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

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

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

Macao

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

In the Year of the Dragon

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

Jungle Speed

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

Undefeated

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?

Calpulli - in - space!!! (Mexica, Space Alert! x2, Jungle Speed)

It's been a few weeks, I was glad to be back.

I traded away a few games recently for Mexica, an older title from the Kramer & Kielsing's "Mask Trilogy" (Tikal, Java and Mexica). Tikal is a game I really like, and Mexica has been described as a faster playing and shorter game that still has interesting gameplay. I've had a few opportunities to get it at trades over the years, and always passed. Finally, curiosity finally got the better of me.

Mexica
Like the rest of the Mask trilogy, Mexica is essentially an area majority game. Here, players place canal tiles to subdivide a large island into smaller regions (which is worth points), and then try to earn further points by gaining majorities in the created regions (the measure of a player's influence in a region is determined by having the largest temples).

Another characteristic it shares with Tikal and Java is that it's based on the action point system. Mexica gives 6 points with which to build canals, temples, bridges, or simply to move around the board. One twist is that up to 2 points may be carried over to future rounds.

I found that the game is certainly shorter than Tikal, but that the level of confrontation and opportunity for "screwage" is far higher than I would normally associate with a "light" game. In my mind, this is much more of a medium weight game... in line with Settlers of Catan and the like.

We started by settling the edge of the board and working our way inwards. There was a substantial amount of nasty blocking and stealing of majorities by all players (a good thing), but Kozure seemed to always be a few steps ahead. The fact that he secured the majority in the unfounded region at the center of the board when the game ended only cemented his win.

I've now played twice (once with WAGS, and once with my in-laws) and both games have been very enjoyable. I have this strange feeling that the incentive to actually end the first round might prove to be lacking, since the first player to do it is at a substantial disadvantage, but we'll see.

Space Alert!

We attempted Space Alert! again, this time with 4 players. After we got creamed in our first session, we decided it would be best if we tried again. Hopefully experience counts for something, right? No. We died again.

This game is certainly an odd duck. My enthusiasm for it has not diminished, despite our continued dismal showings. On the other hand, the group still doesn't seem sold on it (not sure what Luch thought of it). The chaos factor is high, and apparently our ability to self organize under pressure is lacking.

- We have difficulty setting targets, like "fire guns in the red sector on the 6th phase" and making them happen.
- We don't pay enough attention to the text on the threats that come up. In this session, we coordinated an attack on an internal threat, but it was unharmed because none of us noticed it would move around the ship when it crossed the "X" event.
- etc. etc.

Anyway, I had a great time, despite sucking at it. I'm sure that if we kept playing it we'd get better and eventually succeed frequently but I don't get the sense that our group will ever find out! Oh well, at least it plays solo.

Shemp also mentioned that he was surprised I liked the game since I have often complained about unnecessary "fiddliness" in the past. He's right, but for the type of gaming experience this game offers it doesn't bother me. I wish it had been streamlined more, of course, but I also give it credit for being an original idea for a game.

Jungle Speed

We ended with Jungle Speed. It's been a while, so we were all quite rusty. I warmed up in time, and won the game after a shaky start. Fun game usual... perfect for what it is!

Ketchup (Perikles, For Sale!, Jungle Speed)

I'm behind, so I'm just going to write briefly about our game session nearly two weeks ago.

Jaywowzer joined us. We let him pick this time, and he asked to play Perikles... we were happy to acknowledge.

This was our first five player game. The impact wasn't major, other than seeing the persians used more regularly. On the other hand, the experience felt more watered down than our first few games. Not sure if the bloom is coming off the rose, or if I just prefer it with fewer players. Actually, now that I think about it, it's probably the number of players. In any game where players are all playing in the same sandbox, more players means more things change before your turn comes up (which means less control/ more chaos). In Perikles, having less control didn't feel right.

I tried to see what would happen if I simply stuffed the board with cubes and left them there (since they are worth a point each at the end of the game, it seemed like it might work... it takes a lot of 3-5 point battles to make 30 points!) However, I was too single minded: I won only two statues, and one of those was worthless. I won very few battles with the persian armies. All in all, I think I came in 3rd or 4th.

Not sure what Jawowzer thought of it, but I think he liked it.

We then played a hand of For Sale! Not much to say. Fun. Light.

We capped the evening with the return of Jungle Speed. I was at the top of my game, and won (though I jockeyed for first with Luch for several turns before winning).

