A new history (Troyes, Innovation x2)

Kozure, Shemp and I again.

Shemp once again asked us to bring an assortent of games and convince him that what we wanted to play is what he had picked. I don't know that either of us convinced him of anything, but he did ultimately bring games I brought.

Ha!

We started with Troyes, a game that I liked well enough on first play but neither Shemp or Kozure thought much of, apparently. The second play was remarkably easier for all of us, and we all commented afterwards that it was much more enjoyable now that we had a better grasp of what was going on. As far as comparisons go, I'd still have to say it most reminds me of Macao but I still prefer that one better. Either way, I did like it. Both Kozure and I were running short on dice as Shemp concentrated on occupying the main buildings (his secret goal to no one's surprise). I spent longer with fewer dice, however, and this showed up in my last place finish. Kozure was better at snagging VPs throughout and won.

Looking forward to trying this one again.

Next, we played two hands of Innovation. This game is also fun, but I feel like we are missing something because the game never seems to get past the 5-7th age, and once a player gets in the lead it's hard to see how to catch him. We chatted afterwards and discussed that it might be a better strategy to try to just burn through the decks and get to the alternate victory conditions in the late ages if a player is falling behind on achievements. We'll have to try it next time.

In both games, we made good use of cards that stole points from other players. Kozure won the first game and I won the second.

Sometimes, the dice hate you (Duel of Ages)

... and sometimes they just hate Kozure.

We dug up from the vault a game we hadn't played in five years... Duel of Ages.

This is an old favourite of mine. Flawed in many ways but still lots of fun and there still isn't really anything like it that I know of. For anyone that isn't familiar with the game, it's a cross between a tactical wargame and Cosmic Encounter. Two teams of 4-10+ iconic characters from the past to the future (depending on the number of players and their experience) run around on a modular map. They compete to dominate a number of challenges all the while beating each other up. The past to future thing means that Conan the Barbarian might be running around a mall parking lot with a laser gun.

For me, the silliness of the time/ space mashups are only occasionally amusing. The real draw is the tactical game. It combines characters, special abilities, cool equipment, line of site, opportunity fire, terrain, vehicles, etc, etc, in a really fast playing and relatively simple design. The biggest problem I have with the game is the way equipment is handed out... when a character successfully defeats a challenge, the player might get to draw a card (or more) from the stack. The issues arise because the deck is HUGE and the variety is vast. You might draw a turreted weapon, a pet tiger, a powerful gun, a hovercraft, a blowpipe, etc, etc, etc. Since most characters have advantages with certain weapons over others the luck of the draw can get really irritating if you never draw anything useful. Conversely, if you often draw the perfect items for your characters your opponent can be at a significant disadvantage.

I realize and appreciate that part of the charm of the game might be in making the best of what you draw. Unfortunately, some of the stuff i just so much better than the rest that it remains a sore point for me. Going into the game, me and Kozure both had thoughts on how to improve this aspect and we tried two variants. At first, we tried having 8 cards face up and having a successful player choose the one he wanted (with the option to sweep the cards away and draw a facedown card). This led to a somewhat overpowered game, and reduced the surprise that normally comes with revealing your equipment to your opponent. About 3/4 of the way through the game we switched to simply doubling the awarded cards and then keeping half of what we drew. In the end, I think that this was the better solution and I think I'd definitely play this way again.

As for the actual game, we played with 8 characters each on 4 platters (the modular game boards) for 3 hours. I had a fairly brawny bunch with characters that where good with weapons (like a couple of cowboy types) and a few terminator-like futuristic robots. I would say Kozure had a pretty well balanced party, with a better representation of characters throughout the ages.

As the game developed, Kozure poor luck was astonishing. He was failing easy challenges with alarming frequency. Combat almost never went his way. I know he will likely comment that he doesn't like to blame luck of the dice for his losses, but this was embarrassing. I, on the other hand, was benefiting from extreme and unusual luck. I succeeded all but two challenges, often rolling "amazes". I was flush with equipment, without any casualties and ahead in 3 of the 4 challenges. About halfway through, I asked if he wanted to concede but he said he'd keep playing. About 1/2 hour before we scheduled to finish we decided to call it quits (Kozure had a plan to retake a challenge and executed on it, but failed another simple roll and lost his chance. It was the straw that broke the camel's back!).

