Divine Diversions

Moving to a new home!

2006-08-01T23:16:00.000+08:00

Actually, I'm already there.

I'm now on a Wordpress blog. It allowed me to merge my three blogs into one (Wordpress has this amazing import utility) and most importantly, it has a download facility. I can pull down the full contents of the blog and save it if I want to.

So, this is my new URL.

Dream Weaver 7 (merging my boardgame blog, movie/TV blog and general interest blog)
http://dreamweaver7.wordpress.com/

Not everything is working yet (I'm working backwards on the post tagging) and I'm restoring all the sidebar contents bit by bit.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Zupport for Zavandor

2006-07-29T22:09:00.000+08:00

Mike Siggins's new Notebook is up.

Favorable review for Das Zepter, which makes me feel a lot more secure in my decision to order it despite its being an indy game (Lookout Games, Jens Drogemuller) that has a reputation for running too long. I have to admit, it was the theme that tipped me over the edge here. A fantasy-flavored system game? I'm there, and I'm sure my game group will be happily predisposed to giving it a shot.

All I have to do is call it "The Rod of Seven Parts".

Toys 'R (Finally?) Us

2006-07-16T22:55:00.000+08:00

The first TRU store in the country (ever?) finally opened in one of the city's malls a few weeks ago. I finally got to go check it out. I didn't have a lot of expectations, boardgame-wise, but did hope that some of the more common stuff would be there at somewhat reasonable prices.

The store is small by TRU standards. It's smaller than the two TRU stores in Singapore that I've had the chance to visit. The display that greets you at the entrance is a large Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest tableau. I immediately go looking for the only item that might interest me - Pirates Dice.

Nope, not available. Dammit.

I can see the large stack of Monopoly Manila edition a couple of aisles down and make a beeline for the boardgame section. Ooh, Game of Life. Ooh, Trouble. Wow, bunches of chessboards.

Whoopee.

Interestingly, the party games are very sparse. I see several Charades variants (no Time's Up of course). I went looking for Electronic Catchphrase, which I would have picked up had it been there.

Nope, not available. Dammit.

Along with scads of Battleship and Clue and Monopoly Basic Edition and a hundred UNO-brand games were a few boxes of Heroscape Master Set and one of the expansions. Not interested in that (there's a reason that it's a children's game), so that was it for the boardgame section.

Disappointed, I walked through the rest of the store, pausing at the videogame section just because they had some iPods and iPod accessories. Nothing unusual that I couldn't get cheaper elsewhere. So I turned around to leave when something caught my eye.

I could spot the box cover of Vegas Showdown on a shelf across from the action figures section.

This part of the store has a small selection of CCGs and CMGs. I was about to make a remark to the staffers that most of the Wizkids products on display were now unsupported, but thought better of it and instead focused on the boardgames.

There was a small selection of FFG, Hasbro and Eagle Games from the local distributor. Descent and Twilight Imperium III were US$100 each. Good luck selling those things. Vegas Showdown, Sword and Skull, Monsters Ravage America and Nexus Opes were around US$50. Still Ouch. Tsuro? US$50. Doom? US$65. Ingenious or Beowulf, which I was actually interested in picking up?

Nope, not available. Dammit.

So much for that.

I threaded my way past the Disney section, the Barbie section and even more Pirates to the exit.

One last check for Pirates Dice...

Nope, not available. Dammit.

Divining Descent: Journeys in the Dark

2006-07-09T23:12:00.000+08:00

What is it?

Descent: Journeys in the Dark is a boardgame. Designed by Kevin Wilson for Fantasy Flight Games, it's a tactical combat game in a fantasy setting. The main activity is combat. Two to four players each take a character (or characters), ideally forming a team, and explore rooms and passageways. Their opponents are various fantastic critters controlled by another player. Essentially, it's kill or be killed all the way.

What is it NOT?

It's not a roleplaying game. It's also not a Eurogame. Descent is more of a videogame adaptation, since characters cannot die (the adventuring side just loses victory points) and the "overlord" player has an unlimited amount of creatures that theoretically can appear anywhere. It's also not very variable. Descent is a series of endless battles until the victory point condition is met by either side. Characters either hack away with melee weapons, shoot with missile weapons, or utilize "magical" attacks.

What do you get?

A huge box filled mostly with miniature unpainted plastic figures. The game also has cardboard tiles, cards, and a lot of counters. Overall, the production is very well done, as you might expect from Fantasy Flight.

What did you like?

The combat system is interesting. (I never played its predecessor, DOOM: The Boardgame so it's new to me.) The odds of success in attacks and the amount of damage dealt are driven by various colored six-sided dice. The type of attack and the weapon utilized determine which and how many dice are rolled. Damage is soaked by armor. Various status effects apply. The system isn't a bad approximation of what many similarly-themed videogames present.

What could have been done better?

Descent is a long game. Given the system, it's unavoidable since there is no "downtime" for the players unless they leave the dungeon premises and teleport to the town. If they do that, they're no closer to winning the game. There is also very little story here - it would have been nice to have more reasons for things in the game, especially since Descent is purely an experience game. There is no pretense towards balance anyway, so why not lean completely on the theme so that it's easier to overlook the various problematic game elements?

Related to the theme thing - the way the Overlord plays completely breaks the theme. Monsters coordinate perfectly, as if being driven by a hive mind. That makes no sense. They also can use knowledge that they thematically don't have, just because the Overlord player has the game information.

Finally, to beat a dead horse - the treasure rules make no sense at all. Character have to be adjacent to pass items, but treasure from the chest teleports to the characters? And there are always magic items equal to the number of players?

Recommendations

Descent is an MMO "RPG" translated to board game form. As you might expect, it's a lot slower than its computer kin, it's got a lot of moving parts and it makes less sense because of the lack of story. If you shun MMOs and need your fantasy tactical combat fix, give it a try. Otherwise you're probably better off playing a similar game online.

If you're looking for a true roleplaying game, you won't find it here either. It's just a game. There are no roles, and no story to speak of.

If you're after a lot of plastic fantasy figures to paint, you're in luck. Descent has a lot of plastic figures.

Eurogamers, there's no balance and a lot of randomness here. Roleplayers, there's no story or logical structure to the in-game behavior of the elements. Heroquest fans, this is right up your alley. MMO fans, if you for some reason want to get off the net and play with plastic, this is also right up your alley.

Personal Spin

Not for me, but I would play if asked by my game group and there's no one else available. I would consent to playing the Overlord, but would inject reasonable monster knowledge and intellect into the proceedings. I'd also probably choose to not spawn in cleared areas, because that makes no sense. Considering the time investment and the lack of a compelling hook, I don't look forward to the next play at all and will probably never ask for Descent to be played again.

Ratings

My rating for Descent: Journeys in the Dark: 4/10
Current Boardgamegeek rating: 7.2/10

Broken

2006-05-31T23:17:00.000+08:00

I knew it was a bad idea to use a .css file that was hosted on a site other than Blogger. So I converted two of my weblogs over to templated from googlepages.com because I liked how it all looked. Now, that site has exceeded its bandwidth and so it stopped serving the .css file. It took a week to figure it out.

Oh well. So back to one of the standard Blogger templates until a better idea surfaces.

Ah, the distractions from publishing actual blog posts that people want to read... :(

Spoiled by Elegance

2006-05-26T22:48:00.000+08:00

Chris Farrell says exactly how I feel about Caylus here. The key excerpt:

Maybe I would have gotten a kick out of [Caylus] 15 years ago, before I played Adel Verpflichtet, Modern Art, or Settlers of Catan, but today I crave something artful, something well-crafted, and something that is actually fun. And something that provides the intellectual and psychological challenge without making me do this much gratuitous, and fairly boring, work.

Now, what is "fun" is completely subjective. I think this undeservedly-ignored Geeklist "The Qualities of Fun" be Stephen Avery says it quite well (I was going to do a similar one but it would have been redundant when I found Stephen's offering.) Chris and I may share a sensitivity (although perhaps to a different degree - he's played far more boardgame than I have) to rough edges.

Caylus: Chris - 4, Rick -4
Power Grid: Chris - 6.5, Rick - 6
Age of Steam: Chris - 7, Rick - 5
War of the Ring; Chris - 6, Rick - 3
Reef Encounter: Chris - 8, Rick - 4

I can't speak for Chris other than to divine his thoughts from the quote above. The term I usually use in this instance is the much-maligned term "elegance." I take games in a wholistic sense - does the game work as a unified whole? Is there no wasted space? Are players given just enough freedom to know that they have control over their destinies, but not so much control that the game slows to a crawl?

