Gamer's Mind

2010 In Review

2011-01-01T16:21:00.002-05:00

I played about 1000 games in 2010. Overall, it was good year for playing games, but a bad year for new games...

Most Played

Ignoring lighter games and fillers--yes, I think Race for the Galaxy is a filler--my most played games were Go (74x), Loyang (32x), Through the Ages (18x), Shogi (11x), Magic Realm (9x), Tigris & Euphrates (9x), Arkham Horror (8x), Tinners' Trail (7x), War of the Ring CE (7x), Lord of the Rings (6x), Notre Dame (6x), Space Alert (6x), and Age of Industry (5x).

Of these, only War of the Ring and Age of Industry were 2010, although it's kind of a stretch in both cases since they are basically "remakes".

Most Fun

Go: An addictive gem. Despite its obvious abstract physical and mechanical design, Go is a rich game, and probably the deepest game I can imagine.

Shogi: Certainly this gets a bump because I am on the leading edge of the learning curve. If you have ignored Shogi because you think it's just a variant on Chess, take another look.

Through the Ages: Although it's lost most of its learning-curve luster, I play often and enjoy it every time.

Tigris & Euphrates: This game went from an early 10, down to an 8, and is now back up to a 9. For an abstract, it looks nice, it has a lot of tricky plays, and a good dose of bluffing.

ASL Starter Kit: I'm still in the intro stages of full ASL, even after all this time. It's more an issue of getting players together than it is a lack of my own interest. I've tried other tactical wargames (CoH, CC:E, ToI), but they just don't feel right.

Liberté: What can I say that I haven't said before? Not much. If you don't own it already, one of your only options is to pick up the embarrassing new Valley Games version.

Napoleon's Triumph: An unintuitive, yet brilliant design in grand tactics (no line-of-sight or defensive fire, but also no supply). The old adage that it's a cross between chess and poker is right on the money.

Here I Stand: My only play--a 13 hour marathon--was fascinating. It's not a "game night" game, but I'd play again any time.

Paths of Glory: It's been highly rated on BGG since its release, but I've never even looked at it until recently. My first and only play took about 6 hours to get through only 4 turns out of 20. A very clever CDG system that feels so much more open than Twilight Struggle, for example.

Again, nothing from 2010.

2010 Releases

7 Wonders: Everyone around me already owns it and has played it, yet I haven't even seen a copy yet. Everyone is way too excited about it. I've read the rules. I can't see rating this game other than a 7.

London: A very convoluted system for gaining income and losing poverty. The board feels like an afterthought. It feels like a game would feel half way through development, before the chaff was discarded.

Merkator: No theme, high chaos. The little cube boxes are a gimmick. They do not serve their purpose. They are a failed reaction to the physical disaster that is Le Havre.

Haggis: A very good replacement for Tichu when you only have 3.

There are a few that I want to try that I haven't, but there are no "must tries". I think the problem is that the "professional designers" are selling out to the mass market and making video versions of the simpler games, and that there are a lot more small (self-)publishers pumping out crap.

Look at Small World. Vinci is a very good game that's been around for 11 years. It has a rank of 168 on BGG. Repackage it with horrendous graphics, give it a fantasy makeover, and it jumps up 128 points. This is where the industry is going. It's great to get more exposure of games for the general public, but pandering to the least common denominator is destructive to the core.

2010 Flops

Dominant Species: This is a great design, but a terrible game. If I wanted 5 hours of complete chaos with absolutely no control or planning, I would play 2 games of Agricola instead. It also doesn't help that a game with an evolution theme is really about "intelligent design".

Founding Fathers: A really good idea for a game, but approached from the wrong direction. As a player, you never care if you are on the "right side" of an issue (which would make the game interesting and historical). You only care if you are on the winning side. And if you lose, you get points for losing so you don't fall too far behind. All the worst sort of euro mechanisms.

Thunderstone/Ascension: Broken and boring.

Implementations of Theme

2010-09-13T16:48:00.002-05:00

What is it that makes a game have theme? Is it the bits? The box? The images and graphics? If you answered "yes" to any of these, then the theme is in your head. There's nothing wrong with this. I'm sure many gamers would enjoy the most abstract games (eg Risk) even more if the bits were in the shapes of their favorite themes (eg fantasy armies, spaceships, Jedi, etc.).

So when, in fact, is the theme realized in the game play?

You are designing a fantasy-themed game of conflict with fighters and thieves. Fighters deal 4 damage, and thieves deal 2 damage. Thematic, right? Now let's make it about space combat. Heavy starships deal 4 damage, and light deal 2. How about Jedi? Masters deal 4, and apprentices deal 2.

My point is that taking a theme and "abstracting out the numbers" is not really implementing that theme. You are--at best--creating a system that uses theme as metaphor. The systems in the game map to some fictional or real world theme in a way that helps you learn and remember them. The abstracted core could to mapped onto any number of other themes. This leads to the inevitable "pasted on theme" comments. Again, there's nothing wrong with games of this kind.

So what does it really mean to implement a theme? Is it possible to be taught a game using no metaphor, using only abstracted bits, yet have the game play be still unmistakably linked to something so strongly that most players immediately spot the connection? And if so, what designs do this the best?

Magic Realm

2010-07-04T00:16:00.003-05:00

I remember a college friend buying Magic Realm back in 1983. All of us D&D folks were thoroughly impressed, but completely baffled. I don't think anyone even attempted to understand this beast. I recently stumbled across it again on BGG, and have decided to make at least a minimal effort to understand it, despite the game being 24 years old (as of the 1986 second edition), obviously out of print, and used copies going for high prices (ripped boxes, missing pieces, $90).

The unofficial third edition rules--rewritten by dedicated fans--are only 122 pages long. There are some excellent teaching videos at Book Shelf Games, along with many full examples of the various characters playing solo games.

I don't even understand a tenth of what I need to know in order to play the simplest game of Magic Realm, but I am still amazed by it. I tend to think of my hobby as being in its heyday, but perhaps that is just a reflection of my own sense of discovery within it. The 70's and 80's also seem to be brimming with gaming design creativity.

Take this one example. Many rolls in Magic Realm are 2d6, taking the higher of the 2. Think about what this simple mechanism does. Out of the 36 possible rolls: 1 results in a 1, 3 result in a 2, 5 in a 3, 7 in a 4, 9 in a 5, and 11 in a 6. If you want something to occur very infrequently, set it to the 1 result on the table (1/36 = 2.78%). If you want something to occur half the time, set it to the 4 and 6 results (7 + 11 = 18, 18/36 = 50%). You can get just about any rough statistical breakdown using this method provided you have, at most, 6 outcomes. Brilliant!

I've never played any game that uses this system, yet it is 32 years old. Maybe it's time for a reincarnation.

Rules 4: Use Your Words

2010-05-19T11:51:00.002-05:00

Many innocent words and phrases may be interpreted differently by different people. Even within a given context, meaning may not be clear. It's virtually impossible to avoid this completely, but at least be aware of your words, and learn to see all possible meanings.

If condition A occurred in the last round, score 2 bonus points.

Does "last" mean "previous" or "final"?

If there's a token at either end of the road, score it.

Does "either" mean "one or the other", or "both"?

In software, programmers are acutely aware of the difference between inclusive and exclusive "or". "A inclusive or B" means A or B or (A and B). "A exclusive or B" means A or B, but not both. So what does the simple use of the word "or" mean in game rules without further qualification? Do you think you could come up with a rule to its interpretation? Try it, then try to apply it to these two sentences:

On his turn, a player takes action A or action B.
The game ends if condition A or condition B occurs.

Instinctively, you will likely assume the first "or" is exclusive, and the second inclusive.

Rules 3: Terminology

2010-05-10T11:51:00.003-05:00

This topic is closely related to the previous one. Using consistent language in your descriptions of game components, actions, and processes can mean the difference between clarity and confusion.

The game takes place over 5 turns. Each turn, players will take turns selecting a single action until everyone passes. A player may not move a piece more than once per turn.

How often have you seen rules like this? Define the hierarchy of sequence carefully, and stick with it.

Another example. Say we have some kind of wargame with the following phases:

Reinforcement
Movement
Combat
Retreat

Now say some rule or card allows an action "before combat". Taken literally, this could be during the Movement Phase, but obviously that is not the intent. In effect, there's an unwritten phase where certain things can occur. It would be much better to break down phases where this sort of issue may occur, adding new terminology as necessary:

Reinforcement
Movement
Battle
---before combat
---combat
---after combat
Retreat

Even with this, there's the possibility of ambiguous order or multiple "before combat" effects. But that is not the subject of this post.

Rules 2: Under/Over Specification

2010-04-23T13:41:00.003-05:00

As we see from the previous post, induction leads to elegance. However, games often require special cases beyond a simple set of base rules. This can provide a certain amount of texture or theme.

State the general rules first. Then enumerate the exceptions using an amount of detail so as not to imply anything more or less than intended.

A player may choose one the following actions: A, B, or C. A player may never take action B followed by action A.

Huh? What is the meaning of the second sentence? Is it extraneous? Is it an example? Is it implying that a player may take action A followed by action B? Even though it isn't technically in conflict with the first sentence, its presence makes the reader wonder what they are missing. Exceptions imply things. At a minimum, players will make logical inferences.

Roll a die and move that many spaces. However, if you roll a 3, you must move exactly 3 spaces.

Again, huh? Does the second sentence imply that you may move other than your roll when you don't roll a 3? This is another example of a rules writer perhaps thinking they are being specific, but only confusing the reader.

Rules 1: Induction

2010-04-08T18:33:00.002-05:00

This is the first in a potential series of shorter posts discussing rules writing. An appropriate subtitle might be "How Not To Confuse Your Customers". Each designer, editor, publisher has their own strengths and weaknesses. Clearly a great deal of time is spent on various aspects of many rulebooks (eg detail, examples, art, images, component list, sequence of play, index, etc). However, ignoring some of the most fundamental aspects of rules is like spending all of your time and effort on the paint job of a building that is going to collapse. The best service you can do for your customers with regards to the rules is to makes them clear, concise, unambiguous, and elegant.

Today's topic is induction. In the most general sense, induction is the process of finding a pattern or general rule that describes a set of data. It can make a complex aspect of a set of rules an order of magnitude easier to understand and remember. Consider this generic example of a game:

We have a basic wargame. There are 3 different nations represented by the colors red, green, and blue. Within each nation, there are 3 different unit types A, B, and C. The rulebook lists their respective attack values as follows:

red A 5
red B 6
red C 7
green A 6
green B 7
green C 8
blue A 7
blue B 8
blue C 9

Obviously, there's a pattern here, but presented like this, would you not try to remember it like this? How long would you consult the chart before memorizing the numbers? How would you go about teaching this part of the game? Would you list all 9 elements? Would you just show the chart?

Now consider the following description of the above chart: The base attack value is 7. Red units are -1, and Blue are +1. A units are -1, and C units are +1.

Now you are able to state the attack value of every unit without the chart. The nations now have a "thematic" sense, as do the units. You could also add a new nation or unit type to the system simply by describing how it fits in (eg unit type D is +2, nation yellow is also -1).

Moving Targets

2010-03-22T19:06:00.003-05:00

I bought into Magic: The Gathering in a big way back in the early 90's some time after the release of the Revised edition. I was fairly impressed, not only by the game itself, but also by the marketing possibilities. The sheer number of cards, combined with the rarity model, was very compelling, and provided virtually infinite possibilities for play.

However, as Magic became even more popular, new expansions appeared with new rules. This meant that, even if you were happy with your older decks, if you happened to see a new card in play with some unknown property (eg landwalk), you were now at a huge disadvantage: you had new rules to learn, and new combos to grok. At first I thought, "Fine. They are making this one update. I'll learn this, and then I'll be okay from now on." And we all know where this went. The game became a moving target. At this point I bailed out.

I'm starting to feel this way about other games as well, such as Race for the Galaxy and Dominion. I understand that popular games are going to get expansions because they will sell. And I also understand the notion that "you only need to play the expansions you want". But this isn't always true. Someone drops Race on the table. It's already got all the cards for the first expansion shuffled into the deck. No one wants to pull out all those cards. With Dominion, it's more the case that those who have the first two expansions will want to "mix it up". So you have to know them all, or you are out of luck. I feel like the expansions have actually affected my ability and desire to play the games at all.

That being said, I love Pandemic: On the Brink and would play the base game no other way. I also have expansions for Carcassonne, Keythedral, Lord of the Rings, and Arkham Horror. But these cases don't feel like moving targets at all. At some point, a series of expansions starts to get out of hand, and the moving target transition occurs.

This is one of those rare posts where I prescribe no solution. I understand gamers who want more of what they love, and I understand publishers that want to sell more of what gamers are buying. But it certainly makes me feel left behind.

New 10's

2010-02-15T18:56:00.002-05:00

I've been playing quite a few games lately. This has prompted me to reevaluate some of my ratings. The following games--which used to be 9's---are now 10's for me:

Liberté: On the surface, it may seem like a simple area majority game (El Grande) using cards to determine where you can play (China). There's so much going on in this game, I would need multiple posts in order to do it justice. You can plonk down a big pile of influence in order to make it last or spread it out to gain more success with that faction in the short term. You can go all out for one faction, or do a little in each. You can try to manufacture a Radical Landslide or a Counter-Revolution. The card management is complex, and the action decisions (play a card or draw a card) are agonizing.

ASL Starter Kit #1: Advanced Squad Leader has made inroads in my gaming circles. While I have yet to discover the joy/torture of Guns and Tanks, I have been able to teach and play more Starter Kit scenarios. The ASL system is simply the best WWII tactical game system I've seen. Everything else I've played--from Memoir '44, to Tide of Iron, to Conflict of Heroes, to Combat Commander--seems like a cheap knockoff. There are many excellent sources of information out there, including Russ Gifford's ASL training sessions and Joe Steadman's recent video series.

Tichu: I play Tichu all the time, and I always want to play it. There's no better 4-player team game. It is a card game, so there's always the element of chance that can throw a hand one way or the other. It is unlike my other top games in this respect. But it's so fun to try to make a desperate Tichu, or to set a solid one.

Napoleon's Triumph: I had played Bonapart at Marengo a few times before buying Napoleon's Triumph. I liked the system, but I wasn't too fond of the small map and limited options. NT blows that out of the water with its huge board, more than double the number of units, and more ambiguous goals that are somewhat under control of the French player. The mechanics are certainly very abstract for a Napoleonic grand tactical game, but the position-and-maneuver-focused choices are awesome. The uncertainty of the unit strengths and types, as well as the threat of breaking through the lines and/or flanking, keeps the tension very high and your plans very flexible.

Game Day Humor

2009-09-27T21:58:00.006-05:00

I went to a game session today at a game store. We were playing board games in the back while a wild pack of kids was playing Magic out front. During a game of Mexica, one of them was wandering around, stopped at our table, and asked what the game was about...

Us: Players are trying to form regions of various sizes using water tiles, then compete for control of them by placing buildings of various sizes.
Kid: Oh, so it's like Risk. [And proceeds to walk away]

Later on, there was a huge commotion out front, with everyone "gathering" around one table shouting. I asked the game store owner what was going on...

Owner: It's the draft for Magic.
Me: [Loudly] Oh, so it's like Risk.

On Twitter

2009-09-10T20:21:00.003-05:00

Some games rules posted by BGN were not available without a Twitter account. I signed up, and now I guess I'm on Twitter too.

Mike Doyle: Form Follows Function Fallacy Fail

2009-04-25T21:41:00.003-05:00

Since he doesn't allow comments any more, consider this a public place to respond to this steaming pile of crap. Rather than rip it to shreds one paragraph at a time, I'll simply say: Mike just doesn't get it. His erudition may work on a bunch of ignorant suits in a boardroom, but in the context of responding to feedback from the consumer it's meaningless.

100,000 hits!

2008-11-04T03:02:00.003-05:00

Today this blog officially reached 100,000 hits. With all possible access methods (eg feeds), I'm not sure if this means anything any more, but it's still a fun statistic to watch. Thanks to all my readers. I know I haven't been posting much lately. Other than being kinda busy for a while, what else have I been up to lately?

Today I played my 100th game of Dominion on BSW. It's a great game, and I'll have a lot to say on it in my next blog post.

The Metagamers (Mark and I) challenged Into the Gamescape (Mike and Si, sans Paul) to a game of Amun-Re on SBW. It just started.

I've accepted Mark Johnson's recent public invitation to play Vinci on Online-Vinci. This is a great game that I don't get to play face-to-face very often.

LobsterTrap--basically a smaller Gathering of Friends, east--starts in 9 days. Looking forward to checking out a lot of Essen (and other) games: After the Flood, Battlestar Galactica, Cavum, Chicago Express, Confucius, Ghost Stories, Le Havre, Master of Rules, Middle Kingdom, Name of the Rose, Powerboats, Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm, Steel Driver, and Sylla.

If any of my readers are going to LobsterTrap, I'd love to play the following games: Container, Dune, Eketorp, Mordred, Neuland, Pizarro & Co, Scripts and Scribes, The Circle, and Through the Ages.

I'm The Best Friend You've Got

2008-08-20T17:57:00.003-05:00

Let's make no pretenses; board games are a business. Although most people involved do what they do out of passion for the hobby, most cannot do so for free, or worse, at a loss. And being a consumer business, the evaluation of the "quality" of the product is not up to "the professionals" to decide. It is up to the consumers.

The problem is that we are all different. We all have different requirements, different tastes, different degrees of tolerance for choices made by the publisher, the designer, the graphic designer, etc. Do these creative people really want us to "quit whining"? If they only sell half as many copies of XYZ as expected, don't they really want to know why? It's not just about the one game; it's about their future.

W Eric Martin did an excellent job listing many of the tough decisions that publishers must weigh when producing a game. But by what criteria are they to make these decisions? It should be based on customer feedback. If you lean towards higher quality bits, then, yes, some customers are going to complain about the cost. The only way to handle the situation is to take all feedback, and use it to make future choices. As long as customers know that the publishers are listening, they will understand. This does not mean they should "quit whining".

Let's put something in perspective. If player A doesn't like something about a board game, and player B doesn't mind, then player A is a whiner. If player A wants a clarification on an ambiguous rule, and player B "knows" what it means, then player A is a rules lawyer. Everyone is a "whiner" or a "rules lawyer" when put into the proper circumstances. Stop being hypocrites.

What about the common "vote with your wallet" attitude? I don't think anyone wants that, certainly not the publishers. There are games that are too awful for me to buy, and games that are within my tolerances. I assume the publisher would rather that I buy the game and give them feedback, than not buy it at all.

I want all publishers to succeed. When I make negative comments about their games, it is with the intention of helping them to improve (this time or next time).

So who the hell am I? I'm no one in particular. I am not a trend-setter. I am often in the minority in my opinions. But I am always honest, straight, and speak in good faith. I am not out to harm or even disrespect publishers, designers, or others. And, no, telling someone you don't like something they spent months working on is not disrespectful. Lying about how you feel--or equivocating--is.

Knizia said, "When playing a game, the goal is to win. But it is the goal that is important, not the winning." This is true of publishing as well. The goal is perfection. Is it important that you strive for perfection, not that you reach it. That's what I want to see more of.

So who the hell am I? I'm the best friend you've got.

I don't care who you are, I will always tell you what I think. I want you to succeed. I want your games to get better and better. And I want to buy them. If I stop caring about you, I will stop talking to you. Don't get too comfy with your fanboys; they will be the ones standing on your shoulders as you sink into the mud.

Too Much Theme?

2008-06-05T13:24:00.002-05:00

To me, the purpose of theme in rulebooks and game design is to provide a context for the actions you are taking. This makes learning and playing the game easier, and, hopefully, more enjoyable. When mechanics and theme mesh well, you get immersion; what you are doing at the table is somehow analogous to what you are doing in the game's world.

My initial reactions to Race for the Galaxy were not positive. My best explanation was that the game was too complicated for what it was. I like San Juan quite a bit--even more than Puerto Rico--but Race somehow crossed a line. My attempts to explain my attitude in more detail to other gamers were not satisfactory--to them or to myself. Something wasn't right, but I wasn't all that interested in working it out.

One thing I've learned, though, is not to give up on a game too easily. If only one out of five games that I think I dislike is a hidden gem, then it's worth the effort. Did I learn/play it incorrectly? Did I play with the wrong number of players to fully appreciate it? Did some critical aspect of play go unnoticed?

After my first few plays, Maharaja was at the bottom of my game pile, possibly never to be played again. Fortunately, I was in a position years later to really see this game shine. It's now a 10.

So what do I mean by "too much theme"? In this case, I'm referring solely to the game's rules. For me, there was a big disconnect in my ability to associate verb with action, and my mind would not allow me to work just a little harder to get over the hump. Race was supposed to be a light game, after all.

Thematically, exploration is about adding new tiles/areas to the board (eg Lost Valley, Entdecker). Settling is about building villages/bases on already-explored places (eg Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers). Trading is about exchanging resources with other players (eg Settlers of Catan, Traders of Genoa).

In Race, exploration and production are about drawing cards, development and settling are about playing cards, and consumption is about discarding cards for more cards and/or VP's. The complex iconography that supports these actions just added to my mental block. I think the game would be better served by rules that were a little more "mechanical in theme". Reef Encounter could use a similar treatment; its rules read like a marine biology textbook.

After a last-ditch re-read of the rules, I was able to internalize the mental associations between theme and mechanics. From a game play point of view, the theme works well. I just think it doesn't promote a good understanding of the mechanics. The iconography is, in fact, pretty well thought out. The only thing I would change would be to remove the gray background for non-producing worlds, as it serves no purpose. I might also print the titles on the action cards in a much larger size so they can be seen more easily from across the table.

Race is now on my want list. So, a special thanks to all my GeekBuddies, who seem to know me better than I know myself.

Race for the Galaxy image by Rokkr.

Game Spotting 106 - Board Warp

2008-05-12T20:34:00.002-05:00

Check out this GeekList. How many game boards can you recognize once they've been passed through a crazy Photoshop filter? Some you might be able to guess by color, by shape, or by patterns. Some are easier to see at high resolution, and some at low. I had fun with this. A few I had to stare at a while trying to twist my brain into different thinking modes. I might have gotten 20. One I figured out after submitting my answers.

How many can you get?

From My Radar to Yours?

2008-05-04T13:07:00.002-05:00

I've been watching the following lesser-known games with great interest. I'll pass them along to my readers in case you might have missed any of them.

Ascendancy: I'm not a huge fan of 4X games, but this one has grabbed my attention. It claims to be playable in an hour. It has a variable phase order, asymmetric races, and secret "focuses". Some of the playtest images look very striking. Are those glass beads filled with colored sand?

Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear! - Russia 1941-1942: The first of the Conflict of Heroes series, this may be the most accessible and gorgeous hex-and-counter wargame ever made. In a mere 12 pages (including cover, index, and unit/card description page), the stunning rulebook includes infantry, machine guns, mortars, artillery, trucks, tanks, hidden units, close combat, spotters, mines, smoke, fortifications, barbed wire, arcs of fire and unit/vehicle facing, elevation, opportunity fire, and unit/vehicle hit counters (eg suppressed, pinned, stunned, immobilized). Almost everything you need to know is printed on the ¾" counters. This is the game that might bring all the wargame-curious folks into meatier wargaming in a way that even ASLSK #1 could not. The designer has solved the IGOUGO problem without over-simplifying the system (Memoir '44) or abstracting opportunity fire into something unrealistic (Tide of Iron).

Ideology: The War of Ideas: This is far from new, but its upcoming reprint prompted me to check out the rules. Each player controls a nation with a different ideology (Capitalism, Imperialism, Fascism, Communism, and Fundamentalism) and appropriately different advantages and disadvantages. Each home nation competes to control other independent nations through cultural, economic, and military means. The amount of conflict in a nation determines its value. Players can attack and/or withdraw from nations, which might result in loss of control and subsequent changes in value. Players can also develop advances including WMD (worth a VP, unless you use them against another player).

Municipium: If it was only the terrible Valley Games rules and the suspiciously poor Mike Doyle board, I would have no interest in this game. The fact that it's a Reiner Knizia design and that there has been some interesting feedback are the only things keeping me on the hook. I'll probably end up re-writing the rules from scratch.

Neuland: I'm not a fan of Roads and Boats, but this one sounds fun. I did re-write the rules for this one already. The original rules were confusing and described the game's systems incredibly poorly. I feel bad for the average person who might buy this game and have to learn it from the rules in the box.

Senji: 6-player Diplomacy in 90 minutes? I have a feeling that most people who play this game will choose not to use the 4-minute sand timer to limit the negotiation phase, particularly since you might want to talk to several opponents and that you can do it in secret. The interesting twist of this game is that each player has cards for family, military support, and trade. You can offer cards--even those you have acquired from other players--as collateral for your deals. You can hire various samurai each of which has a special ability. A lot of potential here.

The Traders of Carthage: A light card game (with a board) with some planning and a little bit of screwage. Could be a good filler for our group.

Wealth of Nations: Another gorgeous game and rulebook. This is a raw no-luck commodity game. Players build industries to produce commodities, which are used to build other industries and to produce other commodities. Players can buy and sell commodities from the markets, or buy, sell, and trade with each other. Buying from the markets increases the price (a la Power Grid). Selling to the markets decreases the price. Competition for industries is spatial.

Hit Points

2008-05-02T12:53:00.001-05:00

While the concept of hit points is typically associated with role-playing games, they are very common in other game genres, particularly adventure/dungeon-crawl games and collectible card games. Hit points are supposed to represent the amount of damage you can take before you die, but the abstraction is a poor one.

Let's look at D&D. There are 3 different standard game elements that affect hit points: class, level, and constitution.

Your class (or profession) determines the type of die used to roll for hit points. For example, wizards use a 4-sided die, thieves use a 6-sided die, and fighters use a 10-sided die. This represents how good each class is at fighting.

Your level (or experience) determines how many of those dice you roll, one additional die at each level. This represents your character getting better at fighting.

Your constitution is a measure of your physical endurance, giving you extra hit points per level. This represents how innately tough your body is.

Putting these into practice makes for some pretty comical results. A 10th-level wizard is as good at "taking damage" as a 4th-level fighter. A character with a high constitution (+4 hit points per level) gains enough additional hit points at 10th level (40) to equal a maxed-out 4th level fighter. An average 10th-level fighter (55 hit points, no constitution bonus) can stand still and take 16 successful average hits from a short sword before dying, while a 1st-level wizard would drop after a single blow. It requires more healing to bring a fighter to full hit points than it does a wizard. And why is it that class and level determine how good a character is at "taking damage", but have no effect at all on how easy they are to hit in the first place?

For 30 years, I've accepted all this knowing it was fundamentally silly.

In reality--or as close to reality as a fantasy world can get--any 2 humans, for example, are roughly equal in the amount of actual physical damage they can take. Having a more rugged body (constitution) would improve this, but would have minimal or no effect as you gain more experience. Being better at fighting should result in taking less damage in similar circumstances as long as you are able to use your abilities.

