Goin' Old Skool (El Grande, Tigris and Euphrates, Santiago)

Ah, El Grande. I missed you.

I was thinking the other day that it would be interesting to look up when was the last time I had played a few of the games that I claim are my "favorites". The result was disappointing.

El Grande, probably my favorite game, hadn't been played in nearly a year and a half!

Last week, I brought it along in the hopes that there would be time at the end of the evening, but no dice. Lucky for me, Shemp picked it this week along with Tigris and Euphrates and Santiago.

El Grande

Roughly 4 rounds into the game, Luch was far in the lead, Shemp was in second and Kozure and I were trailing. Luch made an offhanded remark that he was not in the mood to choose intrigue, and simultaneously mentioned that he normally loses at the game. It was a Seinfeld-ian moment, because we all kind of realized he was probably in the lead because he was playing the opposite of the way he normally does (there was a time when Luch was referred to as Hapi on this blog. This was a reference to the fact that He Always Picks Intrigue). Anyway, after the realization, he started choosing Intrigue more, and promptly lost the lead he had.

Shemp leapt into the lead. He managed a couple of very nice point grabs with single caballeros (the efficient, german one, no doubt). I was making a comeback, partly due to the backlash Shemp was receiving for being in first place... but would it be enough?

It was. The last scoring round was unpredictable, but when the dust settled red (me) was in the lead.

Tigris and Euphrates

T&E is my second most played game if you count BGG online games, but my actual face to face games have been few and far between. I love the game, but the analysis paralysis it brings to the table makes it well suited to turn based computer play. Face to face, and with two players much less familiar with the game than Shemp and I, the game played out quite differently. I suppose you could say that with the pressure of time, the game developed less optimally than it typically does online. I developed a long skinny kingdom in the north that I *never* would have built normally. I paid for it, too, because Shemp started disaster tiling in strategic locations to swing vast parts of my kingdom to his control. Kozure had retreated to a corner of the board where he was benefiting from a monument. Luch was the swing in the three way battle going on in the center of the board. Although I had a large presence on the board, my score was weak in blue. When the score was tallied, Shemp was the obvious winner and I was tied for last.

We finished with Santiago. Although we had difficulty remembering to distribute the new money every round, in general the game went smoothly. A large crop of green beans allowed me to win the game. Since Santiago is a difficult game to talk about, I won't really try. Fun, though.

I had a great time playing these older titles. There are certainly some lessons in recent game design that seem to have come in vogue after the release of El Grande and T&E.. notably variable turn order mechanics and downtime minimizing. These aren't things that bother me if the game is engrossing enough, as these ones are for me, but Kozure was visibly "antsy" throughout much of the evening.

Sorry, Kozure. I'll be picking El Grande again in the near future!

Shemp played himself so hard he's bleeding (Jumpgate, Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm)

We played a second session of Kozure's prototype, Jumpgate. This was was the first time Shemp and Bharmer had tried it, and I think it was the first playtest with the full complement of 4 players. I was initially worried that there would be too much chaos with 4... many games where the board changes significantly between turns suffer a little bit in my opinion. There's often a feeling of lost control that I find unsatisfying. Luckily, it didn't really feel that way. Again, I'm not going to talk about it too much but it was fun playing it again.

One note: For posterity, I want to record that during this game Bharmer managed to "Bharmer", "Luch" and perform a "quarter Ono". It was quite remarkable.

We finished the evening with our second game of Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm.

I was dealt an excellent hand. My starting world was the Separatist Colony. In my hand were 3 alien cards that had a military bent, and a fourth card that boosted military. They complemented each other so well I was able to put down military/ alien worlds and developments effortlessly, grabbing a "first to have 3 alien cards" chit along the way. I only had a single production world, the damaged Alien Factory, but between it and another card I had played it gave me 6 cards a shot. I spent the second half of the game putting down military worlds for free and 6VP developments. I don't normally do well at Race, but this one was playing itself. I ended the game 20 points ahead of the second place player, Kozure. Yay me!