Single elements of games don't tend to do much for me in terms of making up for less-than-stellar gameplay, just as much as a glaring weakness in my eyes will make a game intolerable. It all has to mesh.

For example, Wallenstein's cube tower is an element that a lot of people enjoy. To me, it's one of the worst resolution mechanisms in all of gaming. It's more annoying than Settlers of Catan's 2d6 production roll and The Game of Life's spinner. I can at the very least calculate odds on those two. There's no calculating the odds of a cube stuck in the tower coming out in a particular battle, or the odds of a cube thrown in getting stuck in there. Add in the thematic break of an army unit fighting on one end of the country teleporting to a battle on the other side of the country and you have a mechanism that I cannot enjoy.

Over to theme. Say what you will about "pasted on" themes, but a game's theme either works on that abstracted level (Knizia's Samurai, Torres, Amun-Re, Euphrat & Tigris) or it doesn't (RA, Medici, Beowulf, Cartagena). To me the more disappointing ones are the near misses like Wally, which would have been a more tolerable area-control/Eurowargame if it had used dice or cards for resolution instead of the gimmicky tower. I cannot tolerate games that are all flash and no substance, games that commit far more heinous crimes to my game sensibilities than Wally.

So, an "elegant" game in my book has streamlined mechanisms and a theme that's integrative but not necessarily all-encompassing. Caylus has neither. Similar to Chris, I feel that it's got a lot of mechanisms that don't necessarily add to the game, and its theme is breached in some places. (On the latter part I'm most bothered by the Provost and the Bailiff. They just don't make sense in the context of the theme.)

So I guess I've been spoiled by Knizia and Kramer and Dorn who consistently produce games that meet my criteria of "elegance." That doesn't mean other games will not be enjoyed by the boardgaming community. They just won't be enjoyed by people with game tastes similar to mine.

THE MYSTERIOUS GAME OF MYSTERY (tm)

2006-05-23T22:37:00.000+08:00

From the exchange of emails between myself, Joe Gola and Gil Hova:

Joe, March 16:

I'm planning to bring Clash of the Gladiators and at least one or two other recent releases just in case. I tend to change my mind a lot at the last minute, though, so I may show up with something totally random. HOWEVER if fortune smiles upon me and a certain package shows up tomorrow or Saturday morning I'll have something VERY new and exciting to bring.

Joe, March 17:

The ones I'm particularly enthusiastic about are Merchants of Amsterdam and Tower of Babel, and if both of you guys are interested in Atlantic Star, then I'm fired up to play that one as well. Naturally I'm also very excited about the MYSTERIOUS GAME OF MYSTERY.

Joe, March 18:

By the way, the MYSTERIOUS GAME OF MYSTERY has ARRIVED! It is (supposedly) sitting at my house right now. I may have to leave work early.

Just to tantalize you further I will let you know that the MYSTERIOUS GAME OF MYSTERY is a brand-new big-box Nuremburg game from a very well-known designer and a very well-known publisher. Two of the previous collaborations between this designer and publisher are in the BGG top 50. The game only just became available in the U.S. two days ago and has less than ten plays recorded on BGG, so to say that we will be on the "cutting edge" when we break this out this tomorrow will be completely accurate.

And it's not Celtica.

Rick, March 18:

Dammit I was guessing Celtica!

Maybe either Blue Moon City or Bison or Thurn & Taxis?

Damn you Joe for making me look for the MYSTERIOUS GAME OF MYSTERY.

Gil, March 18:

All the games sound great; I don't think I'll bring
any of my own, in fact. We should have plenty to do
with what's already been mentioned.

Rick, March 18:

G'night and see you both tomorrow!

1. My first guess (after Celtica) was correct. THE MYSTERIOUS GAME OF MYSTERY (tm) was:

2. Gil lied. He did bring a good-sized bunch of games, including THE PROTOTYPE WE SHALL NOT SPEAK OF which we played!

3. That was a very good day of Quizno's subs and gaming. I wish Quizno's would franchise out to this corner of the world.

Over to the next post.

SNAFU and Haz

2006-05-23T19:54:00.000+08:00

Thanks to "Mr. ekted" Jim C., I noticed that the template of this weblog broke for some reason. It took a bit of time to reconstruct the template, so the promised post will have to wait until tomorrow.

Just to have a bit of game-related content on here, we finally got to play some (Ha Ha) Hacienda (or plain Haz to us) over the past few weeks. It's not Wolfie's greatest game ever (that's good ol' 555), but it meshes a lot of game mechanisms into a nice package. The ones that ususally stand out to gamers are the card drafting mechanism (popularly attributed to The Moonie) and the "score points by connecting to an adjacent hex" thing used by Reiner in Through the Sausage. Honestly, it's nothing like Zug um Zug or Durch die Wuste.

Haz has an economic engine that's powered, interestingly, by the game's spatial element. You get money based on contiguous tile sets. There's no virtuous or vicious cycle here. It a novel way to get around the rich-get-richer characteristic that most economic models in games possess.

I'll revisit Haz with a proper review in the future. For the moment, color me satisfied. (BGG Rating: 7/10)

Yes, I've Been Away

2006-05-21T22:17:00.000+08:00

I've been away in several ways. I was away physically, being in three different countries over the course of two weeks. I was away mentally, with the jet lag killing all semblance of a routine and events forcing me to play catch-up with my own sense of equilibrium. I've also been away spiritually, choosing to give some of my life to other pursuits in the interim. There was no weblogging for about ten weeks. There was a lot of time with my family and friends and other hobbies. There was some vacation and travel and beachbumming and walking around in the rain.

And yes, there was some game playing. We'll get back to talking about games in the next post, now that my fingers have gotten reacquainted with the feel of writing with the electronic pen again.

I've tossed out the piece I did on the fateful convergence of myself, Gil Hova and Joe Gola. I didn't like it. During the time away I guess I got in touch with the artist squirreled away in the recesses of my brain, and he thought that my writing (especially my game-oriented writing) was tremendously boring.

Joe did this. Gil did that. Rick scored this many points. Joe laughed. Gil gestured. Rick won. Pah. Boring. Deleted.

Granted, rewriting the story of The Day We Played the MYSTERIOUS GAME OF MYSTERY (tm) from my fading ten-week-old memory will be a challenge. It's a good bet that I won't remember any details about where Joe moved his silly Blue Moon token, or how many points I scored when playing Gil's prototype, or how strange we thought Rotundo's theme was. What I DO hope is that the things I remember will remain interesting for myself to write, and for those few patient readers of this weblog to read.

It's coming up within the next 24 hours.

LudoNJ 3-Way

2006-03-20T03:18:00.000+08:00

After some touch and go moments I got to hook up with Gil Hova and Joe
Golazeski for some gaming in the hinterlands of New Jersey. Thanks to Gil
for driving down to my hotel and giving me a ride!

Joe had been hinting that he would have a new gae for us to try, the
MYSTERIOUS GAME OF MYSTERY. The clue was that the game was fresh off
Nuremberg, by a well-known designer and from a well-known publisher. That
combo had two games in the BGG top 50, and it wasn't Celtica. (I got it in
one guess.)

I'll run a session report when I get back to Manila. We played 5 games,
including Gil's word game prototype, in about 6 hours.

The "Big" Order

2006-03-12T21:48:00.000+08:00

Well, I'm sitting in my hotel room in Jersey. I'm still a bit woozy from turning my body clock around. It's 8:30am here, but it's 9:30 back home and my system is still insisting that I get ready to head to bed.

Anyway, I just sent off an order to Fair Play Games as recommended by Mr. Joe Gola. I hope this goes off without a hitch. On their website they estimate 2-3 days to deliver to the East. Assuming they get the shipment off by tomorrow, I should expect the games to arrive by Friday. This also marks the first time I've ever put my credit card information online, ever. I'm just ultra-wary of credit card information theft on the web. And here I am risking it all for a bunch of boardgames. It's an unhealthy fixation, I tell you.

Anyway, as I've written before my wishlist is woefully thin at the moment. I augmented my order with a bunch of R&R party games which cannot be had in Manila. Sometime, a good party game is what we're in the mood for and you can only play so much Cranium. Besides, Snoop Glenn's new "You Must Be an Idiot!" is intriguing to me.

So, this is what I ordered:

Hacienda $24.45
Merchants of Amsterdam $27.95
Meuterer $8.45
Power Grid Expansion : France & Italy $10.55
3 Puerto Rico Expansion $10.35
Sticheln $8.45
Thingamajig $13.95
Tichu $7.95
Time's Up $14.45
Time's Up Expansion 1 $6.95
Time's Up Expansion 2 $6.95
You Must Be An Idiot! $13.95
Sub total : $154.40
Shipping - United States - UPS : $0.00
Total : $154.40

Thanks to Tom and Joe at The Dice Tower, I had the discount code for free shipping for an order > $150. I was just short so I tossed in a copy of Tichu even though it's likely that I'll never get that to the table, ever.

