Species, these felt too large to me. I had the mayor and the lawyer, which netted me and absurd amount of points, stealing the game from Bearbomb.

So, I liked it. Some parts were really fun, and quite innovative. However the length, and particularly the wild randomness in relation to the length, bring it down a notch for me.

Keeping Track

2011-12-15T15:44:00.004-05:00

Last week we played Troyes, followed by Tribune. I asked if we could give End of the Triumvirate a miss because I was fighting a cold and wasn't up to the requirements of deep strategery.

We had close games in both cases, though in both games the people who were tied or close to tied were Agent Easy and Shemp. My head was not in it that night.

I believe that Easy squeaked the win in both cases (Troyes - tie?, Tribune, tied for victory conditions, but one point difference on score?) but I am uncertain.

My recollection is hazy but I plead illness-induced head-fog.

Another kick at the can (Dominion x2, Panic Station, King of Tokyo)

2011-11-27T10:03:00.002-05:00

The Wags group welcomed this week a new player, ececec. Unfortunately I arrived late and missed the two opening games of Dominion (with various expansions thrown in). All I know is that ececec beat Kozure bay single point in the last game.

We set up Panic Station. Ececec wanted to give it a try and I think we all wanted to give it another shot as well. Since last week's game, I realized a few things... First, the game DOES have a backstory that makes sense of a few of the game's odd mechanics. Apparently, the aliens are immune to traditional bullets so the players are searching for bullets specially developed by the decimated inhabitants of the ship to combat the aliens. Secondly, the androids are linked to the human's psychi so that's why they both get infected simultaneously. Whatever.

This session was not like the earlier sessions. Shemp was the infected one, but he decided to lay low for a while. So much so that I literally had no idea who I couldn't trust and just one turn before I thought I could win the game for the humans no one else was infected (and as far as I could tell, no attempts had been made either). I started looking around the table in case the host card has been accidentally left out of the game.

I then committed a grave error. I ended my turn in the hive, with all the gas cans I needed, but without any actions left to actually burn the hive. In swoops Shemp. I deflect the infection with a gas can, but then have only two left. Over in the other corner of the map, ececec does a heat scan and it's revealed that I am still human. He then trades a gas can with my android. On his turn, Kozure does the same. My turn again, oops! Let's move the critters and sure enough 4 of them come into the hive (1 in 4 chance of that happening!) and my human is pulverized. We then spend a few rounds coordinating a run by Kozure and Ececec to get my gas cans and burn the hive while avoiding the swarms and Shemp. A well placed grenade thinned the swarm nicely, and Kozure succeeded in putting the hive to the torch.

Again, I had fun,despite the somewhat clunky rules and thematic oddness/ blandness. It does keep you guessing, and it's pretty challenging for both the humans and the infected. I think it would play better with more players, and I look forward to trying it again.

We then finished with a session of Kings of Tokyo. Ececec picked up on it quickly, and luckily didn't seem too bothered when he was eliminated mid game. Kozure's mekadragon, equipped with those damned Wings and Acid breath destroyed us all.

It's just about a perfect game for what it is.

Cans of Gas Stave off Alien Infection + I Have the Stupid (Panic Station x 2, High Society x 2)

2011-11-22T14:16:00.008-05:00

Last week (November 17th) we played Panic Station, twice, plus one other game. Evidently that other game stands out so well in my mind that I've completely forgotten what it was . I'm sure Agent Easy will be along shortly to correct the record. [edit: Agent Easy recalled that it was High Society]

[edit - added "High Society"]

High Society

This is always a fun, quick game. The first game, Agent Easy and I came very close in terms of points but he had slightly more money remaining.

The second game was tight - Agent Easy and Pablo were tied for points and for most money remaining, so it came down to highest purchased item value.

Such a clever little game.

Panic Station

What to say about panic station? Traitor mechanic, exploration, high-tech weapons and equipment, explosives, sci-fi setting... what's not to like?

Execution, it seems.

I wanted to like this one, I really did, but the weird "why is this done this way?" moments started to pile up about half-way through the game and never really went away.

First up, why can't humans use guns? The "in-game" explanation is that they're carrying the flamethrower, so they don't have the "room". OK, fine. They have the flamethrower to purge the alien nest. Sure, I can buy that. But... why do they have to find or trade for the fuel to actually use it INSIDE the facility they're supposed to be purging?

OK, only androids can use guns. I can also accept that, if you assume that the androids have built-in weapons that cannot be detached. But the upgrades are detachable - indeed, they START detached... once again, INSIDE the facility they've been sent to clear out.

Also, equipment teleports back and forth between team members of the same colour, but not between team members of other colours. In addition, if the human gets infected, the same-colour android gets infected as well, and vice versa. Say what?

If a human/android goes down, all their equipment disappears. Huhn? It's possible to lose the game because you can't possibly get enough fuel cans because your team mates got eaten by a parasite and apparently their equipment evaporates when your vital signs disappear?

Too many shaky "plot-points" that might have been 'hand-waved' with better background story writing, or better yet, avoided altogether with better rules writing.

Also, once again, the future is white ... except for one human who may or may not be Asian (Raven). They couldn't fit in a single visible minority? [edit: judging by surname "Ramirez" would seem to be Hispanic, so not entirely WASP] To top it off, all the androids look identical and are the stereotypical bald female hottie with silvery no-iris eyes.

The art is lazy. Actually, I take that back, the equipment art and the station location art is fine. The humans, androids and parasites are lazy. Compare:

Picture of "Alien Parasite":

with picture of "Japanese beetle Larvae":

You're using barely modified images of insect larvae as your evil swarming Alien/Body-Snatcher-esque take-over creature? Did someone on the production team have a bad phobia-generating incident on their lawn?

Okay. Deep breath.

I'm giving this one at least more try before I pass final judgment because people seem so crazy about it on BGG and usually the chattering masses aren't completely wrong, at least at BGG.

So far, though, not very impressed.

Now, to be fair, I screwed up the first game because I (and no one else) forgot the vitally important (but thematically none-too-intuitive) rule that people can avoid being infected by trading a gas can (... wait, what?) so I thought everyone was infected when in fact only three people were infected. I tried to make the case for ending the game early when in fact there was at least one viable human left.

In the end, the infected still won, but the experience was somewhat tainted.

Not to be outdone by my stupid mistake in the first game, I then nearly made the exact same mistake in the second game, fortunately it was spotted and corrected before it did too much damage.

UNfortunately, a strange (though probably not entirely unusual) combination of card trading around mid-game utterly confused both Shemp and Agent Easy making it look like I thought I was uninfected when I was, or was infected when I wasn't (I was actually infected), so a long period passed where Shemp and Agent Easy thought I was playing very stupidly, when in actuality I was really doing the only logical thing, which was to stay away and keep my infected guys out of danger (and being forced to trade back the stolen gas cans) because I had no infection cards left.

Not so! (This time.)

What had happened is that I had tried repeatedly to infect Pablo, only to be given a gas can each time, with the net effect that I had taken all of his gas cans. By reasoning out loud, Agent East figured out what had happened, but this clued Shemp in at the same time. Fortunately for humanity, some canny play by Pablo and Shemp allowed the humans enough time to search for more gas cans and win the game by burning the nest. Cleanse it with FIRE!

Humans 1, Aliens 1.

Now if I could just remember what the other game we played was, I could close down this blog entry in peace. [yeah, it was High Society]

Maria x2

2011-11-16T23:13:00.002-05:00

I'm a few weeks behind, but I wanted to post this before tomorrow's game night so I will keep it short.

Over the past two weeks we've played Maria, the successor to Friedrich. It apparently plays best with three, which is very useful in our group (Friedrich is best with four).

In a nutshell, although we've only played the simple version so far I really like it. Movement is a logistical challenge for the players that aren't playing Maria since units must maintain supply and supply is slower than the troops. Combat is very interesting because the board is separated in regions and each region has a traditional card suit assigned to it. During combat, only cards from the appropriate suit can be used. This has the interesting effect of encouraging players to pay attention to where battles have been fought, because if a suit is exhausted by an earlier battle it can be advantageous to try to take advantage.

Anyway, the full game apparently introduces politics and different armies that change the dynamics substantially. Looking forward to trying it, though it will be hard to find the 5 hours to commit to it.

In our first game, I played France and managed a win on the very last action of the last turn of the game. Similarly, in our second game I won on the last action of the last turn as the Prussians. In both games, I was extremely lucky with my card draws so I can't claim any particular prowess at the game! So far, each power seems to play quite differently (the supply situation for the prussians is much more difficult than it is for France, it seems to me) which is nice to see.

Anyway, highly recommended even at the basic game.

If Babe Ruth was chased by zombies (Last Night on Earth)

2011-10-28T22:44:00.002-04:00

To celebrate Halloween we played Last Night on Earth, a game that I enjoy well enough but only really gets played this time of year.

Me and Kozure were the zombies, Pablo and Shemp were the humans.

The last few times we've played this it's been on irregular maps, so playing the "Save the Townsfolk" scenario felt a little like a throwback.
Since the hero's objective is to keep searching until they find 4 townsfolk, the actual gameplay boiled down to: run to the other side of the board, where the zombies aren't, and then search. Ok, the zombies are close again, run back to the other side. For whatever reason, I don't recall previous games to be this way.

Anyway, the back and forth running went inform a while, occasionally (ok, frequently) peppered by Johnny blasting a zombie with his endlessly loaded shotgun. As the zombies, we were having a hard time cornering the heroes, so we weren't managing to damage them much. In thelastthird of the game, the hero's had found the villagers and were trying to survive until morning. Three of the heroes had taken refuge in the gun store in the corner, trying to keep the horde of undead at bay. It was quite close in the end, but the heroes prevailed because only one of them fell victim to the zombies.

The highlight of the game, for me, was when Johnny the jock sprinted through a wall of zombies. He attacked one and rolled a 5. Pablo, who was playing John, needed anything except a 5 or a 6. Oddly, he yelled "roll a 2!". The zombies did roll a 2 and Pablo nearly jumped out of his hair in excitement.

Clearly, comparisons between Johnny and Babe Ruth's famous prediction were earned and given...

Metal fatigue is a harsh mistress (Galaxy Trucker, Power Grid w/ alternate power plants)

2011-10-16T00:04:00.003-04:00

The recent announcement of another expansion for Galaxy Trucker reminded me it had been a while since we had played this great game. I though it would be fun to try a really punishing series of flights, so we skipped round 1 entirely and instead did the following:

Ship 2 with evil machinations
Ship 3 with evil machinations and 2 Rough Road Ahead cards
Ship 3A with evil machinations and 2 Rough Road Ahead cards

The first round went pretty smoothly, but starting with round 2 we really started feeling the heat. The rough road cards are pretty tough... Round 2 had a card that made any energy use cost an extra tic-tac and another card that reduced our ship's speed for every ship connection that matched a 3 connector with a 2 or a 1. As you can imagine, ship building was slow and batteries/ furnaces where hot commodities.

... But we all made it without horrible consequences. My MVP was certainly the techie blue alien, since it made the first battery expenditure each encounter free.

Round three saw Remorseless fate (which is every bit as bad as it sounds) and Metal Fatigue. Now, between remorseless fate and metal fatigue, I thought the first sounded the most dangerous. Shemp would beg to differ.

Before launching, Shemp pointed out that this was his best ship ever. No bad connections, plenty of the tiles he wanted, every space used up. The problem is that ship 3A looks a lot like the Enterprise... It's got a very narrow middle. A single mishap there, and the ship splits in half. During the second event, Shemp lost a piece which protected the critical part through metal fatigue and then in event 3 a meteor struck and Shemp had to pick whether he wanted to keep flying with the front or the back of his ship. He chose the front.

When Shemp arrived at the end, he had approximately 5 tiles left in his ship, a single crew member, and no engines ( he lost his final one on the last card). It was pretty funny. Also, since ship 3 A is uninsurable, he paid nearly 30$ for the damage.

Ultimately, Kozure won the game. I actually thought I had it, but he snuck past me by a few points. I really enjoy this every time it comes out, even though it's definitely an experience game and not to be taken seriously.

Power Grid

We then played a three player game of Power Grid with the new power plants expansion (the expansion isn't new, only new to us). Although I enjoy Power Grid, I find it requires too much constant calculation which kind of ruins the pace. Also, I dislike the lull that seems to often happen during the middle of the game because nobody ever wants to by the middle powerplants. Apparently, the solution is to play with only 3 players and use the alternate plants because I found this game quite enjoyable.

It's hard to pick out the differences, but I never felt like nothing on offer was worth buying. We did have an odd result because many of the higher plants got pulled before the start ofthegame (as per the 3 player rules). This led to an end game where only I actually could power the 17 cities once they were built. I unintentionally foiled Shemp's hail Mary to beat me because he planned on buying up the resources preventing me from actually powering to capacity. I decided at the last minute not to power all my cities on the before last turn and kept the resources I needed for the last round so I did pull off the win.

Anyway, it would be interesting to know if the new plants simply have a lower capacity and the struggle to attain 17 is intentional. Either way, it was fun.

Shempuzelan TV is more entertaining than Easylander jousting (Civilization, King of Tokyo)

2011-10-09T22:36:00.002-04:00

We played another three player session of the new Sid Meier's Civilization. It was Kozure, Shemp and I as Russia, Egyptians and Americans (respectively).

I was flailing around, not really having much success getting a strategy going (poor choices in city locations meant that the available resources were a touch thin). I purchased the Hanging gardens early so my military was easy to come by, so I went that way. Kozure had quite a productive empire, but also his military was surpassing me in technology. Shemp, meanwhile, was racing after a cultural victory.

Since no one had ever come close to wining with culture, it was not a threat we saw coming. Suddenly, Shemp was on the verge of winning! Kozure and I tried to stop him but Shemp was generating culture points too quickly. A last ditch attempt to thwart him was interrupted by his cultural superiority (he proposed we watched tv, when all we could offer was offer Jousting).

Anyway, Shemp won!

We ended off with another game of King of Tokyo. This one is getting lots of play in and out of WAGS.

Ketchup (Vikings, China, Clans, King of Tokyo, TransEuropa)

2011-09-30T21:13:00.003-04:00

We thought we'd be five players this week, but then, before I knew it, we were back to three.

Pablo, Shemp and I gathered around a large bag of games. Our dictator was absent, but ordered us to play a very specific sequence of games in his absence. Then, the sequence was revoked. In our confusion, we ignored all instructions and chose to play a large number of short games so that Pablo could rip through his unplayed list that much faster.

We started with Vikings, which is a game I like very much. It packs a lot of game in a small package. Unlike a lot of games that try to insert a random factor in the hopes of making each game "different", Vikings succeeds at forcing you to consider each new round carefully once the tiles and Viking combinations are out. I was rocking this game, and built a very efficient set of manned islands. I started the evening with a win.

We followed with China. Another game that feels like a big game in a slim package, China never fails to conclude in approximately 1/2 hour and still provide a nice strategic experience. Shemp was gunning for me, and prevented me from completing any chains but a misunderstanding of the rules regarding emissaries caused him to fail his blocking strategies there. Pablo did manage a long chain, but ultimately I had enough majorities to pull win #2.

Clans followed. In my mind, anyone who enjoys China should also enjoy Clans. The games are completely different from a gameplay perspective, but they have a similar strategic weight, play length and semi-abstract nature. I goofed a few too many times during the game, and ultimately kept setting up the wrong colours. Shemp dominated this one.

Next up was King of Tokyo, the first repeat play for Pablo. I went first, and snagged the tentacles. Shemp stayed in Tokyo most of the game, but I was rolling lots of 3s and made it to 15 points without spending much time in the city. Shemp knocked us down with the -5 vp card but it wasn't enough... I used the tentacles to steal the jet pack from Shemp, forcing him to step down and I gathered the last few points required for the win. Pablo was yearning for hearts throughout the game but he couldn't roll them to save his life. On the other hand, he managed huge smack downs of 5 attacks on at let two occasions... This is a very fun game that achieves exactly was it's going for. Bravo.

Lastly, we played TransEuropa. In our first round, Pablo, in his first time ever playing the game, ended while Shemp still needed 8 links and I needed 5! Shemp managed to hang on a few rounds with his 3 lives before succumbing. In the last round, Pablo and I ended up tying so it was a shared victory for the final game of the evening.

The King with Wings (Roma/ Roma 2: The Arena x2, Lords of Vegas, King of Tokyo x2)

2011-09-26T21:39:00.005-04:00

Kozure, Shemp and I gathered this week to play an evening of Vegas games. It didn't work out due to a lack of available time, but what can you do.

Roma/ Roma 2: The Arena

As Kozure was in charge of his lads that evening, Shemp and I played two rounds of Roma. We pitted the two decks against each other to see how that went. We'll certainly have to play several more times to really know if one is stronger than the other, but it certainly seems to me that the original Roma is a swingier deck, with more opportunity to score big points when things work and potential to get none at all if things don't. Roma 2 seems smoother, with better odds of getting useful cards but a slower overall pace.

In our first game, I was getting creamed because I couldn't get any VP generation going. I was down to one vp if i'm not mistaken. Luckily, Shemp lost all ability to roll the dice he needed, consistently failing rolls that had a 5 in 6 chance of working. I didn't lose that last point and in fact landed two forums and started reaping the rewards. A few short rounds later I bounced back and won the game. I did realize one thing, though... Once the opponent is close to winning, getting VPs can be a bad move if it ends the game before you have more than the othe player. It was necessary to bleed out VPs from Shemp before claiming them. Tricky.

Our second game was more even, and I don't remember who won.

Still enjoying this two player game. Long live Herr Feld!

Lords of Vegas

With the kids in bed, we started our game of Lords of Vegas. As the game developed, a few patterns emerged...

1) I once again started growing a large casino in the big center-left block. I seem to do this every game.
2) Kozure once again received a disproportionate amount of disjointed properties.
3) I got into a war over a casino with Kozure. Normally, this happens between me and Shemp. Although in the end I managed to wrest control from Kozure and end the game with two decent casinos, the constant re-rolling of the casino dice drained both our money and made it hard to stay competitive with Shemp.

There wasn't a huge amount of trading this game. Not sure why... The opportunities seemed harder to find (though Shemp tried his best!).

Shemp won by quite a large margin. Kozure and I were in a tight race for second.

King of Tokyo

Tom Vassel and Michael Barnes have both recently talked up King of Tokyo and so when I saw it I thought i'd give it a try. It's a very simple and mostly silly game about competing monsters trying to destroy Tokyo and each other. Although there aren't a ton of games with this theme, it's also not really particularly original. What sets this game apart is the simplicity and focus of the design. You are either a creature in Tokyo, dealing damage to all the monsters outside of Tokyo OR you are a creature outside of Tokyo dealing damage to the monster currently in Tokyo. Since the monster inside Tokyo cannot heal, it creates a natural cycle of monsters entering Tokyo, trying to stay as long as possible, and then leaving to lick it's wounds. The game is won by either accumulating 20vps or being last monster standing. It's a dice rolling game where you can either roll wounds, healing, VPs or victory points. Each player rolls three times, hoping to get dice in the combination they are trying to achieve, yada, yada, yada. A deck of cards representing upgrades spices things up as players can save up energy to purchase them and slowly transform their creature from, for example, a simple giant dinosaur to A GIANT DINOSAUR WITH TWO HEADS, WINGS AND ALIEN METABOLISM!!!. It's easy to teach, it's short and a lot of fun to play. Big thumbs up from me and easily the best boardgames Richard Garfield has done since Robo-rally.

In our first session, Shemp dominated Tokyo for nearly the whole game because he managed to snag the "wings" upgrade early, which allowed him to spend energy to ignore damage. I think Kozure won the second game, but I'm not sure.

Bilkis' sacks of sand (Roma 2: Arena, Macao, 7 Wonders + Leaders expansion x2)

2011-09-10T00:26:00.004-04:00

Roma 2: Arena

When I purchased Roma, I actually thought I was purchasing Roma 2: Arena. I remembered reading that one had text instead of icons, and that the same one had more paths to victory, but I didn't know which was which. When I saw Roma at j&j cards in Waterloo, I looked at the back and saw that the cards were text based, not icons, and purchased it. Unfortunately, the picture on the back of the box is of the German version, which uses text, but the north American version of Roma 1 uses icons. I purchased the wrong one. Anyway, figuring it couldn't matter that much, I opened it and we played it anyway. As it turns out, me and Shemp liked it quite a bit. Sure, many games are lopsided and the only likely path to victory is having Forums, but it was quick and enjoyable. Shemp decided to purchase Roma 2, figuring that at the very least we could try the variant where the decks from both games are pitted against each other. This week, we got a chance to fruit out (the base game, not pitting the decks against each other). It's good. There are definitely more paths to victory, and the game seems less fragile (less games will end because they couldn't get their engine going before they went broke), but the tradeoff seems to be a significantly longer game. I'd say I did like it better than Roma 1, but not by a wide margin.

Shemp won the game by emptying the vp pile, scoring one "phantom point" (I.e. The vp pile was exhausted, but the bank owed him one more vp). The phantom point broke the tie, making the game 19 to 18. Well played.

Macao

I was in the mood to play Macao again, just to see if Shemp's streak is truly over. In short, it is. The game was very close, between me and Kozure, though. A miscalculation left Shemp 1 cube short of scoring big,leaving him behind. Between me andKozure, it came down to the bonus end game points, and I had more.

About 4 rounds in, I activated the artisan. This card allows you to activate one card per turn without spending the cubes (as long as you have the necessary cubes in your supply). Between that card and the various mistressesthatgaveme a free cube in their co our every turn, I was flush with goods cubes. I either played very poorly or Kozure played extremely well, because I should have killed the other two with that combo so early in the game.

7 Wonders: Leaders expansion

We capped of the evening with 2 sessions of 7 Wonders with the Leaders expansion. It's a simple expansion that introduces a new deck of cards representing famous leaders throughout history. There is a pre game draft to deal each player 4 leader cards and before each age players choose which leader, if any, players want to pay to put in play.

The end result is not terribly different from the base game. The leaders allow a little more long term strategy, which is nice, that's pretty much it. Shemp commented that the downside to having these leaders is that it predetermines a strategy for you and reduces the interaction as players concentrate on their cards instead of blocking opponents.

The art continues to be very nice, and the game remains a very fun and fluid despite the additions. I'll probably keep playing with the addition in future sessions but I'm sure I won't really miss it if I play someone else's copy.

I won the first game using a combination military and science victory (as Rome, led by Ceasar, the guy from 300 and Alexandre the Great). Kozure won the second with a more focussed military strategy that apparently also involved burying all the brick in order to prevent others from building.

Spite upon spite (High Frontier, Quarriors x2)

2011-09-06T21:59:00.002-04:00

The four of us (Kozure, Shemp, Pablo and I) started with an intro game of High Frontier. Knowing that it's a difficult game, Kozure thought a learning game involving just trying to build a factory on mars would be a good idea to ease Pablo into the system (although, as Shemp aptly pointed out in our email correspondence leading up to the game, "not good" is a very generous description of our skill level with High Frontier). What is it about this game that is so challenging? Every time I play, I spin around in circles accumulating fuel endlessly only to realize that I could have launched much earlier. This game was no exception... I had forgotten how the air break leading to Mars worked, so I was trying to come up with a rocket that could get to the planet and still pay the landing costs. Anyway, Kozure got off to an early lead with a mission to drop of the robonaut he needed to build the factory. I was behind him ( once again wasting my time refueling at a nearby planet, not realizing it would be unnecessary due to the air breaking). Kozure essentially lost his lead by blowing up while going through a danger zone.

Then, out of nowhere comes Shemp with all the parts required for the refinery and successfully lands. Shemp for the win!

Pablo seemed willing to play again. We'll see.

Next up, we played 2 games of Quarriors, the new dice building game from Wiz-Kids.

Quarriors is a game that follows much of the Dominion model... Draw a hand (of dice, in this case), see what you can play from your hand and purchase one die from the center. The fact that the dice represent creatures and that there is much inherent randomness gives the game a very distinctly chaotic and light feel, but for a 1/2 hour game it's fun. I've personally been playing this quite a lot with my eight year old son and having a great time of it. The variety of creatures is very good because they very cleverly include several variant creatures and spells for use with each dice. There are synergies to be found between the dice, which is fun, but since it's a dice game you never know whether the combinations you are shooting for will really pan out.