This last point is very important. A devastating blow against a wizard might be fatal, while only scratching a fighter. However, if both were just standing there, the same blow should have similar effects. In the case of most magic, your class should be negligible. Why should a fighter be hurt less than a thief by a fireball or a magic missile?

We've come to accept the classical hit point system, but would it really be that much harder to adopt something that makes a little more sense? I'm not proposing that the D&D system be revamped; TSR does that often enough as it is. I am suggesting that [board] game designers should consider new paradigms.

For example, the current system involves rolling a d20 to attack, adding any class, level, weapon, and feat modifiers. If you match or exceed the target's armor class, you hit. Then you roll the weapon's damage--which might be a d6 in the case of a short sword--and add any strength and weapon modifiers.

I think that the better the target is at fighting, the lower the chances of doing high damage. The current system relies on the lower probability of a hit, but uses the same damage system. If we build the damage into the roll, it almost comes out naturally. For example, if you exceed the target's armor class by 0/1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8, the base damage might be 1/1/1/2/2/3/4/5/6. This has the effect of decreasing the damage amount as well as the chance to hit as armor class increases. Of course, such a system would require each weapon to have its own table, but with modern role-playing, character sheets are already computerized and auto-filled-in. Such tables would also allow various weapons to have non-linear damages, such as my short sword table above.

Should a wizard in chain mail take damage identical to a fighter in chain mail? Of course not. Your class and level should affect your armor class. The abilities of a fighter to not be hit and to turn potentially nasty hits into minor ones is a skill that comes with the profession and experience. A 5th-level wizard in chain mail might have an AC of 15, while an equivalent 5th-level fighter might have an AC of, say, 20! Using the above short sword example, an attack roll of 21 would do 4 HP to the wizard and 1 HP to the fighter.

What if they are both just standing there? In this case their combat skill is not factored into their AC. They would both have an AC of 15, and would take equal damage from equal attacks. Other things could also affect AC: what weapon(s) you are using, the directions various enemies are attacking from (eg flanking), being slowed or stuck in something (eg mud, web, entanglement), using the environment for cover (eg doors, pillars).

And what about spell damage? In the current system, a character with more hit points is less affected. But if fire, for example, should affect all humans equally, then class and level should not be a factor, although some characters may have special protection and/or special abilities to avoid/resist it. A group of characters with different classes and levels that fails a saving throw against a fireball should all be equally hurt by it.

In summary, what I am suggesting in this D&D example is that all characters have approximately the same number of hit points, and that they do not go up in large increments with experience. Some people are frail and others are tough, but not enough to justify 4 HP versus 80 HP. I would perhaps start each character with 20 HP, and allow them to assign "slots" to make themselves tougher, both at creation time and as they gain experience. This should be a difficult choice, equivalent to increasing an ability score or gaining a feat, and should be 1 or 2 HP maximum (ie dedicating a large amount of time to working out or whatever). I would cap hit points at about 30. Of course, this would require changing the entire weapon and spell systems.

Think about how silly the current hit point system is, and dare to challenge it in your designs.

Pandemic Marathon

2008-05-01T09:29:00.004-05:00

On Tuesday night, we played five 2-player games of Pandemic in 3½ hours. The only meta-rule we allow is that no player is required to play the same role twice in a row. This just helps mix things up a bit.

Each game was played with 5 epidemics. We won four of the five games. I'm not sure if this means that we should be playing with 6 epidemics or not. Our previous two games using all 6 epidemics were crazy.

I absolutely love the distribution of the special powers in the various roles. Every time I think that a given role--or combination of roles--is best, another gets its chance to shine. The Researcher/Scientist combo is an obvious one: pass cards easily, cure diseases easily. However, this combo is weak on navigation, so you have to work fast to beat the explosion. The Medic/Dispatcher combo is just pure fun: keep the diseases under control, get to cities where cards can be passed.

Our one loss was using the Dispatcher/Operations Expert combo. These guys have super navigation skills, and little else. They have to use their flexibility both to pass cards, and to keep things under control. In most games I play, it seems there's a point where you think you are close to winning, and you simply decide to stop putting out fires and go for the final cure. This decision is particularly tough to make with this combo.

After 34 games of Pandemic, it's still not getting old.

Some say the decisions are obvious. So far, we have found lots of different creative ideas come up in our discussions of plans. I've rarely felt that there was only one best move.

Some say the game is too random. The setup is random, all the infection cards drawn up until the first epidemic are random (but known not to be any of the already infected cities), and every epidemic city is random. However, the fact that the discard pile is shuffled and placed on top of the draw pile is the brilliant stroke that gives semi-predictability. The one thing I dislike about Arkham Horror is that everything in the game (gates, monsters, encounters, items, events) is random.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out this excellent GoogleTalk given by Matt Leacock, Pandemic's designer.

Bob Day

2008-04-27T10:55:00.004-05:00

I finally got to go to Bob Day again. It only happens once a month. In February, it coincided with ASL. In March, it coincided with D&D. Well, at least I skipped playing games in order to play games.

The quote of the day: One particularly quiet moment was punctuated by, "You can't kill your babies!" from over at the Agricola table.

Hanging Gardens

Thanks to Rick Thornquist--a surprise guest--for teaching Hanging Gardens. I had previously translated the German rules for BGG, and it played out exactly as I imagined. The cards work very well, even when placed several layers deep. I was all caught up making lots of space to plant, as well as nice shapes to grow, but the game seemed to end too quickly to take advantage of it. I think this means that you must play with much less long-term planning, going for the tiles as quickly as possible. Not a bad game, but it's not going on my want list.

Stone Age

Thanks to Tery Noseworthy for teaching Stone Age. Again, I had previously translated the German rules for BGG. In this case, however, I made a subtle but very important error which confused a lot of players. Sorry about that! The file has since been deleted, as the official rules are now available. It's a light resource/economic game that, again, is a little light for my tastes, though I'd play it again.

Im Reich der Wüstensöhne

Thanks to Bob Scherer-Hoock for teaching Im Reich der Wüstensöhne, which I believe means "In the Land of the Desert Sun". It's a derivative of Entdecker. Players travel the desert building oases and claiming water, camels, rumors, and goods. The rumors affect the prices of the goods, giving the game some of the flavor of a stock game. Again, just ok.

Game X - Dominion

Everyone's favorite game [not] to talk about. Thanks to Eric Martin for teaching this. After the first couple of turns, it wasn't grabbing me at all. By the end it really grew on me; I wanted to play again. In fact, I would have purchased a few copies right then and there if it had been for sale. Valerie Putman has recently released some information. It’s simpler than Race for the Galaxy, and as addictive as Pandemic. It’s sure to be a hit with anyone who enjoys CCG-like games. This was my favorite game of the day.

Kingsburg

I had previously played a handful of Kingsburg games using this excellent Java application. It was just about as quick face-to-face. I like everything about the game, except the fact that, when a player blocks you, most of the time it's only because he wants that space for himself. In other words, the player interaction (ie screwage) is serendipitous or unintentional, depending on your point of view.

Game Y

Thanks to Emanuele Ornella (Oltremare, Il Principe) for teaching Game Y, another prototype. Like his previous titles, this game has some unexpectedly inter-connected mechanisms, forcing you to think in multiple dimensions while making choices. It might be a little heavier than it seems. I'm not sure yet.

Felix: The Cat in the Sack

Thanks to Evan Tannheimer for teaching Felix: The Cat in the Sack. It feels a little like an auction version of Nobody But Us Chickens. A reasonable light filler.

Huang Di

Thanks to Bryan Johnson for teaching Huang Di, yet another prototype, although this one is being published shortly. It's a resource/economy game with players trying to build up sections of the Great Wall. Building patterns of your own walls, represented by cards in your hand, earn you bonuses. Having majorities in wall row sections, entire rows, and building the top wall piece at each section end earn you victory points. There are only 4 action cards, 3 of which you can play each round. But each has multiple action types. Optimizing your own economy, while dealing with the ever-changing public resources and wall configuration, is quite a challenge.

Edit: I forgot that I also played Kingsburg. Added above.

Anatomy of a Score Track

2008-03-15T18:42:00.003-05:00

No game requires a score track, but we all know that pictures speak louder than words...and numbers. Score tracks are basically bar graphs showing each player's victory points in such a way that you can easily see the relative positions. This can play an important part of the decision-making process.

You are behind. Is it the proper time to take a risk in order to catch up? You have a choice of 2 good actions. Is your choice going to be partly based on on which player(s) it adversely affects, and their current victory point status?

While most games with score tracks implement them reasonably well, none get good marks in all my categories. Some games use tracks to manage non-scoring information (eg Through the Ages). Everything below still applies to these.

Zero

In almost every game with victory points, all players start out with 0. If the score track doesn't have a 0 space, then all the scoring markers have to start off the board (eg Aton). This is really lame.

If you don't start at 0, and can never have a score of 0, then this rule does not apply.

Length

Score tracks should typically have 50 (0-49) or 100 (0-99) spaces. Stopping at 65 or 80 creates that awkward situation where you have to do modulus math. For example, you have 75 points and just scored 22. 75 plus 22 is 97. 97 minus 80 is 17, so you place your scoring marker on 17. Maybe...

Did your score track end at 79 and start at 0? If so, then your calculations are correct. If they ended at 80 or (exclusive) started at 1, then you are in trouble.

Wrapping the score track more than once is unacceptable (eg Carcassonne) even if the game includes indicators for such states. Make the track longer than a typical game requires.

Odd-length score tracks are only valid when the highest position (potentially with a little slop to break ties) is a winning condition (eg Around the World in 80 Days).

Size

Each space on the score track should be able to comfortably hold a number of scoring markers that you would reasonably expect to be there. They should not have to be packed together on such a small space that you can't tell which space they are on.

In some games, players cannot co-exist on the score track (eg Torres) so it doesn't matter as much. In some games, the scoring markers are meant to stack (see Markers) to save space (eg Vinci), or for turn order purposes (eg Thebes, In the Year of the Dragon people track).

Pitch

Pitch is the distance from the center of one space on the score track to the center of the next. Pitch should be constant across the entire score track. You may wonder why I don't say that each scoring space should be the same size. That's because size can change while still keeping pitch (see 5's and 10's).

Score tracks are most beneficial in games where players score small numbers of points over many, many turns. Score tracks should provide as many cues as possible to help with this process. One of these is pitch. Every time you score 3 points, you should be moving your scoring marker the same distance. Games that have varying pitch--even if done for other good reasons--take away this cue (eg Taj Mahal).

Obvious

It should be obvious what is and what is not a space on the score track. There should not be "spaces" that are not spaces (eg San Marco). There should not be strange artistic distortions at the start, end, or corners of the score track (eg El Grande).

Art

As I've always said, form should enhance function, not hinder it. Many games go way too far trying to be artsy. This can even infect the score track. Spaces contain dark, rich patterns that only serve to obscure the numbers, if they exist (eg Amyitis).

Numbers

Every space should be numbered. I can't say this enough. Every space should be numbered. Not everyone scores in the same way. Some players just count off their points: 1, 2, 3, 4. Some pick up their scoring marker, look at the current value, add the new points, and replace the marker. If the current space has no number, and the spaces around it are crowded with other scoring markers, then you have to either look farther and count it out, or move things around.

Additionally, the numbers should be highly readable. Fancy and thin (eg Ys) typefaces don't get the job done, nor do colors that don't stand out against the background (eg Caylus).

5's and 10's

Every space that is a multiple of 5 should stand out. Depending on the length of the score track, multiples of 10 should stand out as well.

There are many ways to do this, some of which can be used in combination for good effect: larger text, bolder text, brighter text, different-colored text, different-colored background, different-patterned background, larger space (see Pitch).

In this way, even when a space on the score track has one or more scoring markers on it, you can still easily make scoring adjustments without having to see the numbers.

Straight

Ideally, a score track should be straight. This works fine when the game requires few spaces (eg Liberté), but is impractical for most games. A reasonable compromise is to wrap the score track around the outside of the board. The brain can easily "unwrap" this shape to see the 1-dimensional bar graph.

Winding (eg Alhambra) and wiggly (eg Torres) score tracks are bad. They disrupt the linear flow of the 1-dimensional space, and make it more difficult to tell in which direction to move each scoring marker.

Markers

Scoring markers are manipulated often. The must be easy to pick up, must fit well on the scoring spaces with other scoring markers as the game requires, and preferably should stack. Alhambra-style scoring markers are about the best size and shape I can think of. The worst scoring markers ever conceived are those in Railroad Tycoon.

My Dream Score Track

I'd like to see a score track designed so that the scoring markers do not cover the numeric text. The spaces themselves would just be empty boxes with appropriate colors and patterns. The numbers would appear on tabs that stuck out from each space toward the center of the board. These tabs, of course, would be properly differentiated on the 5's and 10's.

Pandemic

2008-03-06T01:40:00.003-05:00

Pandemic has been on my want list since the day the blurb for it was posted. It's one of those games--like Dune, Khronos, or King of Siam--whose concept alone is enough to get me excited. And that excitement continues after 3 plays.

The components are top notch. The box is super sturdy, perhaps the thickness of Mission: Red Planet, but made of the same materials as more standard boardgames. The cards are thick and coated, but not sticky. They aren't cut as perfectly as playing cards, but they shuffle well enough. The board is smooth, almost glossy, but not plastic feeling. The bits are nice, if a little chunky for the playing surface. But other than setup (all players and a research station in Atlanta), there's rarely too much to handle in one location. I didn't get a look at the insert; it had been discarded before I arrived. I'll try my best to salvage it when I get my copy of the game. My only minor gripe is with the role cards. They all have a dark purple background with a small colored pawn making it a little difficult to tell who's who from across the table.

The system for the spread of diseases and Epidemics is inspired. One card per city in the player deck and the Infection deck: My intuition would have been that this wasn't enough. Putting the discard pile on top of the draw deck after each Epidemic: My intuition would have said this was too likely to leave much of the world untouched. But it all works very well, and keeps the tension high all the way through.

I would describe the infection system as semi-random. Cards are drawn from a shuffled deck, each causing a new disease cube to appear. If a 4th cube of a given color is to be placed, then a cube of that color is placed on each adjacent city instead. This is called an Outbreak and can potentially cause a chain reaction of Outbreaks.

However, at any given time, you do know things. There are 9 cards in the discard pile from the setup. As each card appears, it cannot be drawn again until after the next Epidemic. Once an Epidemic occurs, you know you will be drawing all the cards that were in the discard pile before you draw any new cards. Each Epidemic can only occur in a city whose card has never been drawn before (from the bottom of the deck). So it's a constrained kind of random. You can make plans, even beyond dealing with the current situation.

The 5 player roles (Medic, Scientist, Operations Expert, Researcher, Dispatcher) are all fun to play. In my 3rd game, I was the Dispatcher. His special ability is that he can move other players, and can also move any player to another player. My first thought was that it wouldn't be as fun because you are essentially letting other players do the important and/or fun stuff (treating/curing diseases). So very wrong! Being able to continually put people exactly where they need to be in order to use their respective abilities is a very fun part of the game. In fact, the Dispatcher role may be the one with the most cooperative nature since his use requires the most planning and agreement. I would play that role any time.

I would recommend Pandemic to anyone who doesn't vomit at the sight of wooden cubes. The copy I played tonight had already been played 9 times in its first week. In fact, Z-man sold out the first print run in less than a month! How often does that happen?

Pandemic image by clloyd09

Happy Leap Day!

2008-02-29T21:30:00.002-05:00

Sincerely. Happy Leap Day! If you know me at all, you might think I am being disingenuous, sarcastic, or hypocritical by saying this. Not at all. Leap Day is the only day in popular culture that is an acknowledgement of our intellectual progress rather than of our stupidity. It is the only day that, while arbitrarily placed, does not exist arbitrarily.

The Earth rotates on its axis once a day, and travels around the Sun once every 365.256366 days. A year does not divide evenly into days. Therefore, if we held to a firm 365 days in a "human" year, our seasons would flip about every 700 years. To keep things stable, we insert an extra day every 4 years. But because the fractional portion is slightly larger than 0.25, we need to remove a few leap days once in a while. Every 400 years, we remove 3 leap days. 1700, 1800, and 1900 did not have leap days, and 2100, 2200, and 2300 will not. 1600 and 2000 did.

As humans, we have known about the day/year problem for thousands of years. How many people today do you think could explain the meaning of February 29th?

Die Macher

2008-02-22T15:16:00.004-05:00

For the last three weeks I was determined to get Die Macher to the table on a normal game night. My first and only other time playing it was over a year ago. The 5-player game took about 7 hours. This fact gave some pause to try it in a 4- to 5-hour block of time. I figured so what? We could always play it over two sessions if necessary. So three of us--Josh, Mike, and myself--dove in head first.

Setup was a little involved. There are many things to sort, stack, shuffle, deal, and organize. I had to consult the rules a few times: one meeting marker per region, €25,000 starting cash, 5 party membership. During the preliminaries where players secretly select their starting positions in meetings, media, trend, etc. there were the obvious questions about what each thing was good for. We had all watched Scott Nicholson's excellent video, but Die Macher is intricate enough that it's difficult to put any sort of plan together the first time you play.

Our first round took over an hour. This was partly our unfamiliarity with the process, and partly not knowing what were reasonable decisions. One of the minor pains is that some phases do regions in order, and some in reverse order. Our player aids didn't show this. Subsequent rounds played faster and faster.

After the first two rounds, Mike had won both elections, gaining huge VP's in mandate, national media, and party membership as well. He was literally ahead of Josh and I by more than 100 points. I felt like the game was already over. What wasn't obvious to me at the time was that Mike had ignored all else to get this lead, and had spent a lot of money.

I kept buying media and using Shadow Cabinet to replace media. I cashed in votes even when the conversion factor wasn't particularly high. This allowed me to control Coincidence quite well. Mike and Josh had some platform overlaps, and I was determined to oppose that when possible, preferring instead to tweak the regions in those issues instead of my party. Although I still felt behind, I did feel in control.

There were only 2 opportunities for Coalitions. One failed due to insufficient Coincidence, and the other due to lack of interest. More than two thirds of the Opinion Polls were unfavorable to the high bidder, so we were often rolling to increase party membership.

I think I only won 2 elections. One was in round 6. I was able to make my platform coincide with the national opinion 100%! This was undone after the 7th election, but of course the effect was small. Jim - 295, Mike - 281, Josh - 275.

I was very surprised at the close ending given our different styles of play. Mike played big money, big party. Josh played a tighter economy, avoiding big bids for anything, perhaps opportunistic. I played the media control and vote majority game.

Not counting setup, we played in less than four hours. We have now established Die Macher as a "game night game". I suspect it will come out much more often. The three of us could probably play again in about 3 hours. Even with five players, it would not take 4 hours.

Note: I think we played one rule wrong. During the Media Phase, you can keep buying Media markers one at a time until everyone passes. We played each player could only buy one.

The Essence of the Game

The first thing new players need to understand is how the game is scored. Forget about all the terms and the phases. Focus on the Victory Points! Your score at the end of the game is the sum of the Seats won from the 7 elections (votes converted into VP), the values of your media markers on the National Board, your party membership, your coincidence with the National Opinion, and a few small bonuses.

The second thing new players need to understand is where money comes from. You start the game with €25,000. After each election you collect €1,000 for each Seat won. After elections 1, 3, and 5 you collect €1,000 for each party membership. At the end of each round, you can accept contributions from €10,000 to €50,000.

The last thing is winning elections...or at least doing well in them. Players hold party meetings in the regions. Each round they may be converted into votes, each meeting being worth so many votes based on a multiplier. This multiplier is the sum of the Trend and Coincidence. Trend is simply a value shown on a scale the board (-3, -2, 0, +2, +3) representing how well your party is liked. Coincidence is the total number of issues where your party matches a region minus the total number of issues where your party opposes the region (non-matching issues count as zero). Every round, until the regional election is held, you can change Trend using Shadow Cabinet cards and Opinion Polls, and Coincidence by adjusting your party's platform or by adjusting the region's opinion. Changing your platform to improve your Coincidence in one region may adversely affect it in others. Changing a region's opinion to match your platform (when you are able) may also help your opponents. These are all very interesting decisions.

The trick is not simply to wait until your multiplier is at its maximum to cash in your votes. One, since you may only have 10 meetings at a time, cashing in votes allows you to hold more meetings. Two, if a player has more votes than all the other players combined in a region, they can change one opinion. It's all about timing.

The Exchange Pool

This is the name for a set of spaces on the Organization Board where a number of Opinion Cards are placed with which players can exchange regional Opinion Cards. The rules have changed from edition to edition. We played using the Valley Games rule where there's always six cards there. I found this to be a poor choice. Six is not enough to provide a good decision space. The official 2nd edition rules, as far as I can tell, are that all swapped regional opinions, and all leftover opinions (after the election) go there. Swapped out national opinions do not. This would have the effect of increasing the Exchange Pool by 1 or 2 cards each round. There would be between 11 and 16 cards to choose from during the 6th (final) round. Is this too many? Does the system break down if every side of every issue can be swapped in by the end of the game?

Physical Design

Die Macher is certainly striking. But is it functional or gimmick? I think a little of both. I could take or leave the 4 spiraling boards with circular layout. It could be so much better as a single board. My main issue is with what I call "decoding the game" (future in-depth blog post about decoding games in general).

You spend a lot of time in Die Macher calculating Coincidence--players to regions, players to players, and players to national. In a 5-player game, there are 5 sets of 5 platform cards, 4 sets of 4 regional opinion cards, and 1 set of up to five national opinion cards. These are laid out all over the place, and are in essentially random order. Change one region card, and you have to recalculate Coincidence for every player.

Considering playability alone, Die Macher could be played much more easily on a single 24x24" board (61x61 cm). The national opinion, regional opinions, and player platforms would all be a single table. For each row there would be 7 columns, one for each issue. A black cube means no/less, and a white cube means yes/more. Looking across the table, you could instantly see Coincidence between players, players/regions, and players/national. The Exchange Pool would also be a row on the table where multiple cubes could sit in each cell. This idea would eliminate 5 of the 6 boards, cut required table space in half, and probably reduce game time by an hour. The way cards are used (if at all) would need to be changed slightly, but it would have minimal affect on probabilities.

Die Macher image by marioaguila

Recent Acquisitions

2008-01-29T10:17:00.000-05:00

I got into the Math Trade for Unity Games, managing to swap 5 games, and subsequently purchase a 6th. The ease of this process has made me less reluctant to balk at questionable games. Giving up 5 games I would never play again for 5 that I either wanted or was interested in was a no-brainer once I put it to myself that way.

I traded away Age of Renaissance, Acquire, Die Magier von Pangea, Quo Vadis?, and Battle Cry. And I received...

Pueblo is one of those out-of-print and generally unavailable games. I looked far and wide. I found a single copy in Halifax for $50 celsius + shipping + any customs cost and destruction. No thanks. It is unlike any other game in my collection, and I think the spatial nature of the game will be appealing to a wide range of players. Thanks, Michael.

The Bridges of Shangri-La has been on my radar for a long time. I like Colovini games in general. Thanks, Richard.

I was going to order Key Harvest in my next game order anyways. This came in shrink, yet was missing an orange piece. This is the second time I emailed Jay (RGG) late on a Sunday night and got an instant reply that my piece is on the way. Thanks, Richard.

I've played Robber Knights once before and liked it. Unfortunately, this was actually the German version, Raub Ritter. The game is language independent, but I'm picky enough that I would not have put in the request if I had bothered to look at the version info clearly specified in the math trade. My fault. Thanks, Adam.

Thanks to a random late-night game on BSW with melissa, my interest in Thurn & Taxis was rekindled. It's not a typical game for me, but I think it will get some play, if only at home. Thanks, Jay.

I also purchased Augsburg 1520, which I've been reading about with fairly high interest. Thanks, Bob.

Pueblo image by Toynan

Unity Games XIV: Dune!

2008-01-27T13:47:00.000-05:00

With the play of Dune at Unity Games XIV, my Holy Grail list is now complete. And what a finish!

The Game

Dune is not your typical...well...anything. It has a lot of familiar sounding mechanics, but none of them is familiar. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the game was published in 1979, decades before all of our familiar mechanics became familiar. In that respect, comparing Dune to other games seems backwards. But since I discovered it long after most of my current collection, that's the only way I can compare it.

The goal of Dune is to occupy 3 of the 5 strongholds. This seems analogous with many Euro and wargame objectives. But in Dune, you don't necessarily spend a lot of time focusing on this because the only means to that end is Spice, and Spice is a rare commodity for most players.

Player units get from place to place by Area Movement...sort of. Combat uses Area Influence and Simultaneous Action Selection...sort of. The Storm moves around the map randomly...sort of. Spice appears randomly on the map...sort of. Players bid for cards sight unseen...sort of. All of these "sort of's" can create the false sense of complexity. It's simply different. And that is a good thing. It feels very refreshing to play. And just to keep you on your toes, player turn order is counter-clockwise.

The divisions of the planet are also unique. The map has many arbitrarily shaped regions that are used for movement, just as in other Area Movement games (eg Risk). However, the map is also divided into 18 sectors, pizza-shaped wedges with the Polar Sink at the hub. The regions and sectors form a strange mesh of overlapping topology. That is, you can be in a region and also in any one of 5 different sectors in some cases. The Storm fills the sector it is in. This includes every region (or partial region) in that sector. You could be a region along with Spice and/or an opponent but be separated from them by The Storm. All mountain regions, strongholds, and The Imperial Basin are safe from the Storm with a nasty exception: if The Shield Wall is destroyed, then Carthag, Arakeen, and The Imperial Basin are now exposed. All of this creates a very cool spatial landscape on which to maneuver, physically and politically.

The phases of a turn are simple:

move The Storm
place Spice on new location
bid for cards
recover units, land/move units
resolve battles
collect Spice

The interesting thing is that every player has unique abilities. Not just your typical orthogonal +1/-1 "Euro" unique abilities, but completely different powers that no one else has. This gives each player strengths and weaknesses that can be used and abused in the various phases.

The Atreides have prescience. They can peek at each card up for auction. They can peek at their opponents leader, offensive card, defensive card, or committed units before deciding on their own selections. They can peek at the next Spice card before moving their units. This gives the Atreides the power of information. Other players must watch the Atreides carefully to learn as much as they can. But is he bluffing? Are you willing to pay for information?

The Harkonnen are treacherous. They can have up to 4 of the opponents' leaders in their pay, as opposed to the default of one for the rest of the players. They may hold 8 cards instead of the default 4, and every time you win a card at auction, you get an additional one. The Harkonnen almost always have a nasty card ready to mess things up, and battles against them run more of a risk of a traitor being discovered in your midst.

The Guild controls all space travel. All players shipping from off-planet must pay them for the service. They have more options available during movement, and do so more cheaply. They win by default at the end of 15 turns if no other player has won. Every time you land new units on Dune, you are making The Guild richer.

