Well. that's better. (Glory to Rome, Princes of Florence, Pandemic)

After last week's embarrassing session of Princes of Florence, we felt we needed to redeem ourselves by playing again correctly. However, I had just picked up Glory to Rome and Pandemic, so I wanted to play those as well. From what I had read, trying to learn Glory to Rome late at night can make your head explode... so we started with that instead.

Glory to Rome
San Juan should be pretty flattered. Race for the Galaxy and Glory to Rome are both very close cousins to the card game implementation of Puerto Rico. Whereas Race is pretty much a more complicated version of San Juan, Glory to Rome uses a similar basic system but strays a bit further in terms of gameplay.

Let's get some first impressions out of the way: the art on the cards is pretty bad. Really pretty bad. It's a kind of cartoony art that seems like something out of Munchkin. It's odd, too, because the actual layout of the cards is quite thoughtful, so someone was clearly thinking about presentation. Part of the problem with the art is that it gives the impression the game is going to be funny or light. It is isn't either. The only argument I can think of in favour of the comic style is the fact that the game features real, live, direct player interaction (sometimes referred to as "screwage"), which is often not welcome in the more serious euros.

Like San Juan, the basic system involves choosing from various roles in an effort to build various buildings, each of which confers special abilities to the player once built. Most VPs wins. The execution is pretty different, though. Whereas San Juan is balanced, elegant and peaceful, Glory to Rome is complex, unbalanced and interactive. That's neither good or bad, it's just different. An indication of the differences can be seen in the basic roles... There's gathering materials, there's building buildings. There's also stealing materials from other players and hiding goods meant for the reconstruction of Rome in your vault. The buildings add further chaos by providing different ways to mess with the other players' games and altering the rules in pretty powerful ways. The game also introduces a new kind of resource, "clients", which allow a player to do the action of the chosen role as many times as they have of the correct client. This means that a player could conceivably set themselves up to take many times more turns than the other players.

Our first game went remarkably well. Considering everything going on, the game plays smoothly and logically. Kozure built the Forum about mid-game, which gives him instant victory if he can manage to gather one of each type of client. All he needed was a merchant, but we all worked together to prevent one from coming up. In the meantime, Bharmer built a Basilica which allowed him to steal cards to his vault directly from his hand. Let's just say we were all so focussed on preventing Kozure's automatic win that we didn't notice how many points Bharmer was stowing away. He won the game by a significant margin.

Our initial reaction to the Forum was that it was too powerful. Turns out we might have been wrong after all. We've only played one game, but I suspect we will get to see many cards and combos that seem too powerful, only to then find the antidote. Glory to Rome manages to be fun, thematic and strategic despite it's appearance. It should be a fun ride getting to know this one.

Princes of Florence

We played correctly this week. It's such a wonderful game when things are working! It was quite a close finish. Luch was ahead for the entire game, but he had no Prestige cards. On the final round, Bharmer and I tied him. Unfortunately for them, I did have some prestige VPs left to score (though I only completed one of my two cards successfully). I won by a slim margin.

Pandemic

Pandemic was the second new game of the evening. I played a few rounds a couple of days before, and the whole thing seemed pretty easy to pick up. Seemed perfect for the final game of the evening.

Turns out "easy to pick up" doesn't equal "easy to win at".

Pandemic is a cooperative game where players work together to cure 4 major diseases spreading like wildfire across the globe. Each player takes on the role of a specialist (a medic, a scientist, etc). Cubes in four colours are seeded at the beginning of the game to start things off and right away the pressure is on to do some damage control. Each player's turn, the infection spreads (cubes are added to the board). When a cube would normally be added to a city that already has three, cubes are instead placed in each adjacent city. In the meantime, players try to accumulate 5 cards of each colour to find the cures and eradicate the diseases. One of the most innovative mechanics in the game is that the cards which are flipped to determine the spread of disease are shuffled and placed back on top of the deck everytime an "epidemic" card is drawn. In other words, the sick places get sicker. And fast.