Ouch (Nexus Ops, Ingenious, Clue: The Great Museum Caper, Jungle Speed + Expansion)

This post is quite late. The evening in question is Wednesday, September 28th (I wasn't around this week. From the emails, it's possible there was no gaming at all in my absence)

I chose to play the new games I received at the recent math trade (Nexus Ops, Ingenious and Jungle Speed + Expansion), along with one I received at the previous one (Clue: The Great Museum Caper).

Nexus Ops

Nexus Ops is a game from Avalon Hill's recent attempt to make a comeback in boardgaming. While the line in general didn't see much success (or so I hear), Nexus Ops was one of only two games to get any sort of positive recognition (the other was Vegas Showdown). Billed as a sort of "Risk done right", I thought it might fill a niche in my collection.

The concept is a little forced: It's the future and a new planet has been discovered which seems to be rich in Rubium. Each player represents a corporation which wants to mine the planet for all it's worth. To this end, it sends in soldiers and enlists creatures on the planet to help. In practice, it's an excuse to get a bunch of armies together and fight.

The board consists of a number of hexogonal tiles, layed in a circular pattern just like Settlers of Catan, except that the center is an elevated platform. Each player has a base at one edge where units are deployed. After the initial setup, the game consists purely of deploying units, fighting and collecting income based on the mines the player controls at the end of a turn. It sounds simple, and it is, but the designers have slipped in there a few nice ideas which make this game work where others might have failed:

1) The victory condition is acheiving 12 victory points. Victory points are almost exclusively gained by winning battles. This small decision ensures that the game keeps moving and never results in turtling.

2) Players gain secret missions at the end of every turn. These are normally to win a battle in a certain place, with a certain unit or under certain conditions. Players will normally alter their play to attempt to satisfy the conditions, which allows the game to feel a little less repetitive than it otherwise would.

3) If a player wins a battle, he/she is allowed to play mission cards to gain victory points. However, if this occurs the losing player gets to draw an "energize" card, which will grant him an advantage in the future (such as rolling additional dice, destroying units, etc). This is a nice, simple way to keep losing players in the running.

4) The creatures seem well balanced. The expensive ones are worth more, due to the powers they get and their superior ability in battle. Still, they are risky because a well coordinated attack by several smaller units. Even with lots of money, it's never obvious which units a player should buy.

I had fun with Nexus Ops. Though the overall visual impression of the game is ridiculously tacky, the component quality is generally quite good (the only excpetion would be the cardboard center obelisk, which seems too cheap for the rest of the game). The brightly coloured creatures are kinda cool, though in a few instances they could have been better differentiated.

I think it will do just fine in my collection... there for those sessions were I just want to beat stuff up.

Session Report

Not knowing how to play the game, I opened with just 2 units... a soldier and a rock spider. I discovered another rock spider but was unable to man any of my starting mines (leaving me with little income for the next turn). Having observed the weakness of my opening move, the other players purchased more cheaper units and spread out while keeping people behind to generate income. A few turns in, things were looking grim. Shemp, Luch and Kozure had lots of units on the board... my only saving grace was that I managed to get 2 rock spiders on the monolith and enjoyed the energize card bonus for many rounds before the others got fed up with exploring the board and purchasing reinforcements. Kozure started moving into my home base and I could do very little to fight back (Kozure was the USSR of this game, with nearly half the board under his control). Luch was taking the lion's share of the VPs by succesfully battling Shemp and Kozure. My stash of cards was difficult to use because I had so few units, but I managed to focus on a few easy battles and accumulated a pretty good score considering. Shemp couldn't roll a winning die to save his life, and Kozure wasn't fighting very much at all which meant his VP total didn't really reflect his dominance of so much territory.

Entering what was our last round, Luch and I were both in a position to potentially win on our turns. Difference was, I needed to get lucky, and he was so strong that it was almost inconceivable that he would'nt win.

He did.

Ingenious

Ingenious is a kind of variant on dominos which also reminds me of Blokus for it's relative simplicity. There's not much to it (you place a tile which has two symbols on it and score points according to how well it matches with what's already on the board) but the Tigris and Euphrates style scoring and the fact that it plays well with 2, 3 or 4 players make it a much better game in my opinion (I also like Blokus, but the base set only really plays well with 4).

I think everyone liked it, but to be fair I mostly got this one to play with non-gamers at home.