Aren't we popular? (Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm, Agricola)

This night's session neatly assembles the two hottest games for 2008; Race for the Galaxy and Agricola. What could make this impossibly hot duo any hotter? We were playing the just released Gathering Storm expansion for RftG!!!

Catch your breath. Pick your jaw up from the floor.

Okay, it's not nearly as exciting as that. Particularly for us, because unless I'm mistaken our collective opinion on both those games are : Good/ very good... but not great. Still, good/ very good adds up to a fine night's entertainment, so who am I to complain?

Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm

I find it intriguing that this expansion comes complete with an expanded storyline to further that of the initial game. Mostly, this is intriguing to me because when I play Race for the Galaxy, I am aware of very little theme. I would have gone so far as to describe the original setting as particularly generic. Still, I'm actually kind of glad that the game's designer uses a storyline to develop the game... it makes me feel like there is a purpose behind the development of the expansions even if I currently am not really "feeling" it.

In reality, it was the the addition of a fifth player and the solitaire "bot" that attracted me. The additional cards are nice, but I haven't played enough to really know the base deck that well so the "newness" of the cards will be lost on me (most of the cards are still pretty new to me). I wasn't even aware of the new goal tokens, so that was a nice surprise!

The game played just fine with 5 players. I was a little afraid that all the phases would get chosen every round, making things a little "samey" throughout. It didn't really happen. It's still the same game, but we did play with the goal tokens so it did feel a little different. The goals introduce two new ways to score points: The first is a series of 3 point goals that reward the player that reaches particular achievements first (the ones we drew this game were: First to play 3 Alien cards into their tableau, First to accumulate 5 victory points, First to play worlds that produce all of the possible goods and First to to play a "6" development). The second is a series of 5 point goals that reward the player with the most of something (the two we drew were: The most developments and the most military). For our first game, anyway, the goals felt pretty good. It added a sense of urgency to accomplish certain things before other players, therefore increasing player interaction, without dramatically changing the feel or flow of the game. Of course, the danger with this sort of thing is that the players who's goals naturally align with goals on the table are unfairly advantaged (for example, the most military is almost surely going to go to the player with New Sparta). Anyway, it's a concern but it didn't feel like a problem in our first game.

Having claimed two of the "first goals" and one of the "most" goals, and finished the game with a 12 card tableau (including one 6) I thought I stood a pretty good chance of winning. Alas, Bharmer not only beat us, he was way ahead!

Agricola

Bharmer hadn't played this with the cards before, so he asked that we include them. Kozure shuffled up the entire deck of "E" cards and that's what we used (I actually hadn't played with the whole "E" deck myself, so I wound up seeing a number of new cards too).

Since I always seem to go long on animals, I figured I would try to take advantage of a particular occupation I had which allowed me to pay a food for a ploughed field at the start of every round. Problem was that, just like last game, I got carried away and started trying to get way too many of my other cards on the table as well. Although I feel the cards I did play were at least all used, I'm not 100% sure they got me further than NOT playing them. Because I was trying to coordinate the effects of all these cards, I never actually got around to planting anything in my ever growing pastures! I also was particularly poor at accumulating food without the help of the animals and ovens I was used to. I didn't ever resort to begging, but on two occasions I was saved by lucky breaks (other players giving me food for my master forester's wood space). On the final turn, I had to consume the two vegetables I was holding onto to feed the family, and lost 3 points because of it.

I came in second with 30, but Kozure crushed us with 38.

Monsters, indeed. (Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear!)

Kozure and I got together again for some wargaming.

We played the "Monsters" scenario from Conflict of Heroes, Awakening the Bear! I was the attacking Germans, Kozure was the defending Russians.

This scenario introduces vehicle combat to players, and as such features a large number of tanks, trucks and APCs. A large hill separates the germans from two smaller hills that they are trying to take... and of course that's where the Russians are waiting and hoping to make the most of their elevation advantage.