Our first game started poorly. The first card drawn was an "epidemic" card, so the board got ugly pretty quick. Our inexperience led to an out of control epidemic within a few turns and we lost pretty decisively. We immediately wanted to play a second game, however (good sign), so we tried again. Although the second game also felt pretty rocky, we seemed to be holding our own (though the experience quickly and frequently careens from cautiously optimistic to nearly hopeless). Coming down to the wire, we had cured the red, yellow and blue disease. Black was left but we were one turn away from curing it as well, for the win. It came down to the draw of Bharmer's last card. There were only three left, and one was an epidemic. He drew the epidemic. If memory serves, Moscow was the last city to pop, ending the game.

Playing Pandemic felt a little like playing an old 80s video game, like Arkanoid or Berserk. You try to act fast, try to respond to what is being thrown at you. It doesn't feel terribly deep and there's lots of luck, but you can definitely hone your skills and improve. Also, it's fun.

I like that players truly have to work together to succeed. I like that it's not easy to win (we were playing on the normal difficulty with 4 players. I'm told it's easier with fewer players, and obviously if we had played the introductory difficulty we might have won in our first games). I also like that it's pretty short and simple to teach. Another good game.

Princes of *Teh Suck* (Goa, Princes of Florence)

It all started innocently enough...

Goa was the carry-over game from last week. I had mentioned last time that I would try to see what could be done by advancing the money and ships track, since I never seemed to use them much. With the extra money, I was able to make a couple of very strong bids. Of course, the money goes to another player, so I'm not convinced it's a good strategy in the long term.

It was a ridiculously close game. 35, 35, 35, 34. Kozure won the game with the most money as the tie-breaker.

Next we played Princes of Florence. Well, it may be more accurate to say we played some game using PoF game pieces. What it was we actually played is anyone's guess.

You see, we couldn't find the rulebook. PoF is one of m favorite games, and we've played it quite a few times as a group, so it shouldn't have been such an obstacle. Little details were hazy, though. We weren't sure what the starting money was. We figured it must have been roughly 1800 florin. We were wrong (it's 3500). Things went downhill from there.

In the first auction, everyone felt poor and Luch picked up his Jester for 200 florin. We should have packed up then and there, but we didn't.

During his second turn, Kozure realized he had made a mistake. He and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to reconstruct his previous turns, though in the end neither of us were really sure our conclusions were correct. Again, we should have just started over, but we didn't. Incidentally, we discovered later that our calculations were entirely off.

I normally do very well at PoF. This night I sucked. I was constantly having to spend prestige points to be able to afford my actions. I couldn't set myself for future actions to save my life. On the 5th round, I won a jester in an auction on purpose, just before I remembered that what I NEEDED was a park. That move meant I couldn't satisfy one of my prestige cards and couldn't complete more than one work over the next 2 rounds. I briefly calculated I lost 22 points.

Lastly, Bharmer realized (in a weird flurry of activity) that he was both miscalculating his prestige score AND scoring works as though he had features he didn't. It was at this point we came to the conclusion that the results of this session were entirely fictional and that it was impossible to determine the real winner. There was a fit of slightly maniacal laughter amongst the group as we tried to understand what had gone so wrong.

I *think* Luch played the whole game correctly, and so we declared his second place finish as the win.

We will be playing Princes again next week, if only to redeem ourselves.

Oh, and just to rub salt in the wounds we found the rules as we were putting away the game...

Camel. Hump. (Princes of Florence, Through the Desert, China)

BHarmer's pick this week. A random assortment of games, but good ones.

Princes of Florence

We opened up with one of my all time favorites, Princes of Florence. As far as I'm concerned, there is no better optimisation game. What does this type of game need to do well? Players need to be largely in control of their fates, but there needs to be just a little luck to keep things from becoming static, and just enough player interaction that a player might feel the pressure to change an otherwise ideal strategy to react to evolving circumstances.

I've tried a few different strategies in this game. The pure builder and jester strategies are both popular, but since they are fairly obvious the competition for those resources are typically pretty tight (making them less effective as a result). Instead of going a middle road, as I usually do lately, I decided to try to simply bulk up my professions early and see if the extra hand size would carry me through the game. I auctioned for a recruiter card on the first round and purchased a profession as my first action. I purchased another profession on the second round. This meant that, along with the jester I had won in the auction, my works were worth a minimum of 8 (6 profession cards and 2 for the jester). As a large number of my professions required forests and the freedom of religion or opinion, I was able to gather what I needed and play a large number of works cost effectively.