The Bene Gesserit are galactic advisers and have The Voice. If they can predict (and perhaps cause to happen) the winner and the turn on which they win, then the Bene Gesserit win instead. They can ship a free unit (to the Polar Sink) when any other player ships from off-planet. During combat, they can Voice their opponent to play or not play a specific card. The Bene Gesserit are scary to attack, but start very weak.

The Fremen are native to Dune and know its ways. They may move units 2 spaces instead of the default 1. They add units to the map from hidden on-planet locations, so do not pay The Guild. They may ride any Worm that appears in their region to any other region (rather than being devoured). They win after 15 turns if they can create certain stronghold occupancy criteria. Ironically, the Fremen are Spice-poor, but require less Spice during play.

The Emperor rules the galaxy, or so he thinks. He collects all Spice used to bid on cards. Every time you win a bid for a card, you are giving the Emperor Spice with which to bid on the next one.

Combat occurs between any two players in the same region, unless they are separated by The Storm. Each player secretly dials a number of units to commit up to the units present, selects a leader, an attack card, and a defense card. Then everything is revealed. If your opponent is using a leader that is in your pay, you may announce your traitor and automatically win the battle. Otherwise, the offense/defense card pairs are compared to see if the leaders die. If they do, their value does not apply to the combat. Units committed and the values of surviving leaders are added together. The greatest value wins (aggressor wins ties). The loser loses all his units. The winner loses all dialed units.

This combat system is very nice. You can win, but lose your leader. You can lose but keep your leader. You can win even if you've dialed zero, or have no leader. If your goal is to collect Spice after combat, then you have an incentive to dial fewer units at the risk of losing the battle.

The Session

We had the pleasure of playing on David Fontes's fantastic wooden masterpiece. It has raised areas for all the mountain regions and a removable Shield Wall region. We used wooden discs for units and glass beads for spice.

Atreides - Al
Harkonnen - Scott
Fremen - Dom
Emperor - Josh
Guild - James
Bene Gesserit - Jim

I chose The Harkonnens to win on turn 8. It was a complete guess, but I figured I could ally with him early and make it happen. Unfortunately, we didn't get our first Worm until turn 7, so we couldn't form alliances until then, which was too late for my evil agenda.

I felt so weak for many turns. I managed to buy a couple of cards which wiped me out, putting my on CHOAM Charity for a bit. I couldn't ship units because I couldn't afford The Guild's outrageous prices. I took every opportunity to ship my free unit to The Polar Sink whenever anyone else shipped. But this meant I had a big stack on units in the center of the board and nowhere else. I had to start spreading out.

Units caught in the desert are killed if The Storm passes overhead. I had more than my share of bad luck, as well as deliberate attacks through the use of the Control Weather card. No one seemed to consider me much of a threat until my first battle when The Voice showed its power. We had 3 units each. I dialed 1, chose my leader (they are all 5's), a Poison Weapon card, and a Poison Defense card. I voiced my opponent to not play a Poison Defense. My weapon killed him. He had no offensive card.

My battle against The Fremen would have been a disaster, but fortunately I had Stilgar in my pay. The Fremen got screwed badly by traitors in this game.

I decided to be more proactive. I offered Atreides a Spice if he would tell me the location of the next Spice blow. He agreed. You cannot lie or break deals in Dune. Wind Pass North! I had a stack right next to that region. 6 Spice for me on the next turn. Things were looking up.

I kept trying desperately to gain control of Carthag or Arakeen so I could use Ornithopters to move units farther. I had a stack in The Imperial Basin waiting to decide which stronghold I should attack. The Guild player had 6 units on the Shield Wall, waited until the Storm was over me, moved to Hole in the Rock, and blew the wall with Family Atomics. My units and those of Atreides in Arakeen were destroyed. Had I chosen the more forward sector of The Imperial Basin, I would have been ok.

On turn 8, we got a Worm which allows alliances to form, break, or change. Much discussion followed. In the end, 3 alliances formed: Atreides/Bene Gesserit, Harkonnen/Fremen, Emperor/Guild. The Atreides/Bene Gesserit alliance is very powerful in combat, being able to peek at one of the opponent's combat "settings" and Voice them at the same time. The Guild attacked both Carthag and Arakeen, taking on one of us each. These battles should have been easy, but The Guild had powerful cards, winning them both and claiming victory for his alliances 3 strongholds.

This caught the rest of us by surprise. I don't think anyone was really paying attention to the victory conditions as much as just trying to gain more Spice and cards. I really had a blast playing this, and would play it again any time. It's definitely not your typical game. It's got a lot of randomness. The strategic options are more about doing things that take advantage of your strengths rather than executing some specific long-term plan. The game is very opportunistic, and rewards aggression and negotiation.

The Board

There are many version of the Dune game, as well as many custom boards. As always, my thoughts on the board are related to physical functionality.

In effect, there are 4 basic types of regions: The Polar Sink, strongholds, desert, and mountain. The published boards all seem to strive for some less-than-functional textured look. In practice, it's not easy to see what's what.

While I love the custom wooden board and really like the imagery of some of the other custom jobs (1, 2, 3), my tastes go along with Mike Doyle's excellent treatment. It shows the 4 basic region types along with something else important: the 2 green-shaded strongholds are the 2 that need to be occupied to get Ornithopters as well as the 2 that become exposed if The Shield Wall is blown. Very nice.

The Future

I'm going to play Dune again, but I'm not sure I could live with the tiny Avalon Hill version with its cardboard tokens. This game deserves a special treatment.

Fantasy Flight Games is supposed to be publishing a game using the Dune system in Q4 2008 that will be re-themed [perhaps] into the Twilight Imperium universe. At this point, it's either that or make my own. I think I'll wait and see what FFG comes up with. Will they keep the game mechanics exactly the same? What versions, variants, expansions will they include? Will they FFG-ize the game (a million cardboard counters where 10 will do, 200 cards with ambiguous affects that feedback on each other requiring an FAQ larger than the rules)?

My preference--if it means anything--would be Mike Doyle's board, leaders, combat discs, wooden bits for leaders and Spice, and a better solution for hiding reserves and Spice. Player shields never seem to work well. Someone find a better solution.

Unity Games XIV

2008-01-27T12:42:00.000-05:00

The largest Unity Games turnout to date occurred on Saturday with over 350 attendees. We took over the entire Wakefield Sheraton Conference Center, and kept it busy from 9:00am until they kicked us out at midnight. It was yet again a spectacular feast of board gaming goodness.

Thanks

Thanks to Craig, Adam, Dave, Pitt and the rest of the UG steering committee for another great convention. Thanks to Adam and Craig for the charity auction. Thanks to Phil for running the teaching area and setting up the huge number of labels for game storage and math trade spaces. Thanks to Jeff for running the math trade.

A personal thanks to Eric for teaching Agricola, to Bryan for teaching New England, to David for allowing us to use his custom-made wooden Dune board (pictured), and to Al, Scott, Dom, Josh, and James who played it with me.

Games

I started the day in the teaching area with Agricola. I haven't been as excited as most about this game, but I still wanted to try it. We played a 5p game without any of the cards. Even as a learning game, it took less than 2 hours to play. It has elements of Caylus, St Petersburg, and maybe Notre Dame. I found the action selection to be too coarse for my tastes. In Caylus, for example, if you need wood you might be able to get it free, or pay for it, or trade for it, etc. In Agricola, you might not ever be able to get something you need. I dislike being a slave to the turn order unless there is something to mitigate it. I'll play it again, but I have no interest in owning it.

Next up was Dune. Another Holy Grail game for me that, this time, did not disappoint. There's too much to say here, so I'll leave it for my next post.

Next up, Bryan taught us one of his favorites, New England. The tile laying part of the game is quite unremarkable; it's the competition for the tiles that make it's work. I suppose you could call it an auction mechanic. Players each select a coin from 1-10 which sets the price they are willing to pay for 0-2 tiles and/or cards. This also sets the turn order, highest going first. As is typical in Euro games, you must make a difficult trade-off between good resources and cost. And since money is open, you can often play some nasty games by setting a price that forces another player to pay an unreasonable amount for a single tile they desperately need, or give up the tile to another player who would choose before them. Not bad.

I finally hooked up with one of my BSW buddies, Jeff (nyriv). We got a group of 6 together for Vinci, a game I cannot refuse even with the threat of the 6p downtime. We finished in a remarkable 2 hours, with me barely able to keep out of last place. I said, "Kill green!" early on, but no one listened. I love the civilization selection mechanism and the ebb and flow of the 12 (!) civilizations on the board. Your choice of powers and where you expand on the board are affected by other players' powers, terrain, current scores, and future powers. This one isn't getting old.

Red Dragon Inn fell into the same category as Cutthroat Caverns for me. It's silly without managing to be fun. You are playing random cards from your hand with no setup. In Magic, you typically have many cards in play which set your stance and can restrict your possibilities. In this game, there's no warning and no defense unless you just happen to have a specific card. It's all random.

I closed out the night teaching Cold War: CIA vs KGB. This one succeeds where the previous fails. It does have a lot of randomness, but you can work with it. And on the psychological side, it's just as fun as games like Shazamm! and Lord of the Rings: Confrontation.

Dune image by dfontes

Star Fleet Battles

2008-01-24T12:05:00.000-05:00

What geek doesn't have a soft spot in their heart for James Tiberius Kirk? Well over 15 years ago--around the same time that I bought the hefty Advanced Squad Leader rulebook--I purchased the Star Fleet Battles Basic Set. It was partly nostalgia, partly the huge rulebook, and partly because I always wanted to fire photon torpedoes.

At the time, I had only played out a game solo to work through the rules, and maybe, just maybe, played a single real game with my brother. I specifically remember that my chances of playing again with him died on the vine that day. He disliked the Energy Allocation system. I'll get to that later.

The Game

SFB is set in the universe of the original Star Trek series. Each game session is basically some battle between 2 or more ships and/or space monsters/menaces. Unlike most hex and counter wargames, SFB is set in the relative void of space, so terrain and all its repercussions (line of sight, hindrances) are minimal at best. You have the basic Federation, Klingon, and Romulan races along with the lesser-known Kzintis, Tholians, Lyrans, etc. Each race has its own technologies and ship types, making for very different tactics and strategies.

Each ship on the map is a 1/2" cardboard chit, and its controller has 2 sheets with which to manage it: Energy Allocation, and an SSD (ship system display). The Energy Allocation sheet is a table of all the sources of and uses for power. The SSD is a simplified picture of the ship with all the internal systems laid out in their places, along with all the necessary charts for that ship's weapons, movement, and other internal record-keeping. Pictured is an SSD that I colorized to show the different systems (green = defense, blue = power, red = weapons, gold = misc).

One of the aspects of the design that makes the game so tactical is shield facing. Each ship has separate shields on each of its six hex sides. The forward shield is #1, and the rest are numbered clockwise, ending with #6 on the left front. If a given shield is weak or completely down, attacks from that direction could cause serious internal damage. You are constantly evaluating your position and orientation with respect to enemy vessels. In addition, weapons also have firing arcs which usually correspond to one or more shield facing directions. In other words, your rear-firing torpedoes cannot fire at a ship in front of you.

Each turn of the game begins with Energy Allocation. Energy is generated by your warp engines, impulse engines, and reactors. It can be used to reinforce shields, move, and power weapons. Each turn, you must decide where all of your available energy is going...before knowing how the turn is going to play out. You do this secretly. Are you going to put a lot of energy into your engines so you can move quickly? Are you going to pre-load all your torpedoes? Are you going to reinforce all your right-side shields intending for a close pass? What if the enemy goes left?

Once the turn is underway, all speeds are known. Speeds range from 0 to 32, and the turn is likewise broken into 32 impulses. On a given impulse, you either move 0 or 1 hex. After 32 impulses, each ship has moved its movement rate. This is all shown on a chart that has the movement impulses set for each possible speed.

On any impulse, one or more ships may fire weapons if in range, if that weapon is allowed to fire, and if an enemy ship is in the firing arc of that weapon. Most weapons always hit, but damage is based on range (and a die roll). Others require a die roll to hit, then do a fixed or variable damage if successful. Some weapons only do decent damage up close. Some need two or more turns to power up. Some ships have a few big weapons. Some have many smaller ones.

The Session

In our first game, we played 2 newbies against the "expert". I had Klingon Heavy Battlecruiser. My ally, Whit, had a Federation Heavy Battlecruiser. Our enemy, Brian, had a Lyran Heavy Battlecruiser and a Lyran Light Cruiser. The Lyrans have a special technology called the Expanding Sphere Generator. This creates a force field around the ship which can be used to "ram" enemy ships for massive damage.

We decided to stick together and gang up on the bigger ship. The Federation ship would use its massive array of Phaser-1's to punch a hole in the shields into which I would launch all my Disruptors. We set approach speeds, but the Lyrans would have none of it. They turned away on their approach. We couldn't get close enough to do any serious damage.

On the second turn, since we were much closer now, I decided to lower my speed to 8 and put everything I had into weapons and my #1 shield. The Lyrans still set a speed of 24. This allowed them to outmaneuver us and fire on un-reinforced shield facings, and to contact us with the dreaded ESG. Ouch. But as he passed by, we got a pretty serious volley off on his #2 shield and scored so many internal hits I think it took 10 minutes to work it all out.

The game was a learning game, so we didn't play it out to the bitter end. It really was as enjoyable as I had hoped. There's a lot of record-keeping, but it's mostly to do with decisions you are making, or results you are applying so it's all part of the fun. I'm not at the point where I want to add all the complexity of the full rules yet (mid-turn speed changes, seeking weapons, tractor beams, boarding parties, etc.). I'd just like to explore the various tactics of the basic ships and get more comfortable with the system first.

2007 Board Game Internet Awards

2008-01-18T07:17:00.000-05:00

BoardGameNews has announced the winners of the 2007 Board Game Internet Awards. It appears this blog has won something. Honorable mention? Right alongside Yehuda Berlinger's blog. Good company.

I'd like to thank my producer, my director, my editor, my spell checker, and my little dog too. Actually, thanks to all of you gamers who provide fun at the tables, as well as information I so desperately crave. Game on!

Bob Day

2008-01-14T17:15:00.001-05:00

Saturday was Bob Day for January. I had specifically asked for any of 4 different games to be brought and taught. Of the 3 that were brought, I got a chance to play 2 of them. This is their story...

Holy Grail Desanctified

I've been trying to obtain a copy of Princes of the Renaissance for a long time. Fortunately for me, I have been unable to do so. The game fell utterly flat. It had all the promise and structure of other great Martin Wallace games, namely Perikles and Liberté, but failed to live up to my expectations.

During the first decade, players snatch up all of the military tiles. This sets the base attack and defense values used for the rest of the game. These values can only be further modified by acquiring city tiles which give you various +1 and +2 adjustments. Once you get to this point, the whole game is all about tweaking the "stock values" of the 5 cities by declaring battles, and auctioning "shares" in them.

Each player has approximately the same military strength (except me because I failed to see this exact problem I am describing) to which is added a single die roll. So battles are won and lost by chance, which increases and decreases city values. This kind of system works in Struggle of Empires and Perikles because attack and defense strengths rise and fall over the course of the games, players have choices where to apply them, and units can be lost. Princes seemed to degrade into players trying to create battles where they benefit no matter who wins and loses, who fights and who doesn't. I found this wholly unappealing.

Geek Buddy Failure

I put a lot of weight on the ratings of my geek buddies because I carefully choose them based on existing matches and/or useful comments. Blue Moon City was a game I had read the rules to twice and dismissed. But my geek buddies said otherwise. This worked well with Beowulf in the past, so I decided to give it a try.

I found the game to be silly. There's no other word for it. There's no long-term or even medium-term planning whatsoever. There are too many card types to do any kind of hand management. Buildings get completed all around you before it becomes your turn again. I don't see any game here at all. Sadly, I have to rate it a 3.

On top of all that, the production quality is horrible. What's that? Why am I picking on Blue Moon City and not on the quality-inferior Princes of the Renaissance? Because it certainly looks like effort was actually made in BMC. If the game is going to be physically dysfunctional, just don't make the effort. It's not as horrible as Fairy Tale, but pretty close.

Princes of the Renaissance image by Terminus_Est

Age of Empires III: First Play Thoughts

2008-01-03T03:10:00.000-05:00

I finally had the opportunity to try a copy of Age of Empires III tonight. It's a game I once had on my radar but removed. It wasn't that I found something not to like, but that I just couldn't find anything specifically to like. Four of the five of us were first-time players.

I focused on colonization almost exclusively, taking Missionaries and Soldiers when I could, as well as a building that gave me an extra soldier every round. Others focused on goods to generate cash, or on other specialists. I was mostly broke the entire game with others buying multiple buildings per round, but ended up winning by a small margin.

Physical Design

You really have to be a fanatical Ameritrasher or have a small amount of brain damage to think this game has a good physical design. It's not even so-so; it's just plain bad.

The coins are very cool individually, but do not stack well. The notion that the gold ones should be used as 10's is silly. They should be 5's.

The board supports the playing pieces well on the right, but only because the playing pieces are over-sized and out-of-place for the game. The left size of the board--with the map of the New World--is undersized for the huge piles of pieces that end up on them by the end of the game.

The score track is also a huge mistake. Why do so many board games have ridiculously bad score tracks? I'll have to do a post on it, but I digress... You can't see some of the spaces. The spacing of the scoring spaces is not consistent at the corners. The "men" barely fit onto the score track when the score is close.

Overall, the board has the same kinds of flaws as Railroad Tycoon: bigger than it needs to be because of poorly thought out use of space, and a poor score track intended for use with pieces too big to fit. Why do ~~people who can design games~~ people who can sell a game to a publisher think they are fit to design or approve the design of a game board? They certainly make great apologists.

The playing pieces are the biggest blunder. If you line up the 5 different kinds (Colonist, Soldier, Missionary, Merchant, Captain), they are pretty obvious. But when there are 60+ pieces on the board, it beats even War of the Ring in dysfunction. I'm certain the game would not have sold as well, or be as popular, without this dysfunctional decision. What does that say about the game and its fans? The designer himself says, "Wooden cubes or meeples can always be substituted by the players who prefer them, but miniatures actually work best in this design!" Rubbish.

Game Design

I approve of, and even enjoyed, everything about the play of the game, except for Discovery. Basically, you pile up your pieces until you are either willing to risk 3-5 points of them or are willing to use 6 points of them (guaranteeing a success). You flip up a Discovery Tile or Card. If you committed enough to match the number on the tile/card, you are successful and receive gold and VP's. If not, you lose everything.

This is a mechanism typically seen in party games or fillers taking 20 minutes to play, and not in serious and more lengthy games. There's no way to even gauge how much risk to take. Every Discovery is an unknown value from 3-6. You could attempt 2 Discoveries with 5 each, fail both, and lose 10 points worth of pieces for nothing. An opponent could attempt 2 Discoveries with 3 each, succeed on both, and gain lots of gold and VP's.

It would be excusable if players were doing dozens of them over the course of the game; the probabilities would smooth out the randomness. But when you are only doing, say, 2-5 of them, and since the endgame spread is so tight, any single extreme success or failure could be the entire game. Dumb.

Overall

All the above being said, I did enjoy the game, although I'd prefer to find a better-designed Discovery mechanism. I'm sure there are many suggestions from others. This is such an egregious flaw that I cannot possibly be the first to complain.

I like the intentional turn order bias, the initiative/gold mechanism, the limited action selection system, the small amount of conflict, the goods collection, and even the buildings. It certainly has some of the same play feelings as Puerto Rico, Caylus, and even a little taste of Struggle of Empires. However, for a game so popular with the AT-ers, I cannot say that I notice any sense of theme. It's just a Euro with a broken mechanic and stupid plastic.

Age of Empires III image by Capitaine Grappin

Azathoth in the Corner Pocket

2007-12-26T23:53:00.000-05:00

Despite my dislike of so much that is Arkham Horror, I am compelled to play. Tonight we sent Mandy, Mary, and Joe up against Azathoth. His power is that the game ends immediately if he awakens. No chance to fight him.

We got unbelievably lucky with our rolls, encounters, and Mythos cards. Mary kept her Blessing for almost the entire game, and acquired a Retainer that netted her $12. Joe acquired as many Clue Tokens as the other 2 characters put together. Mandy and Mary met at the Curiositie Shoppe to exchange items and to buy something useful. They each found an Elder Sign! We had 4 gates sealed in no time. The only really bad Mythos card required a character to discard 3 spells to cancel it, which we already had.

After the 5th gate was sealed, we all ended up gate diving simultaneously. Joe had an encounter that closed the gate but made him Lost in Time and Space--so no seal was placed. Mandy was next to emerge from the Other Worlds, making an easy roll to close, and sealing the 6th gate.

At no point did the game take on that "out of control" feeling I've felt every other time I've played. I think the 3 characters complemented each other well, and that we got fairly lucky. I think we may just try these same 3 characters again next time with a different Ancient One to see how things go.

Arkham Horror image by Nodens77

New 10's

2007-12-26T15:41:00.000-05:00

I recently snapped all my BGG game ratings to whole numbers. I can still look at any 2 identically-rated games and say which I like better than the other, but I now believe that grouping them serves a better purpose. Rather than look at my 10's, then my 9.75's, then my 9.5's, etc., I can now look at my 10's, then my 9's, etc. It's easier to examine a single larger group for a game to play or to bring to game nights.

This snapping process vaulted a number of games to the honorable 10 spot. In alphabetical order, they are now:

Age of Steam: Not perfect, but really really good. I love the interplay of actions, the competition for goods, cities, and connections, and the share system. I'm not a fan of having to issue shares only at the start of each turn, of the incongruous complexities of town connections, nor of the random selection and random usefulness of the goods production mechanisms. And yes, even with all that, it's still a 10. I'm also looking forward to the Wallace/Mayfair game--whatever it ends up being called. Getting rid of the score/production boards, and being able to issue shares any time should be nice.

El Grande: Raw area influence with the exceptionally fun twists of the "bidding" cards and the Castillo. Some say it's too chaotic with 5, and not competitive enough with 3. I don't mind either number, but I do think 4 is the sweet spot for this game.

Goa: A great game with 2, 3, and 4. The auction system (players choose what to auction spatially, and pay each other during the auction) is inspired.

Liberté: Subtle and complex game of indirect area influence. You don't know which faction is going to win during any given turn. As the situation become more and more clear, players jockey to be on the winning team or to change the victor. Resolving ties is half the fun. The constant threat of the two alternate victory conditions if the other half.

Maharaja: Palace Building in India: A game of controlled chaos and constantly adjusting plans. Players must choose their two actions secretly and simultaneously, but they don't have to choose exactly how to implement those action until it's their turn. Turn order can change during the round. The order of city visits can change during the game.

Princes of Florence: Every time I play this game, it keeps getting better. The player interaction seems almost non-existent the first few plays, then subtle, then overwhelming. It has a basic auction/action system like Goa, but is otherwise completely different. Every time I think I am doing well, the better players blow me away in the final round.

Ra: One of the best twists on the auction mechanic ever designed. Players choose when to invoke an auction, but can only bid using a small and fixed set of Sun tiles. The Sun tile that wins the bid is put into the mix for the next auction. Won Sun tiles are kept for use in the next epoch, and also factor into the scoring at the end. This is simply the best closed-system auction game.

Taj Mahal: Unlike Maharaja, the sequence of "visits" is fixed. What is "unknown" is the cards, but even those can be mostly tracked if you can remember who drew what. Points are mostly gained through the collection of goods and by spatially connecting palaces on the board. Each round is effectively a simultaneous auction for 6 different rewards.

Vinci: A civilization-style game where players "buy" their developments using victory points. Over the course of the game, your civilizations will decline and new ones will appear. Choosing when to decline, what new developments to "buy", and where to start on the board are all important. Declined civilizations keep scoring points for you until they are overrun.

Bob Day

2007-12-16T14:13:00.000-05:00

At LobsterTrap I was invited to a local-ish game group that meets once a month. I couldn't make it in November, but I decided to make the 90-minute trek yesterday. The trip down seemed much shorter thanks to NPR's great program Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. It's amazing how different the world is in the morning. Still not worth getting up for though.

There were about 12-14 people over the course of the 11-hour event playing lots of different kinds of games. There was always a game starting that I was interested in.

We started with Traumfabrik, a game I've been wanting to try forever. It was about as good as I expected it to be. I love the fact that all the "money" in the game just moves back and forth among the players. If you pay a huge price for a lot, you are giving all the other players a big temporary advantage. If you are short on cash, you just need to wait through a couple of auctions to accumulate more--and hope those auctions are for things you don't really need. It's too light for a game night staple, but a good filler.

Next up was Amyitis. I've been tentative on this one since I disliked Yspahan so much. I think it is a winner. It almost feels like an Alea/Feld economy game, but has the expected Ystari style. You can harvest plants, irrigate the gardens, buy camels, and occupy temples. But there is also some good interaction. Players compete for actions of increasing costs, for space in the temples (pushing each other out), and for limited sets of special cards (gardeners, bankers, caravans, etc). The one aspect of the game that's not quite right is the caravan board. If you take an action there, you move the camel around clockwise. You can only move it so far based on which caravan card you have and how many camels you are willing to spend. If the previous player moves the camel past the space you wanted, then you might be screwed. But this may be just a side affect. It makes that portion of the game seem half random, half chaotic. It's not enough to scare me away, just enough to bug me. I think I want this game.

I played 2 games of Race for the Galaxy. Yes, it has been compared to San Juan by everyone, and they are right for the most part. The fact that everyone chooses their roles simultaneously helps to make the game move faster. But this is one of its downfalls for me. What it does is to turn a game where I am watching what everyone does into a game where I mostly ignore everyone else. The other problem is that there are enough card interactions that it feels like the game is over before you can create and profit from anything unless you get some combinations that work well together. If the game somehow lasted 2 hours, you could see the long-term fruits of your efforts. Like Galaxy Trucker, I see why people really like it, but it's not for me.

Another game on my radar was Cutthroat Caverns. Unfortunately, it's rules and design seemed like something from Fantasy Flight Games: ambiguous and chrome-filled. There are too many cards and creature powers that interact with each other. There are too many unclear rules. The game should be fast and furious, yet the mechanics make it slow and plodding. Having to deal out initiative cards every damned round is ridiculous.

I wasn't too keen on playing Flying Carpet, but a new game is often a better choice than an old one when you have the opportunity. Players must fly their carpets over buildings and through the clouds to reach the destination. All movement is performed using cards drawn from a deck showing various horizontal and vertical components (eg 2 up, 1 forward). If you get up high enough, the wind pushes you forward an extra 1 or 2 spaces. It was ok, just nothing special. This could be a pretty decent kid's game.

Mordred was another game on my radar. It played exactly as I had expected from the rules. What I didn't know was how much of a mathematical or psychological balance would be achieved between the players and the Mordred pieces during play. Both of these aspects seemed to play out quite well. If Mordred is winning, players farther along the Mordred track want to correct this by either building as much as they can, or by attacking Mordred to move themselves back. If Arthur is winning, players farther back on the Mordred track want to correct this by adding more Mordred pieces. The game is designed so that if you go all out to accomplish any single goal that you actually undo yourself. Brilliant. The game could really use a VP track where players also keep track of total buildings and Mordred pieces. Every single turn in the later half of the game starts with each player counting up everything anyways. The fact that everything (collecting money, attacking, defending) is done using dice keeps this game from being very meaty, but it might fit in the heavy filler space along with Ra. The jury is still out.