Anyway, for the record Pablo won one of the games. He was very proud, because it was his first win at WAGS. I think I shed a tear of pride.

A new history (Troyes, Innovation x2)

2011-08-31T23:39:00.002-04:00

Kozure, Shemp and I again.

Shemp once again asked us to bring an assortent of games and convince him that what we wanted to play is what he had picked. I don't know that either of us convinced him of anything, but he did ultimately bring games I brought.

Ha!

We started with Troyes, a game that I liked well enough on first play but neither Shemp or Kozure thought much of, apparently. The second play was remarkably easier for all of us, and we all commented afterwards that it was much more enjoyable now that we had a better grasp of what was going on. As far as comparisons go, I'd still have to say it most reminds me of Macao but I still prefer that one better. Either way, I did like it. Both Kozure and I were running short on dice as Shemp concentrated on occupying the main buildings (his secret goal to no one's surprise). I spent longer with fewer dice, however, and this showed up in my last place finish. Kozure was better at snagging VPs throughout and won.

Looking forward to trying this one again.

Next, we played two hands of Innovation. This game is also fun, but I feel like we are missing something because the game never seems to get past the 5-7th age, and once a player gets in the lead it's hard to see how to catch him. We chatted afterwards and discussed that it might be a better strategy to try to just burn through the decks and get to the alternate victory conditions in the late ages if a player is falling behind on achievements. We'll have to try it next time.

In both games, we made good use of cards that stole points from other players. Kozure won the first game and I won the second.

Sometimes, the dice hate you (Duel of Ages)

2011-08-20T08:50:00.006-04:00

... and sometimes they just hate Kozure.

We dug up from the vault a game we hadn't played in five years... Duel of Ages.

This is an old favourite of mine. Flawed in many ways but still lots of fun and there still isn't really anything like it that I know of. For anyone that isn't familiar with the game, it's a cross between a tactical wargame and Cosmic Encounter. Two teams of 4-10+ iconic characters from the past to the future (depending on the number of players and their experience) run around on a modular map. They compete to dominate a number of challenges all the while beating each other up. The past to future thing means that Conan the Barbarian might be running around a mall parking lot with a laser gun.

For me, the silliness of the time/ space mashups are only occasionally amusing. The real draw is the tactical game. It combines characters, special abilities, cool equipment, line of site, opportunity fire, terrain, vehicles, etc, etc, in a really fast playing and relatively simple design. The biggest problem I have with the game is the way equipment is handed out... when a character successfully defeats a challenge, the player might get to draw a card (or more) from the stack. The issues arise because the deck is HUGE and the variety is vast. You might draw a turreted weapon, a pet tiger, a powerful gun, a hovercraft, a blowpipe, etc, etc, etc. Since most characters have advantages with certain weapons over others the luck of the draw can get really irritating if you never draw anything useful. Conversely, if you often draw the perfect items for your characters your opponent can be at a significant disadvantage.

I realize and appreciate that part of the charm of the game might be in making the best of what you draw. Unfortunately, some of the stuff i just so much better than the rest that it remains a sore point for me. Going into the game, me and Kozure both had thoughts on how to improve this aspect and we tried two variants. At first, we tried having 8 cards face up and having a successful player choose the one he wanted (with the option to sweep the cards away and draw a facedown card). This led to a somewhat overpowered game, and reduced the surprise that normally comes with revealing your equipment to your opponent. About 3/4 of the way through the game we switched to simply doubling the awarded cards and then keeping half of what we drew. In the end, I think that this was the better solution and I think I'd definitely play this way again.

As for the actual game, we played with 8 characters each on 4 platters (the modular game boards) for 3 hours. I had a fairly brawny bunch with characters that where good with weapons (like a couple of cowboy types) and a few terminator-like futuristic robots. I would say Kozure had a pretty well balanced party, with a better representation of characters throughout the ages.

As the game developed, Kozure poor luck was astonishing. He was failing easy challenges with alarming frequency. Combat almost never went his way. I know he will likely comment that he doesn't like to blame luck of the dice for his losses, but this was embarrassing. I, on the other hand, was benefiting from extreme and unusual luck. I succeeded all but two challenges, often rolling "amazes". I was flush with equipment, without any casualties and ahead in 3 of the 4 challenges. About halfway through, I asked if he wanted to concede but he said he'd keep playing. About 1/2 hour before we scheduled to finish we decided to call it quits (Kozure had a plan to retake a challenge and executed on it, but failed another simple roll and lost his chance. It was the straw that broke the camel's back!).

I still really enjoyed it, though. The funny thing about DoA is that even if you are getting hammered points can be really close. There are only 5 points to be had in the base game (leading in the ancient, the colonial, the modern and the future challenges and having the most surviving characters). Because of this, it's possible to be down to 1/3 of your original team and still be winning (if you had been successful in the challenges earlier in the game). It's possible to play a defensive game and just block the entrances to the challenges with your dwindling team and hope to hold on until the time runs out. Still, the fewer characters you have the harder it is to keep the other player from gaining on you so it's still a big advantage if you can destroy the other team.

They played Android (Android)

2011-08-20T08:49:00.001-04:00

Shemp and Kozure played Android. Apparently, it was fun but plays better with more than two.

Re-writing history (Civilization)

2011-07-27T22:38:00.003-04:00

It took a lot longer than I had anticipated, but we finally pulled out the new Civilization for a second try. In our first game way back in January, I had really liked it despite few concerns regarding combat, the culture mechanic and general thematic wonkiness. In our second play, my opinion has changed somewhat... The military system didn't bother me this time. Now that i understand it better works fine. The randomness injects a little riskiness to battle but generally the superior force wins. It's still a process that introduces downtime in an otherwise remarkably downtime free design (for a game of this genre), but it's nowhere near as egregious as Fury of Dracula. Culture did not play a huge role in this game, at least not the "take that" aspect that bothered me last time (though I don't know if it's because Shemp and Kozure refrained from using those cards because they disliked them or because they were genuinely less useful. I was the culture guy last game and I was playing those quite a bit, because even though I didn't like that style of play it was the avenue i had pursued and I didn't see a better easy available to me). Hopefully they'll chime in and let me know. The one aspect of the game that bothers me the most, however, is the trading, or lack thereof. In the Eagle games version, trading is central. In this one, the system OSS tight thatthereseemslittle reason to do it. Units and work value aren't tradeable, so that really only leaves "trade", resources and promises. Problem is, since resources are random and rare, so it's unlikely and unusual that you have one to trade AND other than temporary alliances there aren't much promising opportunities available that I can see. This leaves trade as the only commonly available resource, which doesn't work since two different currencies are required to make an exchange.

Otherwise, it's a game that has managed to marry quite a number of civilization elements together in a fun and playable package. I look forward to playing it some more.

(in our game, I was Germany, Shemp was Egypt and Kozure was China. Unsurprisingly, I went military/ science. Shemp went Culture/ Science and Kozure went Economic. I was doing well, but I stalled outside the gates of one of Shemp's cities because i was having a hard time balancing my discoveries with the need to press the attack. I kept distracting myself with unit upgrades and ignoring movement bonuses and increases in my stacking limit. Eventually, i decided to march but realized it was too late. I did crush the city, and would have crushed Shemp's capital, but I was one space too short. Kozure won an economic victory the same turn that Shemp would have won a cultural one. It was very close! The funny thing is that if I had realized that even having developped "flight" I couldn't reach his capital that round, I could have played differently and won a scientific victory with Space Flight. Oh well, I deserve what I got for missing an opportunity!

New's last gasp (Power Struggle, Junta: Vive El Presidente!)

2011-07-18T22:32:00.002-04:00

With Shemp, Kozure and Pablo available, I took this week as an opportunity to play the last few unplanned games in my collection.

Power Struggle

First up was Power Struggle, a game about climbing to the top in a large corporation, by any means necessary. To many, this theme would be unappealing but at least it's not another game set in medieval Europe! I personally find it humorous because iWork in that environment, and in my opinion the theme has been integrated quite well.

Before I start, I have to say that explaining the rules was tough. I've taught hundreds of different games, but for some reason this one stands out. It's one of those games that offer many options AND where each rule seems to require the explanation of another rule to make sense. Also, it's a game where players have hidden objectives, so you want to minimize question asking in order to avoid giving things away at the wrong time. Once I muddled my way through a rules explanation, we started but we all knew nobody had any idea what they were doing (including me).

I'll give a very high level summary: the game board depicts a large corporation building, showing offices, manager's offices, the executive board room and the chairman's office. Throughout the game, players will populate and manipulate the offices in order to get their guys promoted to divisional manager and up. It boils down to a kind of area majority game, in a way. The trick is that there are several ways to go about what you want to do. Departments can be shuffled, merged, etc, divisional managers can be promoted to the board of directors and take their staff with them or exit the company and become outside consultants. Bribes can be offered to get the power of another player's division temporarily, etc. The upshot is that there are a number of score tracks that measure influence, investments, consultants and even corruption and each player must make it to a certain level in 4 categories before everyone else (each player also has a secret nemesis and can gain a victory point by simply being better than him/ her in certain categories).

In our game, after flailing about aimlessly for a few rounds we finally started figuring out what was going on. I started creating main departments and bribing other players at every occasion I had. After dramatically over bribing Shemp early, I reduced 90% of my bribes to the minimum because really I just wanted the corruption and the game punishes players for not taking them (one of the target's employees leaves). I did manage to win, having reached the target in influence, main patments, corruption and having beaten my nemesis, Kozure, in the required fields.

Initial confusion aside, I think I liked it. It will definitely take another play before I feel confident, though,andireally hope idon't need to teach it to a new player next time we play!

Junta: Vive El Presidente!

This one is a much simpler game, but also about terrible bosses. Some southern American country has a military dictator, and all the players want to build up their wealth and replace the dictator.

The game involves the presidente drawing cards and making secret offers to each player from those cards and then those players deciding if they want to attack another player or the president, defend themselves or the president, etc. If an attack on the president is successful, the attacking player becomes the presidente. Iftheattack is unsuccessful, anybody who didn't attack the presidente gets to keep the promised cards. We started with the ask game but quickly migrated to the advanced game... The main difference is that the presidente can also distribute dice along with the cards, and those dice can be programmed to attack other players, etc.

Pablo was our first and most successful Presidente, managing to keep the role for a few rounds. I earned the "worst presidente" honor after I kept giving cards to the player that couldn't defend me (like Shemp with only a single dice when Kozure had four!). In the end, Kozure won the game, funded heavily by my short terms as presidente no doubt.
Anyway, itwasfun but certainly not a "wow"

No more new! (Nightfall x2, Tribune)

2011-07-09T00:05:00.004-04:00

The recent math trade and birthday gift certificate have led to a particularly large influx of new games recently. 100s of games into Wags, the group appears to be reaching their limit with new games, so a point was made to replay a few games we had recently learned (I'll admit to really enjoying learning new games and seeing how they tick. I still have two unplayed games in my collection, Junta: Vive El Presidente! and Power Struggle, but i'm waiting for a night with 4 players at least to try them out).

Nightfall

Nightfall hadn't really clicked with me last time we played, but tonight it really did. Shemp and Kozure are less enthusiastic, but seem to like it well enough. For Shemp, the fact that no effort was made to accommodate colorblind people such as himself makes the game harder to enjoy off the bat. Kozure mentioned that he felt that Dominion was still the smoother, more elegant game. I agree with that, but there are things that Nightfall does much better than Dominion in my opinion:

1) Dominon plays smoothly because it's mostly multiplayer solitaire. The interaction that exists in Dominion i'm not a big fan of, because the effects tend to be irritants rather than actual interaction.
2) I like some of the mechanical design choices, such as making parts of the pool of cards private to each player (increasing the variety between games further) and the victory condition of having the least wounds (solving the ganging up on the weakest problem common to this type of game). It's also clever how the game always starts with a generic starter deck which allow a decent buid-up of defense, boosts influence, etc to get the game going right away.
3) the chaining mechanic, although extremely weak thematically, is original and I enjoy building my deck around possible combinations of cards. In dominion, you have to look at the available pool of cards and decide what combination will allow you to get to hands containing 8 gold as quickly as possible. In Nightfall, like in Thunderstone, there is a wider variety of approaches and part of how you choose your cards has to involve anticipating how certain cards will chain into others, and whether their effects will be complimentary.

All in all, it's a game I quite enjoyed. It's true that there is something to the sequence of operations that feels inelegant or anti-intuitive... Three games later we still seem to struggle to not forget phases, or doing some of them in the wrong order. It's not hard, just a little clunky.

I won both games. In the first, I focussed on combinations that led to large amounts of direct player damage. The game ended rather quickly as I was accumulating a number of 3 direct damage cards and we were whipping through the wound stack. The game ended so quickly that we decided to try again. This time, I focussed on selecting cards that eliminated wounds from my deck. Tis worked quite well, but the highlight of the game for me was playing a card which allowed me to choose the target of an opponent's effect and sending 3 wounds Kozure's way as a result. With final scores being 10 vs 9 vs 8, that move won me the game!

Tribune

In our second play, Tribune continued to impress as a Smooth, elegant euro that manages a nice mix of strategy without brain freeze. I lost any chances I might have had to win on the final turn when I failed to bid for the chariot to protect my vestal virgins from takeover. I needed them to get the tribune, and by losing them my temporary favor of the gods went away as well. Shemp was the happy winner when all was said and done. So far, this is turning out to be a winner.

Two original themes (Troyes, Tribune)

2011-07-03T22:59:00.003-04:00

I purchased Troyes a little while back with a gift certificate, and received Tribune in a recent math trade, so we played a couple of new games tonight. Both feature particularly unoriginal themes, and the kind of abstraction that demands excellent gameplay to be fun (or else it's just another bland, dry and generic euro). Let's see how they did on our first try:

Troyes

Troyes is a game about the struggle between three factions (military, clergy and trade), all the while faced with external threats of various types, in medieval France. The actual gameplay has little do do with this, however. Players get a number of dice in three colours according to their presence in the three main "buildings". Dice are rolled, and these become the pool from which all actions will be activated. Over the course of the game, a number of cards are turned up showing possible actions and on their turn players will choose 1-3 of the available dice and assign them to one of those actions. The actions will generate money, influence, VPs or future bonuses.... But most of them amount to micro moves and the game is won by accumulating many small rewards over the course of the game.

There are a number of unique things going on. Number 1, dice can be selected from any player, not just your own pool. It costs money to do this, but often it's worth it and it obviously it takes away from what that player can do later. Number 2, the actions work by totaling the number(s) on the selected dice and dividing them by whatever is on the card... For example it might say you get 2VPs for each multiple of 3 you had totaled. Number 3, a player gathers "influence" which allows modifications to the values rolled (re-roll dice, flip dice, etc). Number 4, the city of Troyes is perpetually under attack and/or suffering internal unrest of some kind and this is represented by event cards which turn up at the start of each round. These must be defended against and if left un-countered will continue to impose a nasty effect every round. This means that depending on what comes up, or where you are in turn order, it may be necessary to re-prioritize and dedicate resources to quash the event. Lastly, each player gets a secret goal but at the end of the game every player gets to score points from each secret goal (in other words, if the goal was to get X influence for 6VPs all players who have that much influence get the VPs). This is interesting because it means you must pay attention to what other players are concentrating on to try to guess what the bonus condition they have is and try to earn it as well.

Between selecting yours or another player's dice, the ability to modify your roll, and the various items worth pursuing there is a lot more control than you'd expect from a dice game. Commensurate with this, there is a lot more to think about. With the wrong players, this could be an AP nightmare. otherwise, it's an interesting and challenging game, but I think it might take another play or two before it starts to reveal it's true colours. In our first game, the amount of options is large enough that it's hard to see how one choice is better than the other. About half-way in I started seeing how things worked together a bit better. The dice selection mechanic and the way the available actions change each game is quite interesting and should provide a different experience each game. I am reminded of Macao, and the way that the dice and available cards drive the game... A combination I really enjoyed.

I liked it. I didn't love it, but my gut tells me this one is worth investing a few more plays in. It's definitely a VP hunt, it's pretty mathy, and quite abstract but I think the sum is more than it's parts. We'll see.

Kozure won the game, having accumulated a large stack of VPs even before the endgame had been scored. He had gone after many of the events while I was focussing more on end game bonuses. Shemp was unfortunately saddled with a starting position that gave him little income, a problem since his secret goal was money (my fault, I hadn't explained that part). Scores where close, though!

Tribune

For our second un-original theme, we have a game set in ancient Rome. This one is about controlling different factions in order to satisfy a number of victory conditions before the other players. It's worker placement, but the rewards for each space is always a choice of cards (face up cards! Face down cards! 5 face down cards!, etc) and after reading the rules I was skeptical that it would be much fun at all.

Turns out it's pretty good. The cards are collected to try to control factions, and control is established by playing a set of cards. Control is kept until someone else plays a better set (higher total value or more cards). There is a bonus given for simply taking over, and another for being in control. Going after the factions means more than just accumulating the number required to satisfy a victory condition... You need to get them in the right order and at the right time so that the take-over bonus and control bonus helps you satisfy the other victory conditions at the same time. It's true that all the actions available are for gathering cards, but the thematic link (although tenuous) at least makes sense and since players are always trying to complete sets of cards the various ways of collecting them allows for different types of risk/reward.

It flows well, is fun to play and the interaction is interesting. Looking forward to trying this one again as well.

This was apparently Kozure's evening as he won this as well. Shemp thought he had a chance to achieve all the goals at the same time as Kozure but couldn't manage it. Meanwhile, I still had a few more to go.

Catch up (frag x2, Nightfall, Power Grid)

2011-06-27T21:53:00.003-04:00

Very late post... Will keep it brief.

A few weeks ago I showed up late and only was able to participate in the second game. They had started out the evening with Frag, which i've never played and know nothing about. I had recently participated in a mammoth ( for me) math trade, and so had a pile of new to me games sitting around. One of the games was Nightfall, the new AEG deck building game, and Kozure decided he wanted to try it. We unwrapped the cellophane and did what we have rarely, if ever, done before: read and learn the rules as we played the game. Typically we make sure someone knows how to play, but this one didn't seem like it would be too complicated and it turned out to not be too bad.

The game is extremely combat centric. It's all about getting past the other player's guards and doing damage to the players controlling them. Think Magic the gathering instead of Dominion or Thunderstone. The clever twist which makes this game work better than Magic for multiplayer is that the goal is to inflict "wounds" and the winner is th eplayer with the least wounds. The result is that in order to win, players are forced to spread out their attacks, not simply picking on the weakest player.

I used to be an avid "Jyhad" player, and on the surface I thought that the game might feel like a stripped down version of that game. The theme is similar, the combat oriented gameplay fits, but ultimately there us little resemblance. Where Jyhad did a great job of capturing the theme through it's mechanics, Nightfall could really be about anything. The gameplay in Nightfall revolves around playing chains of cards, and other players can choose to add to the chain if they have the right combo in hand. Effects are resolved in reverse order so later orders can mess around with earlier ones. It is through this mechanic that players will play their minions and give them orders. In practice, it creates interesting gameplay and decision making, but the chaining has zero connection with anything that could be going on thematically so it feels like you are playing a game mechanic, not a ferocious battle between vampires and werewolves.

I was very successful and finding combos, but less successful at taking advantage of them. It's quite hard to set up cards that will work together AND be useful, which makes choosing cards for your deck difficult. Our first game saw Shemp emerge victorious.

So, I enjoyed it and look forward to playing it again but I was disappointed by how weak the game was thematically. It's also tough on the colorblind, because the chaining mechanic depends on matching collies between cards that haven secondary symbol associated.

Last week I also missed games night. I heard Power Grid and Frag! were played.

Easy Come, Easy Go. [Historical]

2011-06-16T12:07:00.005-04:00

EASY GO:

Blue Moon City
Phoneicia
Quo Vadis
Pueblo
Betrayal at House on the Hill
Zombies!

Easy Come, Easy Go.

2011-06-16T11:57:00.004-04:00

Agent Easy trades his games a lot. Poor addled Shemp can't keep track of what games are available to the group, since a lot of those listed on the left have been traded away.

So.

I'm initiating a new series of posts. Starting NOW. Hopefully my math trade stalking skills are strong. Of course if I'm incorrect, AE will let me know. I'd hope.

EASY COME -

Tribune Prima Inter Pares
High Frontier
Power Struggle
Nightfall
Dixit

EASY GO -

Dungeon Twister 2
Alien Frontiers
Earth Reborn
Ingenious
Ghost Stories: The Village People expansion

The Raw of Go(f) (Go)

2011-06-14T14:55:00.004-04:00

Shemp and I played Go. We drew randomly for side. Shane won despite me playing black. Pretty substantial loss for me (though not completely crushing), mostly due to my attempt to invade which went disastrously wrong and resulted in a lot of prisoners for him.

I played another game of Go on Saturday with an opponent at TABS which was a real back-and-forth battle. Neither of us was never certain who had the upper hand until the end. My opponent won, but it wasn't quite the same blowout as the game against Shemp, because I learned my lesson and didn't try a foolish invasion, opting instead to pass, which my opponent took. Pretty close. I lost, even though I was black, so again, not a good showing, but this guy had over 40+ finished computer games under his belt where I have many fewer.

They say that one should lose one's first 100 games of Go quickly... I'm on my way to that.

I still really like this game.

The Fog of War (Alien Frontiers, Nexus Ops)

2011-06-04T21:57:00.002-04:00

Another math trade is coming up, and since I had a number of games I was considering trading I sent an email to the group and asked if they objected to me trading any of them away. After receiving their feedback, Kozure mentioned he'd like to give a couple of them a parting play. Alien Frontiers and Nexus Ops it was.

Shemp, Kozure, Pablomeka and I started out with Alien Frontiers. It was actually a very close game, with everyone within one point. The game ended with a great turn by Shemp placing his last two colonies before anyone expected him to. He won.

I like Alien Frontiers well enough. I've played it with the group a few times, and a few more times with my oldest son, but ultimately it's just "meh" and lasts too long for what it is. This farewell session confirmed that to be true...

Nexus Ops was a bit different. I hadn't played in a long time, so I was prepared to feel like maybe I shouldn't trade it. It certainly has it's charms... I like how it forces combat, and the combat system itself is fun. However, it is also too long for what it is AND it suffers from a generic and bland feeling I can't quite put my finger on. I wouldn't have expected a garish and dayglow space combat game to feel bland and generic, but there you go.

This session was characterized by phenomenal bad rolling on everyone's part. Pablomeka, in particular, had his rubium dragon breath approx. 6 times in a nearby square and fail every time. On another turn, I had 3 rock striders and two fungoids attack 4 humans and no hits were registered on either side. We blamed it on a mysterious space fog that must have been causing the problem.

Anyway, it was fun as always but both games remain on the trade pile.

A war of ideas (Clans, Ra, Scrabble Slam, Innovation x2)

2011-05-31T15:57:00.002-04:00

Work prevented me from arriving on time last week, so I missed the first few games. The group was kind enough to play a number of short games until I arrived (Clans, Ra and even Scrabble Slam!) where played, though I do not know the details).

When I did get there, Bharmer perused the games I brought and selected the newly acquired "Innovation", casting aside Troyes and Junta- Vive el presidente! Shemp promptly added "Y'all have got too many games", and we were off.

Innovation

I read the rules. I reread the rules. I played a few hands. I still had no idea what was going on, or why. Mostly, I didn't know why. I was afraid that a four player game would lead to certain brain asplosions.

I really like the designer's previous game, Glory to Rome. It's a kind of managed chaos. Despite similarities to Race for the Galaxy, I doubt anybody would describe the experiences as similar. The game plays quite differently each game because of the variety of possible super combos that inevitably come out in the later game. Innovation has a similar barely contained chaos but the games are distinctly different.

Innovation is about the evolution of great ideas through different periods of history. It's a card game, and every single card represents a different idea. At the start of the game, all the cards are grouped by era and each stack is placed in a circle. All players are dealt two ideas from the prehistoric era and the game begins. Players get two actions per turn, which can be to draw a new idea, to play a new idea or to activate an existing idea. The meat of the game is in the activation if ideas... Each player's tableau of active idea cards will feature a number of icons, and each time a player activates an idea it's necessary to compare how many of the pertinent icon each player has. If it's a beneficial idea, any player with equal or m ore icons also get the effects. If it's an aggressive idea, players with equal or more icons are immune. One of the main, ahem, innovations of the game is the concept of "splaying" cards. An idea that permits the splaying of a stack of cards allows a player to slide all the cards in a stack to the right, left or top. This allows a number of icons from the cards below to be seen, and the revealed icons then count as forming part of the tableau... Very powerful.