Things didn't go perfectly, though. The profession cards and prestige cards I drew didn't match up well with my hand. As I tried to bid up other players I got stuck with a builder I didn't want. I miscalculated on a turn and nearly made it impossible for myself to complete my plan to complete two works on the final round. These things make me happy, because if they never happened, the game would quickly become very boring. I'm glad the resources are so limited, I'm glad that there are so few turns, and I'm glad that I can use the auction to make life difficult for other players (and that it can come back and bite me).

It was a very tight game until the end. I won due to the two works on my last round.

Through the Desert

After the usual griping about the terrible colours that the camels come in, we played two rounds of this excellent little game. Kozure killed us in the first, with a good number of 'longest chains' and surrounded areas. I won the second, largely due to a large 21 point area of the board I was able to cordon off. This is probably the first time that my initial placement amounted to more than just 'I'll place this camel near those two water holes' or 'between these two palm trees'. I placed a camel halfway up the edge of the board, and placed two blockers to the right of it. Since the blockers matched the colour of the other player's camels in the area, it was tricky for them to come block my land grab. Obviously, in a five player game the odds of having a placement strategy work are minimal since it's just luck no one saw what I was doing or even that they didn't place a camel or two in a place which would have screwed up my plan unknowingly. Still, they didn't and it worked! Still, it's pretty cool that despite what seemed like a game winning move, the lead was pretty small since I had to forego so many other scoring opportunities (water holes, palm trees, longest chains) in order to make it work.

Oh, and I ALMOST enclosed a circle right in the middle of the board. That would have been cool (damn you Kozure!!!)

China

We ended with China, another excellent game which packs a punch in very little time. 4 Players is pretty much as high as it will go before kind of breaking down, though (and 3 is best). Luch usually seems to go heavy on advisors, and Kozure normally seems to go majorities and chains. I went advisors as well, so I was in frequent competition with Luch. Not sure who won the game, because we realized later that we forgot to score the roads! Minus those, I had won, but I was very weak in connections so it could have been anyone's game.

Among Royalty (Maharaja, Princes of Florence)

4 Players this week, and what's a WAGS session without a new game?

This week's newest aquisition is Maharaja: Palace building in India. Bharmer bought it this weekend and was eager to try it out.

Maharaja is a Kramer and Kiesling collaboration (the same team which brought us Tikal, Torres, Pueblo, Mexica, etc). The board depicts 7 walled cities interconnected by paths and small villages. Each player is trying to be the first to build 7 palaces.

Each player will enlist the help of a noble on the first turn (though nobles will change hands over the course of a game). The noble confers a special power to the player and determines turn order. On a turn, players must choose 2 actions on a wheel (similar to the wheels in El Grande). There is a wide range of actions, some of them affect the acting player (building houses/ palaces, earning gold), others might impact other players (such as changing the order that the Maharaja will visit the cities, or exchanging character cards with another player).

Some things I liked:
1) Players are building houses and palaces in the various cities in order to gain majorities, so that when the Maharaja visits it they are rewarded with money (which is, in turn, used to build houses and palaces). However, houses are 12x less expensive to build than palaces, yet are worth the same when counting majorities! This leads to a very interesting balancing act as players try to get their palaces on the board yet still win majorities.
2) In our group, turn seemed to go by quickly. I suspect that is because the actions are determined in advance and are quite specific. However, there is real possibility of analysis paralysis if a player tries to think through every possibility and permutation when actually choosing their actions. In the end, though, there is too much chaos in the system to actually have that level of control, so it's ultimately not worth doing anyway.
3) It's nice to play a game which doesn't rely on tallying up victory points.

