Friday Night Gaming: Maharaja, Razzia!

October 2, 2009


Maharaja: Palace Building in India
There is something annoying about a game which requires planning three turns ahead yet still has considerable player-interference chaos. Merwin had trouble wrapping his head around it and thus “hated it.” I was in the same boat, but deluded myself into thinking I was doing better than I was. Robert did a good job staying low and ending very strong. Brian and Ian were the front-runners and in the final round, we knew Ian would win but couldn’t stop him.

Razzia!
Short Version:
We aborted the first game because I missed a rule. Merwin declared he hated the game and proceeded to win.

Longer Version:
When Merwin says, “I'll also have the English instructions for Razzia! printed up” he does not mean that he will have read the English instructions. Or have printed them up. So, the burden of explaining the rules fell upon me again, and I missed a one-line rule that is critical to the proper functioning of the game. When a Razzia (Cop) card is turned over, it triggers an auction. When the 7th shows up, the round ends. I thought the round ended when everyone had used their bidding cheques. Oops.

Auction games are tough, especially when you aren’t sure what things are worth. In Razzia!, bidding is done via cheques valued 1 to 16. What comes up is based on the random draw from deck; there will be 0 to 7 items to bid plus the cheque from the previous auction. You get points for collecting the right sets and lose points if you have the fewest or none of certain cards. Some items carry over from round-to-round while others are discarded. You can only win at most 3 auctions and cheques won in an auction are what you use to bid in the next round. There is a lot to consider, many different dynamics in play, and a press-your-luck element to boot.

Merwin won despite never feeling he knew what he was doing. It might have helped that Brian and Ian were seen as the frontrunners. For my own part, I lost horribly.

Friday Night Gaming: Conquest of the Fallen Lands, Mare Nostrum

September 25, 2009

Friday morning, my RAID 1 external hard drive crashed. I no longer had (and continue not to have as of this post) access to my superhero game files and was unable to conduct playtesting as I had hoped and promised. So, it was board games again.

Conquest of the Fallen Lands
I came in last on this one, but the overall scores were closer than our first game. Unlike my first game, where I traded in cards 2-for-1 and ended up stalling out for lack of cards at the end, I decided to use what I got while getting sorcerers early so that I’d get more cards later on. My hand was dominated by higher-cost troops and they all required craftsmen. For example, I had 2 cannons and 1 catapult, which are great cards if you can get them on the board. Since they cost 4 and 3 craftsmen, respectively, I wasn’t able to field them until late. By then, my forces were split and I didn’t have access to the juicy parts of the board. In the mid-game, I was dying for some low-cost spearmen that I could deploy.

A key element to the game is being able to maximize your resources and capture 2 or 3 hexes in a single turn. Not only does it give you a jump on the opposition, but it gives you the most money for minimal cost. You can achieve this by deploying multiple types of troops and/or opportune use of spells, which can boost an attack.

The end game was soured a bit by kingmaking with Brian and Merwin deciding whether to hurt Robert or Ian. In the end, Ian ran out of the cards he needed and Robert was able to end the game early (when everyone passed, trying to build their hands) for a close win.

Mare Nostrum
It was just past nine o’clock when we pulled this out. We went well past midnight, in part, because it took us a while to remember how to set up and play. After an initial random deal of starting civilizations, Robert and I both called fowl when he and I ended up with Rome and Babylon (again), and we re-dealt. He got Greece and I got Egypt. Brian was Carthage (much to his dismay because it begs to be played militarily), Merwin Rome, and Ian Babylon.

While everyone took their first turns, I desperately tried to remember the trick to having Egypt win on the 3rd turn. I then had to convince them that I wouldn’t do it and thus make myself a very early target. During the “expand a few territories out” phase of the game, Brian and I came face to face. And in an uncharacteristic move, I attacked him before he could attack me. I had already decided to use my mythical creature, the Phoenix, as much as possible. Normally, these units cost 6 resources to deploy. Once killed, however, the Phoenix can return for only 3, the same cost as a legion or trireme. Sacrificing my Phoenix against Brian’s inevitable counter-attack was part of my plan.

As the game progressed, Merwin threatened Robert, Robert threatened Merwin, and Ian was left alone to catch a considerable lead. Ultimately, this game is won or lost during the trading phase. The goal is to buy 3 heroes and/or monuments, which cost either a set of 9 commodities (with no duplicates) or 9 tax cards. If you manage to get 12, you can buy the Pyramids and win straight-away. After the first expansion turn, it’s not uncommon for people to be collecting 9 resource cards each turn. The trick is to use the trading phase to dump your duplicates, pick up ones you don’t have, or convert them all to taxes. And it is a trick. It’s easy to mess up and pick the wrong cards from the wrong people. It’s easy for the other players to not notice what you’re collecting and pull a stealth win.

For my own part, people were preventing me from getting too many taxes, which meant I never got a set of 9 until the very last turn of the game. Ian claimed he screwed up and failed to get the 12 uniques for an insta-win. On a different turn, Robert was close with 11 taxes. Since we knew Ian was a major threat, we started watching him like a hawk and colluded against him during the trading. Eventually, whether to fatigue or kingmaking, I managed to get 14 taxes and built the Pyramids (it helped that I was the Political Leader, and so got to build first). Basically, I pulled off my “three-turn win” three hours into the game.

Part of the problem we have as a group is that too many cards get traded. The lowest this game as six and we traded nine more than once. Paradoxically, this lengthens the game by dragging out the trading phase, but it also allows for insta-wins that bring an abrupt end to the game. If we only traded three cards each, getting the magical twelve would be much harder. You’d still have to watch for Egypt (and Greece) getting too many taxes (and buying the favor of Hermes has to be watched, too), but I think we’d see more victories that didn’t involve the Pyramids. The advanced rules set the price of the Pyramids at 13, which is a must, I think.

Friday Night Gaming: Flaschenteufel

September 18, 2009
Brian wasn't with us. We spent 3 hours working on character creation for a superhero game I'm running and playtesting for the group. Thankfully, the time was mostly thinking of character concepts rather than game mechanics. I had hoped to start a scenario, but I knew it would have been too much. So instead, we brought a new game to the table.

Flaschenteufel aka, The Bottle Imp
This is an interesting point trick-taking game using a special deck of 36 cards of 3 suits (red, blue, and yellow). The cards are numbered 1 to 37 (with no 19) and this card shows how the suits are distributed. Cards have a point value of 1 to 6, with higher-numbered cards being worth more than lower-numbered cards. After all the cards are dealt (it handles 2 to 4 players), each player takes one card, places it aside in a kitty, then passes one card to the left and one card to the right. The first trick is lead by the person to the left of the dealer.

Each player in turn must play a card that matches the suit of the lead card. If they cannot, they can play any card. Ian was sure that he screwed up by not following suit when he could. And I'm sure others make the same mistake as well. We took to asking "You don't have any (color)?" when they didn't follow suit just to double-check.

There are no trump suits, but who actually wins the trick is a bit complicated to explain and we were making mistakes throughout the game. There is a bottle (containing an imp and represented by a wooden piece in our version) that starts out with a value of 19. If all the cards played to the trick are above the value of the bottle, the highest card wins the trick. If any cards are under the value of the bottle, then the highest card that is lower than the value of the bottle wins the trick. And the trick winner gets the bottle, places it on the card that won the trick, and that card becomes the new value of the bottle.

Thus, the bottle changes hands as its value drops. After all the cards have been played, the player with the bottle scores negative points equal to the point value of the cards in the kitty. All the other players score points equal to the point value of the cards in the tricks they took.

It took me several hands to get the hang of the game. Here is what I learned:

• Playing high cards early is not a good idea. Your 37 is unbeatable unless someone plays a card under the bottle value. It's probably best to save your high cards until the bottle value can't be undercut any more.
• You want to win tricks and often the best or only way to do that is to take the bottle. This is good, but you have to have an exit plan. You have to know what low cards are still out there for someone else to take the bottle from you.
• Once someone has played under the bottle value, you can play your low cards, safely dumping them under the card that will win the trick. You want to minimize these opportunities for your opponents.
• Being stuck with the bottle at the end may not be that bad. Hopefully, people got rid of low cards, so you only lose a few points. Usually, you can make up for the lost points, and more, if you do well the next hand. The value of the kitty is usually 12 to 16 (very approximately), whereas you might pick up 20 to 40 points in a hand.
  
• Card counting is very difficult. Keeping track of suits is practically impossible; it's simply too easy for someone to void a suit. However, it really helps to know what low and high cards are still out there. For example, you can take the bottle with a 4 if you know that the 1, 2, or 3 are still out there. They will eventually have to take it from you. And this segues into...
  
• Sometimes you're just screwed. As in Hearts, the deal and card passing can conspire against you and force you to lose. In one hand, Robert held the 1 through 8 (iirc), which guaranteed that he'd be stuck with the bottle. The best he could do is to deny as many tricks from the rest of us as he could.
  

It is that last point that sours me a bit on this game. I still like it and would definitely play it again (if we can convince Robert to play), but there will simply be those hands when no amount of skill or finesse will save you. I can definitely see where the game can become frustrating in the same way Spades can if you keep missing your bid or taking overtrick penalties.

The rules didn't give a definite ending point. They suggest a pre-determined number of hands or a set number of points (they said 500). We played to 200 (decided after we started playing and when I was away from the table). Ian and I ended with 196, Merwin had exactly 200, and Robert was down at 89.

Friday Night Gaming: Conquest of the Fallen Lands, War on Terror

September 11, 2009
After taking a week off for Pacificon, the usual suspects got back together for a couple of games. This summary comes late because I found myself writing full reviews of the games which I then decided to excise.

Conquest of the Fallen Lands
I've been eyeing this game for a while, so when I heard that Merwin had picked it up, I immediately requested it. This is an area control game with a medieval theme. Among the points in its favor is a randomly generated playing field, quick game play, no direct player conflict but lots of indirect conflict, and no randomness beyond the cards you draw. There are two versions of the rules: the basic game and the advanced game. We chose the basic game because the online comments (follow link, above) indicated that it was faster, better for more players (we had 5), and less prone to analysis paralysis. In the future, we may try the advanced game, but I'm very happy with the basic game.

Though heavy on tactics, early decisions on which followers to recruit(soldiers, craftsmen, or wizards) can affect your overall strategy. For my part, I was dealt a beginning hand with powerful spells which needed 3 wizards to use. Since I could only recruit 1 follower per turn, I simply couldn't afford it. I jettisoned my magic-based cards and ended with a hand very dependent on soldiers and craftsmen. This trend continued until the last turns of the game. However, without wizards, I was drawing fewer cards, which limited my options and ability to expand in the end-game.

Ian and I started in the middle of the board while Merwin, Brian, and Robert were on the edges. Somehow, Ian and I expanded in two different directions and weren't in conflict with each other. He did, however, ended up fighting for territory with the other three. His craftsmen-centric force was a clear threat while Brian and Merwin had a ton of cards. I won a squeaker, mostly because I was left alone.

War on Terror
Being that it was "nine-eleven" and all, Merwin had threatened to pull out this game. And he did. I managed to read the primary rule book, but not the one that details what all the cards do, not realizing that it also explained how some of the major actions, like declaring war, work. We worked our way through the vagueness of some key rules and even forgot a semi-major one that might have helped me during the two times I was (randomly) declared the Axis of Evil.

I respect the game for what it is. It's like Risk combined with Settlers of Catan (except there is only one resource: oil). In addition to the player units, there are also neutral terrorist units which can be deployed in enemy territory. So while sponsoring terrorists are the only way to strike at opponents when you don't share a common border, other players can use those same terrorists against you later on. Thematically, it's clever and as a 90-minute game, it would be a gem. But it took the 5 of us over 3 hours. By then, we were practically begging for it to end.

Brian started in North America, which ended up having the best (randomly distributed) oil reserves by far. Ian started in South America, but was wiped out early when Robert nuked him. Ian then took over as "the Terrorist Player" but was perhaps too cash-strapped to use them effectively. I spend most of my time in Africa and Southern Europe. Robert focused on Asia and Eastern Europe. Merwin focused on Australia and Nowhere (Antarctica); he was the second player to "turn terrorist," though I still don't know exactly why he did it.

In a key point (for me), I had a card which would cost another player money (120 to 180 Million). I told Brian and Robert that I wouldn't use it on the player who payed me the most. Brian bid 50 mil. Robert threatened retaliation. I played the card on Robert. He nuked me the next turn. But he was kind: he only took out my European holdings (including by best city) rather than the entire African continent. I was able to recover, but Brian was already well on his way to victory.

Actions are card-driven. The number of development actions is based on a die roll. Combat is based on dice. Resource location is random and which regions pay out each turn is based on dice. There are both strategic and tactical decisions, but too much is out of your control. As I said, shorter would be better. As it is, I think Merwin will trade it.

Modular China

When playing China last Friday, I had a notion to make the map modular, to randomize the setup for each game. In general, I love the concept of modular boards for games and any game with random tile setup automatically gets a bump in my interest level. In both games last time, I ended up playing houses in very similar places, which is something that random setup helps avoid. A fan did something very similar for Power Grid, so it's not a radical idea.

To begin my toying around with the idea, I looked for a modular variant that someone might have already done. Not finding one, I went about understanding the characteristics of the existing map. There are actually two maps (not counting variants like Border Disputes): one for 3-4 players, and one for 4-5. I don't really understand why there has to be two different maps, though I appreciate that they would play differently. This is, after all, one of the goals for having a modular board. I just couldn't tell you why one is better for 3 and the other better for 5. The maps have an identical arrangement of cities and regions and the only difference is how the roads are connected. To help me conceptualize the differences, I recreated the two maps into one, using a grid-based format.



I don't know if this exercise taught me anything, but now that you can see the map, I'll note some of my observations which influenced how I made the tiles.

There are 5 colors and 9 regions in the game. Most regions have 4-7 cities; purple has 8, but there is only 1 purple region. There are no 4-way intersections in the 3-4 player game, and only 3 with 4-5 players. There are plenty of dead-ends. In some regions, all the houses are connected while in others, you can't make a path between them without entering some other territory.

Looking at the regions and their colors, it is clear that they aren't "equal" (purple being a prime example), but each color as the same number of cards. China, like the original Web of Power, is inspired by real-world geography (though I'm doubtful how closely China follows actual geography). But when thinking about an abstract, modularized version, how should the asymmetry be generated? I have "an overdeveloped sense of symmetry" and automatically want to make each region and color equivalent in some way.

I settled on the idea of having 1 tile per region, 2 of each color. From there, I decided to make 6 cities per region/tile with the option to change that later. Though I am still inclined to make the total number of cities per color to be equal, I admit that I don't have a good reason to do it that way.

I prefer hexes because they tessellate well and arranging 6 cities is easy to do. I started with a basic pattern of 7 cities, then removed 1. (The following diagram presented in lovely Courier because Blogger can't handle preformatted text tags.)

..O...O...........O...O...........O...O..

O...O...O.......O...X...O.......O...O...O

..O...O...........O...O...........X...O..

I decided that each color would have 1 tile with the center missing and 1 tile with the edge city missing. I then had to create 5 patterns of roads for each tile type. Of course, there are far more than 5 ways to connect 6 cities, so I had to make some rules for myself. And my "had" I mean, I'd never be able to decide which patterns to use unless I had a set of rules for me to follow. With that in mind, each city could connect only to it's closest neighbors. No tile would allow for a 6-city road. And there would always be paths leading out from the corners to the adjacent tile. Even with the rules, there were plenty of arbitrary decisions.

Working with hex tiles on your typical drawing program (I use OpenOffice) is a pain. Oo has a great feature which allows you to set the vertical and horizontal grid to different spacing, which you can use to create the 1:0.866 ratio of a hexagon length:width. But to hash out my ideas, I went with squares instead. When laid in an overlapping brick format, you can get them to approximate hexes.



The tile in the lower left is my template. The diagram in the lower right shows how they should be laid out. After printing and cutting out the tiles, I noted the need for the arrows so that they could be oriented properly. Hexes rotate 60°, 120°, or 180°; when using squares to approximate hexes, you only get 0° or 180°.

I played around with some tile arrangements and noted that there was a tendency to be too many stragglers along the edges. Several of the edge tiles had 1 to 3 cities that weren't connected to anything (or each other). In China, there are no islands--all cities connect eventually. Web of Power, you have England, which is a 5-city island. I don't mind islands, but because road-building is such an important part of the two-pronged strategy of placing houses and roads only count if they are 4-cities, having small islands is unacceptable. In some cases, you can simply remove those isolated cities from play (since we have 60 cities rather than China's 51), but in others, this created regions with fewer than 4 cities (another unacceptable situation).

I'm not sure it is possible to create tiles in such a way as to prevent these problems, at least without very convoluted placement rules . One thought is to allow islands, but make them their own region for scoring purposes, similar to the harbors from Border Disputes. But this still doesn't solve the road issue. Or I could add a frame around the 10 tiles that allows the edge cities to be connected, but it gets a bit wonky around the corners and breaks the "only connect to closest city" rule. And it still doesn't address any islands that appear in the middle.

Overall, it was a project with mixed success. I still think they concept has merit, but there are obviously kinks that need to be worked out.

Aside 1: When randomly arranging the tiles, what should be done when two tiles of the same color are adjacent? You can either arrange them so that this doesn't happen or let them be one single region (like purple in the original). I think this is something that would need to be shaken out during playtesting.

Aside 2: Yes, I know the red and orange are awfully close to each other. I would have changed it, except I'm paying homage to the fact that red and orange are hard to distinguish in the original game. Yeah, that's it. ;)

Friday Night Gaming: China, Tongiaki, Let's Kill

August 28, 2009
Ok, where was I? Right. I seem to have gotten a tad behind.

China
Merwin bailed on running Bones, so I asked if I could bring something over. Brian objected to Snow Tails, so I brought China. During the setup, Ian chose purple rather than his usual green and that started a cascade of people picking a color they normally don't use. For example, Robert is always red. Always. Well, except this time, when he was yellow and Brian was red. Damned if that didn't screw me up a couple of times. Fortunately, you usually don't have to worry about who is what color as much as what colors besides yours are in a given territory.

Given our past experiences (found here, but lacking details), I went in with a strategy to use the emissaries more. In China, there are 3 ways to score: place houses to get majorities in territories, place houses to get long roads, and place emissaries to get majorities in adjacent territories. So as you can see right away, placing houses has greater utility. Furthermore, while second, third, etc. house majorities can get you points, only the first majority (ties count) for emissaries get points and you have to get it in two territories (and you can only ever place pieces, houses or emissaries, in one territory per turn). So, emissaries can feel like an add-on, something you only do when placing more houses isn't an option. This is what our first games felt like.

To explore emissaries, I focused first on getting second majorities and a decent road, using my fortress to double my best scoring opportunity, and then shifted to emissaries. Because everyone else was mostly on a house-focused strategy, trying to get first majorities, I managed to score a hefty 20 points on emissaries, which shot me to an overwhelming victory.

We played again and I noticed something peculiar: my houses ended up in very similar locations and my fortress was on the exact same spot as before. I also spent many of my turns not using my cards optimally, using doubles as jokers rather than placing twice; I believe this might have been a mistake, but since I finished 2 points being Brian, maybe it wasn't so bad. I didn't go for emissaries, but kept my eye on preventing anyone from doing what I had done last game. It ended up being a very close close game, with Brian getting the edge (and he had the most emissaries).

Overall, I really enjoy this game. It has tough decisions, tactical maneuvering, controlled randomness, and plays quickly. Merwin seemed to have a hard time "wrapping his head around it," and I think he meant coming up with a winning strategy, so I'm not sure when we'll play again.

Tongiaki
Merwin pulled this out so that he could play it and decide whether or not to keep it. The game is about exploring and establishing colonies on Polynesian islands. Unfortunately, our first game was marred by a playing aid that implied we only got points for having one ship on an island tile and it failed to mention that the number on the tile (2 to 5) was its point value. Brian won the first game; Merwin won the second. Both times, I tied with someone and was either second or second-to-last.

The random tile draws make the early game, well, random. Once enough tiles get on the board, things become more predictable. In fact, it is so mechanistic to be almost abstract. But multi-player abstract games tend to be very chaotic, and this is no exception. There are plenty of opportunities for clever play, setting up move combinations and spreading your ships far and wide, but they can also be undone by your opponent's moves. Even if they didn't intend for it to happen that way.

During the game, I was reminded of Girl Genius, I game I own but have never played. But writing the above made me think of Mall of Horror, I game I don't own, but adore. The difference is that the simultaneous action selection of Mall of Horror brings a second-guessing element and mitigates the "my move will be negated by the 4 other players following me" aspect. As it is, Tongiaki is not without interest, but the lack of control (especially compared to China) bothers me.

Let's Kill
Speaking of lack of control... this is yet another cute, chaotic, humor-based card game without any strategic value. Even the tactics are boring because the card selection is so random and samey. Either you get the cards that let you win, or you don't. There's no room for clever play and the decisions aren't interesting. It's still better than Munchkin, though.