So,it's a game about creating synergy between ideas. As expected, some of the powers become quite powerful and can create unexpected combos. One thing we hadn't expected was that some earlier ideas can become quite powerful if all other players move on. For example, Shemp discovered that in the beginning, when everyone has "plant" icons, a card based on them can be hard to pull off. However, as players move on and everyone else starts to shed their "plant" icons in favor of science and industry, it's much easier to dominate in that field. To win, one player has to claim a certain number of achievements (however there are cards in later ages that provide alternate win conditions, so if you are behind you could always make a rush for those).

Although there is some effort made to tie the card's powers to the idea it represents, between the abstraction and the bland cards it's hard to feel the theme in the game. Still, from a gameplay perspective I quite enjoyed it. Chaotic, definitely, but fun. Also, not nearly as hard to grasp or play as I had thought.

I will say for the record that Shemp destroyed as in both sessions. This is untrue, of course, because Kozure and I each won a game, but since I miss reported a few of his wins in previous weeks this will be my olive branch.

Pus is a harsh mistress (Chaos in the Old World, Steam)

2011-05-19T23:27:00.002-04:00

Pablo joined us and made it a foursome, allowing me to select Chaos in the Old World... a game I like a lot but only ever want to play with the full complement. We followed with another game that doesn't play well with three: Steam.

Oddly, despite both game being typically 1/1.5 hour affairs, both took 2 hours each.

Chaos in the Old World

I played Slaanesh, Shemp was Nurgle, Kozure was Tzeentch, and Pablo was Khorne. I had never played Slaanesh, the "prince of pleasure and pain", so it was fun to explore. Speaking of which, as much as I enjoy the game, I still can't get past the corny theme. I'm sure there are people out there that think it's the coolest thing ever, but I have to say that I personally wish they could retheme this game.

Oh well, whatever.

The old world cards that came up where definitely favoring me because quite a few heroes were popping up around the land. Since heroes and nobility give me bonuses, i had a much easier time than I otherwise would have getting my dial ticks. Pablo was doing his best to knock us around but I think Khorne becomes more difficult to use as players get to know the other gods... it seems like getting away or neutralizing the attacks is relatively easy. Anyway, Kozure and Shemp were running away with the VP track so I had to try to get there with a dial victory. On the last turn, three players satisfied a win condition. Lucky for me, dial victories take precedence so I took it.

This game, mechanically, is really good. There is some chaos, and the cards and dice can be swingy, but the better player probably wins most games. Still, I am at a loss for the terrible board layout. Huge expanses of available cardboard real estate are used for nothing while two provinces get crammed into a tiny little space in the corner. This is a fictional landscape, there is no reason why the final layout should have been this impractical!

Steam

This was Pablo's first game of Steam. We played on the USA map and it was a tense game as usual. As with Chaos in the Old World, scores were incredibly close: Kozure in first with me and Shemp tied one point behind the leader. Amazingly, PAblo was just a few points behind us (I say amazingly because in a first game of Steam against experienced players it would be easy to end up in a tailspin and go bankrupt or be way behind). It all boiled down to who had the 6 point deliveries on the last round, and Kozure had 1 and Shemp and I did not. Very close.

The strip is a harsh mistress (Lords of Vegas, Dominion x2)

2011-05-09T22:03:00.003-04:00

this week marked the triumphant return of our good friend Bharmer. He had abandoned us briefly in a quest to gather "knowledge". We roundly criticized him, and then got started.

Lords of Vegas

I was really happy to be able to play this with 4, as I was very curious if the dealmaking possibilities would open up even further. Also, I was hoping that a game played without the game being messed up by spectacularly bad shuffling on my part would go.

In the end, I didn't note much difference as far as deal making. This game seemed to have less, if anything. The properties ended up clumping earlier than normal, which probably contributed. Kozure was the victim of poor luck on a couple of occasions (he should have known he was in for a rough ride when he sprawled and drew that tile on the next turn...). For my part, I once again ended up with a large casino in the center left of the board but there was quite a nail biter in the final rounds because Shemp owned the 6 property adjacent to me and my large casino had no sixes in it. Lucky for me, no casino tiles of the right colour remained. Unlucky for me, Kozure was about to renovate one of his casinos which would have put three back in circulation... I was out of contention by that point, but for Shemp it could have meant winning the game, the only worry was that the game was going to end any turn now and he was afraid he wouldn't get to act. On his turn, he drew the game end tile and missed out! Actually, Bharmer had made a bargain with me that would have made it difficult for Shemp to win anyway, but that's just details. It was a memorable ending.

Must admit I wouldn't have predicted Bharmer winning, though!

Dominion

we finished up by playing two hands of a random setup from the basic dominion cards. We ended up with a whole tableau of cards that allow the trashing of one card to get another. The end result was a setup which led to very lean decks and huge trash piles. It also led to me clearly forgetting how to play the game because not only did I come in last in both games, but DEAD last. I had ridiculously low scores. I think Shemp won the first one through a tiebreaker, and Bharmer the second (though my memory is hazy).

Blight is a harsh mistress (Dominant Species)

2011-05-04T22:43:00.004-04:00

We finally played a full game of Dominant species last week.

I played the insects, Kozure the mammals and Shemp the reptiles. In our two previous games, "Blight" came early and in all three cases I grabbed it to make sure no one could use it on me. Unfortunately for Shemp, he was the recipient this time and it was difficult for him to recover the loss of sun tokens on the board. For my part, the land was awash in grass tokens so it was comparatively easy for the insects to assert their dominance in many regions (what's more was that the grass tokens where mostly aquired through Wanderlusts I was able to associate with water and wetland hexes). Lady luck was shining on bugdom that day and I won. Kozure was right behind and Shemp... well Shemp didn't get lapped, so that's a kind of victory, isn't it?

Every game i've played so far i've felt compelled to go for tundra dominance. It's so obviously a huge source of points. Also, if you have at least a single dominant tile, it's almost a requirement to place on the Dominance track to scoop up first choice in cards... There always seems to be a hugely powerful card available. It's nice that each player gets so many actions, though, because it allows room for important and less important actions to take place.

One thing: I didn't really feel that playing the full game was an improvement. The way points scale means that the value of the tundra scoring gets too high, and the endgame bonus for majorities is overpowered (and somewhat redundant... What are the odds that the player with the most majorities isn't a already the player that will win?). I think my favorite was playing to 5 fewer cards. I might also suggest eliminating Blight and a few other particularly crippling cards.

Yahtzee for geeks (Alien Frontiers, Vikings, 7 Wonders)

2011-04-26T22:52:00.004-04:00

We finally had a nearly normal week at wags, with three people in attendance and everything! It was my pick, but we weren't sure how long we would have so I kept it to relatively short games.

Alien frontiers

Shemp hadn't played this yet, but it,s rather simple so it didn't take too long. Alien frontiers has been a bit of a disappointment for me.... I enjoy it, but not overly. I hadn't yet played it with more than two, and the added interaction and blocking was welcome, but the downtime that comes with it was not so great. In this session I felt that the interplay on the planet was somewhat missing, though. In my last game with Kozure, we had taken advantage of the alien tech cards and their abilities to move space colonies around on the planet and this had added substantially to the game in my opinion. This session, we were mostly just placing them and leaving them be.

Anyway, Kozure managed to win this one. I was in the running, and Shemp was going the "tech king" route which probably would have payed dividends if the game had a lasted a little longer.

Vikings

Tonight was also our second session of Vikings and WAGS. I had been looking forward to playing this again because I had enjoyed the design. Shemp has built his collection out of games that are simple yet engaging straight euros (Carcassonne, Acquire, Transamerica, Santiago, etc). There is a nice mix of straightforward design and tough decisions that makes it a light puzzly auction game.

This one came down to the wire. Kozure and I were tied on points, but he had more left over coins for the win. Shemp looked like he was running away with it at the beginning, but this is one of those games that leaves much of the points for endgame bonuses so it can be unpredictable.

7 wonders

Another game of 7 Wonders. This is consistently enjoyable and I don't see that changing. I might sleeve the cards, because they are starting to show wear ( a problem in hidden card selection games!). We all played uncharacteristically, with me going after military and eschewing science, Shemp doing science and Kozure competing with me in military. It's one of those games where you are rewarded for not doing what the others do, but at the same time once begone down a path it's hard to change it.

With no one else going after science, Shemp managed to accumulate quite a bit. It,s hard to beat an unopposed science strategy.... Shemp won.

Green Eggs and Eyes (Go) + Haaaaroooo! jowl wagging Nixon Gets in Early, B*tches! (1960)

2011-04-15T10:24:00.015-04:00

So I (Kozure) have been meaning to get in better touch with my Japanese roots and force myself to play a game of Go.

A little background... I dislike abstract games. I would use the word "loathe", except that I really appreciate the effort and clarity of vision that is required to distill a game into its most intrinsic elements. That said, if you pull out a game of Dvonn or Yinsh or Nqyltz or whatever, I get the same sensation that I would feel if I were asked to participate in a three day symposium on the economic theory behind 18th century Paraguayan quantity surveying; I'm sure would be enjoyable for some people on this planet - I am not one of those people.

For me, Go fell into the same category of pre-5AM push-ups; I knew that I would benefit from doing it, but the thought of the effort required wasn't making me rush out to start.

However, I force myself to eat fish because I know it's good for me (my Japanese ancestors finger their ghostly wakizashi short swords in shame), even though I dislike the taste, texture and look of most cooked fish, but I eat it nonetheless, so I felt it was time that I swallowed my mental gag reflex and gave Go a decent shot.

The other thing that held me back is that for such a simple game, I could tell that it is dripping with deep strategies. Strategies within strategies. Strategies within strategies within strategies. Strategies so strategic that it reaches a Zen state of strategy. Literally.

I am bad at strategy. Not horrendously bad, good enough that I can tell that I am bad, which is probably both a blessing and a curse. I can hold my own in some strategic games, but in most games where very long term strategy is key, I will be used as a mop to wipe up the blood of my countless slaughtered gameboard minions.

"But," I said to myself, "this is Go, we're talking about here. This is a game where gameplay is rumoured to be so eloquent that Zen masters can hold off of bashing their students about the noggins for several days just to finish a game."

"Self," I said, "You need to play this game."

So, I borrowed a copy from a friend, along with a strategy guide, read the rules and... put it back on the shelf. It's been sitting there for nigh on two years (the friend told me to hang onto the game). I just couldn't wrap my head around the strategy or the appeal.

Recently my wife introduced our eldest son to chess. As an highly-strategic abstract (albeit a wargame-y one), I have a sort of love-hate relationship with chess. I love it because it's a battle, the figures and the board are just so beautiful in all of their incarnations, and its obviously such a remarkably distilled and studied game. I hate it because it's intimidating to game with a better player, and my strategic skills are not such that I feel equal to playing others with any modicum of skill. Playing chess with my son again reminded me of the classical beauty of the game - the strategy involved was deep, but the game itself was also pleasurable.

Recently our games night attendance has dropped to two at times for a variety of reasons, so I took another deep breath and proposed that Shemp and I play Go. He's played before, but not often - he thinks 12 or 15 times - not often that I'd be embarrassed to even venture to compete, anyway.

Now Shemp cares very little for theme. It's not that he dislikes them, but he doesn't care one way or the other if a game is well-themed. I'm almost on the other side of the spectrum. I want that "real-world" connection. I want to simulate the trajectory of a APCBC round from a M1 57mm anti-tank gun smacking into the Zimmermit-slathered front glacis of a PzKfw V Panther Ausf G tank. I want my cubes to be representative of specific commodities, not generic "colours". I want theme!

Go.

(deep breath)

We start simple. 9 x 9 grid. We pick randomly for side. I've read enough of the strategy to place somewhere in the middle of one of the quadrants. I pick a point and play a stone. Shane initially plays conservatively and starts into his own little quadrant. I start to flesh out an eye, then he comes at me with an aggressive play. I treat it like a wargame and consolidate my position, forming a line and linking my chains. I realize there is a definite real-world connection - the connected lines of orthogonal plays are like battle lines, strong, but requiring "supply" in the form of liberties. He continues to push. I try to lengthen my lines. He continues to push. Even with simple stones and points, there is an amazing simulation going on here.

I see the inklings of strategies and how they relate to board position begin form in my mind. He is pushing me. Fine, I will push back. Then, I push too far. I realize I have overextended. I can keep trying to develop this salient, or I can approach it from a different angle. I realize I am throwing good money after bad and play into another quadrant of the board.

Shane looks at me with a expression of mild surprise, "Good play."

(later he says he saw "the penny drop" in my mind)

The game develops. Shane develops a strong chain in the centre, but I am trying for an envelopment strategy. Unfortunately he's too quick and experienced and manages a stable two eye structure. He's also seen the weakness of another portion of my line and starts attacking it. I attack in another direction to change tempo. He backs off his attack to shore up his own flank. I take the breathing room to shore up my chains. He comes back at me, but this time I've got a better footing. He makes a play to get around behind.

I try another angle - I realize that I can also feint, and sacrifice, much as in chess.

At this point, I realize I've been thinking too linearly - too much in terms of real-world strategy. New perceptions open up. This sounds trite/clichéd, but the game is opening up to me. It's like a chime has rung in my mind. Lines are static, conservative. Diagonals are dynamic, aggressive.

We continue playing, but with each stone, I'm trying to drop my pre-conceptions of warfighting and concentrate on the simple - life and death - and then "zoom out" to the complex - stable systems - growing systems, dying systems.

Basho's frog leaps into the pond.

I am playing now with thought, but also "no thought" - I reach a point where I think I have managed a good position, but I will have to fight to the finish to be sure. We are grappling over the interstitial spaces between our strong chains and some of the edges of the board. I've managed an anchor of sorts in one corner, he has one, one is denied to either of us and we're fighting for the third.

Then, suddenly, Shemp says, "I pass."

I've forgotten completely that's an option in gameplay. I blink for a moment and consider the board. Have I missed something? I think back to the rules. My recollection is that if both players pass in succession the game is ended. I ask if that's the case.

He nods, knowingly.

I look at the board. I think I have won. I don't know enough about the game to be sure.

"I believe that I have more empty points," I begin, uncertainly, "so if I pass at this point, I win, correct?"

He smiles broadly.

I pass as well. I have won my first game of Go.

This game is amazing. I couldn't grasp it until I was playing but it is astoundingly deep. Even knowing going in how deep it was, I didn't realize it - couldn't internalize it.

I don't know how easy Shemp was going on me. Perhaps he was holding back, perhaps not. He's not the type to hold back usually, and he's only played just over a dozen times. I'll chalk it up to luck backed up with a little skill.

Or, as my dabblings in the river of Zen has taught me, "Zen mind, beginner's mind."

I asked for another game, but Shemp wanted a rematch in 1960: Making of the President last night. We randomly chose candidates - I got Nixon this time. Again it was a close game in the end, but I won 299 votes to Kennedy/Shemp's 238. AGAIN it came down to Cook County deciding Illinois and Early Returns from Connecticut deciding California. I had leapt to an early lead in the South and West, and we really duked it out in the Midwest and East.

He snaked Texas and Pennsylvania from me in the last turn, and almost (almost!) got California as well with two CA cards in his campaign strategy hole. Nice try, Jack. Maybe in 1964!

Good game, good opponent, great night. (Except for thinking I had left the games on the roof of my car, asking Shemp to go look for them in the streets outside my house, and then discovering I had left them on his washing machine in the basement)

You don't see the fast trolls too often (Dungeon Twister, Roma x3, Dvonn)

2011-04-09T00:09:00.002-04:00

Work and life schedules are getting busier and busier... Kozure wasn't able to join us this week and I've been out for a few weeks myself. Shemp and I convened for an evening of two player games, determined to keep the WAGS torch burning.

Dungeon Twister

We started with Dungeon Twister, using the basic tiles and characters. Very early on in the game, the tile at Shemp's end of the board was revealed showing my troll and the speed potion. An unusually speedy troll sprinted to the finish line one turn later. Otherwise, it was fairly tit for tat as the game progressed... Shemp scoring a point, then me scoring a point. Then, suddenly, Shemp was in position to win because he was able to get the two points he needed. I strategized and came up with a way to frustrate his plan, but alas a third way was open to him to score the last point he needed and that was the game (He had wounded a character previously and so he went and finished him off). Score 1 for Shemp, 0 for Easy.

Roma

I've been really enjoying Stephen Feld's games recently (Macao and In the Year of the Dragon), and thought I'd look into some of his back catalogue. Roma seemed like an interesting two player game so I gave it a shot. Actually, I meant to purchase Arena: Roma 2, but somehow I got the wrong one. Don't ask.

Roma is a short and relatively simple card game that relies on rolling dice to activate cards. Players start with 10 VP and the game ends when a player's VPs run out or when the central pool runs out. This leads to two distinctly different strategies... run the other player down or try to score points for yourself.

In our game, the first 3/4 of the game is about avoiding bankruptcy and staying afloat with VPs. This goes on until players start getting forums (the main bug VP earners) and then it's a race to finish the VP supply.

As with the other Feld games I've played, the theme is weak and weakly implemented but the gameplay is interesting and fun. It seems like luck plays a huge role in the game but clever play can definitely help you change your fortunes.

We played three times, and I lost all three. In the last game, I was pleased to have set up a combination between the Forum and the Crane... If I could activate the crane, I could move the Forum to whatever numbers I had rolled and score VPs easily. It was a good move, but clearly not enough! It's a really good game, and judging from Shemp's enthusiasm I'm betting we'll see it again.

Shemp 4, Easy 0
Dvonn

I discovered that I am missing a regular Dvonn piece from my set. Luckily, a piece of checkers worked reasonably well.

We set up randomly and got going. I felt like I was playing well, but when it was all said and done Shemp and I were perfectly tied! Little known fact:There is no tie-breaker rule in Dvonn.

So, no wins for me tonight. Oh well!

They played 1960 (1960: The Making of a President)

2011-04-03T23:05:00.001-04:00

I was absent last week, but Shemp and Kozure report that a fun game of "1960: The Making of a President" was had.

Recorded for posterity.

Helping people is wrong (Survive!, Clans, Ra, Acquire)

2011-03-19T20:44:00.004-04:00

After a significant period where we played at Shemp's house every week to accommodate my sons' swim schedules, we switched to Thursdays and played at Kozure's place. In addition to giving us a longer block of time to play games, we had a few additional players... Tilitumbleroo and Kozure Junior, the eldest (a very bright 6 year old).

Survive!

Our first game was Survive!, a classic game from the 80's recently resurrected by Stronghold games. This is a game of lighthearted nastiness where players try to get their people off a sinking island without getting eaten by sharks and sea monsters. It's very simple to play, so it's great for a wide audience, but it does have a mean streak because on a player's turn in addition to moving their people they must select an island tile to sink and move a monster... often leading to the fatalities of other player's pawns. Kozure Junior joined us for this game and made it a foursome. A few turns in, he asked if he was supposed to help or hinder the other players... to which we answered that helping people is wrong. Clearly, games teach important life lessons!

Many fatalities later, Kozure emerged victorious beating myself and Shemp by a single point! Kozure Junior finished just 2-3 points behind, so it was all very close.

Ra

Tilitumbleroo was hoping to play Acquire after she put the kids to bed, so as this was happening we started a game of Ra. Just to see what it was like, we opted to play on the Ipad instead of the physical game. Although Kozure amassed a large inventory of monuments, it was quite as much as he needed to surpass me. I was shocked when the score came up and I had won!

I play games frequently on my Iphone and I do quite enjoy it, however this was my first time playing in person against other players in this way. Although I think it would be dreadful on the Iphone, on the Ipad it's a decent experience. The obvious advantages of doing away with setup and takedown and of automatically tracking scores are nice but the tactile feeling is gone and the experience feels muted. In particular, the animations that they introduce to spice things up become annoying after a short time, even though they surely take less time than the physical actions used to take! Anyway, if I was going on a trip, this would be a great substitute for the real thing but I'll continue playing the boxed version for now.

Clans

We played Clans to finish up the time before our game of Acquire. I was green, but I played as red for a few turns (red being my normal colour when playing games). I recovered early enough that it didn't matter. We actually paused the game so that we could start Acquire and came back to it later, but for the sake of simplicity I won't break up the description. The green and red hut people both came within spitting distance of winning but in the end green (me) was triumphant. Go green!

Acquire

Acquire is the last of Shemp's Christmas buying spree. I had been looking forward to playing it for quite some time so this was definitely the highlight of the evening. It's a game from the 60s that, I had been told, still felt fresh today. Judging from the board, a grid of numbered spaces reminiscent of a battleship board, and the hotel chain building theme, I anticipated something in the same vein as Chinatown. It wasn't. Acquire is a business speculation game, not a negotiation game. It reminds me a bit of the casino growing aspect of Lords of Vegas, though far more streamlined.

In Acquire, players are investing in growing hotel chains. Players each have a screen hiding 6 random tiles that identify locations on the board. On a turn, a player must place one of these tiles.

If the placed tile created a grouping of two on the board, a hotel chain is formed. The player may now invest in this or any other
previously founded hotel chain by purchasing a total of 3 shares. The value of each share is determined by the current size of the chain (obviously, this means there is great incentive to invest early, before shares become too expensive).

Another possibility is that the placement of the tile joins two or more existing hotel chains. If so, the larger hotel subsumes the smaller one. Investors in the larger chain benefit because the larger size means higher share value. The investors in the smaller chain benefit because they get paid out. The largest and 2nd largest shareholders get a bonus and everybody can sell their shares at their current value. It's important to note that there is NO WAY to make money in this game unless a hotel chain you've invested in gets taken over. This means that after an initial buying spree, players start running out of money and are looking to have one of their chains absorbed into a larger one. In the end, though, being majority shareholder in the big chains will pay out huge returns so it's probably important not to focus exclusively on the smaller companies. It's quite a nice dynamic and I can see how many modern games could trace their mechanics back to those found here. Overall, although the gameplay felt quite abstract I found it to be a lot of fun and definitely able to stand up against current designs.

In our game, I benefited from the first take over and found myself with more cash than the other players which felt like a large advantage. Over the course of the game, I felt like I lost some ground and it seemed like Kozure was really taking off. Tilitumbleroo was also doing quite well. I felt that I had a very good stock portfolio, and that I might catch up in the endgame. At one point, I was playing an escalation war with all three other players as we were all purchasing shares to try to get a majority before merging some of the last available companies. The shares ran out and I was locked out. Kozure and Tili ended up as 1st and 2nd and did quite well. Kozure ended the game by merging the last company, but as the smaller one liquidated we all realized that Tili was able to convert shares to the larger one and this put here in the lead. When all the money was counted, her majority holding meant the difference and she won.

Lots of fun, very tense, great design.

Brain asplodin' (Yomi, High Frontier, Dixit)

2011-03-14T20:43:00.005-04:00

Kozure, in one of his more sadistic choices, decided to foist upon our inexperienced group a game of High Frontier, WITH EXPANSION. Shemp prepared the room in case of brain asplosion.

Yomi

Kozure and I started with a quick game of Yomi. I played Grave, and got off to an excellent start... succeeding to land every blow I attempted. Kozure fought back to parity and we stayed close until we were both in the low 30s health-wise. That was when I landed the big mega attack for 45 damage, and that was all she wrote...

High Frontier

High Frontier is a challenging game. It's not the rules, though those can be challenging as well, it's that in order to get a succesful mission you have to get the math *just* right. You need to get the right parts that line up with the mission you plan to undertake, then make sure your rocket isn't overburdened by all that tech, then launch it into space and hope you brought along enough fuel to get to where you where wanting to go. Getting this right requires much calculating and recalculating... you can't get it wrong or you waste 30-60 minutes finding out. This is why brains asplode. It's also why I was fearing the expansion.