I was at first a little overwhelmed by the number of units I had under my control, and intimidated by the task of waltzing into a well defended area. Thankfully, Kozure advised me on a couple of things and helped me clear up what I should try to do. I split up a few small teams to circle the hill in two directions while my main force crashed into the waiting Russians.

After the first turn, I had accomplished little. I hadn't taken any of the minor checkpoints in the first hill, and was nowhere near getting to the major objectives.

In the second turn, I organized a fire group in the middle and started laying down smoke to make the approach a little less deadly (thanks again to the selfless Kozure, who realized that the strategic importance of smoke was lost on me). It worked pretty well... I was climbing onto the hill and gaining ground. The Russians had a positional advantage, but as they were much slower and less effective units it was only a question of time before I would take the hill. By the end of the second turn, I had reached one of the two intermediate checkpoints and the russians were on the run from the hill.

I believe until now we were losing units at roughly the same rate. It felt (to me) that we were losing a lot of units, and watching our CAPS dwindle permanently was getting a little scary, but at least it was happening to both of us.

By now, Kozure's reinforcements were entering the board. These were massive tanks, heavily armed and armoured. I'm not 100% sure that these are the "monsters" from the title, but that's the way it felt to me. He spread them to block the two routes around the hill and effectively made life very difficult. A couple of hidden units which sprung up in those areas didn't help either.

Unfortunately for Kozure, he chose to load up his truck with a couple of his units on the edge of a forest that was within firing range of my tanks and movement range of one of another of my tanks. After firing and damaging a couple of units, I played a card which allowed me two moves without possible reaction and engaged him in close combat. He was out of CAPS, and they were used, so he was powerless to stop me. All units were destroyed. Kozure seemed sleepy around this point, and although he noticeably perked up afterwards a lot of damage had been done.

Kozure suggested that I try to make a break for one of the objectives on the last turn of the game. I had a number of units within range so I decided to give it a try (besides, attacking the monster tanks was NOT likely to work). It meant having to run the units through well defended terrain one at a time in order to sap the defense. In the end, the numbers game worked in my favour and I was *just* able to make it.

I won the game, but it was a squeaker. Obviously, Kozure helped me a lot with his advice, so I can't really claim a real victory.

Don't get too comfortable, Kozure: soon, the master will become the apprentice.

The game was a lot of fun to play, and the flexible yet simple system continues to impress me. I really look forward to playing some more.

I.H.T.C.I.M.T. (Diamant x2, TransEuropa x2, Power Grid, TransAmerica)

This week's post will be short:

Games were played in an environment of giddiness that was extreme even by our measure. I.H.T.C.I.M.T. will live on forever.

We played 2 games of Diamant. Those were surely the deadliest caves in Diamant history! 4-5 disasters in a row happened more often than you'd think...

Then, we played TransEuropa twice. Can anything really be said of TransEuropa? Not really, except that Bharmer appears to be pretty good at it.

We then played a ridiculously fast 6 player game of Power Grid. We weren't trying to speed play or anything, but it still clocked in a well under 2 hours... maybe even 1.5 hours. We played on the U.S.A. map (in honour of the recent elections, I suppose). I started in the hideously expensive south west, and pretty much lost when I made that decision. No one else started there, but Luch and Shemp came knocking soon enough. That meant that the few possibilities I had to expand beyond the LA area were eaten up before I could get to them.

Kozure zoomed ahead in the networked city count, and somehow avoided the downsides. He won the game with only JayWowzer as a possible threat to his win.

Speaking of JayWowzer, it's possible this was his last hurrah with us (his project in Canada is nearly complete). If we don't cross paths again, it was a pleasure gaming with you!

(we finished off with a game of TransAmerica. As usual I did very badly. Bharmer didn't win this one, but he was awfully close)

Exploring deep fear (Mall of Horror, RoboRally, Funny Friends)

For our halloween session of WAGS, I was able to choose the games. I felt it was a good opportunity to explore a serious phobia many of us have... the fear of being TRAPPED.