Friday Night Gaming: Manilla, Betrayal

August 21, 2009
There was no game last week due to Merwin scheduling problems. Were were supposed to play Bones, but that fell through as well.

Manila
Brian won this one handily by going into debt, leveraging his existing shares to become the Harbor Master and buy more shares. This works because at the end of the game, each of his leveraged shares were worth 30, but he only lost 15 on each share. With more shares than anyone, this was too big of an advantage to overcome.

In general, I'm reluctant to go into debt in a game. It's my financial conservatism (some might say cowardice) at play here. Because I didn't poorly in the gambling aspect of the game, I didn't have enough cash to do anything useful. Even after I watched Brian leverage his shares, it just didn't feel right for me to follow suit.

Betrayal at House on the Hill
We had most of the house explored (though still hadn't found an exit from the basement that didn't require the Rope item) when the haunting started. We didn't check the errata and ended up assigning the role of traitor to the wrong person, in this case, me. It didn't really matter, but it's one of those errata/FAQ annoyances that often pop up in this game. Another was trying to figure out if the traitor could climb up from the basement to the Collapsed Room (without the rope); we decided he could.

I was the leader of a band of Cannibal "We're not zombies"Freaks. The objectives focused on the Heroes and the Traitor killing each other. This resulted in a scramble for weapons, which meant getting to the Safe and the Vault and exploring the last rooms for items. While Brian explored, Robert was going for the Vault, Ian was keeping the Victims (who had been tenderizing in the attic until now) safe in the Mystic Elevator, and Merwin was... being Merwin.

I had my Cannibals stake out the Foyer, which represented a choke point while I went after items and the Heroes. I got to the Safe and was able to use one-shot items to get the drop on Robert and take his stuff, which included the powerful Spear. Merwin sacrificed himself in the Foyer while Brian stayed in the basement. I then tracked down Ian, killed him, and won when the last the Victims were killed. Brian was still alive, but it didn't matter at that point.

Friday Night Gaming: Tales of the Arabian Nights, Neuroshima Hex!

August 7, 2009

Tales of the Arabian Nights
Merwin was psyched to play the new, improved edition from Z-Man Games. In addition to updating the graphics, the main difference in game play was adding a "destiny die," which is basically a Fudge die (two sides are blank, two are marked with "+", and two with "-"). This modifies the paragraph number you read, essentially tripling the number of different paragraphs and reducing the chance of getting a repeat. This is nice, but even in our one game, we got close to repeating a paragraph when two of us in succession encountered a "crafty sorceress." My favorite edition is the Status card, so that when your character becomes Blessed or Married or Wounded, the card clearly says what the effects are and you don't have to look them up and it reduces the chances you'll forget about them.

But I still don't like the game.

1) The paragraphs don't line up geographically with the game. In the final turn of the game, I was in Baghdad and drew the Ape Island card and suddenly I was being read a story about an island. Other players encountered lions in the middle of the sea, volcanoes in cities, etc. In a game this random, I'm willing to overlook this point.

2) They added quest cards, which give the players clear, optional goals. For example, you might have to visit three locations (chosen by other players) or find a treasure and bring it back to Baghdad. I like this. But some quests are clearly easier than others while giving the same or greater rewards in terms of earned story or destiny points, wealth levels, or status(es). In a game this random, I'm willing to overlook this point.

3) While there are optional "player versus player" rules, it's basically several players (5 in our case), sitting around a table, and passing around a giant "choose your own adventure book." It's a text adventure turned board game. But at least those books/games have a coherent story line, rather than thousands of random paragraphs that bear no connection to each other. I'm willing to overlook the randomness, but the game is too long, the stories too boring, and there is no reason (or desire on my part) to even pay attention to what someone else is doing.

The game ended up being very long and fairly close. I entered Baghdad two story points short of my goal and hoped I got a good encounter; otherwise, Ian would win on his turn. I got a lucky result, got my 2 points, and won. I've felt more accomplishment in games of tic-tac-toe.

Neuroshima Hex!
We didn't really have much time for a final game of the evening, but we pulled this out anyway. It was another 5-player free-for-all. I got a very unlucky when my base was poisoned by the Neojungle in the first turns. This meant that every time a battle started, I took a point of damage. There is no defense or cure against this. And based on the tile draws, there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. Figuring that I was doomed, I spent much of my game taking revenge on Robert. Ian and Brian did very well, using Merwin as a shield. But after I died, Robert stopped taking damage, Brian started getting hit, and Merwin was able to pull out New York's rocket launcher which did some righteous damage to Ian. As the three of them pounded on each other, Robert lasted to the end with the strongest base at 7 points (out of 20). The others were at 6, 5, and 4 hit points left. But I was still dead.

Saturday Gaming: A Bunch of Games

July 25, 2009

The n0rmal Friday night group got together on Saturday for a full day of gaming while Merwin had the house to himself. Also attending was Brian and Ian.

Neuroshima Hex!
After everyone finished eating their lunch, we started with a couple games of Neuroshima Hex! and tried out the Babel13 expansion. The expansion comes with two new armies: New York and Neojungle. It also includes terrain tiles and various scenarios, but we didn't use those.

We took the two new armies, randomly added two of the original armies, and dealt them out the players. We then formed two two-player teams. As it turned out in both games, New York and Neojungle were never teamed together and I was on the team with New York. It also turned out that my team won both games. This may have been because New York is overpowered and/or Neojungle too weak, especially in the two-on-two format. Neojungle player seemed to have a difficult time building strength and helping to defend his partner. With two teams, you generally want to focus your attacks on one opponent. In both games, the New York team ignored Neojungle and hammered his partner. In a cutthroat, three- or four-player game without teams, the Neojungle should do better.

Big City
The start of the game was delayed considerably as the rules were read. The reference cards were in German and so weren't as useful as they could have been (though they did add amusement as Brian and Ian tried to apply their incomplete knowledge of German with Merwin and I adding our terrible pronunciations). The game itself is straight-forward and easy to pick up once you play a few turns. The learning curve comes from memorizing the special placement and scoring rules for the various buildings you can build during your turn (which is where the reference cards would have been helpful).

The game board consists of 8 neighborhoods (only the first 5 of which are out at the beginning) consisting of 8 or 9 city blocks (in a 2x4 or 3x3 grid pattern). There are eight decks of cards, one for each neighborhood. Each numbered card in a deck corresponds to one of the numbered city blocks. To build a building (and get points for it), you must play the cards (typically 1 to 3) corresponding to where you are going to build it. Getting cards of adjacent blocks is necessary to place buildings covering 2 or 3 city blocks; naturally, these buildings score many more points than smaller structures. The decks for the even-numbered neighborhoods (which only have blocks) also contain special cards to build parks and factories. You don't get points for building these; they are used primary for blocking (since you can build them on any city blocks where they fit) though they also add (parks) or subtract (factories) points from buildings placed next to them.

On your turn, you can place any building, but since you must have the right cards, it limits the amount of time you spend thinking about it. It also adds a luck factor which can be very frustrating. One strategy is to only draw cards from a single neighborhood, which maximizes your odds of getting contiguous blocks and building options. You can only draw 2 cards from any neighborhood deck at a time, so it takes a while to build that monopoly. But then, someone can place a park or factory in your neighborhood and really mess with your plans. You can also place street cars (which double the value of buildings placed next to them, but earn no points on their own) to split city blocks and prevent the placement of 2- and 3-block buildings.

On your turn, you will either be placing buildings (and drawing cards to replace those you used) or doing something that earns no points but will block an opponent or enhance your future building scores and opportunities. The latter includes building city hall, placing street cars, park, or factory, or adding a neighborhood (especially useful if you've been drawing cards from a neighborhood deck before it has been placed), City hall doubles the value of buildings placed next to it, but since there are only 4 such blocks, this rarely comes up. However, until city hall is built, you can't build banks, post offices, theaters, churches, or shopping malls and are limited to residential and office blocks. Lastly, if you don't like your cards, you can spend your turn discarding some (which get recycled into the decks) and drawing new ones.

In the first game, Ian and I were way out front, but I managed to squeak past for the win. The second game was much closer; I think the spread from last to first was no more than 6 points.

One point of rules vagueness is whether or not you can see (or ask) the backs of other players' cards. Since the backs of the cards show the neighborhood number, you can see where they might be building. If you had a perfect memory, you could simply remember the decks everyone drew from and not have to ask. We decided that the memory element wasn't something we wanted, so we allowed asking. So, when I saw that Ian not only had the last undeveloped block in sector 5 and several 7 cards, and had just placed the 7 neighborhood, I placed Central Park (1x3) to really screw with his plans.

I also benefited from being able to build a church (with very restrictive building rules) when Brian discarded his "33" (neighborhood 3, block 3) card in favor of drawing more cards for neighborhood 8. I also picked up the factory he discarded and used it for further blocking. Again, I squeaked past for the win.

Tonga Bonga
This game reminded us of Manila because it is essentially a dice-based gambling game. Your best plans can be screwed up by inopportune dice rolls, either by yourself or your opponents. But it also has a strong racing element: you get more money (ducats, in this case) by being the first to visit islands. After visiting four islands, it is a race back to Tonga Bonga and those to make it get a bonus. But it is also a bidding game in which you are offering money to your opponents to put their highest-value dice on your ship. How fast you move is based on the value of dice on your ship. All in all, it is quite a light, clever game with interesting decisions.

After Big City, we broke for dinner. It was pointed out that I had won every game so far. Now, I'm not going to say they were purposely gunning for me (though they did mention the possibility), but I will point out I ended up dead last in Tonga Bonga. However, it was all my fault. As Ian, the winner, pointed out, the rest of us were offering too much money and he was doing just fine with offering minimal amounts. Even though I was the first and only player to make it back to Tonga Bonga, my overhead costs limited my profits. Ian's "low bidding" strategy wouldn't have worked if the die rolls had included more "pukers," which don't get placed on ships. [The six-sided dice are numbered 1-5, with 1 side showing a sailor hanging his head over the side of the ship.] It also wouldn't have worked if another player had also been low-balling. But such is the group-think of a bidding game.

Though enjoyable, it didn't beckon us to play more than once. And since it only handles 3 or 4 players, it's appearance at the game table may be limited.

Iliad
Brian won. We didn't even have to play the last round because his lead was that substantial. After we tossed in our cards, it was noted that Ian could have won if he won the round and Brian lost it. But it was too unlikely to happen; besides, Merwin and I had no desire to continue. The game just doesn't click with us and Merwin declared that it was going on this "to trade" pile.

In general, my cards sucked. I had a good starting hand, but wasn't able to win that round. For the rest of the game, I was stuck with elephants, siege engines, and other non-scoring cards. Only in the penultimate round did I get some hefty offense with 3 chariots. Merwin had similar problems and we both ended with scores close to zero compared to Brian's 10 and Ian's 6 (or so).

The Red Dragon Inn / The Red Dragon Inn 2
We dealt out 2 characters to each player and we chose 1 to play. Ian got his treasured Eve, the Illusionist. Brian was the Dwarf, Merwin the Wizard, and I the Half-Ogre. Things were looking grim for me at the beginning as I was losing gold fast. But despite Merwin's best efforts, I managed to win a hefty round of gambling and save my ass, so Merwin changed his focus to Ian. Later, Brian won a drinking contest. Unfortunately, the alcohol content sent him to oblivion but not before he won Ian's last gold piece. This left Merwin and I, but I managed to wear him down for the win.

It was a fun ending to a fun day.

Sunday Gaming: Settlers of Catan

July 19, 2009

Normally, every alternate Saturday, I play in a D&D (3.5) campaign that Andrew runs. Unfortunately, one of the group couldn't make it this week, so we bumped the game to Sunday. But we ended up not playing D&D due to miscommunication and instead pulled out a board game. Andrew had The Settlers of Catan, but had never played. Of the four of us there (Andrew, Rob, Tammy, and myself), only I had played before.

My two previous experiences were not positive. I did terribly; I chalked it up to not liking "trading games." In Catan, you have to trade resources with other players to be successful. The trading game that most non-gamers are familiar with is Monopoly, though few people play it that well. Hell, few people actually play by the published rules, which include auctions and don't include any special reward for Free Parking (except, you know, parking for free). And my last experience was back when D&D 3.0 came out, so I was quite rusty (but surprised myself by how much I actually remembered). I wasn't thrilled at the idea of facing Catan again, but I thought, like taking my fiber, it would be good for me.

As the first game, we decided to play with the beginner's setup, which starts with a specific map and pre-placed settlements. So much can ride on that initial placement of settlements--what resources you will get and what your expansion routes are--that this was clearly the best way to go with the first game. I know in previous attempts I had chosen poorly with my settlements and paid for it.

Catan, being the classic "Euro game" that it is, has been analyzed and described to death. But with 1 novice and 3 newbies, it was a fun, refreshing game. We (but especially Andrew) encountered the fickleness of the dice. We learned the value of development cards. Tammy ended up with the most knights and biggest army. I ended up with the longest road (thanks to the "build 2 road segments) card. Rob struggled but had fun.

I forced myself to trade and not hoard cards without giving away too much. Fortunately, I was able to build cities relatively quickly with my surplus of stone. I also designated myself "lord of the sheep" and was able to grab a 2:1 sheep port (cutting off Tammy from it) to good effect. When I built my fourth, along with my longest road, I was the first to 10 victory points and won the game.

For the second game, we played with a random setup and chose settlements. From the very beginning, Andrew and Rob were clashing for position. Unfortunately, Rob lost the race to build roads and was trapped. Rob had a settlement on the intersection of 3 stone hexes and a 2:1 stone port, but just couldn't make the most of them. In part, this was due to the robber spending half the game on one of the 3 stone hexes that he shared with Andrew and myself. In the first game, it was a race between Tammy and me. This game, Andrew was in the mix as well.

I (who went first and last in settlement placement) had a good starting position with lots of room. Tammy and Andrew were expanding into each other. I had wood (being on the intersection of 3 wood hexes) but no bricks. Andrew had clay, but no wood, which meant we traded 1-for-1 several times to help each other build roads. I was able to cut off Andrew to a 2:1 wheat port (flashback to game #1) and used it good effect when trading ("You'll have to offer me more than that for my wheat, because it's like a wild card for me"). I was also lucky because I had two settlements on the "11" wheat hex, which came up far more often than the 2-in-36 odds would predict. I grabbed more development cards this game and ended up with the most knights. And somehow Tammy let me get away with having the longest road. This time, I only built one city and it provided me my 10th victory point and the game.

This group, for whom I run my Monster Hunters Savage Worlds campaign, doesn't often play board games, but we've had a good time when we have. The last time was Dominion. For myself, I think I got over my Catan-aversion. Though experienced players can still clean my clock, I am open to playing it again.

Friday Night Gaming: Antike & Family Business

June 26, 2009
During the week, four of us made characters for an rpg, Bones, that Merwin was going to run. Only, Merwin didn't think he was running this week. :/

So, we played board games instead.

Antike
Coming off our game last week, it seemed like a good idea to play again while the rules were still fresh. We turned over the board and used the Mediterranean map this time. As Rome, I had Merwin's Germany to the north and Brian's Carthage to the south. Figuring that I had to move quickly ahead of Brian, I moved into the Iberian peninsula and took Sardinia. This boxed Brian in, who did manage to take Sicily-slash-Southern Italy. Meanwhile, as predicted, Merwin simply developed without expanding and we had a defacto demilitarized zone between us. Robert, as Greece, expanded to the north and east until he ran into Ian's Phoenicians.

Because of the rondel, Antike makes it very difficult to take swift military action. And even when forces are finally built up toward the end game, the brutal one-for-one combat system takes a heavy toll on any aggressor. So, like last time, there was little conflict until the end. By then, Ian in his safe corner was able to amass a slight lead and good momentum. Brian went after him, but it was too little, too late. In fact, as predicted, it meant I attacked him a little while later. We were able to put off Ian's victory by buying up the last temples, but Ian sacked one of Robert's temples for a much needed victory point, and then it was just a matter of waiting a few turns to buy up his missing technologies.

Two weeks in a row, there was significant end-game calculations and king making. Once someone gets within striking distance of winning, the end game becomes calculable. This time, we didn't even play out the last round because we couldn't stop Ian.* We've seen similar endings to Vinci and Mare Nostrum (though we've had a few surprise, sneaky wins there). I don't think it's fair to complain about this element of the game. You see it in racing games (most recently, Snow Tails) and abstract games ("mate in 5"). And it's our own damn fault for how we played in the early and mid-game anyway. But given the personal sacrifice that one or two players have to make (there was no way Merwin or I could stop Ian, except when we built temples) to try to stop a leader, it can lead to bad feelings, king making, and not an enjoyable end to the game.

Part of the problem is that since you can't lose vp in Antike, bashing the leader isn't an option the way it is in other games. You might slow them down. A bit. But it's probably not worth it. But not doing anything--not even trying to go after the leader--doesn't seem like a good option, either. I don't know if there is a good solution of even if a solution should be sought.

*: For the record, I could have won a turn later, and it would have taken Robert two turns.

Family Business
We desperately needed a filler, and Merwin pulled out this game from his achives. It was a favorite of his from college. But as a game design, I don't think it has stood the test of time.

My first issue was with the "pre-Magic" card design. Like Fluxx, this is a card game in which all the cards have special functions. There are attacks that send your mobsters to the "to be killed line" (an inspiration for Guillotine, perhaps?), defense cards, which don't work against some attacks, cards that remove your guys from the "to be killed line," and counters for those cards as well. Unfortunately, the cards only list the name of the card--not what they do. For that, you have to look them up in the rule book. Which meant that as newbies, we didn't know what the cards did and made several mistakes. Experienced players wouldn't have a problem (though even Merwin made a mistake or two) and the reference card at least makes a stab at explaining what can or can't be countered. I see that the 2008 edition seems to address this issue, thankfully.

But really, my biggest problem with the game is that it is an early-eighties design that hasn't aged well. The only tactic is "attack people you think can't counter it," and the only strategy is "draw good cards."

The shining moments of the game is when we ganged up on Ian, eliminating him first as payback for Antike. And later, Robert eliminated both himself and Merwin with one play. And perhaps that's really the point of this lightweight, back-stabbing game. Brian and I were left to fight it out, but we didn't remember a crucial rule (essentially sending the game into "sudden death") and so we don't know who should have won. But I lost.

Like Red Dragon Inn, it's all about attacking and eliminating other players. But it lacks the humor and mixed card play of that more recent game. Bang! has hidden roles and special powers. Hell, even Guillotine has set collection to liven up the strategy. I simply can't recommend it over those other games.

Friday Night Gaming: Antike

June 19, 2009

Antike
Most of us had played once before, a few years ago, not long after we first played Mare Nostrum. It was new to Brian, so he spent some time going of the rules on his own while we talked about other stuff.*

This is another civilization-building and expansion game with some interesting mechanisms. You gain victory points when you reach certain achievements, such as establishing 5 (or 10, 15, etc.) cities or building 3 (or 6, 9, etc.) temples, controlling 7 (or 14) sea spaces, or being the first to purchase one of the 8 technologies (4 basic and 4 advanced). The hardest points to earn are those from destroying opponent's temples. The first to a preset number of points (based on number of players) wins.

Each land space is marked with one of three resources: Iron, Marble, and Gold. Each turn, everyone also gets a Coin, which acts as one of any resource. Having a city in the region gives you one of that resource, three if you have built a temple (with Marble) there. You can build a city for one of each resource, but only if you have a unit already there (which requires Iron to build). So what tends to happen is that people expand territory, establish cities, build temples, and buy technology (with Gold) until they have to start attacking other players.

Combat is deterministic and brutal. Units (you have both ships and legions) destroy each other on a one-for-one basis. Cities require an additional unit, Temples two more beyond that. So if you wanted to sack a temple, you have to send in four units plus an additional unit for every defending unit occupying the region.

What we saw this time was an extreme build up of forces between Robert and Merwin, but neither attacked each other. Hell, I was completely vulnerable to Robert and he could have wiped me out, but by then, it would have left him vulnerable to Merwin and/or Brian. Eventually, Robert made his push and destroyed a few of Merwin's temple. Unfortunately, this ended up giving the game to Ian.

Merwin had a temple-focused strategy, eventually building 9 of the suckers. And with a limited number of temples available, it got so no one could build more. I was trying to take a balanced approach, but switched to taking technology before Ian could. Brian maintained his balanced strategy. Ian never attacked anyone, but was able to concentrate on technology. He was prevented from building more temples, but once one of Merwin's was destroyed and put back in the box, I was able to build his third temple for the win. Had Brian or I been more aggressive against Ian, things would have been different, but then the high cost of attacking makes this a very difficult trigger to pull.

We had an interruption in the game when Max decided that leaving the house and going to play in the neighboorhood without telling anyone was a good idea. A search party was gathered and things went on hold for a while until the wayward child was found.