Gipsy King was a surprisingly good filler. You score points for having majorities around ponds with fish in them (in a way like Carcassonne H&G), but much more points from chains of connected pieces using the popular triangular sequence (eg 1, 3, 6, 10, 15...). The skill in this game is knowing when to pass. Really, that's it. If you pass, you go first on the next pond. If everyone passes, the last player gets to place pieces in all the rest of the spaces. You play one round in increasing numerical order, then a second round in decreasing numerical order. In the second round you can place 2 pieces on the same location two times. Very good game for a 20-minute filler.

Und Tschüss! is a strange Martin Wallace card game. It was ok, but there are much better card games that take the same amount of time.

I closed the session with Cold War: CIA vs KGB. I love this game, and this play of it was exceptional. We had some great combos happening. By the half-way mark, we had both lost our Master Spies. This eliminates a lot of the bluffing potential, but the Assassin's still did their jobs. At 80 points, I could have used Olympic Games to get my Master Spy back, but that would have jeopardized my win if a 20 Objective card appeared. I enjoy the press-your-luck aspect of the Group card play, the Group/Agent bluffing, and the psychology of the Agent selection and usage.

Arkham Waning

2007-12-01T23:51:00.000-05:00

Tonight's 3-player session of Arkham Horror may well be one of its final plays. Although I lack experience with the distributions of encounters at the Arkham and Other World locations, I finally feel like I have a handle on the game mechanics themselves. And it's not pretty.

My main problem is that, when I play a game, the one thing that is absolutely necessary is that I have choices, and that those choices prompt appropriate results. This doesn't mean that I always get what I want or what I expected. But it does require that my choices matter. So let's look at Arkham Horror from this point of view.

There are 3 ways to win: seal 6 gates, close all gates and have gate trophies equal to the number of players, or defeat the Ancient One. Let's assume the first option is the easiest.

Sealing Gates

How do you seal a gate? One, you need to get to a gate. This requires moving around the board, and potentially fighting or evading monsters (see Monsters). Two, you need to survive 2 or more turns in the Other World associated with the gate (see Encounters). Three, you need to close and seal the gate (make a Fight/Lore check, then discard 5 Clue Tokens), or use an Elder Sign (see Items).

If you don't have an Elder Sign and fail your roll to close the gate, then you need to stay there and try again next turn. If you leave the location, you lose your opportunity and must make the entire trip again. If a monster that you cannot evade or fight happens to show up (perhaps a Hound of Tindalos), you are out of luck.

Encounters

At the start of each turn, each player may adjust their skill settings to varying degrees. The encounters in the game often have you make skill checks based on skill settings that you could not have predicted before the encounter. Skills appear in 3 pairs of values running in opposite directions. So, for example, if you increase your Lore, you are decreasing your Luck. Going into an encounter, you never know if you will need either of these to be high. Finding a happy medium, say 2/2, if often bad because many of the rolls are at -2.

Monsters

Most monsters move randomly. They can block your entrance/exit to/from a location, and can enter your space to force you to deal with them. Combat requires 2 skills: Will and Fight, which are on the same scale running in opposite directions.

Items

With few exceptions you can never just go buy what you want. You might be able to draw an item and keep it, or draw 3 items and buy one at its face value if you have the money.

The Big Problem

With all this in mind, here's the big problem that seems to occur in every game I've played. I thought it was maybe just bad luck or inexperience the first few times, but it seems that this "problem" is by design.

You are standing in your current location. You have no money, no Clue Tokens, no Elder Sign, and insufficient weapons/items to fight anything on the board with any better odds than needing to roll a 5 or 6 on a single die. The best place to get money is the Newspaper, but that is blocked by a monster. So you go to the best location to get a weapon. You have an encounter there (draw a card) and have to make a random roll against a random skill, fail, lose 1 Stamina, and gain nothing.

More gates open. More monsters pour onto the board. You are still in the same situation, so you just sit there turn after turn just hoping you will get something useful before the store closes. Before that happens, some other random event forces you to fight or move. So you abandon the current plan to get a weapon and start wandering around to various places, just because you can get to them, hoping something good will eventually happen.

You might get 1 good encounter of every 4 you have. But if you really just need something specific like a physical weapon, it may take more turns that the game itself just to get one.

I have yet to feel that I was able to make even the simplest short-term plan and have it work. I've certainly had good luck, but that's got nothing to do with my choices. I enjoy the narrative of the game, but I want to be a more active participant in it.

Game Night...And Day

2007-11-24T22:58:00.000-05:00

Friday night was an unexpected game night...and then some.

Thanks to Brian Leet, Mary Ann now loves La Citta. I have developed a new-found interest in it as well.

Our previous game made it painfully clear that citizens form the largest share of your victory points. Each in our own way, we both decided to go all out for population. I had built both of my extra castles by turn 3, Mary Ann by turn 4.

La Citta is one of those games where you can be a victim of your own success. Every turn you need to be able to feed your population or bad things happen. Having 4 cities means that you normally gain 4 citizens each turn. This is in addition to any placed with markets and any gained through migration.

If you are doing too well, you could conceivably gain 6-10 or even more citizens in a single turn. The most food you can hope to add by building a farm is 5, with 3 or 4 being much more common in later turns. What this means is that if you decide to build 4 castles, you have to start focusing on food in a big way. We both found ourselves building farms everywhere, taking Rich Harvest cards, and sadly hoping we'd lose citizens to the opponent's cities.

In the end, I was the only one who couldn't feed all my people (turns 5 and 6). This cost me 3 citizens on turn 5 (and a lost action) and 5 victory points on turn 6. Even with that, I won 35 to 28. Even though the German version is easily playable, I am considering buying the new English version and selling my German copy.

After La Citta, it was already 10:00pm, but Mary Ann suggested that I teach her Arkham Horror. She'd seen me playing it, and thought it looked fun. I concealed my excitement and told her we could stop at any time if she wasn't enjoying herself.

I could not imagine a game going worse. Our two characters--I forget who they were now--had little cash and no weapons. On the very first turn we got Terrible Experiment that put 5 extra monsters in play. Every turn we had to add a new monster. If the pile reached 8, the Terror Level would be set to 10. The worst part was that most of the monsters in the pile we had no chance of defeating.

So we tried to get some items that we could fight with. The gates started popping up all over, and more unkillable monsters moved to block the entrances and exits from critical locations. It was frustrating as an evil dimension. I kept trying to explain how this wasn't how it normally went in the hopes of salvaging any shred of interest she might have in playing.

Three hours later, 1:00am and around turn 12, my character died outright when we were only 2 Doom Tokens away from waking the Ancient One. I looked up in defeat and started to explain what happens in this situation. Mary Ann said, "Now I know how the game works. Let's start over." I replied, "...," and quickly started resetting the board before she figured out what time it was.

Our second game was the best game I've played to date. I was Jenny, and Mary Ann was Dexter. We both had some good items. The Mythos Phase draws were more "normal" and the monsters were nicely mixed.

At 3:15am, Dexter emerged from a gate, Elder Sign in hand, but with only 1 Sanity and 1 Stamina. He decided to seal the gate regardless, giving his life. We left the board overnight, and would setup a new investigator for Mary Ann in the morning. She drew Michael, another tough one.

The entire game, we only managed to find a single Elder Sign, but we still had 5 gates sealed before the Doom Track filled. I was in the Other World going for number 6, but I failed some check and was Lost in Time and Space.

Unfortunately, Yig Curses all characters when he awakens. We had failed to plan for this event by acquiring Blesses. We needed to make 20 cursed successes (rolling 6's) to defeat him. Jenny had 9 dice each time, and Michael had 10. Jenny could only fail Yig's Sneak Check 3 times before being devoured, and Michael only 2.

On the 4th round, Michael gave his last hit to Yig and went under. On the 5th round, with Yig still at 14 life, Jenny, using all 5 of her remaining Clue Tokens, failed to pass a Sneak -3 Check and fell as well.

This was the first game I've played where I felt I had some control over events and where I felt we might actually win if things went well. But, in the end, you really don't mind losing.

Missed rule: if a gate has +1 difficulty to close, you don't roll 1 less die, you need 1 extra success. So a -3 gate to R'lyeh does not become a -4 gate; it becomes a -3[2] gate.

La Citta image by dipdragon

Back from Lobster Trap

2007-11-11T22:39:00.000-05:00

As I expected, four straight days of nothing but gaming was not enough to cover the post-Essen flood of goodness even though I was staying awake on fumes for much of the time. In all I played 22 different games.

This event was a complete blast. It was held in the hotel where I was staying. Every minute that I spent sleeping and eating felt like wasted time. Everyone was very pleasant and helpful. A huge thanks to Pitt Crandlemire, Craig Massey, Adam Smiles, Dave Bernazzani, and the other members of the organizing committee. Thanks to Scott Nicholson, Adam Smiles, Kevin Horovitz, and Brian Leet for going beyond the call of duty to teach some complex games.

Of the games present, I did not get an opportunity to try Agricola, Amyitis, The Circle, and Cuba. The disappointing absences of new games were Chang Cheng, Container, Darjeeling, El Capitan, Kingsburg, Mordred, TZAAR, and Tribune. The disappointing absences of older games were Die Macher, Dune, Princes of the Renaissance, and Stephenson's Rocket. Unplayed (sadly) older games that were there: Byzantium, Liberte, Perikles, Struggle of Empires...hmmm all Wallace.

Of the games I played, the following are the ones of interest, good or bad:

Bug Bluff: Very simple and silly game. Perfect when you are tired. I was surprised how much fun this was. Pass a card from your hand depicting one of eight bugs/animals face-down to another player and name it. That player has 2 options: call true/false (if he's right you get the card back face-up, if he's wrong he gets it face-up), or look at it and pass it to another player naming it whatever you like. The first player with 4 of the same face-up cards loses. There's some good bluffing as well as tactical options. Scott Nicholson has the Stare of Truth™.

League of Six: Decent game, but it didn't wow me. Mostly tactical. The "auction" phase consists of an Evo-style system where you bid Guards for the rights to tax a given city (one per player). If you are outbid and decide to travel to another town, you collect the other player's offer immediately. If you move to a city with another player, you must outbid them. Chain reactions are common. In fact, you can start the round with no Guards and end up with quite a few. It's got a lot of physical stuff to do each round that's a little annoying.

Cold War: CIA vs KGB: Wow. Just wow. I had this one my radar at one point, but removed it when I was convinced that it came down to the luck of the draw. There are some really cool combinations you can execute here. There's a lot of press-your-luck and bluffing as well. If you like games with cards that have special powers that can mess with your opponent (eg Magic the Gathering, Jambo, Citadels, Roma, Babel), buy this now!

In the Year of the Dragon: I've had this on my radar for a while, but I wasn't sure what to expect for how the game would actually feel. To give you a clue, we called the plastic bag that held the people tiles "the body bag". Every round, each player can perform one action and hire one person. Afterwards, an event occurs. Events usually result in people dying...from starvation, disease, war, execution, you name it. You have to manage your pitiful collection of palaces, people, and resources trying to keep them alive--at least the ones you need, until they are expendable. This game also has a very original turn order competition sub-game which is a very big deal since going first can save you a lot of money. I'm very happy with this one.

King of Siam: A very serious and short (30 min!) game reminiscent of Liberte. There are 3 factions on the board, owned by none, controlled by all. Each player gets 8 total actions for the entire game of 8 rounds. Use 3 actions in the first round and you'll only have 5 left for the next 7 rounds. After each round the current region is resolved. If one faction has majority, it wins control of the region. If there's a tie, the British Empire wins. If the British get control of 4 regions, the game ends immediately and the player with the most sets of all 3 faction cubes wins. If the game ends "normally", the player with the most faction cubes in the winning faction wins. Very slick.

Origins: How We Became Human: A game that plays like a 3-hour Discovery Channel special on the rise of man. Each player plays a different species (homo sapiens, neanderthal, etc) bent on becoming the dominant intelligence on Earth. Players start out trying to unlock the areas of their brains that allow for speech, and end up mining for uranium. Quite a wide scope. It's detailed and seems very well-researched, but I just never got over the feeling that I wasn't just drawing cards and playing the ones whose requirements I had met. You did get to choose how fast you expanded and where you migrated to, but it was over-shadowed by the cards.

Through the Ages: I played the full game (all 3 ages) starting with 4 players and ending with 3. It took me half of the game to get it through my head that the cards in play DO NOT represent the items they describe (buildings, military units, etc). They represent that you have the ability to make those things. The yellow markers on the cards are the things themselves. The population and resource systems seem to work exceptionally well, but I can't wrap my head around the math that drives them. With resources, efficiency is a concept built into the system. If you can create 1 unit of food, then one blue marker on your farm is 1 unit of food. If you can create 5 units of food, then one blue marker is 5 units of food. The more blue markers "in use", the more corruption you have. So being able to generate 5 food (advanced agriculture) as a single unit (1 blue marker) is much better than generating 5 food one unit at a time. This game really challenges many of the typical notions of game mechanics. After the game, I was still so overwhelmed I didn't know what to think. Since then, I've started to think about how I would play differently (I got my ass kicked). This is a good sign, and will probably lead to a purchase.

Utopia: A medium-light game of drafting, set collection, and "stock price" manipulation. Contrary to many statements, this game has no Area Influence. The box is full of beautiful plastic monuments and wonders. That being said, the physical design is very non-functional. I'm certain the designers wanted to go for theme. The buildings are textbook examples of the architecture of the 5 civilizations (China, Egypt, Maya, Greece, Persia). The prince markers depict the faces of archetypal people. The problem is that 90% of the work in this game is looking at the board trying to figure out where your pieces are, what buildings they match, and what regions they are in. This leaves 10% of your brain to actually play the game. It's just too over-the-top busy and visually disconnected. I would have made the board much more subdued with more distinct borders, and done away with all the plastic in favor of colored wooden discs with simple symbols for each civilization.

Key Harvest: I never even had this game on my radar, but I had an opportunity to try it. After one game, it's already almost a must-have. Consider playing Acquire (except on a hex grid) where each player has their own board with matching letter/number coordinates, but there's still only 1 tile per location; if I have B4, then no one else can fill that space on their boards. Now instead of drawing tiles randomly for your own use, make the system into a two-level drafting mechanism. The drawn tiles go onto a public board. Players can put the tiles up for sale and offer goods they are willing to pay. Other players can pay them those goods to buy to the tile (and place on their board). On a subsequent turn, you can buy the tile(s) you have up for sale by giving up the goods you previously offered. The other interesting part of the game is the workers. They can only be placed if they touch as many goods tiles as their number (1-3 on personal workers, 4-5 on public workers). Tiles placed on the same location as a worker cause that worker to move to a new location re-activating their power. If you are clever, you can build twice and move the same worker twice. I really enjoyed this game.

Lobster Trap or Bust

2007-11-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

Lobster Trap, a four-day game convention, starts tomorrow! The Gathering of Friends is held in Ohio because Alan Moon's private game night grew so big that Ohio was the only place that would inexpensively accommodate the 600+ invitees. Lobster Trap is a local, and more intimate, version of that.*

I attended Unity Games at the same location. It was a great one-day event, but lacked a certain quality that only multiple days, late nights, and lack of sleep can provide.

I made a list of games I'd like to play. Some are games that I'd like to try before I buy. Some are games I'd probably never buy unless I played them and really liked them. Some are games I'd like to play with experienced players so I can learn them better. Some are games I just want to play because I don't get the right crowd for them often. And some I've just wanted to play for a long time:

Agricola, Amyitis, Byzantium, Chang Cheng, The Circle, Cold War, Colosseum, Container, Cuba, Darjeeling, Die Macher, Dune, El Capitan, Galaxy Trucker, Il Principe, In the Year of the Dragon, King of Siam, Kingsburg, League of Six, Liberte, Mordred, Neuroshima Hex!, Origins, Oriente, Perikles, Princes of the Renaissance, Pueblo, Quo Vadis?, Qwirkle, Stephenson's Rocket, Struggle of Empires, Take Stock, Through the Ages, Tribune, Tzaar, Utopia, and Wadi.

If you are going to Lobster Trap and you own any of these, especially Dune, King of Siam, League of Six, Mordred, Neuroshima Hex!, Origins, Princes of the Renaissance, Pueblo, Stephenson's Rocket, Through the Ages, and Tribune, please bring them and teach me!

* AFAIK.

Rehash Redux

2007-11-04T10:12:00.000-05:00

Each time a new game comes out, it is inevitably compared to all those that came before it. This is even more the case when a large batch of new games is released, as occurs each year around Essen time. If some new game has, for example, an Auction mechanic, then it is denounced as "yet another Auction game."

I believe that such superficial comparisons are presumptuous.

Consider the Area Majority mechanic, which is exemplified by such great games as El Grande, Maharaja, Liberté, San Marco, Aton, Carolus Magnus, Mexica, Mission: Red Planet, and Carcassonne. I own and happily play all of these. None feels remotely like another even though some share other mechanics.

Another way to look at this is to choose any mechanic and find games you like and dislike that use it. If the mechanic alone made the game, this would not be the case at all. With Set Collection for example, I like Taj Mahal, Ra, and Tower of Babel, but dislike Ticket to Ride and Fairy Tale.

Games are more than a list of mechanics. Mechanics must be stitched together in various ways, drive each other, feedback into each other, and complement each other. This stitching provides the sequencing and flow of a game, directly affects the kinds of decisions players make, and can provide tension and conflict.

The simplest rule can completely change the texture of a game. Imagine Quarto! without the rule that you choose the piece your opponent plays. Imagine Medina without the rule that you can't start a new palace of a given color if the current one is incomplete. Imagine Rheinlander without reinforcements.

When I hear about new games featuring mechanics that exist in games I love, I don't dismiss them, I pay attention. Did the designer find some new way to hook things together? If so, don't be so quick to pronounce the game a rehash.

Arkham Horror

2007-10-23T23:44:00.000-05:00

This post should be titled "Game Night", but when one huge game oozes in, gets comfortable, and won't leave, I have to make an exception. Tonight, I broke out my brand new copy of Arkham Horror to test drive with a friend. It was the monster that I expected.

I had read through the entire 24-page rulebook twice before buying, and the FAQ, and the clarifications, and the FFG and BGG forums, so I knew what I was getting into. I was somewhat prepared for the evening and didn't expect we'd finish our first game in 4 hours.

We did not. The first hour was just setting things up. I expect this to be more like 10 minutes next time. The second hour was playing through the first turn. I expect this to be more like 2 minutes next time. When we called it, we had played through maybe 10-12 turns.

The problem is not the game; it's the rules. They read like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. Not only do cards break the rules, the rules break the rules. I think Arkham Horror is not anywhere near as complicated as the rules make it out to be. In typical FFG fashion, they do not organize their design before putting it on paper. So when a card directs you, for example, to move your Investigator to a location that has a gate and a monster, you find yourself having to consult sections of the rulebook that have nothing to do with the Encounter Phase to try to guess how you are supposed to resolve the situation.

It's sad, because the game is a lot better than the rules. I'm just not sure I'll ever play it as intended, because the answers to the endless stream of questions over the years are mostly specific clarifications rather than an overall cleanup of the system (which would in no way change the game itself). For a really good and well-researched synopsis of the entire system, check out UniversalHead's incredible Arkham Horror Rules Summary.

We drew everything randomly. We got Amanda and Mandy versus Hastur. In a 2-player game, there can be only 5 monsters in Arkham at any given time, and only 6 in the Outskirts before the Terror Level increases.

A gate appeared in The Woods. We started on our mad rush for Clue Tokens, basically ignoring what the various locations offered. A second gate appeared on Unvisited Isle. Then we drew a card that put 5 extra monsters on the board that would keep building up every turn until we defeated them all. That got our attention. Fortunately (?) the next Mythos card was Unvisited Isle again. This caused a monster surge, but opened no gates and caused no Doom increase...

There are so many options available to you, it was hard for me to decide what to do. I got caught up so much just playing out my current turn that I wasn't really paying attention to the big picture. I know this will change with experience. For example, Mandy got sucked into a gate, survived her 3 turns (one of those exceptions) in the Other Worlds, but returned with only a single Clue Token remaining. I was looking for way to get to a location with a Unique Item symbol so I could perhaps rush her an Elder Sign if I was lucky enough to get one. Was this even a good idea? So much to do. So little time...

The physical design is pretty good. The board is very functional, although a little busy when full. I think I can even make the insert work, but it's not perfect.

Overall, I would have enjoyed playing out the 2-4 more hours that it seemed we would need to finish the game. I like the gradual, and sometimes sudden, buildup of monsters and gates. I like that you can go to locations with specific plans or wants. I like that you can tweak your skill levels each turn. And I like that you get to use a lot of cool items, spells, and skills even though some may go away after one use. There's plenty more where those came from...if the shops are still open.

I think this was a good choice for a nice long immersive solo game. For a comparison of Arkham Horror and 5 other cooperative games, check out this post.

Arkham Horror image by Nodens77

New Games!

2007-10-20T13:56:00.000-05:00

My 1960-triggered game order has finally arrived. I am happy to report that I have no crushed or dented boxes nor any missing pieces. The full rules to 7 of the 8 games were available online, and the 8th was a no-brainer from the images and reviews. All I've done so far is open the boxes, punch the sheets, and drool.

1960: The Making of the President: My god! I was expecting a 4-section board. This baby has 6 sections! It's enormous! 26x30" (66x72cm). The only issue is the insert. There's really not enough room for everything. I am reluctant to flip it over, like some have, because I want to support the board on the ends. Maybe I'll just stick the bags of counters underneath.

Arkham Horror: After reading the complaints about this box, I was expecting a Mission: Red Planet disaster--a pile of punched tokens overflowing the open box. I was able to bag everything and get it back in the box without much fuss. I do wish the insert was a little deeper, though, so the cards would not extend above the top.

Il Principe: I agree with all the complaints about this one. It's the same size box as 1960. The board is 1/6th the size, and there's only a single handful of parts. Fold the board in half and you could fit the entire game into a Citadels box. The components are just ok.

Khronos: It seems they went to a lot of trouble to design the insert for this game. It's really sturdy, printed with the various game colors to organize the tiles...and completely inappropriate. The smallest tiles are about 1cm square. The compartments in the insert are not sealed, meaning that small bits can get stuck/lost between compartments. This is not good especially since the component counts are fixed in this game. The detailed plastic miniatures are only 1" tall. I'd prefer wooden cylinders to these clumsy things. In general, any game with wood and cardboard and plastic bits has been improperly designed.

Lord of the Rings: Battlefields Expansion: I'm surprised the rules aren't available online. Is this a choice by FFG or simply an oversight?

Portobello Market: I hate when games restrict your color choice by number of players, but I guess it did save them from having to put an extra 24 large wooden market stalls into the box.

Shazamm!: I've been enjoying this quite a bit online. I haven't won a game yet, which says a lot for a game that may seem at first like every choice you have is completely random. The mana track is a little small. I'm worried that we'll loss track of the values during play.

Vikings: I've been back and forth on this one. There were never any red flags, just a worry that it would be blah.

Lessons to learn. Think not only about how the game must be packed for shipping, but also how people are going to be packing them away after playing. Allow extra depth for unknown card thickness and for pieces being stored in bags.

Game Nights

2007-10-18T04:28:00.000-05:00

The respective game nights of the past 2 days have been a great way to distract myself from real world memories. Lots of new stuff getting to the table. I'm trying to be more of a "type A gamer", as coined by Valerie Putman.

Lord of the Rings: Friends and Foes: I played this solo (2 Hobbits) 2 weeks ago and died in Isengard. I played it last week with 2 players, and we died in Helm's Deep. Last night we played a 3-player game, and died in Shelob's Lair. This expansion is really kicking my ass. I've won the base game more than lost playing solo with Sauron at 12. I think we need to start Sauron at 15 until we get a better feeling for how to change tactics with this expansion. Very cool though.

Sleuth: I love deduction games. I've owned Sleuth for years, but didn't get it to the table until tonight. The 3-dimensional nature of the information does make for a more interesting and complex game than Black Vienna. The choice of cards and who to play them on is really nice. You can play a card with a single attribute and get a public count, or you can play a card with 2 attributes and get a public count but also see the actual cards secretly for yourself. In our 3-player game, I was able to deduce the hidden gems with only about 6 questions per player. I'm certain I could have done it sooner, but I was learning how to record the information and changing my mind on the fly. Another hit.

RoboRally: Another game I've owned forever and never played. What a shame. This was a real blast. I laughed at myself even when I made mistakes. The one unexpected thing was that players with severely damaged bots might have only 1 card to play. This means they are starting the timer immediately. If you are in a complex situation, you really don't have time to think, much less factor in what the other players might do. But it's really ok in this game, and makes it even more fun!

Lifeboat: A couple more players showed up. Now we had 6. Fortunately I had thought to throw Lifeboat in the game bag. It was the first time for everyone, including myself. My description of the rules did not seem to impart as much understanding as normal. It took almost the whole game before people were getting into the flow. There were a couple of very interesting fights. The final scores were 20-20-16-15-14-13, with no one dying. I think the next game will be a little more nasty. I have quite a few questions on game play for BGG, if I can just remember them all.

RoboRally image by kilroy_locke

Rest In Peace, Sassafras

2007-10-17T02:57:00.001-05:00

Late Sunday night, Mary Ann and I made the very difficult choice to have our kitty Sassafras put to sleep. She was 19 years old, and had been dealing with minor health issues on and off for over a year.

Last week she stopped eating and drinking, and developed more severe problems. It was unclear if she was in pain, but she was certainly distressed and not herself. The vet had only theories, which would have potentially required weeks of hospitalization just to keep her alive long enough for a diagnosis and subsequent treatment.

Sass was a very sensitive cat. She preferred to remain hidden in her favorite nooks and crannies unless she wanted something. Dropping her into a clinical environment with other animals and IV's, and getting poked and prodded by strangers day after day would have been a torment for her.

I must say that despite my intellectual, practical, and reasoned outlook on life, I was quite unexpectedly shattered by the experience. It's been 2 days, and I can barely go 5 minutes without thinking of her. Sometimes I used to think how nice it would be not to have a cat. Now I would give anything to have her back.

She had lots of favorite spots to hide, to sleep, and to be near us when it suited her. In fact, the entire house was basically hers. When she wasn't using it, she allowed us to sit in her chair. If she wanted food, she never let sleep get in the way...mine that is. The smaller the box the better. Books were for sitting on. Paper was for shredding.

It's amazing how many little things she was a part of. Her presence could be seen in every room. Now everything seems a little more lonely, a little more empty. We will miss you.

Rest in peace, Sassafras.