I still really enjoyed it, though. The funny thing about DoA is that even if you are getting hammered points can be really close. There are only 5 points to be had in the base game (leading in the ancient, the colonial, the modern and the future challenges and having the most surviving characters). Because of this, it's possible to be down to 1/3 of your original team and still be winning (if you had been successful in the challenges earlier in the game). It's possible to play a defensive game and just block the entrances to the challenges with your dwindling team and hope to hold on until the time runs out. Still, the fewer characters you have the harder it is to keep the other player from gaining on you so it's still a big advantage if you can destroy the other team.

They played Android (Android)

Shemp and Kozure played Android. Apparently, it was fun but plays better with more than two.

Re-writing history (Civilization)

It took a lot longer than I had anticipated, but we finally pulled out the new Civilization for a second try. In our first game way back in January, I had really liked it despite few concerns regarding combat, the culture mechanic and general thematic wonkiness. In our second play, my opinion has changed somewhat... The military system didn't bother me this time. Now that i understand it better works fine. The randomness injects a little riskiness to battle but generally the superior force wins. It's still a process that introduces downtime in an otherwise remarkably downtime free design (for a game of this genre), but it's nowhere near as egregious as Fury of Dracula. Culture did not play a huge role in this game, at least not the "take that" aspect that bothered me last time (though I don't know if it's because Shemp and Kozure refrained from using those cards because they disliked them or because they were genuinely less useful. I was the culture guy last game and I was playing those quite a bit, because even though I didn't like that style of play it was the avenue i had pursued and I didn't see a better easy available to me). Hopefully they'll chime in and let me know. The one aspect of the game that bothers me the most, however, is the trading, or lack thereof. In the Eagle games version, trading is central. In this one, the system OSS tight thatthereseemslittle reason to do it. Units and work value aren't tradeable, so that really only leaves "trade", resources and promises. Problem is, since resources are random and rare, so it's unlikely and unusual that you have one to trade AND other than temporary alliances there aren't much promising opportunities available that I can see. This leaves trade as the only commonly available resource, which doesn't work since two different currencies are required to make an exchange.

Otherwise, it's a game that has managed to marry quite a number of civilization elements together in a fun and playable package. I look forward to playing it some more.

(in our game, I was Germany, Shemp was Egypt and Kozure was China. Unsurprisingly, I went military/ science. Shemp went Culture/ Science and Kozure went Economic. I was doing well, but I stalled outside the gates of one of Shemp's cities because i was having a hard time balancing my discoveries with the need to press the attack. I kept distracting myself with unit upgrades and ignoring movement bonuses and increases in my stacking limit. Eventually, i decided to march but realized it was too late. I did crush the city, and would have crushed Shemp's capital, but I was one space too short. Kozure won an economic victory the same turn that Shemp would have won a cultural one. It was very close! The funny thing is that if I had realized that even having developped "flight" I couldn't reach his capital that round, I could have played differently and won a scientific victory with Space Flight. Oh well, I deserve what I got for missing an opportunity!

New's last gasp (Power Struggle, Junta: Vive El Presidente!)

With Shemp, Kozure and Pablo available, I took this week as an opportunity to play the last few unplanned games in my collection.

Power Struggle

First up was Power Struggle, a game about climbing to the top in a large corporation, by any means necessary. To many, this theme would be unappealing but at least it's not another game set in medieval Europe! I personally find it humorous because iWork in that environment, and in my opinion the theme has been integrated quite well.

Before I start, I have to say that explaining the rules was tough. I've taught hundreds of different games, but for some reason this one stands out. It's one of those games that offer many options AND where each rule seems to require the explanation of another rule to make sense. Also, it's a game where players have hidden objectives, so you want to minimize question asking in order to avoid giving things away at the wrong time. Once I muddled my way through a rules explanation, we started but we all knew nobody had any idea what they were doing (including me).