*: At one point, there was a heated discussion of whether an imaginary number like 3+2i is "between" 1 and 10. I maintained that it isn't, but Brian argued it is. It was agreed that the next time someone asks us to "pick a number between 1 and 10," we'd have to ask what they meant by "between."

Friday Night Gaming: E.T.I., Snow Tails

June 12, 2009
We had the normal group of 5 this night.

E.T.I.: Estimated Time to Invasion
I was surprised at how smoothly this game went, considering that it is a rather odd game. I did my best to explain it, having studied the rules the weeks previous. The theme is of defense contractors preparing to defend the planet themselves against an alien invasion--an invasion that will be orchestrated by one of them who has been secretly infiltrated by the aliens. They conduct research (draw cards) to complete projects (get different cards) to improve their Defense and their Fame. But there are always fewer available projects than players, meaning that they are always fighting with each other. When the aliens invade (once a certain number of projects have been completed and the alien player reveals himself), the alien's launches attacks (plays cards) against each company. Among the companies who withstand the assault (have a Defense score higher than the attack total), the one with the highest Fame is the winner.

One might mistake this for a cooperative game, but it really isn't. There's constant backstabbing and self-interest reigns. The only thing that matters it that you survive the attack with the most Fame. You don't care who else dies. There are event cards which trigger some negotiations and voting of outcomes, but there is no inherent incentive for working together or finding compromises. This is good; I find most cooperative games too much like group projects at work.

Robert was hit by horrible luck the entire game. He kept getting scooped on projects and during the alien invasion, he was hammered by the worst possible cards. Meanwhile, Merwin was getting the best cards for completing projects and easily survived the alien invasion--the only one of us who did.* The randomness of the card draws soured the game for me. The others didn't seem to mind as much and wanted to play again (though not this night since it did take a couple of hours).

* For my part, I made poor selections of projects, leaving myself with too little defense and was easily overwhelmed by Brian, as the alien.

Snow Tails
I have been waiting for this game for a while and when the new Asmodee edition hit the states, I ordered a copy. It arrived this week, so I forced this on the group.

Brian and I had communication problems during my rules explanation. Part of the problem is that though Snow Tails is a racing game (in this case, with dogsleds), it is not a simulation. It uses cards for controlling speed and steering, doesn't involve any die rolling for maintaining control and avoiding crashes, and the physics of steering (what Snow Tails calls drifting) is actually backwards.**

As with many racing games, it it can be difficult to impossible to catch up when behind. There is no direct way to interfere with those in front of you and you just have to hope that they screw up and/or you get better luck. But this is true of real-life racing too. I can certainly understand why some people don't like the entire genre of racing games, but I enjoy them if they are quick, allow for interesting decisions, and are not simply dice-fests. This is certainly true of Snow Tails.

I was the first to cross the finish line, but Ian was not on my heels and was able to just pull ahead, finishing his turn one step ahead of me past the finish line and taking the win.

In the second game, we tried a different map from the rulebook, adding a section of saplings and a bottleneck. I had what seemed to be a good start, but I floundered in the u-turn and fell behind. Conversely, Brian really cruised through the turn and took a commanding lead. He finished first; I finished last.

The second game went very quickly and easily within the posted 45-minute time listed on the box. Only having 4 players (Robert left at his usual 11:30 time) helped, but the big difference was in how much more quickly we could execute our turns. In my case, I was able to use the time between turns to figure out what I wanted to do and once it became my turn, it was simply a matter of checking to see if I was in danger of hitting anyone.

As a card game, winning in Snow Tails requires some luck, but it is all about managing what you have the best you can. The quick game play and clever mechanics make for a game I'm proud to own and happy to play any time.

** Having a faster dog on the left causes you to drift to the left, but it actually should cause a turn to the right, as the slower dog adds drag and the left-side "circles" to the right. To this, I simply say Pfth! and don't worry about it.

Friday Night Gaming: Through the Ages, Mwahahaha!

May 29, 2009

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization
Merwin, Robert, Brian, and I tackled Through the Ages again. We went for the Full Game, which didn't add much complexity over what we had played before. Brian was running late so we took the time to do a run-through with Robert.

We played for about four hours before we called it for time and had only gotten through two-thirds of the game. In the end, Robert had a commanding lead, thanks to his early development of theatre. Brian was dogging him, thanks to his superior military and good use of Homer (who adds culture based on military strength). Merwin and I floundered in the back. I was able to gain some ground by attacking Merwin, who left himself weak after successfully colonizing new territory. This is how the game is designed--expansion makes you weaker, and weak players will be picked on by stronger ones. As it turned out, Robert was hording cards he wasn't supposed to (a misinterpretation of the rules by the newbie), which limited the opportunity for colonization, much to Brian's consternation. Though we enjoyed it (and Robert did well despite it being a "victory point" game), we agreed that we just couldn't bring it out until we had an entire day to play. No one knows when that might be.

However, it got me thinking about how to create a simple, fast civilization game that really plays in an hour. Maybe two with six players (TtA only supports four). I have some thoughts, but they aren't coherent enough to share.

June 5, 2009
With Ian joining us, we had our core five players.

Mwahahaha!
Mwahahaha! is a game about villains building doomsday devices and threatening the world. They start small, by ransoming a city, and progress to a state and then an entire country. Finally, the first to successfully threaten the entire world wins. The devices take resources, of which there are four types, which players get by drawing cards, trading with others, and successful ransoms. They also have puppet corporations that allow them to better aquire resources. Finally, they also have minions and gotcha cards with which to attack (or defend against) other players.

Each device uses a different mix of resources. Some require more and thus take longer to build, but their odds of success are better. Players are dealt three and chose the one they want to build. During the game, you can also swap out your device.

The premise is good, the mechanics fit the theme quite well. For example, you get bonuses for a) blowing up your device when the city/state/etc. doesn't bow to your demands; b) sacrificing minions; c) stealing and then discarding resources from another player. Similarly, you are penalized if your ransom demands are not met.

During the game, I think we all inadvertently cheated at some point. I kept confusing "Energy" (red atomic symbol) with "Eureka" (yellow light bulb) resources, taking the latter when I was entitled the former. Brian had the same problem. Merwin cashed in more cards than he was allowed. Because the resource and trading phase is simultaneous, it is very difficult to keep track of what everyone is doing and these types of mistakes don't get caught.

Dice rolls are used to attack other players and make threats with the doomsday device. The dice are compared Risk-style (high-to-high, down the line) and you want to get a certain number of successes to win. To threaten the world and win the game, you need four successes, for example.

During our game, we saw some pretty wild results (some saved by bacon, to be honest) which will definitely not be to everyone's liking. The card draws for resources, minions, etc. also add randomness to the game. And this would be fine and fun if the game didn't take two hours to play.

Merwin put it on his trading list.

At one point in the game, I played a card against Robert that robbed him of his chance to attack other players and made him a target for the other players. This move was immediately declared a "typical Patrick strategy." I was taken aback and amused, as I didn't think I had a typical strategy except being conservative (in Poker, I would be described as "tight"). But no, according to them, setting other players up so that I don't use my own resources against them is something I do consistently. It certainly fits my definition of diplomacy--"Let's you and him fight"--I just didn't realize I actually applied it (and I suck at Diplomacy).

Friday Night Gaming: Power Grid, Palastgeflüster

March 22, 2009
There was a good chance that I wasn't going to make it this evening because of Kublacon. But the problem with playing in Friday night games at Kublacon is the 30-40 minute drive home at 2:00 a.m. and then having to get back to the con by 9:00 a.m. the next morning. So, a game has to be really enticing for me to commit. And since Ian had called for a return of Power Grid, it was an easy decision for me to join the regular gang. We were missing Zach (who was not at the con), whose new job/home in San Francisco has been limiting his participation and probably will continue to do so into the future. We had Merwin, Brian, Robert, Ian, and myself.

Power Grid
As with the first game, Step 3 seemed to come a little late. This time, it was Brian just waiting to pounce to trigger the end of the game. Seeing this and that he could power 13 cities to my 12, I picked up a power plant that increased my capacity to 13. Unfortunately, between this cost ($16), buying garbage for my 6-city plant, and expansion to 13 cities, I spent a little too much money. I finished behind Brian by $13, iirc. Merwin, who consistently had the fewest cities, managed to connect 7(?) new cities in one turn to bring him up to 13 cities as well. but this left him >$100 behind Brian and I.

We played on the U.S. map (minus New England), which as the usual "western problem." That is, the major cities are concentrated in the east and expanding into the west is expensive. You see this in games like Empire Builder, Ticket to Ride, and many others. It is not really a problem, so much as an element of geography that one has to account for. In our game, Merwin owned the west. Brian had the best position in the east and the lack of serious competition helped to bring about his victory. But that's the rub. If someone had been butting heads with him, neither Brian nor this other player would have done as well, leaving opportunity for a third player (such as I, who was concentrated in the midwest) to win.

Of course, Merwin "hates this game," but his analysis paralysis wasn't so bad. And though he'd martyr himself and play again if the rest of us wanted, I doubt I'll be able to play again for a long time.

Palastgeflüster
Once Power Grid was over, we had time for a filler, but I wasn't too keen on the usual Bang! or The Red Dragon Inn. So we pulled this out instead for a second time. After a good start, tied with Brian and Merwin in the lead, I proceeded to stink up the place and finished in last place. The horribleness of people's hands in the last few rounds was astonishing. But Merwin got the best of it, beating Brian in the tie breaker.

Friday Night Gaming: Die Säulen von Venedig, Notre Dame

May 8, 2009
We missed Robert this week.

Die Säulen von Venedig
Many games are maligned for having a kingmaking situation, when one player (who has no chance to win, himself) can make a decisive move that determines who wins the game. In general, this is a sucky situation for everyone involved. On the other hand (and you see this most often in two-player games), you want to create a situation wherein your opponent is forced into a play that gives you the win. Die Säulen von Venedig, about the building of Venice on top of wetlands, has both of these features.

Player actions are dictated by cards. Everyone has a hand of five cards; there is a clever scheme by which cards are added or removed from the deck based on the number of players. Everyone plays a card face-down and reveals them at the same time. Then, in clockwise order from the starting player (which almost always moves one seat the left each turn), players perform the action dictated by the card they played.

The three basic actions are:

• Pick city district tiles that you can build later.
• Place pillars onto which city tiles can be built. This also lets you tag some pillars as yours.
• Build city tiles that you had chosen earlier on pillars that you or others placed earlier.

When you build a city tile, you get victory points based on the size and placement of the tile. You also earn points when someone else builds on top of the pillars you tagged. Almost every time you earn points for yourself, someone else does too, which leads to a weird mid-game kingmaking situation. If you aren't in the lead, do you maximize your own score, even if that means giving the leader more points? Or do you help others while not helping your own position as much? Come to think of it, this happens in other games as well (Vinci comes to mind), but it just seemed more prominent here.

There are other ways to earn points, such as playing one of the 3 special action cards that give you points if someone plays another specific card. I am a terrible at second-guessing what my opponents will do, so I mostly avoided this tactic. Another option is to play the Gondolier card; as the gondolier (and you lose the position when someone else plays the card later), you earn points each time someone builds next to the Grand Canal.

And there are a few cards which copy another player's action, choose a card from another and use it, or lets you build without giving anyone else any points. The starting player of each round also has the option to draw a random card from another player and return it or replace it with one from their hand. This and the fact that played cards rotate one seat left helps prevent card-hoarding and insures an interesting mix of actions. If you have no build cards, you can be sure that eventually they will make their way around to you as other players play them. But what to do when you don't have what you want is part of the strategy. Overall, I was reminded of Notre Dame (and a little bit of Citadels), which is why I requested it later.

The game ends immediately when someone reaches 80 points (never happened to us) or when the last pillar is placed. There is no "finish the turn" rule as in most games, so it is important to grab points when you can. It also means the leader can help bring the game to an end by placing pillars, but the timing has to be right else someone else might build and gain the lead before the pillars are drawn (once you choose your action, there is no backing out).

The first game we played featured four players: Merwin, Ian, Brian, and myself. Ian showed the power of the gondolier when he built a bunch of small tiles along the canal. But since he was forced to pass it to me, I became the gondolier soon thereafter. I then had to pass it to Brian, but as the starting player, I lucked out and drew it from his hand. I then held onto the card for the rest of the game. This was the primary factor in my victory.

For the second game, this time with Zach joining us, everyone was keenly aware of the gondolier, and sank pillars far away from the Grand Canal, limiting the gondolier's importance. As with the first game, Ian and I seemed to do the best. He is a master of tagging pillars such that players are forced to build on them, and I tried to follow his example. In this game, I purposely delayed building until the latter half of the game and timed it relative to the starting player such that I wouldn't get locked out of building in the best spots. It seemed to work because I won that game too.

Notre Dame
This was Zach's first game and since he was sitting to Merwin's right, we told him repeatedly never to pass him the Bank or Notre Dame cards. In every previous game, Merwin won and each time it was with the same strategy: get coins from the Bank and give them to Notre Dame for prestige points. Plus, the extra money allowed him to buy the favors of the various character cards.

Despite the handicap, Merwin nearly won. This time, he focused on the location (I forget what it's called) that generates prestige points directly. In the final rounds, he was cranking out 5, 6, or 7 victory points at a time. But he suffered from not having influence cubes in the Hospital and was hit by the plague multiple times. At -2 points per hit, this was just enough to give the edge to Ian (sitting to Merwin's right) and his Carriage-based strategy.

For my own part, I finished dead last. In two of the three rounds, I was dealt both the Bank and Notre Dame at the same time, preventing me from adopting Merwin's winning strategy. I don't think I ever managed to get 3 cubes into a single location, except when I used my Trusted Friend (essentially, a wild card). Brian, to my right, had his own struggles and finished just ahead of me.

I still enjoy the game, but I can't tell if my horrible performance (except for the very first game) was due to bad luck or me just not getting it. I think I say this a lot, but it just seemed that I couldn't gain any momentum. In this case, I couldn't build the engine that would allow me to generate points in any meaningful amount.

Friday Night Gaming: Giants, Bang!

May 1, 2009
On Monday, Zach sent a message saying, "I will be there friday and there will be SF. BE READY TO RUMBLE!" On Friday, it was, "It doesn't change my attendance but... can we board game tonight? I'm not feeling so hot myself today." And since Max was also under the weather and Jill under multiple deadlines, Zach was told to stay home and keep his germs to himself. So no Street Fighter. Again.

Giants
I hate it when we break the seal on a game at the table. I hate listening to someone else read the rules from the book (even when I do it), which is completely different than having someone teach the game. I hate stumbling through the rules and arguing for 10 minutes because no one looked at the FAQ or discussions online. So, I wasn't happy when we started the game. I was further dismayed when in the first blind bid auction, I got exactly zilch.

Like Moai, this is a game about building statues on Easter Island. Unlike that cutthroat and claustrophobic game, Giants reminded me of Tikal. Both games have worker allocation, but no one starves in Giants. You can cut off and screw players in both games, but only in Moai can you cannibalize the opposition. And while both games involve getting victory points by building moai, only in Giants do you actually move them across the island and into position; plus, you can add the pukao for extra points.

Even though I got off to a very slow start (and was cut out of a couple of later auctions as well), I came in second. The reason was that Merwin went for a blitz win, something that I had contemplated at the beginning but didn't have the moai to accomplish. The end of game is triggered once someone erects five moai, which gives someone the opportunity to build cheap and fast and end the game before the others can transport their maoi to the highest-scoring spots. And that's exactly what happened to Brian and Ian. Like me, Robert was taking the middle ground, and the first/only one to start a pukao (and I was going to start the next turn, had the game not ended).

The various workers and tokens in Giants are kept hidden behind a screen. Also, when you build a moai, you place your marker face-down under it. So, you have to remember who built which moai. Ideally, all this information is very trackable and someone with a perfect memory can tell you what everyone has. In practice, though, you simply lose track. This allowed Merwin to build his fifth moai while the rest of us were thinking "Really? Already?" Merwin ended with 48 points, I had 23, and everyone else was below that.

I'm sure we'll play again and when we do, we'll be watching and guarding against the blitz win. But I can't say that I'm thrilled at the prospect.

Bang!
Merwin is the worst Deputy, ever. As Sheriff, I got far more assistance from Robert the Renegade than I did him. Never once did Merwin attack either Outlaw, even though we knew Ian was one of them. See, he was eliminated by Robert and I, but was later resurrected by a card from the Fistful of Cards supplement. By the time Robert killed Brian, the other Outlaw, Ian had regained his strength. I started attacking Merwin simply because I was tired of hitting Ian. Luckily, I didn't kill him--that was left to Robert. With the three of us left, we went a few turns until the High Noon deck hit the end. Ian then blasted me and I died when my turn came around and the High Noon card made me lose my last life point. Not bad for a dead guy.

Friday Night Gaming: Through the Ages

April 24, 2009
The entire evening was spent with one game. Since there were only four of us tonight, Merwin wanted to pull out a game that could only handle up to 4. At my request, he scanned the rules earlier in the week so that we could have them available for review. I created a two-page rules summary and made it available to the group. [I just made some fixes to it now: one important typo (changing a II to a III), one clarification, and one rule that I thought that I had missed, but actually only had forgotten to put the bullet in front of it, so it got lost.]

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization
This card-and-cubes game has many similarities with the Civilization computer games. Players build up their populations, farms, mines, military units, etc., discover new technology, acquire leaders, and build wonders, all based on historical people and monuments. This last bit actually annoys me. For the first part of the game, I had Moses while Brian had Julius Caesar. These were not exactly contemporary characters (assuming Moses was even a real person). Later, I built the Taj Mahal. Do you see the disconnect? If we aren't following actual Earth history, I'd rather not have actual historical Earth figures and monuments. It's a minor point and consistent with Civ and similar games, so I'll drop it.

The rules are pretty heavy. They're pretty logical when you work out all the kinks (the rule book definitely doesn't help), but it takes a first game (or more) to figure out what you're doing wrong. For example, a player's turn consists of 4 phases: A, B, C, and D. Well, that's how I numbered them, since the rules don't. [Actually, they do have reference cards which breaks it down into 6 phases (1-6), but I didn't have access to it when I made my summary.] For the first several rounds, we were playing such that we do phase A, then everyone does phase B in turn order, then phase C, then D. As it turns out, this really slows down the game and really screws the last player (me, in this case). We were supposed to each do all phases, A-D, during our turn and then let the next player go. The game works better when you play it correctly. The reason for the error is that during the first turn, you do A, skip B, then everyone does C in order, and then D.

So this was definitely a practice game. We had a few stoppages while we tried to decipher the cards and understand the mechanics (which mostly involves pushing a lot of little cubes around). As it was, the game lasted ~4 hours and we stopped after only playing 2 of the 3 ages of civilization. The final score didn't really matter, but for the record, Ian was the winner, due in large part to his strong military (strong cavalry with Ghengis Khan) which gave him bonus points. Brian and Merwin followed, and I came in last. I was winning before we counted the end-of-game bonus points. I was earning the most points per turn, so I theoretically had a better longer-term position had the game continued. The biggest problem I was having was an inability to keep out of last place in military strength, which was linked to a lack of resources and science. But I did have the happiest population, so that counts for something... just not the score.

The big question is when we're ever going to be able to pull this out again because it will clearly take more time than we typically have Friday night and it doesn't accomodate 5+ players. But we are looking forward to it.

Friday Night Gaming: Clans, Moai, Volle Wolle

April 17, 2009
Zach was supposed to have run Street Fighter, but he never showed. This particular post is late due the relative ennui I've been feeling about the site. That and Google thinks this is a spam blog, for some bloody reason.

Clans
I brought this over hoping to play while we waited for everyone to arrive and I'm happy that we were able to do just that.

The first game featured Robert, Merwin, and myself while Jill semi-watched. It took Merwin a long time to wrap his head around it. And even though I was following him, it didn't seem to help me and I couldn't get any traction. Robert was the clear winner.

However, we had piqued Jill's interest and she joined in the second game. She had a bit of a struggle wrapping her head around the rules, but no worse than anyone else playing the first time. Meanwhile, it seemed to me that Merwin basically gave up trying to get the game. I ended up winning by a good margin.

Moai
Rather than wait until the end as we did last time, we all ganged up on Ian from the beginning. Meanwhile, I kept tangling with Brian which cost me momentum during the first few rounds when I couldn't get any wood. Because if this, I wrote myself off (and some of the others might have as well). However, I managed to gain considerable ground and had the lead going into the final round. I compare my situation to a middle-distance runner who starts his final kick just a bit too soon. Robert was able to destroy one of my moai, which set me back enough that I really had to work at the end. But I wasn't paying attention. I made the tactical error of pulling out the rules for our next game and was studying it instead of figuring out what I needed to do to win. I knew that Robert would win if someone didn't stop him, so I focused on denying him wood, which limited how many moai he could build (not only because he lacked wood, but was using his workers to fight for the wood rather than building a moai). But this also netted me nothing and all my workers starved in the final round. Meanwhile, Brian focused on simply keeping his workers alive and pulled away with the win. Had I been paying attention and not sacrificed my workers, focusing on getting points rather than stopping Robert from getting points, I might have had a shot at the win, but I'm not worried about it.