BGG Ratings

2007-10-09T11:27:00.000-05:00

The master game ratings list on BGG is the target of quite a bit of fuss from time to time. Why is this game rated so high? Why is that game rated so low? How can these 2 games be rated the same? As usual, I have several thoughts on the matter.

E Pluribus Unum

BGG is a melting pot of gamers with different tastes in game genres, themes, mechanics, play times, components, and weights. The image above is meant to show the various groups in varying degrees of overlap. It is not intended to represent reality, nor to imply that any given person is only in a single group. The number of ratings and the values of those ratings depends on how active that group is on BGG.

Just look at the kinds of disparate games that all appear in the top 50: Puerto Rico, Battlelore, Die Macher, Go, Tichu, Crokinole, Ticket to Ride, ASL, Dune, and Blood Bowl. Where else are you going to find these 10 games together? It's unlikely that many people rate them all highly. Yet they all share the status of being loved by--at least--the fans of their respective kinds of games.

Audience

As with political elections, BGG's rating system allows anyone to "vote" regardless of how "informed" they are. In saying this, I don't mean to criticize. But it is certainly true that a person's gaming experience is going to affect their perspective.

Settlers of Catan is rated by over 11,000 people. I would be very interested to see a graph of the number of ratings given by these 11,000. I would say that the "core users" of BGG (those who login every day, play many different games, etc) numbers well under 1,000. I could be wrong.

My point is that I think that, in many cases, the ratings by the core users is a small fraction of the data, the largest being "drive by" input. This, in addition to the melting pot effect, further complicates any sort of meaningful information.

Validation

One particularly bad effect of ratings is the need for people to validate their tastes. You hate Puerto Rico, yet it's ranked #1. So now it's your job to attack it at every opportunity. You love Monopoly, but it's ranked #3921. You must defend every post made against it.

Many games I like quite a bit are ranked 500 or worse. I couldn't really care less what others think of them as long as I can find opponents.

Recommendation

This is a tough one. I suppose the ratings could be one factor of many when looking for games. I would not count it very high, but I supposed viewing the game list from #1 on down until you find something that appeals to you for other reasons is not a bad way to go.

A much better way to find games is to use the GeekBuddy system, or to read GeekLists with topics that interest you.

Discussion

The one positive thing to be gained from game ratings, other than pure entertainment, is discussion. When two people on opposite sides of the fence are discussing a game's merits and failings, a lot of useful information might be conveyed to others reading the thread.

It may also be discovered that a person who disliked the game may have been playing it incorrectly, and that this very mistake was the cause of the dislike.

Values

Some say, "Either I like it, or I don't." Some use a slightly wider scale. Some use 1 to 10 with decimals. I use 2 different scales depending on the context.

On BGG, I rate games from 1 to 10, but then differentiate game on the same level using increments of 0.25. This granularity is useless in a practical sense; there's no real difference between 8.25 and 8.5. But when I consider the two games in question, I still feel that one is slightly better than the other.

In my head, I use a 4-tiered system:

A: Games I will suggest and play almost any time.

B: Games I won't suggest, but will play if they are suggested.

C: Games I will argue against if suggested, but will play if out-voted.

D: Games I simply will not play.

You would think that the D games should be a non-factor, but there are enough popular ones in that category for me that I still run into them quite often.

Random Is Random

2007-10-02T08:40:00.000-05:00

Has this ever happened to you? You are playing some game which requires every player to draw a card from a shuffled deck. You accidentally draw before your right-hand opponent, and they exclaim, "Hey! That's my card!" I only tolerate this sort of irrational behavior if the player is less than, say, 10 years old.

Let's ignore mathematical definitions of true randomness for this discussion and say that any reasonably-well-shuffled deck of cards/tiles, and any rolled dice are random enough for game purposes.

In college, I had a friend who claimed that if no one knew the order of cards in a shuffled deck, then all the cards changed when you touched them. In his facetious way, he quite nicely summed up the "quantum" nature of the unknown. It doesn't matter if you draw the top card, the bottom card, or any card in the middle.

In games like Die Macher, some cards are drawn and placed face-down to be revealed at some point in the future. Does this give players the false sense of some eventuality set in stone? It's no different from waiting to draw the cards until the point that they would be revealed. Unless this changes the distributions in the deck for intervening actions (I've only played once), but you get the point.

In Arkham Horror, there's a plethora of decks. Among these are the 9 decks of Location Cards, 7 per deck. When you need one, you draw the top card from the appropriate deck. When a card is "discarded", it is returned to the deck which is then shuffled. 9 decks take a lot of space! It's much easier to simply put all the Location Cards together in a single deck, and shuffle them all. When you need a card from a specific "deck", just fan the cards out and draw an appropriate card. When you return a card to the pile, slip it in the middle and give the whole stack a quick shuffle.

Some games require the rolling of varying numbers of dice. Some people are very sensitive to the "rules of conduct" when there are abnormalities (cocked dice, wrong number rolled, rolled off the table, etc), or when the intention of the roll was incorrect ("I wasn't rolling for attack! I get to re-roll!"). The bottom line is that it doesn't matter, as long as everyone agrees how to resolve all situations. My preferences:

If you roll too many dice, always re-roll all of them regardless of the outcome.
If you roll too few dice, only roll the extras needed.
Re-roll only cocked/off-table dice.
In all cases, previously-rolled dice may not be "bumped".

Many games "suggest" tiles should be shuffled and formed into a specific number of stacks. In most cases, this is only meant to facilitate laying them out in groups during play (eg Puerto Rico, Santiago, Alhambra). However, the tiles could be in a single stack, or even drawn from a bag as needed.

Recent Gaming

2007-09-20T00:47:00.000-05:00

It's been over a month since I posted about games I've been playing, and, although I have played many since then, I'm not going to try to play "catch up". Instead I will just discuss some recent fun.

Last week I received my latest game order consisting of: Arkadia, Babel, Condottiere, Lifeboat, Lord of the Rings: Friends & Foes Expansion, Mr. Jack, Ponte del Diavolo, Primordial Soup, and TAMSK (completing my GIPF collection). And, of course, I want to play them all NOW!

Mr. Jack hit the table almost immediately. I was very happy with the component quality. The character/alibi tiles are particularly impressive. My one nit to pick is that they went to the trouble of reversing the punch direction of the alibi cards so the color would not show around the edges, yet they placed the connections to the frame at unequal positions. So the original issue has not been solved; you still have to hide the cards with the box (in the deck and out) so that the opponent can't see the card edge. The game itself is very slick, fast, and fun. Our first game with a real copy, Watson was Jack. I had a heck of a time trying to get him into the dark so I could escape without giving away his identity. He was flushed out and accused on turn 6.

Next up was Primordial Soup. I've been trying to arrange to play this for a long time, but it just never worked out. So I decided to buy it. The components are all nice and plain, but I would have made the damage markers into a shape that wouldn't roll around so much--perhaps a hex "disc". Everything is functional. You can see exactly what is going on at a glance. The cards seem uncoated, but are still thick and would shuffle well if shuffling was required by the game. We were all a little overwhelmed in our first game by all the combinations of the gene cards. More than once I forgot that I could use Tentacle to drag some food with me. Fortunately, when we are learning everyone helps everyone else out and allows corrections. Substitution plus Movement II seemed to be a killer combo in our 3-player game. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a game breaker in the long run. I can't wait to play this again.

Pippin saved the day in a 3-player game of Lord of the Rings (no expansions). Normally I'd prefer that Sam carry The Ring since he's usually the least corrupted as the game progresses. Because of this, I, playing Sam, bore the brunt of some nasty results a bit too often and ended up with the most corruption. Fortunately, Pippin unwittingly picked up his precious after Helm's Deep and kept it secret and safe for the remainder of the game. When we reached Mount Doom, Sam could see the blacks of Sauron's eyes as Pippin did his slam-dunk.

I played Shazamm! a while ago at Boite a Jeux and decided to give it another try after reading the Z-Man version of the rules. An interesting thing that never occurred to me until this point is that Shazamm!'s wizard combat system is very similar to that of Dune. Each player dials a number (up to his mana/troops) and secretly adds card(s) which can affect the total attack value. Highest attack value wins, with several exceptions. Players typically lose whatever mana/troops they dialed. In Shazamm!'s case, players are wizards fighting on a crumbling bridge pushing a wall of fire into each other. The cards represent spells that can do nasty things like: adjust the total mana, end the round, steal spells, turn the loser into the winner (for that turn)--the kinds of things you might expect from games like Magic: The Gathering. I might be interested in buying this, but I want to play it a few more times online.

I was not taken with Arkadia after reading the rules, but after playing it at Unity Games, I changed my mind. I played my copy for the first time tonight with 4 players. It really is easy to play, although slightly heavy in setup. It's got a classic stock mechanic (eg Acquire, Manila, Imperial) using colored seals as "shares". The three twists are 1) the availability of seals is dictated by what building cards are played, 2) competition for the seals is done spatially by placing buildings and workers in various configurations, and 3) the value of seals is adjusted by taking a tower piece of a seal color and covering a location of another seal color, potentially increasing one seal price and decreasing another. Although I think the 4-player game is a little above the sweet spot because of the chaos, there is some surprising depth to the choices, especially in the second half. Some of the decisions rely on some simple math, and others on where and when to build, place workers, and cash in seals for gold. I'll be trying this with 2 and 3 soon.

An unexpected play of Black Vienna closed out our game night tonight. We happen to have an actual original copy on loan. The only other deduction game I know that's as pure as this is Sleuth. Whereas in Sleuth there's a 3-dimensional array of information (1/2/3, diamonds/pearls/opals, red/green/blue/yellow), in Black Vienna there's only a deck of person cards (27 letters of the German alphabet including Ö) and a deck of investigation cards (36 cards with different combinations of 3 letters). Three person cards are randomly removed from the deck and set aside, the rest being dealt to the players. Three investigation cards are flipped up. The first player chooses one and places it in front of another player. That player must place a number of discs on it equal to the number of those 3 letters in his hand. All players write down this information and try to deduce more information from it. Then the player who answered gets to choose a card to give to someone. This process is repeated until a player shouts, "Black Vienna!," writes down his guess and checks the 3 set aside cards. This is a solid game.

While I have your attention, check out the stunningly good prototype images of The Emperor's Arena, a game I know nothing about, and the latest image of Hamburgum.

Mr. Jack image by nnoc

Help With Game Rules

2007-09-06T23:13:00.000-05:00

I recently stumbled onto the new rules for El Capitan on the Z-Man website, and it struck me how easily this could have passed me by. I decided to create a wiki page on BoardGameGeek for the purposes of tracking when new game rules come out, and when they get updated (eg Living Rules).

Please contribute to this page when you know something that others do not.

On Radar

2007-08-18T22:22:00.000-05:00

It's getting to be that time again where I make my next big order.

Mr. Jack: Due out very soon. This was going to trigger my next order, but I don't know any more...

1960: The Making of the President: I've been watching for the rules since I first heard of this cousin to Twilight Struggle. It's now firmly on my want list, and I may even delay my next order. Twilight Struggle is #4 on BGG, and I see 1960 making it close to that very quickly. It's faster to play, has a less extreme CP/event/rest card-driven system, has elements of Die Macher, and the board is less busy during play because of the "only one color on a state" mechanism.

King of Siam: I stumbled onto this on the Essen 2007 Geeklist. It's light and plays quickly, but hints of a Martin Wallace design.

Lifeboat: Each player plays a person stranded on a lifeboat, and has a secret love and a secret enemy. Players score points if they live, if their loved one lives, and if their enemy dies. If your secret love is yourself, you are a narcissist and score double if you live. If your secret enemy if yourself, you are a sociopath and score points for everyone who dies. It's the perfect filler for 6 players.

Lord of the Rings: Friends and Foes: We love the original, and I think this expansion (of the 3 available) adds to the base system without really changing the game into something else.

Ponte del Diavolo: There's more to this than you might expect from looking at it. I didn't get a chance to play it at Unity Games, but I have tried it a couple of times on Yucata. It's very cool and very nasty. Sometimes, you don't even know your opponent has been nasty to you until later.

Babel: Another interesting stumble-onto game. This is why I love just "surfing the Geek". Babel may be even more nasty than the previous game, but I haven't actually played it yet. A friend will be bringing it to next week's game night.

Cold War: CIA vs KGB: I know almost nothing about this game, but if it's a non-collectible card game with some good planning, secret missions, and take that, then I'm interested.

Friedrich: First Impressions

2007-08-18T18:28:00.000-05:00

I recently had the opportunity to learn Friedrich, and I jumped on it. We played a 3-player game which lasted about 5 hours. I was Russia/Sweden/France, Lance played Austria/Imperials, and Mark was Prussia/Hanover. The game lasted about 13 turns. As this was my first game, I'm not sure if that is uncharacteristically long.

Russia and Austria were quick to put the pressure on. Sweden and the Imperials didn't do much. France was ineffective, not because of Hanover's efforts, but because she drew mostly "hearts" for the first half of the game. Prussia pushed too hard into Austria and got clobbered. Russia took advantage and pushed far into Prussia. France got impatient and attacked Hanover in "spades"--despite the lack of cards--and lost 2 generals at the same time.

The Fate Deck was kind to the "allies" with cards of little or no effect coming early. Hanover pushed into the French, destroying their supply train. Prussia's losses and southern distractions allowed Sweden to have her way for a few turns. Russia threatened a win with 8 victory markers, but was unable to push a newly placed general far enough away to claim the critical final locations.

Austria was also close to victory by this point, but Prussia kept a single "fly in the ointment" general nearby, frustrating the Austrians with a series of single-loss retreats. At this point in the game, battles were often 10-15 cards long, which was fine with France. She managed to get a general and a supply train back on the board and push back at Hanover. Sweden left play with the

Russia and Austria were both one location away from winning, but these locations were too far apart for Prussia to be able to cover both with all her forces. Russia tried once and failed. Austria tried once and failed. Russia tried a second time and won!

The learning curve is much shorter than the rules would suggest. The game is fairly simple: draw cards, move generals and supply trains, conduct battles. There are no rules for interception or pursuit.

Combat itself is simple in mechanics, but there are some tricks which were not obvious to me playing the first time. As you start your turn for each nation, you draw a specific number of cards. These cards are arranged like a normal deck of playing cards (2 through 13, in 4 suits) with special Reserve cards added in. The board is broken into squares labeled with suits. When a battle is conducted, players may only play cards in the suit in which their army is located (may be different for each player), or play Reserve cards.

To start a battle, players compare army strengths (kept in secret until armies fight). The player with the lowest strength begins by adding cards until his total is greater than or equal to the opponent's. If the total is exactly equal, the opponent must play a card if he has one. If the total is greater, the opponent may play cards in the same way. At any point, if you are unable or unwilling to tie or beat the total, you lose the difference in units and are retreated away an equal number of spaces.

Sounds pretty abstract, eh? It is. If you have no spades, then you better not find yourself fighting in spades regions. If you have lots of diamonds, then you can boldly venture into diamonds. The more cards you have, the more flexibility you have.

Reserve cards count as any number from 1 to 10. Why would you want a smaller value? This is where the tactics of the game come into play. Say your opponent is up 6 in a battle. You have no cards left in the appropriate suit, but you do have 1 Reserve card. You could play it for 10 and be up 4. But now what if he plays a 13? You will be down 9, losing 9 units and retreating 9 spaces--a dire loss. Say you play your Reserve card for 5. Now you are only down 1, losing a single unit and retreating 1 space!

Another interesting way to use a Reserve card (or a normal card of the right value) is to make very high jumps. Say your opponent is up 8, and you have an 11 and a Reserve. You could be up 1 with the Reserve or up 3 with the 11. What if you made the Reserve into a 7? Now you are down 1 and can continue to play cards. You play your 11, and now you are up 10!

I find all of the above very cool, but also so abstract as to bring Friedrich almost completely out of the wargame genre. It is rightly called a hybrid. However, change the combat to a CRT or a Battle Card system (eg Hannibal), and it would probably not even be any fun.

The 3 smaller powers (Sweden, Imperials, and Hanover) seem relatively useless other than being buffers and minor threats. Fortunately, you never have to play only them (until powers are eliminated).

Each turn of play after the first 6, a Fate Card is drawn from a shuffled deck. The cards determine the order of a number of historical events that slowly bring the war to an end: various countries pull out, etc. If Fredrick the Great can last until this time, he wins.

I can see this game easily playing in 2-3 hours my next time. For now, it's an A game (will suggest) partly because I like the system, and partly because I want to try stuff now that I have seen the system in action. I don't see it ever falling below a B game (will play if suggested).

The game is very pretty and has nice--albeit small--wooden discs for the generals. I loath the cardboard standups as seen in Wilderness War and Hannibal.

Friedrich image by oceano

Unity Games XIII

2007-08-06T11:43:00.000-05:00

I will be attending Unity Games XIII this coming Saturday, August 11th. I'd love to meet the readers of this blog and the listeners of The Metagamers podcast, and perhaps play some games. I'll also have a trunk-full of games that I'll be selling. Ask me for the list at the con. We can sneak out to my car between games.

See you there!

Geek Movie Puzzler

2007-07-25T13:51:00.000-05:00

Head on over to this GeekList to see how much you know about obscure geek-loved movie quotes and obscure game links, or to add your own.

Essen '07 Picks

2007-07-23T21:54:00.000-05:00

Scanning this excellent GeekList, the following are my games of interest for this year's Essen games fair:

Amyitis: (Interest B) I love Caylus and Mykerinos, Ys is ok, and Yspahan is a flop. But I'm still interested in anything Ystari puts out.

Brass: (Interest A) Martin Wallace equals immediate interest.

Civitas Hamburgum: (Interest B) I love Antike, but dislike Imperial.

Die Suche nach dem Gral: (Interest B) I remember the original (Conspiracy) from college. I found the idea very cool. Will the remake have any changes?

Kingsburg: (Interest B) I've only seen the draft rules, but it sounds pretty good.

Municipium: (Interest B) Heavier Knizia equals immediate interest.

Roma II: (Interest B) The original is a good game, but degenerates too frequently. If this new version fixes the startup issues and wild card imbalances, I'm all over it.

Through the Ages: (Interest A) If the reprint has good quality, I'll buy it without even having the rules ahead of time. That's saying a lot.

Veritas: (Interest B) The description sounds cool, although the mechanisms by which you "spread your truth" are unclear.

Knowing what I like, have I missed anything interesting?

A Year in the Making

2007-07-15T01:27:00.000-05:00

A year ago, my brother recalled having tried to play Advanced Squad Leader with me back in 1993. He remembered the game fondly. At the time, my knowledge was insufficient to play even the simplest scenario.

I wasn't so much taught the game by a co-worker as I was led through it choice by choice. Ok, you can shoot now if you want. Can I move? Only if you are done shooting. Can I rout this way? Yes, but then I get to sort of shoot at you. You are better off moving just one hex. The simplest of concepts was never internalized. I was fascinated and undaunted by the magnitude and the rules, and although I bought my own copy, was never motivated enough to try to figure things out by myself.

In July of 2006, I was motivated by my brother's interest to find a wargame for us to play--hopefully one that we would spend more time playing than learning. I knew of the existence of the ASL Starter Kits (at the time, only 1 and 2), but I wanted to do a proper search and see if something other than the ASL line was available.

I looked at a whole gamut of possibilities including Fire in the Sky, Ardennes '44, Bonaparte at Marengo, Lock & Load, Hammer of the Scots, and Empire of the Sun. I even won a copy of one of them (EotS I think) from The Dice Tower, but decided I probably would never play it, so I asked Tom to find it a better home.

I needed something that appealed to both of us, and my brother was partial to World War II tactical squad-level games. I was unimpressed with Lock & Load's graphics and posted rules snippets.

I decided to give the ASL Starter Kits a try. By this point, #2 was available, but #1 was sold out. At the time, I think it was due for reprint in August. So I waited. It was pushed to September, then November, then January, then March. Somewhere in there I found a BGG'er who was willing to teach me. I decided that by the time #1 was available, #2 would be out of print, so I bought it. At least I'd have my own copy of the rules to digest in the meantime. #2 has all the rules from #1 with fixed errata. The changes between the versions are clearly marked.

Starter Kit #1 finally came out, but was unavailable at retailers where I bought other games. I figured at least Boulder Games would have it eventually, so I waited. It wasn't happening, so I broke down and ordered it, along with A Victory Lost, from Bunker Hill Games. I got my copy, carefully cut out and clipped the counters, bought a great storage case and organized everything, and waited for the opportunity.

Tonight was that opportunity. My brother came over. We setup the board for scenario 1: Retaking Vierville. I taught him everything he needed to know--from scratch--in order to play. Thankfully, I didn't have to teach any support weapon stuff, since I don't know it too well. As I expected, Defensive Fire was the most difficult thing to explain and to understand.

My brother took the Germans, who are trying to retake the French city which the Americans occupy. Both sides get reinforcements over the first 3 turns. He played a fairly conservative game, as expected for a beginner. This keeps your units safe, but puts the pressure on during the final 2 turns. You really need to push a bit.

Once he got all his units on the board and into place around the central area, he started to work on the buildings required by the victory conditions. Any one would do. All my units were in place as well, reaching the city without much interference. This usually bodes ill for the Germans.

Following a nice Prep Fire attack, I had to rout 2 units, leaving a front-line building with just a leader. I know, bad idea. Send the leader with the routing units, right? He concentrated some effort on this lone leader, and threatened to advance into the hex. I suggested--this being a teaching game--that he first deal with my one stack that could fire as he crossed the road. He started to do this, but not quite. We are alike, he and I, so I let him experiment to see what happened.

Before I realized what was going on, his attempts to "deal with" my western stack became an outright onslaught. We was no longer going for the eastern building! Even so, he managed to get a unit unscathed into the building with the lone leader, ambush him, and take him out before I fired a shot.

This is what I love about ASL. I've played this extremely simple scenario at least 6 times before and it's never been the same twice. Even a beginner was able to surprise me, and disrupt my plans.

We had to put the game on hold in the middle of turn 4. The entire session took about 5 hours. This included teaching the game, playing it, various chit-chat, and pizza. I was very happy with this session, and I think we've found what we were looking for. I can't wait to flip sides and Retake Vierville myself.

Game Night

2007-07-14T00:27:00.000-05:00

After 10 or so plays--the last just tonight--Power Grid is losing steam with me. I've complained before about its inelegance, but that is not really the issue. The real problem is its lack of granularity in three different areas.

One, another player cutting you off from the only city you can built to cheaply can be devastating. You can't build. Therefore, the fuel you might have just bought at less-than-reasonable prices is wasted. The money you spent on it could have been used for a better plant, or saved to build elsewhere. And I don't really enjoy the spatial aspects of this game.

Two, the fuel market can be ridiculously unfair. One player could buy coal for 1, while you might have to pay 5. Players do not have enough control over their turn order to make this huge difference a matter of strategy. It almost feels like you are caught in a machine, moving at a specific pace trying not to get ground up by the gears.

Three, the game often ends with one player spending more cash than they had in the entire first half of the game building 4 or 5 new connections. The notion of tempo is completely lost. It's all or nothing.

I rate my games with fractional values because I like to compare even those that are very close in appeal. But when it comes to picking games for game night, I pretty much have 4 categories:

A - Games I will suggest and play any time: Taj Mahal, El Grande, Age of Steam, Princes of Florence, Maharaja.

B - Games I will play if others suggest them: Caylus, Carcassonne, Santiago, Manila, Attika.

C - Games I will play, but will actively try to suggest others: Ingenious, Reef Encounter, Oasis, Yspahan, Diamante.

D - Games I will not play (skipping game night if necessary): Ticket to Ride, Fairy Tale, Hacienda, Antiquity, Runebound.

Power Grid has moved from a B game to a C game.

Next up was a 2p game of Lord of the Rings with Mary Ann--a first time for her. I've only played twice before, and both times were solo. I had to refresh a little before playing.

I'm always amazed at how bad the original rules are, as well as the expanded version by Chris Lawson. I simply fail to see how anyone not obsessed with figuring out the game, and willing to spend hours on BGG, will ever figure this thing out. It's not a complex game by any means, but both sets are missing that very important game overview that would pull it all together. And the individual sections describing the flow of, for example, the active player's turn, are horrendous. I can't believe these were written by Knizia himself. Was it Hasbro or FFG's work?

Anyways, the game rocks. We played the entire Moria board incorrectly (we played only a single card after resolving any event tiles), and still managed to win.

I don't know the special cards off the top of my head by any means. At one point I was trying to decide if I should play cards or draw cards. I decided to draw cards. Mary Ann (as Sam) said, "Master Frodo, I really think you should move us along." I was down to 3 cards, but who am I to argue with Sam...or Mary Ann for that matter. I played 2 of my precioussssss cards. On my next turn, with only a single card left, Mary Ann plays Lembas, allowing me to draw 5 more cards! Nice job.

We destroyed the ring with Frodo and Sam at 4 corruption, and Sauron at 11, a very good result compared to my previous attempts. The game was a hit. If it holds up over the next few plays, I may look into the expansions. I'd appreciate the thoughts of anyone who has played any of the expansions, which work well for 2, and why.

Lord of the Rings image by breakmanynecks

Game Night

2007-07-12T23:03:00.000-05:00

One of the best game nights ever just happened. We had 4 serious gamers, and played my #3 and #4 games back-to-back.

Age of Steam is not suffering at all from repeated recent plays. However, I wonder if there are any winning strategies that don't involve players keeping all their tracks connected together. Every time I consider building away from my "empire", it seems it will gain me nothing and ultimately cost me a lot.

I was doing fairly well through the mid-game. On turn 7 (out of 8), I had a critical decision to make. My best play was to Urbanize and make two 4-link deliveries. This would net me 8 income. I had enough cash to secure going 2nd from the auction, and Urbanization didn't look too attractive to the player with$ 10 more cash than me. It was clear he was going to outbid me no matter how high I went, so I settled for 2nd.

He chose Urbanize, and to rub it in, built a different city on the site I had planned to use. This forced me to use my first Move Goods action to upgrade my Locomotive, and make a 5-link delivery using 4 of my own links. This ultimately cost me 12 VPs. I think I lost by about 14.

I also had an entire wasted turn. I miscalculated a delivery, then built a link that was useless. It felt like that moment in Caylus when you place a worker on, for example, the carpenter, but are unable to acquire a wood cube before building because of the execution sequence.

The Production action was used very often this game, and proved to be valuable. After my first two games, I considered it a weak choice. But in this game, with many deliverable cubes placed during setup, the board emptied quickly.

El Grande came next. By the end of the first scoring round. one player was ahead by about 20 points. This lead only got worse after the second scoring round.

I was playing an unusual game. By the end, I had not used my 10, 11, 12, or 13 cards. Needless to say, I went last quite a bit. This works well in the scoring rounds, but also means you get the choice of only 2 action cards (in the 4p game). The King card (#5) was always taken early. I did my best with cards that let you move cubes around, and managed to position myself to score in many regions, while seriously diminishing the leader's position.

Somehow, I squeaked out a win 107, 104, 103, 95.