1) You are trapped in a strange place, and hideous monsters are trying to kill you. Mall of Horror.
2) You are trapped in a deadly factory, and surrounded by insane machinery and robots programmed by buffoons. RoboRally.
3) You are trapped in a life that is going from bad to worse, and that's on a good day. Funny Friends.

Okay, so the game choices were a bit tongue in cheek, but whatever.

Mall of Horror

Luch took control of the parking lot early on and held it with an iron grasp. He accumulated enough weaponry to take out all the zombies that came along. Meanwhile, the rest of us jockeyed for safe haven as the zombies accumulated ominously at the doors of the shops. Shemp, in a disastrous turn halfway through, lost all his characters and played the rest of the game as the designated zombie placer. When it was down to four survivors, Kozure and Luch tied because their hot chicks survived. Luch had, of course, more cards in hand and won on the tie-breaker.

Side note: Bharmer announced that he got married recently (and, apparently, very stealthily). Luch gave him an equipment card he drew from the parking lot as a wedding present. Just wanted to point out that that present came from ALL of us.

RoboRally

We played the scenario called "Ball Lightning". It's a relatively short 1 board/ 4 flag scenario but the trick is that all cards MUST be programmed within 30 seconds (one turn of the sand timer) or cards are programmed at random. That's a very short period of time to plan, and everyone's execution suffered for it. Of course, RoboRally is funniest when plans don't go as they should, so I enjoyed myself as usual. The only problem is that I had specifically chosen it because it was listed as "short" in the scenario book, but unfortunately it took 1.5 hours. Going where you needed to go with so little time to plan was quite difficult, never mind the inherent chaos created by having 5 robots on the same playing field.

I laboriously made it to the first flag and then barely made it to the second flag before 10pm hit (in the real world) and we decided to pack up so we could play our last game. By then, it was clear that Luch was going to win... he was two spaces away from his fourth and final flag. Shemp just barely made it to 1. It was chaotic, hellish and funny. Exactly as I had hoped.

Funny Friends

It's been a long time since we've played this at WAGS. JayWowzer joined us to make it a sixsome(?) and we set about leading really pathetic lives together. For those keeping score. Luch, Chris and I where men; Shemp, Bharmer and JayWowzer were women.

I started out finding the church and becoming sad nobody loved me. Then, I fell in love on a school trip and I promptly cheated on her. The poetry I started writing led me to become an Elvis impersonator. Some may argue that that was the high point of my miserable life, because the later part saw one of my condoms break leading me into fatherhood and a relationship with Shemp that I tried REPEATEDLY to get out of (I cheated through a one night stand with Bharmer, turned to drugs, consented when Bharmer wanted me once again and eventually turned to drugs because alcohol wasn't enough to dull the pain of being in a secure marriage with Shemp.

When Kozure ended the game, I had just started a cult.

Other lives lead:

Kozure was a drinker, an eater, a frequenter of roadhouses and a workaholic. All that changed when he had a vision of St. Mary, joined the loser club and became an alcoholic. Lucky for him, he caught a bridal bouquet, met "Kevin" at a drive-in movie and became happily married, and a freak. (Is it obvious he won the game?)

Bharmer was a freak in puberty and had no friends. He eventually discovered BSW (online gaming site), became so fat he resorted to liposuction and then became a game designer (obviously, that was when I swooned and consented to sleep with him).

JayWowzer was in an accident as a youth, and turned to drugs, drinking, religion and crash diets to deal with the pain. Despite becoming a certified addict, his parties and church meetings allowed him to establish the large circle of friends he always dreamed of.

Luch's life was rather incoherent. He dabbled in the black market, bullied and got a girl pregnant before selling his body to science, getting into fights and being a male sperm raider(!). All this allowed him to quit smoking, write his memoirs and become a millionaire.

