Easy Come, Easy Go

I continue to stalk Agent Easy's math trades.

EASY COME -
Lord Of The Rings: The Card Game
Kingdom Builder
Glen More

EASY GO -
Nexus Ops
Mission: Red Planet
Container
Lock n' Load: Band of Heroes
Junta

Apparently, I'm hot (Railroad Tycoon: Rails of England and Wales, Mission: Red Planet)

It's getting late, so I'll keep this short.

We played the brand new Railroad Tycoon map, Rails of England and Wales. Now this is a map I hadn't even heard of until it was staring me in the face at Fungamescafe.com. Probably, this is partly due to the fact that it's actually an expansion to the upcoming Rails of the World game and not Railroad Tycoon. However, it's by the same designer and is 100% compatible, so that's good enough for me.

This expansion comes with advanced rules to play a game that more closely resembles Chicago Express or an 18xx game, but we didn't bother with that just yet. As an expansion to Railroad tycoon, it is pretty good. Better than the base map, but not as good as the Europe one. The city density is incredibly high, to the point that the board becomes quite hard to read by the time you are 3/4 through a game. The railroad engineer card, which gives you 4 free tracks, loses some of it's value because you rarely need to build that many.

We played with a series of variants which seemed lifted from Martin Wallace's recent "Steam". Six piles of goods are available at all times to choose from for urbanize actions, turn order is auctioned, etc. Most interesting was the mechanic that forced a player to choose between gaining victory points or income when claiming deliveries. Unfortunately, while the goods cubes setup was a great addition, the income/ VP split was less interesting in practice. I can't say whether it feels different in Steam, but the sliding income scale in RRT meant that we all pretty much gave up on increasing our income at the same level. I'd have to see how the income track works in Steam, but ultimately I think I'll stick with the combined track for RRT in the future (one benefit of the Europe/ England tracks is that the income reductions come sooner, providing a more tangible impact on the leader).

I enjoyed the map. Amazingly, colour issues persist. Grey appears to be blue when the two aren't side by side. Purple is also similar. How hard can it be to get this right?

I had a good lead for much of the game but I boxed myself in to a region that had no future. As other players were starting their long deliveries, I was struggling to find ANY deliveries. Shemp, Luch and Kozure had a pretty tight finish, but if I'm not mistaken Shemp ended up victorious with the help of a north/south track that tied in well with a couple of his own hotels and proved quite lucrative.

Mission: Red Planet

We haven't played this one in a long while (January 2007, to be exact), and I was wondering if it was worth keeping. Now that I've played, I think I'll keep it for a while longer. There is a mixture of chaos and relatively fast play which is pleasant and fun. Kozure said he felt that with a few tweaks, he would consider this better than El Grande. I absolutely disagree, but in the end neither Kozure's comments or my disagreement are very surprising. As entertaining as the whole choosing of roles + launching mechanic can be, the area majority part of the game is kind of lacking. The situation on Mars seems pretty static throughout the game, and the scoring mechanism (giving only the majority any points at all) is a little heavy handed.

Anyway, I amassed a large stash of Ice as well as the 3 point resource, fullfilling both the 9 point bonus and my secret mission, for the win. All three other players used their seductress to convert my cubes, so I must be pretty hot.

"Fusion" games (Mission: Red Planet, Space Dealer, Beowulf)

To a certain extent, all new games owe a debt to previous ones... whether it's an elaboration of an old game mechanic, a variation on a theme, or a refinement of a game system. However, recently we've played games which seem to wear their inspirations so prominently that they feel more like combinations of other games, rather than wholly original works. Three such games are Mission: Red Planet, Beowulf and Vegas Showdown. I've started calling these "fusion" games, for whatever reason. I have nothing against this sort of game! As long as the result is fun, and different enough from it's sources to be worth pulling off the shelf, I'm happy to play them.