Clue: The Great Museum Caper

This was a game I picked up at the last math trade. When we played it, it seemed like fun but I couldn't understand how it was possible for the thief to win. I almost traded it away at this math trade because the box is SO big, and the game seemed SO unbalanced, that I figured it wouldn't get much play. Having failed to trade it, I figured I'd give it another shot.

The balance seemed even worse than before. Utterly impossible, in fact. I've checked BGG, I can't see anything we are doing wrong. I'm guessing that 2-3 players would work better, but I'm not sure I'll ever find out...

(oh, and Shemp said at the end of the game that he couldn't decide whether he would rate this above or below Lord of the Rings: Sauron. Considering how much he hates that game, I was quite surprised. Sure, it's not working very well...but it's not a game that stands out enough that it would even occur to me that it would be worthy of hating. And this from a guy who likes Scotland Yard, so I thought he might really go for this)

Back to the trade pile.

Jungle Speed + Expansion

Not much to say, except that if you've ever played this before and thought that it made your head hurt... you ain't seen nothing yet. The new cards provided are not all new patterns. They are further variations on the existing ones! There are subtle changes which are not easy to process, and the whole thing is very headache inducing.

I LOVE it.

(note: I don't recommend playing with the full deck with 4 people. Our game did end (I won), but it could have gone on for a long time. )

Mania! Mania? (Jungle Speed, RoboRally, Canal Mania)

Apologies to the gods of blogging, I'm posting this a week and a half late (it's a session report for Wendesday the 12th of Spetember). Why the delay? I'm blaming in on Metroid Prime 3.

We kicked off the evening with Jungle Speed. Does age matter? maybe. Shemp wasn't doing too hot in our game, but JayWowzer and I were neck and neck. Does time matter? Definitely. Starting out the evening with the game led to a far slower game than normal... I guess we hadn't properly "stretched" our gaming mojo yet.

RoboRally with 5 players should be chaotic enough, but I wanted to up the ante. I chose a scenario which appeared to be quite deadly (3 flags concentrated at the center of a board, with pits and conveyor belts all around). No one died in the first round, so that was discouraging. I cruised along unimpeded to the 1st and 2nd flag while the others struggled to get anywhere. Sadly, I lost all my mad programmin' skilz and ran around in circles trying to get number 3. Meanwhile, Luch managed to finish it off. I did manage to reprogram a few robots with my radio control beam, and Luch did manage to shoot alot of robots with his rear-firing laser. Kozure lost his last robot before the end of the game, and I don't beleive that Shemp ever made it to flag 1. Hmmm.

Canal Mania

Canal Mania can be best described as Railroad Tycoon meets Ticket to Ride (and, to a much lesser extent, Maharaja). You've got a board littered with English cities, and you need to connect them with canals. It resembles Ticket to Ride because you have routes you are trying to fulfill, and you must draw cards from a face up supply in order to pay for playing the canal pieces. It resembles Railroad Tycoon because you place hexagonal pieces of canal paths on the board, and ship goods from town to town once you've made the connections. Scoring also draws from both of it's sources: You primarily get points for completing your routes and sending goods across a long network of your cities. From Maharaja, the game borrows a very similar "role" system.

When I first was explained the rules, I thought the whole thing sounded pretty clever. It seemed like many of the downsides of the previous games had been addressed and/or streamlined. You would no longer be frustrated for a long period of time waiting for a particular colour of card to come up, because the cards come in only 5 varieties (actually, 4+ wilds) and every route can use a combination of all 4 different types. Also, the routes you choose determine the only places you can play on the board, so there should be much less analysis paralysis than the totally open options of Railroad Tycoon.

Oh, and the special powers of the roles, and the ease with which they can be swapped around, makes it possible to do SOMETHING productive at almost any time.

But you know what? It didn't do much for me. I'd play the original games before this one any day. It wasn't bad at all, but the process felt slower and more constrained than they do. The slower part might resolve itself with more plays (it SHOULD move fast, because there aren't many choices at any one time. I guess the multiple phases in each player's turn takes it's toll). I think the part that bothered me, though, was the scoring...

There are just a few ways to score points:
1) fulfill routes (contracts)
2) place tiles along those routes that are worth points
3) deliver goods along a long series of your cities

The problem I have is that the points for the routes seem irrelevant. A route worth twice as much takes twice as long to complete. They also go through 2 cities. Therefore, after I've completed a long route, you've completed two short ones, and we are even again.

