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

Still three players.

Pandemic

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

Side note: Troubleshooter= awesome.

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

Close. Fun.

Beowulf

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

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

Dominion: Intrigue

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

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

Déja Vu (Steam, Pandemic: On the Brink, Excape)

Shemp thought enough of last week's games that he picked them again this week.

(That, and I suspect he was feeling too lazy to think about choosing different ones)

Steam

Our second game of Steam was played on the German map, which is designed for 4-5 players. As it's designed for more players than the USA/Canada one, we expected it to be more wide open, and for the most part it was. That said, when the game was completed every single town and city had been built to. I wouldn't have predicted that (in fact, I predicted quite the opposite because I pointed to a particular town, Seiglen, in the bottom right corner and asked why anyone would ever build there!).

The four of us kind of picked an area to start with. Kozure was North-East, Luch North-West and Shemp and I started in the middle at Düsseldorf(though with the intention of developing in different directions). Right off the bat I got into trouble because Shemp was able to steal the cubes out from under me, and I got no deliveries on the first round. Luckily, with my newly upgraded train and a good corridor of deliveries setup in the south-west I was able to make up ground over the next few rounds. While Luch was building in the south-east and Shemp was developping the middle of the board, I noticed that Kozure had set up a very lucrative east-west delivery network (Arnhem/ Dortmund)and was making lots of points shipping lots of goods. Since the blue city had already been urbanized, it was difficult to stop him (and being way down in the south I couldn't do much to steal cubes). I concentrated on making sure I`d have as many six link deliveries as possible and did pretty well at that, but it wasn't *quite* enough. On our last turn, Kozure built track to one of my northermost cities and scooped up my last 6 point delivery, making the situation even more difficult. Although I came in a close second in the VP race, Kozure had better income AND more links, so with those VPs he won decisively.

Now that we`ve played a second time, I think I've come to understand what makes Railroad Tycoon an easier game for casual gamers (I was definitely wondering though. It's much longer to play and somewhat longer to explain due to the cards and barons... not qualities I would expect in a "casual gamer" targetted game). The first reason is obvious: The income mechanic is less forgiving. In RRT, every step forward increases your income by a few thousand, but every share only reduces that by $1000. In Steam, it's 1:1 so getting out of debt and staying there takes a bit of effort (though already in our second game it seemed much easier to do it). The second, less obvious reason is that the the mechanics and financials in RRT encourage players to stay at low engine levels much longer than Steam. Visualizing deliveries in RRT is a simple affair of looking for cubes and nearby cities of the same colour, with only maybe half or a third of the game spent delivering 3/4 links and up. Also, since the vast majority of cubes used in the game are present from the start, the number of them to consider becomes smaller by this stage and therefore easier to visualize anyway. In Steam, the need to start planning for long deliveries happens early. I was making three link deliveries on my 2nd round this game! Further, more goods will wind up on the board from the goods track than from the initial seeding, so this planning process needs to consider what's available on the goods track as well (and grabbing those goods needs to be done early if a particular set is important to you, or else someone else might take them). The amount of forward planning is certainly less than Age of Steam, but more than RRT, and definitely leads to a more "thinky" game.

Not sure how the others feel on this one. What do you say, guys?

I think that ultimately Steam is better suited to my tastes, and I certainly appreciate the smaller footprint and shorter playtime. However, there are things I liked about RRT that are missing: I like the effects of some of the cards, particularly hotels. This type of card succeeds in altering the texture of a map from game to game in a way that isn't replicated in Steam. Similarly, the major lines add a second set of goals to the game that I enjoyed, as long as they were laid out at the start of the game (this is why I wasn't crazy about the service bounty cards, as they often seemed to just give bonus points to however happened to be closest). In theory, I also like the hidden roles aspect of RRT, but in practice the ones supplied in the game were oddly imbalanced and unsatisfying. Finally, I liked the fact that income started decreasing over time, somewhat keeping the leader in check (Steam has a rule that could have a similar impact in the advanced game, where the level of your engine is deducted from your income every round, but we haven't played with that yet).

Since Kozure also has RRT, I'll be able to play it once in a while even if I trade away my copy. If that does come to pass, I think I'll be keeping the Europe map so we can play that on occasion, because it really was a lot of fun.