It turns out the expansion isn't so bad after all. The main addition, besides the expanded map, is a greater array of parts required to build your space rocket (previously, all that was available were thrusters, robonauts and refineries). Now, these same main elements are supplemented with reactors, radiators and generators. Some parts are interdependent, for example a particular reactor might need a level 2 radiator. It works, and provides more interesting combinations and possibilities without being too complex. This part works very nicely in my opinion.

There are other additions, such as politics, environments, glitches, etc. These had a very mild impact on our game, so it's hard to say if they were any good. My first impression is that they are not worth the overhead, but that could be just because of the way our session played out.

I have a feeling that the expanded game is really just the whole game the designer wanted to publish, before he was convinced that it would be too complicated. The whole experience feels more fleshed out, and I for one liked it better this way. Complexity be damned!

We didn't manage to finish the game. I managed to pull together a combination of equipment that gave me a heavy, high thrust ship. I flew to Mars and built my first factory and decommissioned everything. I then built the same rocket and went to the nearest M planet that I could explore, which was on the expansion board (technically, the closest planet is Hartha but Kozure would be getting there before me).

I think it happened to all of us, but in the confusion of trying to assemble these complicated ships parts kept getting left behind. In my case, I showed up at said M planet and realized I forgot the device that allowed me a re-roll in case of failure (odds where 50-50 of success without it). I did succeed, but if I had failed the whole mission would have gone down the toilet because there was 0 fuel left after I got there.

High Frontier is a fun, but very challenging game. Mechanically, it feels like it could use further development, but regardless it's quite an intriguing and immersive challenge. It's definitely right up there in terms of games I know I will remember when I look back someday.

Dixit

Just as we were packing up, Kozure pulled out Dixit so we could take a look. I suggested we play a round or two, just to see how it plays. It was the perfect relaxing type of game to follow High Frontier so we went with it and played out the whole game.

Dixit is the Spiel de Jares winning party game. Players are dealt a hand of cards depicting surreal images and each round a the acting player needs to select one and come up with a clue based on the image. All the other players must select a card from their hand that they feel also matches the clue, and all selected cards are mixed together. Points are then awarded based on how many people select the active player's card. As is often the case with these types of games, the acting player must select a clue that is neither too obvious or too obscure because there are no points awarded to the acting player if everyone or no one gets it right.

The images are quite nice and evocative, and the process of inventing descriptive clues for the images is fun. Ultimately, it's just an apples 2 apples clone, but a little more cerebral and involving more creativity.

That was then, this is now (Macao)

2011-03-13T10:10:00.004-04:00

or "Shemp's 100% win record with Macao is *so* 2010"

We had a late start, so only time for one game. When I suggested Macao, Kozure's reaction was "what, you want to pad Shemp's record even more?"

No. That's not what I meant to do.

Things did not start well. I had a couple of baronesses and a few cards that gave me additional gold, but I was falling behind. Shemp and Kozure where ahead, but I was accumulating more end game bonus cards. When all was said and done, I finally managed to break Shemp's perfect streak with a squeaker of a win.

Great game.

Ooops, you win (Yomi, Cyclades, 7 Wonders)

2011-02-25T23:42:00.003-05:00

It's going to be a short post this week...

Shemp and I started out by trying out Yomi. I purchased the Grave/ Jaina two pack, and I played Grave. Yomi is a card game that simulates Street Fighter type videogames, and has been getting great buzz so I was happy to try it out. I'd say I enjoyed it, but given our unfamiliarity with the rules I think it could definitely get better with practice. The mechanics do a good job of replicating what goes on in the games, allowing combos, feints, special powers, etc, while still being rather simple. I'll keep bringing it for a while and hopefully it will be easier to get a feel for it. For the record, Grave crushed Jaina, having landed his super mega move and dealing 45 points of damage... she never stood a chance.

We played Cyclades first (after an interesting email exchange about Kozure's fickle game moods). Everything was progressing normally, with maybe a little more combat than usual, and then Shemp won. No one saw it coming, and he made a huge bid on Athena so we should have been suspicious at least, but we weren't. Shemp took her unopposed, purchased his fourth philosopher and won. In Kozure's defense, he didn't have the funds to stop him. In my defense, I'm an idiot (I forgot to collect incom that round, so even if I had noticed he was about to win, I would have thought I couldn't stop him... even though I could have)

It was a bit anticlimactic, but bravo to Shemp for the stealth win!

We ended with 7 Wonders. As usual, I favoured science and completely ignored military, Shemp ignored science and Kozure was balanced. Shemp did a better job following through and beat Kozure by a hair. Me? Not close.

Sincere flattery (Defenders of the Realm x3)

2011-02-22T22:50:00.003-05:00

At last week's session we played Kozure's newest acquisition, Defenders of the Realm.

I've read that this is very similar to Pandemic, and in many ways it is. There is a map of the game world, made up of many "locations" connected by paths. There are four types of minions spreading on the board trying to destroy the world, just like the diseases in Pandemic, and it's up to the players to stop them. If more than a certain number of minions is ever on a space and the game calls for more, there is an outbreak and new minions are added to all adjoining locations. If a minion of a certain type is ever meant to be added to the board, but none are left in the supply, the game is over and the players lose. The players win by defeating the minions in each colour.

Still, there are some significant differences. The obvious thing is that "curing" the invasion of a particular colour means defeating it's boss, a creature that has specific powers and win conditions. Players have quests that they can fulfill to gain advantages, each round adds a random effect to the board, and boss battles are resolved through die rolls.

For me, one of the defining mechanic of Pandemic (other than it's cooperative nature) is the the way the infection deck stacks. Cities that have been infected previously get added to the top of the deck, creating significant tension and putting huge pressure on the players as they strategize to prevent the diseases from creating an outbreak. This facet is missing completely from DotR, which is too bad. All of the "chrome" type mechanics which have been added successfully give the game a fantasy/ D&D feel, for better and worse. I enjoyed the retheming, the quests, the boss battles, etc, but the game definitely had a looser, more random and luck-driven feel.

We actually played three times. In the first, as the cleric (me), the Paladin (Shemp) and the Ranger (Kozure) an unfortunate series of card draws led to our demise before we all had our second turn (one card put a single orc on every empty green space, and the next put an additional orc in all locations with only a single orc. Guess what, no more orcs.

In our second game, we bumbled around the board with the same party and ultimately tried to defeat the demon lord. Although the odds were on our side, we failed and never managed to recover. The game ended with another loss before even defeating a single boss.

In our third game, we were firing on all cylinders. We switched the party to the sorcerer (me), the wizard (Shemp) and the Eagle Rider (Kozure) and got to work. Having recalled the mistake we made in our early games of pandemic, putting too much time and resources on removing disease cubes instead of attacking the source, we focussed much more on defeating bosses as early as possible. The demon boss was first on our hit list once again, though this time we defeated him. We then went for undead boss and orc, ending with the dragon. We successfully beat the game!

I found the game quite fun, though the game mechanics are not quite as tight as Pandemic. The comparison reminds me of Dominion and Thunderstone, actually. Dominion is clearly the better developed game, but the chrome of Thunderstone makes it enjoyable in it's own way, and maybe better for a different crowd.

Won't somebody think of the zombie children? (Earth Reborn)

2011-02-14T21:44:00.002-05:00

I took a gamble on a game called Earth Reborn recently. I'm a big fan of Duel of Ages, and always appreciated the freedom of actions available, the multitude of character powers and equipment, etc. In many of our games, memorable stories would emerge as players would attempt unexpected or desperate strategies against one another (or failed spectacularly at what seemed like an easy success). The game does have issues (components, balance, playtime, etc), however, and rarely gets played anymore. When I was browsing the BGG essen videos, I stumbled across the one for Earth Reborn and was was quite attracted by the designer's stated goal to create a game that would foster these types of stories and memorable events. The fact that I really like Dungeon Twister, by the same author, certainly helped. It's a game about an apocalyptic future where two factions have emerged after hundreds of years hiding from nuclear radiation and are apparently not getting along. One faction is military, the other dabbles in the occult (zombies and such). In the weeks since I purchased it, I've been slowly working my way through the considerable rulebook and playing through a few scenarios solo to get acquainted with the system before inflicting it on anyone else. It's a very ambitious title that attempts to bring a lot to a single game, and from a production standpoint you get quite a toybox. Cool minis, tons of double-sided tetris like tiles for scenario building, a large assortment of equipment cards, tokens for decoys, passcards, mines, doors, etc, etc, etc. There is a lot of stuff here.

With some familiarity with the system, I became simultaneously very enthusiastic and discouraged. Setup time for the scenario based games are quite long. Although there isn't anything wrong with the theme itself, the implementation is pretty weak. Despite the huge effort to flesh out the backstory and the characters (there are pages of this stuff), it all comes off as *really* generic and cliché. Second, the scenario based learning system is great in theory, but we don't play games often enough to play 8-16 times just to understand all the rules. Luckily, I *really* like the game system. Despite it's incredible flexibility and depth, the rules are very logical and playable. The scenarios are much more than simply "kill everybody else", and once all the rules are known and the full game is being played the game setup seems like it will be reduced to something much more reasonable.

All that, and I wasn't really sure if anybody in the group would like this type of game.

Anyway, this week I picked it. We skipped to the scenario called "zombie family", which is a 3-4 player learning scenario which uses weapons, duelling for initiative and equipment.

In the scenario, the Salemites (the occultists) believe they've unlocked the secret to allowing zombies to procreate. A female zombie has been impregnated as a proof of concept. The Norad (military types) must invade the lab and destroy the female zombie before she escapes.

We played twice. The player controlling the Salemites starts with all his characters hidden mixed in with several decoy markers to make things harder for NORAD to figure out. We had a bit of a hard time with the hidden movement rules and got several things wrong, which was frequently leading to odd and unsatisfying results (ex: when characters were revealed, I thought it was necessary to wait until the next turn to activated them. In fact, it's just until the next round. Big difference. There was also perpetual confusion about the movement rules of hidden characters). Other than these scenario specific rules, everything was going quite smoothly rules-wise.

In the first session, Shemp was the Salemites. Kozure and I spread out our forces and stormed the building. It all boiled down to 3 individual skirmishes, but in the end the lady zombie was killed before she was very close to escape. Shemp suffered the brunt of the misunderstood hidden movement rules, and we realized that the male and female zombies are reversed between the miniatures and the cards which caused an error in deployment. Oh well, it was a good learning experience.

In the second session, Kozure was the Salemites. Shemp and I decided to storm fewer doors to prevent leaving too many open escape paths. We managed to uncover several decoys, but ultimately James Woo and Vasquez (NORAD characters) where caught in a showdown in a corridor while the zombie mommy got around them. There was a brief chance of stopping her as she struggled to bash down the door to get out, but zombies aren't easy to take down in a hurry.

At this point, it's still playing like a skirmish game. I'm looking forward to playing a more advanced scenario which opens up the possibilities a little bit (special powers, non-weapon equipment, destructible terrain, spying, searching, communication blocking, etc). Still, I think the game system is great... a combination of order tiles (that allow many different types of actions to happen while still limiting choice in a reasonable way) and action point allocation (which allows surprising flexibility to manage actions, special actions, opportunity actions, reloading weapons, etc, with very little unnecessary complexity.

Shemp and Kozure seemed to enjoy it, but not overly. Kozure mentioned that he preferred skirmish games that are more focussed on the skirmishing. Fair enough. I do think I'll be making this my pick for a while until we get to the full game so I can make a final assessment on the whole game. Right now, I am cautiously optimistic...

Next time, you shuffle (Dominant Species, Lords of Vegas)

2011-02-06T00:21:00.004-05:00

We had a longer than usual game night this week. Toronto braced itself for a huge snowstorm and everything was closed. All the schools, etc. Turns out that it wasn't much of a storm. Still, it led to me being off early, Kozure being off early and Shemp's wife not working hence Shemp being available early. Unfortunately, Bharmer couldn't join us due to illness and he'll be unavailable for quite some time so it's three player sessions for us!

Dominant Species

We decided to take advantage of the longer than usual session and play Dominant Species again. We still shortened the game by 10 cards, just to make sure it wouldn't go all night. I played the birds, Shemp played the arachnids and Kozure played the reptiles. We actually played 3/4 of the game with a major rules error (scoring points based on dominance instead of numbers of animals) but came to the conclusion that results wouldn't have differed greatly anyway. Kozure was looking for a win after a losing streak with this game (not all at WAGS) and early on it looked like his wish would come to be. I felt like I was making blunder after blunder (maybe everyone felt the same?), but luckily I was still holding my own. Let's face it, there are so many choices that it's probably inevitable that really good moves go unnoticed until it's too late. Kozure did crush us, and his last turn near complete domination of the island only distanced him further. His wish was granted!

Although I think the full game would be too long, removing 10 cards felt like too many. Probably next time we'll take out 5.

My feelings towards the game haven't changed. It's like a super charged El Grande. Fun, quite engrossing, but longer/ more complicated isn't in and of itself better. One advantage it has it that it plays quite well with 3 and 4 players. For 5 players, I think I would pick El Grande every time, however.

One other thing that I hadn't considered the first time: As the game progresses, the scoring increments for certain types of actions get larger, particularly the tundra scoring. In the games we've had the tundra scoring on the last turn has seemed really large but still probably balanced. I just realized that if we played to the end of the full game these swings would get that much larger! That might seem game breaking. We'll see.

Lords of Vegas

We played this session with a variant where the deck is split in thirds instead of fourths when seeding the game end card. This was meant to eliminate the problem we had last game where we ran out of dice. Unfortunately, I shuffled the property cards REALLY poorly and the colours stayed clumped. This led to a very weird game where the player who just happened to bet on the right horse did well and the others did not. I was the beneficiary of the luck, and won by a significant margin. One of the colours was entirely under the game end card, so it provided no points to Shemp and Kozure who had seen none were out and figured it was inevitable that they would come.

Shemp continues to display his negotiating skills. There is a lot of room for trading and deal-making in this game and Shemp came up with a few interesting angles again this game (convincing another player to build a section of casino for him so that he gets cash payouts but is no threat to being casino boss, for ex). I had a lucrative casino growing where Shemp owned half of the 6 dice. His constant threat to re-roll the dice defined much of the game for me. I ultimately agreed to a massively one-sided deal where he promised to not re-roll the dice in my casino if I gave him just about every unbuilt property I had. It was risky, but the endgame came before Shemp could capitalize on all the new money. I won.

I still think this is a great game, I just hope someone else shuffles the property deck next time!

The long and the short of civilization building (Sid Meier's Civilization, Ra: The dice game x2, 7 Wonders x2)

2011-01-27T21:32:00.003-05:00

I'll be wrapping up two week's worth of session reports into one post again this week. If anybody reads this, sorry!

Civilization

Last week we finally got the new Fantasy Flight Sid Meier's Civilization to the table. This game has just about nothing in common with the Eagle games version of the same name, but according to Kozure it has a very tight relationship to the videogame. In fact, as I was going over he rules with him, he was predicting what I was going to say based on his experience with the computer version, so it seems like the relationship is definitely there.

This game has all the usual trappings of civilization games: a tech tree, trading, politics, various paths to victory, combat... and game length. Compared to the Eagle version, the playtime is a very reasonable 1 to 1.5 hours per player. For a typical game night, it's right at the top end of doable.

The game board consists of several large square tiles that are arranged in a rectangle or triangle pattern (based on # of players) and revealed as the terrain is explored. Each player draws a political power from amongst the 6 available ones (Rome, America, China, Russia, Egypt and the Germans). Players really only have two kinds of units: Scouts and Armies. Scouts are used to found cities, and armies fight wars. The map is littered with symbols representing trade opportunities, natural resources and labour pools. When a player has a city, all the surrounding spaces are considered the city's outskirts and all things produced by those squares are available to the player who controls it. As the game progresses, wonders, buildings and great people will be placed in the city's outskirts and replace what they used to produce with the symbols on the token in question. All these resources are used to try to achieve one of 4 distinct victory conditions: Cultural, Financial, Military or Scientific.

Overall, the game quite impressed me in our initial playing. Many games of this type owe their game length to the time required to fiddle with purchasing military units, upgrading, trading or navigating the tech tree. In this version of the game, much of this fat is trimmed and the resulting gameplay is surprisingly efficient. The tech tree is very well done: a level 2 tech can only be placed on two level 1 techs. It's literally a pyramid. Simple, and works well. Resource gathering, building constructions, military advancements, wonders, styles of government and wealth are all dealt with in a manner that works, feels thematic yet requires very little overhead. Quite an achievement.

Still, it's not perfect. Chief amongst my complaints would be the combat system. Each token on the board represents an army, but the actual units are represented by cards and when a battle occurs a mini card game sub-system kicks in which didn't really click for me in our fist game. You draw a random set from your deck (why am I sending out random troops again?) and then play a series of rounds of establishing "fronts" and resolving combat "rock/ paper/ scissors" style. I can't say it doesn't work, but it's fiddly and introduces unnecessary downtime in a game that otherwise avoids most of these traps. Also, the culture victory condition involves dedicating your city to the arts and advancing your token along the culture track. Along the way, cards are drawn that give the player the ability to take some "take that" style actions on other players. I don't know, but it felt a little tacked on and random to me. "Take that" actions are rarely satisfying and can punish the receiving player arbitrarily (a similar problem I have with the church effects in Warrior Knights). I'm hoping that when we play again we will see more negotiating and hopefully these attacks will work better in the context of deal making and threats.

Lastly, the streamlining did come at a cost. Although the different factions are present, and different ages are represented by their technologies and wonders I couldn't help but notice that the progression from one era to another felt muted and diffuse. Modern day americans going against the egyptians, researching an ancient technology late in the game to make room for an additional modern one doesn't make sense and somewhat disrupts the thematic continuity/ atmosphere. It's not a big deal, but there it is.

Otherwise, a very solid addition to the civ building genre. Probably my favorite to date for it's combination of playability, play time and overall strategy and fun.

In this session I was the Americans, Kozure was the Russians and Shemp was the romans. I expanded like everyone else, but quickly saw that the Russians would overpower me so I concentrated on a cultural victory. Along the way, I watched as the germans and russians pulled away militarily and scientifically. Somewhere, I realized that I wouldn't get there in time but saw that an economic victory was attainable. I was one turn away from winning when Kozure took advantage of his steam technology to send a large force to destroy Shemp's capital (for a military victory). Just before the battle took place, Shemp declared a financial victory. In fact, it was a little anticlimactic because he only realized he could win that way as he was scrambling to find a way to fend off the incoming russian threat. He realized he could simply spend trade to add a coin to an existing tech and win the game.

Still, it was very close. I assume that such "accidental" realizations of victory will diminish with subsequent plays!

Ra: The Dice Game

I missed the first game since I arrived late (stupid work!), but participated in the second. It's a fun game, but not the equal of it's parent. Another difference: I do well at RA. I suck at RA: The Dice Game, if this session is any indication.

7 Wonders

We played this twice. This was our first try with more than 3 players (with Bharmer around, we were four). Early impressions continue to hold... this is a great, quick, engaging and clever game. 30 minutes with 4 players, lots going on, very fun. With 4, it's already noticeable that the free upgrades are harder to come by (of course, as Shemp pointed out that may also be because we are getting better at blocking). This week we saw a science win and public building win. There is no question that science is strong and needs to be watched, but clearly other strategies are viable as well. I bet that with time the winner will be the player who manages to eek out the most points in many categories that will win, due to other players blocking the obvious strategies.

Also, this was our first playing with the "B" sides. Not a huge difference, though since the wonders are less consistent in their VP allowances you need to play to their strengths or else you can fall behind (in the second game I lost badly despite having built the three stages of the Hanging Gardens. Only the first stage was worth VPs, with the other two allowing me to play the 7th card in a round and giving me a bonus science symbol. Alas, I was denied most science cards and didn't capitalize on the ones I did get). Typical scores are quite close. Lots of fun.

I wo-wo-wo-wo-wonder (Clans x2, Vikings, 7 Wonders)

2011-01-15T22:10:00.003-05:00

Shemp went on a rare buying spree and purchased three games recently. Clans, Vikings and Acquire made it under the tree for Christmas. Tonight, we played Clans and Vikings, as well as my christmas present: 7 Wonders.

Clans

Clans is an older euro that was released in 2002. It's ostensibly about the formation of clans in early human history, but it's really just a pasted on theme. It is played on a board broken up in several small terrain sections (plains, mountains, etc). Wooden huts in 5 different colours are seeded across the board, one per space. On a turn, players must move all the huts in one space to an adjacent space with at least one hut (the clans are consolidating into bigger, more populous clans). Once a grouping is no longer connected to a space with any other huts, it is scored. All colours present receive the same number of points UNLESS all colours are present, in which case any singles are eliminated before scoring. The game is played over a couple of different eras and each features a terrain where bonus points are gained, and a terrain where no points can be gained (because that clan is DOOOOMED). The catch is that each player is secretly dealt a colour at the beginning of the game, so no one knows which colour is benefiting which player at the beginning (and, even at the end, in our case). There is therefore a requirement for bluffing if you don't want other players to start hosing you because they know who you are.

Clans reminds me of China, in the sense that it feels like a lot of game in just 30 minutes. It's extremely simple, but the combination of secret roles and possibility for screwage made it quite enjoyable. We actually played twice, and in the second game we were already seeing some layers to the strategy... scoring groups of huts in the doomed terrain to get the tokens off the board, moving groups of huts into combinations that encouraged other players to make your moves for you, etc. Good game.

Vikings

Vikings is also a kind of old school euro. It's central mechanic is an auction where players have to bid for a combination of vikings and land tiles. The vikings and land tiles are then placed on a player's tableau, where vikings in different places gives money, victory points, etc. There is too much to explain here, but it's essentially an efficiency game that feels like a more forgiving Princes of Florence. There is a nice mechanic where pirate ships must be guarded by warriors, or they nullify al the vikings placed in that column. It was a fun game that I would gladly play again, but it's not a stand-out either.

In this session, I went for fishermen vikings early and didn't get much else other than warriors. Although the fisherman did net me a huge number of points at the end, I was so far behind that I still ended way last. Kozure was far in the lead. Clearly he nurtures his inner viking.

7 Wonders

7 Wonders is quite popular right now, so I won't bother describing it much other than to say that it's a card drafting game with a theme of building civilizations. Cards can be used to gain money, to build a wonder of the world, or build a building/ develop a technology. Remarkably, it plays in 30-45 minutes even if played by 7 players.

The trick to making the game work so quickly even with large number is that each player is only able to interact with their neighbor on the right and left. In other words, no matter how many players are playing it's alway essentially a series of discreet 3 player games going in a circle.

In my opinion, this game is pretty slick. There are many things to consider, and many different paths to follow (production, science, wonders, etc). Although I felt dissatisfied with Fairy Tale, 7 Wonders feels substantial enough while you are playing. It's obviously been seriously playtested... it plays very smoothly. Also, the card art is extremely well done.

Overall, this game seems really good. There aren't many good 7 player games out there that play quickly, and even fewer that play as well across the entire player range (from 3 to 7 players).

Our first game was extremely close. I was forever the whipping boy as my military might was forgotten in favour of going for scientific achievements. I did managed to get quite a few and the big points made at the end gave me the win.

Rocket science is hard (High Frontier)

2011-01-15T21:52:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago, we played High Frontier. This was my second play, but Kozure and Bharmer have played 3-4 times now and Shemp was playing for the first time.

Shemp struggled through the game in much the same way I did the first time out. I came in thinking that it would be much easier this time but I had a hard time getting started anyway. The game simply requires such precise planning that it's hard to wrap your head around when you are not sure what's going on.

I was playing the group that gave a bonus to thrust, so I took the solar sails and went to Mercury. I had forgotten that it was necessary to exceed the planet's rating to land/ take off for free and had to really be creative when I got there to avoid wasting the whole trip. I did manage it, though (I had a second thruster). I developed a better thruster and things became much easier. I managed a second factory, a first for me. Meanwhile, Kozure had a tragic accident and lost all his early progress to an explosion. Bharmer similarly suffered an explosion and suffered a setback, but his was later. Thanks to being explosion free, I managed to beat the more experienced players by a few points (otherwise, I am sure I would have been a distant third).