I thought it would be fun to combine them into a gaming session. JayWowzer was in attendence this evening (though Bharmer was not), and he brought along Space Dealer. Space dealer is definitely NOT what I would classify as a "Fusion" game... I haven't really played anything like it! Still, themes are meant to be broken, right?

Mission: Red Planet (Citadels + El Grande)

We started off with Mission: Red Planet. I drew the mission card with a bonus for having the most astronauts on Mars, so I decided to make that my guiding principle for the game. I figured I would pick the roles offering the most astronauts, and then use the prospector a few times to maximize their use. That didn't happen.

Maybe I'm missing something, but an earlier irritation of mine came back: there is something odd (and unsatisfying) about the number and types of roles! The penalty for playing the prospector (only placing one astronaut, no other ability), is simply to strong to allow a player to use him twice. If the powers of the other characters were of wildly different strengths, then I could see swallowing the penalty in order to get the powerful ones back, but as it is all the roles are normally usefull at all times. If I have the soldier left, I'll remove another player's astronaut, if I have the temptress, I'll convert another player's astronaut. Changing the destination and blowing up a ship are both usefull and disruptive. The scientist has it's place. etc, etc. All are useful, but none so much that I would pick the prospector twice to see it three times (for example). So, the game becomes: which one or two roles will I use twice, and when will I make the switch (which follows that every game will see each player play each role once over the course of the game)? That's too bad, because it seems like it would be interesting to build an alternate strategy out of recycling the same characters to achieve a specific goal.

Anyway, I played the scientist early, and it netted me a second mission card (have an astronaut in each of the eastern regions). I focussed on fulfilling those missions, but watched as my spaceships routinely got redirected to other regions (seriously, it happened several times). I actually quite enjoy this aspect of the game. This is area control done with a healthy dose of chaos, but it is fun as long as it's played fast. I found myself mostly in competition with Jaywowzer in the East, and since my ships kept getting redirected I was constantly in competition with Luch in the north-west (a region I had no interest in, yet which had nearly half my astronauts!!!). Shane had free reign of the south-west and Luch was sitting quietly in the center all on his own (two ice regions). Kozure had his eyes on the north and south poles.

When the dust settled, Shemp was the winner by a nose. He had 37, Kozure and I had 35. Things might have been different if Jaywowzer and I hadn't placed astronauts in Luch's center regions on the last turn... he had a major bonus for any regions he solely occupied (not a card either of us were familiar with. We'll be more careful in the future).

Space Dealer

We followed with Space Dealer. I'm not going to get into detail, but this is an odd one. Players each have a ship and a home base. They each develop their home base in order to be able to produce resources. They then take their resources and deliver them to another player's home base in order to sell them. Victoy points are aquired by 1) being the player to have sold the goods another player's base needed, and 2) having a section of your base receive what it wants by another player.

Therefore, you win by building a base others want to deliver to, and by beating other players to satisfying the needs of other bases. Nothing terribly special yet.

The game stands out because of the way it deals with time. A game will always last 30 minutes, because it comes with a CD which must be played along with the game. When it ends, the game ends. Secondly, each player gets two sand timers. When they want to take an action, they place a sand timer on the item they want to build/ move or use to produce a good. When the timer ends, the effect happens and the timer can be moved to another location. In other words, there are no turns. There is no downtime. No time to analyse, so no analysis-paralysis.

Does it work? I have no idea. In our first (and only) game, I committed so many mistakes that it was embarrassing. I would place my timer on resource production, only to realize that since my ship was gone all the resources would go to waste. I would put my timer on a new section for my base, only to realize I couldn't fit it anywhere. I'm pretty sure others were doing the same. It was fun, in a wacky sort of way. There was tension in trying to orchestrate things to produce the right goods and then send your ship to the other player's base before the guy across from you could do the same. A few times I would be waiting with my hand next to the timer, staring at Kozure's across from me, watching the sand go down to see who would make it first to Luch's base and satisfy the request (since you have to focus so much on what you are doing, it's not uncommon to go through the trouble of producing something and start delivering it, only to discover it's no longer available or someone else is trying to do the same thing at the same time). Anyway, it was fun and definitely a change of pace.