Then, the choice of tiles used is fairly prescribed as well. I haven't played this often enough to know for sure, but it seems like over the course of a game most players will gain approximately the same number of points from tiles.

So, that leaves connections for delivering goods. Here, major differences in points can occur. If I have a good series of unconnected routes, and you don't, I bet there is nothing you could do to win. Therefore, it seems like the other two paths to victory engage players in a very close battle where 1 or two points will separate the winner from the loser, but the goods delivery makes that race irrelevant. So, then, why bother with counting the rest?

And finally, if the delivered goods are the key to victory, I would hope that there would be fair control over which routes you pick. Not so. On your turn, you pick from the available 5 routes (or much less, if some have already been taken). You can't play without a route, so if you don't have one, you pick from what's available. It seems that only 6-7 routes get completed in a game, so the luck of having the right route available at the right time seems very important to victory.

Now, I could obviously be missing something because I've played only once and didn't do well. Kozure CRUSHED us with a well connected series of canals. Clearly, he "Got It" way before we did (at least, long before I did). We were all virtually tied in second place.

I'd definitely play again. I eventually came around to Maharaja, and it's quite possible I just didn't get Canal Mania this time.

Note to potential buyers: there is very little "mania" involved in Canal Mania.

Dying the Sky with Blood, and Pounding the Earth (Crimson Skies, Jungle Speed) 8454

Short post:

We played Crimson Skies, a "Clix" game featuring a boardless movement system (similar to Wreckage). In it, concept planes face off in arial combat. I beleive it's a two player game, but it worked fine with 4. Not much to say, except that I thought it was quite a bit better than HeroClix (and wreckage, for that matter) due to a more reasonable learning curve. This would be due to the fact that planes tend to start off with powers which they can only lose as they get hit... HeroClix characters aften gain abilities as they weaken. Also, those powers are relatively easy to absorb since the colour chart matches up reasonably well. The most interesting part (also the one I had the most problems with) was the movement mechanic. After initiative is determined, you play a "Maneuvre" card (my term, not theirs) to describe how your plane will fly. The card shows a flight path and you essentially place cardboard hex pieces end to end and match the flight path until your flight reaches it's speed rating in spaces. In theory, it's a nice way to encapsulate many of the possible movements that a plane could do without adding much complexity. In practice, I sometimes wished I could deviate slightly from the flight paths available since it seemed arbitrarily limiting at times. Also, while the cardboard spacers eliminate the need for a board, precision is lost and alignments can get out of wack if people aren't careful.

Ultimately, though, it's not a game for rules lawyers. It's a fun game if you accept the inherent "sloppyness" of a board-free environment and some of the game's limitations (and let's be honest... planes go fast. I might be kidding myself that such modifications in flight would be easy).

Team Easy-Bharmer took the skies in a tight formation and barreled towards Luch, leaving Kozure to fight a single one of Bharmer's planes. Much questionable maneuvring occured, mostly on my part, and planes threatened to crash on multiple occasions (that was mostly Luch, Kozure, Bharmer. Mostly.) I took down one of Luch's planes and Kozure got enough solid hits on Bharmer that he decided it was wise to escape rather than crash and burn. Team Easy-Bharmer ultimately shot our way to victory, despite much flying ineptitude all around. Well, everyone but Kozure (and that was expected).

We finished off with Jungle Speed.

Potluck! (Yspahan, Dungeon Twister, Louis XIV, Jungle Speed) 8169

I had everyone bring a game they owned tonight.

Yspahan

Yspahan is a game I'd heard much about recently, but what I heard hadn't intrigued me very much. Having played it, I'm happy Bharmer took the plunge... it's a very good game.

It's a game about trading in the middle east, but the theme is thinly applied. This falls squarely in the category of games where theme could be just about anything (not to imply that the theme isn't appropriate or welcome, just that it's somewhat irrelevant). Really, it's just one in a long line of euros where the goal is to get as many victory points as possible by managing your resources and making tough choices along the way. What sets this game apart for me (after one play, mind you) is that there seems to be several legitimate avenues to success and the level and type of confrontation feels just about perfect. All this, and the game is very short at 45min. to an hour!