High Frontiers was much more enjoyable this time. The early game feels kind of pointlessly lengthy (lots of purchasing/ reselling just to get water supplies up), which is a bit irritating in a game that is so long. It also still feels like the dramatic drop in game difficulty once advanced techs are developed could have been softened somewhat. From Kozure's description of the advanced game, there is a bit more granularity to the progress in that version, so it could be a case of seeing the concessions made to simplify the system. Either way, it continues to be a very intriguing game that I look forward to playing again.

2010 WAGS Year in Review

2011-01-02T22:59:00.005-05:00

2010 has drawn to a close. Here's a quick look at what we played this year.

10 plays
Dominion

7 plays
Mr. Jack

6 plays
Macao

4 plays
Bacchus' Banquet
Chaos in the Old World

3 plays
Cyclades
Mexica
Ra
Steam
Warrior Knights

2 plays
A Game of Thrones
Beowulf: The Legend
Carcassonne: the City
Dice Town
Glory to Rome
I'm the Boss!`
Jungle Speed
Ra: the Dice game
Small World
The End of the Triumvirate
Tikal

1 play
Dungeon twister
1960: The making of the President
Alien Frontier
Battle Line
Boomtown
China
Cutthroat Caverns
Die Macher
Dominant Species
Dungeon Lords
Galaxy Trucker
Goa
Guerilla
High Frontier
In the Year of the Dragon
Le havre
Lords of Vegas
Louis XIV
Mare Nostrum
Pandemic
Perikles
Race for the Galaxy
Roll Through the Ages
Santiago
The Fires of Midway
Through the Ages
Thunderstone
Way Out West

So, that's 96 plays of 49 different games, a little below average for us.

2010 was a very peculiar year at WAGS. We unfortunately lost a core member as Luch could no longer attend. We also dealt with some life/ work conflicts which shortened most of our game nights to 2-3 hours instead of the usual 4. The end result was that we played fewer games than past years, and most of them at 3 players. Although our collections are large, and we thankfully do have quite a selection of games that work well at 3, it's definitely not the sweet spot for games. With 3, there is very little opportunity to play negotiation games, bidding games or conflict games. Worst of all, El Grande doesn't play well at three, and this will be the first year in WAGS history that it didn't get to the table even once. Awful, I know.

Game of the Year
For me, 2010 had two distinct phases: Before the fall, and after the fall. For 3/4 of the year, very little of the new crop of games interested me. Since September, suddenly quite a few games were announced that I found very interesting (7 Wonders, Civilization, Lords of Vegas, Dominant Species, High Frontier, Space Frontiers, Earth Reborn, Death Angel, Luna, D&D Castle Ravenloft, etc) , but most were only available just too late in the year to get purchased/ played. During the early dry period, I picked up Cyclades and Macao, and liked both quite a bit. Over the course of the year, Macao was played several times and my interest in the game has only grown. It's hard to say whether the scarcity of interesting games was the cause for the repeat plays, but it's quite unusual for us to play a single game this often in a year. Although it's been criticized by others as being a bland and soulless euro, to me the boring theme and presentation are an unfortunate veneer on a very interesting game system. It's a solid mid/ heavy euro that plays really well from 2-4 players, that mixes efficiency engine with card drafting and luck in a really novel way. Macao is an easy game of the year for me.

Most innovative/ Interesting game of the Year
Although I didn't particularly enjoy my single play of it, High Frontier wins as the most original and interesting game I played this year. The map is so incredibly cool and nerdy that I almost want to buy it just to have that. I really enjoyed the different tech cards with their sketchbook illustrations of how the technologies are supposed to work. I'd like to play this one again since I discovered that I didn't really understand how to play, and I think it would be much more fun played correctly (though it wouldn't exactly be easy, as it is supposed to be a tough game).

A close runner up could have been Earth Reborn. The theme not the greatest (the designer, based on his character development in Dungeon Twister: Prison and Earth Reborn, isn't particularly gifted at creating compelling characters without falling into silly stereotypes and tired clichés). Still, from reading the rules I am very excited about what this game has to offer. It looks like a miniature/ dungeon crawl/ scenario game like Descent or the like, but there appears to be a very clever and flexible game system underneath which will allow varied game play with short sessions. The terrain and rooms can be interacted with, character actions are quite flexible yet still simple to manage, missions are story-like can be much more engaging than simple "kill everyone and get to the boss", etc, etc. It appears to be everything I loved about Duel of Ages, Dungeon Twister and Conflict of Heroes all wrapped up into one well produced and lavish game that works for 2-4 players. I am quite excited to play, but until I do I will reserve judgement.

Lords of Vegas also deserves to be mentioned. Although it's too early to tell, this may well be the Monopoly replacement I've been looking for. A few more plays with the group and hopefully a try or two with the extended family should confirm. It's got the trading, the negotiating and the speculating I've been looking for without all the things that drag down Monopoly (game length and arbitrary roll n' move/ cards, mostly). If it can prove as re-playable and accessible as I think it is, i'd be really happy.

Thoughts on 2010
Fewer games were purchased, and consequently fewer new games were played in 2010. Despite my game of the year, WAGS seemed to take a distinct lean away from pure euros this year and embraced more american style games. I suppose it's natural that as game design evolves some schools of games borrow from each other. Whereas american style games have always had compelling and well integrated theme, euros have always prided themselves on streamlined play and reasonable game length and collectible card games offered nearly endless variety, many recent games have managed to integrate elements of all of them. Two great examples are Cyclades and Chaos in the Old World, but other games such as the recently released D&D game, Earth Reborn and Death Angel show that games heavy in theme don't have to be overlong, clunky and random. Although my favorite games continue to be mid-heavy strategy euros, fewer of them feel vital enough to warrant being added to my collection. For whatever reason, these new hybrids catch my eye a little better and I'm more compelled to give them a try. Even many of the euros we did purchase this year featured a distinct increase in randomness and confrontation (Dominant Species and Lords of Vegas come to mind)

Also, Iphone games seemed to come out of the woodwork this year. I have purchased and played Ra, Carcassonne, Keltis, Medici and many others. I don't really see these as replacements for their boardgame equivalents as I don't really like playing hotseat style with other people, but when no human gaming opponents are present I quite enjoy playing a game against AI (or, occasionally, against a networked opponent).

On a personal note, gaming with my eldest son has been awesome this year. We are playing a lot of Thunderstone (this would easily be his game of the year, I'm sure). We've also played several games of Fresco, Agricola, Pandemic and others. Life is good!

2 (Dungeon Twister, Carcassonne: The City, Mr. Jack x2)

2011-01-01T22:34:00.003-05:00

A little late, but here it is.

We ended the year with a two player games night, as others needed to attend to christmas preparations. It was just Shemp and I .

Dungeon Twister

I hadn't realized it, but Shemp had never played Dungeon Twister. Way back in 2007 DT was played this a couple of times, but apparently he wasn't at either session. Since no one present seemed to particularly like the game back then, I had relegated it to something I played outside of WAGS and never suggested it. Glad I brought it, because Shemp wanted to try it out and seemed to quite enjoy it!

I haven't ever handicapped my play against inexperienced players, though sometimes I think I should to avoid turning opponents off from the game. Luckily, Shemp is a very good player and I didn't really have to. There was an blunder made in the first few turns where he allowed me to get my goblin out unopposed, but after that the game was quite competitive... I did win but the score was close (maybe I would have lost if my goblin hadn't made it!). The game was unusually combat heavy, and both of us made good use of the rotation gears, speed potions, etc. All in all, it was a lot of fun and I'm very happy to have a willing opponent at WAGS! (as an aside, this continues to be one of my favorite games. I purchased the Prison set just to get the solo rules, which I had heard very good things about. I'm sorry to say that it has fallen flat with me. Buyer beware! I received Earth Reborn by the same designer over Christmas, and I'm very much looking forward to giving that a try. It looks very ambitious)

Carcassonne: The City

We played a quick game of Carc: The City afterwards. The game was characterized by ridiculously long corridors of city, caused by both of us lining up the purple buildings with the soldiers on the walls. In the end, the city walls didn't come anywhere close to closing and the game ended due to lack of tiles. I won this game as well because I paid more attention to the "farmers" (what are they in the City?), but Shemp's loooong lines of purple buildings gave him huge points as well.

Mr. Jack

When me and Shemp have a two player session, Mr. Jack always makes an appearance. We continue to find it difficult to win as Jack, but it's fun giving it a shot. The light side won on both occasions (once as me, once as Shemp).

Vegas Baby!, Yeah! (Lords of Vegas, Boomtown)

2010-12-17T22:46:00.007-05:00

I'm always searching for a great negotiation game. Although Monopoly has it's flaws, I still haven't found a game that I think does negotiation better. I think that ultimately it boils down to the fact that I find negotiating more fun when there is latitude to deal and returns are based on speculation. This means that I inherently prefer negotiation games that have an element of luck, games where a calculated risk can pay off or go bad. The problems with Monopoly are numerous, but unfortunately all the euro games I've played since starting this hobby solve many of the mechanical problems but also strip the negotiation aspect of much of it's interest.

The three games that I have played that came closest where Traders of Genoa, Chinatown and I'm the Boss!. ToG is a great strategy/ negotiation game but it's too heavy for most and there is little financial latitude in most cases. Chinatown is a nice, pure negotiation game but the value of a trade can be calculated and that sucks some of the fun out of it. I'm the Boss is a lot of fun, but it's almost a party game.

So, how does Lords of Vegas fare in the field? First impressions are quite good.

Lords of Vegas

Lords of Vegas has a few surface similarities to Chinatown. Both feature a gameboard showing city blocks that are organized into labelled grids. Both see players drawing lots at random, thus seeding the board and giving everyone a starting point for negotiation. Of course, this is a vegas game, so it makes sense that risk and reward figure prominently in how the game actually plays out. And dice. Lords of Vegas has lots of dice.

Each turn, after a player draws his/ her random lot, the game pays out a small amount to anyone who has unbuilt lots in play and a larger amount to anyone who has built portions of casinos matching the colour of the drawn card. Next, victory points are scored by the players who are "the boss" of the casinos that paid out. Clearly, the aim of the game is to be the beneficiary of as many pay outs as possible and be the boss of casinos that will generate victory points!

With the unbuilt lots as a starting point, players have the following options:

1) Build casinos on lots: Players choose to build a section of a casino on a lot he owns. There are several colours of casinos that can be built. The colour is completely up to the player (as long as pieces are available). The choice of colours depends on two things; a) two casinos of the same colour that grow into each other merge, and b) you can see which casino cards have been drawn so far and therefore which casino colours are likely to pay out in the future (there are only 9 of each colour). The lot will have a picture of a die with a number on it. The player will take one of his dice and place it on the space with the appropriate number facing up. This is important because if two casinos merge, the player with the highest number is the boss.

2) Sprawl: Players can expand an existing casino into an adjacent lot. This is beneficial because casinos generate VPs based on size. This is risky because if a player later draws that lot, he immediately becomes the owner. Not all cards come out, though, so it's a gamble.

3) Renovate: Change the colour of a casino. This can be a defensive move to prevent a merger or an offensive move to create one.

4) Reorganize: Any player that owns at least one section of a casino can "shake up the establishement" by re-rolling all the dice in that casino. Whoever has the highest numbered die after the re-roll is the new boss. Obviously, this costs money so it can't be done on a whim, but it is a way for a player to take a risk and try to take over a casino that was previously someone else's.

5) Gamble: Any player can go to someone else's casino and gamble. They place a sum of money on the line and roll the dice. If the roll the right numbers, they double (or triple!) their money FROM THAT PLAYER'S MONEY. If they fail, they give the player the money.

In addition to all this, players are encouraged to negotiate at all times. Don't like the lot you drew? Trade it with someone else. Create a deal to free up some yellow tiles so you can renovate your casino and merge with the one next to you, becoming the boss in the process. There are a lot of possibilities.

The fact that so much of this is dependent on speculation is just icing on the cake. You can expand you casino to increase you VPs, but how long will that investment pay off before it's taken away from you? You can pay a princely sum to get that last red casino tile and anticipate scoring big when it comes up, but what if it doesn't?

The one last item I didn't mention is that players MUST be bosses of ever growing casinos in order to win, because the VP track does an interesting thing where bigger and bigger casino VPs are required to advance a single step. This single design decision provides all the incentive necessary to keep players from sitting on single tile casinos forever.

Overall, Lords of Vegas does everything I wish a trading/ negotiation game did. In our first play I had some concerns about the pacing (due to all the options available on a player's turn, even a quick player can take a little while). Chinatown definitely has the edge as far as feeling like a pure negotiation game, but I see this one having longer legs because it merges interesting boardplay with negotiation and speculation. We'll see after a few plays.

In our game, we started trading early and I was able to consolidate a couple of casinos early. Before long, I had a large one developing in the center of the board and Shemp and Chris found it difficult to stop me. I think in future games, we will all be hanging onto our lots a little more strongly! Along the way, there were some interesting upsets through reorganizations, and a couple of critical merges that swung control of the casinos involved. We also gambled a lot, and it was observed that gambling has strategic opportunities as well by reducing that player's ability to do actions on his turn.

Chinatown should start sweating right about now...

Boomtown

I won't go into much detail, but Boomtown is a card game that mixes auctions with the resource production of Settlers of Catan and cards that are reminiscent of Bang! You have to bid for mining prospects in order to generate money, or try to get cards that can help you or hinder you opponent. One clever mechanism I hadn't seen before was that whoever won the auction picked first and selection proceeded clockwise but the winning bid was distributed to players counter-clockwise. In other words, if you got last pick, you got more money. It's an interesting balancing mechanism.

I enjoyed the game, but it's not stellar. I'll try it again with a different crowd and see how it goes. My only concern is that auction games don't tend to fare well with people who don't game enough to be able to evaluate such things.

Better than El Grande? (Dominant Species)

2010-12-14T23:51:00.003-05:00

Kozure purchased Dominant Species recently, and Shemp made it his pick this week.

In Dominant Species, each player represents a type of creature in the animal kingdom (reptile, mammals, birds, insects, arachnids or amphibian). The world slowly expands to reveal various types of terrain while simultaneously the ice age creeps up and turns a subset of the terrain to inhospitable tundra. The various types of creatures struggle to evolve and adapt themselves to the available terrain while simultaneously trying to outnumber the others.

At it's core, Dominant Species is a worker placement/ area majority game. There are a large number of options each turn, from selecting from an available list of adaptations, to exploring the land, to migrating and attacking other creatures. Players select where to place their 3 action pawns (to start) amongst the available options. Afterwards, the actions are resolved. The board play itself felt very much like playing El Grande EXTREME edition... Various mechanisms are pushing many coloured cubes around the board, all in a contest to gain majorities. What sets this game apart is the vast array of options and intertwined mechanics. In particular, the area majority has two facets which must be managed simultaneously: Who has the largest number of animals present, and who is the most adapted to the environment. When scoring occurs, the player with the most animals gets the most points (similar to El Grande), but the player with the best adapted animal gets to draw from several face up cards which can confer powerful bonuses to that player.

With all these extra layers of stuff comes the inevitable longer playtime. in our game, we played a shortened version (Kozure removed a number of cards. 10?) and it still clocked in at 3hrs. Honestly, I didn't really see what would have improved with the full game. There doesn't seem to be long term strategies that would only come to fruition after a certain amount of play (as opposed to Through the Ages, where "idea" strategies take longer to compared to the short term military strategy). Personally, I would probably choose to play the same way next time.

In our session, I played the arachnids, who's special ability is that they can kill one animal (one cube) of their choice every round for free. I took a domination card called "Blight" (I think) which allowed me to eliminate certain resources from the board. The intended effect was to slow down Kozure, the leader at the time. The actual effect was nearly wiping him off the board when extinction was checked. He was reduced to a single cube! Over the course of the game, Kozure saw his early fortunes fall and Shemp took the lead. I managed a comeback, and when the end game points were calculated I won by a handful of points. It was very close.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the game. The theme is well executed, there appears to be multiple players of strategy, there is a good amount of player interaction, etc. It's long though. And it's a thinker, open to definite analysis paralysis. Given the similar feeling to El Grande, I'd likely choose to play that game most of the time just because it's so much shorter. Still, there is lots of depth to explore here, so I'd be happy to play again!

Crowns, Glory and NERDS!!! (Warrior Knights: Crown and Glory, High Frontier)

2010-12-06T21:45:00.004-05:00

I've neglected the blog for a few weeks, so I'll play catch-up on our last two gaming sessions.

Two weeks ago, we added the "Crown and Glory" expansion to Warrior Knights and last week we played a game that is so obviously and joyfully nerdy that it's almost cool: High Frontier.

Warrior Knights: Crown and Glory

We've played and enjoyed Warrior Knights a couple of times already, and I've been surprised at how much the "flaws" I had read about the game didn't bother me. Specifically, many people complain that the game's title is misleading and the lack of combat is disappointing. Personally I liked the mix of politics, religion and territory control that the game offered and felt the lessening of combat was a fair trade-off for the additional facets the game offered. Still, there were a few issues that bothered me somewhat. The two biggest ones were the movement limits and the anti-climactic endgame. Actually, the two are related... The lack of movement ability makes the endgame predictable under some circumstances. This means the winner can be obvious going into the last turn and the last little while can be kind of boring.

The new expansion introduces new elements that address both these issues and more. For the movement issue, a new action card allows a player to refresh and re-use an exhausted noble. For the endgame issue, hidden missions are dealt out at the beginning of the game and points are awarded for completing the objective at the end. Both these additions work very well and I wouldn't want to play the game again without them.

Other additions: Technology can be researched and developed. The mercenaries have a few special units that confer powers to the controlling noble. The mercenary track comes into play more frequently due to a tweaked rule. Town levies and fortifications have been added. All good, in my opinion. Tech is probably my favorite due to the special powers they confer and the impact that can have on the game.

The final addition is the "King" variant which grants one player the title of "King" partway through the game. This title comes with a considerable army, an advantage in gaining influence... and a huge target on your head. Suddenly, all players are out to get you to prevent you from getting the bonus influence (and to get it themselves). It's an interesting way to focus attention and keep the game from being a free-for-all. This aspect of our first play through was disappointing because the "quick game" suggested setup is too short. The game ends the turn after someone becomes the King.

In our game, I took a slight lead early and grabbed the title of King. Kozure was doing a great job of generally matching my influence totals but doing it in such a way to not attract attention. Shemp was struggling with the all the new options and had a hard time focussing his strategy. On the last turn of the game, Kozure was banned from the assembly by me and Shemp, and I took to the field with my new kingly army. My lead in influence was not great, but it didn't seem likely that anyone could catch-up. I made a mistake trying to steal a kingdom from Kozure and he exploited it... taking one of mine on his turn while I was on the road. This had the double whammy effect of losing me an influence and making me fail my secret objective. Kozure had met his goal and the game ended with a Kozurian victory. The missions had their intended effect, the last turn was NOT boring!

High Frontier

High Frontier was designed by someone who is clearly passionate about scientific space exploration. And someone nerdy. Definitely nerdy. It's about building rockets out of futuristic technologies and going out to space to explore/ research and claim planets. The map is fantastic. It's a depiction of the solar system and further galaxies and planets, and the routes to get there. A large number of 'futuristic technologies" actually researched for space travel are depicted in the available components for rocket construction. The cards feature little sketch diagrams with explanations of the way these things should work. It's all crazy and geeky and somehow awesome.

But how does it play? Well, I'm not sure. I played the game for 4 hours or so and still didn't really understand all that was going on. This is odd, because there doesn't APPEAR to be anything complicated in the rules, but the tolerances are low and it all felt somewhat opaque. You have to accumulate water tokens to purchase rocket thrusters, robonauts and factories and send them to space. The thrusters are necessary to fly, but the robonauts and factories are necessary to settle a planet. What initially makes the game hard is that you have to build your ship out of parts, and the parts have a certain weight. The better engines are heavy. Getting to where you want to go means balancing fuel capacity, fuel consumption, weight and trajectory... all the while making sure you have enough to get back! Planning your route felt a little like Power Grid to me. Lots of calculating and recalculating... only here if you get it wrong you are stuck floating back from space (this happened to BHarmer at least once). The destinations are laid out such that there are precious few, if any, easy routes. Very precise calculating is necessary. This works for simulating space travel but it's somewhat taxing in a game. Over the course of the game it's possible to develop technologies which make the game suddenly significantly easier. We may have been playing wrong, but it felt to me fairly heavy handed how dramatically the game shifts once a player has one of those advanced components. Once I developed one myself I was quite surprised how all my difficult number crunching became unnecessary. Does this mean the game is all about who gets that first tech? Hard to say... I still think we were doing something wrong. There is also a concept of producing tech from an established colony and selling it back to earth which I never did understand.

My first reaction is that the theme is executed brilliantly, the map is fantastic and the abstraction of scientific info into a playable game fascinating BUT the gameplay itself is frustrating. Is it really possible that the player that gets a particular thruster has THAT great of an advantage over the others? Are we correct that there are only a few viable early game planets? Does the first player to develop an advanced tech have such an advantage that they will automatically win the game?

I continuously felt like I was missing something. Like something wasn't quite adding up. How can the game possibly work with 4-5 players if the viable options are so few? We'll have to explore this one further, if only to see how the whole thing gels together. I confess I didn't really enjoy our first game, but I find the game fascinating nonetheless. I really WANT to like it. The map alone makes me want to OWN it. I find it mind boggling that what we played was the SIMPLE game and that an ADVANCED game ships with it right in the box!

What's that, rustling in the bushes? (Alien Frontiers, Guerilla

2010-11-20T21:11:00.003-05:00

It was Kozure's pick this week and he selected a 20 year old Avalon Hill game called Guerilla. As we waited around for the group to be ready to start. we also had a chance to play a two player game of my new copy of Alien Frontiers.

Alien Frontiers

The Boardgame industry appears to have gone through a slump recently as far as interesting new games are concerned. This time last year I would have struggled to name 5 new games that interested me, and for most of this year the situation was the same (this explains why we have actually been playing our back catalogue recently!). Suddenly, though, a number of games are being released which have picked my interest. One of these was Alien Frontiers.

Alien Frontiers is a dice rolling and placing game similar to "To Court the King" or (apparently) "Kingsburg". Each player is given 8 colony tokens and must attempt to make as many VPs as possible, mostly by placing colonies on the planet. On a turn, players roll the dice they have (their "ships") and place the dice according to the space they are trying to activate. For example, it's possible to gather ore or fuel, to learn an alien technology, etc. Learning the alien techs allows players to manipulate their dice, and gaining dominance in an area gives game changing bonuses as well.

To Court the King ultimately fell flat for me, but so far Alien Frontiers has been quite fun. Dice allocation games are not my favorite, but this one I have enjoyed. At first, I felt the game was fun but lacked a certain dynamic necessary to push it over the top. Now, I've played a few more games with my son and we are starting to use the second type of action available on the alien tech cards: when players discard it and a player can move colonies around, exchange, them, etc. Suddenly the game becomes much more interactive and interesting. A fun game, and unique in my collection.

Guerrilla

This is a card game attempting to recreate guerrilla warfare between government and rebels. Unlike many wargame recreations, Guerilla features a couple of game mechanics which makes for a very interesting game without relying on the theme. Before getting into the specifics of the game, it's important to understand at it's heart this is a simple game that involves playing cards that represent government or rebel units to your tableau and using them to attack other players. It's also necessary to understand that all players may control units from both sides and that a player's actual loyalties are secret. There are three possible loyalties: To the government, to the rebels and to no one (meaning that you benefit from having the war and therefore want neither to gain a clear advantage). The mechanic which really makes the game is that as players conduct attacks on other players, the winner of the battle scores points AND the faction of the winning units score the same amount of points. This is important because at the end of the game, if your faction isn't leading (or if the spread in points is too large if you are the mercenaries) your points are HALVED. This means that you will sometimes plan attacks that fail simply so that the faction you want to win gains points. Aside from the units, there are various buildings which grant special powers and VPs to the owner, cards that can be played for "take that" style effects (cutting off supply, assassinations, air raids, etc). The cards are thematic without being overly complex, and the rebels and government factions get different cards which each give them their own feel. It's a well executed combat/ take that style game which is made much more interesting by it's innovative scoring system (not bad for a 20 year old game!).

My main complaints are 1) it's way to long for what it is. The deck should definitely be pruned before we play next. 2) Once you start falling behind, it's hard to get back in... and kinda boring as you watch the others do stuff while you wait. Solving #1 also happens to alleviate #2 so it's not that big of a deal to get over these issues.