If the games arrive by Friday I'll have something to bring along if the rendezvous with the Hovas and Gola (wow that rhymes) happens.

Off to NJ

2006-03-12T07:49:00.000+08:00

Just a quick post - I'm sitting on Northest flight 20 headed for Minneapolis then on to Newark. It's a business trip, but it looks like the stars will align and I'll get to meet Gil "ingredient X" Hova, Heather "guenlian" Hova and the most esteemed Joe Gola.

Pardon the format if it's screwy, I'm doing from from a Blackberry and the results have been unpredictable.

Next post will be from NJ!

Of Killer Bunnies and Beer Money

2006-03-01T23:15:00.000+08:00

I've played Killer Bunnies exactly once, and that was enough for me. I've never played Beer Money, but the description of the game convinced me that it wasn't for me either. Apparently, I'm supposed to imbibe large amounts of alcohol before even attempting to play.

I listen to a really fun podcast from The Dragon Page called Wingin' It where the crew led by Michael R. Mennenga and Evo Terra drink beer and talk about... well, practically anything. It's usually somewhere in the genre universe of science (speculative?) fiction and fantasy and it's almost always funny. Anyway, the folks on the podcast are sometime (casual) gamers, and lately Evo's been on a Killer Bunnies kick ever since some bloke from Australia named Phil visited their studio in Phoenix and introduced them to the game.

As a person who would never willingly play Killer Bunnies ever again, I'm fascinated by the way they talk about it. They're passionate. Excited. Pumped. And they're ready to play Killer Bunnies right. this. second. After drinking some beer. In the referenced show, the people on the cast talk a bit about some of the games that many of the Euro or War game crowd probably wouldn't touch with a 10-foot meeple.

I mention all of this because of this thread on Boardgamegeek disparaging party games, of which Killer Bunnies and Beer Money are a subset of, if not in form, then certainly in spirit. People seem to forget that we play games because they're interesting or fun. Moreover, we play boardgames and cardgames instead of computer games or online games because of the PEOPLE. Even if you're playing the biggest baddest multiplayer brainburner on the planet, you've still got other people sitting at the table around you. So what if they want to play Killer Bunnies or Cranium or Taboo? Suck it up and play, or sit out and shut up. But don't complain that they're stupid or retarded or uneducated. That just proves that YOU are stupid, retarded and uneducated.

Listen to the people playing. Are they having fun? You're not having fun? You're the problem, not them. You need to find people who like the same stuff as you if you're unable or unwilling to suck it up and just enjoy the company of other human beings. Or, maybe you can imbibe some Arrogant Bastard and that'll loosen up your clenched ass enough to have fun. It doesn't always have to have anything to do with what game you're playing.

Free Parking, or Why We Don't Do House Rules

2006-02-26T00:08:00.000+08:00

If there's one game mechanism that can show us why house rules, or not playing but a game's published rules, is something to avoid, it's Free Parking.

Free Parking jackpot, which usually consists of an initial stake plus collection of fines and taxes that would otherwise be paid to the bank. A player who lands on Free Parking wins the jackpot, which may then be reset with the initial stake (if any). The jackpot is usually put in the center of the board. (Wikipedia.org, Monopoly House Rules)

Thus it mystifies me when I read many posts of gamers modifying game rules due to perceived imperfections in the original design. Essentially, they are creating their own Free Parking problem. House rules are fine if the same group of players confine themselves to playing with each other. I'm sure that there are gaming groups where this is the case.

However, when gamers start playing with (or even worse TEACHING the game to) people from other gaming groups, then the house rules become a problem. It becomes easy to forget the correct published rules when you are used to playing with house rules.

Say, your group has decided that you don't want to deal with memory and therefore always play Euphrat & Tigris with open scoring. You then teach the game to a cousin from out of town, who then buys his own copy and takes it back home. He then teaches the game to his own friends with the same open scoring rules error. It is in this way that Free Parking comes to Mesopotamia. When these players go out and play with others, they are surprised to learn that they have been taught Euphrat & Tigris incorrectly.

It is understandable that gamers try to take a game that they found uninteresting or borken and try to salvage their investment by tweaking the rules. Perhaps it would be better to simply take the offending game and sell or trade it. There are many games that work very well out of the box. Why dignify a crappy game by devoting even more time trying to fix it, and then playing the same crappy game again in the hope that the fix improved gameplay? Sell or trade it for a game that you know works. Boardgamegeek is a good place to see if a game you have your eye on has any problems.

On a final note, companies are exhibiting an increasingly alarming tendency to issue games with poorly-written rules. Whether this is a result of poor translation from a foreign language or simply having a poor rules writer AND editor is irrelevant. Companies then try to correct this problem by issuing errata or "official variants". ("Official variant" is a term that is horrible and laughable at the same time.) A recent and very amusing example is the recent release of the new edition of Britannia, which had its "FAQ and errata" released one day (Feb 23) after the game (Feb 22). That's just pathetic from a consumer standpoint. There is clearly very little focus on quality in this case.

There are apologists who say that this kind of thing is expected and should be tolerated. Bullshit. What happens to the people who buy the game but never access the internet? They're stuck with a product that's flawed or even broken such as Avalon Hill's Betrayal at House on the Hill. The publisher's product contains house rules (since the rules are incorrect and/or incomplete) as produced, and the correct way to play the game is issued as a fix. We've already given up on holding software companies to standards of high quality, accepting that all software will have patches, bugfixes or service packs just to get them to work as advertised. Let's not do the same thing with publishers or any other companies that produce flawed products.

Let's not pay for Free Parking.

Memory

2006-02-25T23:04:00.000+08:00

One of the unending debates in games is whether memory is a valid skill. I've always found this argument silly.

The people against memory usually invoke the term "trackable information" as an argument against memory. Essentially, if you can take pen and paper and take notes on (usually random) elements of a game in order to keep track of what has appeared and what hasn't, then that information should be open. A good example of this is RA's random tile draw. The initial tile distribution is random, so if you have a tracking sheet and tick off each tile as it appears, then you should have an exact inventory of what remains in the bag.

A closely related argument to this is "countable information" wherein all the game elements are out in the open except for one, and that hidden element can be determined by counting known elements and calculating. For example, the number of caballeros in El Grande's castillo, or the amount of cash each person has in Power Grid are examples of countable information. Countable information is always also trackable.

Now, I don't know if the people who want to keep this information out in the open are just bad at remembering things, so they don't want to be disadvantaged. Memory is a valid gaming ability, just as spatial reasoning or strategic brilliance or mathematical ability or word association or a vast reserve of trivia in your head. Is memory just as valid a source of competitive advantage as the ability to think four moves ahead or the ability to crunch numbers in your head accurately? Of course it is.

For example, if Karl-Heinz Schmiel wanted all players in a game of Die Macher to always know how much money each party had at any time, he would have either built it into his game mechanisms or components, or mentioned in the rules that players should keep track of everyone's cash with pen and paper. (Note that Die Macher is a game where you already need pen and paper for scoring and bidding. Money in this game is trackable information.) Therefore we can infer that Schmiel wanted players who can keep track of money in their head to have some advantage in bidding for the Opinion Polls, especially in the final election. You make that information freely avaialble to all players, and you remove a source of competitive advantage from the player with good memory that is granted to him by the game rules.

Unless the rules explicitly state that players should keep track of something with pen and paper, it is assumed that either players use their memory to maintain count or recount the game elements on the board when necessary. I know that many groups hate it when someone starts counting caballeros in order to determine how many of them are in the castillo. However, this is part of the game and is therefore part of the design. If you play El Grande, you get to count the caballeros anytime you damned well please. (This is one of a few reasons I'm not enamored of El Grande.)

If you insist on playing a game against the rules (like the very silly house rule to use open scoring in Euphrat & Tigris) then you are playing a variant that eliminates an important game element - memory. You (and your gaming group) might all agre to play it that way. That's fine. Just be aware that you're applying a variant house rule that tinkers with the way the game was designed, and are therefore playing a different game than the rest of us who play with the rules as published.

Simultaneous Action Selection, Bluffing and Other Mechanisms of Little "Skill"

2006-02-24T22:24:00.000+08:00

Geeks love these kinds of discussions.

Jim over at The Gamer's Mind talked about Simultaneous Action Selection and randomness.

Thi Nguyen picked it up and made a counter-argument in Geeklist form.