I'll give a very high level summary: the game board depicts a large corporation building, showing offices, manager's offices, the executive board room and the chairman's office. Throughout the game, players will populate and manipulate the offices in order to get their guys promoted to divisional manager and up. It boils down to a kind of area majority game, in a way. The trick is that there are several ways to go about what you want to do. Departments can be shuffled, merged, etc, divisional managers can be promoted to the board of directors and take their staff with them or exit the company and become outside consultants. Bribes can be offered to get the power of another player's division temporarily, etc. The upshot is that there are a number of score tracks that measure influence, investments, consultants and even corruption and each player must make it to a certain level in 4 categories before everyone else (each player also has a secret nemesis and can gain a victory point by simply being better than him/ her in certain categories).

In our game, after flailing about aimlessly for a few rounds we finally started figuring out what was going on. I started creating main departments and bribing other players at every occasion I had. After dramatically over bribing Shemp early, I reduced 90% of my bribes to the minimum because really I just wanted the corruption and the game punishes players for not taking them (one of the target's employees leaves). I did manage to win, having reached the target in influence, main patments, corruption and having beaten my nemesis, Kozure, in the required fields.

Initial confusion aside, I think I liked it. It will definitely take another play before I feel confident, though,andireally hope idon't need to teach it to a new player next time we play!

Junta: Vive El Presidente!

This one is a much simpler game, but also about terrible bosses. Some southern American country has a military dictator, and all the players want to build up their wealth and replace the dictator.

The game involves the presidente drawing cards and making secret offers to each player from those cards and then those players deciding if they want to attack another player or the president, defend themselves or the president, etc. If an attack on the president is successful, the attacking player becomes the presidente. Iftheattack is unsuccessful, anybody who didn't attack the presidente gets to keep the promised cards. We started with the ask game but quickly migrated to the advanced game... The main difference is that the presidente can also distribute dice along with the cards, and those dice can be programmed to attack other players, etc.

Pablo was our first and most successful Presidente, managing to keep the role for a few rounds. I earned the "worst presidente" honor after I kept giving cards to the player that couldn't defend me (like Shemp with only a single dice when Kozure had four!). In the end, Kozure won the game, funded heavily by my short terms as presidente no doubt.
Anyway, itwasfun but certainly not a "wow"

No more new! (Nightfall x2, Tribune)

The recent math trade and birthday gift certificate have led to a particularly large influx of new games recently. 100s of games into Wags, the group appears to be reaching their limit with new games, so a point was made to replay a few games we had recently learned (I'll admit to really enjoying learning new games and seeing how they tick. I still have two unplayed games in my collection, Junta: Vive El Presidente! and Power Struggle, but i'm waiting for a night with 4 players at least to try them out).

Nightfall

Nightfall hadn't really clicked with me last time we played, but tonight it really did. Shemp and Kozure are less enthusiastic, but seem to like it well enough. For Shemp, the fact that no effort was made to accommodate colorblind people such as himself makes the game harder to enjoy off the bat. Kozure mentioned that he felt that Dominion was still the smoother, more elegant game. I agree with that, but there are things that Nightfall does much better than Dominion in my opinion:

1) Dominon plays smoothly because it's mostly multiplayer solitaire. The interaction that exists in Dominion i'm not a big fan of, because the effects tend to be irritants rather than actual interaction.
2) I like some of the mechanical design choices, such as making parts of the pool of cards private to each player (increasing the variety between games further) and the victory condition of having the least wounds (solving the ganging up on the weakest problem common to this type of game). It's also clever how the game always starts with a generic starter deck which allow a decent buid-up of defense, boosts influence, etc to get the game going right away.
3) the chaining mechanic, although extremely weak thematically, is original and I enjoy building my deck around possible combinations of cards. In dominion, you have to look at the available pool of cards and decide what combination will allow you to get to hands containing 8 gold as quickly as possible. In Nightfall, like in Thunderstone, there is a wider variety of approaches and part of how you choose your cards has to involve anticipating how certain cards will chain into others, and whether their effects will be complimentary.

All in all, it's a game I quite enjoyed. It's true that there is something to the sequence of operations that feels inelegant or anti-intuitive... Three games later we still seem to struggle to not forget phases, or doing some of them in the wrong order. It's not hard, just a little clunky.