As mentioned above, despite my strong start as the government I was beaten down and never really made it back. Some assassinations, cut supplies and a few bad die rolls took me out of contention about midway through the game and I floundered afterwards, knowing it was impossible for me to be a contender. I can point to many errors I made, however, so I'm not blaming the game for my poor showing. I'm sure our next session will be even more fun now that we understand how it works.

Vive la révolution!

The deal is done (I'm the Boss! x2, Santiago)

2010-11-11T22:44:00.003-05:00

The are two categories of games that get shelved almost immediately when our numbers dwindle to 3 players: Multiplayer conflict games and negotiation games. With Bharmer joining us in recent weeks, we've had a chance to fix that and play a couple of sessions of Warrior Knights. This week Shemp once again took advantage of the foursome and selected I'm the Boss! and Santiago.

I'm the Boss!

Shemp purchased a shrink wrapped copy of I'm the Boss earlier this year but we haven't been able to get it to the table until today. I was curious if the game would be as much fun the second time around and I'm happy to say that it was. The game started with a bang as Bharmer and I made a deal before he had even selected the starting space (technically illegal, I now know). He placed the marker on a deal that needed exactly our two investors and he proclaimed that the deal was done before anyone could react. It was fun, and it set the tone for the next few deals, but it became somewhat boring after a while. We then made a house rule (or began respecting the game rules, possibly) and mandated that all cards needed to be on the table before the Boss could claim that a deal was done. The game then turned into the "flurry of cards and yelling" kind of bargaining we all remembered and it became fun again. I was particularly proud of landing a deal where I had no cards to contribute (the deal required two investors and I had neither, I offered one share to Shemp and Bharmer for their contribution and it was accepted). Good times.

We played two games, with Kozure sneakily pulling a win in the first game (seriously, no one thought he had that much money) and then me winning the second (but with Kozure once again coming a close second though no one saw it coming).

Santiago

We finished off the evening with Santiago. The highlight of the game was the turn where Bharmer was the overseer and there was little incentive for anyone to bribe him for anything in particular (there were open canals already). He was offered "a punch in the face", "yo ass" and something about his mother. We are normally a respectable group, but apparently we slipped a little there.

In the end, he had the last laugh because he won the game!

God is jam, and the apostles are jelly! (Warrior Knights)

2010-11-04T21:39:00.002-04:00

This week we played Warrior Knights for a second time. Since I didn't really give a very good overview of the game last week, I'll do a quick one now:

Warrior Knights is a very ambitious conquest game that attempts to weave many facets into a single game. In addition to the typical combat for territory, players must also consider religion, politics, mercenaries and expeditions!

On the surface, things seem very much like a RISK clone. There is a map with regions and some castles. Players place between 1 and 4 Knights on the board and start trying to expand their territory.

The structure of the game cleverly manages to reign in the complexity and makes the game play surprisingly simple. Players have 2 copies of 6 different cards in their hand, each representing an action they can take (gaining votes, gaining faith, moving units, hiring mercenaries, etc) . Each game turn, they must select 3 pairs of cards and put them in three different piles. After everyone has selected their three pairs of cards, "neutral actions" are added to each pile and each pile is then individually shuffled. Once this is done, the cards are resolved one by one. In other words, players know that they will get two actions in each "pile" but they don't know in what order they will come up.

When the neutral cards come up, different kinds of things can happen. An expedition to a far away land might be launched, and players have an opportunity to invest in it. A random event might be drawn from a deck (often assigned to a player by the current leader of the church). An opportunity might come up to reinforce the cities on the board or recover some casualties. etc, etc.

A third important mechanic is that one a card is used, it goes to one of three special discard stacks, either "taxation", "assembly" or "wages". When these discard stacks equal twice the number of players, they triggers special phases such as gaining money from your cities, having to pay your troops or having to gather at an assembly in order to vote on issues.

All together, there is a lot going on but the gameplay is not that complex (as long as at least one player knows how to handle the administration of the game). On the flipside, having so many different things going on at once means that each individual aspect of the game sees little development in a session. The game has a significant luck/ chaos factor to it (events can have a big impact, combat is decided by card draws, turn order is decided by card draws, the items to vote on at the assembly can favour one player more than another). Still, there are typically ways to mitigate the luck so it's up to the players to put the odds on their side.

Overall, I felt the game was quite engaging and fun. My biggest complaint would be that the last turn feels quite anticlimactic because there is very little worth doing except conquering yet only a fraction of the cards you have allow you to do that. Further, the limited development in the game means that if you are not close to winning there is very little that can be done to come back in the game.

In this session, Shemp and I managed to get into a spat before we had even placed all our pieces. I had placed at a port town near his fortress so he placed near mine. He attacked my knight on the first round and destroyed him and his army. In retribution, I attacked the town he was holding and won. Luckily for both of us we decided to put our differences behind us and try to focus on the two others that were benefiting from our combat.

As the religious leader for most of the game, I was able to direct several bad events to the players that displeased me. Before we had made our truce, I had Shemp declared a heretic (apparently because he said that God was made of jam) and then declared again (because he said the apostles were made of jelly). Shemp controlled the assembly for much of the game. Meanwhile, Kozure and Bharmer were accumulating influence faster than we could because they hadn't yet suffered any losses.

As the game drew to a close, we all decided that Kozure was going to win and tried to take him down. We hurt him, but not bad enough... Kozure won by a point.

If I had to compare Warrior Knights to another game we have played I would tend to pick Conquest of the Empire. The gameplay is quite different, but that game has also made an effort to incorporate events, politics and combat. Between the two, I'd say I prefer this one. The political aspect work much better, for one.

Anyway, looking forward to playing it again, hopefully not too far into the future!

Kenigets (Warrior Knights)

2010-11-02T23:54:00.002-04:00

Last week we played Warrior Knights for the first time. This is a game I received in a math trade, and a stellar example of what I look for in such a trade: lose a game you don't like for a game you are interested in but would never buy. Warrior Knights was too long and opinion is too divided for me to spend money on it, but a trade was perfect.

We are playing again tomorrow evening, so I will wait until the next post to go into detail but I will say this: Warrior Knights is an extremely ambitious design. It mixes RISK like conquest with religion, politics, negotiation, drafting armies, events, exploration, and I'm sure I'm missing a few. The obvious downfall of this design direction is that there can be too little of any one thing to feel satisfying. In our first play, I'd characterize my opinion as mixed. It does everything more successfully than I expected, but there is a sense that some aspects of the game feel underdeveloped (not in a game design sense, but in a game development sense... though I suppose one leads into the other). There is significant chaos in the game, but some design choices help to minimize it's impact. All in all, I'm cautiously optimistic that this game will find a permanent place in my collection.

In this session, Bharmer started with all four of his knights, whereas Kozure and Shemp had three and I only played two. All approaches seemed feasible, and in the end Kozure and I were tied for influence and Kozure won on the tiebreaker.

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

2010-10-24T00:17:00.002-04:00

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!

Midway = Half Way (The Fires of Midway)

2010-10-18T22:39:00.002-04:00

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.

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

2010-10-08T22:11:00.003-04:00

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.

Three's Company

2010-10-06T14:28:00.005-04:00

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 DÃ© 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

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

2010-10-04T21:40:00.003-04:00

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.

Undefeated

2010-09-23T00:15:00.001-04:00

Well, Shemp pulled off another come-from-behind win in Macao, which makes it 5 wins for 5 plays for him. 100%. Undefeated.

Impressive... most impressive.

We also played In the Year of the Dragon (Easy won) and Jungle Speed (Bharmer and Easy won one each).

I had to content myself with two (close) second place finishes in the non-filler games.

Which brings me to the interesting question... which games are we, as members of this group, good at?

There are many games which I enjoy but I'm not necessarily good at. Power Grid, for example, I usually come in the middle of the pack (used to be middle-high end, but recent plays have left me lower than usual). Conversely, one of the games which I almost put in the "will not play willingly" category, Phoenicia, I actually had my own personal highest win rate for. What does it say about me that the game I win most often I happen to dislike? Fortunately, (or maybe unfortunately for my win record), Phoenicia has been traded away.

I think I've got a reasonably good win rate at Railroad Tycoon. I enjoy it, which usually assists in getting me to play better. I'm also usually pretty decent at Tikal.

As mentioned in previous entries, when El Grande was introduced to the group, I had a fairly high win ratio. Over time, that edge has been lost and now I'm frequently middling.

Shemp, as mentioned, is trending high wins at Macao.

This weekend, at TABSCON, I had the opportunity to play Race for the Galaxy with two people who play it a lot. I was creamed. Seriously creamed, twice in a row. Point spreads of something like 70 or 80 to my 30-ish. I felt like... well, I'd use some sports analogy here but I don't know sports teams well enough... the Nigerian Woman's Hockey Team up against Canada... or Canada's soccer team up against Spain. I thought I was not bad at RftG, but either I just had two seriously bad runs of luck, or those guys are super-geniuses. Now, granted, we were playing with two expansions, one of which I hadn't played before, but I was not in the running here.

One nice thing about going to places like TABSCON, it exposes you to playing skill levels outside your "regular" group. Generally I've found, much to my satisfaction, I do pretty well against other groups, save in games where it's obvious they play a particular game a lot.

I think it's clear, if you're a regular reader, that I'm not a "play only for the win" kinda guy. I try to win, for sure, but for me, it's the social atmosphere, friendly competition and sense of thematic engagement that draws me to board gaming.

But sometimes... sometimes... I just want that first place finish, dang it!

Hey WAGsters (or readers), what are the games that you're good at?

Military advantage = win (Through the Ages)

2010-09-13T23:21:00.002-04:00

Life's become real busy lately, so writing this blog is tougher than it used to be. Sorry if things are getting sporadic.

Last week we played Through the Ages, a game I like some aspects of but which ultimately is not one of my favorites. One of the reasons is because I dislike the aggression system, and another is related to the first: In my experience, the player who gets the lead in military strength wins and the player who is in last has a really rough road ahead of them.

Now, I should add that in the games I've played, we have often truncated the game for lack of time. It's entirely possible that something in the third age balances out trying an idea strategy or a culture strategy against the advantage of going military in the first two ages. Maybe those strategies require longer to mature, for example.

Anyway, I was the lucky beneficiary of a winning military strength strategy. I started with Homer and tried to focus on always being in the lead for strength and also having solid culture generation. I built the railroads and discovered professional sports and enlisted James Cook to give me massive culture through the many colonies I had controlled (using the aforementioned military advantage). Shemp got beat up on a few times. Sorry about that buddy.

Kozure did mention when we wrapped up that his engine was just starting to ramp up and he would have benefited greatly from playing out the third age. Who knows?

Threeny Madness! (Ra, Glory to Rome, Beowulf, Dominion)

2010-09-06T22:46:00.002-04:00

Shemp's pick this week, and he went for Threeny Madness (a play on "weeny madness", the name we used to give Magic decks that focussed on many small creatures). Turns out many of the games played aren't particularly "weeny", but what can you do?

Ra

First up was Ra, with Tilli playing instead of Kozure. Auction games are often subject to groupthink, and so I think everyone was somewhat surprised at how differently me and Shemp evaluated things compared to Tilli (who would typically play outside our group). In particular, it is my habit to purchase many smaller lots early rather than go long and hope for quantity. At first, it looked like it was a losing strategy... Tilli had a huge first round and Shemp and I scored very little. As the game wore on, Ra looked with dissaproval at those wanting quantity over quality and rewarded me with an enormous last round for the win.

Glory to Rome

Kozure stepped back in and Shemp chose perennial favorite Glory to Rome. I've often said that this game is characterized by a new "unbalanced" combo every game. Just to prove me wrong, this session didn't have that. We were all building away and minding our own business when suddenly all the building sites had been used and the game ended. Another odd thing: None of us had a single piece of material in the vault. Shemp thought he had me based on the influence I had gathered from building, but what he hadn't noticed was that I had built the ... (I don't recall the name, but it gives me 1 VP for each 2 materials in the stockpile). This sneakery allowed me to surpass Shemp by 1 and win the game.

Beowulf

A few weeks ago we were wondering if Beowulf with 3 would be any good. Having now played it, I must say that it is! Knizia distributed the episodic rewards very well so that there is as much interest in the 3 player auction as the 4 or 5 player.

In the early episodes, luck was shining on Shemp as he was making out quite well at all the risking challenges. Kozure also appeared to have a persistently large hand of cards. I struggled early in the game but game but found my footing about a third of the way. Through sheer dumb luck I won an episode with a single card from my hand. This reward allowed me to snowball my successes and soon I felt like I was doing really well. Going into the battle with the dragon, I had a hand of 10-15 cards ALL of which could be used in the battle (i.e. just fists and axes and wilds). I don't often do well at this game, but clearly this was my evening!

Dominion

We ended, as we often do, with Dominon. Shemp noticed that the was a themed deck called "Hand Madness!", so being unable to resist the tie in with the evening's theme he chose it. As you'd expect, it's a deck that has players manipulating the number of cards in their own and their opponent's hands quite a lot. Dominion is another game I typically don't do well in, but unfortunately this time the result was in line with the odds... I came in last after an unsuccessful attempt to pull off a bureaucrat + Council room combo. It didn't help that Shemp was constantly playing Militias to keep my handsize down. I unfortunately do not remember who actually did win, however.

Don't you understand the meaning of "Yield"? (Goa, China)

2010-08-27T22:51:00.004-04:00

Strange story: I was listening to my "A Game of Thrones" audiobook as I arrived at Shemp's house. Shortly before I parked the car, a character says "Don't you understand the meaning of "Yield"? to John Snow after he goes into a rage during a practice duel. Upon entering Shemp's house, he tells me about how he had to yell at a guy in a car that almost ran him off the road on his bicycle. He mentioned that he had to yell "Don't you understand the meaning of "Yield" ? I don't know, to me it was weird.

We went "old skool" this week. I was hoping to get Goa, Puerto Rico and China played, but we only had time for Goa and China

Goa

Goa is a game that often gets put temporarily on the trade pile, but always comes off because it plays well from 2-4 and that's unusual for a game of this type. Also, it's theme is particularly uninspiring and therefore rarely gets off the shelf (it's been over two years...). Finally, and probably most damning, it's a good game but too bland to be very memorable amidst all the games we have (it's pretty close to playing a spreadsheet). Despite all this I enjoy it when it does comes out for the pure efficiency engine gameplay (though with auctions and an odd dash of luck introduced with the expeditions). I like it. It can stay.

Kozure seemed to be running away with the game, and Shemp clearly felt that he was doing very poorly throughout. In the end, Kozure did win, but Shemp and I were tied only 3 points behind.

China

Not much to say here. We are constantly surprised and impressed how much game there is here for the 30 minutes it takes. I pursued advisors more aggressively than Shemp and Kozure, and that won it for me.

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

2010-07-29T17:38:00.003-04:00

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)

2010-07-25T20:50:00.004-04:00

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)

2010-07-24T11:42:00.005-04:00

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)

2010-07-18T21:35:00.002-04:00

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)

2010-07-16T12:31:00.005-04:00

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)

2010-07-06T22:33:00.002-04:00

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)

2010-07-04T22:30:00.004-04:00

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.

More More Martin and Macao (Steam, Macao)

2010-06-18T22:02:00.003-04:00

I've signed up to playtest some new Steam maps, and this week I brought a new three player map to the group. I also brought along Macao, since I'm finding that game quite intriguing at the moment.

In an email exchange prior to games night, I discovered that Kozure wasn't particularly enamoured with the game. Shemp also confessed that his enitial enthusiasm for the game had waned. I was pretty surprised, because I still love the game. It pushes many of the same buttons as El Grande (the puzzle aspect of most effectively pushing wooden cubes around) but it plays with a wider number of players and has lots of expansions to keep it fresh. Shemp mentioned he wasn't thrilled with all the quirky new rules that come along with each expansion board, and Kozure prefers Railroad Tycoon's more forgiving and less constrained feel. Both said they like it enough to play it, but there was definitely little actual enthusiasm.

Isn't it funny how differently players can feel about games. We've been playing together for over 6 years and although we all enjoy a broad section of games together, I wonder if we were to make top 10 lists how many games would end up on all three.

I won't dwell long on how the games played. The Steam map played very well for three players, which is not really the case with the boards included with the game. I consider it a success and would choose to play this one again if we were three. Macao was characterized by dice that rolled very high, all the time. I recovered from a shaky start and managed to come within ONE POINT of Shemp. So. Close.

Kozure does not appear to be terribly enamoured with Macao either (though he says he thinks it's a good game, just not one of his favorited). I'll certainly grant that the theme is rather weak in this one (though still better than some). Probably on par with Puerto Rico theme-wise. I continue to be very interested in the way you have to plan ahead, all the while behaving tactically every turn and trying to get combos going. Very engaging.

More Martin (Perikles, Bacchus Banquet x2)

2010-06-16T22:40:00.003-04:00

A.K.A. or good games that are best with more than 3.

Perikles

Perikles was well loved when we first played it. That was a four player game, and we have sinced played it 5 player and 3 player. In my opinion, 4 player was the best.

With three players, there are too many cities to vie for. It's not a huge problem, because they are not all equal (some have better armies, others are worth more VPs). Still, there was definitely less tension.

I did very poorly. I was getting neither the nominations to rule, nor the victories in battle. On many occasions, I realized I should have spread my forces to be in a position to get the VPs as the prime attacker/ defender, but didn't. I don't know.

It was much closer between Shemp and Kozure, but I don't remember who won.

I still liked it, but I wish we had been four.

Bacchus' Banquet

We played two hands of this odd little game. I started out as Caligula and won by getting the food and wine necessary to fulfill my goal. I also won the second hand as one of the characters that require 3 daggers. We had some nice doublethink going on with the gifting, and a few good uses of special cards messing up people's plans.

One of the issues with this game, other than it is yet another game better with 4 than 3 (probably even better with 5) is that the game length varies wildly between plays. If you are looking for daggers, you might have to wait a while if all that comes out is food.

Fun enough. Definitely different.

Cocktail Weenie! Pew Pew! (Way Out West, Small World)

2010-06-05T22:32:00.002-04:00

Kozure picked an oldie this week, Way Out West, to accompany one of his trusty standbys... Small World.

Way Out West

Way Out West has the distinction of being one of the very few Worker Placement games that Shemp likes. I made a concerted effort to buy the stage coaches in all the towns as they were available (it mostly worked. Kozure got the one in Abylene). This gave me a substantial amount of income, and counterbalanced the fact that I have a tendency to overspend in this game. Early in the game, Shemp attacked me in Kansas City (shooting pretend guns in the air, yelling "Cocktail Weenie! Pew Pew!". He would go on to repeat this frequently over the course of the evening). He had good odds (5-3, I think). I crushed him, losing only a single cowboy. This, too, would be repeated frequently over the evening. I grabbed my first improbable wanted poster and Shemp licked his wounds.

It's not that I was invincible... against Kozure the odds generally dictated the outcome. With Shemp, however, my dice were ON FIRE. I had a lot of wanted posters.

Shemp did eventually lock down the entirety of Kansas City. In the last round, he stole the majority in San Antonio from me. Kozure held the majority in Abilene. I had a few buildings spread around and some cattle, but my ace in the hole was my majorities in wanted posters and money. When the dust settled, it was a tie between me and Shemp, with Kozure close behind. There is no tie-breaker in WOW, but we awarded the win to Shemp, since the luck I had against him should have put him dead last so he must have been playing "real well-like".

Small World

This session of Small World was characterized by frequent declines. I started with Wealthy Halflings, grabbed the 7 gold and put them in decline in round 2. Shemp had the Stout Dwarves, which also went into decline in round 2 (since he keeps their bonus in decline). Kozure played the Merchant Ghouls(?), and as usual the merchant ability proved lucrative. My Tritons stayed in the West, fearing the spreading horde of Kozure's Commando Skeletons. Shemp had the Flying Giants, but they did not prove as fearsome as when Luch had played them last. I spent my last two turns with the Swamp Sorcerers, but I Shemp went into decline and so I was unable to convert man of his tokens (Kozure came along with his Diplomat Ratmen, but he made the truce with me so no dice there either). I only managed one conversion. Bah.

Small World is a game of maximizing small differences. Kozure made good use of the Merchant ability and also went into decline once less than me and Shemp, and I think this was the recipe for his success. Hard to say for sure, but if there was one power I'd say was slightly out of balance, it would be Merchant. Still, fun game.

Popular opinion wins (Mare Nostrum: Mythlogy expansion, Galaxy Trucker)

2010-06-04T23:40:00.000-04:00

Last week, there was a brief exchange in the comments section about other games that might be better points of comparison for Cyclades than RISK. Although the commenter suggested Antike, I felt that ultimately it was Mare Nostrum w/ mythology expansion. Mare Nostrum is a game that was well liked when we played it a few times in the fall, but now with only three players it wasn’t getting any table time. For the sake of comparison and contrast, I suggested we try it out despite BGG’s unanimous warnings against it.
Mare Nostrum: Mythology expansion
On the surface, Mare Nostrum with the Mythology expansion is extremely similar to Cyclades. They are both wargame and euro hybrids, both set in the Mediterranean and both concerning themselves with the gods and mythological creatures of that era. The similarities end there, however… the ways the games are treated make quite a difference (of course, I could list many games set in renaissance Italy about trading goods and managing resources too).
We had never actually played the mythlogy expansion, so even though I was aware the game might not work that well with three players, I WAS looking forward to giving the new stuff a test drive. The mythology expansion adds four main things to the game:
1) The Atlantis faction for a 6th player, along with an add-on board to accommodate it (not used in our game).
2) A new Role card, the Priest, and +/- 8 gods. The Priest adds a new step to each round where players can choose to make an offering to a single god that will give them a one time use power that round. The cost is a 3 card set.
3) New military units: Mythological creatures. Each faction has a specific mythological creature that can be purchased and placed on the board like any other military unit. It always rolls 6s in combat, and grants an additional ability depending on the creature. The cost is a 6 card set.
4) New heroes. There is a huge variety of heroes in this expansion. In fact, there are so many that I ignored them because it was too much reading to know what they all did.
I liked the mythological creatures. They are a simple addition that further differentiates the factions. I hope that the game doesn’t become too focused on them, but that’s just a worry… I have no specific reason to think they would.
I liked the Priest role and the associated gods as well, but as Kozure pointed out there is a very real possibility that they would grind the game to a halt. They have abilities like “destroy any City on the Board” , which seems quite powerful considering the effort that needs to be expended to do the same thing using the military route. Although it’s true that there is a god that exists solely to defend yourself against the other gods, it means spending a 3 card set every time and that would extend the game as well.
The session we played demonstrated why Mare Nostrum is not recommended with 3 players. Without the crowded board, it’s too easy for all three players to just keep exploring until one of them wins the game. Trading is wonky, too.
I was Carthage, Shemp was Greece and Kozure was Babylon. As we explored and grew our empires, it became clear that Shemp’s engine was winding up faster than ours. I purchased a behemoth and went after him just as he was about to win. Although he made my life difficult crossing the sea, I did get to Athens and took his richest province. Problem was, going after Shemp in this way simultaneously weakened me and therefore the victory was handed to Kozure (who had spread out to form a monstrously large empire in the meantime). Unfortunately, I don’t think this was an isolated incident… it’s just not meant to be played with three players.

Galaxy Trucker
We finished the evening with Galalxy Trucker. We tried the “Evil Machinations” expansion for the first time. The idea is that each player is dealt four cards at the start of the game. Each card is a particularly nasty/powerful event , and players must choose one to go into each event deck. In other words, each player knows about one of the bad things that is going to happen, and can therefore plan for it. I had been holding back on this one because it sounded particularly nasty, but having played it now… it seems easier than the Rough Road expansion.
One thing that happened: Shemp’s ship got hit by large cannon fire in such a way that the ship broke into three pieces!
Maybe next time, we’ll try with Rough Roads AND Evil Machinations… Galaxy Trucker is more fun when things go wrong anyway! This game has legs. Lots of fun.

Release the Kraken! (Cyclades x2)

2010-05-23T22:37:00.007-04:00

Birthday money and a Paypal miss-hap has led me to owning a few new games. Most prominent among them is Cyclades.