Volle Wolle
Ian left early because he had to fly to Japan the next day.

Merwin called the game "quaint," which is pretty accurate. It has elements of a dice game and a set-collecting card game. In this case, the dice are a d8, d10, and d12 with the goal of rolling as high as you can. The cards feature cute artwork of sheep and are of good, but not great quality. They are square with rounded corners, making them a little awkward to shuffle, but luckily it only has to be done once at the start of the game. Each player also has a bidding card and a cute little clothespin with which to secretly indicate the bid, by clamping the pin on the bid value which are positioned on the outside of the card.

A number of cards (one more than the number of players) are dealt face-up. The cards have a point value and over the course of the game, whoever collects cards with the most points wins. The cards depicting black sheep have negative values. There are also a few special 3-7-0 cards, which are worth 3 points if you only collect 1 such card, 7 points if you get a pair, but no points if you have 3 of them. Similarly, there are 0-0-7 cards. There are sheep dog cards, worth 9 points if you only have 1, but you get negative points if you either don't have one or have the most sheep dogs. There is also a bone card which gives you bonus points for each sheep dog you have.

As you collect cards, you place them in a single stack and are not allowed to review your pile, so you have to remember which cards you picked up. The top card of the pile may give you a positive or negative modifier to your die roll. In general, black sheep give a positive bonus whereas sheep worth more give you a negative modifier. Each card also has a number from 1 to 60 (or something like that). The value of the card on the top of your stack is used to break ties during the bidding process.

Once cards are revealed, each player makes a bid. The highest bidder goes first and rolls the 3 dice. If the roll (with any bonuses from the top card of your pile) equals or exceeds your bid, you get 3 of the face-up cards. If not, you can re-roll 2 of the dice. If you get your bid, you get 2 of the cards. If not, you can re-roll 1 of the dice you just rerolled. If this makes it, you get 1 card. If you fail to get your bid, you get a wool token (actually, a gray wooden disk). When rolling, you can spend a wool token to increase your die roll by 1; at the end of the game, each disk is worth 2 points (iirc). If you fail to roll 14 after 3 rolls, you are forced to take any and all black sheep that were dealt. When you win cards, you pick which ones and can choose the order in which they go into your stack.

Then, the next lowest bidder goes. The person with the lowest bid doesn't have to roll and simply gets all the cards that are left. It's also possible that that lowest bidders don't get any cards. You keep going in this way until all the cards have been captured and then you add up all the points of your cards, noting any black sheep or sets you were able to make.

I could never get any traction, and while Merwin and Robert were racking in cards, I floundered around. I even ended up with the most sheep dogs. Some of it was due to unlucky die rolls and some was due to being completely unable to predict what everyone else was going to bid. Brian seemed to be in much the same boat, but was still doing better than I was. In the end, we thought that Merwin was going to be the clear winner, but Robert managed to pull off a couple of good sets of 3-7-0 and 0-0-7 cards and came away with the most points.

As a filler, I guess it's an ok game, but I'd rather play Clans.

Friday Night Gaming: Wizard's Quest, Power Grid, Clans

April 10, 2009
With Merwin out of town to celebrate Vampire Day* with in-laws, we gathered at Brian's place this week. Mid-week, it was looking we would have 7 for gaming, but come Friday night, we only had myself, Ian, Robert, and of course, Brian.

Wizard's Quest
As Brian said, it was his house, so he got to pick the first game. And since he doesn't own any games less than 20 years old, he pulled out this Avalon Hill classic. Ian was the last to arrive and missed most of the rules explanation, but the game is pretty straight forward. Unfortunately, Ian made an early strategic error when placing Brian's treasures and made them too easy for him to get. For his part, Brian was last to pick his starting position and seemingly got the worst position. I put my castle on one far end of the board while Ian (the first to pick) had a prime central position. Robert was wedged below Ian and between Brian's scattered territories.

Despite his bad position, Brian was able to get a second castle and build up his forces. Meanwhile, I was hammered by orcs, the dragon, and Robert (though the Great Tunnel). My card draws were pretty bad too, twice losing men and only getting moderate benefits from the others. The only time I was able to muster a large force and get my first (and closest) treasure, they were decimated when I attempted to take over an orc-occupied castle.

Ian started with the most contiguous territories and ended the game that way too. Despite his superior numbers, he wasn't able to make great progress on capturing treasures. Robert hung in there, certainly doing better than me, but he seemed too hemmed in to make progress. That left Brian, the only one of us who had played before, able to sweep in and snatch all his treasures for the win.

We agreed that it was a good, but not great, game and we'd be willing to play again.

Power Grid
I've had this game since Rio Grande published the first English edition (complete with a few annoying typos). The only time I played it, long ago with Merwin and Gordon**, I screwed up the rules. I've been wanting to pull it out again, but it's not a Merwin-compatible game. Sure, he'd be a trooper and play, but it's not his cup of tea. After playing it with the four of us, it was agreed by all that adding Merwin, an hour would be added to the game duration.

Because of my earlier errors, I spent much of Friday afternoon pouring over the rules and making a one-page rules summary. I find that making my own cheat sheets greatly helps my understanding of the game. It highlights what I don't know and forces me to get all the little details and easily-forgotten rules correct. And there are plenty of those in Power Grid, whose rule book is written in such a way that I'm often left baffled at what it's trying to say.***

After stumbling through setup and a rules overview, we began the first auction. At its core, Power Grid is more about the auction of power plants than creating the network of connected cities. Because of this, there is certainly a learning curve that demands multiple replays. Knowing when to buy new plants, upgrade old ones, and how much to pay is critical. And because the plants come out in a random order after the first round, you have to decide whether to take what's available now or wait for something better. This particular point was my failing this game.

We were playing on the northern regions of the Germany map. Ian had the west, I had the east, Brian was in the middle, and Robert was wedged into the north-west. When Step 2 began and we are able double-up on cities, Brian jumped into Ian's territory with its cheaper connection rates, much to Robert's consternation. We did manage to hem Ian in, forcing him to pay for an expensive expansion. However, this did not impact Ian's funds all that much; he was flush with cash entering the final stage of the game.

During Step 1, Ian was consistently in the lead whereas I tended to be at the tail end. At Step 2, I expanded and captured the lead. Just before the end, Ian purposely sandbagged to be in last place. This allowed him to buy resources and build connections first. It worked well for him.

I was too conservative in my plant purchases. Hell, I ended the game with the 07 plant. Brian and Robert had both wind and nuclear plants, which limited their total capacity. Ian had the largest capacity (and only garbage-burning plant) at 15 cities. So once we were able to have 3 players occupy each city, he went on a spending spree, connecting 6 (iirc) cities at once, bringing his total to 17, and triggering the end-game. Since we couldn't match his capacity, it was a well-deserved, if anti-climatic ending.

Brian and Ian really enjoyed the game. Robert was less enthralled but agreed to play again. I really like the game and know I have much to learn, especially about auctions and cash flow.

Clans
After the 3-hour Power Grid game, a light closer was needed. Robert went home early, so the 3 of us took on "the huts game." Ian had never played, yet managed to kick our asses. It was a weird game, with a lot more village-building than our previous games. Brian was picking up tokens and I was trying to catch up. But neither of us did much for our secret clan color. No matter what I did, I just couldn't seem to advance my color (red) without also advancing blue, green, and/or yellow. Brian's black was lagging even further behind. That left Ian the clear winner.

*: Why I call Easter this is left as an exercise to the reader.
**: A long-absent member of the group.
***: (4/11) As as it was, I just discovered that I screwed up the setup, neglecting to remove 4 power plants from the deck. This had the result of making Step 2 last a few turns longer. Since the game ended so quickly once Step 3 began, I'm sure that my error had an effect on who won. I'm not saying that Ian wouldn't have won, but his blitz-ending probably would not have happened the way it did.

Friday Night Gaming: Street Fighter, Jamaica

April 3, 2009

Street Fighter
There were two fights this night: a 2-on-2 tag team match and a 3-on-3 king of the hill match. In each case, PCs were teamed up against a team of NPCs. In both bouts, the PCs prevailed.

In the first fight, Brian probably could have finished his opponent without tagging out, but he let Merwin in anyway. Unfortunately, the NPC was also able to tag-out, and so Merwin had to face a fresh opponent. Brian was eventually tagged back in to finish it. As a bystander to the bout, I must admit that I was pretty bored. The rules arguments, griping, and general sense that none of this really mattered got on my nerves.

In my fight, I tried to help Robert and Ian, but was mostly neutralized by good tactical choices and Zach and Brian (who played an NPC to help Zach with the load and also rolled phenomenally against me). I was finally able to be effective at the end and scored the final, decisive point. But since Zach was still having trouble juggling 2 NPCs and left idle one fighter who was causing me problems, I don't claim victory. I was just happy to have it end.

With no other bouts planned for the night (thankfully), we pulled out a board game.

Jamaica
When we pulled this out and began setting up, I made a point to let Brian know that it was a light, luck-based game. Well, it's not entirely about luck, but so much depends on factors outside of your control, including random card draws and die rolls, that it's a game I simply can't take too seriously. But it is exactly the kind of game that I want to play after a heavy game. It's too long to be a filler, exactly, but it's a good alternative if we get burned out on Bang!, et al.

Merwin struggled the entire game, ending with a negative score. Brian was stockpiling gold and seeing if he could survive without getting food (and not doing a bad job of it). Robert and Zach seemed to tangle a lot. Ian and I lead the actual race near the end and we both finished at Port Royal at the end. I won with the most points, but Ian and Zach (who ended with stocks full of gold) were very close. I think 3 of the first 4 treasures were cursed and exchanged hands multiple times. I took a -4 treasure from Ian and ended up giving it to Robert; later, Ian took a -2 card from me.

We ended at 11:00 and called it an early night.

Friday Night Gaming: Neuroshima Hex!, Palastgeflüster

March 27, 2009

Zach flaked on running the second session of Street Fighter, so it was board game night. Zach never did show up, distracted by work, so that left us with five: Brian, Merwin, Ian, Robert, and myself.

Neuroshima Hex!
While Merwin took Max (his son) for a walk, we started a four-way deathmatch. Afterward, this was declared the best game of NH ever and I think Robert vowed never to play it again because of this.

Since every player was out for themselves, the tactics were pretty interesting. There were cases when your best move would be against player A, but then it would hurt player A's attack on player B, so you went against player C instead. And because the board is so cramped, ganging up on a single opponent, 3-to-1, was actually pretty difficult. Another theme that emerged was that I seemed to start most of the battles, often when my tile filled up the board. This gave Ian, to my left, more open space to deploy units, and there were many times when I simply had no units on the board beside my base.

At the start, Brian took an early, but narrow lead (having the base with the fewest hits). And then thanks to some good play, Ian slammed both Brian and I, knocking us hard and taking a substantial lead. And then we turned our attention against him while Brian was still struggling to get his blockers in place to protect his base. At one point, I had the lead with Robert close behind. As we entered the final stretch, I started getting my Move tiles rather than actual fighting tiles, limiting my options right when they targeted me.

Brian, the first player, triggered the endgame with his last tile draw and it went around the table. As the last player, Ian pulled off an amazing maneuver. He was actually in a king-maker situation and his placement would determine who won. He placed a tile and then played a battle tile. As the dust cleared, there were three bases with 3 hit points left, and mine with 4. And then, the Final Battle took place, giving one last point of damage to my base. End result: four-way tie.

Except I just read the rules that say "When any of the players has drawn his last tile, Battle tiles cannot be used." I can't claim this would have given me the win, because catching this restriction would have changed what Ian played. Still, it was a damn cool ending.

Palastgeflüster
This card game came as a surprise. It is light, very chaotic, yet still fun. It lacks the same direct, visceral attacking of Bang! or The Red Dragon Inn, but there are opportunities to directly screw with people. Bruno Faidutti has a very good synopsis/review at his site.

We did have problems with the rules and the poor English translation, the lack of detail on the summary cards, and Merwin's cursory rules reading. We misplayed two character abilities in the first game and aborted a second to restart and play a full game with all the correct rules.

I started out by "shooting the moon," winning the hand giving me a one-point (out of four) lead. I then lost the next two hands, making the score everyone else: 2, me: 1. Brian then won a hand when Robert got greedy, could have taken a co-win by knocking me out, but went for a solo-win and failed. And then there might have been another hand in there. In the end, Brian won the game all by himself by winning the last hand.

I expect this to come out as a filler when we have less than six players, as it unfortunately only handles up to five.

Friday Night Gaming: Galactic Emperor

March 13, 2009
We were missing Zach and Ian due to Ian's sister being in town. This meant that we still haven't played Street Fighter. But Tom was able to make it, giving us a table of 5.

Galactic Emperor
Merwin pulled this from his collection and during setup, it was clear that it had been too long since we had played. And since this was Tom's first game, we decided to do a couple rounds of practice before resetting and beginning fresh.

I tried to not make myself a target, choosing Scientist 3 times instead of more controversial roles. With Space Pirates (a controversial technology to be sure) and Protein Fields, I was hoping to have access to resources without a lot of early expansion. Unfortunately, I ended up with two systems that generated Energy and Robert (to my left) had none, so I was a target for him. Merwin expanded onto a bunch of food planets which no one contested and ended up giving him lots of income when he sold is 10+ food cubes each time Merchant came up. Brian and Tom were butting heads on their border to their mutual distraction.

I eventually moved against Merwin, Robert moved against me, and I lost a lot of ground. Merwin preemptively struck against Brian and won. Figuring he was going to lose anyway, Brian made a suicide run at Merwin. Tom made a run at Robert, but then Robert (aided by his Robotics, he easily had the most deployed ships) grabbed territory from him.

The game lasted around 4 hours and we finally called it at midnight. A final tally of victory points put Robert and Merwin tied, but Robert won the tiebreaker. It's possible Merwin forgot to count all his vp and should have won, but we'll never know for sure.

As with the first time we played, I think the game is good but too long, at least with this group. I doubt it will come out again, as everyone was very fatigued at the end. I wouldn't be surprised if Merwin trades it.

Friday Night Gaming: Vinci, Neuroshima Hex!

March 6, 2009
Earlier in the week, Zach emailed the group and told us that work would prevent him from game night and running Street Fighter, so this week turned into a board game night. With Robert away for work-related training, we only had a group of four this night.

Vinci
I really have to learn how to not make myself target. Long story short, I was keeping pace with Brian and had established a pretty good persistent empire in decline. But then Brian slammed me with the help of Merwin. At one point, I only had a single token on the board and though I was still in the lead pack, it would take me several turns to regroup. Meanwhile, Ian benefited from being ignored. During the entire game, he only had two empires, both of which had Currency (which provides a bonus victory point for each controlled territory). So though he was in third for two-thirds of the game, he caught up very quickly and became a major threat once I was out of the way.

One of the complaints about Vinci appears to be that its deterministic combat system and open scoring means that the endgame can devolve into over-analysis. I don't mind this so much as the kingmaker situation that occurred. Depending on what Merwin did, either Brian or Ian would win. Choosing not to make a choice, Merwin instead maximized his own victory points, which is a good way to cut that particular knot. But it also meant that Ian won.

Overall, the game was well received and we finished in just over three hours. I predict it will hit the table again and I look forward to it. I just need to do a better job convicing people that Brian and Ian are the biggest threats. In any game.

The same designer has created a revised version of the Vinci system in a game called Small World, which moves the action from Europe to a fantasy world, simplifies/restricts the civilization combinations, and helps mitigates the endgame problems. I really want to try this version out as well.

Neuroshima Hex!
The four of us decided on a team game and it was randomly chosen that Merwin and I would be against Brian and Ian. After a very quick rundown of the basic rules for Ian, we jumped right in. Brian and Ian had the tougher and harder-hitting forces. Merwin and I had more mobile and flexible forces; I predicted that we were going to get creamed.

Much to my surprise, we got off to a quick start, making some lightning strikes and severely damaging Ian's base. Since the team game ends when the first base is lost, it made sense to concentrate on a single base rather than split attacks. Brian lamented discarding his Sniper earlier (when there weren't any units to target with the Sniper) and mentally checked out of the game. They were getting poor tile draws and we were able to take advantage of it. I tried to explain that the next rounds could completely turn their luck around.

I hated being right. Ian was able to bring in his heavy-hitters, get some good synergies, and focused on Merwin's base. At one point he had one unit that could do 6 points of damage. And it was tough (meaning hard to kill). And there were two other armored units also hitting the base. I tried to neutralize them, but was thwarted by Brian's nets. In other words, our agile units got pinned down and just couldn't stop the onslaught. I don't think we had gone through half the tiles before Merwin's base went under.

Ian seemed particularly excited to play again in the future, but as it only handles two to four players, it will have to wait for another week when multiple people cannot make it.

Friday Night Gaming: Red Dragon Inn, Bang!

February 27, 2009

We spent the first part of the evening making characters for Zach's short Street Fighter campaign. We are only using the main rulebook, but we only had PDFs on 3 laptops, which slowed the painstaking process of selecting maneuvers. We never actually got to the point of having completed characters, but we got far enough so that we could finish the characters on our own (which I did Saturday).

Since the characters weren't in shape to run some practice fights, Merwin pulled out a couple of light games that could handle 7 players. We had 7 because Tom made a rare appearance tonight, even though he won't be in the Street Fighter game.

The Red Dragon Inn
With the expansion, this game handles up to 8. The "take that!" card play and chaos is still very prevelent, but it scales up very well. While it is possible to gang up on player who seems weak, thus making them weaker and head to a quick elimination, that didn't happen in this game. With so many players, the biggest difference was in the gambling rounds: the swings of fortune in one round can be huge. In one instance, I went from fearing I'd go broke to becoming the predominant leader in gold and could practically sleep through future rounds. I think 3 players went down by going broke (which is the only way to get the Dierdre character, it seems). Merwin and Robert went out first. I was knocked out soon after a disasterous drinking contest, and it came down to Ian and Tom. It was a true nail-biter, with both of them on the edge of going out for several rounds until Tom, playing in his first ever game of Red Dragon Inn as the half-ogre Gog, finally won.

Bang!
With 3 Outlaws (Robert, Tom, and I) and 2 Deputies (Merwin and Ian(?)) in addition to the usual Renegade (Zach?) and Sheriff (Brian), the beginning was a little show. We didn't know who each other was and the increased range with so many players limited targeting options.

I began by playing it cool and using cards that effected all other players, like the Gatling and Indians. Tom came out first by making a move against the Sheriff and was one of the first to go. The turning point of the game was when Merwin died from the Dynamite that he, himself played. Robert soon began to unloaded on the Sheriff and I helped. As Slab the Killer, Brian had good offensive capabilities, but his defenses were weak and the outlaws prevailed.

Friday Night Gaming: Moai, Ruse & Bruise, Cosmic Encounter

February 20, 2009
Merwin was sick this night, but managed very well even if he was slower than usual. He definitely wasn't into the last game, but he co-won anyway.

Moai
Named after the famous statues on Easter Island, Moai does a very good job of recreating the desperation and cutthroat nature of its setting, even if the actual mechanics are abstract. For example, in the final turn, Ian made the choice to build moai rather than feed his people because that would give him more victory points. In this respect Moai is like Mall of Horror and I give the game kudos because of it. As the game progresses, fields become barren, trees diminish, and players turn on each other in a desperate bid for survival and building the most and biggest moai.

Players begin with five people cards and nine workers with values 1, 2, and 3 (evenly distributed) with an equal number of workers in reserve. Players bid their people cards for turn order and then N+1 epoch cards are revealed (N = number of players). In turn order, players pick an epoch card. Some epoch cards allow the player to build a boat. Others have effects such as destroying a moai, killing another worker, causing a field to become barren, or burn a unit of wood (on the board or in someone's reserve) or someone's boa ; the players who chooses the card chooses who is affected. The epoch card also indicates how many new people cards the player draws and how many workers must return to the player's hand at the end of the turn. Lastly, for each epoch card showing a palm (which becomes less and less frequent), one unit of wood becomes available.

In turn order, players allocate one worker to get wood, work in the fields, or build moai. These workers supplement any that might have been left on the board from the previous. Workers are placed with their values hidden, except in the fields. A player with a boat can also place a worker there, which is like having a worker in the field. Players assign workers to one of the units of wood available (typically 3 to 6 units per round, I think). The player who has the highest total value of workers allocated to a particular unit get it. The first player decides who wins ties (except in a tie for first player position). In our game, Robert was shut out of wood for several rounds, even when there 6 units of wood for 5 players. As I said, this game is nasty.