I'm not really interested directly in the debate here, although it IS excellent reading for the hardcore gamer. I'm more interested in the use of the word "skill" within that discussion.

What follows here is my personal interpretation of the arguments in the articles preceding.

People seem to define "skill" as a game element where players' decisions have a meaningful impact. I.e., making a deliberate decision based on available information should give the player a better game result. So, this opens a different yet not-less-significant can of worms.

First: If a decision is based on pure conjecture, is it skill? Is "reading" your opponents a valid "skill"? Some, especially poker players, will argue this to be true.

Second: If a player makes a decision based on statistical probabilities, is there skill involved? The Rock-Paper-Scissors example cited in Thi's list is a simple example here. Now, if in the counter-example in the same list where you have "Good ol' Rock" Bart Simpson likely to pick Rock, a player (Lisa) makes decisions based on THAT assumption, it becomes "reading" the opponent OR using preacquired information. Is that skill? Is there skill involved in (a) knowing Bart picks Rock a lot and (b) therefore playing Paper more often than you otherwise would?

Third: If a player makes a decision based on perceived outcomes that he attempted to influence, but where he is uncertain of the outcome of his influence -i.e., Diplomacy - is this skill? Is a player who is backstabbed more often a player of less skill?

Fourth: I'm adding this as an afterthought. Are decisions based on historical information "skill"? This is part of the Simpson idea in the second item, where Lisa has information on Bart's tendencies when playing Rock-Paper-Scissors. It's also one of the "skills" poker players tend to cite - knowing how other players play. This explicitly means you are using "metagame" information - information obtained outside of the current game.

In all four cases, I would argue that there is no skill, as I define it. The reason is that the decisions a player makes is based purely on conjecture, or on information coming from outside of the current game. I would call this making decisions based on "peripheral information". This information is not coming directly from the game, but from the players. Is this part of the game? Maybe, but I would disagree. I *might* even call it cheating to an extent.

It's like playing poker on the internet. The only information you have is the amount of the bids and the bidding pattern. Poker players tend to not consider this as "real" poker because they lose the peripheral information they get from physical cues. Anyone can count cards when playing online with the use of pen and paper. So all you have now is the bidding, which is essentially how one bluffs. Without peripheral information, it's not much use game mechanism-wise. So the game of poker, without the peripheral information, is barely more skillful than blackjack.

Yes, yes, some gamers will call this "interaction". Any game has that. Even a game like Puerto Rico contains these elements. If I know that Billy prefers the corn strategy and he's sitting on my right, I can use that information in decision-making. If I know that Mary always bids in increments of five in Modern Art, I can use that information too. And if I know that Gerald is a pathological liar in Diplomacy, I'll play as if he's gonna backstab me every damned time.

Is that "skill"?

No, it's not. The ability to take current game information and only current game information and make a meaningful decision based on that - now THAT is skill. You MUST remove any peripheral information, such as historical preferences of the other players, from the mix. Decisions based on probabilities - my goldfish can do that. "Princess Bride" decisions also identify game mechanisms where skill in not involved. Same thing with "bluffing".

So you poker players out there - you're playing a game that requires very little skill.

New Look. New Name?

2006-02-20T06:17:00.000+08:00

I just updated the weblog template, swtiching out one of the built-in Blogger looks for this style named "Beckett" courtesy of Blogger Templates. Let me know if it's an improvement or if I made a horrid mistake! (Those of you reading via an aggregator might want to surf over just to have a look.)

Also, taking a cue from my buddy Jim I'm considering changing this weblog's name. "Rick's Boardgame Blog" is descriptive, but not terribly catchy. (And there are a lot of Ricks out there.)

If you've got any suggestions, feel free to post it in the comments or email me at dreamNOSPAMweaver7@gmail.com. (Take out the NOSPAM of course.) If I use your suggestion I'll give you due credit, and 5 shiny Geekgold if you're a BGG denizen.

No Games Played, and No Good Fantasy Quest Games

2006-02-19T20:30:00.000+08:00

I showed up at the Lily Pad on game night to find George down with a bug. She wasn't feeling all that bad, but it was deemed best that she lie down and recover. Three others also either sent regrets or cancelled, so it was just the two of us. I did have YINSH and TAMSK with me, but in the end we decided that for a change we'd watch a film.

I'd just acquired the DVD of the film Mirrormask. It's an interesting story of twisted dark fantasy from the minds of Sandman collaborators Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. If that sounds interesting to you I put up a review on my film weblog, The Silver Screener. (I'm also reviewing all the Academy Awards Best Picture nominees.)

While viewing the film we did lament that there are no good fantasy quest games available. Good is relative, yes, but the ones we've tried have never garnered enough interest for a second look. Heroquest, Runebound, Return of the Heroes, Dragonhunt, Magic Realm - all either took too long, didn't provide enough flexibility, or required a player to be the "dungeon master". I suppose if you classify Reiner Knizia's The Lord of the Rings boardgame as a fantasy quest game (and why the heck not) then that would be the best fantasy game we've ever played.

I suppose our standards are just too high after growing up with AD&D and having some amazing game masters among our group.

Anyway. Hopefully back to Eurogames next week. I'll have to tide myself over with games on Spiel by Web, which just launched Tikal, and the new MaBiWeb, which debuts with Hansa and Richelieu.

And I thought I was a curmudgeon...

2006-02-14T06:14:00.000+08:00

Check out the Knizia-hating Geeklist by BGG user MichaelB. (I don't usually read Geeklists any more but a comment linked to the list from Jim off of my Geekbuddy list.)

I know I just ranted on low-utility plastic figures. I think I had good cause.

Conversely, I wonder why this guy plays games at all.

1. He hates randomness (E&T and RA tile draws).
2. He hates Taj's bits: the plastic palaces and their colors. While color is entirely subjective, the palaces are simple and nicely done. Cheap? So he hates plastic.
3. On Amun-Re: "Everything is great in this game but it just feels mediocre... " You're calling the game great and mediocre in the same sentence?
4. Samurai is "not as fun as it should be". Huh?
5. Lost Cities is "too light even for a filler". Duh. I wonder what his idea of a filler is. And I do not think "rip-off" means what he thinks it means.
6. TtD has "silly components and stupid colors". I love the comment "what is a stupid color"?

Amusingly, his Top 10 include Age of Steam (random production rolls, very cheap bits), Conquest of the Empire (plastic bits that are no better than Taj Mahal's palaces), Age of Mythology (more plastic bits, and a mess of a combat system that's more random than tiles could ever be) and Mare Nostrum (simply a mess of a game due to the map balance and crazy trading).

I'm not picking on the guy. I'm just noting that despite nitpicking on certain games and game elements, I enjoy playing games and don't rag on them just for fun. Vasel knocked Farrell for this in one of his recent podcasts, which was completely unfair and unfounded. Farrell has a staggering 42 '10's and 48 '9's which is far more than Tom does, so saying "why does he even play games" is uninformed. I don't expect journalistic responsibility from the boys in Korea, but they could at least do a little checking instead of shooting from the hip based on the negative stuff written on games they like.

The Case Against Plastic

2006-02-11T22:45:00.000+08:00

You've got your 'old school' chits-and-counters on one side of this theoretical spectrum, and plastic toy soldiers on the other. I'd place your common Eurogame wooden pieces somewhere between those extremes.

Bits. They can make your game look a lot better than it is, or make a good game look like crap. They can work well, or be tremendously annoying during play. They can also be completely useless.

There's been a trend lately, led by Eagle Games (okay, they've been doing this for a while), Fantasy Flight Games, and good ol' Hasborg (fine, they've been doing it for a while too) to stuff as many plastic figures into a game box as possible. The function of this practice is pretty clear - appeal to the Army Men toy gene inside male gamers to entice them to buy a game. For the longest time Eagle did this a lot, with mediocre games like War! Age of Imperialism, Attack! (before the expansion) and Age of Mythology sporting lots of cool plastic figs adorning games that leave much to be desired. Hasborg never really stopped, most recently releasing THE game for young boys to have these days, Heroscape. Finally, FFG has Chinese factories churning our prodigious amounts of plastic figures to stuff into their "epic box" games - Twilight Imperium 3E, World of Warcraft and Descent: Journeys in the Dark, and the less-than-epic-yet-still-plastic-choked Doom. FFG also did the stateside release for Nexus Editrice's War of the Ring, no pushover in the plastic wars itself.

So, what do all of those games have in common?

The plastic pieces have little to do with the game itself. They're purely eye candy and have no impact on the mechanisms. They don't even carry any game information outside of whatever unit they represent. In some cases, the units are even functionally identical despite looking different.

I think that's just silly from a gameplay standpoint. Of course, to some marketing to the eyes is more important than actual gameplay, so you have the games presented as above.