Cyclades

A bit of trivia: Cyclades is correctly pronounced "KEYK-laTHayz" (Κυκλάδες) and not "Sigh-klayds". Who knew?

(Kozure, did. Apparently)

Cyclades is yet another game about civilizations rising and falling in the Mediterranean, though with Gods and mythological creatures in the mix. So, is it just another Mare Nostrum (w/ mythology expansion)?

No. It really isn't.

If I had to describe it in a nutshell, I'd say it's a kind of euro/ Risk lovechild with mythological creatures and fantastic production quality.

The board shows a map of a generic expanse of water filled with little islands. There are predetermined setups for 2-5 players (and a clever board which offers different combinations of islands for each player count). Each player starts with 2 armies and 2 fleets. The goal is to be the first to acquire two metropolis, either through building your own or conquering someone else's.

Five gods are overseeing the action. Zeus, Poseidon, Ares, Athena and Apollon:

Each game turn has two main phases, an auction to determine which god's favour you have won this turn (i.e. which ability you can use) followed by an action phase where the actual turn is played out.

1) The player who wins Zeus gets a priest which gives a discount on future bidding and can purchase a temple.
2) The player who wins Athena gets a philosopher which gives a player a metropolis if a set of four can be turned in and can purchase a university.
3) Ares allows a player to purchase and move armies and purchase a fortress.
4) Poseidon allows a player to purchase and move fleets and purchase a port.
5) Apollon gives a player gold and a cornucopia that increases future income.

The auction is Amun-Re/ Vegas Showdown style, and the outcome determines turn order in addition to the specific actions available to the player. Three mythological creatures are available for purchase each turn (from a deck of 20 or so), each giving the purchaser a game-bending one use power.

Over the course of the game, players build up their armies, build buildings, acquire priests and philosophers. Invasions happen. Krakens are released.

So, is it RISK? It's certainly more complex than RISK, but it's still fundamentally a relatively simple game about building up armies and beating each other up. It's like RISK, but moving armies and attacking is only possible if you win the auction for the favour of Aries. It's RISK, but a mythological creature can swoop in a turn someone else's plan on it's head. It's RISK, but there are multiple paths to victory, not just conquest. It's RISK, but it plays in about 2 hours.

In truth, these changes makes Cyclades very little like RISK, but then again... it somehow scratches a similar itch. I'd say it's quite a successful hybrid of euro and american design. You have to adjust to the tempo of bidding on the gods you need at the right time, figure out how to best take advantage of the creatures available, set up opportunities to threaten and/or defeat your neighboring islands, etc. It works well, and I liked it a lot. Playing with three players there is an adjustment to the normal god auctions that alternates which ones are available on a given round. Knowing that a particular auction won't come back for a turn or two gives me the feeling similar to the order selection in Mr. Jack.

We played two sessions. In the first, we were just getting a sense of how things worked together and really didn't capitalize on the creatures much. While others were floating large fleets and amassing great armies, I was quietly building buildings. I used the power of the cyclops to convert one of my buildings to the last one I needed to build my second metropolis and won the game.

The second was much more hard fought. Shemp made a move about 30 minutes in and stole a metropolis from Kozure. He was bringing in +/- 10 gold a round and seemed unstoppable. Just as he was about to build his last building, Kozure stole half his money using the Griffon and unleashed the Kraken on his massive fleet and reduced it to kindling. Kozure also managed to steal a large, profitable island from him. Shemp was not close to winning anymore.

Lucky for me, I was. I needed either one last philosopher or a university. Trouble was, both of those need Athena and between Kozure and Shemp there was always someone with enough money to outbid me. Earlier in the game, Kozure had been forced to abandon an island with a few buildings. If I could get there, I would have the university I needed and therefore win the game. They set Medusa on me (troops are frozen on the island, and cannot leave), but I knew I would get my second metropolis shortly (then again, Shemp's earlier near annihilation reminded me that nothing is assured) . On the turn I made it, Shemp had managed a second metropolis we were therefore tied. I had more gold, and won the tiebreaker.

Shemp could have won if he had noticed that Polyphemus could have been purchased to make my fleets scatter and prevent access to the island I stole to win the game. I record this purely for posterity. Honest.

Oh, and "Don't s*** f*** my bowl noodle".

Update 2010 05 25

A few additional thoughts:

1) One of the critical game design improvements this has over Mare Nostrum is a built in timer to force the end-game. Each round, someone gets a philosopher. 4 philosophers = 1 metropolis. Mare Nostrum has other advantages, not the least of which is greater depth of play, but it requires more players, it's longer and less aproachable.
2) One of the major advantages Cyclades has over most games of this type is that it apparently plays well across it's entire range of players. Most seem to require the maximum to work well (Mare Nostrum, A Game of Thrones, etc), and finding that many players is not always easy.
3) I worry the game length will go up to high with more players, though. I can't think of anything that would counterbalance the added time required for a 4 player game compared to a 3 player game, for example. Given that our 3 player games this week took 2 hours each, this could be an issue.

New Record Set!! (Battle Line, Dominion, Dominion:Intrigue, Race for the Galaxy

2010-05-18T14:44:00.007-04:00

So, they were going to play Cyclades, which was Kozure's selection, as he was dictator this week.

Unfortunately, I didn't show up until 11pm. I was stuck at a function that should have been over at 9pm. Oh well.

Kozure and Shemp played Battle Line and Dominion/ Dominion: Intrigue, and from the sounds of it they played quite a few times.

(Shemp started this post, and I'm publishing it to keep them all in order. I presume his title refers to many games played)

When I arrived, we played another game of Dominion and then Kozure and I had a hand of Race for the Galaxy.

Sorry, not very interesting, but there it is.

They played Le Havre (Le Havre)

2010-05-01T11:05:00.003-04:00

Kozure, Shemp and Bharmer played "Le Havre" this week. I wasn't there, but I recently received an email from Kozure which ended with:

"PS - Le Havre was much better with three players."

So, that sounds good.

(sorry, this entry exists solely to give me accurate records for games played this year)

Play to yer strengths (Macao, Cutthroat Caverns, Roll Through the Ages)

2010-04-24T23:47:00.009-04:00

We were three this week. I was looking forward to introducing Macao to Kozure, and decided I'd like to take Cutthroat Caverns for a spin.

Macao

This was our second play at WAGS, though I've also played a third game solo. I am very much enjoying this game, though as Shemp pointed out it really doesn't play to my strengths.

I've compared Macao to Taj Mahal, and I still believe that it's an accurate comparison in many ways, but it's in the differences that I get caught. In Taj Mahal, you are trying to manage the chaos introduced by the cards while balancing the short and long term goals of the game. Macao does much the same thing, but it is both denser (due to more simultaneous options) and more tactical (due to the impossibility of carrying cubes from one round to the next). I don't tend to do well in tactical games. I also tend to fare poorly in games where things need to be converted into other things (which is why a game like Le Havre is tough for me). Macao is very much about quickly ascertaining which of the cards that come up will create the best synergy with your plans. Since you get many cards, and there are various board elements as well, the player who can string together combos will be most successful. I'm not good at this. Not here, not in Dominion, not in Race for the Galaxy. Oh well, I still enjoy the challenge of this type of game and I am very much loving this one right now.

For a while this session I thought I had figured the game out. I was staying on top of my cards, making sure that I was activating cards fast enough to avoid getting penalties at the end. I had a card that allowed me to trade two cubes of one colour for any one other cube... which made activating 4 colour cube cards much easier. I managed to ship all three silk goods with a card that doubled the points. I was making some big purchases for VPs. I was way in the lead.

... but then Shemp started catching up. Then he was on my heels. Then he had baronesses so he leapt out in front. He won in distant first. Kozure did very well for his first game. He came in last, but not far behind me (and he would have done better if he hadn't been stuck with a number of cards on his tableau).

Cutthroat caverns

I picked up this game recently in a math trade, somewhat by accident. I thought this was along the lines of Heroquest... a kind of childish dungeon romp. Turns out, it's not that.

Cutthroat Caverns is more of a take that game than anything. There are nine monsters to defeat, and players must play cards to destroy them in order. The trick is that only the player that actually lands the killing blow gets the VPs. In other words, players are all "working together" to defeat the creature, but simultaneously trying to work it out so that they kill the baddie and get the points. Towards this end, the players get a hand of cards. Many are simple numerical values used to do damage to the creature. Others are effects that do tricky things like make other players miss, lose turns or other effects. To add further variety, there is a large deck of creatures, each with their own special powers, and only nine show up in a given game.

I don't know. As a take that game, I liked it well enough. It goes too long for what it is, but I could definitely see enjoying it if it was cut in half, which would be easy enough. It was funny trying to mess up the others, and we did laugh a fair bit. Shemp didn't seem too enthused, but I think Kozure liked it OK. I might try it again, or I might just save it for another group. We'll see.

For the record, I was winning this one too. Then Kozure stole one of my big kills and won the game. See a trend?

Roll Through the Ages

We had a few minutes left, so we played a game of Roll Through the Ages to finish. I rushed to a quick 5 techs and the others didn't see the end coming. This victory was not stolen from me.

Hah!

Well, I won the dice game... (Mexica, Dominion: Intrigue x2)

2010-04-16T21:01:00.003-04:00

Shemp took a page from Luch's playbook and has decided to select the same thing for a few picks in a row. Whereas Luch was picking Die Macher, Shemp chose Mexica and Tikal for the second time.

However, just like last time, we only actually played one of the two (Mexica, in this case).

Mexica

At the end of our last session of this, Shemp remarked that there would be nothing preventing a player from placing buildings all around the board right from the starting space (before any canals were up). He decided to try this out, despite the obvious danger of getting the buildings he put out there surrounded and rendered useless. It worked fairly well. By placing buildings in every corner he ensured that he had a presence in all the regions we were creating around the board. We nicknamed the technique "carpet bombing the board". I suppose we could have spent points to put canals around them and cut him off, but there is so much you want to do in the game that it seemed too inefficient.

The board developed is a fairly screwy way. It was a mess of canals, and the land was nearly choked out well before the end of the game. I kept playing defensively, placing buildings in front of the bridges I built, etc. It meant that I ended up having to spend most turns teleporting... a rather inefficient way of playing.

Shemp built a commanding lead, and won the game in a distant first place. Kozure was in second place while me and Bharmer brought up the rear (of course, he had never played before... I had no such excuse).

Dominion/ Dominion: Intrigue

The Mexica game lasted a couple of hours, so we didn't really have time for Tikal. Shemp requested our latest go-to game for this situation... Dominion.

In our first session, we had the Saboteur, the Torturer, the Swindler and other similar types. There were no extra buys, and few extra actions. It was looking like it would be a long, drawn out affair. I latched onto buying lots of swindlers, and managed to play one just about every round in the game. This put a lot of curses into people's hands, it was burning through the stacks of cards on the table, but wasn't really getting me anywhere. I ended the game by exhausting 3 piles of cards, something that rarely happens in our group. Unfortunately, I was hoping to do it before people started buying provinces but it didn't work. When the game ended, we all scored pretty low but I was dead last with only 10 points. Bharmer won.

As an aside, we were arbitrarily rolling an 8 sided die and two 6 sided dice to determine turn order (geek enough for ya?). Going into this session, I rolled 20. This would be the pinnacle of my achievements this evening.

In the second session, things were more upbeat. There was festival, laboratory and others that provided plenty of additional actions and buys. I had an idea to combine the bridge and the workshop, allowing me to take duchies each time I made the combo. It worked pretty well, but it wasn't enough. I came in second with 32 points, while Bharmer (again) won... this time only ahead of me by 3.

So, I ended the evening winless. My biggest success was the dice game for turn order. Sigh.

Remember Alea? (Macao, 1960: The Making of the President)

2010-04-10T15:32:00.008-04:00

Circumstances conspired to give me and Shemp another 2 player game night. I thought it would be a good opportunity to play Macao and 1960: The Making of the President.

Macao

Many eurogamers say they really like Alea games. I am one of them. Scan my top games list, and you will see quite a few of them (Ra, Taj Mahal, Princes of Florence, In the Year of the Dragon, Puerto Rico, Traders of Genoa, etc). Still, with the exception of Ra they rarely get played anymore. I can't be sure why, but I feel like the plethora of game releases has led me to search out games whose theme excite me as much as the underlying game mechanics. Alea games, though they typically provide excellent gameplay, often have very thin themes and for a couple of years this type of game wasn't really appealing to me (of course, Alea went on a pretty weak streak for a while there, which didn't help their cause). Last year they released Stephen Feld's In the Year of the Dragon, which I really liked and we've played a fair bit. Now Alea has collaborated with Stephen Feld again for Macao and I wanted to give it a try despite the particularly humdrum theme of the game.

Macao is yet another euro game about gathering resources, delivering goods and building buildings in a random distant location (in this case, a portuguese colony in China). It also jumps on a number of recent eurogame bandwagons by including dice and many, many cards with text that give various special abilities. Excited yet?

However, as I've often said it's how things come together than matters. Macao is a fantastic example of this. In playing Macao, I felt like this was a very unique and engaging game, despite how bland most of the component parts are. Oh, and challenging. Definitely challenging. Feld appears to like to add a dose of punishment to his games, if In the Year of the Dragon and Macao are any indication, and this appears to raise the stakes a little bit when playing his games.

At it's heart, Macao is a game where players must struggle to plan amidst randomness. It's hard to describe, but you have to think strategically as you act tactically.

Each round, a player rolls 6 differently coloured dice. Each player chooses two of the results and receives cubes in number and colour according to the chosen dice. The big trick is that the larger the number on the die, the longer it will take before you can actually USE the cubes. For example: if you choose the red dice showing a 4, you will get 4 red cubes in 4 turns. These cubes will be used to purchase cards and buildings later on, but cubes don't carry over from turn to turn so in order to buy something that requires a particular combination of cubes you need to plan ahead and make sure you coordinate the dice you choose so that you will receive the combination you want together on a given turn. This isn't as hard as it sounds but it does require forward planning... over several turns you know that at least one cube of every colour will be produced and it's up to you to select them if you need them. Most times, the choice is between few resources now or many resources later. Where things get, err, dicey, is when you decide you need to build or purchase something fast and really need certain combinations to come up.

What are the cubes used for? You can build buildings in the city to gain goods, you can sail your ship to deliver said goods, you can pay for cards which will give you special powers and you can jockey for turn order. Deciding which resources to go for, which cards and buildings to purchase in the coming turns, etc, is already enough to require some serious think. Planning for these costs while faced with the pressures of other players competing for the same resources and in the face of the randomness of the dice makes it feel even more challenging. Don't play this game while drinking... it can melt your brain a little bit.

While the randomness makes the forward planning difficult, it also makes it a little less of a brain burner than it might have been if everything was open and perfect forward planning was possible. You don't know how many cubes of various colours are coming, and you don't know what card powers will be available. You have to go with the flow to a certain extent. That being said, you also need to plan ahead quite a lot. If you don't put effort to filling your future turns with cube combinations that work to purchase the cards and buildings you need, it will NOT happen on it's own and you will spend the whole game accomplishing nothing.

The card powers available in the game are very interesting, and really impact the flavour of the game. Spying the cards that come up that will enhance your engine is key to winning the game (and manipulating turn order so that you are free to pick those cards before other players is therefore also very important). On the other hand, you will be frustrated if you attempt to do the reverse and play the game hoping to make specific card combinations from the start... there are too many factors that prevent this from working (only about half the cards come up in any given game, and many of those will get discarded and therefore be inaccessible to players).

On the surface, the only two ways of ultimately getting VPs are delivering goods and purchasing VPs (some VPs can be gained through purchasing cards and making lines of buildings, but these seem to be small amounts). That said, developing your engine through the various cards that come up will require players to play differently each time. I've only played once, but it seems like there would be huge variety in the way the game would play out between games.

I can't help but compare the game to Agricola in that aspect, but I would say that I found that the card effects in this game were more interesting and had a more pronounced impact on the game. Also, since the cards come out over the course of the game, they aren't as initially overwhelming either. On the whole, however, the feel of the game reminds me mostly of Taj Mahal. That too is a game that has been accused by some as being too random or tactical because of the card draws, but in actuality the player who can plan ahead and use the tools available to mitigate the randomness will win almost every time.

The game is probably best played with 2 or 3, because AP could certainly cause it to go too long with 4 players. With 2 players, I certainly liked it a lot.

We stumbled through the first half not really succeeding to do very much. I selected cards which allowed me to build twice in the city every turn and then earn gold based on the number of cities I had there. It seemed like a good combo I could profit from, but then I got distracted by other things and didn't make it happen early enough. Meanwhile, I managed to acquire all the rice and tea so in a final turn mad dash I spent nearly 10 cubes just crossing the board to make 20 points in deliveries. Shemp, for his part, was purchasing cards which allowed him free cubes and cube conversions. He managed to purchase many more cards than I could because of this advantage, and ended up winning by about 5 points.

1960: The Making of the President

This is a great example of those thematic games that have caught my attention over the years, but since it's only two players I've never had the opportunity to play until now. It's a game about the Kennedy vs Nixon election which uses a "card driven wargame" system similar to many popular wargames (We the People, Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, Twilight Struggle, etc).

Because it's a game about elections, it's unsurprising that they chose an area control system to represent the success of the two candidates. Cubes in each player's colour are placed in a state to represent who is leading or carrying that state. In addition to this, cubes can be placed to show who has the "media support" in each region, and cubes can be placed on the three issues to indicate who leads in each of them.

Each player has a hand of cards which are used either as action points (to move the candidate around the country placing cubes to show support, to add influence on issues, etc) or as events (historical events which have a game effect, such as displacing cubes or adding new ones). There is a special turn where normal play is suspended and a new subsystem is introduced to represent the "debates" and at the end the votes are tallied and the winner is elected.

Although I liked it well enough, I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed in the game. There are a few reasons for this:

1) The "area majority" mechanic felt somewhat arbitrary because the board changed so drastically between turns that it sometimes felt futile, or simply an exercise in outlasting the opponent.

2) The events on the cards were almost always more powerful than the number of action points on the card, so there was actually not much of a choice to be made when selecting them. If the event was for your side, you picked it. If it's for the other side, you used the action points. In Hannibal and Wilderness War, other card driven wargames I've played, the choices seemed more difficult... in a good way.

3) For all the uncertainty involved in gaining media support, it didn't seem to matter much.

4) The "rest" mechanic was odd. There would seem to be a tradeoff between playing high AP cards and getting little rest or vice-versa. The thing is, you have to play every card in your hand except one, so ultimately there is no tradeoff... you just get what you were dealt. Also, I kept forgetting to grab the rest cubes, which was annoying.

5) Having to read each event card to the other player in case they wanted to activate the event was a little annoying.

6) The translation of the historical events to actions in the game didn't work for me very well, which lessened the theme for me.

Anyway, it was okay but not a home run. I certainly wouldn't mind playing again. Of course, my opinion may be influenced by the fact that I won...

(truth be told, Shemp was crushing me leading into the debates. At the debates, we both realized that we had kept poor cards for the job, but he fared worse than I did. In the final two turns I managed to grab quite a few seats and won the game).

Roll 'em, pardner (Dice Town x2, Dominion x2)

2010-04-05T22:07:00.003-04:00

It was Kozure's pick, and he was in the mood for fast, low fuss games.

Dice Town

A few weeks ago I participated in a math trade where I was looking to shift Dungeon Lords. It's a hot game right now, so I probably could have been greedy and held out for something valuable but I saw someone offering Dice Town. It sounded like a lot of fun so I went for it (I'm discovering that it's rather hard to find, so even better).

At home it's been an instant hit. My son LOVES this game. My sister, who doesn't particularly like games, likes this one. I like it, too.

Dice Town is a dice rolling game set in the old west. Players roll 5 custom dice with pictures of playing cards (9s to aces), hoping to set up combinations that will net them some goods. Everyone rolls there dice simultaneously and picks on to keep. Then they reveal what they kept, and roll the remaining four dice and keep one. This goes on until all five dice have been selected. Optionally, a player may pay 1$ per die to keep more than one die on a given roll.

Most 9s = gold nuggets
Most 10s = rob the bank
Most jacks = draw cards at the general store
Most queens = Steal cards from another player
Most kings = become the sheriff (sheriff breaks ties)
Best poker hand = Get land claims

If you got nothing on a turn, you visit "doc badluck" and receive a consolation prize (note that some of these are good enough to make intentionally visiting doc badluck a valid strategy on some occasions)

Nuggets, money, land claims and some general store cards are worth VPs. Most VPs win the game.

This game is easy to explain, plays relatively quickly, and is a lot of fun. There is a small amount of strategy, as it's important to pick your battles and spy what opportunities exist for getting lots of stuff with little effort. For example, if everyone is going for best poker hand, then a single 9, 10 and jack can land you gold, the money in the bank and a card from the general store. Similarly, if someone appears to be going for 9s (to get gold nuggets) and has more than you, pursuing 9s will likely yield nothing. Having said that, Doc Badluck can be a viable option in some cases and a player might well decide that it's beneficial to follow someone in a category they cannot win to make sure they get to visit the doctor... one of the doc's "remedies" is a gold nugget from each player, for example, if you can finish the hand with at least one ace and still win nothing.

It might have been fun if more combinations/ goals were at play, such as rewarding players for getting straights or whatever. Not a big deal, though.

We played two sessions, and although I had a strong start in the first one Kozure managed to beat us all on both occasions. Everyone enjoyed it, we'll see if it becomes a staple!

Dominion

Speaking of staples, Kozure followed up Dice Town with Dominon/ Dominon:Intrigue. This was the first time I had played with both expansions mixed together, and the first time I had played with the expansion since I realized I liked the base game (I played the expansion first, and was lukewarm to it). Having played the basic system a few times now, the expansion did not seem as intimidating as it did previously. I would say that on the balance I still prefer the simplicity of the basic cards, though I could see that with repeated play the different possibilities offered by Intrigue would be appealing.

In the first game I tried to build an engine where I would have several high gold cards in my deck and then use the "adventurers" card to constantly get more of that gold into my hand. I managed to purchase a number of Provinces this way, but couldn't prevent a loss. In the second, I floundered badly as I tried to make coppersmith work for me but it didn't. I lost badly.

Did Kozure win both Dominion games, too? Good night for him...

Hey guys, I like it! (Tikal x2)

2010-03-28T14:21:00.003-04:00

Shemp picked Tikal and Mexica this week, though as he picked them he mentioned that we would surely trash him at Tikal since we had so much more experience than he did with the game. As we gathered around the table, he suggested we start with Tikal... he seemed curious to find out if he really liked the game or not.

He did. And then we played that again instead of Mexica.

The first game was characterized by very expensive pathways. There was a temple site that had two 6 step branches off of it. This also meant that many paths were completely inaccessible (i.e. no stepping stones). All in all, movement was wonky. I was lucky enough to draw the lion's share of the treasure hexes and so I built a big lead in points from those. In the end, those points won me the game (though Kozure surprised us all with a massive 50+ point scoring round at the end).

In our second game, Shemp had the lead in treasures and also strategically located his two tents on either side of a long uncross-able path. The mobility this afforded him allowed his domination of some big temples that we couldn't get to easily. He won.

I'm a little curious how often the player who draws the most treasure hexes wins the game. It's hard to say that it's definitely an advantage, because digging up treasure is costly (and making up sets even more-so). Definitely being able to score complete sets across multiple scorings is a huge advantage.

In my opinion, Tikal is best with 3 players (and is one of my favorite euros when played this way). It was nice to get it to the table again.

More thinky bloodshed (A Game of Thrones : A Clash of Kings)

2010-03-21T16:16:00.003-04:00

Although we were only three players, I wanted to try the A Game of Thrones expansion one more time (now that I've played it with four, I was less afraid of getting a bad impression if it didn't work out).

I was Stark (white), Shemp was Lannister (red) and Kozure was Barratheon (black). Greyjoy is mandated as the house to remove from the game, which appeared to make sense though I was afraid that without my natural enemy it would be too easy for me (in the four player game, Stark and Greyjoy start in the north).