Workers building moai may build a moai equal to (or less than) the total value of the workers assigned to the task. There are three moai available for 4-10 victory points each. Thus, you want to get the higher-valued ones before the other players, but this means allocating more and higher-value workers, which may limit your ability to either get wood or feed your workers. If you have the wood and multiple groups of workers, you can even create multiple moai per turn. Ian did this and damn nearly won because of it, even if all his people starved.

Workers in fields (or boats) feed other workers, one per value of the field worker (a value-1 worker in a field only feeds himself, for example). Workers who are not fed starve at the end of the round (but not before they've gotten their wood or built their moai). To stave off starvation you can use a cannibalism raid card (from the people deck) and a people card; this kills an opponent's worker (whose value equals the people card you played) but saves one of yours. In our game, I made a point of getting boats, which was wise because it helped prevent my people from starving, but it was also stupid because it marked me as a target and my field workers were targeted. Robert had a lot of raid cards, but not the other people cards to use them.

After logging, building, and feeding (or not), you get to draw new people cards, which you can save for next round or use them now to get more workers from your reserve by playing a pair of cards. People cards are either raid cards or have a value from 1 to 3. Playing a pair of 2s, for example, gives you a new value-2 worker. You can play an unmatched pair, but you get the worker of the lower value. You also have to return workers from the board to your hand. This is good because it allows you to reassign workers more freely, but it is bad because you may be forced to remove workers from a value field or wood-gathering spot.

Eventually, the epoch deck marks the arrival of Europeans and the last round is played. After all is said and done, each surviving worker is worth 1 vp, each spare wood is with 2, but the bulk of the points come from moai. In our game the spread of points was 27 to 30 among 5 players, making for a very close game, but it was Brian who came out on top.

At any point, any one of us could have won had specific actions not been taken against him. Merwin and I ganged up on Ian in the final turn. Both Brian and Merwin had moai destroyed. They hit my fields and even burned one of my boats. The ability to attack leaders is both good and bad and I suspect, based on the comments on BGG, that most gamers find it bad. The winner may be the one who convinces the others to pick on someone else. But it certainly makes for a tense game throughout and gives enough room for a surprise come-from-behind victory.

We might have played it again if Zach hadn't showed up; the poor guy actually sat through most of the game in front of television or watching us pay. The tough decisions does slow the game down and some may find it too long for a game that is mostly a "take that" tactical game.

Ruse & Bruise
I enjoyed this game much more than my first. I essentially stopped worrying and just played cards. I was pretty successful getting the middling cards that others weren't fighting over, but it cost me any shot of getting a complete set and maximizing my score. Ian was taking the "get one of each" approach, but ended up being screwed when Robert had to leave at his pre-stated pumpkin time of 10:30 and we had to end the game early. Brian was the official winner due to a very good last round during which he picked up two 5-vp cards, but if Ian had been allowed to double his score of his incomplete "rainbow" hand, it might have been different.

Cosmic Encounter
Zach and Ian hadn't played before, but I gave a very quick rules overview, dealt out powers, and we were off. I was Hacker, Merwin Kamikaze, Zach Warpish, Ian Dictator, and Brian was Trader. The warp was very crowded, making Zach a force to be reckoned with, but he only managed a few bases*. It wasn't until the very end that Brian "got" trader and realized he should burn through his good cards and trade his junk away. Ian used Dictator defensively and ended up in 3 encounters with Brian at the end. He succumbed to Brian's onslaught with the help of Merwin** for a co-win.

* In one case, I ended his turn by taking his encounter cards during consolation).
** I helped Brian get his fourth base to get my third, hoping that I would get my turn, but Brian won his second encounter and the game.

Friday Night Gaming: Cosmic Encounter, Toledo

February 6, 2009

Cosmic Encounter
We knew we would be missing Zach and since I had called dibs to play CE the first time we only had 5 players, I was all geared up to give the new FFG version a spin. But then Ian canceled (something about a lady friend asking him to take her to a concert...) and that brought us down to 4. Since I wouldn't be here the following week because of DunDraCon and Zach would be back after that, I decided to continue with the original plan and bring CE.

Merwin had already expressed his hated for CE, having played a couple of times back on college, but he was still willing to give it a go. And I thank him for that, because the new edition did nothing to change his opinion.

After a rules summary and game setup, we got started. The powers in play were Macron (Brian), Void (Merwin), Tick-Tock (Robert), and Masochist (me). It was interesting that we had 2 "alternative win condition" powers in the game, but I was thankful to have a time-limiting power like Tick-Tock in the game even though I feared it might win. FFG took the opportunity to tweak some classic powers and one of the things they did was give Macron 2 Consolation or Reward cards per ship instead of 1. Only getting one card due to their one-ship limitation was always a drawback and so I approve of this change. But it also helped Brian amass a very large hand. He played a Negotiate when I was attacking his home planet and wiped out my hand; I think he did the same to Robert.

As Masochist, I threw my ships into battle, not really caring if I lost, even against the Void. Since I could also win with 5 foreign bases colonies, I also didn't mind if I won, and I was doing ok in that department as well. Robert had depleted half of his timing tokens and also had a number of colonies. Merwin was likewise chugging along. At one point, we were tied at 3 colonies each with Brian at 2. And that was about when Brian's monster hand starting kicking in. He managed to get the Vulch flare, and used it to take the Macron flare from me,* and he never looked back. In other words, he won handily.

* I basically had the choice to either give it to him right away or dump my relatively good hand and then give it to him. I chose the former, hoping that it wouldn't make him too powerful. I was wrong.

We started a second game with Observer (Brian), Parasite (Merwin), Citadel (Robert), and Healer (me). With both Observer and Healer in the game, there were not any ships in the warp. And with Observer and Parasite, it seemed like most encounters had all four of us involved. Citadel didn't come into play. Robert played his cards, but I don't think he ever used them. It was simply too easy to avoid them by pointing the cone hyperspace gate at a planet without them. I don't remember the details, but I do recall that Merwin and I shared a win.

We didn't have any major problems with the rules, but a couple of cards did cause us problems. The description of the Wild Mind flare is very straight-forward and clear, yet the designation as "Main Player Only" and "Alliance" (as in, only during the alliance phase) made it seem almost completely useless. In my opinion, it should be "As any player" and "Any Phase" like Wild Void is (for example). The other card, which I cannot seem to find, had to do with "ships on the hyperspace gate," which would not seem to apply to defensive ships in the new game, since they aren't put on the defensive ring as they were in previous editions; this wording seemed odd to me and I'd like to see an official clarification.

Toledo
We actually started playing this before Robert arrived, but abandoned the game after only a few rounds in favor of Cosmic. We closed out the night by returning to Toledo.

Let me begin by admitting that I totally handed the game to Robert. I didn't pay close enough attention to the open victory points and thought I had the most when I made my game-ending move (getting my third pawn to the palace). I had 16. Robert had 17. But no one seemed to mind that much.

Toledo is what I call a "silent game." There wasn't much talking among the four of us, as we focused on our hands, counted out spaces on the board (there is a lot of counting), and contemplated our next move. There is player interaction--the game has duels after all--but after the interaction-fest that is CE, it felt quite subdued. I definitely felt a considerable amount of tension at the end (when I went for my failed blitz), but Brian already knew he wasn't going to win so he didn't have the same feeling (and didn't warn me of my mistake when I commented that Merwin was a threat, neglecting Robert). But he did say that he started liking the game once we started playing.

I felt that there was a distinct advantage to those who were able to draw duplicate movement cards, since that is the only way to take multiple actions in a turn. I had fewer traders on the board, which filled up sooner than I thought it would, and didn't get cards from other players. In general, we were very reluctant to give each other cards to use their traders, and I specifically avoided giving Brian any. I am reminded of China, in which there seems to be a disconnect between playing housing and playing emissaries, there seems to be a disconnect between placing trading tiles and other actions in Toledo. We just played our tiles until they were gone and went on to the rest of the game. I skipped a turn (or two?) to do something else and so didn't get as many tiles down.

There is enough strategy and tactics, as one would expect from Martin Wallace, but I don't know yet if the game was fun.

Friday Night Gaming: Neuroshima Hex!, Gloom

January 30, 2009
This installment is later than usual because BoardGameGeek was down and I had a bunch of character-creation stuff for other games I was trying to get done.

This week, we began by splitting into two groups of 3 to play two different games. This allowed us to play a couple of games that don't handle 6 players. While Ian, Robert, and Zach played Monsters Menace America, Brian, Merwin, and I played...

Neuroshima Hex!
This tile-laying game has a post-apocalyptic military theme, but it would have worked just as well with a fantasy theme (and if was produced by Fantasy Flight Games, I sure it would have been). There are no dice, combat is completely deterministic, and the only randomness is the order of the tiles draws. While the timing of tile draws can be critical to victory or defeat, strategy and tactics will favor the more skilled player.

There is ample opportunity for analysis paralysis. First, you draw 3 tiles and choose which one to discard. Then you have to place one tile. On an empty board, there are 19 spaces and 6 possible orientations on the board. And then you have to place the second tile (or keep it or discard it, which only only happened a few times). As the board fills, your placement options decrease, but the interactions between tiles increases. Tiles can have various abilities, most of which only work on 1-3 different sides, so facing is very important. Powers include:

• Melee attack against adjacent hexes
  
• Ranged attacks that follow a straight line until it hits the first target
  
• Nets that immobilize adjacent tiles so they can't move or attack
  
• Armor that reduces damage
  
• Additional toughness, allowing them to take additional hits (most tiles can only take 1 hit before dying)
  
• Power boosts to adjacent allied tiles
  

Normally tiles are immobile, but there are a few mobile units and there are also Move action tiles that you can draw. Eventually, someone plays a Battle action tile (or the board fills) and sets off a series of "this tile kills that tile, and this other tile kills that other one" determinations based on the initiative score of each tile. Initiative is a very important factor to consider when placing tiles, since your tile may die before it can act. Once all the dead tiles are removed, the board slowly gets filled again. Each player has a home base which is killed after 20 hits. The player with the healthiest home base after all the tiles have been used wins.

With 3 players, it was a free-for-all battle. With his very tough and armored units, Brian developed a very strong position and took the lead until Merwin and I sacrificed units to break through his defensive line. Eventually, I was able to set up my heaviest attacks behind my home base for cover (my home base also gave them additional attacks) and did some massive damage to Brian for a couple of turns. As the game came to a close, I had a clear lead. They did a good job of boxing me in, but my final draws were all Move action tiles, and I was wiggle free and win.

Brian chastised us for thinking too much since this was the first game. But I really feel that I need to think hard to just get up to his level, so was taking my time. When I had my sights on him, he chose to move cover in front of his base rather than move his base out of the line of fire, which was a mistake on his part (he said and I agree) and probably cost him the win. I'm sure if he wasn't so concerned with keeping the game quick, he would have won.

We played another half-game while the others finished their game. When we quit, Merwin had a very superior position and was the favorite to win.

I'd definitely play the game again, though it is doubtful when this 2-4 player game will fit our schedule. I certainly appreciate the design. In some ways, it reminds me of Nexus Ops since you simply have to accept that units will die and realize that you'll get more. And sometimes you just want to start a losing fight so that the board clears a bit and opens up other options (this is not a factor in Nexus Ops).

Gloom
Both Ian and I had expressed interest in this, so Merwin begrudgingly brought this out along with the first two expansion Gloom: Unhappy Homes and Gloom: Unwelcome Guests so that we could accommodate all six of us.

While Merwin had played before, it had been several years ago and he remembered little of the game, except that the cards are incredibly difficult to read. And boy was he right. When we play Bang!, we never have players getting out of their chairs and walking over to another player to read the cards face-up in front of them. Hell, I had a hard time reading the cards in front of me. Not only is the print small with poor color contrast, but is also in a funky thematic font.

The rules of the supplements failed to explain how to actually add their special cards and rules to the base game. The game itself was very lackluster. I saw very little strategic play beyond "play bad cards on other people, play good cards on me, and hope no one can stop you" with few opportunities for clever card combinations and thoughtful tactics. With 6 of us, it dragged and dragged. Yes, there was some humor in the cards themselves, but that wore out quickly. The game ends when a player has 5 dead family members. We finally gave up when we had only 2 or 3 dead each.

Gloom has an interesting theme and novel cards, but it pretty gloomy to play.

Friday Night Gaming: Kamisado, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg, Ruse & Bruise

January 23, 2009

Being that it was Merwin's birthday, or we just used it as an excuse, we started an hour earlier this night. Unfortunately, it ended up being a very long night.

Kamisado
Though I suck at most abstract games, I generally appreciate their design and have even designed (but never playtested) a few myself. We very rarely play such games with this group, but since people were trickling in, Merwin opened this newly-arrived game, and we banged out a couple of plays before we got the main event(s).

In the first game, Merwin and I moved pieces and were just trying to get a hang of the rules rather than the strategy. It definitely seems to be a game of reducing your opponent's movement options while keeping yours open. This requires some foresight, but I doubt one could look more than two moves ahead. Well, I certainly couldn't. But it also requires "seeing" moves, both good and bad, which is a skill I'm particularly bad at. I even had a mulligan because I made a particularly obvious bad move; we blamed it on me confusing which pieces were whose... Anyway, I lost.

Zach and Brian took their chess experience to the game and had a more thoughtful time of it. I actually saw the winning move before Brian did, but then, I didn't see a bunch of bad moves that he did. Anyway, like a jerk, I blurted out "Oh, you can win!" which (rightfully) ticked him off. He soon found it and won.

By now, everyone had arrived and we moved on to...

Tales of the Arabian Nights
Merwin has very fond memories of this game from earlier years. A new edition is coming from Z-Man games, so he was anxious to play this at least once before getting the new version for the sake of comparison. It is essentially a combination of an adventure boardgame (like Prophecy, but without the fighting) and a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

The production values on this well-used game were pretty low with square cardboard shits and non-laminated cardstock player boards and cards. We started the game fine as our character chits set off from Bagdad and had a number of encounters. Brian had a very involved encounter and converted a nation to Islam and got half way to his goal. Ian was griefstricken and lovestruck. Merwin became griefstriken and enslaved. Robert was imprissoned. Zach had a "no encounter" and a city quest. I had a small event that I can't even remember anymore. And then Brian got the exact same enounter again and got to his winning conditions. We all had one turn to either stop him or overpass him. Since none of us were anywhere near him and simply didn't get a super mega-event to catch up, he won. I think the actual play time was less than an hour and the actual number of turns was 4.

I'm not playing it again. It's dull, random, nonsensical, and (though I usually try to avoid this word) broken. I'll give the Z-Man version a try when Merwin gets it, but if the flaws aren't fixed, I'll pass.

Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg, die
I'll just quote what I wrote for BGG:

Despite elements of Bang! and Shadow Hunters, such as role-deduction, variable powers, and direct conflict/interaction, it just fell flat with me. The decisions aren't hard. The card play isn't clever. Dull.

Ruse & Bruise
Afterward, this game drove me nuts because it reminds me some other game that I just can't place. During the game, I compared it Wyatt Earp, but that wasn't it. One could even say it's Loco (a game I've never played) on steroids. During the game, it drove me nuts because very little that I did worked. No, I take that back.* Everything I tried in the second-half of the game failed. I was even completely shut out for a round.

Each turn, you play a card on one of six stacks, trying to accumulate enough points to win the victory point card at the top of the stack. The round ends when each stack is filled (one card per vp reward in that stack). After six rounds, the game is over and the player with the most points (double if you manage to get one of each of the six "suits" of vp). Every card has a special ability that changes the rules or screws with other cards. Cards are played face-down initially and then revealed when the next card on the stack is played. You can bluff. You can set traps. You can really screw with the other players. It's a game of tough decisions and second-guessing. And I didn't really like it.

When it comes your time to play, you only have a choice of 3 cards, which is good because it reduces your options to a managable number. But it's bad because sometimes those options suck. Certain cards work really well together, which is great for you when you get them during the same round. And you must play to a stack, even if you know all your options are bad. Even when things are working and you have clear control of a particular stack, someone can swap the vp card you're after by playing the Traitor on a completely different stack (meaning that there was nothing you could do about it).

The ability to control one's destiny in a game is important, but there must always be elements outside of your control (and it ceases being a game and becomes a puzzle). When the lack of control comes from die rolls and card draws, a game is random. When it comes from other players, a game is chaotic. Not enough randomness and/or chaos can make a game dry and prone to "optimal strategies." Too much randomness turns a game into a pointless excerise. Too much chaos and the game becomes frustrating. I'm very inconsistent when I rate a game based on its level of chaos. I like some chaotic games (Fluxx, Bang!) while chaos annoys me in other games, and I can't say I know why.

I want to say that Ruse and Bruse is too chaotic, that your plans are too easily thwarted by the actions of the other players. Control is ephemerol, such as when Robert screwed me with a Traitor and then I did the exact same thing to him (reversing his earlier move) in the same round. But then I was hosed by Brian's traitor two rounds later. And since you can only expect to get your Traitor card once per game, it's just random whether or not you can use it when you need it. I'm picking on Traitor because those three uses stand out in my mind and affected me personally, but the same kind of thing happens with other cards.

Of the six of us, Robert, Zach, and Ian did really well. Ian came out clearly on top while Merwin, Brian, and I languished in the cellar far below.

* Why don't you just delete it and type something else?
Shut up, you.

Friday Night Gaming: Red November, Coloretto

January 16, 2009

Red November
We played this cooperative game twice. The first time, we were still learning the rules and trying to puzzle things out. I had read the rules before the game, but not having the whole game, especially the event cards, I failed to grasp some of the finer points. We were plagued by fires and no fire extinguishers. Then the flooding started, which helped against the fires. Meanwhile, the asphyxiation, heat, and pressure gauges gradually rose. And just as we were getting a grip on things, at just about the midway point, the sub imploded.

The second game went much more smoothly. We were able to keep the gauges in check, timed event cards were discarded during feint checks, fires and flooding were under control, and Zach even started complaining that it was too boring. We even lucked out in that the dreaded Kraken showed up one minute too late to be a threat. The last 10 minutes to the rescue were quite hairy, though. Passages were becoming blocked and so we were unable to deal with the rapidly increasing number of events. In the end, Brian was locked in the fully flooded reactor room and I was locked in the missile room which was on fire. But no matter, we were rescued. The only casualty was Merwin, who passed out and died from a flood or fire.

Cooperative games are fun, but I am tiring of them. In some ways, our group is too good at cooperation. Sure, we may still lose to the mechanisms (and machinations) of the game and we often have disagreements on the proper course of action, but we are all professionals. We're very open with each other, we respect each other, and we work relatively well together. And any sense of group accomplishment is overshadowed by the thought we that just got lucky. Case in point, in our first game, we too often rigged things so that we had a 100% chance to fix a problem. This costs time and resources, but it is probably what we would do in our day jobs. In the second game, we took more chances (typically between 60% and 80%) and it payed off more than it probably should have.

Coloretto
Merwin and I had played this before, several years ago, but neither of us remembered much about it. I got off to a good start with Brian on my heels. And it went downhill from there. I finished third behind Brian and Merwin, between whom I was sitting. I place a bit of the blame on luck. Twice I drew a joker that Brian picked up after me. And others just seemed to have better luck with drawing cards to fill out a collection when they were the last to play. During the game, I frequently looked to Ian, who seemed to approve of my moves, but he came in 4th, so maybe that wasn't such a good idea. :)

Friday Night Gaming: Vanished Planet, Bang!

January 9, 2009

Vanished Planet
This small-press cooperative game has some of the most poorly organized rules I have ever had to use. For example, we weren't sure if a player's ships were eliminated when their home planet was destroyed. It took me a while, but I found it under the section called Satellites are Special, describing the satellites were you draw Goal cards.

The premise is not unlike Pandemic in Space! Basically, there is a giant space blob that starts in the middle of a large hex map. On each player's turn, the blob grows out one hex toward that player's home planet. As the blob grows, it also becomes a navigational barrier/hazard, making things tougher. To win, you have to gain a number of victory points (5 per player) before the blob destroys the last home planet. VPs are gained through completion of goal cards that you draw, but you can only hold one at a time.

You begin your turn by drawing an Event card, which often provides some benefit like a free Resource, but there are a couple of nasty cards in there as well. For example, the Creature Growth card advances the blob one more hex toward you. The number of such cards, like Epidemic cards in Pandemic, are the primary means of adjusting the difficulty. We played the standard difficulty with two in the deck and Merwin got them both. Later, when it was clear his home planet was doomed, but he was racing to complete his goal, he debated about grabbing one more Resource. We convinced him not to because if he drew another Creature Growth card (the deck had been reshuffled by now), we wouldn't complete his goal. And sure enough, he drew that fateful card on his turn. But since he took the brunt of such cards, it gave the rest of us more time.

