Games with rules and components (Entdecker, Pillars of the Earth, Fairy Tale)

Kozure was camping, so it was a foursome.

Entdecker

Before Shemp arrived, we started with Entdecker, a game we pretty much massacred the rules to last time. What is it about Teuber games, anyway?... We keep mangling the rules to Domaine as well (I should say "kept", as we haven't played Domaine in a really long time... hmmm... we should fix that)

We managed to correctly play the exploration rules, and we filled in the areas correctly. Unfortunately, we completely screwed up the in game scoring because we were only giving points to the first place player! Lucky for us, we noticed well before the game was over and gave back the points to the players who should have received them. I'm pretty sure we got it right, too.

The starting scenario we used had the 4 bonus tiles set up in 2 pairs on either side of a wall of water. Obviously, it was a race to set up two huge, high scoring islands. I snagged the first one, but I poured a lot of effort into it and Bharmer and Luch both received points for it. Luch and Bharmer worked together to develop and close the second island, and I got shut out. Bharmer was way out front in points, so I started closing lots of little islands to get my scouts onto the village tracks and tried to secure a couple of high scoring huts. In the end, it all came down to a single tile draw... if I could flip a tile that closed the second last space on the board, I would be able to send the last scout I needed to secure a pivotal majority. If the tile I drew didn't fit, Bharmer would do it. I got the tile I needed, and won the game by a slim margin. It was close all around (Luch, who was behind most of the game, got a lot of points off the scouts and nearly overtook us).

Entdecker and Domaine actually share a similar space for me in the game landscape. I really enjoy both, but they are somehow unspectacular. Between the two, Domaine is the tighter game, but the late land grab that usually determines the winner is a big problem. If Entdecker was a little shorter, and if it did a little more to differentiate itself from other exploration games (like the superior Tikal), I'd probably want to play it more often. The luck involved may rub some the wrong way, but it fits the theme well in my opinion.

Anyway, I don't intend on trading it or anything. It' a fun game to play once in a while.

Pillars of the Earth

The latest "new" and/or "hot" game mechanic is "worker placement". It was featured in last year's Caylus (which I've never played) and in this year's phenomenon Agricola. Pillars of the Earth was released between those two, features similar gameplay mechanics and has been well received in it's own right.

If you watch Oprah, or if (like me) you have a spouse that does, you know that Pillars is based on a novel that somehow involves the building of a cathedral. Bharmer has read the book but claims not to watch Oprah. Whatever, I have my eye on him. Anyway, here the cathedral simply acts as an elaborate timer: after each round one section of the cathedral is added. When the cathedral is complete, the game ends. As an aside, we all disliked the cathedral design proposed by the game. The one we built with the pieces was decidedly more... deconstructionist.

These worker placement games have certain similarities: There are a lot of options laid out at once, and players must find the most efficient order to choose them in. However, small differences can have a big effect:

-The mechanism used to determine turn order in Pillars is slightly wonky (each player has three token in a bag and they are pulled at random. If you get picked early you have to pay or go to the back of the line). I'm not sure that the cost makes up for getting screwed out of turn order, but is it really worse than Agricola, where placement is simply clockwise?

- Whereas Agricola is fairly devoid of interrelated mechanics, Pillars has several interesting tradeoffs inherent in the system. The resource mini-auction at the beginning has to be weighed against the gold provided by unused resource workers. The resources are converted into victory points at different rates according to the different professionals you've hired. Etc.

- This may sound petty, but the presentation in Pillars is several leagues better than in Agricola. Instead of multiple awkwardly organized boards in the middle and piles of wooden tokens with no place to go, Pillars has a single board with a place for everything. Even money is handled with a track (a system which works remarkably well, and yet I can't think of another game that does it). Also, despite the fact that there is a similar seeding of the board that occurs every round, it's far more reasonable.

Anyway, I thought it was a pretty good game. There is a good amount of push and pull, tough decisions, etc, etc. I'm still wrestling with my feelings over Agricola, because although I can point to several things that Pillars does better I can't deny that it feels more generic than Agricola does. When I played Agricola, it felt like a rather different animal than the other games I've played, Pillars doesn't. Agricola also has the obvious advantage that it's entirely modular design allows it to be more variable and therefore (theoretically) stay entertaining longer. I say theoretically because after five games I've noticed a sameness developping in each game potentially due to the semi-ordered presentation of the action spaces, the need to do things in a certain order to get your farm going, and needing a little bit of everything in order to do well. Keep in mind that I've only played one advanced game and only one multiplayer game, so the sameness issue may not be real (and if it is, the modularity would make it very easy for an expansion to completely turn the sameness on it's head). So, while Agricola lacks severely in the elegance dept., it feels like it breaks new ground.