Each turn. players must choose between claiming souks for points, building buildings (for points and special powers), claiming spots on the "camel track" and gaining money or camels (a form of currency in the game). One of the most interesting aspecs of the game is the dice mechanic which generates these choices: the starting player rolls eight dice. The dice are then spread on a board with 6 fields. All the dice showing the highest number rolled get placed in the "generate money" field. The dice showing the lowest value is placed in the "generate camels" field. The rest of the dice are spread out according to the value shown on the fields in between in ascending order. Example:

Roll=1,2,2,2,4,6,6,6.
Result=Place the die with the 1 on the camel field, the three dice with 2s on them on the second field, the die with the 4 on the third field and the three 6s on the highest field (because no 3s or 5s were rolled, this leaves the fourth and fifth field empty).

The fields with dice on them determine the choices available to the players. 3 dice on the camels would allow a player to take three camels. 3 dice on the second field allows a player to place three cubes on the sooks of a particular region (among other things). Etc, etc. In this way, the choices are constantly changing, and depending on the situation a player might want to choose something to advance his strategy, or to prevent another player from doing something advantageous to them.

My biggest complaint about the game would be that for such a quick and light game, there are a lot of rules. Once learned, it's easy to ignore this criticism, but I would consider it a barrier to teaching it to some people I think would otherwise enjoy this level of game. On the other hand, rules density shouldn't be a surprise considering one of the main strengths of the game is that many viable strategies are available.

Bharmer won. I came in a reasonably close second and Tilli was third.

Dungeon Twister

Luch arrived and we set up to play Dungeon Twister. Rather than attempt a four player game, we played two simultaneous 2 player games. I really enjoy the game for the balance it brings between strategy and chaos, and the theme helps releive it of some of the dryness it could have had otherwise. The rest of the group isn't enamoured with it, sadly, so I might not get to play much until I find someone who likes it as much as I do.

I won against Kozure 5-0, and Luch won against Bharmer 5-4.

Louis XIV

Another game I like very much, Louis XIV is another example of a very nice strategy game that packs a lot of punch in a short timeframe (and a small box). Now that I think about it, it's also pretty rules heavy. Goes with the territory, I suppose.

Things went very well for me. I was able to get almost all the goods I needed, when I needed them. I completed the mission which gives you a free cube where Louis is every turn... I think that one is very powerful. With it, I managed to fulfill 7 missions over the course of the game, giving me a victory (Bharmer was a close second). Very good game.

We finished off with two rounds of my favorite closer of all time, Jungle Speed . Good times.

Attack of the Weenie Hoards!!! (Hey! That's my Fish!, Liar's Dice, Bohnanza, Mama Mia!, Wheedle, Set, Jungle Speed)

Luch wanted to play lots of really short games. To that effect, we managed to play Hey! That's my Fish!, Liar's Dice, Bohnanza, Mama Mia!, Wheedle, Set, Jungle Speed. Surely, this is a record for most DIFFERENT games played in an evening, and maybe most games too.

Missing the cut were: Falling!, Cash n' Guns and Can't Stop.

Bohnanza

I learned that Kozure is not a big fan of Bohnanza. Myself, I like the game, though I agree that three rounds is too long. The biggest problem, though, is how deeply counter-intuitive some of the mechanics are. The cards cannot be sorted or moved in your hand (I'm looking at you, Bharmer!). The three phases in each round always take a read through of the rules to remember. Whatever, it's a fun game once it gets rolling. Luch won, which was not surprising because he was clearly the best at setting up trades in his favour (my favorite was when he refused to take a card Kozure was offering him until he agreed to give him both, knowing Kozure could not afford to keep both cards)

Mama Mia!

I cleaned up at this game. Apparently, it's hard to complete all your orders by the third round but I had all but one done in the second. Throughout, it seemed like everyone else was playing for my benefit (if I had an order for 3 olives and a pepperoni, the other players would play 3 olives leading to my turn, and I would complete the order). I don't expect to see luck like that again for a loooong time.

Wheedle

When I last played this game, I rocked. This time, not so much. Out of four rounds, I called three and made errors in all of them. My score at the end was -10. The others seemed to be doing quite well, so I apologize to all for repeatedly making potentially good hands redundant.

Set

Set seems to be a board game version of Wii's Big Brain Academy. Find patterns in a set of tiles before the other players do. The patterns have to be pretty specific, though: The image on each card has four characteristics (colour, shape, number and fill). To make a pattern, every characteristic has to be THE SAME or DIFFERENT on all three cards. It's pretty hard to do (and to explain), but Kozure was clearly much better at it than us. He CRUSHED us. Big Brain indeed.