You then spend your turn moving your ship, placing one of your 10 influence tokens on planets, nubulae, research stations, asteroids, and markets to gain Resources like colonists, energy, research, ore, and money. You then spend those Resources to create Personnel like diplomats, doctors, engineering, scientists, and soldiers. Personnel plus more Resources are spent to create Equipment. And finally, Equipment, Personnel, and Resources are used to build Upgrades, including new ships, faster engines, and mines that can hold off the blob.

There is also an opportunity for trading. You can trade one Resource or Personnel with another player on your turn. This is vital since what you'll probably be missing something specific you need to build the thing you want. We handicapped ourselves through three-quarters of game not realizing you could trade Personnel or Mines. The rules say something to the effect of "we suggest trading the same thing (Resource for Resource, Personnel for Personnel)." This and other areas of the rules make me think they just couldn't decide on what the official rules should be. I sympathize with this plight, but I don't find it acceptable in a published, non-beta, game.

Goals consist of performing missions such as creating a specific piece of Equipment and dropping it off at a special location or having influence markers on 7 areas of a particular resource. Typically, they are worth 2 to 4 VP, so every player needs to complete two goals to "pull their weight." You get goals by visiting Satellites that end up being engulged by the blob by the 5th turn or so. You can only have 1 goal at a time, but by the time you finish your first goal, the Satellite will be gone, so you have to build a new one to get a second goal.

I started with a rare (only?) 5-point goal of visiting every other home planet, a nigh-impossible task. Brian said the examples in the rules mentioned this as the toughest goal, which I took a challenge. It took me a long time to gain momentum, to gain resources, to build the translocator drive that would let me jump instantly anywhere on the board. Without this Upgrade, I would have never been able to finish my goal, but I did get my 5 vp.

The first part of the game is about placing tokens, building some initial upgrades (like a second ship!), and homing in on your goal. The second part the game is a mad scramble to build things and travel to where you need to complete your goal. The third part and endgame is getting second goals that can be completed in two or three turns (and building mines to buy time). I found the pacing really worked well with victory and defeat running neck-and-neck down to the wire. However, there can be a lot of downtime between turns, especially in a 6-player game, so I spend some time away from the game, watching television while the others played.

We won with a turn to spare. No one else died after Merwin, and we erected a monument in his honor. Well, we talked about it, anyway.

Besides the horrendous rules, fiddly nature of building stuff, and 3-4 hour playing time,* it is a fairly straight-forward, hectic cooperative game. But like Pandemic, I felt that it would work better as a computer game, and it is really a single-person game spread over multiple people. The solo (one planet, one race) version might actually be harder because of the lack of trading, but having one person playing multiple races and their resource collection and development would be too much to handle (without a computer).

I think there was interest in playing this again. If we did, it would probably be with the expansion rules that give each alien player special bonuses and has a faster/harsher Creature Growth. Also, I will suggest using an optional rule that will make winning the game harder, but management easier. In the standard rules, you can collect Resources at any time, including before, during, or after moving and building. I suggest just collecting them right after drawing an Event to help keep play moving (by limiting options and making each turn a little more regimented).

* The box says 60 minutes.

Bang!
After the heavy, long game play of Vanished Planet, we needed something lighter that didn't require us to learn the rules. Even so, there was still some rules questions and misinterpretations by Brian and Ian, due mainly to assumptions they had, such as Indians not affecting the player who played the card. Robert went home after Vanished Planet, so we were down to five.

I was an Outlaw and began by opening fire on Merwin to my right. Why? Why not? I joked that it was because I wanted him to go out first again. During one turn in which I really unloaded on him, I commented that I was getting him because I couldn't reach the sheriff. But that wasn't true, since two of the cards I played were against any player, regardless of range. During my last round, I had a chance to knock out Merwin, but he used his special power and stole my last Bang! card after I played a Gatling. On his turn, I saw that Bang! again when he killed me with it. But he fell soon after me, revealing himself to be the Deputy, completely justifying my assault on him.

Ian the Sheriff was left to stand against the Renegade (Zach) and last Outlaw (Brian). We were playing with both the High Noon and A Fistful of Cards expansions, so things were a little crazy. At one point, Merwin and I were able to draw cards and play them, which I used to hit Ian, bringing him down to 1 life. Brian was in Jail at the time, and I probably should have used my cards to free him, but he got lucky and was able to finish off Ian. So, I kinda-sorta co-won, despite being dead. The end came as a surprise since we all assumed that Ian's ability to play any two cards as a Beer would make whittling him down impossible.

Though it was quite late, we went for another game, without the expansions (though Dodge City is always in play). As with last time, the Deputy (Zach) and first Outlaw (Merwin) fell quickly. As the Renegade, I managed to off Ian (the other Outlaw) and face down Sheriff Brian. But I was getting very unlucky card draws. I had a lot of Bang! and Missed! cards (which I could use for each other, as my special ability), but only my basic gun since Ian managed to bury both Volcanics before his death. At one point, both Brian and I were down to 2 lives each and unable to play Beer. Three times I played General Store only to turn over two of the same card, and twice, those were two Bang! cards. Eventually, my luck just petered out and Brian was able to off me, for his first win as Sheriff.

FFG CE

The new FFG version of Cosmic Encounter is out, but there are already plenty of good reviews of it, so I'm not going to bother with my own. I do, however, have a few comments.

1) Despite Scott's statements (see the link above) to the contrary, this version is still subject to rules debate and confusion. When I talked to the FFG guys at GenCon, I was assured that there would be a FAQ. But I'm still waiting.

2) It only supports 5 players. I was going to make my own 6th system, but there simply aren't enough cards to support 6 players. 6 players times 8 cards each equals 48 out of the 72-card deck (84 once you add in the 12 flares). Sure, it's doable (though certainly worse with Miser in the game), but I don't like the idea of dealing over half the deck at the start of the game.

3) They used my idea of Dictator. I don't know if they actually got the idea from me, but I'm taking credit for it. :D

Update (January 14, 2009): I got an email from Jack Reda today and he wrote:

I wanted to let you know I pushed for your change to Dictator, so by all means take the credit! It's a great, thoughtful improvement.

4) The components are definitely nice, as you would expect from FFG. I like the planets, but I don't care for the new saucers (though they're certainly better than the Avalon Hill ships).

5) The new technology rules look interesting. The idea of allocating ships to R&D presents a challenging resource-management problem, especially if you end up with too many ships in the warp.

I look forward to trying to the new edition, but I am a bit worried. After getting totally frustrated with the online version (I won't even put a link), I really soured on Cosmic. I am hoping that playing face-to-face again will rekindle my original affection for the game.

Friday Night Gaming: Evo, Betrayal at House on the Hill

January 2, 2009

Robert came over early and he and Merwin cranked out some two-player games while the rest of us arrived. I won't report on those games.

Evo
While I waited for those two to finish their game of Mr. Jack, I read through the rules of Evo, a used copy of which Merwin had just received in the mail. I had played this once before at a ConQuest several years ago. I had sought to purchase a cheap copy for myself, but since it is out of print, that never happened. As it turns out, Robert had also played it before, so it should have been a smooth game.

But it took four turns for Merwin to get it. At one point, I wanted to strangle him. Hopefully we'll be able to bring this back to the table before he forgets again. But I'm not sure it will since the first experience was pretty painful. Brian made became the runaway winner and the game was effectively over several turns before it was officially over. Evo is an auction game and we simply let Brian get too many "egg" genes too soon and too cheaply, resulting in a consistent vp advantage for him every turn. It was painful and Robert and I should have known better. I'll get you next time, Gadget. Next time!

Betrayal at House on the Hill
We played this cooperative, horror-themed game three times. In the first two, Brian ended up the traitor, but was frustrated by his inability to win or to even kill one of us. In the last game, Ian took the reins and the outcome came down to the last turn, with two good guys left standing. They were barely able to defeat the blob monster. But the night was marred by a heated rules argument caused by rules that are too vague. Fortunately, the official FAQ cleared it up once someone* bothered to look it up.

Because the game designer and rules author (who might not be the same person, especially with translated rules) are not there to guide you, the rules have to be very explicit. And yet, they also need to be approachable and not read like legal text. There can be a conflict between what the rules say and what they mean. This happens all the time in everyday life. How many of us have failed to properly convey or read meaning in an email that lacks the appropriate vocal tones and body language? If you interpret a rule one way, it's a stupid rule; but if you interpret it another way, other players think you're being stupid. I've certainly found myself arguing one side or another at different times with different games, trying to glean the meaning out of what the text says. And when two (or more) people disagree, it can get very frustrating very quickly.

* That would be me.

Tuesday Gaming: Doom, Notre Dame, Tikal, Manila

December 30, 2008

In general, I don't like the holidays. But I like the time off, especially when it means we can have a gaming day in the middle of the week. Robert and I went over to Merwin's at noon, and Brian joined us in the afternoon, just as we were clearing up our first game, which was ...

Doom
Robert had requested this recently, saying, "And for some strange reason I've had a little itch to play Doom again. Must be the Christmas spirit. Futurama style." On a Friday night, it would have been the main event, but on a Tuesday, it was a good, meaty starter.

My memories of Doom, which we apparently hadn't played in over 18 months (according to Robert), were of a tense-filled dice-fest. This time, it ended up being a slow grind to inevitable defeat. Robert and I played the marines and Merwin the Doom Master (or whatever it's called), running the bad guys. In theory, the marines had some great synergies. I had Special Ops (two extra damage with hand-to-hand weapons), Killer Instinct (allowing me to move and attack after a successful kill), and Prepared (gave me 3 tokens which I could use to cancel event cards played by Merwin). Robert had Officer (one extra damage and range to him and close allies), Marksman (3 or 4 extra range), and Frontal Assault (?) (one additional attack when he used the Advance option). While I was going toe-to-toe, Robert could snipe at the baddies before they approached. In theory, anyway.

The single biggest frustration with Doom (as the marines, anyway) is that there is a one-third chance you'll run out of ammo after using a gun. It is not uncommon to pick up an ammo pack, shoot, and then lose the ammo. Yes, his adds to the nail-biting excitement of the game. But yes, it can make the entire effort of getting ammo rather pointless. Robert's other problem was that one of the central areas had limited lighting that reduced line of sight to four squares. So even though he had a minimum range of six (!), the demons (who were not affected by the lighting, naturally) could always move up on him.

More so than when we played previously, I was struck by how the boardgame differed from the video game. The ammo is one thing (I never ran out of ammo as often when I played on the PC), but two other factors were the spawning of monsters and the respawning of marines. In the original game, when you killed a demon, it didn't come back. You could clear an area and take your time sweeping through the empty rooms and corridors, picking up equipment and looking for secret rooms. In the boardgame, new demons can be added every round, making it impossible to clear an area. And since there is usually little opportunity to ready a defense, it means that you will be eventually worn down and killed. And when you die, you return with full life and all your equipment (except additional armor, which doens't really make sense). Every time we respawned, however, we chose to appear close to an ammo pack, which was situated on the far side of the demons that had just killed us. Thematically, this seemed like cheating (Merwin read the rule and okayed the placement), but it didn't really help.

The game definitely had its highlights. I got the chainsaw and was able to rock some great death and destruction, especially when I got additional armor. There were several turns when Merwin missed every shot (each attack has a one-sixth chance of an automatic miss), which was a great relief to us. But then there was a time I threw a grenade, missed, and it landed back in my square. Oops.

In the end, we each died three times, which gave the win to Meriwn. I'm not sure if there was anything we could have done tactically to improve our chances. We died two rooms from the end, I think. I got the feeling we were moving too slowly, giving Merwin too many opportunities to spawn monsters. Next time we play, I think I'll volunteer to control the demons--they don't run out of ammo.

Notre Dame
After Brian arrived, I requested this game. Though we didn't have Ian, our ending ranks exactly matched our previous game. Merwin won and I came in second (though well behind him rather than tied). Brian was third, but did much better than before, improving his prestige (VP) total from 19 to 50. Robert was last, this simply not being his kind of game. Merwin was able to again grind the Bank and Notre Dame to get a lot of prestige. He was to my right, so he never passed me Notre Dame (except at the end when it didn't matter), and my own Notre Dame card always seemed to show up at the wrong time (i.e., when I had no money to spare). Brian to my left set out to sweep up points with the Carriage, and I tried to avoid giving him that option. Which meant I ended up using the Carriage a lot myself. With two markers in the Park, I managed to sweep up bonus prestige by getting several smaller rewards. In contrast, Merwin was picking them up six or more at a single shot; one time, I think he picked up twelve from one action. I think we only had one person hit by the Plague and that was at the end.

I'd like to play this once more to see if I can duplicate Merwin's success; otherwise, I think we've explored the options in this game. I downgraded my BGG rating from 8 to 7. We might end up saving it for a day when Robert can't make it.

Tikal
At first, I thought this was going to be a fairly complicated game. Each turn, you have ten action points to allocate, which give a lot of options to ponder. But the tactics are straight-forward enough that you don't agonize (too much) over every single action point. Often times, we'd end a turn with unused points and just use them to put more workers on the board (some of which went unused for the rest of the game).

We played the basic game, which means we randomly drew tiles instead of auctioning them. This adds luck, but it seemed to balance out for us. In the beginning, I drew two treasure tiles, giving me an early lead on the treasures, but I didn't see one for the rest of the game and was unable to expand my collections.

Initially, there was great confusion regarding how scoring rounds (which appear randomly during the course of the game and once at the end) worked. The rules seemed contradictory, but we eventually figured it out. Thanks to being the starting player and getting my lucky treasure draws, I got an early lead, but didn't expect to see it again. I fell back during the middle game as I just couldn't get useful tiles and I was fighting with Merwin over the control of a temple. I came back at the end when the board was really tight and was able to place a good base camp. During the final round of scoring, I went first and roared into the lead. Based on my experience with Mykerinos and Princes of Florence, I expected everyone else to pass me as they scored. But Brian fell short and Robert was last (he just doesn't seem to do well with vp-counting games). And then Merwin came out one point ahead of me, making it three win in a row for him.

We all know that Merwin is slow taking his turns. But because the board changes so much by the time your turn comes around again, everyone has to spend time figuring out how to optimize their action points. This means there is a lot of down time between turns. Brian and I spent ours working out what we would do if we were the current player. On one of Merwin's turn, we both figured out exactly what he should do and made the mistake of telling him what it was. It not only gave him possession of a good temple, but screwed Robert and Brian. Because of this, Merwin didn't take credit for the win because that's just the kind of guy he is. But more importantly, Brian and I realized we just need to learn to keep our mouths shut.

Manila
Merwin had been clamoring for a return of this game for a few weeks. I was slightly sour on the idea since the first (and only) time we played, he won handily thanks to a really lucky combination of rolls allowing his pirates to plunder every punt during one turn. But after reading the rules earlier this week, I softened to the idea and humorously suggested that we play it so that Merwin would quit asking for it.

At its heart, Manila is a gambling game. You spend money to place bets on certain events and reap the payouts when they occur. For example, if one, two, or three punts will make it to Manilla or if they will scuttled. Pirates let you plunder, but only if the punts land on a specific space. And you can bet on specific punts and share in the profit if they make it to port. But it also a stock game, and the value of the stocks you hold at the end can be worth much more than the money you earned from the payouts. You start with two random shares, but can only buy more if you are the Harbor Master, a role that is auctioned each turn. Also, the Harbor Master determines which three of the four goods will be sent down the river and what their starting positions will be. So, it is a very powerful role which we have probably been undervaluing.

Given the previous game experience, my strategy was to get a pirate every single turn. This is exactly what I did; I think it only failed to pay off twice during the game. There are too many variables to calculate precisely, but I think it works out the pirates will plunder about one-third of the time.* I think I definitely beat the odds.

The other thing I did was win the Harbor Master bid several times. And every time (in addition to placing a pirate), I picked to send Silk and Nutmeg to Manila, bought a share of one of those, and put those two punts in the lead spaces (at 5 or 4) with the third far behind (at 0). Every time, both Silk and Nutmeg arrived in Manila (perhaps even after I plundered it), which increased the value of my shares. Lather-rinse-repeat. Eventually, the others started out bidding me for the Harbor Master and I took a few turns off, as it were, but by then my lead was substantial. I grabbed the Harbor Master for the last turn and ended the game when the share price maxed out.

I won handily because of the Harbor Master, with the Pirate giving me enough cash to win the auctions. In the beginning the Harbor Master was going for ~10 Pecos. By the end, we were over 20. I suspect that our next game will be very different with the auction reaching those high values from the very beginning. But even so, there is quite a bit of luck with the die rolls and any strategy can fail.

*: If you assume that two punts are in range to land on the right space, and you need to roll the number exactly on a die, that means that means neither punt will land (5/6)^2 = 69.4% of the time. And at least one will land 30.5% ~ 1/3 of the time.

Friday Gaming: Five Games

December 26, 2008

With half the group out of town, Robert and I went over to Brian's place at noon for a day of gaming. Rather than play one long game, like last time when we played Shogun, we went for many shorter games. Except for the last game, we played each game exactly twice. Except for the first game, they were ones I brought over. There were far too many to do a report* or even remember who won every game, so I'll just present the list.

• Nexus Ops
• Igel Ärgern
• China
• Clans
• Prophecy

* Except to note that Brian started the day with his usual claim that I would benefit from lucky die rolling and ended the evening by suggesting that I roll for the creatures so that they could win the battles.

Friday Night Gaming: Mare Nostrum, Mall of Horror

December 19, 2008

Mare Nostrum
Even though we didn't have Zach tonight (and won't until January), we went forward with our plans to play Mare Nostrum. We used the Mythology expansion, but not the Atlantis board. Robert demanded that he not be Rome, and he ended up with Carthage. I don't know how the civilizations were distributed because I ran out to my car to find a copy of the rules that I thought I had.

I played Babylon, with Ian as Egypt to my left and Merwin's Greece on my right. Brian had discovered a method for Egypt to win by the end of the 2nd turn, so I bought Hermes in the first round to prevent that. In fact, Hermes got more use this entire game than ever before (and it contributed to the win). After a good start and getting Spartacus to help build up my army, I was stymied by the trading and couldn't get another set of 9. Brian "Vulcanizing" one of my caravan's* didn't help. Ian, Brian, and Robert were building slowly but surely; however...

Merwin sneaked in with a win, building the Pyramids with taxes. I'm blaming Brian, who was Commerce Director the last round and put 7 resources up for trade and giving Merwin the opportunity to grab Ian's and my taxes. But certainly there were other things that we could have done to prevent it, like attack Merwin's provinces sooner (I was just gearing up for it when the game ended). There are just so many things going on that it becomes impossible to keep track of everyone's resource progress and it puts particular pressure on the Commerce Director, who controls trading and is probably the most powerful position.

*: If I had an elephant, he would have shot it.

Mall of Horror
As we were discussing what to play next, Brian blurted out Mall of Horror, which I never say no to. However, I don't know what it is about that game (besides the poorly written rules) that makes me forget some critical rule and we end up playing wrong (I don't take all the blame, but I really should know it all by heart by now). In this case, we added the extra zombies for the most total people in one location and most cheerleaders in one location before movement instead of after. Since we played the entire game this way, it didn't really matter, but it effing annoys me.

A well-timed Hidden card in the Parking Lot saved me while Ian's and Merwin's last people were eaten by zombies. Unfortunately, it was my cheerleader who was left there and she ended up dying in the next round. We were down to 3 locations, the others having been condemned, and she had no where to run when the zombies came.

Robert then made a well-timed use of the Sprint card, which put both of his guys safely in the Cachou with my two guys** and Brian's one being overrun in the Security Office. Because there were only 5 total people left, the game would end when the next person died. Brian could have saved us by using his Shotgun, but tried to vote me off instead with a Threat card. But I countered with my own and it ended up going to a group vote. If I died, Robert would win. If Brian died, Robert would win, beating a tiebreaker with me. So, Robert won.

Several times during the game, both Merwin and Robert mentioned how they hated this game. I was assured that it was "hate in a good way," but clearly they find it more stressful and less fun than I do.

**: I was following a deliberate strategy of not doubling up a location with my own people, which I was able to do until this final round. Where I failed was not guessing at safe rooms that might open up, which would have saved my cheerleader (though not the world).

Horseshoes

Standard Game
Horseshoes is a trick taking card game designed to emphasize precision bidding (and clever play to back that up). It can be played with 3 to 6 players and uses a standard 52-card deck.

Deal
Deal an equal number of cards to each player. If there are cards left over (as there will be with 3, 5, or 6 players), set the leftover cards aside face down until the end of the hand.

Bid
The player to the left of the dealer bids first and also declares the trump suit or no-trump. The other players bid in clockwise order. You may not pass. Bids of zero are allowed. The dealer, who bids last, is under no obligation to make the total bids total the number of tricks to be played.

Play
The player to left of the first bidder (two seats to the left of the dealer) leads the first trick. Players add cards to the trick in a clockwise order until everyone has played a card. Players must follow suit, if possible. If they cannot follow suit, they may play any card.