Pandemic: On the Brink

For our second crack at the Pandemic expansion, Shemp decided he wanted to try the "Mutation Challenge". This one introduces a 5th disease, purple, but otherwise plays very much like the original. Purple is easier to cure, and doesn't seem to spread very rapidly, but the number of cubes is very low so if it starts to spread players can easily lose because the supply runs out.

In this game, Luch was the Operations Expert, Kozure was the Medic, Shemp was the Archivist and I was the Field Operative. The purple disease didn't show up until late into the game, and then mostly just sat there so it didn't appear to be very threatening. Then, suddenly a chain of events caused it to explode all over china and we were suddenly very close to losing. We got it under control, cured it and three of the other diseases, and then struggled to find a way to cure the last one before the deck ran out. We were *1* action short of winning, but ended up losing (I had the 3 samples and the 3 cards I needed, and I was at the research lab, but didn't have an action left to perform the cure.

Doesn't get any closer than that.

All in all, I think I preferred the virulent strain expansion, but this was certainly fun as well.

Excape

We played a couple of games of Excape. We laughed a lot. A lot. More than in Steam, even(?). At one point, Luch kicked Kozure off the 2 step of the track and I saw his eyes roll back further than I`d ever seen them go before. It was classic. This is a great game to end a night of thinky games with. Although it looked like I might win the first game, Luch came back from behind for the win. In the second game, it was Luch all the way on a series of lucky double threes.

Kozure and Shemp mentioned that they felt the "doubles" rules dissatisfying (pawns move forward the number shown on the dice if they are doubles). I like it, because it both moves the game along and allows a player to come back from behind. Their complaint had more to do with the fact that it can also puch the leader to a distant win, which is true. I suggested that a simple fix would be to dissallow the first place player to benefit from the rule, for the second place player to only be able to move on double 1s, the second place player to move on double 1s or 2s, and the third place player to get 1s,2s and 3s.

Even simpler, the rule could simply not apply to the leader.

I`ve only played this with 4, but as much as I like it I don't think it would work well with 6. With four players, the balance between taking a risk on a number and having it sometimes make it's way back to you seems pretty much spot on. With more, I would imagine the odds of having your dice get back to you are pretty remote, and the game might therefore take quite long.

Also, Kozure mentioned that he preferred Can't Stop. I like Can't Stop, but it's a longer game, with more downtime between turns. There is certainly more depth there, but I didn't have as much fun so I think I have to give the nod to Excape.

Edit: I forgot to add a (semi) interesting tidbit: Not only were the games the same as last week, but the results are also quite similar. Kozure won Steam (last week was a draw between him and Shemp), we lost Pandemic and Luch won Excape (well, last week Kozure won once/ Luch won once, and this week Luch won twice). Ok, maybe not so interesting after all.

Hmm. Steamy. (Steam, Pandemic: On the Brink, Excape! x2)

More new games!

Steam

I've always really like Railway Tycoon. Despite this, and despite the fact that I like many heavy strategy games, I've had very little interest in Age of Steam. It's reputation as being a particularly unforgiving game and some of the discussion I've read about wonkiness in some of the rules kept me from giving it a try. That being said, Railroad Tycoon has it's own set of issues (well known by now... huge board with sections that will never get used even with 6 players, a card system that can unfairly advantage a player if the right cards come up, component colour issues, long play time, etc). When the Railways of Europe expansion came out, I was thrilled because it really fixed a lot of the things that bugged me about base RRT. I liked it a lot, but it remained a long game and the cards never really felt right.

Anyway, when I heard about Steam I was definitely interested... smaller box, shorter playtime, streamlined design... it sounded like it was the refinement in the system that I was waiting for. I've had it for a while now, but this week we finally were able to try it out.

I'm not going to list all the differences between the two games, but I will talk about a few of the more interesting ones. I will say that for a game that is ultimately very similar to RRT, Steam felt very different.

Steam's biggest difference, in my opinion, is the fact that the victory point chart is separate from the income chart. When delivering a good, the player has to decide if the want to put the points into the company (income chart) or into his pocket (VP). Whereas RRT sees players start on a slow progression to sustainability as the income levels grow, in Steam you start at "0" and can go up or down based on the shares you take out and the various items you can build/ buy. Achieving profitability is it's own goal for the first part of the game, and the decision to go to VPs is not an easy one. This is a change that I quite liked, but it gives the game a much less forgiving feeling than RRT.