Some may say that Shemp's life was defined by him (her) starting a commune and checking into a looney bin, but I would argue he (she) existed primarily to keep me married and use me for sex in order to first achieve the common goal of being a sex maniac.

...

I'll be the first to admit that Funny Friends doesn't really work as well as it could mechanically, but it's not bad and we all laughed a lot while playing. Other groups I've played this with have loved it, so even though it's not full of strategery I still am happy to play it once in a while.

It's O.K. father Joseph, it's the next world that matters (Last Night on Earth: The Zombie game x2, Pandemic)

I have to admit, if you had told me last year that it would take until now to play Last Night on Earth again, I would have been surprised. It's not the type of game that we usually play, but what it's trying to do it does it well. I'm glad Shemp was in the Halloween spirit and chose it this week.

We chose to play the online scenario "We have to go back!". It's an unusual setup that requires all 6 boards, where the heroes need to go into a village to look for two bio-canisters that are required to cure the zombie plague.

Shemp and Luch started as the zombies while Kozure played Father Joseph and Billy and I played Sheriff Anderson and Jake Cartwright.

Things didn't start off well as both Luch and Shemp rolled the maximum number of starting zombies AND they started with an "overrun" token on on of the buildings that potentially had a biocanister (overrun buildings can't be entered). We set about searching the other potential sites. Lucky for us, they were elsewhere and we managed to both find and escape with the two before sundown. I don't exactly recall, but I think we managed to do it without any casualties.

The game went quite quickly, so we played again. This time, Kozure and I played the zombies, Luch was Johnny and Becky and Shemp was Jenny and Sally.

As the zombies, we didn't start with nearly as many zombies as the Luch and Shemp did but we did have one major advantage... when we played the heroes THEY MOVED FASTER THAN THE ZOMBIES DID. It was very bizarre, but Luch and Shemp had the slowest moving heroes I've ever seen. Rolling higher than 1 or 2 was exceptional, it seemed. Oh, and then it rained, so they moved slower still. The zombies didn't shamble once, but they did manage to surround and then chomp on the heroes quite frequently. Becky ran around with an infection of some sort that would make her a zombie if she got hit again, and then Johnny and becky bit the dust and became zombie heroes. There was some fancy maneuvering on the part of team "Go Girl!", with a highly successful dynamite explosion being particularly effective, but ultimately they ran out of time and lost. Shemp was visibly perturbed when Luch's replacement hero Jake Cartwright spent a long time searching for items just as time was running out, but Jake did come out swinging and nearly saved the day (it came down to one roll against my zombie, and I got a 6). The zombies did not go hungry. There was no cure.

We closed the evening with a game of Pandemic. We decided that the black cubes were areas of zombie infestation, and that we were now witnessing on a macro scale the effect of the zombie plague we had just battled in Last Night on Earth (the micro scale).

We played at medium difficulty (5 epidemic cards) despite the fact that Shemp hadn't played before. We worked together pretty well, and things seemed very doable for most of the game. Our biggest problem was that we didn't have the medic, but I was playing the logistics character and discovered that the ability to move other players on my turn was very valuable indeed.

The early scares were zombie infestations, but yellow fever was equally problematic. A few turns in, scarlett fever showed up in spades throughout asia and much of our resources were consumed putting out that fire. We had discovered two of the cures, and had what we needed to cure the last two if the game could just get to me one last time (Luch had cure #3, and I had cure #4). As is often the case in Pandemic, the we ran out of time just before we could wrap it up. A final epidemic in Johannesburg finished us off.

Apparently, zombies should not have been our primary concern.

No. We weren't mooning you. (Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear!)

Kozure and I got together for some extra-WAGSial affairs and played a recent wargame called Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear!.

It interested me because of three main reasons:

#1 It was said to be simple, without being simplistic.
#2 It played 1-4 players
#3 Scenarios are short (1-2 hours)

In wargames, those three characteristics are hard to find in one system. Add the fact that it is a very nice package (large counters, mounted maps, very nice box art) and I was sold.