Jungle Speed

This was a lot of fun when we last played with guest Wagster Sonja. I'm happy to say that it was just as much fun last night. There was a lot of laughter, twitchyness and bruised fingers to show for it. Once more, Kozure displayed his affinity for pattern recognition by winning 2 of the 3 games rather comfortably, with Luch winning the third. Me? On a couple of occasions I felt like I was on fire and doing really well. Then Kozure would win, and I would realize that I am old, slow and not good at pattern recognition. Sigh. Anyway, this is lots of fun and I hope it becomes a semi-regular evening closer. Back to the Big Brain Academy for me... I will avenge these losses!

FAST FAST FAST s l o w FAST (Jungle Speed x3, Power Grid, Poison)

Remove your jewelry, clip your nails... Jungle Speed hit the table this Wednesday and it got violent real quick.

If you don't know, Jungle Speed is a game where each player has a stack of cards they are trying to get rid of. Each card has a symbol on it, and players take turns revealing cards. If the card just flipped matches one another player has in front of them, those two players must quickly reach for the "totem" in the middle of the table... First player to grab it gets to give all his face up cards to the loser.

This is both harder and more interesting than it sounds. Many of the symbols are VERY close to being identical, but aren't. Cards will occasionally turn up which change the parameters of the game (such as colour matching, rather than symbol matching). Some cards simply reward the first player to grab the totem when flipped. The worst part: If you ever mess up and grab the totem when you weren't supposed to... you get EVERY player's face up cards.

Kozure, Luch, Shemp, Sonja and I squared off. We got "twitchy" real fast.

... well MOST players did. In this group, Sonja clearly kept her cool when we could not. The system penalizes far more heavily for grabing the totem in error than it does for being slower than the other player in a duel. Lucky for her, she was both FASTER and MORE ACCURATE than we were. She won all three games handily.

Are we getting slow in our old age?

Anyway, this was unquestionably a pleasant surprise. It was crazy, but lots of fun for what it was. This was Luch's pick from a long list of Sonja's games we had never played. Good call.

Next up was Power Grid. What a change of pace! After such a frantic opener, this one felt (to me) like molasses. This was particularly odd because one of the things I've always liked about this game was that the broken up phases of the game typically keeps things moving and keeps the game from going too long between player's turns. I think it might have to do with number of players... more than 4 might just be too much (I also felt like this the time we played with 6, but never when we've played with 4). On a personal note, I was having a hard time making the calculations for buying the building due to "foggy brain" syndrome, so I was definitely responsible for a good chunk of the slowdown. Oh well!

We played the Germany map. My memory for german cities is extremely limited, so I'll just say that I started in Essen and grew from there. Sonja immediately crowded me while Luch started in the North and Kozure/ Shemp went to the South. Over the course of the game, I tried to lay back and go for the end run with a large amount of cash, but I was completely unable to pull it off. Due to the pressure by Sonja, I constantly had to spend to break out of possible dead ends. I wasn't generating the income I needed, and a few of my plant purchases were "unwise". Luch was a green machine, but not expanding too fast in the North. Shemp tried to block off the South while Kozure managed to spread himself in an arc across much of the board. Sonja found herself on the last turn with insufficient power generation to compete for the win, and I ran out of cash to build enough buildings. It came down to cash on hand between Shemp and Kozure.... Shemp had more.

We finished up with Knizia's Poison since we didn't have enough time for Tower of Babel or the Jyhad CCG.

This is an "ultralight" game. It takes only a few minutes to play, is extremely simple and is quite fun for what it is. It's another Knizia numbers manipulation game with a thin theme applied (shades of High Society and Lost Cities). Players have a hand of cards with values from 1 to 7, in three colours. There are three pots (huge unnecessary cardboard pictures of cauldrons), one for each colour. In turn, players play a card into one of the pots. If the sum total of the cards in the pot is over 13, it boils over and the player takes all the cards in the pot. Additionally, there are "poison" cards which are wild and always valued at 4. Once all cards are played, each player gets 1 point per colour card they accumulated, and 2 for each "poison".

Of course, there's a Knizia twist.

Wait for it...

If you are the player with the MOST cards of a particular colour, you have developed an immunity to it and don't have to score those cards!

I had a good time with this one. There is some skill in hand management and observation of which colours have been taken by who, but it's mostly fast and easy. Sonja has a knack for picking fun "light" games (her record so far, For Sale!, Jungle Speed and Poison, has been very good). A very nice closer for the evening (for the record, she won this game after two hands with a score of 2. I was a close second with 4, and the others were much higher)