The second biggest difference is that turn order is determined by selecting roles. Each role gives the selecting player a special power for the turn, such as delivering cubes first, building extra track, urbanizing a town, etc. The clever aspect is that the role you pick this turn also determines the order you will select roles in the next turn (and picking early can be very important if you need a specific action). Although I like that the system manages to accomplish more than the RRT auctions could do in a fraction of the time, in practice I was surprised at how long it took us to feel comfortable with it. The was something about remembering the turn order, and the exceptions to the turn order due to powers, that had us stumbling a lot. Also, the freedom available in RRT to do anything you want on your turn instead of hoping you are able to grab the right role tile proved frustrating at times. Time will tell whether the initial awkwardness will fade, and whether the constrained action selection will reveal itself to be an interesting strategic layer or a simply an artificial stumbling block.

The third biggest difference is the impact of a series of minor rules changes on gameplay. In RRT, City Growth and Urbanization were rarely used in our groups due to the prohibitive costs and uncertain result. Similarly, high cost kept many players from increasing their engine level to beyond 4 in a typical game. In Steam, these actions become part of the role selection mechanic and are therefore theoretically used one a turn. With the goods cubes visible from the start, and the actions much less expensive, new cities and City Growth and high level engines were the norm. The board just felt like it was transforming more than the RRT maps do.

All in all, I liked the game quite a bit. I'm not sure that I'd go so far as to say that I like it better than RRT, but I do like it as much as that one (and with the shorter playtime it's likely to see more play as well). I found it odd that on many turns none of the special actions appealed to me, and found myself picking solely for turn order.

In our game, I started on the east coast, while Luch was in the north-west, Shemp in the south and Kozure a bit more in the middle. I became profitable earlier than the others, but a couple of bad decisions meant that I was missing opportunities. Luch unfortunately figured out too late that his starting setup was less than ideal. Far from other cities, he started taking a hit on the income track and flirted with the "stock death spiral" but managed to get a few deliveries in and dig himself out of the hole. In the end, the game was a tie between Kozure and Shemp (Luch needed to make a delivery on his last round that would see either Kozure or Shemp get the point, and whichever got it would win). We called it a draw instead.

Pandemic: On the Brink

Finally! The expansion I'd been waiting for for so long has finally arrived! The game ships with nice petri-dishes, many new roles and special action cards and 3 new ways to play the game.

We tried the "virulent Strain" expansion game.In this one, a single colour of cube becomes "Virulent" and gains a new characteristic every time an epidemic card is drawn. It's interesting that, unlike Lord of the Rings co-op, the added challenge isn't balanced by added powers. This game is just harder than the base game. I can imagine that combining these expansions and playing on the newly introduced "legendary level" would be pretty challenging for just about anybody.

It turns out that Red was the problematic disease in our session. The added challenge made it harder to concentrate on all the other diseases and in the end, a series of yellow and black outbreaks ended the game. We worked together as well as we could, but in the end we succumbed. I liked the new roles we played with (I was a field operative that could collect "samples" of diseases and use them to make cures more easily).

I really liked this expansion. It felt like we were playing a somewhat more interesting version of the same game, with the added bonus of a lot more roles to choose them. I suspect that the mutation expansion and certainly the Bio-terrorist will make it seem more like a substantially different experience.

Excape

What do we do? Excape? Why? Who cares?!!!

I bought this filler just because of the name. There is a single funny line in an old Jack Black movie called "Orange County"... a stoned Jack Black says "we have to Excape!" (in the movie, it's funny). It's stupid reason for wanting a game, but it was cheap and it's Knizia so I took a chance.

I really like it. It's a simple push your luck game that allows players to bump each other out of contention but the balance achieved between the main scoring mechanic and the various other results keep it interesting an unpredictable throughout (pairs advance tokens immediately, Xs end your turn and make you go back, etc). We played twice and each game lasted only 10 minutes. We laughed and groaned a lot, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.

It's worth mentioning that both the winners (Luch and Kozure) ended the game in the same highly unlikely scenario: The rolled a 76 (the highest roll possible) on their last turn. The only way to beat this is to also roll a 76 and then bump them. Even more unlikely: I DID roll a 76 to bump him! E V E N more unlikely, the newly bumped Kozure immediately rolls double 3s to advance for the win.