Some things I liked less:
1) The chaos, after one play, seemed a little high to me. I found it a little frustrating to have to plan 2 actions ahead of time, only to find out (repeatedly) that the Maharaja wasn't were I expected him to be, or that I was no longer the character I started with. As I alluded to in an earlier point, I find this to be an odd combination with the amount of potential analysis in planning out your turn.
2) It seems very difficult to do anything to stop a leader. Other players can't be directly affected, other than stealing their character card, so I kind of watched Brian coast to victory 3 rounds ahead of the end of the game... unable to do anything about it. I guess the idea would be to work together and try to prevent that player from gaining the majorities needed to raise cash and build palaces... but I suspect that's pretty hard to actually do.
3) On the surface, it seemed like there was at least two strategies available for earning income: Gaining majorities inthe cities, and placing houses on the roads to collect tolls. At least in our game, the houses on the roads were far too easy to circumvent, and did not really earn their keep. If they weren't necessary in order to get anywhere, I suspect players would soon stop playing them at all. I wonder if this will eventually lead to a game of "chicken" as players wait and see who will make the sacrifice and useup their turn to build there.

In the end, I felt like I was playing a combination of El Grande and Aladdin's Dragons. The area majority mechanic occupied most of my thoughts during the game, but I found myself constantly trying to guess what other players might do, and what I had to do in order to avoid getting messed up. I's a weird combination of deep strategy and guesswork. I made the wrong decisions far more often than I should have!

I did notice that Bharmer made extensive use of the character card trading mechanic, and that he made a point of building a palace on all but one turn. I lost sight of the goal of the game early on (building palaces), focusing too much on gaining majorities. This was despite Bharmer's warning at the beginning of the game not to do that! He won quite easily, but I would expect much stiffer competition in a second game.

In the end, Maharaja strikes me as potentially a very good strategy game. It seems to be aiming for depth of strategy combined with enough chaos to keep it from being dry/ predictable. Time will tell if it succeeds!

We followed up with a game of Princes of Florence, which Bharmer hadn't played yet. In my mind, there is no game which so much about optimization of resources, and that's why I love it. It also means that it's nearly impossible for a new player to compete. I went for a "jester + lots of works" strategy, but I faltered and produced at least 1 work too few to win the game. Shemp, who isn't a huge fan of the game and often does poorly, used a very well balanced strategy of a little bit of everything and won the game! Bharmer? He did come in last, but not by much. It was quite a tight game, and I'd say he did really well.

I Made a Math!

Luch's fancy this week were Puerto Rico and Princes of Florence, two excellent games (in my opinion). Sonja was playing with us again, and trying Puerto Rico out for the first time. Sadly, Kozure couldn't make it!

First things first: We decided to come clean about some of the mistitled roles in Puerto Rico. The Mayor? Since when is it a mayor's role to take "workers" off a boat and give them work. The "workers"... well that's pretty sketchy too. The theme of this game is pretty tasteless, but luckily it's a good game anyway! I had taught Sonja briefly before playing... so she wasn't going in completely blind. Luch and I were racing with the same strategy, harbor and wharf, but I managed to win. I tend to gravitate towards that style of play every game (Buy a market and coffee or tobacco early for income). Speaking of strategy tendencies... we talked a little about the fact that in every game we've played, Shemp has built a warehouse, and I've NEVER built one... kind of odd. I think Sonja liked it well enough, but I don't think she'll run out and buy it.

Next up was Princes of Florence. Shemp likes this game but historically does very poorly with it (last in every case, in fact). I encouraged him to play against his instincts, to see if that would help.... I'm not sure if that's what he actually did, but SOMETHING worked, because he would have won (!) the game if not for a bidding war with Luch on the last round (which he lost due to lack of funds, messing up his plan). His loss was my gain, as I narrowly snatched the victory. We had a good laugh as Sonja exclaimed she "Made a Math" as she completed a work.

This was my first time really going after the jesters (I don't think I've ever bought more than 1 per game before). The verdict? Of course, the experts are correct... they are really quite powerful. Suddenly, all the turn minimum became very easy to meet (I had 3). Still, Shemp's end run made it clear to me that the game has many avenues of strategy which can work, and the key to winning is open to any of them.

Does this change Shemp's opinion of the game? Sonja's? Both commented on the down time between turns, which can definitely be an issue when players aren't snappy. But it's a worthwhile experience in my mind, hope others agree (so I can keep playing it!)