El Grande image by garyjames

Unusual D&D Session

2007-07-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

Saturday saw our party of 6 long-time adventurers once again in the unknown. The main story arc has been going on almost since the start of the campaign 3 years ago. Sometimes it feels like we are no closer to solving it now than we were then. Our situation involves a group of local cities and towns, werewolves taking over various positions of power, a strange cult planting operatives and consecrating temples, and a lot of people dying.

Our treasure finder¹ was contacted by a local treasure finder guild. They had been aware of suspicious activity in the area for some time, but were unwilling to take action. When they saw us investigating, they told us of an ancient ruins in the woods where people would meet. They secretly guided us to it.

It turned out to be an old Elven temple that had long ago crumbled. Beneath the mound of collapsed columns, however, there was quite an extensive dungeon. The initial set of chambers yielded a gate trap and a couple dozen skeletal guards, some of which were wrapped with muscular tissue. Killing them--which was exceedingly difficult--only seemed to pass their powers on to the neighboring beast. In other words, we had to kill the easy ones first. The party's overall offensive capabilities were enhanced by the use of several sorcerer Fireballs and clerical Turns.

Raising the bars let us into 3 ancient and desecrated temple chambers. Behind one altar, we discovered a hidden stone panel which revealed a long-descending stairway. Having exhausted ourselves in the previous battle, we decided to make for the surface and setup camp.

Now, as usually happens in D&D, the bad guys get surprise, and the bad guys are in the dark shooting at the party in the light. In this case, the tables were turned! Our fire-less camp set into the trees on the edge of the clearing kept us hidden from the 20-odd men spotted by our watch. They were mingling around the mound talking. Some were obviously of the magical sort, and others were obviously guarding them. One in particular was being guarded more carefully. They wielded the barbed blades often accompanying the enemy we have encountered.

We whispered our plans as we carefully put ourselves into attack position. We decided initially not to use anything that would give away our location, so I refrained from magic, and set my crossbow. Three, two, one. Arrows flew from the darkness impaling the supposed leader. One! Two! Three! Four! Five! He was one tough spellcaster, if that's what he was. I dubbed him: Boromir. Six! Down he went.

The soldiers started fanning out. Our Ranger used a Wand of Entangle. This kept about half of the men, including all of the robes ones, in place for now. Another round of arrows dropped several more guards, but now they knew which direction we were in. I switched to Magic Missiles. The Cleric cast Enchanted Weapon. The Dwarf switched to his axe and charged.

About 30 seconds later, the entire group lay dead, the party stunned with success. And then it happened. The words you do not utter in the presence of the DM. Someone asked, "Did anyone take any damage?" The DM happens to be my brother. He noted the passive-aggressive taunt with a smirk, but he is not one to change anything in his campaign to make it more difficult because of something like this. Still, the karma was in place...

In the morning, we ventured back to the hidden door and continued down. We found ourselves in a medium-sized room with a statue in each corner. Bow-wielding guards appeared behind the two farther corners and began shooting. We quickly split up. Then some kind of spellcaster appeared (out of thin air!) along with a large animated stone creature.

The two guards proved easy to kill, the magician much more difficult, and the stone beast impossible! It seemed unaffected by arrows, axes, magical weapons, magical spells of fire and cold. In short, we had no way to even hurt the thing. I began to retreat from the room after seeing how much damage it was doing with a single blow. The rest of the party, having a renewed sense of invulnerability from the previous evening's fun decided to stay and have it out.

It was touch and go for a long time. We had two characters near death only to be revived by potions or our Cleric's ranged healing spells (he has a ring). By the time they decided they must retreat, one character was dead, and the party was split between two hallways by the stone beast's long reach (Attacks of Opportunity are very poorly designed in D&D).

The Paladin sacrificed himself so that we could get the dead body out. The beast chased him. His best option was to duck into a room through a door too small for the beast to follow. Unfortunately, this room contained more spellcasters. The Paladin slammed the door shut and quickly summed his warhorse. His only chance now was to gallop past the emerging men and the beast, and pray to survive all the attacks. His horse collapsed from the first hit, and the Paladin from the second.

The session closed as we were dragging the fallen Dwarf up the stairs.

¹ We have a Paladin in the party.

Age of Steam

2007-06-21T08:09:00.000-05:00

I pushed for Age of Steam again this week since we may lose our borrowed copy. My second session did little to alter my feelings about the game, but some of the warts are starting to show themselves. I'll get to that later.

This was a 5-player game. The cube distribution favored long links; I think there were only 6 initially deliverable on our first builds. Perhaps this is typical, but, in my first game, we delivered a lot more before needing to increase our link capabilities. Urbanization became the action du jour. First Move was more valuable than First Build because there was more competition for cube colors than there was for board space.

Age of Steam is a fantastic game. I even raised my rating from a 9 to a 9.5--a spot which it shares with El Grande.

So what are these warts?

One, towns ruin an otherwise elegant system. You not only have to build track to the town, you must add track in the town hex to connect to the smaller circle within. Also, since track built in the town hex counts for VP's, Urbanizing over a town to kill opponents' VP's become viable. This is way too gamey. Towns should just be full gray hexes with no internal tracks.

Two, the rules are not very good. For all his posturing about the rules, "minimum spanning set" diatribes, and his precious not-allowed-online intellectual property, John Bohrer just makes himself look like a fool. For example, the rules for Unfinished Track, Income Reduction, and VP's for track in towns (example notwithstanding) are all arguably unclear. The point of the rules is to teach the game, not to be as "minimal" as possible. And these rules fail on both counts. They are not terrible rules as rules go; they just do not live up to the hype.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Martin Wallace comes up with for Age of Steam 3rd Edition. I'm hoping that all of the above is taken care of. Mayfair should do a good job with the rules, and they will be posted online. I'm also hoping that they do not go overboard with art and/or graphics. The plain style of the original board is very functional, although the scoring/goods boards could use a better treatment.

Age of Steam image by Nodens77

Tide of Iron: Scenario 2

2007-06-13T01:41:00.000-05:00

Tonight was our second game. We decided that we are going to play all the scenarios each using the same sides all the way through. This way it won't be as easy to remember the mistakes of the opponent from the day before.

With my new cases, setup and cleanup were much faster. We played this scenario in only 4 hours from empty table to empty table. This included many pauses for rules checks. I thought it would be easier than our first game, but many things came up which we just couldn't answer. I posted all my questions to BGG. Mike Z has been great about supporting the game.

I had hopes after the first game that the rules were 99% complete, but I'm starting to see the holes as I try more complicated things. By holes, I mean 2 things: ambiguous or unaddressed issues, and touches of inelegance. Examples of the latter are assaults from razor wire, and assaults against vehicles. Granted, the system is simple and abstract, but a more realistic system (mostly small tweaks) would be so much more elegant. Most of the issues I have are small.

Setup is getting to me. I simply can't stand putting 36 tiny infantry figures into 9 bases. Since most of them are filled with regulars, I simply adopted the convention that an empty base is full of regulars. If it takes hits, I add figures. This saves about 15 minutes.

I played the Americans, and made a lot of silly mistakes, like not playing the command card that dropped in a "Neutral 2" marker, and then when I did do it, I forget to occupy it. Several times, I moved units one less than their full movement and didn't think to fire at half. With all my mistakes, I easily overran the German defenses, occupying 5 of the 6 buildings on turn 7. The Germans had a single squad left at that time. We couldn't come up with a better way for the Germans to play other than to throw everything they have at holding the bridge.

Tide of Iron image by earache

Tide of Iron!

2007-06-08T04:13:00.000-05:00

I played Tide of Iron tonight. Where do I begin...

We started at 7pm, opened the box, laid out all the components, punched and punched and punched, setup the first scenario, played it, put it away. And it was barely 3am.

Punching and organizing the bits took about an hour. Putting the game away took about 20 minutes. See those cases in the image? I need some of those. That would easily save 45 minutes per session.

Setup was about an hour, but only because I had to describe some of the rules to make the decisions meaningful.Then another 30 minutes to go over command, cards, turn sequence, movement and combat. The first game turn was about 90 minutes. Turns got progressively faster--maybe as fast as 20-30 minutes.

In the first scenario, the Americans are holding a line on one end of a 9-board map (3x3). The Germans must occupy 3 hexes of this line at the end of any game turn to win. The Americans must prevent this. The Germans get the use the Command and Morale decks, but the Americans get Reinforcements and Support. It really looks bad for the Germans, but my opponent was up for the challenge.

I lost a double machine gun squad early on. I really thought I would be overwhelmed, but my stream of reinforcements--albeit regular infantry--was enough to fill the gaps the Germans were blasting in my front lines. My favorite move was to use combined fire (4 squads) against the mighty Panzer (in open ground) which resulted in heavy damage. It could no longer move, but it could fire at half firepower for the rest of the game.

As is done in ASL, we decided to create a verbal notation for attacks. A normal attack with 4 black dice and 2 red we called a "4-2". A long range suppressive attack with 5 black dice and 1 red we called an "L-5-1-S". The above combined fire attack on the tank was a...oops! As I am typing this, I realized we played that wrong. Infantry has a range of 1 against vehicles. We did, however, remember that all the supporting units fired at half firepower. This kind of thing will likely happen often in your first game. There are quite a lot of rules to wrap your head around. Not really exceptions. Each unit type just has its own characteristics in various situations.

Contrary to all expectations, I didn't have to run to the computer to check BGG for a rules question once. The rulebook isn't perfect, but we managed to figure out stuff that wasn't 100% clear.

Components

The boards are so warped! Just kidding. They are solid and flat. Did I mention they are flat? The map graphics are kind of low-res and blurry, but at least they are very functional and not harsh in the least. All the cardboard bits are thick and colorful--very nicely chosen icons and colors to contrast the boards and plastic. The men were a little smaller than I expected, but after handling them, I don't know how you could make them bigger without making everything else bigger. I didn't have much trouble fitting infantry into the bases, but it does take a while. All in all I'm pretty happy with the production.

Mechanics

This is a solid game. You are playing not only a positional game, but also a game of management of command (which lets you buy initiative and cards that give you cool benefits), unit composition, using special abilities, careful timing, misdirection, and risk. For example, mortars can only fire at enemy units that can be seen by one of your non-fatigued units. If you wait too long to use them, you may have no "forward observers" left. Units in Op Fire mode (waiting to shoot at moving enemy units) become fatigued if they get pinned or disrupted, and a savvy opponent will know when to take advantage of this.

The normal/suppressive fire concepts really work well. In fact, suppressive fire can be deadlier than normal fire. If you are will to use up 3 units (and 3 actions), you can take an enemy unit from normal to pinned to disrupted to routed (eliminated) with only 1 resulting hit each attack. Leaders play a huge role, especially in their ability to remove disruption markers, and to allow pinned units to fire. Leaders and elite units increase effective cover against suppressive attacks. Squads with medic specialization increase effective cover against normal attacks, and can heal (replace) lost men.

I really felt like I had complete control over my fate, and many ways to accomplish my goals. In fact, the more I understood how the mechanics worked together, the harder it was to decide what to do. I really enjoyed this first game. The only thing that might give me pause to "whip it out and play a quickie" is the setup time. It really is a beast. When we play it, it will likely be the only game we play that session. I expect our next play of this same scenario to take about 3 hours.

I'm probably ordering Descent with my next game order. I now need more space for my games! Maybe I can get by without a bed?...

Tide of Iron image by WhereAreTheBlackDice

Age of Steam!

2007-06-07T02:47:00.000-05:00

Tonight was the night. A lost, found, borrowed, and transported copy of Age of Steam arrived amidst our game night. We had 7, and were eager to split into 2 groups: those who wanted to play AoS, and those other losers (I forget their names).

I've played Railroad Tycoon once. I heard that AoS is a heavier and less forgiving version of RRT. I expected very bad things if I made the slightest mistake. I expected at least 1 of 4 new players to go bankrupt before the end.

In reality, AoS is more elegant. The only nasty thing about it is that you can only issue shares at the beginning of each turn. This forces you to plan...and plan...and plan. You may want to build a certain link. What if someone builds it before you? Where will you build next? How much will it cost? What if you have to bid more than you expect?

From what I could see, there are two extremes. Either you decide to hold yourself to a fixed amount of cash and deal with shortages by building less or in a different location, or you plan for the worst case so you can do something good no matter what happens. I didn't plan everything, and I didn't examine contingencies too much. I always made sure I'd have enough cash to build the minimum of what I wanted (and expenses after income), plus a little slop. This worked well for me, although I did not win.

I wouldn't call the game forgiving, but there seems to be plenty of room for many different styles of play. I did not miss the cards found in RRT, but I did miss the 3 rounds of building track. I liked that I could focus almost exclusively on building and shipping.

As the game reached the midpoint, the number of possibilities became large. Each turn began with several minutes of silent calculation. The one part of the game that is opaque to me is turn order. If I'm not going first, how can I have any control over what action I select? If I allow myself go 2nd, I might not get what I need. Do I take a chance? Should I be able to figure out what the player who might go first will select? Maybe that will come with experience.

The board is a minimalists dream: bold, solid colors, very little artistic license that confounds playability, and simple discs and cubes (ie no silly plastic trains or empty city markers). The only negatives are the horrible rules (we were eventually able to figure out what they meant by inference and common sense) and the cheap plastic coins.

I like AoS slightly more than RRT after this one play. I might actually try to pick up a copy some day.

Age of Steam image by Nodens77

Yet Another Game Order

2007-06-03T23:20:00.000-05:00

Tide of Iron seems to be in short supply despite the thousands of copies pouring into the US. So when I saw only 8 left at Game Surplus, I didn't waste any time. It will be mine.

And while I was at it, I added a couple more games from my want list. I was inspired by Mark Haberman, one of my co-hosts from The Metagamers podcast, to give Fjords a try (during the show no less). And, of course, one of my recent favorites, Notre Dame.

Many, many pages of rules to read this month...

Game Per Cubic Inch

2007-05-31T11:52:00.000-05:00

Or "Game Per 16.4 Cubic Centimeters".

I commented on BGG the other day about In the Shadow of the Emperor--a personal favorite with a great online implementation. It struck me that some games just have small boxes, but a lot of game stuffed into them. Of course, many wargames fall into this category, but I don't think a ton of euros do.

Of note, In the Shadow of the Emperor, Struggle of Empires (and perhaps some other Wallace designs like Perikles), Louis XIV, and Intrigue come to mind, which I played last night. It's not simply game length that I am talking about, but also complexity and immersion. Judging by size on the shelf, and not knowing any better, one might misjudge some of these small boxes.

What are some other games that might qualify?

Wargame Order

2007-05-29T12:35:00.000-05:00

I was excited to find Troll & Toad a couple of weeks ago. They sell euros and wargames. This makes it easier to get all the games I want in a single shipment without having to order twice, pay for shipping twice, or wait for a package to arrive twice. I was going to wait until several euros on my want list were released. Since then, one of my wargames went out of stock there.

So I said, "screw it," and decided to order the wargames by themselves from Bunker Hill Games. They are very close to me and charge exact shipping. Late Saturday night I placed an order for ASL Starter Kit #1 and A Victory Lost. Sunday morning (Memorial Day weekend!), I got an email to verify shipping method and amount. The order shipped Tuesday morning, and will likely be here Wednesday. Note that, since I placed my order, T&T has AVL in stock again.

I've already started playing AVL on Vassal. It's rather deep for a game with such simple rules. I had figured out the basics of play just by reading the reviews and rules questions. My online opponent filled in the missing pieces. The Vassal implementation has a few huge advantages over face-to-face play: it highlights active units when their command chit is drawn, and it can display command radius for HQ's (even when it snakes across a bridge). The only downside (especially for the Axis) is that you have to zoom way out to get a good overview of the situation to decide what chits to select for the current turn. It would be awesome if you could right click on an HQ and select "use the chit for this HQ".

The game covers Operation Saturn, in which the Soviets launched a major effort to push back the Germans (and other minor forces) late in 1942. It ended with Manstein's famous Panzer counter-offensive. The Soviets have superior numbers, but their units are weak, less mobile, and more difficult to command. The Germans must fall back very quickly or suffer flanking and severe losses. As the turns progress, the Germans get better reinforcements and command ability. If the Soviets push too far, they will get cut off. If they do not push enough, they cannot secure enough victory points. Railroads are key for reinforcements. Supply lines must be maintained or your units become weakened.

Playing the Axis feels a little bit like playing the French in Bonaparte at Marengo. except that the Germans need to run away a little more deliberately. If you try to hold your ground at all, it's very easy to get flanked. And if you are forced to retreat into a zone of control (a space adjacent to an enemy unit), you lose a step (in most cases counter gets flipped for first step, then eliminated for second).

I've played 113 games so far in May (with 2 more game nights coming this month). I only missed one day, which was an all-day D&D event. The real hits this month have been Struggle of Empires, Torres, and Colossal Arena.

A Victory Lost image by mandelberg

Yspahan

2007-05-27T21:29:00.000-05:00

I am beginning to question my ability to pick games I will like just by reading the rules. The latest in my sporadic series of bad calls is Yspahan. It's got lots of choices and a nice dose of randomness to keep things fresh, but it fails to generate anything positive within me.

The theme is meaningless. The choices are uninteresting. Of course, there's skill involved, but not at a level that I care to exercise. It has the hallmark of a game with direct interaction, yet every time I have the chance to steal a row of dice or send a cube to the caravan, I start to wonder what's on TV.

The fact that it got a Spiel des Jahres nomination should be a clue that this game was destined for my "maybe never play again" pile. It will likely join other recent uninspiring purchases: Hermagor and UR.

Yspahan image by richardsgamepack

Google Reader

2007-05-25T19:48:00.000-05:00

I've been having such trouble with BlogLines that I gave up and decided to give Google Reader a try. It's pretty painless. You can export your feed list--folders and all--to an OPML file, then import it into Google. Let's see how this one works...

Stocks Are Down

2007-05-07T06:49:00.000-05:00

After playing Imperial last week, I started thinking more about stock games. These are games where players can buy shares (or whatever they are called) in some commodity (or whatever they are called). You try to make your shares worth more, and the opponent's shares worth less. You also try to acquire more shares that are likely to increase in value.

I consider all of the following to be stock games: Acquire, Imperial, Manila, Gheos, Arkadia, and Modern Art.

The problem I have is that, at any point in time, the "commodity speculation" part of the game is not a very interesting exercise. If you have more of one share than anyone else, you want to increase its value. If the only other player who has more than you is behind you in points, the same holds true, to some degree. If you are behind in all shares, then you need to buy more. All by itself, it's just a math problem.

Of course, the ways in which stocks are acquired, and the ways in which their values change is the interesting part. But, sadly, all games of this type have lost just a little bit of shine for me.

New Blogger

2007-04-19T12:01:00.000-05:00

I just updated my blog to the new Google-based one because they stopped letting me login using the old system. If anything bad happens, there's nothing I can do about it.

It looks like the feeds may have been messed up by this change. I had to resubscribe on BlogLines to make them work. If anyone gets the feed for this post, let me know so I don't have to notify people to update. Thanks.

Game Nights

2007-04-07T16:24:00.000-05:00

I participated in 2 fantastic game nights this week.

The first started off rather slowly while we were waiting for people to show up and be ready to play. Two of us played Factory Fun and Lost Cities. The former was no better and no worse than my first experience. The latter was my first time with the real game--all my other plays being on BSW. I think the cards are just too big and difficult to shuffle. Perhaps they felt the need to take up space in the box.

The night ended with a 4p game of Goa. One player had played once before, and, for the other two, it was the first time. As with similar auction/action games, like Princes of Florence, the essence of the game is the evaluation of the resources that players are bidding on. And, as in Ra, the values of the various resources are different for each player. For example, if you have no ships, a tile that gives you a few ships may be worth a lot, but to another player with many ships or the ship track upgraded to 4, it might be worth little. Will you get it cheaply? Will he force you to pay more? This was a learning game, but everyone got right into it quickly. We had 2 players with flat development boards, and 2 players with some tracks on row 1 and some on row 4. The big surprise was the ending scores: 34-35-37-38

On the second game night, with 3 players, we did our usual "pick 3, pick 2, pick 1" thing.

The first round was a choice between die Magier von Pangea, Terra Nova, and Masons. Terra Nova was chosen. Did I ever tell you this is a nasty game? It has some of the flavor of Hey! That's My Fish!, in the movement and blocking mechanisms, but rather than removing hexes as you pick up pieces, you place blocks to form walls. Enclosed areas score points for the player with the most pieces inside, but only if they have 3 or fewer terrain types in them. You can place walls adjacent to any piece you have moved this turn. You can use your pieces to block movement and wall placement. I would describe the nastiness of this game in this way: Imagine Carcassonne. You are about the finish off a big city where you will score 30 points when another player slips in and places a wall inside, closing off a much smaller space which only gives you 6 points.

Our second game was a choice between Medina, Maharaja, and Beowulf, the mythic hero winning out. I was glad to play this again as I am still looking for its essence. I had to teach the game to both of my opponents. This is a game of hand management and planning. However, I find myself tempted to compete heavily at every episode. I certain this is a bad thing, but it doesn't help me break the habit. Some episodes have positive rewards, even for the "losers", but this being a Knizia game, I'm not convinced that that is a good time to back off early. I played way too conservatively, and ended without a scratch, but only 24 fame. The player with 2 wounds and a scratch had 37 points. I'm definitely starting to see that there something here beyond my vision, which bodes well for the game. That, and the fact that everyone loved it.

Our third and final game was a choice between Liberté, Mission: Red Planet, and Louis XIV. These were not my 3 picks! I had to remove one of them for the final chooser. This decision was painful! I hadn't played a full game of any of these, and I wanted to play them all, dammit! After successfully making a Will Check, I put his majesté back on the shelf, expecting soon to be sending my astronauts to Mars. To my utter surprise, Liberté was selected. I even warned them that this game would take a while to explain and to play, but they were keen. Onward!...

This game is really difficult to look at and evaluate the situation. In this rare case, it is not the fault of poor physical design. It is the sheer nature of the 2-dimensional matrix of players vs factions. However, if the game was just this, it would ultimately fall flat. The essense of this game is the personal display: a set of 4 or 5 cards left in front of you rather than discarding them. These cards, if still there at the start of the next round, are picked back up into your hand to be used again. This is a great way to recycle useful cards. Cards in your personal display are also used to break ties during the election. Liberté is all about ties.

Since the regions are resolved in a fixed order, you must figure out where the ties are, when they will be evaluated, whom they will be against, and what cards each of those players will have (at that point) to use in breaking the tie. Having all your ties later in the sequence means the opponents might have fewer cards with which to compete against you. Being last in the player order means you get to decide which card(s), if any, to play. There is a certain magic in the way all of this comes together.

The first round ended with a split of all the 3 major VP's between the players: 5, 2, and 3. The Moderates, won the election and all players had presence in government, making the Terror and Purge cards very dangerous. At the end of year 2, I could see that the radicals were going to win, and that I had control of them by quite a large spread. To my dismay, the Radicals achieved 16 votes--one short of a Radical Landslide win for me! The same player went last 3 rounds in a row, and used this position to win a couple of battles and some regional VP's. In fact, we were unable to come back from this, although I don't think we worked well against the leader. Final scores: 15-17-30!

We ran into one strange rules issue during play. If anyone reading this blog who knows the game could answer this question, I'd appreciate it.

Liberté image by GeoMan

Game Dump

2007-03-29T04:28:00.000-05:00

The past 2 weeks have been busier than usual. The good news is that some of that was playing games. Over 8 different sessions, I played a total of 21 games. I'm certainly not a quantity over quality kind of person, but if you can combine the two, even better.

I played another game of El Grande using my 2p variant. Clocking in at about 60 minutes, I have to say this variant gives a heck of a lot of enjoyment per unit of time--"gaming density" if you will.

On our normal gaming night at home, we played Cartagena, Tikal, and Carcassonne: The City--all with 3 players--followed by 2 games of Roma. The gaming density for all versions of Carcassonne is starting to feel on the low side. It's a great design, and fun to play, but somehow every game I play feels twice as long as it should. Perhaps it's a function of the extra time it takes when playing face-to-face. Tikal, on the other hand, is dense, even with occasional AP issues. Our first game of Roma was one of the degenerate types where one player just gets 2 Forums and gets perfect rolls for 3 rounds in a row. Our second game, however, was the best I'd ever played. It took over an hour. My opponent hovered around the 16-20 VP mark for a long time. He was able to keep 2 or 3 holes on my side most rounds, forcing me to shun my Forum for fear of an instant loss by attrition. It was a fascinating battle using and recycling many kinds of card combinations.

I finally got to experience Shogun, the reworked version of Wallenstein. It plays almost exactly the same except for the addition of bidding for turn order and special powers. I think the changes improve the game somewhat. They give you something else to use your gold for, and let you compete for the minor powers (+1 gold, +1 rice, +1 attack, +1 defense, and bonus army). The board is beautiful and double sided. The fact that it's an island makes the game feel a little more real, as well as allows for some longer sea connections. It has a similarity to Antike in that, although you are building a military force and conquering territory, you have to be mindful of the winning conditions so you don't get carried away doing the wrong things.

A few fillers--Catch Phrase, King Me!, and For Sale--carried 6 of us late into the night, to be ended with a fantastic session of Shadows Over Camelot. We were working together so well that, at the half way point, I was convinced there was no traitor. We carefully choreographed our movements and actions, playing on a knife's edge of losing outright. When we reached that vital moment when the last card needed to be played on the final quest, the player there got all pissed realizing she didn't have the "5". She had only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before, so none of us thought much of it. However, on her next turn, she Accused another player who had shown absolutely no sign of being a traitor. Her identity was revealed! Fortunately for the knights, we only needed 3 more player turns to finish the game successfully. 9 White Swords. 11 Siege Engines.

On a lazy Sunday, we played Pheonix--one of Mary Ann's favorite new fillers. It's okay, but at 45-60 minutes for a 3-round game, it's a little too long for me. That night, I went to BSW to check out their latest addition: Venedig. I'll save my comments on this game for an upcoming podcast.

Our next game night at home was short. We played Jambo. It had been so long, we needed to refresh ourselves with the rules. I'm always interested in games that feel like Magic: The Gathering--which has worn out its welcome--without the collectibility or expansions. Next we played Medici vs Strozzi. I was worried Mary Ann would find this game a little too math heavy, but she loved it. For such a simple game, it's got a unique two-tiered force system at work that I will have to think about some more in order to describe.

For lack of a third on BSW, Linnaeus and I decided to try Bonaparte at Marengo on VASSAL and Skype. This game was the hit of the past 2 weeks for me. We had both previously read the rules at least once. Still, it has enough unusual, unexpected, and non-intuitive things that it is difficult to internalize. We had to stop after almost every action to see if we were playing properly. Our first game took 3 hours with the French winning by easily holding back the overly-passive Austrians. Our second game--with a better understanding of the rules and the tactics--ended with the French surrender at 6pm (morale 5-0) and took less than 2.5 hours. I think we can get it down to about 1.5 hours once we are more comfortable playing, but I don't see this game having long-term staying power. I'd prefer to play just once in a while to keep it fresh.