Beowulf (Lord of the Rings + Taj Mahal)

We finished up with our second playing of Beowulf. We corrected a rule we played incorrectly last time: players can risk once EVERY TIME an auction comes around to them (we were playing that each player could only risk once per auction). Still not that familiar with the board, but certainly it helped to know roughly what was ahead. With the risking system properly implemented, the tone of the game really changed. The first circular auction (Grendel's attack) was a brutal, long battle which saw players risking turn after turn. I've read that the odds of failing a risk is roughly 30%. I think that it must be less than that (15-20%, perhaps?). That, or we all were quite lucky throughout the game! Either way, risking featured so prominently this game that it seemed our hand was roughly 50% of what was necessary to win any hotly contested auction. It was dramatic and exciting, and certainly fun, but also very luck heavy. Knowing Knizia, there is a way to win at Beowulf without risking too much, but it probably takes a much sharper player to win that way. Right now, I'm seeing this as a game where you stack the odds in your favour and hope things pan out (this is an aspect of RA which I really like... that you play the odds and do your best, but things can play out in unexpected ways despite your best layed plans. Despite this, the better player will win most of the games)

I actually had a lot of fun. Certainly, Kozure seems to know something we don't, because he won this second game as handily as the first! I limped into the end and managed a second last place (as opposed to my last place showing last time). He seemed to always work it out so that he'd have the right resources at the right time. He had his share of lucky draws, but so did the rest of us. I hope the risks stay fun, and don't become an annoyance (I know, I know, that those who play this game a lot say that this can all be controlled to a certain extent. I'm even willing to beleive it. Like Ra, percieved chaos is a frequent complaint levelled at the game). It only mention it because there was SO MUCH successful risking this game that I can't imagine the next would see less. I feel that risking should hurt a little more often, to make the decision to risk a little harder, but we'll see.

It was too late to play Vegas Showdown, but I'm sure we'll see it again soon. Thanks to JayWowzer for coming, and for being our connection hot new games!

Twice as nice (Santiago, Mission: Red Planet)

Two games played this week, each of which I had played once before (though the rest of the group hadn't yet played Mission: Red Planet).

Tili, Shemp, Bharmer, Luch and I played Mission: Red Planet first. The rules were easily explained, and the game began. When I played this on new year's eve, I enjoyed it but predicted it would get better on subsequent playing and I'm happy to say that this is the case.

In my first playing, my concerns about the game were that I felt that there was too many roles, that it was annoying to relate the destinations of the ships to the regions of Mars and, ultimately, the chaos was a little over the top. Surprisingly, in my second playing most of these resolved themselves.

Despite the fact that I still feel 9 roles is an awkward number, I was surprised at how quickly I internalized them all this game. I normally knew which role I wanted ahead of time, so the multitude of options didn't really slow me down. I suppose that it still would have been better, from a game design standpoint, to include the full 11 roles (to allow a player to try to go the distance without resorting to the prospector) or drop the number to 5-6 (to simplify the choices)... but it doesn't bother me much already.

The destinations on the ships were very frustrating in my first game. Getting a handle on what I was trying to do involved too many steps for what was supposed to be a fun, fast game (correlate the destinations of the ships available to the regions of mars they are going to/ see how many astronauts are already in those regions, and how many are on their way/ decide on the destinations you are interested in/ see if those ships are full or if they risk filling up before you get to to play / figure out which role to play based on how quickly you need to get them on the ships and which power you want to use). Again, despite the fact that the process doesn't really get any simpler on subsequent play I was surprised at how much easier it all was this game. I think the key is that the regions names started becoming familiar, so I didn't have to do as much cross referencing for every step. Combined with my newfound familiarity with the roles, things were becoming far more manageable!