Lastly, we played a couple of rounds of Sonja's favorite game: For Sale! This is a very simple and quick game which involves bidding on properties over several rounds in phase 1, and then selling them to prospective buyers in round 2. In my opinion, this game is excellent filler. It's fast and fun, and everyone is involved at all times until the end. There is a good balance of luck and strategy, which keeps everyone in the running but gives an edge to the player who puts his (her) mind to it. Although this feels similar in weight to High Society, I give this one the edge in the fun factor. Hmmm, I might have to get it eventually.

Games are Like Jolly Ranchers

They're hard, sometimes sweet but sometimes sour, and they hurt your teeth. Wait. No. Santa head candies taste like Jolly Ranchers.

No.

Blokus pieces are like Jolly Ranchers.

*record scratch noise*

Well, we kicked off the 2005 season of WAGS with two classics and one newcomer, Princes of Florence, Pirate’s Cove and Blokus.

Princes of Florence is becoming more strategic as people begin to understand better the more subtle aspects of bidding, and the more coarse aspects like remembering to leave an action to actually play a work on the last round. This time I was very satisfied with my timing and my bidding, but it wasn’t quite enough to prevent Easy from snatching first place. We are achieving higher scores than ever in Princes of Florence, with familiarity being the obvious cause.

Pirate’s Cove held up well on its third appearance, with some shrewd strategy and sneaky moves making appearances. All the other players managed to build up their ships quite quickly, while I limped off to Pirate’s Cove to nurse my wounds after two early round trouncings. Fortunately, I was able to claw my way back up, and despite Shemp’s apparently commanding lead on rounds 8-10 the final scores were fairly close. Shemp did win, but Easy and I had to fight it out for second.

The introduction of Blokus, a simple geometric strategy game with a lot of depth, was a success. Blokus is played on a raised grid of squares, onto which each player plays an assortment of differently shaped pieces ranging in size from five squares to a single square, 21 shapes in all. The pieces must be placed so that each newly placed piece only touches corners (not flat sides) of your own colour pieces, and no pieces may overlap in any way. The play proceeds with each player placing a piece until he or she is “out of the game” when unable to place a new piece. The player with the fewest total squares in their pieces remaining once no one can play a piece is the winner. Bonus points are given to players who play all of their pieces, as well as those who use the tiny one-square piece last.

Blokus is one of those games which you cotton to immediately. It has an attractive look, the pieces interlock easily and are removed easily, and the game play is simple but strategic. There is no theme to speak of, but in the case of this game, none is needed. It is a refined a game as you could expect, up there with Go, Chess, Backgammon and Chinese Checkers as shining examples of simplicity in design.

I kept on having fragmented flashbacks of the light cycles from Tron while playing this game initially, but more apt comparisons are to Qix, Domaine or fractal geometry – the successful strategy is a combination of defensive play to maximize your own future moves, while offensively blocking opponent options.

A very good game, destined to become a classic with many enthusiasts, I think.

For the records (being kept by me, but open for your inspection), scores and rankings:

Princes of Florence

1st Place = Easy – 63 prestige
2nd Place = Kozure – 59 prestige
3rd Place = Hapi – 50 prestige
4th Place = Shemp – 49 prestige

Pirate’s Cove

1st Place = Shemp – 37 fame
2nd Place = Kozure – 36 fame
3rd Place = Easy – 35 fame
4th Place = Hapi – 26 fame

Blokus, Session 1

1st Place = Easy – 7 squares
2nd Place = Kozure – 14 squares
3rd Place = Hapi – 17 squares
4th Place = Shemp – 19 squares

Blokus, Session 2

1st Place = Tie, Kozure/Easy – 7 squares
2nd Place = Hapi – 8 squares3rd Place = Shemp – 12 squares

Rules Question: Pirate's Cove

Can one person play a Royal Navy card, then another person play a Royal Navy card to send the RN somewhere else?

Ford - American - Most Def... *

Cryptic and irrelevant titles aside, the choice of games went to Easy this week. He selected an Italian theme and we went with Princes of Florence, Traders of Genoa and Citadels, which though not set in Italy, is designed by an Italian. Complementing the theme was pizza for dinner, "Italiano" dorito chips and pizza-flavoured pringles. In the nice-idea at the time but ending up tasting like fishy spiderweb dust-in-our-mouths-category were "the desserts that shall not be named" but looks like an attempt to be icing sugar-coated bocconne but staler, drier and less appealing. They're called anginetti, and I hope to be acquainted someday with a much better version.