I just finished a game of Capitol on Ludoholic. I think it suffers quite a bit playing online. I came away not really liking it, but I'll certainly try it again face-to-face if the opportunity presents itself. That being said, the web implementation is decent.

Game night at the condo was lackluster once again. It took us over an hour to get started playing a 6-player game of Power Grid on the Benelux map. Even with this shortened version (only 14 cities), it took us over 3 hours to play. That left just enough time for a great 4p game of Ra. At the end of the first Epoch, I had the 2-3-5 Sun tiles. At the end of the second Epoch, I managed to upgrade these to the 2-3-6 Sun tiles. Even so, I ended the game with 6-7-10 and came in a distant second place.

On the same day that I decided to add more possibilities to our 6p game nights by reading the rules to Struggle of Empires and finally punching all the counter sheets (I had to make a new insert) to my year-old virgin copy, I was contacted by a fellow BGG'er to see if I wanted to join a group to play it online. So far, there are 13 of us from various time zones with various preferences for live vs PBEM play. My preference is, of course, live play. It's difficult to get 6 or so people to schedule several hours all at the same time, but I'm willing to try in order to play a game of this kind.

Bonaparte at Marengo image by Lord_Prussian

Game Night at the Condo

2007-03-15T08:19:00.000-05:00

Yet another vague 6-player start, followed by a veto of I'm the Boss by me, and we were off playing Cluzzle. I have nothing against the game, but it's always a bad sign to start off a game night with a filler or a party game. I tend to choose the hardest thing on my card so it's unguessable in the first round no matter how good a job I do. I chose "park" and built a bench and a tree. The bench was just a 3-sided blob, and the tree looked like a mushroom cloud, but it was guessed in round 3. After about 45 minutes, we were only about half way through, and 2 more players arrived, so we called it quits.

Next came Factory Fun, the first time for 3 of us in this 4-player game. The game is nicely designed--physically and play-wise. The optimization of your machines, tanks, and pipes is quite an interesting puzzle, though perhaps it would be more fun as a web flash game. I disliked the part of the game where you have to quickly choose which machine to grab. Sure, you can make a partially-informed guess as to what you need, but the coupling of quick-draw intuition followed by careful mental calculation makes for an uneven tempo. I think I would prefer bidding for the tiles, so I could decide what I really needed and how badly I wanted it. But, of course, that would take away the "Fun" and who wants to play "Factory". That being said, it's good enough to give it another chance.

At this point, I think everyone was ready for something meatier. I managed to get Perikles on the table and setup once again. Would we actually play this time? Sort of. It was the first time for everyone, but I managed to teach it with almost no peeks at the manual. I decided that rather than teaching every detail of the entire game up front that we would play each phase one at a time and I would explain just enough to get through it. Still, it took 30 minutes to get started. I went all out to get Sparta, hoping to grab one other city if possible, but it didn't happen. Another player got Athens and Corinth, but had to deal with 4 battles this turn while I had only 1.

I chose the player to my left to start the round placing military units so I could go last. This was a miscalculation. Because of the distribution of 1- and 2-shard tiles, the player to my left actually played last. I defended Sparta in its single battle, and attacked 2 other cities. There were no allied units played. My defense was unchallenged--only netting me 2 cubes--but my 2 attacks failed. Sparta lost 4 major units in the first round. I quite liked the simple CRT combat system with the single or double staged battles. There's just enough randomness that you never know what's going to happen, and the game is always different.

After 2 hours, we decided that we didn't have time to finish the game, so called it quits. I didn't get a good read on the other players. I think they were somewhat overwhelmed by the complexity. I really liked it...so far. I'll have to play a full game to be able to judge the inter-round continuity, which Perikles has in spades. Winning leaders lose support--possibly all of it. Defeated forces lose units, which may or may not be under your control again in the next round. Based on players' influence and past leaders (statues) in the cities, players may have conflicting attitudes about each city. This is definitely one sweet and juicy treat.

I closed the night out by teaching P ÜNCT. I find that I prefer ZÈRTZ more and more because of the faster play.

Perikles image by toulouse

Game Night

2007-03-11T09:01:00.000-05:00

Mary Ann proposed Keythedral, Carolus Magnus, and Alhambra. I chose Keythedral. There are 2 minor problems in this otherwise excellent game. One is that the rigid starting layout of the field tiles and cottages makes for a less interesting repetition of rounds. This is mitigated somewhat by the changes in starting player, the changes in resources needed over time, the upgrading of cottages to houses, and the ability to build fences. Still, I wish players could somehow modify the layout over time (aside from the special rule that allows you to move a house if it gets cut off by fences).

We decided to throw in the expansion tiles to make the endgame more interesting. This mitigates the second problem. The resources needed to complete the 12 tiles in the basic game are mostly iron, stained glass, and gold. All of these resources must be acquired by trading for them in the market. This means that the placement of workers degenerates from wanting specific resources, to just trying to get the most resources. The expansion tiles correct this problem by having, for example, 6 water, or 2 iron and a Law Card.

For our second game, I proposed Mexica, Tikal, and Attika. Mary Ann chose Tikal, which she had never played before. This was the first time I had played my copy; I wasn't even sure if I had punched it yet. This is one of those games where the insert looks very well designed, but that is completely inappropriate for travel.
Having played Mexica a few times before, Mary Ann picked up the gist of Tikal very quickly. Surprisingly, there were no real gotcha plays other than a mildly annoying volcano she played adjacent to my first camp during the B phase. I treat all games that I am teaching as practice, so I wasn't going for the throat. That being said--and I am making no excuses--I was taught a good lesson.

After the first 2 scoring rounds, we were exactly tied at 56. After the third scoring round she was ahead by 11 points. In the final scoring round, I played to maximize my score. This was a huge mistake. By doing this, I ignored the fact that I was leaving some of the larger temples vulnerable. For example, by trying to score a 7 and a 2, I allowed her to take control of the 7 on her turn. If I had given up the 2 and beefed up the 7, I would have scored 2 points less and denied her the 7. This is such a basic move that I'm certain I considered this in all my online plays.

The good news is that Tikal was a hit. Next time I will add Java to my proposed games.

Tikal image by garyjames

Game Night at the Condo

2007-03-08T14:27:00.000-05:00

This was the second week in a row where the number of players and indecision resulted in a somewhat disappointing set of games.

Two new games for me this week: UR and Beowulf. Both were okay, but I didn't come away with any good or bad thoughts. I think they will both need to be played again to form any sort of opinion. In UR, our game finished without players interacting at all. It made me think we were playing wrong, no matter how certain I was that I had the rules right. Beowulf just seemed overly random--definitely not the kind of game my Geek Buddies would rave about...but they do.

The night ended with 2 games of Subbuteo, and a great game of Zertz.

Games I want to play on game nights. Why do they come out so infrequently?

Taj Mahal
El Grande
Maharaja
Railroad Tycoon
Shogun
Perikles
Liberte
Princes of Florence
Struggle of Empires
Louis XIV

Beowulf image by itiswon

War of the Ring

2007-03-05T15:32:00.000-05:00

A surprise call late Saturday night by Mike opened the possibility of playing War of the Ring on Sunday. I quickly erased everything on my busy schedule (actually I had nothing else to do whatsoever) and wrote in WAR OF THE RING with a thick, black magic marker. I stared at the words in awe as if Death himself had spoken them.

Sunday morning, we spent about 90 minutes setting up the game and going over the rules. We weren't sure that we would be able to finish in one day, so we setup the game on his beautiful Subbuteo table. This gave us plenty of room for all the extra stuff, and allowed us to stand at the table as we planned our evil--and I suppose good--plots.

We weren't in any particular rush, ate a bit, and stopped a few times to lookup rules and check the FAQ. With all that, my first game played in about 6 hours. Just to be extra geeky, Mike downloaded the LotR soundtrack on his laptop and we listened to that while playing.

The Game

War of the Ring is basically a simple wargame with some alternate victory conditions. It is not card-driven as BGG suggests. Cards modify game states, affect combat, and create events. Your choices are driven by die rolls. At the start of each round, both players roll a number of dice. At the beginning of the game, this is 7 for the Shadow player and 4 for the Free People player, and can be increased up to 10 and 6 respectively.

One result of a die roll is an Army action, which lets you move 2 Armies or make a single attack into an adjacent region. Combat is simple. Both the attacker and defender roll a die for each Unit (Elite or Regular) present up to a maximum of 5 dice. For each friendly Leader (Leader figure, Companion, Minion, Nazgul) present, a player may re-roll a die. Rolls of 5-6 are hits. Each hit removes a Regular Unit or reduces an Elite Unit to a Regular Unit.

This process is repeated until the attacker decides to stop, the defender is eliminated, or the defender chooses to retreat. Before each set of die rolls, each player may play one card to affect the current round of combat. There are defensive benefits to being in a Stronghold, a City, or a Fortification. The Shadow wins if it can take 10 points worth of regions. The Free People win with only 4. Strongholds are worth 2, and Cities are worth 1.

Getting new Units onto the board is done using a Muster die roll. You can only do this in friendly regions with Strongholds, Cities, or Towns, and only if the Nation in question is "At War". This status is obtained by moving a counter for each nation along a political track. Muster rolls, special card events, and being attacked are the normal ways to bring a nation closer to it.

The Fellowship itself starts in Rivendell and moves across the map in secret. Each time you use a die roll to move them, you advance a counter that shows how far away from your last known location you are, but not where. Each time you are revealed by the Shadow player's action (or choose to reveal yourself), you must place the Fellowship figure on a region no more spaces away from its last known position than the counter indicates. This is similar to an old space wargame from 1972 called 4000 AD.

The Shadow player can set aside a number of dice (rather than roll them) for The Hunt. Each time the Fellowship moves, a number of normal d6's is rolled equal to the number of Hunt dice. Any 6's rolled means the Fellowship has been found, and a tile is drawn from a bag to indicate how much Corruption is taken. If the Fellowship reaches 12 Corruption, they succumb to The Ring and lose the game. There are a couple of unpleasant ways to prevent being found.

And, of course, despite the miltary situation, the Free People win if The Ring is destroyed.

The Design and Theme

This is really quite a nice piece of work. The map, the units, the actions, the events, and the choices are all evocative of the story. You can choose to follow similar paths and plots, or make your own. If Sauron concentrates all his will on finding The Ring (ie uses his dice mostly for The Hunt), then he sacrifices many military options, and vice versa.

I am a little confused about the Fellowship movement. I don't see why you would ever take any path but the one through Moria. Since nothing can interact with you at all (other than Corruption), why would you ever take a longer route? Perhaps I missed a rule or some nuance in my first play.

That being said, I found myself almost ignoring the Fellowship, reacting more to my opponent's military moves. In fact, in that regard, it had an almost Twilight Struggle feel to it.

The physical design is a big issue. The image above shows the actual set I played with. Each nation's pieces have been spray-painted the same color as their map border. This is crucial to effective play, and even with that, there are some difficulties.

Some of the map locations are way too small for the number of pieces that would be typically placed in them. Cities, Towns, and Forts are poorly differentiated and don't stand out enough on the board. There are also many other size issues, like information counters and text on cards.

In one section of the rules, it implies that all Strongholds, Cities, Towns, and Fortifications are Settlements. Then in another it says, "Fortifications or Settlements", while in another it says, "Stronghold or Settlement". The good news is that this is one of the few ambiguities.

Rules: A-
Physical Design: B
Play: B+ (very tentative)

War of the Ring image by msherwoo

Weekend Gaming

2007-03-05T08:47:00.000-05:00

This past weekend was another exquisite non-stop romp of gaming goodness. It always amazes me how much gaming can happen when almost none was planned. I think some people think it's too much of a waste of time to specifically plan for it, but end up enjoying themselves so much once they start that they want more. Of course, we geeks already know this, and make no attempt to hide it.

Despite feeling like I'm climbing to the second plateau in Zertz, I did lose one of my three games to Mary Ann. I think I had fallen into a pattern of plays. It's a good thing she's there keeping me on my toes. We also played 4-player games of O Zoo le Mio and Carcassonne. The latter is seriously starting to lose its luster for me with non-gamers; it's only fun when everyone is really playing a solid game.

I kicked some serious ass in 3-player Manila. Evaluating the worth of the Harbor Master is still problematic. If another player is interested in roughly the same good as you, then it's much better to let them have it. Compare this to Ra, where you always know the exact worth of each lot to all players.

We also played two games of Antike--one 3-player and one 2-player. In the first game, I was the Germanic Tribes and made the mistake of spreading to the east and west in order to get ports on both sides. This resulted in me having two small fleets that couldn't support each other, all for only 1 VP (7 seas). Rome took advantage of my sprawl and cut me in two. In the second game, I was Rome and Greece. I used the Greek fleets to keep the Phoenecians at bay while the Greek armies and Rome pressed hard on the Germanic Tribes. We both reached 8 VP's on the same turn, but I won the race to 9.

I also played my first game of War of the Ring, but I'll save that for my next post, since I have so much to say.

Antike image by garyjames

The Metagamers

2007-03-04T06:59:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't heard elsewhere, Mark Haberman, Jay Little, and I have started The Metagamers--a podcast by board gamers, for board gamers.

The first two episodes are up. The first one is a little rough. We were still working through some audio recording issues, and trying to decide how best to structure the show and ourselves. We decided to go with a slightly less scripted format for episode two. We think it's an improvement. Note that we were trying to record a few shows before going public, so either some of the "news" is not really news any more or much more information has become available.

We hope everyone enjoys the show. Please post comments, feedback, and questions to the podcast website (above) or to the show's master geeklist.

Game Night at the Condo

2007-03-01T16:28:00.000-05:00

After getting all excited about game night, it ended up being rather luke-warm for me. We started with 5 players, but expected a 6th, so we started with a filler. Sigh. Once we had 6, we fell into the trap of choosing something none of us would have chosen individually. Next time I will demand we play Railroad Tycoon, Antike, or split into two groups of 3.

Boomtown
Not a bad game. Just not something to start a game night with. It's just a little too long for game so light. The good news is that I finally won a game with 91 gold.

Acquire
I own this, but it's in the pile of games I'm not interested in playing again. Perhaps it's just from a few bad experiences, but I just don't see the game here. The only way to win is to get the shareholder bonuses, or to guess very early and buy a ton of stock in a company that's going to worth much more in the future. Either way it seems to come down to what tiles you draw. On turn 2 I knew I would come in last. There was absolutely nothing I could do the entire game to get a shareholder bonus, nor to even start a corporation. This game is now solidly in the "never play again" pile.

Wyatt Earp
A nice twist on Rummy. Rather than rushing to "go out", players use melds to increase their stake in an attempt to bring in the 7 wanted men/women. The payout rules are rather quirky, but not cumbersome. This game played in about an hour for 4 players with 3 of us learning. We could probably play in 30-40 minutes next time.

Wyatt Earp image by Geosmores

The most wonderful day of the week!

2007-02-28T03:18:00.000-05:00

A packful of games means a sackful of joys
For millions of girls and for millions of boys
It's Game Day for a Geek
The most wonderful day of the week!

A bag full of games waits for gamers to shout,
"Wake up, don't you know that it's time to go out!"
It's Game Day for a Geek
The most wonderful day of the week!

Games galore
Scattered on the floor
There's no room for more
We have to try..Samurai!

El Grande for Jimmy, and Caylus for June
And maybe a copy of Railroad Tycoon
It's Game Day for a Geek
The most wonderful day of the week!

Guess what tonight is? :)

Game Night

2007-02-25T23:12:00.000-05:00

Playing meaty games with a crowd of gamers makes me want to try these games at home, even if it might only be 2-player. For my three games tonight, I picked El Grande, Antike, and Princes of Florence. After a one-minute explanation of each, Mary Ann picked El Grande. Her three games were Keythedral, Magna Grecia, and O Zoo le Mio. I chose Magna Grecia, but I would have played all three.

El Grande
This is one of those games where the box says 2-5 players, but really shouldn't. We played using my own variant which was easy enough to explain once the very elegant default game was understood. My variant involves the following 2 changes from the basic rules:

One, score two values instead of just one as the rules suggest. This provides a much better dynamic. Consider a 5/3/1 territory. If you use the rules as written, then whoever is ahead gets 5 points. If someone is ahead by 5, the other player may as well not bother. If two numbers score, then placing even one Cabellero takes 3 points from the first place player. The scoring possibilities change from just 5-0 to 5-0 and 5-3 (or 2-0). There's much more impetus to compete, and the "score only the first value in all regions" card still has meaning.

Two, rather than the first player choosing one of 5 action tiles, then the second player choosing one of 4, I provide an additional dynamic. Say player A played the higher power card. Player B starts by removing one of the 5 action tiles. Player A now chooses one of the 4 remaining and takes his actions. Now Player A removes one of the 3 remaining action tiles. Player B chooses one of the remaining 2 and takes his actions. The effect of this is to make the 2 players act like they are going 2nd and 4th instead of 1st and 2nd. It also keeps the decisions interesting.

This variant worked really well. It's still not as incredible as a 5-player game, but it's completely playable where the normal 2-player game isn't. I wasn't particularly nice, but I didn't try to absolutely crush her either: 75-62.

Magna Grecia
It's been so long since we played this that we almost had to learn from scratch. The rules for building cities and roads refuse to lodge themselves in my brain. For some reason, it didn't really click before that Magna Grecia is a stock game that uses a spatial system to drive the economy. With that in mind, I found it much easier to plan my actions.

Our game was relatively non-confrontational. We started from opposite sides of the board, and built towards the Oracle-heavy center. I used every action tile with a 5 resupply to perform an extended resupply action and get 7 cities/roads. By the end of the game, I had built all my roads and all but 4 cities. Mary Ann was able to secure 4 of the 7 Oracles, and almost caught up: 32-31.

Magna Grecia image by warlock

Game Dump

2007-02-22T23:15:00.000-05:00

I've been playing so many games over the past week, I haven't had time to talk about playing games.

On the Underground
Played this a lot, with 2, 3, and 4 players. It's really a nice design. The passenger mechanism works great. The only bad part of the game is that while a player is considering where to build--usually based on how to maximize the passenger for themselves--there's nothing for the other players to do. Fortunately, the game is light, short, and even with 4 players, the wait is not excruciating.

Shadows Over Camelot
I finally got the be the traitor! It was only a 3 player game, so I didn't discover my identity until we had 6 swords. Fortunately for me, I had Lancelot's Armor. I was able to bury the not-so-awful Black cards and act as though I drew 2 bad ones. The players foolishly left 11 Siege Engines in play when it came to my turn. I think they must have figured there was no traitor.

Masons
After the first half of the game, I was embarrassingly ahead. I think I started playing with a more cavalier attitude. My opponent quickly caught up and won by about 5 points. My bad. This was the first game I've played where the board was almost "full".

Downfall of Pompeii
I played this another handful of times. Nothing much to say.

Villa Piletti
Dexterity and physics. The pieces are all different lengths. Since they support the levels to varying degrees, you can get screwed if your piece is slightly longer. I don't really like the play or the design of this game. When the tower falls, the only thing I feel is, "It's over. Now we can play something else."

Tumblin' Dice
It's strange. If this game had dice with no numbers and scoring was purely based on the number of dice at the given levels, it would be much less luck-driven...and much less fun. Still, it's only good as a filler. If this came out in the middle of game night, I would probably go play something on the Wii.

Liberte
Finally got this on the table! I liked it even more than I thought I would. There were so many little things that jumped out at me as we played. There's more depth here than the rules would suggest. The game is also not as complicated as the rules would suggest. I can't wait to play this again!

If you play 3 blocks in the same province, you get more influence, and only lose 1 if you win the election there (other than ties or Paris). If you play 3 blocks in 3 different provinces, you might lose a block in each if you win all 3 elections, and will have no blocks left in the next round for your efforts.
Using cards with 3 blocks (and placing them in your personal display) too early in the round is dangerous. The opponents have more time to counter your influence, and to remove your card. However, if you wait too long, the round may end before you get to play them.
The order of resolution in the regions and the provinces is important since breaking ties involves playing cards from your personal display.
Going last is significant. Don't worry if you get no VP in the first year.

St Petersburg
It was nice to sit down and play a meaty game without having to teach anyone or learn how to play for a change. We used the alternate scoring for the Nobles which reduces the effect of differences. It had no effect on the outcome, but our scores were further apart than they usually are in games I've played.

Twilight Struggle
I got to teach a first-timer who had read the rules already. I played the US. I thought that would be enough of a handicap to make the game roughly even. I managed to get to 6 VP by the end of round 2. Then it was all downhill. I lost in the middle of round 7, the USSR reaching 20 VP. The game took about 4 hours. I found the game to be significantly more enjoyable this second time. Knowing what type of events exist makes the decision process an order of magnitude easier. Twilight Struggle is now a game I look forward to playing again. I'm keen to win as the US.

Princes of Florence
My first ever game of PoF using the actual game. Until this evening, I had only ever played using the dreaded BSW interface. We had the full complement of 5. It took a while for me to get comfortable with the physical mechanics of the game since I had never had to perform them before. I started the game with 2 Laboratory Profession cards and two that overlapped in Landscape and Freedom. I grabbed the first Jester for 1000, and easily performed the best work during round 1. My plan was to grab at least one more Jester early, but I never got another the entire rest of the game. I acquired an additional Profession card, a Recruiter, and 2 Builders. I published 5 works in all. My downfall was in preparing for round 7 at the end of round 6. I decided that I only needed 700 florins to cover the cost of a Builder and a Building. During the auction, another player called for the Builder. Oh %$#@! I had to go up to 500 to get him, leaving me with only 200. I ended up spending a PP to pay for the Building, which gave me the best work. I tied with another player at 54 PP, but had no cash left. He had 300. It was a fantastic game face to face. I may have to bump it up in my ratings to Amun-Re levels.

Yspahan

2007-02-15T12:04:00.000-05:00

A huge storm with lots of blowing snow and freezing rain caused the cancellation of the usual game night. So we stayed in and played Yspahan using the official 2-player variant. This was the first time for both of us.

2-Player Variant

There are only a few tweaks to the normal game to play with 2 players. One, use only 8 of the 9 white dice. Two, the current player gets a second action at the end of each day (similar to the system used in 2p San Juan). Three, any yellow dice added by the current player remain in place for his second action, but cannot be used (if selected) by the other player. Four, building is now a normal action instead of an optional action; you must do it instead of placing cubes, taking camels/coins/card, or moving the supervisor. Five, only 2 camels on each row of the caravan are used.

It's fairly obvious why these changes are necessary. With the extra action given to the current player (which results in alternating actions), each player now gets 10 or 11 actions per week as compared to only 7 in the 3p and 4p games. Making building a normal action forces you to forego other action if you want to build.

Not Sure I Get It

I understand the mechanics of the game completely, but I don't understand the design, and in particular, the scoring system. There are 2 basic ways to score points: souks and the caravan.

If you fill an entire souk--and keep it full by the end of the week--you score points (from 3 to 12). However, the only way to get cubes into the caravan (other than by a few of the cards) is to play cubes into the shops then use the supervisor to transfer them to the caravan. Either you lose the cube from the board, or you spend a camel to ship a cube from your reserve instead.

Either way, you must get cubes onto the board. So you have to fill up souks and grab lots of camels to protect them, or play cubes and use the supervisor to get them to the caravan.

Will other players ever help you do this? Well, clearly if you have a big score in a souk (eg 12), it's better to force one of those cubes to the caravan. But normally, it's very little change in points to kill a souk. You might be getting 6-8 points for the souk, or an extra 3-5 in the caravan for the transferred cube. Is it really worth using an action to do this to another player?

I guess I just don't understand why the game was designed this way.

Enough Actions?

Each player only gets 7 action (10 or 11 in the 2p game) per week, then the town is cleared. This is barely enough to do anything interesting. By the time you get the Hoist built, for example, the week is over. If you went for all 6 buildings, I'm guessing you'd score little else.

The action limit is, of course, there to coincide with the potential filling of the town and/or the caravan. But this is of little consolation. At any given point, I can seem to make no plans, even short term. Which action do I take? Does it even matter? If nothing looks useful, I can always go for a card, but that's a shot in the dark.

Summary

After one play, I place Yspahan at the bottom of the Ystari pile of offerings. It's a mish-mash of mechanisms with no real goal or discernible theme. I see no strategy nor tactics whatsoever. We did find ourselves discussing ways to improve our results, so all hope is not lost. Perhaps with more play, we will find the game in here.

Yspahan image by richardsgamepack

Fury of Dracula

2007-02-11T02:37:00.000-05:00

I got an opportunity to play Fury of Dracula tonight for the first time. I had read the rules a few times before, so I played the role of Dracula. The other poor fellow had to manage all 4 Hunters. It took us about 30 minutes before we were up and...er, walking. There's quite a bit of game setup, and there's a lot of rules to explain before you can start.

The game quality is pretty high. If I could change anything, it would be to make the insert work for what's in the box, and to make the large city squares a little bigger so you can see them when a figure is there. The rules need a ton of work. They are disorganized, rough, and ambiguous. Using the enclosed rules, the errata, the latest FAQ, and reading all the Q&A on BGG, you learn about 95% of what you need to know to play the game. That's pretty sad. Still, we had a good time.

The Hunters distributed in a wide pattern. I started in France. Bad luck (or Hunter greed) flushed out my trail during the first day, and I was on the run. The Hunters forced a fight during the day and staked me for 5 damage. I made my way to Spain, then Portugal, then out to Sea. The Hunters were initially upset at the ease of my escape, but somehow managed to guess my destination.

The map looks very open. It seems impossible that 4 Hunters could ever trap you. But when you're in Lisbon, with one Hunter in Madrid, another in Genoa, and another in Berlin, the water starts to look attractive, even though it hurts.

Landing back in France--perhaps a mistake--I was pounced upon again, the Hunters aided by Agatha. By the end of my next 2 fights, I was down another 5. I raced away using Wolf Form, heading for Italy, hoping to increase the distance. The Hunters guessed right again and started to close me in. I went to Sea yet again from Venice. I could have been in Rome, and was hoping the Hunters would think that. They did not.

I moved to the Ionian Sea. The Hunters used Resolve and Events to get 2 of them to the ports surrounding Athens. With only 4 life, I had to disembark. I played a road block on the only road out of Athens and landed there. I wasn't about to attack during the day. Reward was in the Mediterranean Sea, and I used Control Weather to drop him in Ireland. A Hunter used Sense of Emergency to move directly to Athens (bypassing the roadblock?). I had to laugh at the sight: 3 Hunters and Dracula in Greece, and a lone Hunter in Ireland.

He then played the card that replaces a fight with a die role each to lose life. I rolled a 6! Dracula died a painful death in the evening of the third day. Europe was destined to be completely uninfected with my spawn for eternity...or until our next game.

Fury of Dracula image by riledguy

Game Night

2007-02-10T02:57:00.000-05:00

Tonight was a fairly long and late game night for us. Since we sometimes have different preferences about what to play, we have come up with a nice system to select games. I choose 3 games I would like to play, and Mary Ann picks one of them. For the next game we switch roles.