The trick is won by the highest trump card played. If no one played trumps or the game is no-trump, the trick is won by the high card of the lead suit. Aces are considered high. The player who wins the trick leads the next trick.

Scoring
The player to the dealer's left begins scoring after the last trick is played. Each player scores their hand clockwise around the table.

The goal is finish the game with the fewest number of points.

Players who won exactly the number of tricks they bid take no points. But if everyone won the correct number of tricks, everyone instead takes 3 points.

Players who did not win exactly the tricks they bid take one point for every trick by which they missed their bid.

Examples:

• If you bid five but win only three tricks, you get two points.


• If you bid zero but win three tricks, you get three points.

The game continues with the deal passing to the left until one player accumulates a score of 13 or more points at the end of scoring. At this point, the game is over and the player with the fewest points wins. Of course, you can vary the length of the game by changing the number of points per game.

Optional Rules
The following rules are ideas for changing the standard game.

Partnerships
With four players, you may wish to play in two teams of two players. Teammates sit across from each other. The deal and bidding are unchanged. Teammates add their bids together and try to take a combined number of tricks equal to the bid. For example, if you bid five and your partner bids zero, you have to take five tricks between you. Unlike the game of Spades, the player who bid nil can take tricks without added penalty—only the total tricks among teammates matters.

With six players, you can play in three teams of two, or two teams of three.

Face-up Leftover Cards
Leave these face-up instead of face-down so that everyone can see what they are.

Jokers
Add one or more jokers to the deck. Jokers may be played on any trick and need not follow suit. If the joker is not the lead card, it can never win a trick. If a joker is lead as the first card to a trick, the following players may play any card and need not follow suit. Trumps are ignored and the person who lead the joker wins the trick.

Even Deal
So that there are no extra cards left after the deal and all players have an equal number of cards, adjust the deck as follows.

• 3 players: Add 2 Jokers. Total of 54 cards (18 per player)
• 5 players, Option 1: Add 3 Jokers. Total of 55 cards (11 per player)
• 5 players, Option 2: Remove all the 2s, then add 2 Jokers. Total of 50 cards (10 per player)
• 6 players: Add 2 Jokers. Total of 54 cards (9 per player)

Breaking Trump
The trump suit cannot be lead until a trump card has been played to a trick, unless the player with the lead has nothing but trump.

Aces
Aces may be high or low. When you play an ace to a trick, you declare whether it is high or low; if the ace is not trump and does not follow suit, this is not really necessary.

Stars
If you make your bid, you get a star. You can note this on the score pad, but it might be best to use tokens like poker chips instead.

If everyone makes their bids, no one receives any points and everyone gets a star. At the end of a scoring round, players may turn-in one of their stars to receive 0 points for that round.

The first player to get 5 stars wins, regardless of the score. If 2 or more players reach 5 stars, the one with the lowest score among them wins. The game can still end when someone reaches 13 points before someone gets 5 stars. In this case, the winner is the one with the lowest score, as per the standard rules. If someone gets 5 stars and someone reaches 13 points in the same hand, the winner is the one with the 5 stars (and the fewest points, in case of a tie).

Friday Night Gaming: Notre Dame, Iliad, Get Bit

December 12, 2008

Zach couldn't make it, so that brought us down to five and gave us the opportunity to play a game that only handles up to five (which is common trait of "Euros").

Notre Dame
Because we knew this was coming to the table, Brian and I had a chance to read (and discuss) the rules before the game. Imagine that. Ian was late, so we started without him, but by the time we got through one round, he had eaten dinner and was ready to play. We aborted that game, reset the board for a five-player game, and jumped right in. To Ian's detriment, we didn't give him a run-down of the rules and he was "flying blind" for the first rounds.

But boy did Ian make a good run at the finish. With a loaded residence, which generates victory points prestige directly and the opportunity (to activate it twice), he would have blown by the leaders if he only had a coin to activate it a third time (by hiring the fool). Both he and Brian did a good job using the Park to generate extra prestige. Brian was going strong but faltered in the last era. I don't know what went wrong; I know that Merwin and I cut off his opportunity to grab messages, but I suspect that inopportune card draws blew his strategy.

If there is one flaw of the game, it is that a well laid plan can be blown by getting the wrong cards at the wrong time. However, this game needs the cards to prevent total over-analysis and optimal strategies from dominating (I'm looking at you, Puerto Rico). In pure card games (Hearts, Spades, etc.), the point is to do the best with the cards you are dealt. I'll gripe more about cards when I talk about Iliad, below. In Notre Dame, you have some control over your card choices and you can be saved by having the right card passed to you, but sometimes you just have to do the best you can with crap and hope you don't fall too far behind. I think that you don't so much make a plan as end up with a plan.

I ended up following a carriage plan, cruising around and (eventually) ending up with 8 messages. Unfortunately, this meant that I was perpetually short of cash and had to get coins with messages, but those only yielded a single prestige point each. Meanwhile Merwin had his bank cranking and got prestige through donating to Notre Dame. I managed to cut off the messages and was the only one who collected more than 4. Merwin might have been able to get one more for a complete set, but there isn't a special reward for such, so it probably wasn't worth it to him.

The plague rats are an interesting feature, as they give you something else to worry about. Countering them via the hospital and doctor doesn't yield any prestige, so it's a distraction from any plan you might have. Brian and Robert both got hit by the plague more then once. I avoided it until the very last turn.

The final count of prestige left Merwin and I tied for the win, but he handily beat me in the tie-breaker thanks to his abundant coin collection. I could point to half-dozen or more things I could have done that might have earned me that extra prestige for the win, but I can't say they would have not hurt me elsewhere. For example, I lost 2 prestige from being hit by the plague, but if I had put an influence cube into the hospital, I would not have not been able to get the message (1 prestige and 1 coin) that let me hire the Lady of the Court which gave me 6 prestige. So, I earned 5 extra prestige than if I had held back the plague. But maybe if I had done something else sooner, like picking up a rat message phase 3 of era 2 (or whatever), things might have been different.

And that's the beauty and agony of the game: balancing short-term opportunities and necessities with long-term strategy. And the cards will screw with both. I like this game, though it is a bit dry and perhaps a tiny bit too chaotic. Robert, who finished last barely behind Brian, but well behind the rest of us, didn't take to it, however, and he wasn't interested in another play. I don't know when this will be brought out again, but I hope it will.

Iliad
Many months ago, Merwin and I tried a two-player game of Iliad. It was just interesting enough for us to want to try again, especially since the two-player rules remove some elements.

Having read the rules (again) earlier in the day, I did my best trying to explain them. Even so, Brian (in particular, others might have had similar issues) couldn't grasp the difference between a Gorgon siege and a Thanatos siege. This was one of several times this night that I wanted to throw something at him. And I might have, had my right hand not been occupied. I throw like a girl in general, but with my left, I'm downright pathetic. He accused me of PMSing or something, which I probably was. Anyway...

Ian immediately jumped into a strong lead when he won the first siege and the 5-point Helen victory card. This was exacerbated by it being a Gorgon siege, meaning that he was the only one to earn VP that siege. Literally, he was half-way to victory after the first seige. He would then be able to maintain that lead throughout the game and win. He mentioned how grabbing this early lead was key to his strategy, and I think it was because he was able to skip or cruise through the next few sieges and build up his hand.

Most victory cards are worth 1 to 3 victory points, but the single Helen card is worth 5. She came up in the very first siege, which felt wrong. I thought that perhaps she should have been placed at the bottom of the victory deck, but could not find it in the rules. I just checked again now and the rules say nothing of doing this. However, I think it should be an official rule for two reasons:

1. It prevents someone from jumping out to a strong lead, as Ian did in our game.
   
2. The 5 VP would allow more players to vie for the win. In the race to 12, it would allow players with only 6 VP a chance at winning (winning a siege earns the Agamemnon tile, worth 1 VP).
   

For my part, my hand pretty much sucked through the entire game. I started with a bunch of 1-point Hoplite and Archers and some miscellaneous cards, but nothing that would generate a large army value. I couldn't form phalanxes and my elephants kept getting offed. This plagued me through the entire game. And the one time I tried to draw a line in the sand and win a siege, I was up against Ian and he pummeled me. After that, I was just going through the motions, playing my sucky cards, and being picked on by Merwin. No, seriously, at one point, he killed one of my cards simply because he didn't want to lay down a card or pass, and I had the only unit he could attack. Overall, I came in third in 2 sieges and dead last in another, in total netting me 1 VP by the end of the game.

Robert, I think, was the closest to catching up to Ian. Brian did just well enough to be in a king-making situation. Merwin was completely flustered and resorted to killing my units just to give himself something to do. Yes, the game was painful. At its core, Iliad is a take-that card game with interesting roshambo-like card interactions. Due to the chaos (not knowing what other people have), randomness (your card draw), and king-making opporunities, I don't think I'll ever request to play it again. But I still don't hate the game, and I might play it again (it might be better with 3 or 4) if the others were gung-ho about it.

Get Bit
I like light card games; I enjoy Fluxx, after all. But Get Bit is too light even for me. It has great, cute components with tiny plastic robots that you get to dissassemble. But since the game play is a guessing game of picking the card that you hope either matches no one else or matches a robot between you and the shark, there's just not enough there to hold my interest. And the winning condition is almost completely random, having more to do with luck than a tactical choice (since any choice you make is completely dependent upon the choices made by others). I won, but it felt completely hollow and pointless. Thankfully, it's fast.

Next week, Mare Nostrum (again!)

Friday Night Gaming: Mare Nostrum

December 5, 2008

Mare Nostrum
We played this with the Mythology Expansion (without the expansion, it only handles 5 players). In clockwise order around the board (we shuffled seats to accommodate), I played Rome, Zach Greece, Merwin Babylon, Brian Egypt, Ian Carthage, and Robert Atlantis. Because it had been so long since we had played, it took an hour to review the rules. And yes, the game took a couple hours longer than the time on the box, but I'm tired of beating that particular horse, so I won't mention it again.

In the initial round, everyone did the "step one (or two) provinces outward" maneuver to grab resources. By the second or third round, I think all the caravans had been purchased. While Zach quickly built his triremes, Merwin expanded his influence pretty far (but lacked caravans to make use of it), Brian was doing something or other (see comments at the end), while Ian, Robert, and I drew lines of demarcation. At one point, Ian and Robert temporarily occupied each other's regions until and agreement was made. On my side, I kicked Robert out of a region too close to my border, and then we established a heavily militarized zone (my 3 legions, his 4 legions and fortification) on either side of the Pyrenees. (In fact, this left the eastern region of Iberia open because neither of us could afford to take it.)

I made two primary mistakes:

1. I got off to an early lead, being the first to the purchase a hero, and then being the first to purchase a second (one short of victory).


2. I forgot how limited my number of available legions were. You can only build at most eight, but I focused on them rather than branching out and buying triremes and mythological creatures (in my case, titans). Either of those would have helped prevent the Carthaginian sea invasion which allowed Ian to occupy Southern Italy for a turn. Plus, Zach's centaur made my reliance on legions a liability.
   

Another problem I had was that Robert grabbed the title of Commerce Director (or whatever it's called) and prevented trading. I had 9 resources, but without trading, I couldn't make a set of 9 to buy heroes and even sets of 6 (for markets and titans) was limited.

Brian seemed to be struggling with resources. More so than any other power, Egypt is rich in taxes, but limited with commodities. Zach and Merwin seemed to be playing too passively (as was I, really) and didn't finally butting heads until it was too late). Robert and Ian did a good job of obtaining resources without needing trading (as I did). Unfortunately, and the only sour note of the game, was that both of them were at the doorstep of victory and the winner just depended on which one got to build first (I might have been there as well, but again, I lacked the necessary 9-commodity set), which was in Brian's hands. He rolled a die and Robert won. Here, I wish the winning conditions allowed for a simultaneous win with a tiebreaker.

Other Comments
Many games develop tension through the issue of timing. In Mare Nostrum, do I "waste" turns building units or attempt to grab resources some other way? When I jumped to an early lead, my short-term strategy paid off very well. I didn't get legions until, iirc, the third round. But it cost me in the long-term and my momentum died. I find the issue of timing, opportunity cost (if I do such-and-such, what am I not doing?), and momentum critical factors to consider in games of capturing territory, whether they be area control games like Mykerinos, war games like Shogun, or civilization games like Mare Nostrum or Tempus. I both like and hate (but in a good way) this element.

Also, if my posts appear too focused on my own play and actions, it is because that's how I remember the game. I don't keep notes of what everyone else does. For example, nothing that Merwin and Brian were doing impacted me, so I wasn't paying attention and cannot comment. I apologize to anyone who feels slighted by my slanted reporting. But it is my site, after all. :)

Friday Night Gaming: Clans, Shogun

November 28, 2008

We had a change to our routine this week as Merwin was out of town, so Brian hosted. Also, this being the day after Thanksgiving, we started around noon, rather than the usual seven o'clock. The additional time allowed us to pull out a monster of a game that we would never have been able to play on the usual game night.

Clans
No, this is not the "monster game." It's an engaging multi-player abstract that I've had and wanted to play, but it only handles up to four. I brought it along with a bunch of other games, not knowing what we would be playing. At first, it was just Brian, Zach, and myself, so I chose Clans from my stash. The first game was a learning experience, but it has very smooth game play and we quickly got into the swing of things. Zach was setting up opportunities for me to create villages (and earn tokens), but which also advanced his (secret) color. I took the opportunities, making sure to not disadvantage my own color. I guessed wrong about Zach's color, giving him the lead, but my tokens made up the difference and we ended up tying. Because Zach and I were colluding (though we didn't necessarily realize we were), Brian was left behind.

Robert joined us for the second game. I never managed to get anything going and my poor blue huts suffered terribly. I finished dead last by a wide margin. Brian, following the sole strategy of not revealing his color, ended up winning (actually, he was tied with the unused color, which I think is telling).

Shogun
Brian had the first printing of the game now called Samurai Swords (and now out of print). The guys agreed that since we had the full day (it was two o'clock by now and Ian had arrived), we should take the opportunity to play a bigger, longer game. Shogun certainly qualified.

After an overview of the rules, we tackled a couple of practice rounds to get a feel for the game and smooth out some of the rough edges of our understanding. Then, we cleared the board and started the game proper. After the random setup, Robert and I found ourselves tangled in a mess. We quickly realized that if we fought each other for the northern third of the board, where the majority of our pieces were, that we'd just weaken ourselves, allowing the others to take advantage of the situation. So, we made an allegiance that lasted the entire game; except for a few sacrificial territories* to create continuous regions, we never attacked each other. Brian convinced Ian and Zach (themselves in a war that fluctuated between cold and hot) to leave him alone, allowing him to slowly expand his territory without worrying about his backside.

The prudent strategy seems to be to not overextend or expose yourself, but this results in a very slow, long game. We were very cautious of making costly mistakes and leaving exploitable vulnerabilities, so we did not send our armies rampaging across the board. Eventually though, a quiet boredom creeps in and you start wishing that something would just happen already. In that spirit (I think), Ian pushed into my territory to see how far he could get, and I pushed back hard, killing one of his three daimyos. After the dinner break, Brian made a very strong push against me, forcing me to retreat into a defensive position. Robert took Brian's aggression as a threat (since if Brian broke through me, he'd run over Robert's position in the north, even if this was never Brian's intention), and went after Brian, killing one of his daimyos (with the help of very favorable die rolls). Then, Zach went nuts and did exactly that rampaging push that we all knew was a bad idea, running into Brian, and losing. We agreed to call the game once the first player was eliminated, and a few turns later, it was Zach (and might have been Brian had I got my turn).

As with Galactic Emperor, I just don't see how we were supposed to finish the game in the recommended time of 4 hours. At the rate we were going, it was going to take 12. Maybe if we were worse (or much better) players, it might have been faster. Sure, there were little annoyances that slowed things down, such as not having enough room to spread out and make die rolls on the table), but they don't add up to triple the game time. It's not a bad game--I can appreciate the design--but I know I'd never suggest it.

*One element of the game which I didn't like was that players could help each other by leaving weakly defended territories to be taken over by an opponent's daimyo, who would gain in rank for winning the battle. The daimyo would then retreat and allow the other player to do the same. While perfectly legal, it's cheesy and breaks the pretense of a quasi-historical wargame.

Friday Night Gaming: Galactic Emperor

November 21, 2008

Galactic Emperor
Oh, man. This was a trial. The box says it takes 90 minutes to play. For the six of us, it took 5 hours or so. Normally, we expect that the first game will take much longer, especially for more complex games. And there is always the Merwin Effect, which can double the typical play time. But I guess these two factors multiplied together to give us an extraordinary long game.

In its defense, the game didn't feel like it took that long. For me at least, it was engaging and interesting all the way through. But then, I was targeted as an early leader thanks to my back-to-back choices of Explorer and Brian's relentless campaign to let everyone know I was winning. As we entered the final stretch of the game, it was clear to me that Robert was the biggest threat--he certainly had the greatest military might thanks to his Robotics. Brian made a late-game surge by picking up multiple systems with multiple planets and earning hefty victory points. But in the end, Zach came through with a surprise win because everyone had written him off in the first round.

Why did they write him off? Because he tried to quit. See, Merwin made an aggressive move against him, severely hurting his position early on in the game, and he gave up. He took his pieces and systems off the game board and declared he was quitting. We should have all quit right then and started over, but I, at least, think it would have tainted the next game we started. Instead, we convinced Zach to keep playing; he ended up winning, but not happily. He seemed to be just going through the motions, having minor clashes with Merwin, and picking up planets and victory points. Though we mocked the notion that the earned victory points were kept secret (surely someone with a good memory and attention span could have kept track of everyone's score), it ended up being the key to Zach's win. I think Brian, on Zach's other flank opposite Merwin, could have been more aggressive against Zach, but he was focused on me and (I think) being nice to Zach.

And Ian? After being the first to get to the Black Hole and becoming the game's first big military threat, he directed an attack against me, but my counterattacks and admitted errors on his part eventually weakened him to the point of having very few ships or planets. Attacking the leader is a very necessary part of the game, but there wasn't enough coordination with the other players, especially Merwin on the other side of me, and Ian "took one for the team" that cost him. And this was perhaps the element that I least liked about the game. Though player elimination is impossible, since the home planet is immune from attack, a player can be so crippled as to have a negligible chance of winning. This is fine in a 90-minute game, but not a 300-minute game.

Galactic Emperor has the role-selection and theme of Race for the Galaxy with combat and units not unlike Nexus Ops. Merwin disliked what he called the Risk-like nature of the battles, but I think we all appreciated the direct conflict and empire construction that was missing from RftG. Personally, I need to play it again. The duration bothers me a lot and I'm hoping a second play will get it down to 2 hours; if not, I cannot see us playing it again. Plus, we made several rules-related and tactics-related mistakes that would have made some critical differences in how the game went. For example, Zach was rolling half the dice he was supposed to be in defending against Merwin's fateful early attack. In hindsight, we should have agreed to a shortened practice game, perhaps a full round (with everybody having a chance to pick a role), to get all the rules down and get a feel for the game. But without that agreement, Zach's knee-jerk decision to quit was just bad form.

Friday Night Gaming: Mykerinos, Citadels

November 14, 2008

Mykerinos
A while ago, I mentioned to Merwin that I wanted to play this game. Naturally, the one time he did pull it out was one week when I wasn't there. Arg. I think he felt guilty after I gave him grief. Even though he didn't especially enjoy the first play, he didn't trade it away before I had a chance to play it. Tonight, with only four players, he pulled it out again. He later commented that this second game was more enjoyable and that he wouldn't be trading it.

Mykerinos has the typical gameplay of an area control game. You place cubes hoping to have the majority control or second place so that you can either score points directly or get the thing that will let you do the other thing that will score points later. The game certaintly has tension throughout, but when I realized half-way through the second round that I had been locked out of the museum and had no chance of winning, the game turned into an exercise of trying not to lose too badly. At this same time, I realized (or at least strongly suspected) that Brian would win (which he did). He mastered the technqiue of getting second (or even third) place in a number of areas with minimal resources.

There is a nasty (in a good way) mechanism that to increase the value of your goods, you have to sacrifice collecting a good. You could just sacrifice a good you don't care so much about to increase some other good, but since this means giving the good to someone else (and here, the third-place spot can get something) and since the goods have useful abilities, this is a losing technique. There is also a good which allows you to increase the value of some other good without making this sacrifice (though you do have to pay attention to timing and it does use a control cube). The goods are "patrons" and the value is really "place in the museum," but you get the idea.

In the end, I managed to score a whopping 25 points for my yellow goods. But since Brian and Merwin were getting 5-15 points each for multiple goods and other bonus points, they did the best. Robert was getting a lot of direct points for captured tiles, but it only left him just ahead of me; it didn't help that my last round quest for yellows prevented him from getting one (which would have given him a bonus).