The opener was Princes of Florence. With five people, the game was a bit slower starting than most, with everyone eying various strategies for ensuring they had sufficient professions for endgame, which was frequently the complaint of our first few forays. Tili and Easy vied for polar opposite principality awards, with Tili creating a sprawling complex of parks, forests and buildings and Easy packing in the buildings like sardines, with a lone forest for relief.

In the end, Easy's new strategy of multiple builders + many buildings + two prestige cards won the day, but all of the other players were within 3-6 PP of the leader, so it was by no means a blow out.

I miscalculated on the final two turns, thinking I had one more action than I had. I must remember that buying action cards takes an action, as does completing a work and building. No doing all three in the same turn. Bad prince strategy. Bad!

Traders of Genoa was much quicker this time with a few rules clarifications from Easy, but trading was shrewder as people began to figure out the cost vs. profit margins of many actions. Easy carried the day with a respectable final bankroll of 590 Florins. Once again, a turn miscalculation left me holding a large order and all the goods to fill it in my hand at game end.

Two courtyard rolls accelerated game end by two turns, putting a crimp in the plans of most of us who were concentrating on large orders. Easy ducked under the wire to get his orders in.

Easy's early game strategy of multiple messager jobs and ownership of several key properties netted him a lot of floriny goodness, but the three rapid fire large job orders towards the end didn't hurt either. All my wheeling and dealing netted me 395 Florins, a unfilled large order and six goods laying unused in my warehouse. Unrealized earning potential is always a sad thing.

Everyone seemed to have learned their lessons about not overbidding on certain building actions and knowing their profit margins. This game wasn't as close as Princes of Florence had been, but it was fun nonetheless and we finished in an hour and a half, much shorter than the whined-about three hours that most complain of.

Rounding out the night at just after 10 was Citadels. With a few games under our belt of this game, strategy was much more in evidence. ?????, unfortunately, was a magnet for assasinations,
thievery and hocus pocus. Also a feature of this game was the frequently passed around hand (courtesy of the magician) which went from ????? to Kozure to Easy over the course of three turns. Easy grabbed the hat trick by completely destroying us with a final score of somewhere in the vicintity of 30 points, with the closest follow ons being ten points behind.

So, the night belonged to Easy, in more ways than one. Fun night, with much Simpsons quotation and confusion about speaking (see title).

* For posterity, the meaning of the title related to a discussion of the upcoming Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. We were discussing the fact that Zaphod was being played by an American. Shemp pointed out that "Ford was American - Most Def." I thought that Shemp meant that Ford was "most definitely" an American (partially right) while Hapi thought he was talking about the former President (not right at all). Evidently Easy didn't understand the relation of any of the three sentence fragments and had to ask for a full-on clarification, which only ended up confusing things, since I don't believe it is generally understood that Most Def is a legitimate name for an American rapper, quite apart from it's apparent similarity to valley-speak. Much hilarity ensued.

Getting Medieval

Last week, we had three players for a new game and an old favourite while Easy was up North w/ the family.

First up was Castle, a card game co-designed by Bruno Faidutti of Citadels fame. Put very simply, it is a game where all players race play all cards out of their hands and draw piles onto the table. Each card has it's own rules regarding where it can be placed, and getting previously played cards returned to your hand is a common occurance.

We played three hands, and I enjoyed each more than the last - it's a good little game, where SYN type gameplay is necessary to win, and momentum seems to shift often and quite rapidly. I think that things would get really wild and woolly with more than 3 players, and I think that would be a good thing, too. Nothing fancy, but very enjoyable. For the record, I think that I won two hands of this, and Kozure one. That's not necessarily indicitave of the play, though. I felt that all of the hands were close to the end, and would play this one again in a second. I'd rank this just slightly higher than however I ranked Bang!, so, give it a 7.