In practice, it wasn't too bad. I did enjoy relative peace for much of the game as I grew my forces and slowly marched south. As it happened in our last game, the Lannisters shot out ahead in VPs early in the game. Unfortunately for Shemp, he watched the Lannisters get beaten down for it, just as in our last game. It was Kozure who was pulling out ahead. He took King's landing and was pushing back the Lannisters, winning Claim with his abundance of power tokens. The three houses converged at Harandhall and Riverrun. I took Riverrun first, satisfying my house tactics card Claim condition. Kozure took Harandhall. Shemp came from the south-west and put pressure on both of them. In order to steal the victory from Kozure, Shemp and I hatched a plan to surround Harandhall, so that I could support the Lannister's siege against the city. As it often happens, particularly between me and Shemp, the partnership did not go as planned. He had just taken Riverrun from me, so in an effort to give me the opportunity to take it back I took an unconventional route to surround Kozure... I crossed the river with a single unit and "supported" with Rob Stark's army rather than moving the army itself. It was good enough to defeat Kozure's army, and good enough to take back Riverrun, but it left me with a single army at the gates of Harrenhall (ironically, the idea to take back Riverrun that turn came frm Shemp, though it was certainly my plan to go back eventually). In the final turn, Kozure's Barratheon's had 7 claim, Shemp's Lannisters had 5 and I had 6. If things went according to plan, Shemp would steal a city and we would find ourselves in a three way tie. knowing I wasn't in a position to gain any claim this turn, and knowing I had to stare down a host of betrayed Lannisters at Riverrun, I had to be defensive on my last turn and set myself up to win on the tiebeaker. Unfortunately, in placing my action tokens I didn't think to put a support token on my army adjacent to Harandhall and s when Shemp did attack, I couldn't help in any way. He lost by one. I hadn't seen it coming, but Shemp had a second target in mind, as he swept east to King's landing and took the city. Barratheon managed to get it back, but for a second there it seemed like he might have managed to stop Kozure from winning.

In the end, my programming mistake was a huge one, because I would have won on the tiebreaker (most supply). Oh well. All hail king Barratheon! All hail the master of A Game of Thrones: A Storm of Swords, Kozure, as his win ratio remains 100% at this game.

Of LannisPort and King's Landing (A Game of Thrones: A Storm of Swords)

2010-03-16T22:09:00.003-04:00

Back when we were often four players, I used to lament the fact that we couldn't play A Game of Thrones since it took five to play optimally. I recently decided to spring for a copy of the expansion called "A Storm of Swords" because it features a new board designed specifically for four players. Of course, that's when Luch moved out of town, and we dropped to just three players...

Well, this week Bharmer made his once a month appearance and so we were four. Kozure decided to pick this game, and there was joy in the land of Westeros.

If you know A Game of Thrones, this is mostly the same game on a different board, but there are important differences:

1) There are no boats or wilding attacks.
2) Leaders are added to the game, and new rules for taking hostages and hostage negotiations go with them.
3) Each player gets a "Tactics" deck, which gives an ability for each game turn.
4) Four "Ally" deck representing factions that can be, err, allied with.
5) A claim track allows players to gain VPs in other ways than conquering territory.

A few other new items have been added which have a lesser impact on the game, such as a weather track that makes some passages inaccessible during stormy weather, and garrisons which are units that can only defend.

In my opinions, each of the additions are excellent. The loss of boats is unfortunate, but is more than compensated by the other additions.

The leaders, major characters from the books, are interesting because they have two "states". The first is their basic state, and boils down to an addition to the combat value for the group. The second is triggered when the player controlling it plays a certain kind of order (usually raid or consolidate power)... in this case the player can choose to ignore the chosen event and instead execute a march order and benefit from a slightly altered, more powerful leader. As an example, Jamie Lannister goes from a 1 strength unit to a 2 strength unit with a bonus sword icon when activated. The subtle impact here is that the triggering order might cause combat out of sequence... A raid marker that triggers a march allows combat earlier than normal and can therefore allow a player that would otherwise be later in the combat turn to make an attack before his opponent can act. If a combat involving a leader produces losses, the winning player can choose to claim a leader as a prisoner instead. Later on, power tokens can be squeezed out of the owners of your prisoners. Further, hostage negotiations can take place which adds a welcome layer of politics to a game that is meant to be political in the first place.

The tactics cards add a level of uncertainty to each game turn because depending on the choice, a player might have a bonus on siege or on defense, a player might make an alliance from the "Ally" deck, a player might squeeze power tokens from the former owners of prisoners in his holding cell, etc.

The Ally cards are interesting because they add reinforcements and other abilities to the players, and offer another path to follow to cement a lead or stage a comeback.

The Claim track adds another way to gain VPs. Certain tactics cards and westeros cards give the possibility to a player to gain a point on the Claim track, which gives players an alternative to pure military victory.

Overall, the game feels at once significantly different and much the same. The foundation of the game is unchanged, but a layer of chrome has been added which changes the flavour. The tactics card and the Allies shake up the chess-like simplicity of the basic game. Some players may strongly hate or prefer this introduction of randomness, but I like both for different reasons. Due to game length issues, I would probably pick A Game of Thrones: A Storm of Swords for four players and Mare Nostrum for five, but I'd happily play either.

In our game, I was the Lannisters, Shemp was the Barratheons, Kozure was the Greyjoys and Bharmer was the Starks. In the starting setup, the Lannisters start spread out and with Eddard Stark as a prisoner. The prisoner puts me immediately at odds with the Starks, and geographic adjacency + a Barratheon tactics card ensures that there will be conflict with them as well. Still, early in the game the Lannisters managed to conquer two neutral cities and satisfy their tactics card VP condition... I was within a single point of winning the game!

Then came turn 6.

In turn 6 I miss-programmed one of my armies, putting it in a situation where it became decimated. I lost King's Landing to the Barratheons, lost a 7 point army due to rout, etc, etc. I played very badly, making stupid call after stupid call, dropping back to 4-5 points in the process.

Greyjoy and the Starks were similarly exchanging blows in the north for much of the game. Jamie Lannister was planning a raid into the Greyjoy camp as The Starks came down from the north and started putting pressure in the center of the board.

Unfortunately, it was getting late and we were forced to end the game prematurely. It ended up being a three-way tie for most VPs, so we had to go to three levels of tie breaker to find the Greyjoys victorious (most supply was the determining tie-breaker).

A Game of Thrones is quite a long game to play, and requires a certain amount of effort to play properly. That's fine. I enjoy it quite a bit when it does get on the table.

What's a Calpulli again? (The End of the Triumvirate, Mexica)

2010-02-27T13:33:00.005-05:00

No new games played this week, so the post should be short.

Me, Shemp and Kozure again. Shemp picked The End of the Triumvirate and Mexica.

The End of the Triumvirate

Just to shake things up, we chose colours randomly. Kozure was red (Caesar), I played Blue (Pompei) and Shemp was black (Crassus). The starting positions make Pompei a military force in the beginning, whereas Caesar favors politics (I can only assume Crassus is somewhere in between). I started out by building/ conserving my strength and increasing my competency. Kozure and I were butting heads over control of Rome, while Shemp was remaining mostly unmolested. He stole my advisor, but I was managing to hold my own as a military force on the board. Kozure won the first election. Shemp won the second election, stealing the victory from Kozure by dragging ALL the remaining votes to his side. I was within two provinces of winning, but Shemp was so close to being acclaimed that it was imperative to bring him down. I spied a way to knock him down while simultaneously getting within one turn of winning through "competency" I had so much gold producing provinces on the board I was sure I would win, but Shemp and Kozure stole enough of my provinces that I was 1 gold short. In the end, we were all so close to winning every move was damage control. Due to the built in timer of the election, the game ended as Shemp claimed his second election as consul and won a political victory.

The End of the Triumvirate is quite a curious game. It simultaneously feels very much like a euro, and also very much like a wargame, which puts it in a very small category of games (with Antike, but what else?). The balance is terrific, and the tension of trying to advance your agenda without giving the game to another player through a different victory condition is palpable. Further, the constant timing mechanism of the elections ensures that the game ends eventually (this is an issue with Mare Nostrum, another game I quite like that feels similar). The main downside is that a player's turn has enough steps that downtime is somewhat of an issue. It's a three player game, and turns aren't THAT long anyway, but it's enough of an issue that I was noticing it (and I think that we tend to play reasonably quickly, so it might be worse for others).

Anyway, for a three player wargame it's quite good.

Mexica

In this session we started out fairly predictably by each going to our own corner and we eventually worked towards the middle. I forced the first scoring with a move that gave me the majority in a region AND got me on the sacred space for the bonus points, which I was very happy with. However, we forgot that the scoring only happens after all the players have had the same number of turns, which in this case would have given Shemp and Kozure a chance to act (and obviously would have improved their score). When Kozure ended it, it looked like I was comfortably ahead throughout the scoring. In counting the last half of the board, however, the score tightened up and it ended very close with me in the lead by 4-5 points. Hard to say if I still would have won if we hadn't made that mistake in the first scoring, however.

Battles: With and without Pus (The End of the Triumvirate, Chaos in the Old World)

2010-02-20T23:24:00.003-05:00

No new games this week (shocking, I know). We played The End of the Triumvirate and Chaos in the Old World (me, Kozure and Shemp). Curiously, these are all games that I was impressed with the last time I played them, but felt a little less satisfying this time. Maybe it was the games, maybe it was my mood. Who knows?

The End of the Triumvirate

This system is a very successful three way tug of war. In order to succeed, you have to make sure you are moving towards one of the three possible victory conditions without allowing another player to get ahead of you in another track. Alas, this is what happened.

I was Caesar, and decided I would try for the political victory. I focussed on gold, and political competency. The idea was that I would stay ahead in that track, buy votes as often as I could and either get elected twice or do it once and corner the vote. I thought that if I made myself an easy target I would benefit from people attacking me and move ahead on the political competency track for free (due to the compensation given to the vanquished in battle). Unfortunately, Shemp and I skirmished too much and allowed Kozure to get too strong. Although I was one turn short of winning myself, we weren't able to stop Kozure from winning a military victory. To Crassus go the spoils.

As I said, it's a fun game but for some reason it felt a little "off" for me. There was some downtime between turns, we had to look up the rules a lot, etc. Not sure why, just seemed less polished than I remembered.

Chaos in the Old World

Having finally figured out the correct rules to the game, I was anxious to give this potentially great game another spin (the game ships with a couple of game-breaking errors which made our last games interesting but incredibly lopsided). We drew randomly, and I ended up being the same character as last time... Khorne, the red. Kozure played Slanesh and Shemp was Tzeentch.

Playing correctly, it becomes extremely easy to gain dial "ticks" as Khorne. Khorne is such a force militarily that overcoming the other's minions is a simple task if they don't run away. I was gaining two ticks nearly every turn.

I'm told that it's very easy to play and win as Khorne at first, but experienced players make it very difficult for him to win. I can only extrapolate that seasoned players know how to retreat and make Khorne waste actions. I'll really try to play a different god next time in order to broaden my horizons...

Anyway, it was still a good game and I did enjoy it, but there is something about the gameflow I find clunkier than it should be. Particularly, the multiple housekeeping phases required before ending a turn is annoying. Similarly, having to go through all the provinces sequentially three times in order to resolve combat, then domination and then again to do corruption seems like a bit much. We ended up doing many of the steps simultaneously, but also often forgetting a step here or there.

Not a deal breaker. As the others said at the end of the game, by the end it was starting to feel pretty smooth. I feel there is probably a very good game there, we just need to internalize the steps a bit better.

Regardless, here are a few additional thoughts on the game:

1) One of the characteristics that often separate a euro from and american game is the presence of a spacial element and the representation of physical movement. The euros will frequently go with a more logistical approach which presents choices in an abstracted way, while the american game will often have a map and units moving from one space to another. In this respect, Chaos in the Old World feels much more like a euro than an american game. Although the units occupy a map that represents a fantasy world, units do not really travel from place to place in any meaningful way. Every game turn, players summon creatures to one or more regions, they battle and/or corrupt and then that's it. Adjacency is only meaningful because of a few placement limitations (units need to be placed in contiguous provinces). It's much more similar to El Grande or China than Risk, for example.
2) Another defining characteristic of american games is that at the end of a session there is usually a story to tell, whereas with euros it's pretty hard to describe what happened thematically. CitOW doesn't lend itself very well to storytelling in my opinion.
3) The game effects that the random "Old World" cards have on the game give the system an ameritrash feel, but not nearly as pronounced as I expected. The effects are all known at the start of each turn, and although they will certainly favour one player over another it hasn't yet felt like it was overpowering. More than anything, it transforms the landscape over the course of the game and forces players to keep on their toes.
4) The player's cards and factions work together very well to make each god play differently. The powers of the cards in particular are just powerful enough that playing well requires using them effectively, and playing them effectively means doing things differently than the other players. It is also quite obvious that each faction has cards designed to nullify the powers of others, so there is a definite tug-of-war going on in this game as well.

All in all, despite the heavily applied theme and the presence of dice based combat, the game mechanics feel more euro to me than american. Given my personal preferences, that's a plus.

Not as humorous as you'd think (Dungeon Lords, Bacchus' Banquet)

2010-02-13T21:49:00.002-05:00

Vlaada Chvatil is a designer that interests me quite a bit. His games aren't necessarily polished or anything, but they tend to be pretty innovative. Different, anyways. Galaxy Trucker is the biggest hit among his games in our group, and a personal favorite. Through the ages is a very clever civilization game marred by a terrible combat mechanism (imho), and Space Alert is a game I quite enjoy but unfortunately the rest of the group dislikes. The premise of Dungeon Lords sounded intriguing and potentially interesting... I pre-ordered right after I heard about it. We had four players this week (Me, Shemp, Kozure and Bharmer), so we gave it a go.

Dungeon Lords

The premise of Dungeon Lords is that each player is an aspiring dungeon lord looking to pass his dungeon lord exam. Over the course of two years, he will build a dungeon out of tunnels and rooms, monsters and imps and see how well it stands against the adventurers that always seem to show up at this sort of thing. The rulebook is humorous in it's explanation of the game system, the illustrations are whimsical in their description of the setting and the creatures, the setting is silly, the gameplay is... convoluted and fiddly and unfunny.

Frankly, I'm pretty disappointed. The gameplay boils down to worker placement followed by an efficiency puzzle. Players start off by sending their 3 minions to collect food, hire imps, mine gold, hire monsters, dig tunnels, etc. This feels a lot like any other resource management worker placement game where you start by gathering X so you can perform Y, etc, etc. There is a twist involved because there is a hidden ordering system which makes it unpredictable in what order the minions will make it to the desired location, and depending on the order they get there the benefit changes slightly (for example, when gathering food the first to arrive must spend a gold to get the food, the second gets 2 food for free and the third gets food and gold). At the end of each season, an adventurer goes to each player's dungeon with the most powerful going to the most evil player (I didn't mention it, but there is an "evilometer" that gets modified by certain actions). At the end of each year, the adventuring party is complete and storms the dungeon the player has been working hard to build. The game then changes character completely and it becomes a puzzle for each player to determine the best order to send creatures and traps after the party to minimize the damage they might cause.

At the end, if your score is positive, you passed the exam and become an official Dungeon Lord. If you have the highest score, you win.

There are things I like about the game. The hidden worker placement mechanic works well and introduces some interesting doublethink. However, I think I would have liked it better if the swing between coming in first, second or third was less pronounced. Determining the selection order for monsters is one thing, but needing to pay gold to get one food vs getting two food paying no gold is a big difference that can seriously impact your plans. I like the "puzzle" aspect of defending your dungeon, and enjoyed the training dungeons quite a bit because of this, but the actual game introduces so much fiddliness as to sap the fun out of it (the spells, the varying fatigue, etc).

I think if I had to sum up my main issue with the game it would be just that. The humour is lost amongst the ponderous fiddliness of the whole thing. The strategy aspect which comes from the elaborate worker placement system (which goes against the silly setting in the first place) is undone by the level of chaos in the game.

...and there is WAY too much shuffling of bits around.

Anyway, I won the game after facing off against the 2nd year paladin and beating him. I tried not to be particularly evil, but always found myself in front. I have to admit that I found planning the defeat of that party very satisfying, even though I wish I didn't need to wait as long as I did to get to that point. Oh well.

As I've thought about it more, I now feel compelled to try to simplify the game and give it another chance. I wonder if the hidden orders and cycling of available actions could be reduced to a simple 3 step worker placement phase. The party could be dealt out in the beginning and the players could build their dungeons accordingly. Tokens could all be laid out ahead of time to save time (the question mark markers face up from the beginning and the creatures/ rooms turned face up as the one above it gets purchased. Maybe the spells would bother me less if the rest of the game was simplified.

Or I'll just trade it.

Bacchus' Banquet

We also tried out this game which promised to be a shorter, more streamlined "hidden identity/ hidden goal" type game in the vein of "Bang!". The idea is that various characters are attending a great feast hosted by the Roman emperor Calligula. Depending on the secret identity a player receives, he may be trying to kill Calligula, try to gather up valuable presents or just... you know... eat and drink a lot.

The mechanics are simple. There are seven cards showing gifts, food, wine, poison, etc. The active player chooses three cards then discards one, keeps one and presents the last card as a present to another player. That player must decide if they will accept the gift before looking at it, or pass it on to another player. When a gift is accepted, it's effects are resolved and the game keeps going. The trick is that if the gift is not accepted by anyone, then the active player will have to accept it.

It's worth mentioning that each time a player accepts food, drink or poison he/she must adjust a token representing a belt buckle on his/her player board. If the belt buckle goes too far, the character passes out and is out of the game (though the player isn't eliminated, he/she simply draws a new hidden identity and keeps playing).

It works well. The simple act of picking three gifts and discarding one/keeping one/ offering the last as a gift leads to all sorts of double-guessing. For example, if the player takes poison as one of the three cards, will he risk gifting it in case it gets back to him? Maybe he will take two good cards and one bad one, discard the bad one and gift a good one hoping no one will be brave enough to take it... therefore getting two good cards that turn.

I rather enjoyed Bacchus' Banquet. It's not stellar, but it is fun. We laughed quite a bit and engaged in some serious double-think over the course of two sessions. In both games I played a conspirator who won if Calligula died or if three daggers were ever on the table at the same time. I won a joint win with Shemp as three daggers made it to the table in game one, and won again in game two as Calligula Shemp ate a hunk of meat that made his belt buckle burst.

The Thunder-business (Dominion x2, Thunderstone, Ra)

2010-02-05T21:29:00.001-05:00

It was Shemp's pick, but Shemp did not pick. So, we brought games, and we played some of those. Three players again (me, Shemp and Kozure).

Dominion

First up was Dominion, which I had never played before (although I've played Dominion:Intrigue a few times). When I had played the expansion, I was a little ambivalent... The games wants to be played quickly, but the cards were *just* complicated enough that I couldn't quite internalize what they all did or how they could be combined and still play fast. The result was that I just wasn't getting into it. The base game, on the other hand, is much easier to grasp quickly and I found it to be much more enjoyable. No doubt if I played enough I'd want the additional variety and interaction of Intrigue, but for now I'd pick this one every time.

We played two times. In the first, I focussed on mines, the bureaucrat and the cellar. I purchased coppers, upgraded them to silvers and then gold (or, alternatively, received silver from the bureaucrat and upgraded it to gold). My multiple cellars ensured that I had a copper or silver to upgrade whenever I had a mine in hand. I soon had many gold cards and purchasing provinces was relatively easy. The funny thing was that both Shemp and Kozure had a lot of thieves in their deck, and were repeatedly trying to steal from me... and not once did I turn over anything more than a copper! Luck was certainly on my side. I ended up winning... my first Dominion victory ever! In fact, it was my first non-dead last finish ever.

In our second game, the cards were strangely skewed to the high end. The only relatively inexpensive card was the moat (ironic, because there was only one attack action card available). I attempted a "garden" strategy by accumulating as many cheap cards as possible and as many gardens as possible. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me until later that I should have focussed on cards that gave me more "buys" so that I could bulk up my deck even further. I didn't quite make it to 40 cards, so my gardens only scored 3 points each. It wasn't quite enough because Shemp's last minute purchase of the final garden card gave him just enough to get by me.

Thunderstone

I gave my son "The Adventurers: Escape fromt he temple of Chac" by AEG for christmas, and unfortunately after our very first play he gathered up all the cards (so he could figure out what was the highest possible score) and then sat them down on the couch. My other son was jumping on the couch. Within seconds, al the cards were bent and folded. Not great for a game where hidden information is essential. I wrote an email to AEG to ask if they sold the cards separately, and they offered to send me a whole new deck for free! Because of that great show of customer service, I decided to see what other games they sold and noticed Thunderstone. As I mentioned above, until today I hadn't particularly enjoyed Dominion but I did find the central mechanic interesting. This game seemed to have a bit more depth, a theme that actually was reflected in the gameplay and it was getting good reviews. I decided to go for it.

Our game group generally doesn't go for fantasy themed games. Shemp, in particular, voiced that his desire to play was low largely due to the theme and "me-too" gameplay. Luckily, the guys are good sports about trying out new purchases and Shemp proclaimed that we would follow up Dominion with "the Thunder-business".

There are a lot of similarities between the games. Cards in the middle of the table represent the village and are used in the same way as the cards in Dominion. The deck that players build over the course of the game are worth gold and depending on what you get in your hand you can purchase better cards. The main difference in the game is that players have a second option... cards have other symbols which indicate the kind of adventuring party that can be mustered for a dungeon crawl. To the side of the village, a dungeon awaits consisting of a deck of cars and three face up creatures. If a player decides to pit their party against a creature in the dungeon, then the strength of the attack is compared to the hit points of the creature and if defeated the creature goes to the player's discard pile (analogous to VP cards in Dominion). The game ends once the Thunderstone is unearthed from the near the bottom of the creature deck.

Although the dungeon represents the biggest departure from Dominion, many other aspects of the game have additional little modifications. There are hero cards that can be leveled up, heros have a strength rating and equipment can only be used by those that have enough strength. Fighting creatures in the dungeon requires light, and the deeper into the dungeon you go, the more light is necessary. There are other differences as well, but suffice it to say that the game is at once similar to Dominion and quite different from it.

My feelings on the game are mixed. The theme of the game is relatively well captured. Unlike Dominion, it doesn't feel like you are just acquiring cards for the sake of gathering VPs. The additional details add some interesting decisions and force players to balance more things at once (powerful heroes are good, but light is also necessary, and the dungeon can't be ignored too long as you build up your deck or else the other players will get all the VPs). There are downsides to these changes, however. In Dominion, each player determines which combos they are aiming for and nothing really constrains their actions except the common goal of gathering VPs. In Thunderstone, certain basic necessities are needed in order to achieve the overall goal , and each player needs to look after them to a minimum degree. For example, everyone needs to get light. Everyone needs to get heroes and upgrade them. Everyone will be going to the dungeon and fight the monsters. This may lead to an overall feeling of sameness even though the specifics of each game may be different. The variety is found within that context... the selection of heroes, the village cards purchased, the monsters encountered in the dungeon. Also, the larger number of factors that need to come together means that the decks are more prone to clumping.

Anyway, I'll need to play a few more times to make a final judgement. I'd say that I like it better than Dominion: Intrigue, but less than Dominion. I'm not a big fan of the way the game ends as written... it feels a little like kingmaking, but it's easy enough to fix it and say that the game ends as soon as the Thunderstone is revealed. I also think that there is a strange disconnect between the experience the game delivers and what we have come to expect from dungeon crawling games: usually the easy creatures come first and there is a build up to the big bosses at the end. The random distribution ensures that this won't be the case in Thunderstone, for better or worse. I suppose it would be possible to make a variant where the monsters were encountered in order of strength if it really bothers me later on.

I won the game because I managed a lot of dungeon victories early in the game. Later, my deck got clogged but I had a good enough lead that it didn't matter.

"Ok, Blink dog"

Ra

We finished up with Ra. Fun as always, I learned an interesting tidbit about Shemp... He told us that Ra is the game that makes him willing to keep playing games he is initially unimpressed with. At first he hated Ra, now he thinks it's great.

Kozure came from behind and won on the strength of a great haul from his monuments.

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

2010-01-31T20:33:00.004-05:00

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)

2010-01-22T00:07:00.001-05:00

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)

2010-01-16T22:45:00.003-05:00

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

2010-01-15T09:31:00.006-05:00

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)

2010-01-09T00:03:00.002-05:00

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.