In our session, I first tried to go long on sand, acquiring a prince that gave it to me for free every round fairly early. I overspent in the second round and bought myself a lead that was already erased by the third. The others where manipulating turn order and stealing all the sand contracts before I could get them, so I switched to stone. I couldn't get it together, though, and placed last. It was a tight race between Bharmer and Shemp for first, but I can't remember who won in the end (I think it was Shemp).

Fairy Tale

This has been a long post, so I'll keep this short: Fairy Tale was much more fun with four players than it was with two. It felt more like I remembered, so it's nice to see it wasn't a worthless trade. I actually think four might be ideal, if only because during the draft you know one of the cards in your original deal will come back to you.

I was doing pretty well until Shemp hunted the card I was using to unflip two cards that would have triggered lots of points on the table. I didn't recover. Still, Bharmer had a huge score on the table and won... I don't think any of us where even within striking distance.

Fun filler.

The men who saved, and then sold, the world (Fairy Tale, Pandemic, Traders of Genoa)

Remember Fairy Tale? We played it almost exactly three years ago when Jaywowzer brought over his copy. I felt it was a good game, but nothing spectacular. I recently received it as part of my last math trade, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. Guess what? Nothing's changed. It's decent.

Next, we played Pandemic. Reinforcing my theory that the luck of the draw is a rather overwhelming factor in the game, we followed a two game losing streak (6 if you count Kozure and Tili's games at Tabscon) with a rather easy win tonight. It didn't start off well, as Bharmer's first player card was once again an epidemic card. Lucky for us, however, we had very little difficulty getting sets together for cures, and the pandemics never really got into chain reaction territory. It was great finally registering a win, though, so I'm not complaining. Lots of fun.

We finished the evening with a game of the venerable Traders of Genoa. Predictably, I went with an ownership marker strategy. I managed to get one on the cathedral (ownership markers), the post office (messages) and all four goods buildings. They paid off.

Thankfully, too, because other than delivering messages I wasn't accomplishing too much. As the game wore on, I felt that I was quickly losing the lead my marker business had given me. I decided to use a "start anywhere" marker to start in the middle of the board and therefore shorten the game by a round. I did win, but it was very close (795, 770, 720, 695). 

Luch has to win a prize for most complex turns. He managed to play the entire tower on a couple of occasions by playing a flurry of additional action chips.

Ironically, Glory to Rome was the game we had all picked as the carry-over game from last week. It didn't make it on the table this week, but maybe next week?

Bright Lights, Big City

New Week.
2 new games.

Joined by our honorary Wagster, JayWowser, we took on Kozure's new copy of Power Grid. This is a top 5 game which had a reputation for fiddly rules but tight and enjoyable gameplay. How did it fare? Well, first off, we played a 6 player game where half the players had played a basic game and the other had never played. For this reason, our first full game took quite a long time (over 3 hours). Still, it turned out to be quite good.

Most of the criticisms regarding fiddly rules are valid. There are 3 rounds, and the rules change in each successive one, every turn has a lot of steps, there are lots of little pieces which all do different things and finally the is a lot of "book-keeping" type activites which SOMEONE playing the game needs to remember (ex: power plants getting cycled in or out of the game, resources being put back into circulation, etc). I remember thinking that this was one of those games which would play in under 1/4 of the time if it was turned into a computer game.

That being said, the game's got a lot going for it. For all their complexity, the mechanics do two things very well: 1) They create the illusion of a changing economy, a fluctuating market in fuel sources. 2) The players who are trailing have advantages against the leaders to keep them in the game. It's not terribly elegant, but it works.

The basics are simple enough:

1)Each player bids on power plants until everyone has bought one or passed.
2)Fuel is purchased for the power plants
3)Players build connections between cities
4)Players burn fuel to produce energy to those cities in order to generate money

The winner is the player who, once the requisit number of power plants have been built by any player, manages to power the most cities (and if that results in a tie) the one with the most money.

There is honestly too much going on in the game to decribe succinctly, but a few items deserve to be noted:

1) The fuel economy is represented by a chart indicating the cost of different fuels. The larger the available quantity of fuel, the cheaper it is. Different fuels power different power plant (coal, oil, garbage and uranium). In the beginning, coal is plentiful and cheap, but if everyone buys coal power plants it gets snapped up pretty quick and becomes expensive. In contrast, since garbage and uranium are initially expensive players are tempted to avoid the plants which use them as fuel. This seems to lead to a few players who have easy access to the fuel when it becomes cheap. Of course, everyone wants the wind generators, since they provide power without the need to purchase any fuel! for all the interlocking systems of the game, there is one they DON'T have which would seem to be a natural: Players who invest in a technology early gain no advantage or discount on future power plants of the same type.

2) The board is made up of cities which are eligible to receive power plants. In each phase from 1 to 3, the players can only have as many cities as the number of the current phase. This has the interesting effect of making the board alternately constricted and open as the game goes from phase to phase. Since the progression from phase to phase occurs differently each game, players must be flexible and think ahead in order to avoid being boxed in for a few turns. To keep things constricted, a game with fewer players uses a smaller portion of the board.