Forget for a moment that I hate War of the Ring's mechanisms. Even if the mechanisms were good (say, Hannibal good) I still would have been unable to get past the tremendously annoying figures that not only choked up all of the board real estate, but were functionally identical. The physical attributes, the decision to use plastic over more sensible counters, would make me give War of the Ring a rating of no more than a generous 6/10.

Days of Wonder has so far shown restraint. The worst offender in their portfolio is Memoir '44, but that's a game that's targeted towards young boys who appreciate the plastic Army Men so we can forgive them. Its older sibling Battle Cry was a Hasborg publication after all. Ancients gave up on the plastic and uses far more sensible blocks. Sadly, BOTH sides of the blocks show the unit. I don't get it. Why not stick with the usual fog of war granted by block wargames?

The bottom line is that the drive of some companies towards using plastic figurines (a) prevents more meaningful use of the game component, (b) is often detrimental to gameplay, and (c) drives up the price point of the games.

Down with plastic. Go back to sensible cardboard counters.

Weblogs, Boardgamegeek and a Surfeit of Idiocy

2006-02-08T23:15:00.000+08:00

It's the topic of the moment I guess.

Susan Rozmiarek
Yehuda
Naturelich
DoctorJ

I just mention what Mary (aka sodaklady) said in the comments on Susan's blog entry. BGG HAD blogs, and those who were so inclined did use them a lot when they were there. Your humble weblogger here included. When the Geek went all Forums on its community, the Geek Journals, as they were called, disappeared from the front page and were relegated to an obscure corner of the Geek Forums.

The motivations in using a weblog vs the Geek forums are easy to cite: more control, no inane traffic, ability to censor comments without idiotic invocation of nonexistent "freedom of speech" in that context. Yeah, sure there's freedom of speech. Go set up your own weblog and you can say any fucking thing you want. You post it on the Geek, and Dan Karp can delete your ass any time he damned well pleases because AlDerk say he can. (By the way, I like that I can say "fuck" on here without people screaming that the Geek is a "family site". As if your 10-year old is going to be researching the advantages of Age of Steam vs Railroad Tycoon. Besides, one post of Mr. Cranky is going to traumatize him more than any four-letter word will.)

Oh, and I don't have to put up with reading worthless comments on "cost per minute of enjoyment" computations on every other thread. Good lord, the idiocy that has permeated the Geek. I long for the days of Aaron Potter.

While I'm ranting, what's with the steady stream of irrelevant pics? Girls with game boxes where the games are a fraction of the picture and the girl isn't even playing the game? Does www.boardgamegeek.com now point to www.spielboy.com? What the fuck? Miss Panda's cleavage pic was a lot more relevant than the "kitten pics" and the "meeples in strange places" pics and the "look at my nice paint job" pics. At least she was playing the damned game!

I knew I had to give up Geekmod when I rejected 14 of the first 15 pics I looked at (mostly for being too big or irrelevant - pictures of computer games? Can I submit 20 pics of the World of Warcraft PC game under that game entry?) and all but one got accepted. At least when a pic I submit gets rejected it's for "redundancy" of my own pics.

The Geek is still the supreme database for boardgames, but as a community it's steadily descending into anarchy. Jim's creation of the BGGF was prescient. Thanks Jim.

Home Sweet Home - Two Game Nights, Three New Games

2006-02-04T23:20:00.000+08:00

After my two trips I was only too glad to get back to the Lily Pad for gaming with the gang. Jay was going to join us so I packed five unplayed games for both game nights - Maharaja (this groups still hadn't had the pleasure) and the four games I got in Hong Kong (Medina, Attribute, TAMSK and YINSH).

We had just four players so Medina was the first out of the bag.

I first experienced arguably the best game from Stefan Dorra's catalog online on Brettspielwelt. Medina is intriguing in that it's the ultimate game of stalling, or what I call "negative timing" as players try to hold out and force opponents to cede the initiative on the board. It's got a feel akin to Reiner Knizia's Samurai, but taken to the extreme. Morgan Dontanville has called it as a game where he never wants to take his turn (he doesn't like Medina). I see it as a plus as players are forced to manage their resources in an unintuitive manner. Here, it's not HOW you spend it, it's WHEN you spend it. (And sometimes, IF you spend it at all.)

Then of course there are the bits. Sure, they could have used cardboard tiles, but the effect wouldn't be the same. This isn't a case of a game company stuffing low-utility eye candy plastic minis into a game just to increase marketability at the cost of functionality. Medina's wooden pieces help visualize the game and set the city features off from each other, which is important in a placement game such as this. People with big hands may have trouble sticking the little wooden men into the alleyways snaking through the city, but otherwise, the wooden pieces are a huge plus.

Anyway, we screwed up the most difficult rule in the game - taking control of the watchtowers by building walls adjacent to palaces. We played through with the incorrect rule, and will correct it on the next play. I had a decent lead through the midgame, but George took the negative timing of the game to heart and held out for a couple of large palaces. The Frog sacrificed a bit of time to deny everyone else the use of his palace blocks after he'd claimed palaces of those colors, but that cost him in the endgame as he "went out" the earliest. This decision led to his not having any towers to his name. All in all, everyone liked Medina and are looking forward to the next game.

It was late that night so I proposed that I show the gang YINSH. Now I've played YINSH extensively on BSW but again this was the first time I was going to teach people the game with a physical copy. The Bakelite felt good, and The Frog picked up the rules quickly. Of course, this being a GIPF game experience counts. Even in YINSH, the most accessible of the series due to its fluid game states, having a few dozen games under one's belt leads to wins over newbies much more often than now. I left the game at the Lily Pad for the enjoyment of my hosts until the next weekend.

>>> FAST FORWARD ONE WEEK <<<

So, it was a week of lots of YINSH and lots of TAMSK. Over this period I grew to love TAMSK and as much as I enjoy YINSH, TAMSK is the best game in the Gipf series for me. The three-layered fourth dimension of time creates a game so unique that I could play a half-dozen games in a row and still be left wanting more. That's a first from an abstract for me.

For the unfamiliar - TAMSK is a game where player's pieces are three 3-minute hourglasses. These pieces move around on a hexagonal board, and when they move the players place a ring on the peg/space when the hourglass lands, and if a peg/space ever gets full up on rings it becomes illegal to move there. When an hourglass is moved, it is flipped. The object of the game is to use more rings than your opponent. If an hourglass ever runs out of time, it dies and becomes immobile. The last element is the 15-second "move glass" or what I've begun calling "the hammer" (because it drives the nail into your opponent's coffin if used correctly - i.e., brutally). You may flip the hammer to force your opponent to move before it runs out of time. If he fails to complete a move he begun, then you get to place a free ring. If he fails to move at all, he effectively passes and you go again.

Try to use the hammer off-rhythm. Don't automatically flip it when your opponent's turn comes up. This forces him to pay attention to it, as he can't reliably determine how much time he has left to move if he doesn't. At the very least, it creates a distraction from the main board. At worst, it'll kill an hourglass or give you a free move.

Anyway, Erik was present for this gathering and we kicked the night off with several games of TAMSK and YINSH before dinner. A good time was had by all. Geroge and I won the TAMSK games. I also won the YINSH games I played.

After dinner, it was decided that it had been too long since we played Puerto Rico. Having four players, the opportunity was ripe so out came PR for its first appearance in 2006.

As usual, a brutal game with The Frog and I ending up with the Factories, and Erik and George scarfing up the Harbors. It was close through the midgame, and the Harbors were humming, but in the end the Frog picked up the win with great balance between shipping and the city, bolstered by the very deadly Guild Hall/Fortress combo.

Stealing (Game) Time in Hong Kong with Alan Kwan

2006-01-26T22:32:00.000+08:00

Two days after arriving from Bangkok it was time to pack my bags again for a conference in Hong Kong.

Now I haven't been to HK since I left my last "major" job which had its regional headquarters in HK several years ago. I was primarily a roleplayer then and tracked down a game shop in an office building somewhere in Kowloon. Name of the store had "wargame" in it somewhere I think - I can't remember exactly.

Anyway, this time around it was a snap to identify who to contact for a boardgame fix. Alan Kwan is an active voice on BGG. He's also the YINSH champion from the last tournament run at Essen Speile. Finally, he's the proprietor of Tarot Games Hong Kong, the premiere source of Eurogames in HK. I dropped him a line because I'd only be able to get around the city on a Sunday, and Tarot is normally closed on Sundays except by appointment be regular customers.