Note: Over at BGG, this is the wargame equivalent of Agricola at the moment (in other words, the hype machine is in overdrive, and it has shot up the charts to become the #1 wargame almost instantly). Considering I was somewhat disappointed in Agricola, how did CoH fare? Happily, much better.

I won't get into the details of the system, but I think I'd describe it as a wargame design with the discipline of a euro design. The designer has clearly spent enormous effort trying to make a clean, easy playing game system that still manages to give players a fun, immersive and interesting tactical experience.

Each player has a number of units under their command (interestingly, this first set only includes German and Russian units). The game system revolves around a point system which successfully creates a very fluid environment (similar to Tikal, where 10 points are spent doing a variety of actions, COH gives each unit 7 points). The stroke of genius, in my opinion, is the inclusion of "Command" points which are a central reserve that can be used as the player sees fit (to add to fire power, to activate units that are already spent, to organize separate units into an organized group, etc). This simulates a lot of leadership, planning, luck, etc that would often be modeled by a number of additional rules, but with little to no complexity. Opponents each take one small action at a time, keeping downtime to a minimum.

The second stroke of genius is the way damage is represented. If a unit is hit, it is either eliminated or it draws a token and place it on the unit. If a unit with a token is hit again, it is eliminated. The great part is that the tokens have a variety of effects, such as "panic", "pinned", "suppressed", etc. These are kept hidden, and affect the unit in ways you would expect (slow/ eliminate movement, hamper fire, etc). Thing is, you don't know what happened to the enemy you just fired at. The fog of war it creates is interesting, and again there are nearly zero rules required for all this.

There are also cards in some scenarios which further add to the strategy and fog of war for the game. All in all, it's very difficult to fall back on "gamey" tactics like waiting for opponent's units to be used so you can run past them with impunity. Sure, you can try it, but your opponent might use its Command reserve points to jostle a spent unit back to action, or a card might get played which allows some sort of counter-measure you hadn't anticipated. It works very well.

The first scenario involves a couple of units converging on a central crossroad. The russians are defending a supply route, I believe. It's a good scenario to learn the basics of the system, but otherwise I don't see myself coming back to it very often.
Kozure capitalized on his superior knowledge of squad level combat and took me out. I don't think I eliminated a single one of his units!

The second scenario introduces hidden units, cards and group actions. It involves the germans trying to take a bunker and spot a section of road behind it. THIS scenario was a lot of fun.

As the germans, I thought thing were stacked in my favour. The scenario had me set up on a road leading to the bunker. I had three sets of machine guns and riflemen, wereas the russians had few visible units. I knew two of his units were hidden, but I would deal with that later...

Kozure wins initiative and immediately fires on my frontmost units. They are all hit and go scurrying in the forest for cover. That didn't go well.

After rallying the units, I sent a small force to the right and a larger force to the left. I discover that a large stack of machine guns and riflemen puts out a hell of a lot of bullets. Kozure, surprised by the power of my attack, lost a unit fairly quickly. Unfortunately, my large stack of units walked right up to one of the hidden units and suffered badly at the hands of close combat. I did take them out, and I did manage to rally all but one of my units. Things were looking good. Kozure vacated the bunker, but chose to hide the units.

Things then started to go very badly for me. I came to realize how dangerous stacking units can be as I walked up to a second hidden unit (the former bunker force). I was destroyed. My last surviving unit had a "panicked" damage token on it, which lowers the front defensive rating but actually increases the rear defensive rating (I guess, in their panic, they spend a lot of time looking behind them). For this reason, it was in my best interest to put my rear towards Kozure's oncoming units. Kozure was puzzled by my move, and thought I was mooning him.

Simultaneously, the last hidden unit took out the smaller force I had sent out earlier.

I lost. I'll be more careful about those hidden units next time.