Next, we had a three-player game of Princes of Florence. I always enjoy Princes, but find it to be more fun with four or five players than with three. With more players the bidding process is more competitive, and more profession cards get out into play. I'm not sure I can put my fingers on the reasons why, but the game just seems more interesting with more players, to me anyway. And this is despite the fact that it seems (based on our limited data) that 3 player games tend to be closer.

Anyhow, during this session it came into the last round a three way tie - I had gotten greedy and spent 2 bonus cards in the second last round, which meant I couldn't complete a work in the last round, which meant that I lost. Damn, I shouldn't be such a greedy duck. ????? was slightly ahead at the end of the last round, but Kozure used his Prestige cards (2 of 'em) to secure the win.

I think that I am going to downgrade PoF slightly - it's still a great game, but I haven't been quite as jazzed about it the last few times. Call it an 8.

Edit: I mistakenly thought that Faidutti designed Bang! That's just not true. Emiliano Sciarra designed Bang! Tripped up by a foreign language web site, I was - and I shall be more careful next time, you betcha.

Paranoia will Annoy Ya

Last night we took a trip into the paranoiac and utterly nonsensical world of Corn-22, Easy’s homebrew board game based on (now defunct) West End Games’ “Paranoia” RPG universe.

The Computer is Your Friend. Traitors are Everywhere. The Computer Wants Corn.

As a revamp of Easy’s earlier foray into board game design, Corn-22 featured a much slimmed down game board and a more limited equipment set. The stated object, to collect priceless “Old World” substances like corn, beer, cat food and soup, is paired with the necessity of rooting out traitors (and not being pegged as a traitor yourself). Of course, touching or carrying “Old World” items would acknowledge the very existence of the “Old World” which is, predictably, traitorous.

Assigning a rank, a secret society rank and a fighting skill as well as a “role” (Zoologist, Security, Intelligence Officer, Robotics Engineer or Schmoe) each player is sent into the contained area to root for goodies, avoid being turned into a mushy paste by the various nasty beasties, robots and traps that roam the area. The roles permit certain abilities, such as moving creatures around, getting extra points for catching traitors in the act or, in the case of the schmoe, being able to pass the buck.

The game uses an interestingly different point based movement system which permits players to take a number of moves and then reserve points, letting other players go before they go again. Unfortunately, this can lead to multiple circuits of the table in each turn, as players sit and wait to see what happens. Still, the system is different and has some interesting possibilities.

Also somewhat novel is the fickle nature of the computer’s desire. Although the computer starts off wanting Corn, its preferences can change, modified by the fulfillment of secret society missions, which are doled out based on the character’s secret society rank.

Thankfully, given the many terrors of the contained zone, players have an unlimited number of clones, though death carries a penalty in points and the necessity to drop all carried gear.

The game ends with the return of all the currently desired “Old World” product, or a set number of turns. If the second limit is reached, all players are killed by irradiation, in which case the player with the least number of points wins.

Playtesting proceeded a bit more slowly than Easy had expected, possibly due to unfamiliarity, and possibly due to the way that the movement system worked. Unusual situations like one player being effectively trapped and trying to decide on the most strategic way to kill himself highlighted the unpredictable and funny gameplay atmosphere. Two players quickly worked out the drawbacks of having a lower than average fighting skill. In the end, it became clear that we were all going to be microwaved, and having recently suffered a major loss of goods when Easy sicked a big honking robot on me, I proceeded to off myself twice in consecutive rounds in dramatic ways, divesting myself of all points and obtaining the lowest score.

The playtesting yielded many constructive details which I’m sure Easy will put into Corn-22’s next incarnation.

If not, the Computer will not be Happy.

Warping from a comedic Utopian future into renaissance Italy, we broke out Princes of Florence for the second half of the night. A perennial favourite, the game had a very different feel with only three players in attendance. We quickly learned that with less competition for desired items and improvements, we had to be very cagey about what we bought in order to absolutely maximize our WVs. Gameplay was close and see-saw even until the very last scoring round, with Shemp out in front by 4 PPs ahead of Easy and I, who were tied. Then, we both pulled out prestige cards, one giving me 7 PPs, the other giving Easy 8 PP. We were startled by the fact that had Shemp chosen two larger buildings for his final two builds, he might have denied Easy the 8 extra points, which earned him a one-point margin win. A well played and very close session.