In a trend among Asian gamers that warms my heart, Alan was wonderfully accomodating. He agreed to meet me at his shop Sunday afternoon. That meant that not only would I get to meet him, I also would be able to buy games! He had TAMSK and YINSH in stock, two games that have been on my wishlist for a long time. He also amazingly had a copy of Stefan Dorra's MEDINA still in the store. Now, TAMSK and MEDINA aren't cheap, the former carrying an MSRP of $50 and the latter being an out-of-print game with a lot of wooden bits, but they are both on my wishlist as "grail games" so I had to have them. Finally, Alan also had a copy of Lo0kout Games's little card game Attribute (yes, the English version) which I believed to be almost impossible to find. Those four games cost me clost to US$200, which was reasonable for an Asian environment. Besides, we have to show support to the people who bring "our" games into the region. Without guys like Alan in HK, Damien in Singapore and Edwin in Malaysia, we'd all be in the same boat as Thailand - no game stores and no way to get a new game fix other than by expensive orders from overseas.

Tarot Games is located on Hong Kong Island, and my hotel was on the other side of the bay in Kowloon. Fortunately, my hotel was a two-minute walk from the nearby ferry dock, which took me across to HK Island. Again, I was lucky since the ferry dock on the other side was right across from the MRT (subway), so I hopped on a train. Fortress Hill, the station nearest the mall Tarot was is, was just two stops away.

I popped out of the MRT station and took the five minute walk to the mall.

I was a bit early so I looked around. Alan had an intersting mix of games in his store window. There were a couple of games (I think they're kids' games) that I couldn't identify (boo). There was Ingenious, and Igloo Pop, and Pickomino, and of course the new Kris Burm game PUNCT.

Alan arrived shortly, and after the requisite introductions we chatted about the HK and Manila boardgame scenes. I had a bit of time, so I proposed that we play a game. PUNCT was handy in the store window, so that was what we played.

I had only played PUNCT before online at punct.biskai.de. The physical game has nice Bakelite pieces. For the uninitiated, PUNCT is an abstract connection game. Players try to connect two sides of the hexagonal board using various-shaped pieces. There are three twists. First is that pieces that are already on the board can be moved in straight lines, with one of the three points on the piece as a stable pivot. The second is that the pieces can stack on top of each other, as long as the pivot point is placed over a piece of the same color. The third twist is that there is a dark area in the center of the board that players can't play pieces into, but can move pieces into.

Alan, as expected, smoked me in two games. Hey, he's the 2005 YINSH World Champ and he's probably played PUNCT and all the GIPF games a lot more than me. I don't mind getting whipped like a BGG Pony two weeks in a row, in two different countries. Abstracts have never been my strong suit. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it!)

I had to run back to the hotel for dinner, so I thinked Alan for his hospitality and got going. Two games off my personal "grail list" and four games total off my wishlist, plus a couple more games played in a different Asian country. Not bad at all.

A Gaming Afternoon in Bangkok with Dale Walton of PIN

2006-01-21T23:40:00.000+08:00

My flight arrived in Bangkok in the early afternoon so I was able to meet up with Dale Walton, "technical consultant" for toy and game maker PIN International headquartered in Thailand's capital.

I contacted Dale through Boardgamegeek prior to my trip. He offered to meet up with me and play some games. Sure enough, a call to his mobile phone and Dale said he'd meet me in my hotel's lobby to play.

As an aside, there is no place to get Eurogames in Thailand. Even PIN's abstract games which are manufactured in Thailand are not sold in the country. In light of that I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about Manila's dearth of game shops - at least one can purchase the likes of Die Siedler and Carcassonne off the shelf here, albeit at a painful premium. BGG member Michel "pixyfrog" Dauget had just relocated to Bangkok and was planning to open a game cafe sometime in 2006. I hope to visit next trip down.

Dale was carrying two of PIN's abstract games with him. One was a game I expressed interest in seeing - an unusual number that went by the name Zaroc. The other was a game called Creeper.

We chatted about the abstract game scene while Dale demolished me at Zaroc. This little niche of the gaming world has its own quirks. What stood out for me was the stigma of an abstract game being labelled as "broken" or "solvable" which carry far more weight than they do in the Eurogame world. Lacking a theme, mechanisms are the only thing that an abstract can fall back on. If the mechanisms don't work, then the game is usually toast. If it wasn't an abstract, you could bathe the game in artwork and stick shovelfuls of plastic minis into the box and people would buy the game just for the look.

Pic by Geoman, "borrowed" off the Geek

Anyway, about Zaroc - this is a counterintuitive movement game where you're trying to get three of your pieces into the five-slot "bottom" row of the board. Your pieces are skewered on pylons which get shorter as you go "down" the board. The counterintuitive element is in the movement. You can only move your piece "downstream" if it occupies the very top spot on a skewer, and even then it can only move into the adjacent downstream pegs. Otherwise all your piece can do is move sideways; it cannot move backwards. The rule that threw me though was the one where you couldn't "undo" the last move your opponent made (each player gets two moves on his turn). Zaroc is a short game, and it's not really complicated, but it certainly requires a bit of thinking.

The next interesting series of stories Dale related was about the abstract game industry, in which his PIN International competes against the likes of Gigamic. I won't go into details so as not to get Dale into trouble, but suffice to say that there are interesting rivalries and relationships between the companies and the game designers even in the niche world of abstract games.

The next game Dale showed me was Creeper. Now this was a more straighforward game and I wrapped my head around it much faster than I did with Zaroc. The object of the game is connect two corners of the rectangular board with markers. The markers are placed with metal pins that slot in between the hexagonal board spaces. When the pin hops over an empty space, it leaves a marker of its color on that space. If there's a piece in the space the pin jumps, it flips the piece (a-la Othello and YINSH). If it moves along the edge of the space and over an opposing pin, the pin is captured.

Dale still smoked me twice in a row, but at least I didn't embarass myself too badly.

After a second game of Zaroc, Dale said he had time for one more game and would I like to see Fire and Ice? There was no way I'd pass up playing a new game, so he went to grab the game from his car.

Fire and Ice, as Dale tells it, is a game of symmetry. This explains the unusual board layout. Players take turns placing colored pins (red and blue, hence Fire and Ice) onto the board. The game starts with just a single red peg in the center slot of the center isle. The start (fire) player now has to move that peg, either to any open slot on the same isle, or to the same exact slot on a different isle. The catch? You place a peg of the opponent's color in the spot that your peg just vacated. The object of the game is to control three island in a row, or in a ring (see the pic of the board). You achieve control of an isle if you have three pegs in a row or in a ring on that isle.

The fun part is that the game is expandable in iterations. You can play on seven boards, thus expanding the game into controlling three isles in a row or ring on three boards in a row or ring to win. And then you can play on seven sets of seven boards if you really have a lot of time on your hands. Or you want to go insane.

Pic by Pergioco, "borrowed" off the Geek

Dale had to go after killing me at Fire and Ice. Before leaving, he generously gifted me with the copy of Creeper that we had played on. Thanks Dale! It was a nice afternoon of coffee and games, and I was very happy that I got a chance to meet another gamer in Asia.

Games around Asia and a Time-travelling Note

2006-01-19T21:21:00.000+08:00

I hadn't realized that I'd been away from the weblogs for over three weeks now. My last posts were from mid-January, after I began a series of three trips - to Bangkok, then to Hong Kong, then back to Hong Kong where I am right now.

I took up boardgames as a hobby in between "major" jobs - i.e. the jobs where I do a huge amount of stuff for a transnational corporation and travel a lot. This kind of travel has allowed me to "see" gaming around Asia and meet fellow gamers. These were my first trips to Bangkok and Hong Kong while being a boardgame hobbyist.

My last post promised the story of my afternoon with Dale Walton. It's coming, but don't mind the date. I've been writing the posts but haven't been completing and publishing them on time. So, I'm publishing these things with past timestamps. Not hugely important, but some of you may wonder. Anyway, on with the tales.

Just Happy to be Nominated

2006-01-17T09:14:00.000+08:00

I was shocked to see this blog nominated for the Boardgame Internet Awards. Whoever nominated me, thanks, I'm glad that someone out there thinks it's worth the time to read my random ramblings. That pretty much made my day. :)

I should be more controversial. That nominated post was generated by getting pi$$ed at some stuff on the Geek (which prompted the creation of this personal pulpit to begin with).

An Afternoon with Dale Walton (placeholder)

2006-01-17T07:10:00.000+08:00

I'm travelling right now, spending a few days in Bangkok, Thailand. As is my habit I dropped someone from Boardgamegeek a note asking if a meetup was possible. In this case, it was PIN International "technical advisor" Dale Walton who generously agreed to hook up for a few games. (The "technical advisor" bit is an inside joke which I might relate later.)