Downfall of Pompeii (x2)
I was lucky enough to get this on the table the day after I received it. I had just finished my first solo pass through a game when Mary Ann came home. Perhaps seeing it in play was the reason she chose it over El Grande and Mexica. I didn't get a great vibe about this game from my geek buddies, but I had read the rules myself, and thought it would be good enough to own.

After playing twice, I understand what people don't like about it, but it didn't bother me. I'll address the issues here:

>> It's too random.

It is very random. You draw cards that tell you what you can do. You draw tiles that determine where the lava flows. These 2 factors are no more random than Ticket to Ride, and you have more meaningful choices in Pompeii. I could do without the Omen cards, unless they allowed all players to remove a piece.

>> There's not much to do in the first half of the game.

It does feel like this, doesn't it? But there are interesting choices. One, you want to get as many piece on the board as possible, which gives you the best chance to save the most. Two, you want to clump those pieces as much as possible, so you can perform longer moves during the second half. Three, you want your pieces as close to the gates as possible. And four, you want a nice scattering of pieces, so that a blocked gate or two doesn't completely wipe you out. These are opposing forces in some cases.

>> The two halves of the game seem unrelated.

This might be true for you if you focus only on theme. One theme is adding people, and one is removing people. When I'm playing a piece onto the board, I'm thinking about how I am going to get it out a gate. How far is it? Where will the lava be coming from? I think a slightly better design would have been to ramp down the playing of people and ramp up the lava at the same time. This would have allowed players to do both actions in inter-related ways. Of course, this would not have been thematic; you don't stay and have babies when the volcano erupts.

>> There's little player interaction.

Perhaps. In some sense, you are playing against the game as much as against the opponents. But one of the opponents is a volcano after all. You compete for board position, but only if you hold cards that allow you to do so (I found almost no cards useless). You selectively play lava tiles to kill or surround the opponents' people and block the gates. You also play a game of leapfrog with the opponents' people. Being the first to leave a space is more beneficial. This is the opposite of games like Verflixxt. In fact, the second half feels a little like Through the Desert in this regards.

I think Pompeii will hold up as a light and fun choice. The deck preparation is a little much, but at least you do it once and don't have to mess with it again like in Power Grid. The volcano mechanism is very thematic, but serves virtually no purpose (only to break ties). I think it's just a gimmick to sell the game. 17-7 and 17-14.

Entdecker
Mary Ann's 3 games were Entdecker (new), Keythedral, and Magna Grecia. A tough choice for me--which was great--but I opted for the one least played. Since we had played this for the first time recently, we dove right in, and it played pretty quickly.

We used the standard setup. Mary Ann went right after the +10 island and a fortification, while I opted for the cheaper approach, placing as many scouts as I could. Once a nice central sea lane opened up, I dropped my own fort on it. This only gained me a single toll, but otherwise hindered my opponent's choices.

Unlike Carcassonne, in Entdecker when there's a single-tile hole, it gets filled in automatically. This rule can be used to huge tactical advantage. You can explore an "easy" tile to force the fill-in of a difficult one without having to pay the 4 gold for it.

My abundance of scouts gave me 5 huts (with no 5's!) to her 2. I was also ahead about 15 points. Mary Ann did a great job catching up in scouts, but could not catch up in points. 123-87.

Phoenix
Our first play with our new copy. Our games of Phoenix are getting nasty. When we first started playing, we'd pretty much just do our own thing until someone finished their side. Now we are swapping pieces when it hurts, and changing the blocks for the win. 24-15

Downfall of Pompeii image by GeoMan

New Games Are In!

2007-02-08T21:51:00.000-05:00

My new game order arrived today. They are all now opened, caressed, punched, counted, and bagged. My comments that follow are regarding the physical quality of the games only.

Downfall of Pompeii
I opened this last because it was the biggest. Up until this point, I had no missing pieces. Alas, there were 3 missing yellows! Other than that, Pompeii scores very high in physical design. The board is pretty and functional. The tiles all punched out perfectly with no nubs, including the huge hole in the board where the volcano goes. The large red tile bag is a nice touch. The rules are very good. An "A" for Mayfair...as long as I get my missing pieces.

Hermagor
Once again, the tiles punched out perfectly. The board is standard. I usually have no problems with game art, but complain about the graphic design. In this case it's the opposite: the design is fine, the art is not great and is rendered at a resolution low enough that you can see the pixels. Nice bits, bag, and box insert. The rules, however, put Valley Games' Die Macher rules to shame. They used some crazy font. I think it's called Illegible Sans Serif. Overall a "B+".

Medici
When talking about Rio Grande Games, I used to tell people, "Don't worry about Jay. He'll either do it right, or make it right." Since the recent releases of Goa, El Grande and now Medici, I don't say that any more. I've already discussed the terrible choice of colors in Medici vs Strozzi. They used the same art/graphics in Medici as well. Is that a light grayish-yellow or a light yellowish-gray? The insert (and basically the entire box) is a joke. There's nowhere for the board to go without modifying the insert or tossing it. Why spice bags instead of simple cubes? The cloth bag is too small for the number of tiles that need to go in it. Hermagor has a larger bag and fewer tiles. Speaking of tiles: since when does RGG publish a game where the tiles have nubs on them? I once asked Jay if he was going to be picking up Kreta. He said no because it wasn't good enough quality. Yet he's fine with Medici. Go figure. Overall a "C".

I think there's a Medici curse. No version of Medici has ever looked good. The strange thing is that it's the simplest game board ever. You need 5 tracks with 8 stages each. It's too simple to screw up. That may be the problem. With no real artistic or graphic design issues to deal with, they decided to make up issues. Let's use 5 shades of gray. Let's put the board into a mobius strip shape. Let's only show prime numbers on the score track. Don't quit your day jobs.

On the Underground
A small box (same size as Phoenix) with a huge gorgeous board (I was expecting something half this size) and tons of great wooden bits. After bagging all the colors separately, it's a little tight. The rules are very good. Overall an "A".

Phoenix
Colorful, functional, chunky wooden bits, a large bag, functional board, and nice rules. Overall an "A".

Trias
Standard hex tiles, tiny wooden dinosaur meeples, a good box, and black and white rules. This game deserves to be slightly larger with larger bits. Overall a "B".

UR
You can't get a solid "A" if I have to clip tiles. This game has 40 of them along with 4 cardboard player aids. I think I spent an hour clipping. Other than that, it's fantastic. The cubes are big, and there's 5 very large wooden planks for the ziggurats. Overall an "A-".

Yspahan
The dice, cubes, pawns, camels, cards, and rules are all great. The box and insert are awkwardly sized and organized for the many boards that need to go in and on them. A different design was required. Overall a "B+".

Game Night at the Condo

2007-02-08T01:24:00.000-05:00

Tonight saw some 13 gamers show up. The more the merrier. However, more players always seems to mean more distractions, more decision time, and more downtime between games. I took it as a good sign that a game of Zertz was in progress when I arrived. Soon after, a 6-player game of Cluzzle started upstairs, which gave me an opportunity to play...

Subbuteo
A "local" tournament Subbuteo player was in the neighborhood, and he was kind enough to go easy on me and only kick my ass by a little. I learned some new and "totally obvious" tactics like: you can block a man from behind by flicking one of your guys where the opponent's finger wants to go. It was a killer tactic against me. I also learned--and started playing by--the official offsides rules. Adding these rules changes play and setup quite a bit, but in subtle ways.

Tempus
My first play. Obviously, I'd head some pretty bad things about the game, but I hadn't read the rules myself, so I was determined to give it a fair chance. Half way through, one player was just winning the progress battle every turn. She just kept building cities, but kept only 3 hexes with pieces on them, so we couldn't attack. At this point we stopped and started discussing this seemingly game-breaking strategy.

A quick check of the rules revealed that we were playing incorrectly. Cities only score 1 point towards progress (full points at the end only). Well, this small point turned a broken game into a reasonable game. We played on from this point. It seemed as though this same player was now in not-so-great a shape.

The game feels a little bit like Trias and a little bit like Vinci. I like that there's no tech tree. Everyone just gains the same advances, with the progress winner getting them a turn early. There's nothing to hate really. I'm not big on "games of efficiency", but I still love Goa and some others. I can certainly see how Tempus might have undergone an enormous evolutionary process to fine-tune many of the game's systems. I can't say that the game feels under-developed, but at the same time, I can't call it great or even very good, but I'll certainly play again.

I won the 3VP bonus for reaching the Age of Flight, but failed to match the winner's 22 points.

Boomtown
The night was going to end, but we managed to get 4 together for a "quickie" 45-minute game. A cell phone means always having to say you're sorry. The winning score was 127. I had 74. I think I am over-bidding.

Tempus image by aceraxon

Game Order

2007-02-06T18:56:00.000-05:00

It's that time again. I'm down to only 23 unplayed games in my collection, and my shelves are full. Might as well add some new games to the pile and increase the tension on getting more new games to the table. The excitement of placing a new game order just never gets old. This time there's nothing really heavy.

Downfall of Pompeii
Yeah yeah. This is very light, and very random. It still sounds like fun, and something to play with a less serious group. I think I only read the rules because I was bored, but I think I'll enjoy this.

Hermagor
This game was on the fence for a long time. The rules never came out in English, so I was a little in the dark. I decided to grab the French rules and translate them to English. I posted these to BGG. I like the market "auction" mechanic, as well as the PowerGrid-esque expansion system.

Medici
I've been waiting for this one ever since it was announced. Was that over a year ago? I've since bought and played Medici vs Strozzi, and while it is math-heavy, I enjoyed it. I think a similar game with 3-5 players will be even more fun with less math (by virtue of the chaos of the extra players). The board design is better than all of the others, but still not great. I also dislike the use of Goa spice bags for markers.

On the Underground
Although I'm not really comparing the two, this game will likely take the place for me that Ticket to Ride does with others. By far the most attractive and functional board in this order.

Phoenix
Brownie points. 'Nuff said.

Trias
It didn't sound that good reading the rules long ago, but playing it sure was a blast. I love games where other players do things you never thought of.

UR
Very abstract, but interesting system. Maybe this game will be to me what Blue Moon City is to others.

Yspahan
Another hit from Ystari. What more can I say?

Downfall of Pompeii image by GeoMan

Game Night at the Condo

2007-02-01T02:16:00.000-05:00

Some game nights can suffer from severe logistics problems: players showing up and leaving at random times, people needing to eat, the distraction and temptation of Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution, and the transition time between games. One of the more ambitious gamers and myself decided to keep a supply of 2p games on hand to fill the gaps...

Zertz (2x)
I think I've reached the first level of play. Some of the more simple patterns are starting to become second nature. I am now looking a move or two deeper, and am able to see sequences of sacrifices to gain a ball or two that helps me. When the "board" gets smaller, it's very tough to find locations to place new balls without giving the game away. I like Zertz easily as much as Yinsh, Dvonn, and Punct. A huge advantage is its 10-minute playing time. I can't imagine a game ever taking more than 15 minutes. On the other hand, I have played games of Yinsh that lasted over 45 minutes.

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation
My first time playing. It seemed rather random, but I am told that after a few games, the subtlety of play will become apparent. It was very quick, and at no time was anything unclear. I had a chance to get Frodo to Mordor, but the enemy brought 3 minions to The Shire first. Note to self: remember the victory conditions.

Tumblin-Dice
Fantastically well-produced, silly-fun game slightly reminiscent of Crokinole. Players "tumble" dice down a wooden layered board trying to land them in the high-scoring regions (up to 4x). Dice can be knocked around and out of play (shuffleboard style). It goes without saying that every single die roll ends with simultaneous screams of joy and lament as 6's get knocked off the board or flip to their 1 side. A great filler that might fill the entire evening if you are not careful.

Cluzzle
My first time playing. You get a card with a bunch of words on it. You have to choose one of those words and make a clay model of it. If player(s) guess it in round 1, you and they get 1 point. If they guess it in the 2nd round, you and they get 2 points, etc. So the trick is that you want your model to be guessed, but not right away. Before each round of guesses, there's a 1-minute period where you can ask up to 4 yes/no questions of any of the other players' models. Again, if your question is too helpful, you might be giving away points. Cluzzle is more fun than I would have guessed, and I am looking forward it playing again.

Oasis
I went for the middle ground this time, trying to keep from running too low on cards. This resulted in me being 3rd or 4th for most of the game. I fell behind in tiles, camels, and scoring markers. The player who went 1st most of the time won the game handily.

San Marco
It's been way too long since I played this. We had 3 players--1 new--and about 1 hour. We used the variant that the first chooser is always the player currently in last place, randomizing it if there's a tie. I like to get creative with the card splitting. Rather than make equal piles, I sometimes like to make big piles with many points and small piles with few points. A common mistake is to make a pile with just a Doge in it. If you are left with it, the other players will most likely leave you no place to score. I focused on just getting my cubes on the board, and ended with a huge final scoring.

San Marco image by jenoe

Weekend Gaming

2007-01-29T13:31:00.000-05:00

This past weekend saw a surprising number of games hitting the table. So many, in fact, that I fell behind on my reading of the rules for Tide of Iron (Fantasy Flight Games) and Duel in the Dark (Z-Man games). More on those in a future post.

St. Petersburg
This is a classic for us, but it's not really shining for me any more--maybe at #50 in my ratings. At some point, the fun of the mechanics has to take a second seat to the fun of actually playing the game. This may go without saying for most people, but I do enjoy the challenge of simply "figuring things out". The strange thing is that I was wondering while playing St, Petersburg if the game Through the Ages felt anything like it: buying updates, gaining their benefits, and having these benefits feedback into future updates.

Zertz
I enjoy all the Gipf-series games. Again, I think it's the challenge "figuring things out". I haven't played any of them enough to do that, and that's fine with me. I have no interest in trying to solve any of them; I just enjoy the discovery of interesting tactical plays.

Terrace
A pretty Chess-like abstract. I've owned this game since its release in 1992. It comes out every now and then.

Ra
I hate to use the phrase "luck of the draw" with a game I rate a 10, but I feel like this is exactly the reason for my crushing 70-to-35 win. I got civ tiles and floods right when I needed them and when my opponent could not outbid me. My opponent took reasonable chances with end-of-round tiles and got hosed both times. You pays your money; you takes your chances.

Twilight Struggle
The big game of the weekend in terms of time. I had played a single turn a long time ago. We had both read the rules prior to playing. It took us 6 hours to play 8 turns (out of 10), before we had to call it. USSR was up 15 VP's. After this one game, I rate it a 6.

The rules themselves are fairly elegant, but the rulebook is only half the story. In any game with lots of unique cards that interact with each other and modify the rules, you must consider the cards themselves to be part of the rules. In the case of Twilight Struggle, this utterly destroys any pretenses of elegance. For a glimpse of this, check out this thread.

The other issue is the influence system. Insofar as individual countries are concerned, everything is great. Each country has a Stability Number, say 2, and you have to have that many more influence than your opponent to control it (the rules include another redundant condition). In addition, if your opponent does control a country, it costs 2 points to add 1 influence. This makes it easier to take control than to take control away. All great so far. However, the sheer magnitude of calculating Presence/Domination/Control over the larger regions of the board is too much. Every time you gain to lose control of an individual country, you need to be aware of the changes in control of the region. It's about the same as playing 7 simultaneous games of Tikal.

I think the game has some very good ideas that are implemented ad absurdum. I don't understand why it's so popular (but I don't care), or how anyone can play this game in less than 4 hours (unless they don't think at all about what card to play, how to use it, or where to place influence). El Grande does a much better job of giving the same kind of feel while keeping all of the elegance.

Tower of Babel
This is one of those games that forces you to turn your brain sideways, which I can never seem to manage. The one problem I have is that I always seem to offer every card I have of the chosen color. Perhaps this is strategically incorrect, but it worries me that there really aren't many interesting choices. Of course, you still have the choice of which disc to build on your turn, and whether or not to offer the trade card, but I'm worried enough that I lowered my rating a half point.

Iliad
I finally got to try this in a team game. It much better this way. The card-play is great. You not only build up your army and react to the opponents, but you also defend your partner. Figuring out who will get what benefits, how the markers will move around, and what the scores will be is still a little too heavy for the game.

King of the Elves
My first time, and maybe my last. Too much randomness and chaos for my tastes, especially for the time required.

El Grande
My second ever play of my newest favorite game. Every time I had a tough choice between 2 or more cards, I went for whatever option placed more cubes on the board, or that removed more of the opponents' cubes. I only consciously planned to compete in the Castillo during the first scoring round. Like in my first game, I led the pack for much of the way (or was very near the front), but did not win. And, again, the scores were very close (something like a high of 108 and a low of 97). I love this game.

Vegas Showdown
Brought out on a whim to fill the final hour. This game has the individual player board solitaire feeling of Alhambra with a bidding mechanism like Amun-Re or Evo. There are a lot of ways to get VP's, with some difficult choices about what action to take, what to buy, and where to place things you do buy. This is a pretty decent offering for an Avalon Hill euro game.

Phoenix
A simple and pretty game with mildly interesting choices. Mary Ann really likes it. I'm barely luke-warm on it. In my favor, the game is not available through any means that I am willing to pursue, so we can only play if I borrow a copy.

Twilight Struggle image by Chad Jensen

Game Night at the Condo

2007-01-25T00:27:00.000-05:00

In Maine, we are used to cold weather. Today it went from a balmy 34°F in the day down to a nippy 6°F at night. But no matter how bad it gets, it won't stop us from staying indoors, having pizza delivered, and playing games. We are hearty folk.

Zertz
My first time playing against a player who rates it a 10. That was my first clue that I was about to get my ass handed to me. And it was...twice. Even after glancing at the excellent Stephen Tavener's Zertz Strategy Guide, I was helpless against someone who knew even the basic tactics. This is a really good game. I knew I was going to like it before I bought it, but I was still surprised how good it is. I mean, in the end you are simply acquiring marbles by jumping and by isolation. But you are accomplishing this by forcing the opponent to set you up, and you must be willing to give the opponent more marbles than you are going to get--just make sure they are the wrong ones.

The thing about Zertz is that you really have to get over the hump of learning basic tactics. A bunch of mediocre moves equals a loss. I had to work hard to find moves that wouldn't be a disaster. My opponent kept doing stuff to me that was obvious immediately afterwards. I suspect this will be the case for quite some time. I could have played this game all night.

Goa
My first time playing with 3. The first time for the other 2 players. The thing about Goa is that no matter how many players you have, each player gets an average of 1 tile and exactly 3 actions (plus any extras) per round. So you would expect a similar scores. The only thing in the game that changes based on the number of players is the availability of the bonus expedition cards from reach the 4th and 5th rows on the development chart.

Finding efficient paths of development and evaluating tiles is difficult in your first game. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that most of Goa is about short-term planning. You may decide up front, for example, to go for the expedition track, but if you get no nutmeg during the first round and your colony fails, then you have to try something else. If you build ships, then decide on a later action to increase your ship track, this has cost you a ship (if you could have done the actions in reverse order). Regardless, the new players did fairly well: 46, 31, 30.

Other games played: Diamant, Basari, Santiago, Coloretto.

Zertz image by toulouse

Best Humorous Article: Runner Up

2007-01-23T06:31:00.000-05:00

This post won the Runner Up slot for the Best Humorous Article in the recent Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards. Congratulations to all the winners. There is some truly great stuff out there. One unfortunate omission was MaBiWeb. It is every bit as good as SpielByWeb--maybe even a little bit better--but is lacking the sheer volume of games. Still, everything gets better ever year: more games, more rules, more information, more ideas.

Game on!

Unplayed Games in the Top 50

2007-01-18T19:15:00.000-05:00

For the most part, I love to try new games. I like being exposed to new styles of games, new mechanics, and having to think in different ways. I have no compulsion to like what others like, but I do like to compare my tastes to others'. A recent discussion of the reprint of Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage got me thinking about his very thing. Here I discuss every game in the BGG Top 50 that I have not played, as well as my interest level (out of 10):

Battlelore (interest level: 0)
I just simply dislike the M44 system of letting your cards telling you want you can do and what you can't do regardless of how obvious a move you have. However, even if you could completely choose your actions, like in a real wargame, the system is too simplistic for me to enjoy. If I was locked in a room with only Battlelore for a month, I would not play it. I'd rather talk about paint drying.

Twilight Struggle (interest level: 9)
I only played 1 turn of this online. The experience was soured by the terrible implementation. The graphics are excellent, but the usability is poor. A friend is picking this up soon, so I'll get the play face-to-face.

Age of Steam (interest level: 9)
I love Railroad Tycoon, and I'd love to try its big brother. I've ignored it for too long because the rules were never available. Some day I'll meet someone who owns a copy. So who owns the rights to Age of Steam anyways?

Commands & Colors: Ancients (interest level: 0)
See Battlelore.

War of the Ring (interest level: 8)
I actually have access to someone who owns this game. They have even spray-painted the figures to match the colors of the home regions. This game is certainly not a typical one for me to like, but some of the mechanics sound very fun. Now it's just a matter of setting aside a day...

Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage (interest level: 7)
It's clearly a very hyped and sought-after game, even more so now with the announced Valley Games reprint. I really dislike cardboard figures in plastic stands; that would keep me from ever buying it. But I'll try someone else's copy.

Paths of Glory (interest level: 3)
I've really just never looked into this. I guess if I'm going to play a long wargame with cardboard counters, I'd rather play something squad-level.

Hammer of the Scots (interest level: 5)
I'm only moderately interested in block games since my experience with Wizard Kings. I am also one of the few people I know who thought the movie Braveheart was ridiculously bad. So it really comes down to: Is the game interesting. After reading the rules, I cannot dismiss it. But the system is a little fiddly.

Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition (interest level: 0)
I've never read the rules or seen it played, but this game has all the wrong things going for it: space epic, long playing time, modular board, plastic bits, FFG design.

Up Front (interest level: 0)
I like San Juan more than Puerto Rico, but I doubt that analogy is going to work with a wargame.

Struggle of Empires (own it, interest level: 8)
Complex game with typically poor Martin Wallace rules. I need to spend an entire day going through this game and all the errata so I can understand it enough to teach it. I know the game is simpler than it seems, but it's going to take some work to find it.

Ticket to Ride: Marklin
Ticket to Ride: Europe (interest level: 0)
You cannot make a good game by tweaking a bad design. I will never play a Ticket to Ride game again.

Dune (interest level: 6)
The rules sound pretty fun. The custom board designs look very nice. I don't know if I'll ever see a copy in my lifetime.

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (own it, interest level: 7)
The deluxe version that I bought is inferior in every way to the normal version, except that it has variants for all the characters. The only reason I haven't played it yet is for lack of a willing opponent.

Battle Line (interest level: 5)
The rules just don't grab me, but many people whose opinions I respect say there's really something to this.

Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage image by ubirata

Game Night at the Condo

2007-01-18T01:12:00.000-05:00

Tonight ended an 8-day marathon that included 5 game sessions. I don't think I'll see that again any time soon. A lot of really fun favorites were played, as well as some great new games. It's no fun going anywhere when it's 5°F (-15°C) outside, but for gaming, I'll deal with it.

Taj Mahal
I only brought this on a whim, but it seemed to be the game of choice. 2 had played before, and 3 had not. It's getting easier to teach every time. One thing that I did not make clear, however, was how the regions are differentiated. There's a subtle background on the board that's very easy to overlook. Once it's pointed out, it's obvious. I will make sure to describe that next time.

As before, I tried to play the connectivity game, while at the same time, go for the Princess card. My connectivity was sketchy, and I didn't get the Princess until about turn 7. At that point, I was in the middle of the pack with no goods whatsoever. The player in the lead was cleaning house with goods. I managed to get a couple of big connection scores to put me well into 2nd place, but I was still 15 points or more short of the winner.

Maharaja
This game gets better every time I play it. I think I'll have to bump it up again, but I don't know how far yet. When I analyze the mechanisms, I'm surprised I like it as much as I do. It's got pretty heavy chaos coupled with simultaneous action selection. You can play pretty conservatively and have nothing ever go wrong, but that is not the road to victory. The great things about Maharaja are the future planning, changing the future, and changing the present.

You can plan for the future by not worrying too much about the current city. Build palaces or houses ahead a city or 2. Build houses along paths players are likely to take.

You can change the future by adjusting the governor track. This can score you easy money if you have strong influence elsewhere, leaving you with another action to do things elsewhere.

You can change the present by careful switching of roles, or when a player takes your role. If you have the 6 tile and a player takes it, you can take the 1 tile and go next as opposed to last, etc.

I really enjoy the risk taking. In this last game, I had the 6 tile, 23 gold, and selected "Build Palace" for both of my actions. I was hoping that some player would have to cross one of my houses and give me a gold so I could actually perform both of my build actions. The player with the 1 tile did not have to pay me anything, and took my 6 tile! I was no longer going last. At this point my tile choices were 1, 2, and 4. Although I didn't need the 4 tile, I chose it so the player with the 3 tile would have to go before me. I got really lucky; he was unable to complete his "Build Palace and House" action, so we all got 2 gold from the bank. Bling!

3 of the 4 of us built our 7th palace on the same turn. Money broke the tie. I came in 2nd again.

Taj Mahal image by garyjames

Game Day at the Condo

2007-01-16T07:37:00.000-05:00

The holiday gave us the opportunity to get together during the day for a longer gaming session. As usual, my preference is to get unplayed games to the table. We've had a new gamer join us for the past few session. He shows huge potential, so we've been trying to expose him to as many different styles of games as possible.

Medina
This was one of my early gaming experiences on BSW, but, until today, I had never played my physical copy. Medina is much more subtle and devious than the rules would suggest. The opportunities for stealing bonus tiles, blocking expansion, using up palace colors, and generally screwing opponents are everywhere. Of course, you do not appreciate this until it happens to you. Despite my prior experience, I only managed to eke out a win: 43, 41, 39.

In the Shadow of the Emperor
I managed to convince the group, now 4, to try this. It's not an easy game to teach; it's got so many interlocking mechanisms, and you skip the first 3 phases on the first turn. I started as Emperor, won 2 electors, and kept the throne in the first round. In the second round, I lost all electors and the throne; I was hoping to play for position and get all my aristocrats on the board. The 2nd-round Emperor kept this position for 3 rounds, as well as Mainz. This turned out to be more profitable than I guessed, ignoring this player for another I thought had more VP's. The 4th player was Emperor for the last round, but it was not enough to come back: 23, 17, 17, 15.

Power Grid
The last type of game we wanted to show "the new guy" was something with economy/finances with a building theme. It was either this or Railroad Tycoon. We opted for the easier to setup and play. The power plant market was very strange this game. The 36 plant became available very early. The player who grabbed it lagged way behind the rest of us for many turns. No further ending position plants (eg 5-6-6 or 4-6-7) were available for a long time. During the final turn, we were all able to build 17 cities (I had over 250 elektros), but only 1 player was able to power them all.

Medina image by cIo_OIs