Finally, with my increased comfort level with the mechanics the chaos seemed to drop dramatically. On one hand, no one is going to confuse this with Princes of Florence... there is definitely a healthy dose of randomness and chaos in the game. On the other, I honestly felt like I was in control of my destiny for most of the game. In other words, I had a plan and I was able to pursue it, though other players were also able to do their best to mess with it.

My initial mission card was to have the most total astronauts in the central regions of the planet. With that goal in mind, I was disappointed that none of the initial crop of ships led to any of them! I played the travel agent in the hopes of getting my numbers up on the planet (I could always move them around later with the explorer). Alas! 3 players chose the secret agent and launched ships prematurely, leaving me with no options to place astronauts. Only one round in, and I had already been outplayed. On my second round, there still were no ships to the center so I went with the scientists in the hopes of getting a second bonus card. Instead, I picked a discovery card, but it was a good one: at the end game, the region with the card produces 5 goods instead of 3. I placed the card in Sirtis Major, a region I could get to that round and loaded the ship.

Over the course of the game, I fought over majorities in just 3 regions (two in the center and Sirtis Major). Every round, even if I couldn't do EXACTLY what I wanted (no ships going where I needed them, etc) I felt there was always something useful to do and some way to reach my long term objectives... a sharp contrast to my first game. In the end, I succesfully met the criteria in my bonus card by beating Tili in the center, kept control of Sirtis Major from Luch and managed a win by a large margin (not surprising considering how much of an advantage I was drawing from having experience with the system). I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I am impressed at how much the game system seemed improved for me over the first play. I'll have to choose this one again soon in order to allow others the same advantage. I am also looking forward to further plays because a few possible future strategies crossed my mind that I'd like to try!

Our second and last game was Santiago (Kozure joined us and Tili bowed out). This game of crop speculating was well received last time and it held up well. Things were looking up for me in the beginning, as I had successfully planted and dominated a large red pepper crop. Unfortunately, I took a gamble at one point and placed my 1 free irrigation marker at the edge of the field hoping to encourage anyone who would choose red pepper in next round to place there. NO red peppers were turned up, and so all the players closed off my field with different crop types. Meanwhile, Bharmer established an even larger green bean field, Luch had a potato thing going, Shemp was banana master and Kozure had interests spread out everywhere. Bharmer's combination of giant bean field and smaller crops elswhere gave him the game.

Although could be boiled down to a rather dry, mathematical game, I quite like it. I enjoy the simplicity of the system, I like how the auction relates to the tile placement and the overseer role going to the lowest bidder adds a nice twist to keep things interesting. It has many of the hallmarks of a good german game (short playing time, simple rules, clever mechanics, abstract, auction+tile laying, small board+wooden bits). For this reason, I would think this is a good choice as a follow up to Carcassonne or Settlers of Catan for anyone wanting to introduce themselves or others to German gaming.

My only complaints about the game are that a player can get paralysed considering tile choice and placement since everything is open information, and it can slow things a little (I'm guilty of this). I do like the fundamentals of the mathematics, though. If I add a tile to a crop, I'm giving other players a point for every token they have in the field, while I gain 1 or 2 times the size of the field. It's a good thing that the order of future crops is unknown and that the overseer is ultimately in control of the flow of water, as this forces players to speculate on the future and take chances. I suppose it's probably possible to accurately analyse the worth of every move in the last few rounds, which could also make the game drag, but thankfully our group didn't really play that way.

Ultimately, this is a very fun game. Thanks to Shemp for buying it!

Ringing in New Year, Geek Style (Things..., Wits and Wagers, Twister, Cluzzle, Mission: Red Planet)

For New Years the Wags group brought together their significant others and a few unwashed (?) friends and relatives for an evening of wine, cheese, food and laughter at Casa Agent Easy.

Obviously, a few games were played!