Interesting note: In a classy move, the board ships with two maps on a two sided board, U.S. AND Germany!

3) The winning conditions are counter-intuitive at first. The game ends once SOMEONE builds his/her 14th power plant (in a 6 player game). At the end of that turn, the player who was able to power the most of his/ her plants in the cities wins. Therefore, if the player who built the 14th plant first only has enough fuel to power 3 cities, any other player who manages to power more than that will win. More typically, what seems to happen is that a few players manage to make it to 14, but not all of them have reserved enough fuel to power all of them. If there are ties, the most remaining money wins.

In our game, we quickly discovered that the board feels very full, very fast. Our starting cities where all very close and I feared that my proximity to Tili and Kozure might do me in pretty early. I banked on claiming about 5 cities in my area, but my first plan was to secure an escape route for future growth in Eastern Germany. Sadly, turn order didn't go my way and Tili blocked up the escape route right away. I slowly put plants in the 5 cities nearby and then, when phase 2 came up, started claiming the second spots in the territory of my neighbour to the south: Kozure. Little did I know that JayWowser had plans to snap up all but 3 of them in one turn! (He was clearly playing a boom and bust game, doing very little for several turns and then exploding with big purchases once in a while). Having been outbid on the eco-plants by Tili, I resorted to focusing on coal. I managed to build a trio of plants which could power 14 cities quite early, and that proved to be instrumental later on... As other where busy bidding on plants to get to 14 in the last few rounds, I was able to spend my second last round just buying fuel for the plants, and my last round doing nothing but building my last cities and powering them (putting me in a very favorable financial position compared to the others, who were spending big bucks bidding on power plants). Shemp managed to also build plants in 14 cities on that last turn, but I had much more money in hand, giving me the win.

Luch spent, I think, the entire game in the "last player" turn order. This afforded him the opportunity to buy fuels first (making them cheaper), and build first (giving him a jump on prime locations). Unfortunatly, that strategy didn't pan out for him. Still, it seems that it could definitely work because the advantages are clearly there.

A few early notes on possible strategy:

1) The North West section of the Germany board, with many nearby cheap connections, really seems like the place to be.
2) Cycling your plants too many times gives diminishing returns. The plants are expensive, and cities progressively return less money (going from 1 to two cities gives a player 11 more electros, but going from 13 to 14 gives only 5 or so more).
3) Going last in the turn order can be a huge advantage, but it would likely have to be teamed up with a strategy of using coal or oil power plants (Because buying those first would always mean cheap fuel and cause other players to pay more). If the last place player is using eco plants or nuclear energy, his ability to go first isn't that useful, since he's not in competiton for fuel anyway.

Anyway, great game. Look forward to playing it again (I bet it will be much faster!)

Next up was Fairy Tale, a japanese card game brought to us my JayWowser.

I won't spend too much time describing this one... it's basically a set collecting game where players try to accumulate points by matching complementary cards, playing high scoring single cards and satisfying the condition on them or play cards which disrupt the other player's plans. The theme is that players are building a story, or something. The card art is quite nice in a Manga sort of way (although overly busy with symbols), but in the end the theme is quite thin... Which is okay because I though the game itself was really good.

The heart of the game is in the hand building... Each player is dealt 5 cards. They choose one and pass the rest to the left. Then they choose 1 card from the fours they were passed, and so on, until they have chosen five cards. Then they discard 2 cards and play the round with the remaining 3.

Players then choose 1 of their cards and reveal them simultaneously. Players check to see if any cards have global effects (such as the "Hunt" cards which immediately cancel any black cards just revealed, or the variety of cards which reveal or hide previously played cards). This continues until all three cards are played, and the whole thing (drafting of cards, etc) happens 4 times, for a toal of 12 cards layed.

At the end, each player counts up to see how many points they've made. Many cards are simply worth the amount printed on them. Others act as multipliers for themselves (if you have 1, it's worth 1 point. If you have 2, they are each worth 2. Etc) Others are "friends" of another card, and are worth 3 times as many of the "friend card" which you have managed to accumulate.

In the first of our two games, we didn't do too badly considering we didn't really grasp the way the cards worked just yet. Kozure won it, I think. The second game saw us all trying a few strategies, with the most impressive being Shemp's, who managed to get all but one of his baby dragons, resulting in 6x6 points=36. Unfortunately, as it turns out, that wasn't enought to win... My hand of "Friend" cards and individual points nudged slightly ahead of Kozure's version of the same.

All in all, a great filler game which only takes 20-30 mintues to play and was lots of fun. It's a shame it's such a hard one to find!

Anyway, JayWowser (if you are reading this) it was nice having you again, and we look forward to another!

Powergrid: 8.5
Fairy Tale:8