Citadels
Merwin's copy included the Dark City expansion, though we only played with the roles from the base game. This was Brian's first game and damn it if he nearly won. Robert got off to a quick start with a number of low-cost cards. But before he could blitz his way to victory, he lost momentum due to poor cards and our active attempts to slow him down. I plugged away building the largest buildings I could afford at the time and built up a lead in overall value with only a few cards. Merwin seemed to struggle at first, but managed a respectable showing at the end.

There was a moment when Merwin managed to destroy two building in one turn: one of Robert's and one of mine. He had a property that allowed him to destroy any other, which was a (relatively) inexpensive way to take out an expensive property and had he directed it at me instead of Robert, the end might have been different. As it was, he only took out a 2-point building of mine with the Warlord, which wasn't such a detriment to me. On the other hand, Robert's building that Merwin did take out could have been worth a ton of points and Robert might have won instead.

In the last turn, with all of us within striking distance of getting 8 properties, I had to give Brian a lower-value roll which allowed him to go first in the round and get the "first to 8" bonus. But it guaranteed that I could build another 6-point purple property. I could have also risked trying to draw a cheap red property to get a "one of every color" bonus, but I figured I had just enough points to squeak by Brian for the win. Which I did. This is my first, and probably my last, win at Citadels.

Friday Night Gaming: Race for the Galaxy

November 7, 2008

Race for the Galaxy
With just Merwin, Zach, Brian, and myself and a little forewarning, we pulled out Race for the Galaxy, which I had refused last week. At least Merwin was reading the rules when I got there. RftG has a steep learning curve as you learn what all the phases, actions, and options are the cards. It has heavy iconography which takes getting used to. Indeed, our first game took over two hours for this 30-60 minute game. Once we knew what we were doing, the second game only took an hour.

This game is often described as multi-player solitaire, and its a fair description. It is from the same designers as To Court the King and has the same feature that you don't really need to pay attention to what the other players are doing. As Brian pointed out, this is bad because sometimes you need the other players to make sure you don't screw up or inadvertently cheat (as he did, but then caught himself).

There are two sources of tension in the game. Obviously, you want to beat out the players in this race, which means getting down your developments and settlements in time before the game ends and hope that you've earned enough points to win. This prevents you from using your producing planets to simply churn out victory points every other turn and instead have to pick your moments to strike. The other element is that you will want to perform multiple actions, but you can guarantee one; you have to rely on the other players to choose actions that you too want to perform. This means there is a little thought about what the others players will do and so you might have to stop and pay attention to what they are doing. But at best, it's an educated guess.

The strategy of the game is very much dictated by the cards you get. In both games, I was focused on acquiring settlements through military might. I had few settlements that produced and/or consumed. There are many synergistic possibilities between various cards (reminded me of Fairy Tale, actually), but you have no control over whether or not you get all the connecting pieces. I enjoyed the game, but this lack of control bothers me. I am reminded of the crayon rail games, which I enjoy. Those games have a similar issue of control, since you are limited by the load cards you get, but I just love building the network of tracks. In RftG, the empire you end up building is just a bunch of face-up cards, which simply lack the aesthetic appeal of other empire- or network-building games.

Traditional card games are all about doing the best with the hand you're dealt, and RftG is no different. But when I won the second game, I felt it was more due to the cards I drew than my skill and planning. Also in that game, Merwin lost (no idea if he could have won) due to a significant error in not fully reading an expensive card that ended up being useless for him. I often paraphrase a quote that I attribute to Knizia: well designed games make the winners feel they won through skill and the losers feel they lost due to bad luck. Unfortunately, in RftG, this was reversed (at least in our second game).

Friday Night Gaming: To Court the King, Mall of Horror, Shadow Hunters

October 31, 2008

As we waited for Ian and Robert to arrive, Merwin suggested that we break out Race for the Galaxy, though he hadn't read the rules. I flat-out refused. We pulled out another game, which was good, because RrtG only handles 4 and Robert soon arrived, bringing us to 5 players. Ian showed up before the first game was done.

To Court the King
In abstract, To Court the King sounds like an interesting, multi-player Yahtzee variant, but it practice, I felt it fell flat. During the game, I felt I was lagging behind Zach and Brian, who seemed to be getting the better rolls. Merwin seemed like he was struggling to catch up, lamenting his lack of dice-adders. Robert simply played his turns in silence; I don't think we even payed much attention to what he was doing. And that, I feel is the great failing of the game. Sure, you expect it to be multi-player solitaire and you expect downtime while others take their turn. In a good game, there is some entertainment value in watching someone take their turn. Or you have a vested interest in the outcome and want to see it play out. In this game, it really doesn't matter; even with kibitzing, there isn't enough going on for me to care.

And apparently Robert felt the same, because he went for the King and got it as soon as he had 7 dice. He was bored and wanted the game to end. Merwin and I still needed to finish out the round, and I was able to grab the General, which gave me 2 more dice, bringing my total to 9.

As this was our first game ever, we weren't clear on the winning conditions. The rules say, "each player tries, on his turn, to roll as high a dice result as he can..." But they don't tell you what that really means. Most of us assumed this meant the highest overall dice total, counting all he pips. This is not the case. Really, "the more dice of a kind the better (e.g. eight 1’s is better
than seven 6’s). With the same number of dice of a kind, the higher the number the better, of course."

Zach started the final round with 9 dice and managed to get 9 fours. Brian had good manipulation cards, including the Nobleman which alllowed him to add 2 pips to every die. This would have been great if we were going for highest total, but since he only had 8 dice, he could not win. Robert, even with the Queen, only had 8. I was the only other player with 9 dice and I was able to roll 9 fives to take the win. I got a little lucky at the end, but so did Zach to get his nine-of-a-kind, so I don't feel bad.

Having played it once from start to finish, I think it would be beneficial to the group to play it again with knowledge of what it takes to win. Otherwise, I don't find the game fun or interesting enough to pull out again.

Mall of Horror
This is one of my favorite board games. I have already written a full-length review, so there is no need to go into the details here. Tonight was the first time we played it with six. I really wanted to introduce it to Brian and he enjoyed it as much as I thought he would. The Security Office was dominated by Zach, Brian, and Ian in that order. They were also seated in that order, and Zach began character placement by placing his gun-guy in the office. I had a suspicion that the roll of Security Chief was slightly too powerful and this session reinforced that as Zach went on to win with Brian in second (more on this later). Because zombies were not showing up a the Security Office, Zach was able to sit pretty there for a long time. The same thing happened in the usually deadly Parking Lot, where Brian was able to gather a bunch of cards.

In the penultimate round, I screwed up by playing it safe. Though I knew it was a bad idea, I placed my two remaining characters into the same location. Generally, this is a bad thing to do, especially as the zombies piled up, but I thought I was taking a calculated risk. I really was walking into a trap. In the final round, I could only move one of them and the other would be left to die as the zombies swarmed the area. But an interesting thing happened. This was in area 3. Zack was in area 5 (yes, the Security Office) and was also going to be overrun. But because my guy died first, it triggered the end-condition of only having 6 characters left on the board, and Zach was able to win because the helicopters came before his guy died. If the timing had been different, Brian would have won.

Earlier, I had screwed up the rules, thinking that the end was triggered with 4 characters and told this to the group. In my defense, this is the case in all games except with 6 players. To my guilt, though, I simply failed to read the game summary properly. Had we realized my error sooner, the end of the game and winner might have been different.

Shadow Hunters
Ian kicked my ass this time. I was cruising along as the Vampire, trying to figure out who everyone was. I was taking a bit of damage, but not enough to start using my healing ability (requiring me to reveal myself). Ian, playing a Hunter, got a Hermit card that forced me to show him my card. He had determined with a Hermit card and meta-knowledge that Brian was the other shadow and attacked him. This screwed me up a bit. I was sitting at 7 or 8 damage when Ian turned and brought the smack-down on me, revealing himself and doing enough damage to kill me in one turn. Oh well.

Zach (the Neutral) and Brian (the Werewolf) managed to pull out a co-win by killing the two Hunters, but I don't remember how it all went down. There was the usuall post-game discussion of how powers are unbalanced, some cards are really useless, and what changes should be made. I feel that the idea of the game is really good, but the execution just falls short and it begs to be reworked.

Friday Night Gaming: The Citadel, Bang!

October 24, 2008

The Citadel
The game wrapped up tonight with a satisfactory, if unexpected conclusion. See also, part two (I never wrote up part one).

Ameline, Henry, and Brian managed to outrun the Hounds (mostly due to low rolls from me) though Henry did get separated from the others. He then encountered another Opener, named Rikard, who took him first to Singapore and later to an African savannah. He told him how the Captain of the Guard was closing all the gates, meaning killing all the Openers. They were the last two. He gave Henry some advice on how to move between the world and the Citadel before leaving, always staying on the move so that the Hounds would not catch up to him. During this encounter, Henry also realized that normal people could not see Aspects of The Citadel, such as the giant spider legs growing out of Rikard's back.

Meanwhile, the other four met up at the Tower and noticed how portions of it were fading in and out, being replaced by a high-rise under construction, and then back again. After venturing inside, they saw glimpses of an unfinished hotel lobby. Nigel had the idea to jump into the hotel areas when they appeared. But then they made the leap (and all but he made their Essence rolls), Ameline, Brian, and Terry ended up on a Chicago work site and Ian was left alone. Soon after, the Magician walked in and opened a secret doorway that revealed the empty throne room. He explained how the lack of an Emperor was causing the collapse and that he could stop it if Nigel recovered the Key. As the Emperor, he would then be in need of a right-hand man....

Henry returned to the Tower and met up with Nigel before they both went to Chicago. The building swapping places with the Tower was the building Henry was working on. With the five of them together again, they decided to search for the Key and the Emperor in New York, where Nigel and Brian had encountered him. In the transition from Chicago to The Citadel to New York, they were followed by two Hounds, and they did battle in a New York park. During the fight, Terry discovered that he could use his shotgun, which shot blue flame as it had done when he first encountered a Hound. Nigel developed an Aspect, with mystic symbols appearing in his eyes, and he helped Brian jack a car. After dispatching the Hounds, they retired to Nigel's apartment.

Eventually, Brian lead them to the gate where he had picked up the Emperor. The gate was now closed and secured with a heavy chain (there was no lock). Ameline recognized the area beyond the gate as the Park, where she had met the Emperor and the Magician (during the first session). Brian realized that someone was missing/different. Brian (Robert) realized he was driving a different bus he had used on that fateful day. I then described a cut scene* which showed the Key lodged in the collection bin of the bus. This was a good a-ha moment for the players when they remembered me describing the homeless guy dropping something in the bin back in the first session.

They tracked down the bus, smashed the collection bin, and recovered the Key, all in plain view of the bus driver and his passengers. Terry (at Ameline's suggestion) pretended to take the other PCs hostage with shotgun in hand. Later, they tried to find the Emperor, but to no avail. Terry sent his crow in search mode (another cut scene showing the crow arrive next to a homeless man under a bridge), but he later became aware that crow died. Ameline realized that the Emperor was in a dual state of being/non-being and transforming into something else. After consulting the major tarot arcana, Zach intuited that the Emperor was becoming the Hermit. With this knowledge, Ameline was able to determine he was living under a bridge in Central Park. She also saw a replay of the scene of how the Captain of the Guard had attacked the Emperor, but he had gotten away and came to New York.

They had to decide who to give the Key to. The Citadel needed an Emperor or bad things would happen (like the walls between the world and The Citadel collapsing in a mystic cluster fuck). Needless to say, they were divided. Nigel wanted to give it to the Magician, but Ameline was against it. Her vision had shown the Magician leaving the Emperor's side just before the attack, so she suspected that he was complicit in the coup attempt. I think they didn't understand why the Emperor/Hermit had dropped the Key so were perhaps hesitant to give it back to him.

After much deliberation, Henry took action. He grabbed Brian (who was holding the key) and returned to the Citadel. Nigel and Ameline managed to follow after, but Terry didn't bother. Henry and Brian made it inside the Cathedral where they sought sanctuary. The doors closed behind them, leaving Nigel and Ameline, who were soon joined by the Magician, outside. Brian handed the key over to the Priestess, making her the new Emperor. She opened the doors and the Magician assumed his place as her right-hand man. Brian pledged his allegiance to the new Emperor and eventually so did Ameline. Nigel was given the option to become the Magician's apprentice and he took it. Back on Earth, Terry was beginning a long journey home to St. Louis, when the Hermit came up along side him. Terry's crow returned.

Analysis: I am pleased with how the story unfolded. I had to give them more insight and guidance at the end than I had wanted. I had no plans for how the PCs would find out about the Key and the Emperor/Hermit. I had hoped the players would come up with something inspired, but they didn't. I don't blame them. I used Ameline as the conduit of information because she had not developed any powers up to that point. I had originally envisioned that the PCs would form a cadre allied with the Emperor (whoever that turned out to be); I liked the way it turned out better. This last session, and especially the Key a-ha moment and the allegiance-making scenes, really brought the game to a satisfactory and enjoyable ending. For me, at least. I'm not sure how the players took it. They had fun, I think, but I have a feeling that I got more out of it than they did.

I'm glad I ran it, and I'm relieved to have the concept out of my head. I could turn it into a convention game, but I don't think I will, as I think there is too much opportunity for player frustration and confusion. I plan on taking a break running games for this group until at least DunDraCon, where I am running a space marine sceneario using Savage Worlds. I'm also thinking about Call of Cthulhu for Kublacon. I may playtest these games with the group, but I'm in no hurry to.

*: Brian (the player) made enough references to the cut scene that I'll never use cut scenes when he's playing ever again.

Bang!
This was one of the more unusual games of Bang! we have played. We had six players and all the expansions were in play. Ian, as Sheriff started, followed by Zach and Brian playing the Deputy and Renegade (I forget which was which). Robert, being as far away from the Sheriff as possible, attacked the Sheriff. Merwin followed suit and also played a card that forced us all to discard a card. Unfortunately, my unplayed Volcanic was taken from my hand.** With 3 Bang! cards (and I drew 2 more on my turn), I could have taken out the Sheriff on my turn. I was able to copy Robert's Slab the Killer power, so I knew Ian didn't have enough Missed cards to stop me. But it was not to be a quick win and so I just shot him once.

During the following rounds, the Outlaws seemed to have the advantage without the other three able to establish a foothold. Merwin was close to elimination throughout, but managed to hang on. Since the Outlaws were all revealed in the first round, there was little pussy-footing and deceptive play. We just gunned for the Sheriff, mostly ignoring the other two players. The card selection was on our side and having two Slabs helped too. The Sheriff was the first (and last) to be killed.

Using the High Noon and A fistful of Cards expansions added some weird moments to the game, but I'm not sure they really add much to the game besides the "something different happens this round" factor. Ian has said that he definitely prefers playing with them whereas Brian prefers to leave them out.

**: And I admit that I felt a strong urge to cheat to prevent this from happening. No one was paying attention to the card I was randomly discarding and could have pulled it off. But I didn't. But damn it was tempting just for that brief moment. After my turn, I was forced to discard two cards (I only had three bullets), and I discarded two Bangs to show how close the game came to a first-round win for the Outlaws.

Friday Night Gaming: RoboRally, Cutthroat Caverns

October 17, 2008

RoboRally

One would have thought that I would have played RoboRally by now, but one would be mistaken. I had no aversion to the game, but had no deep burning desire to seek it. Brian brought it over and we played a 2-board, 2-flag, 6-player game. Even though this was my first actual experience with the game, it pretty much played out exactly as I expected. Programing my robot was tricky, but not overly so. During the course of the game, I don't think I had a single D'oh! moment of mis-programming... except, of course, when I was interfered with by other robots.

As it turns out, by the time the game was won (by Brian with Robert and Ian close on his heels), I still had not managed to reach the first flag. But I still basically had fun doing my little programming thing, trying to do the best I could with the cards I had. However, the gaming experience was very frustrating. Not because other people were getting in my way, but because other players couldn't get their shit together. When two players have to reply the last 4 phases because they couldn't properly keep track of their movement, I think I would prefer to peel off my own eyelids.

Ultimately, I do think the game is too chaotic for it's hefty duration and can't imagine requesting it but I probably would not turn down a game if I thought it wouldn't take longer than two hours.

Cutthroat Caverns

Cutthroat Caverns was another exercise in frustration. The core concept is fine: a group of adventures attacking monsters, each trying to place the killing blow. I can imagine this as a small Knizia card game. Cutthroat Caverns takes pains to make each monster and character have different abilities and this is where they run into problems. In far too many places, the rules are terribly vague. If we had read the FAQ and a firm understanding of the rules*, I think the experience would have been better. As it was, Brian and Zach were ready to burn the game, buy a replacement, and burn it. So I don't see this one coming out again with this group. I wouldn't mind**, but I'd want to borrow the game, read all the rules, read the FAQ, read all the BGG forum discussions, etc. before tackling it again.

*: Rather than Merwin's typical skim of the rules as we were sorting the pieces.
**: And not just because I won.

Friday Night Gaming: The Citadel, Red Dragon Inn

October 10, 2008

The Citadel

We had the second session of my modern day mystic shit game. With all the PCs together, it was time to provide some direction. They found themselves in The Tower that is at the center of The Citadel. From the top, they were able to identify The Cathedral, The Ziggurat, The Gate, and The Garden.

After making their way down to street level, they encountered a talisman merchant whom only Nigel (played by Ian) could understand. Eventually, they would all come to understand the language, called Ur, but Nigel learned it first. After making their way to the marketplace, they were approached by a witch who introduced herself as Karina and lead them to her home. She answered some of their questions while getting information from them as well. She noted that four of them bore the mark of The Emperor, now missing. The marks on Ameline and Terry (played by Zach and Brian, respectively), were revealed in brief flashbacks. The exception was Henry (played by Merwin), whom she identified as an Opener. It was also made clear that the black bird belonged (somehow) to Terry.

They then headed to The Cathedral, where they encountered The Priestess and got the first hints of a political struggle in the wake of The Emperor's disappearance. They then went to The Ziggurat and spoke with The Magician, whom was earlier identified as the person on Ameline's card. Nigel allowed himself to be given a mark, which gave him the power of transmutation. This was a hint that eventually, they would all get powers, should they seek them out. Henry has a notion of his Opener abilities, but the rules, scope, and limitations haven't clicked yet in Merwin's mind. Brian (played by Robert) has shown some of his power. Terry's crow is obviously something power-related. Ameline (who really should have been the one to get a power from The Magician) has shown no signs of power.

They then set off to meet with the Captain of the Guard, whom they found at The Gate, giving orders to his Guards. After some deliberation, Ameline, Brian, and Henry decided to approach and question the Captain of the Guard while Nigel and Terry waited out of sight in a nearby alleyway. Unfortunately, neither the PCs nor the Captain was about to give out any information, so the Captain ordered his guards to take them into custody. The PCs decided to make a break for it and the session ended on a cliffhanger.

Red Dragon Inn

Red Dragon Inn and its first expansion Red Dragon Inn 2 which also acts as a stand-alone game) were combined to make a 5-player game after Robert called it a night.

I played the Bard character, which had not yet been played with this group. I built up a considerable lead in gold after a good round of gambling and spoiling another round. But I also gained gold by winning 3 drinking contests. This also proved to be my downfall because they combined for a total of 18 Alcohol points. Twice, Brian and I tied (which prompts a second round in the contest and adding more Alcohol), and we both went under at the end of the third.

I might have survived longer if I had been more conservative. Before the last drinking contest, I was down 1 Fortitude and could have healed myself for 2 (wasting half the benefit) but instead played a card that increased everyone's Alcohol content, including mine. This put my Alcohol 4 away from my Fortitude. Naturally, my next drink had 4 Alcohol, putting me out.

Merwin quickly fell after that, leaving Zach and Ian still standing. And just like last week, they ended in a tie, simultaneously knocking each other out. But as we starting putting things away, Ian realized he had a card that could have given him the solo win. Moral of the story, don't assume you know what the card does.

First Space Tigers Playtest

Space Tigers is a light, tactical dogfighting-in-space game that I have been thinking about for a few years now. Despite having written the rules twice (not to mention a couple started and halted drafts in between), I had never actually playtested it. My design goals were clear, and I have a ton of ideas for expanding it, but I never knew if the basic game system was sound. So it was with great relief (and not a small amount of trepidation) that I finally tested it with three other players last night. There were a few glitches, which were expected, but the central mechanic of the game seemed to hold up pretty well. I now know for certain that I am onto something here and can continue testing and tweaking with confidence. I received some very good feedback and now have to update the rules from the notes I took.

My biggest fear was that it would flop, that the game was boring. I am happy to report that it was pretty fun. The first game was a bit of a blow-out due to bad luck (that's my team's story and we're sticking to it). The second game was called due to length, but was pretty exciting right up to the point when it got boring (or rather, when it transitioned into a lengthy endgame which would have been too plodding to play to completion). I am anxious to play more.

To do list:

Update playtest rules

Test a few more of the optional rules we did not use last night

Start making some preset missions, finding out which scenarios work best