I'll get into our afternoon games when I get a moment. Have to rush off to the conference.

So, I played Caylus on BSW...

2006-01-09T23:20:00.000+08:00

I need to congratulate Ystari Games, the new French publishing house with two games to its name, for allowing online gaming places Brettspielwelt.de and Spielbyweb.com to put its red hot title, Caylus, on the web. I think the reasoning is sound - games of this weight are desired by a small niche market, and that's the niche that's got a good chance to trying the game on those sites.

I've had my misgivings about Caylus purely due to its parentage - a game from a first-time designer and a two-game publisher. After disappointing experiences with titles from small publishers and designers with much more experience (F2F and Friedemann Friese's Power Grid, and R&D and Richard Breese's Reef Encounter) I approached Caylus with apprehension. Coupled with massive Boardgamegeek hype, it was destined to be a let down.

So, I played Caylus on BSW.

It was about what I expected it to be based on its lineage and rules reading. My four main gripes about the game follow in reverse order of significance. (Yes, I'm a curmudgeon. ;-) )

1. Caylus is fiddly. The BSW interface emphasizes this by showing the coins and cubes flying around the screen. Combined with the workers, tiles and house-markers, there are a lot of moving parts each and every turn. If the game was better, though, I could live with this (see Puerto Rico).

2. Caylus is long and slow. Before the the only BSW game I've played that took longer than 60 minutes was a game of Intrige. (Oh, that was painful.) Even the longish Power Grid never took 90 minutes, which Caylus did. This was with everyone taking turns briskly, with little or no downtime. I can imagine how long it will take with just one slow, deliberate player, the need to administer the game (see #1), and the need to consult the rules periodically. Again, I can live with this - Die Macher is even longer but I don't feel the time fly by. I felt Caylus being to drag after 60 minutes... online.

3. Caylus is underdeveloped. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the clean lines of the Knizia and Kramer titles, and by the development that HiG and alea put into their games. The little stock segment of Reef Encounter bothers me as an extraneous mechanism, as does the player-changing and power plant-manipulating mechanisms of Power Grid. I get the same grating feeling from the Bridge/Stable mechanism of Caylus, as well as the ill-fitting majority subgame in the Castle and the favor track. Finally, the multiple currencies (masquerading as "goods") are an element that I rarely like in a game. This is perhaps the thing that most says "needs additional development" because playing the game to collect various currencies then buying stuff with those currency "sets" is tremendously unappealing to me. This, I find very hard to play through.

4. Caylus is processional, a game on rails. Just as Power Grid uses its clunky "stepping" mechanism to control the game's throttle, so does Caylus rely on the three castle segments and the carpenter-mason-lawyer-architect sequence to control game flow. A player cannot decide to start the game off building prestige buildings straightaway, oh no, because you need to build the mason, then the lawyer, which needs to create a residence before you can make that monument. Oh, and you need gold (aka most scarce currency #6) which isn't available until the mid to late game due to similar constraints. This I find hardest to play through as it gives that good ol' cliched "the game is playing me" feeling. So, do I build something that produces two food and one wood, or two wood and one food? Oooh. That's an interesting decision. Not.

I can see how people can like Caylus. Hell, I still don't get the love for Power Grid (still inexplicably #4 on BGG). Caylus just doesn't have the things that I look for in a good Euro.

The BGGs I Have Known

2006-01-03T23:32:00.000+08:00

Well, it was inevitable. On January 3rd, BoardGameGeek underwent a major facelift. As expected, the are those in support, those against, and those who are apathetic. Personally, I adapt to things that I cannot change, so I'll learn to use this version of the Geek as I have the versions in the past.

This is the first version of the Geek I ever saw. I had just played my first game of The Princes of Florence and thought that it created possibilities. However, at the time we had a D&D campaign going, and there was just no time for a new hobby.

I returned to the Geek in 2002 after playing Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, I was living in a foreign country at the time due to work and the main requirement for this hobby to catch on, a steady gaming group, was not available. So, again BGG was more of a curiosity, and my main hobby at the time was videogaming via PC and PS2. Interestingly, I was a sometime member of another online community over at GameFAQs, a site that I had seen evolve over several years. (It has since been purchased by CNET, but seemingly still retains its independence.) I rarely visit GameFAQs these days since I've practically given up videogaming (it was just a lifeline hobby in a lonely time) but when I peek in it's undergone radical changes itself.

I created my BGG account in November 2003. I had returned to my home country and happily regained my gaming group. Our regular gamemaster no longer had time to handle a campaign, and none of us had the time to invest in full-time Magic: the Gathering involvement, so we turned to Eurogaming as our regular hobby. I started to collect games. Hello, Reiner Knizia.

This was a minor redesign in 2004, when the Geek first switched to the two-column format that we see today. It was a very nice format, clean and user-friendly. The twelve months surrounding November 2004 were the peak of my Geek activity, when I wrote most of the content I've submitted to BGG to date, and when I met and began gaming with the online boardgaming buddies I've known the longest - Mary, Gerald and Chester. Joe Gola joined our little group shortly thereafter when we discovered 5P Durch die Wuste on Ludagora.

2005 marked the debut of the Tabbed Geek, which was just an evolution of the 2-column design. This is what most of the current regulars of the Geek should be familiar with. Despite the emegence of Boardgamespeak, my BGG activity declined as the number of users and site traffic increased. I started this blog early in the year when the old BGG Blogs were removed as a site feature. It was a respite from the noise of the Geek, and provided much greater freedom and control. My group of online gaming buddies expanded, and later in the year our invite-only extended online gaming "group" (I use the term loosely here), BGGF, was created. I had the pleasure of meeting and gaming online with Jim, Jasen, Jason, Gerald the Elder, Kane, Chad, Seth and I'm sure I forgot a couple of others!

Which brings us to today.

I'm not quite sure I like it, but that was more or less how many people feel about familiar things that change. It's like tossing your old, comfy but worn-out shoes for stiff shiny new ones. They more advanced, more functional, and shinier, but they're less comfortable and you have to break them in for a while. I use BGG a lot less now than I did in 2003-04 when the hobby was new and much research had to be done on the back catalogs and there were a lot of cool Geeks to meet.

Now, with regular online gaming buddies, a nice selection of online gaming venues (BSW, SBW, BaJ, Ludagora) a mostly-complete collection of all the games I care to own, and a wealth of content being cleanly fed to me by Bloglines, there is much less need to be on the Geek. That is why I guess the redesign bothers me much less than it does other users. I still plan to send in my $25 eventually, as well as submit more content, just for old times' sake.

Thanks to Aldie and Derk, and best of luck to Scott in his new career as Overlord of Boardgamegeek.

2005: My Year of Boardgaming, Part II - The Best Games

2006-01-01T08:06:00.000+08:00

In a previous post I mentioned that we have a very tight rotation of games. Most of the games that "click" with us will get a lot of repeat play, and those that fail to make a good first and/or second impression likely will not see the table again in a good long while. In 2005, I acquired many games based on their chances of breaking into the rotation. I whiffed with some (Through the Desert, Santiago, Mexica, La Citta - I like them all, but my group likes them less) but others outperformed expectations.

Here are our Top 10 Games Played in 2005. All these games, save for #3, made it to our dime list.

10. Euphrat & Tigris

Much as I'd like to play this a lot more, some of our group just get paralyzed on E&T. I realyl have no idea why. In specific combinations of players, we can polish off a 4P game in an 75 minutes, which is pretty good.

9. Samurai

Got play despite its arrival pretty late in the year. Speed and elegance. Games are over in under an hour. Will continue to see time in 2006.

8. Taj Mahal
7. Modern Art
6. RA

Three rotation staples. Taj gets less play than the two auction games due to length, but overall I don't see them leaving the list anytime soon. RA was finally reprinted so I have an uberplay edition to supplement the lone alea edition we have for play.

5. Clash of the Gladiators

Purchased on a whim, due to the Knizia/HiG pairing and the theme. Turned out to be a huge hit, and hit the dime list in under two months. I think the heavy play will want eventually, but it should be a rotation staple for years to come.

4. Traumfabrik

T-fab surpassed my lofty expectations, becoming more popular than RA and Modern Art just because of the Hollywood theme. It's also surprised me with its mechanisms - I wasn't expecting much due to comments read, but it's a lot more intricate than I was led to believe. It's at least as interesting as RA and Modern Art. I consider this US$70 well spent, as the 2006 reprint does not look promising. This was my best purchase of the year.