Things came out first. I'm not sure that we've documented this before on the blog, but we've played a few times before. If you haven't played it, the premise is simple: A "reader" chooses a card at random and reads it to the group. "Things... you shouldn't put on top of your car", for example. Everyone answers on a piece of paper and returns to the "reader". The reader then reads them to the rest of the players and everyone, in turn, tries to guess who wrote what. (To the sample question, I wrote "the bottom of your car")

Bottom line: This game is hilarious. I enjoy many party games, and many of them are quite funny (Time's Up, Taboo, Apples to Apples, etc), but none of them are this funny. Sadly, the part where players guess each other's answers does not live up to the fun of writing/reading them. I'd love to come up with a better system to go with the game (I posted a question on BGG in case someone else could think of one). Next time, I'd like to try simply reading all the answers once, then reading them again one at a time as people write down who they think wrote what. 1 point per correct answer.

At 11 people, it took a long time for all the correct answers to get guessed. Also, the difficulty in remembering all the answers seemed to drag the game a bit. Still, I think everyone had a good time since there was a lot of laughter as the answers came out... Kozure did very well in the beginning, winning the 6 point bonus for being the last player standing on several occasions. My sister in law was surprisingly good at guessing herself, particularly since she didn't know anyone there!
We didn't bother counting up the final scores, but I'm pretty sure Kozure had it in the bag.

Next up we played a quick game of Wits and Wagers. I hadn't played this before, but most of the rest of the group had. This is a trivia game where the trivia doesn't really matter!

The idea is interesting: The game asks a question you are not likely to know the answer to. Everyone takes a guess, and the answers are all layed out on a betting mat in order. At this point, everyone must bet on which answer(s) they feel are the correct ones! The lowest and highest answer will payout more, whereas the median answers pay out less. At the end of a number of rounds (8?), the winner is the player or team with the most money.

The concept is cool because there are points for being the player with the closest answer (without going over) and there are points for correctly betting on the answer (whether it's yours or not). Therefore, a player with little or no knowledge of trivia can participate and have a good time. If you don't do well on the trivia, you still might win on the strength of good betting.

I've only played once, but so far I'm a little ambivalent on the game, despite how much I like the idea. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's because there's a few contradictory things going on in the final product:

1) In trivia games, the fun tends to be in testing yourself in trying to answer the most questions correctly. Here, most of the questions are impossible to answer, so that tension is quickly lost. Those that can be answered still suffer from the following problem...
2) Although the premise is that a player with little/ no knowledge of trivia can compete, in effect both phases of the game reward the player who know the correct answer.
3) I personally find betting more interesting when it's tied to some sort of bluffing (poker), or to odds created through hidden and revealed information (blackjack). Betting in Wits and Wagers is more akin to betting in Roulette... kind of a crapshoot.

There's no denying that it was a fast and interesting party game, but it wasn't funny or challenging enough to make me want to choose it over others I prefer (though I'd be more than happy to play again, if someone else suggested it). Kozure will be writing a more thorough review on BGG before long, now that he's had a chance to play it with lots of different groups of people.

We wrapped up the evening's game playing with a variation of twister which is played on a map of the world. Now, I'm not old, but I'm not young either (33). I thought the days were I would even imagine playing this had long gone, but my lovely wife really wanted to play so we gave it a shot. Predictably, it was silly, embarrassing fun. It also hurt a little. We played three rounds, and all had a good laugh (particularly when Luch took the role of spinner and ignored everything he spun... calling out instead the worst/ most difficult maneuvre possible on every round).

On new year's day, we tried a few rounds of Cluzzle. This is a game were players choose a word from a list to model out of clay. Everyone then has to try to guess what the other player sculpted over three rounds of questions/ answers. The trick is that a player gets more points if their sculpture is guessed in the third round than in the first, but they get no points if it's not guessed at all. Therefore, you want to make your sculpture difficult to guess, but not TOO difficult.