Anyway, the combination of cards, flexible point allocation and hidden damage tokens created an environment of uncertainty that I found quite exciting. The simplicity of the rules allowed us to spend more time playing, and less time looking up rules. Obviously, a certain amount of abstraction is inherent in a system that is this streamlined but I'll take playability over historical accuracy any day of the week. Great game, and exactly what I was looking for!

Hyperspace, baby! Yeah! (Jumpgate)

We were down to three this week (of note, Shemp couldn't attend because of an "explosion of insanity" at his place).

This will be very short, due to the fact that we only played a couple of rounds of a game Kozure has designed for a local contest. I'm not sure to what point the details are under NDA.

I WILL say it's called Jumpgate, and that it's a good game. Kozure has remarkable talent for designing games of this type, and always surprises with components that are better than homebrew prototypes should have.

Here's hoping our constructive criticism wasn't too hard on him, and that the game is a success in the competition!

The peasants are NOT happy (Glory to Rome, Shogun)

Bharmer ended his long WAGS absence by inviting us to his boss' place while he was house sitting. Unfortunately, Kozure strangely felt that a lecture by "some guy" (Umberto Eco) was a more worthwhile use of his time than gaming. Clearly, he's lost it.
JayWowzer almost attended as well. However, I told him we were playing Glory to Rome again and then he didn't come. Hmmm.

Glory to Rome

Shemp revealed to the group that somehow, through his various absences, he has managed to:

a) Play Race to the Galaxy only once
b) Never play San Juan
c) Never play Glory to Rome

I was kind of startled by that information. Funny how that can happen.

I was determined not to let the vault bonuses elude me this game. Unfortunately, every one else felt the same. I built the building that let me take the merchant card from the deck instead of the pool, and figured this would work well if I could get a couple of merchants as clients. I then tried all game to do that, and failed miserably. Luch sat to my right, and he would scoop every merchant card from the pool before it would get to my turn (he was collecting stone and merchants). I wasn't doing badly, but it was far from a well oiled machine.

Luch built the forum, which gives an instant win if the player gets one of each client. Kozure tried this once before, but we blocked the pipeline by not allowing any merchants into the pool. Unfortunately, Luch had wisely picked up all the tricky clients before building the forum. All he needed was a laborer and a craftsman, and there was about eight of each in the pool already. We were powerless to stop him.

(well, Bharmer could have completed the Catacombs to end the game, though I don't think it would have given him the win so there wasn't much point).

Another fun session, and another that felt completely different from the others we've played. The variability of the game is impressive.

Shogun

We tried an advanced setup system along with the advanced board this time. While I like the way the advanced board makes the borders to the different regions less defined, the new setup routine felt like a step backwards. We were drawing two province cards and picking one, with the additional option of drawing a face down card if neither face up choice was any good. Honestly, with just two cards to pick from the setup was a crapshoot. I think at least three cards should be used for this system to yield anything much more coherent than a standard RISK setup.

In the west, Luch and I were at odds from the start. Meanwhile, Shemp and Bharmer coexisted somewhat more peacefully in the east. We were having rather significant battles pretty early on, and many were resulting in ties. In Shogun, when players tie, both players lose the region... a big blow to all involved. The odds are against ties happening. Then again, the odds are against most of the combat results for the evening.

Love or hate the cube tower, it does make things unpredictable. Also, the green peasant cubes add further uncertainty. It felt like the peasants were on a rampage, however. Odds meant very little. You could dump 8 cubes of your colour against 2 peasant cubes, and still lose the fight. The peasants were not happy.

I placed a large number of buildings early, and got a good lead to show for it at the end of the first year. Unfortunately, I went broke doing it, and never really managed to get out of that hole. I started losing important territories to Luch, and played much of the second year with only 6-7 territories (amazing how difficult it is to plan your actions when you don't have enough territory cards to pick them with!). I did win, but it was by a single point. A single extra round and I probably would have been left in the dust, considering how badly I was bleeding. Glad it didn't happen.

Is there an option to play three years in Shogun? I'm curious how that would change the game