I won both games. In the first, I focussed on combinations that led to large amounts of direct player damage. The game ended rather quickly as I was accumulating a number of 3 direct damage cards and we were whipping through the wound stack. The game ended so quickly that we decided to try again. This time, I focussed on selecting cards that eliminated wounds from my deck. Tis worked quite well, but the highlight of the game for me was playing a card which allowed me to choose the target of an opponent's effect and sending 3 wounds Kozure's way as a result. With final scores being 10 vs 9 vs 8, that move won me the game!

Tribune

In our second play, Tribune continued to impress as a Smooth, elegant euro that manages a nice mix of strategy without brain freeze. I lost any chances I might have had to win on the final turn when I failed to bid for the chariot to protect my vestal virgins from takeover. I needed them to get the tribune, and by losing them my temporary favor of the gods went away as well. Shemp was the happy winner when all was said and done. So far, this is turning out to be a winner.

Two original themes (Troyes, Tribune)

I purchased Troyes a little while back with a gift certificate, and received Tribune in a recent math trade, so we played a couple of new games tonight. Both feature particularly unoriginal themes, and the kind of abstraction that demands excellent gameplay to be fun (or else it's just another bland, dry and generic euro). Let's see how they did on our first try:

Troyes

Troyes is a game about the struggle between three factions (military, clergy and trade), all the while faced with external threats of various types, in medieval France. The actual gameplay has little do do with this, however. Players get a number of dice in three colours according to their presence in the three main "buildings". Dice are rolled, and these become the pool from which all actions will be activated. Over the course of the game, a number of cards are turned up showing possible actions and on their turn players will choose 1-3 of the available dice and assign them to one of those actions. The actions will generate money, influence, VPs or future bonuses.... But most of them amount to micro moves and the game is won by accumulating many small rewards over the course of the game.

There are a number of unique things going on. Number 1, dice can be selected from any player, not just your own pool. It costs money to do this, but often it's worth it and it obviously it takes away from what that player can do later. Number 2, the actions work by totaling the number(s) on the selected dice and dividing them by whatever is on the card... For example it might say you get 2VPs for each multiple of 3 you had totaled. Number 3, a player gathers "influence" which allows modifications to the values rolled (re-roll dice, flip dice, etc). Number 4, the city of Troyes is perpetually under attack and/or suffering internal unrest of some kind and this is represented by event cards which turn up at the start of each round. These must be defended against and if left un-countered will continue to impose a nasty effect every round. This means that depending on what comes up, or where you are in turn order, it may be necessary to re-prioritize and dedicate resources to quash the event. Lastly, each player gets a secret goal but at the end of the game every player gets to score points from each secret goal (in other words, if the goal was to get X influence for 6VPs all players who have that much influence get the VPs). This is interesting because it means you must pay attention to what other players are concentrating on to try to guess what the bonus condition they have is and try to earn it as well.

Between selecting yours or another player's dice, the ability to modify your roll, and the various items worth pursuing there is a lot more control than you'd expect from a dice game. Commensurate with this, there is a lot more to think about. With the wrong players, this could be an AP nightmare. otherwise, it's an interesting and challenging game, but I think it might take another play or two before it starts to reveal it's true colours. In our first game, the amount of options is large enough that it's hard to see how one choice is better than the other. About half-way in I started seeing how things worked together a bit better. The dice selection mechanic and the way the available actions change each game is quite interesting and should provide a different experience each game. I am reminded of Macao, and the way that the dice and available cards drive the game... A combination I really enjoyed.

I liked it. I didn't love it, but my gut tells me this one is worth investing a few more plays in. It's definitely a VP hunt, it's pretty mathy, and quite abstract but I think the sum is more than it's parts. We'll see.

Kozure won the game, having accumulated a large stack of VPs even before the endgame had been scored. He had gone after many of the events while I was focussing more on end game bonuses. Shemp was unfortunately saddled with a starting position that gave him little income, a problem since his secret goal was money (my fault, I hadn't explained that part). Scores where close, though!