I had fun with this one. Like Pictionary, charades, and other such games, it's fun to test yourself against the semi-artistic challenge of representing something across a different medium. The added twist of wanting the sculpture to be hard but not too hard is a little confusing at first, but definitely makes playing the game an interesting challenge. As with Things..., I have a bit of an objection with the scoring, but it's a comparatively minor point (players who guess correctly in the first round of the game score LESS points than those who do it in the 3rd round). There are apparently good reasons for this, but in the end it feels like an entirely different scheme might have been better.

Lastly, we played Mission: Red Planet. Quite a change of pace!

Mission: Red Planet is the latest chaos-fest from Bruno Faidutti (and co-designer Bruno Cathala). Players are trying to get their astronauts onto Mars in order to become rich from the mining of that planet's resources. It's been described as Citadels meets El Grande. While that's fairly accurate, I would add that there is a dash of Puerto Rico in there and that the sum of it's parts left me feeling like I do when I play Robo-Rally.

How's that for a summary?

Ok. Here's a better one.

A map of Mars is the main play board. The map is divided into several regions. Five Space Ships are waiting at a launch pad. Each one has a destination to a particular region of Mars, and a maximum number of astronauts it can take there.

Each player has a reserve of astronauts, and a hand of "role" cards. Every round, players simultaneously choose a role card which determines the turn order and how they get their astronauts onto the ships. Any ship which is filled to capacity launches, preventing any other player from adding to it. Once all players have taken their turn, any ship which has launched lands at it's destination and the astronauts are placed in that region. At the end of the 5th, 8th and 10th (last) round, scoring occurs. Points are only awarded to the player with the mighest number of astronauts in a region.

It all sounds pretty straight-forward, but it's really not. As in Citadels, the role cards each have special abilities which can be rather chaotic (such as the saboteur which can destroy a space ship before it takes off, the pilot which can change the destination of a ship, or the femme fatale which can convert another player's token to your colour). Like Puerto Rico, the simple effect of having ships which fill up and depart can cause the best laid plans to fail if you go late in the turn order. Add to that a set of event cards which give players hidden objectives for bonus points and endgame effects on the various outer regions of the map and things become rather difficult to control. When I say that I felt like I was playing RoboRally, I meant it in the sense that RoboRally is about trying to extract order from chaos, then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

I had my hopes up for this one, because the theme is very good, the game is very pretty and the execution seemed like a very interesting twist on many familiar mechanics. The end result is a fun game, which works better than it should. It's not without it's flaws, however. I disliked that in order to make an informed decision, I constantly had to relate the ships in play with the regions on the map. It would have been nice if the ships were layed immediately into their destination region (I don't think there is enough room for that, even if we wanted to). Also, 9 roles is too many. With 10 rounds in the game, 9 is not enough to go the entire game without playing the prospector (who allows players to reclaim their spent roles), but too many to make decision making simple. The game is obviously quite chaotic, but I suspect that the mechanisms to reduce the chaos are there, once we become more familiar with the game (not to mention that I don't mind chaos if it's fun... Robo-Rally IS in my top 10 games).

It was a five player game and I was doing poorly from the beginning. It took me some time to get used to the rhythm created by placing your astronauts and waiting for ships to launch. I was too often counting my chickens before they were hatched! Note to self: If an astronaut doesn't make it to the planet, it doesn't count towards the majority...

I also missed using the explorer on two of the scoring rounds, which most of the other players used to very good effect. Kozure did a very nice job cornering the ice, and snapping up the bonus for that (even though my brother in law gave him a good run for his money). Both my brother in law and my sister in law did well at choosing a few areas of the board to concentrate on and established solid ownership. Kozure was picked as the leader and got hammered on more than a few occasions, but it wasn't enough... he won the game. I think everyone enjoyed it, and I bet future playing will be even better.

Happy New Year everyone. I hope this coming year is even better than the one that just ended.