Tribune

For our second un-original theme, we have a game set in ancient Rome. This one is about controlling different factions in order to satisfy a number of victory conditions before the other players. It's worker placement, but the rewards for each space is always a choice of cards (face up cards! Face down cards! 5 face down cards!, etc) and after reading the rules I was skeptical that it would be much fun at all.

Turns out it's pretty good. The cards are collected to try to control factions, and control is established by playing a set of cards. Control is kept until someone else plays a better set (higher total value or more cards). There is a bonus given for simply taking over, and another for being in control. Going after the factions means more than just accumulating the number required to satisfy a victory condition... You need to get them in the right order and at the right time so that the take-over bonus and control bonus helps you satisfy the other victory conditions at the same time. It's true that all the actions available are for gathering cards, but the thematic link (although tenuous) at least makes sense and since players are always trying to complete sets of cards the various ways of collecting them allows for different types of risk/reward.

It flows well, is fun to play and the interaction is interesting. Looking forward to trying this one again as well.

This was apparently Kozure's evening as he won this as well. Shemp thought he had a chance to achieve all the goals at the same time as Kozure but couldn't manage it. Meanwhile, I still had a few more to go.

Catch up (frag x2, Nightfall, Power Grid)

Very late post... Will keep it brief.

A few weeks ago I showed up late and only was able to participate in the second game. They had started out the evening with Frag, which i've never played and know nothing about. I had recently participated in a mammoth ( for me) math trade, and so had a pile of new to me games sitting around. One of the games was Nightfall, the new AEG deck building game, and Kozure decided he wanted to try it. We unwrapped the cellophane and did what we have rarely, if ever, done before: read and learn the rules as we played the game. Typically we make sure someone knows how to play, but this one didn't seem like it would be too complicated and it turned out to not be too bad.

The game is extremely combat centric. It's all about getting past the other player's guards and doing damage to the players controlling them. Think Magic the gathering instead of Dominion or Thunderstone. The clever twist which makes this game work better than Magic for multiplayer is that the goal is to inflict "wounds" and the winner is th eplayer with the least wounds. The result is that in order to win, players are forced to spread out their attacks, not simply picking on the weakest player.

I used to be an avid "Jyhad" player, and on the surface I thought that the game might feel like a stripped down version of that game. The theme is similar, the combat oriented gameplay fits, but ultimately there us little resemblance. Where Jyhad did a great job of capturing the theme through it's mechanics, Nightfall could really be about anything. The gameplay in Nightfall revolves around playing chains of cards, and other players can choose to add to the chain if they have the right combo in hand. Effects are resolved in reverse order so later orders can mess around with earlier ones. It is through this mechanic that players will play their minions and give them orders. In practice, it creates interesting gameplay and decision making, but the chaining has zero connection with anything that could be going on thematically so it feels like you are playing a game mechanic, not a ferocious battle between vampires and werewolves.

I was very successful and finding combos, but less successful at taking advantage of them. It's quite hard to set up cards that will work together AND be useful, which makes choosing cards for your deck difficult. Our first game saw Shemp emerge victorious.

So, I enjoyed it and look forward to playing it again but I was disappointed by how weak the game was thematically. It's also tough on the colorblind, because the chaining mechanic depends on matching collies between cards that haven secondary symbol associated.

Last week I also missed games night. I heard Power Grid and Frag! were played.

Easy Come, Easy Go. [Historical]

EASY GO:

Blue Moon City
Phoneicia
Quo Vadis
Pueblo
Betrayal at House on the Hill
Zombies!

Easy Come, Easy Go.

Agent Easy trades his games a lot. Poor addled Shemp can't keep track of what games are available to the group, since a lot of those listed on the left have been traded away.

So.

I'm initiating a new series of posts. Starting NOW. Hopefully my math trade stalking skills are strong. Of course if I'm incorrect, AE will let me know. I'd hope.

EASY COME -

Tribune Prima Inter Pares
High Frontier
Power Struggle
Nightfall
Dixit


EASY GO -

Dungeon Twister 2
Alien Frontiers
Earth Reborn
Ingenious
Ghost Stories: The Village People expansion