3. Die Macher

Follow the story here and here. We have played Die Macher every game night since it got here, which is 5 times. Not unexpected, despite Macher's 4 hour playing time. I've managed to come in last or next to last every single time, which is a sign of a very good game. ;)

2. Puerto Rico

If I did this list for the past three years, PR would have come up as #1 every year. It slips to #2 this year, which is still nothing to sneeze at. I chafe at the 5P game that the rest of the group loves, but still would play 4P in a heart beat. This must have contributed to the rise of our new #1.

1. The Princes of Florence

I finally got some of the people in my gaming group to say that Princes is better than Puerto Rico. Well, of course it is, a lot of people just haven't realized it yet. We usually play with 5 or 4, and Princes plays with 5 in half the time (or less) than our 5P PR games last. So it gets the nod, having even served as "the appetizer" for our last Die Macher game. Isn't that amazing? Princes is still the best Euro ever made.

(No, it's not lost on me that 7 of our top 10 are Knizia games. However, none of the top 3 are by Reiner. Interesting. Just missing the list were Amun-Re, Goa, Power Grid and Java.)

2005: My Year of Boardgaming, Part I - The Worst Games

2005-12-31T22:32:00.000+08:00

Happy New Year!

2005 was a pretty good year for boardgaming in our circles. For the first time in a while we did not have a regular RPG running, and we managed to meet on most Saturdays for a evening. We averaged 2-3 boardgames a night, spread out around dinner and a lot of conversation. We can only hope 2006 is just as good, if not better, gaming-wise.

So, some lists. Let's start with the BAD.

The Shit List: 5 Games played in 2005 that I'd rather not play again

5. Reef Encounter

This game would also win my "Greatest Disappointment" award, if I gave one out. After anticipation at getting it due to all the good comments from my online buddies, I got to try it on spielbyweb. Ick. Even online, a format which the game is well-suited to, the clunkiness and patchwork mechanisms oozed through my monitor. I tried it once face to face (and hey, the Z-Man edition is pretty) and it was far worse. No rhythm. No soul. No more plays for you RE.

4. Niagara

Another example of a game with no soul. Niagara couldn't hold my attention for five turns, much less a whole game. I can't pinpoint anything particularly wrong with it, but I can't see anything right with it at all. There's just nothing fun or interesting about Niagara. Whiff, the SdJ strikes out with me again.

3. Roborally

This was... painful. Richard Garfield's "other game" got the reprint treatment from Hasborg in 2005, but it's one reprint that I wouldn't have minded getting passed over. Roborally is a chaotic mess, and one that I personally consider unplayable due to this. If you have no control, what's the point?

2. Shadows over Camelot

Proof that "gimmick games" don't work. SoC's gimmick is the mechanism stolen from Werewolf - having a secret traitor working against the team. How is this supposed to work if all the other players work together? The game depends on conflict between the players. In a group agreeable to designating a leader (who makes final decisions and breaks impasses) and everyone else cooperating completely, the traitor does not have a chance. In the end, it's all in the luck of the cards.

1. Wallenstein

I don't get it. I just don't. The silly cube tower is the absolute worst resolution mechanism I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. There is no way to calculate odds, and it doesn't make any sense! You have armies going into the tower, and some getting stuck there, and those stuck armies can fight in another battle on the other side of the map? What the hell? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Add that to the tepid area-majority mechanism of Wally and you get the worst game to ever race the BGG Top 10. It's even worse than Settlers, which is saying a LOT.

Merry Christmas

2005-12-24T16:20:00.000+08:00

Just wanted to wish anyone reading this blog a very Merry Christmas. May God bless you all and your families, and keep you safe through the holidays and into the new year.

No gaming for me until Monday, the 26th. The gaming group is planning to meet up in the afternoon for another game of Die Macher. And here I am with the notes from last game yet to be put into session report form. Oh well. Can't think of many better ways to spend half of a day off of work than to dive once again into the German electoral process.

Also, no games for me this Christmas. Receiving Die Macher, Keythedral, Capitol and Flandern on loan is gift enough. I might get to score a couple in Hong Kong in January from Alan Kwan's store. Hopefully, they'll have something I want (Merchants of Amsterdam?).

Vasel & Santa

2005-12-18T23:52:00.000+08:00

For all the crap on the www that gets tossed Tom Vasel's way for whatever reason, this is one of the most interesting things to happen on boardgamegeek that I've seen:

Tom's Secret Santa Thread

It's amazing for three things:

1) Over 200 people signed up to send a game, blind, to someone else regardless of geographical location. This all happened in a few hours.

2) There is no guarantee that you're going to get a game back. Tom worked eight hours to match people up, and he still missed some. People don't seem to really care.

3) People are having fun just scheming to send gifts out, and then some.

Tales of the Secret Santas

So, by posting a single thread on the Geek, Tom created sales for 200+ games and an equivalent amount of postage and delivery out of nothing. And people are happy to send out games because they know that the recepient is a boardgame geek like themselves. I think that even if you don't get a game back (possible) the giddiness of sending out something that brings joy is worth the $50 or so.

If I didn't live on the other side of the world, I'd be doing the same thing. Maybe next year.

Good show Mr. Vasel, good show.

Thoughts on Die Macher

2005-12-11T23:30:00.000+08:00

Yes, we played Die Macher on Saturday night despite my zonked out state from partying the previous evening (and into the morning of Saturday). Session report to follow, including some bits about "double dong". In the meantime, thoughts on the game:

TRUE: Die Macher is takes a bit of time to play. It's four simultaneous elections for four turns, then 3, 2 and 1 for the last three turns. Three hours is a good time once everyone is familiar with the gameflow, timing and mechanisms.

FALSE: Die Macher is a heavy game. It isn't. The rules are pretty simple, and it flows well. Once the relationships of the mechanisms are clear, you know what you are able to do. It's the choices you make with your resources that put the tension and enjoyment into the game.

TRUE: There isn't anything like Die Macher out there. With the aggressive streamlining that game developers put into games, the direction has turned away from epic-scale 3-4 hour games in the Euro arena. Reiner tries to keep his games around an hour long, for example. So it's likely that Macher will stand alone - a Eurogame that's truly epic in its feel, with unusual length, but retaining the elegance of a well-developed, polished product. Contrast with the longer indy games of today (say, the Splotter stuff, or Caylus to a lesser extent) which may be epic in playing time but lack the elegance and polish of Macher.

FALSE: There's too much luck in the opinion polls. This is the only knock I've heard about Macher's mechanisms. The poll has a bit of luck in it, sure. Too much to overcome? No. The poll attacks your trend at a single point in time. If you refuse to allow yourself to be vulnerable to it in an important region, you can covert party meetings way before the region becomes current. Or you can bid enough to win the poll. Or you can control the media and immunize yourself. Getting whacked early in the game hurts a bit, but there's an entire game to catch up. With coalitions, no one is ever completely out of it.

TRUE: This is the Grand Shit Poohbah of German Gamers' Games. People who like Puerto Rico, The Princes of Florence, Goa and Amun-Re should seek out Die Macher. It's a 9 by my BGG ratings right now. With more play, it should ascend to a 10 eventually.

FALSE: The won't be an English edition because Die Macher cannot be rethemed and I can't imagine a game this heavy, themed on the German electoral system, generating enough sales to justify and English edition. If you're looking for a good example of theme-to-mechanisms integration, Macher has it in spades. It took a while to understand the "overhang" seats, but now I can explain it and talking about the theme as you teach the game makes it so much easier to digest. So, those who are inclined to own and play it will seek out the German 2nd edition, which isn't all that hard to find in Germany as I understand it. I know I'll continue to do so.

The Curse of Quality vs Quantity

2005-12-07T22:52:00.000+08:00

By all indications I possess a very reasonable (you might even say pitiful) game collection. I have 67 games listed in my collection on Boardgamegeek. Of those games, I would describe just 40 as "active" - i.e., a possibility on game night. This list includes all of my Eurogames, includinig my two Cheapass games (Falling and the set of Brawl decks), my lone AH game (Republic of Rome) and exactly one CCG (Magic: the Gathering). To these 40, I add nine games I have on loan: Die Macher, Flandern 1302, Capitol, Keythedral, Evo, Vinci, Carcassonne, The Settlers of Catan and Cosmic Encounter.

Wait. Let's take out the last three because they don't have an ice cube's chance in hell of seeing the game table, because we don't like them at all.

So, I have 46 games available for game night. Most of these games play in two hours - the usual meaty Euro like Princes of Florence, Torres, Puerto Rico, Taj Mahal or Amun-Re. Some run longer, like Java, Louis XIV and La Citta, or shorter, like Modern Art, Royal Turf, Samurai and RA. I have precious few fillers - King's Breakfast, High Society, Falling and Brawl. And I have a handful of "event games" - those games that need to be scheduled and take a whole night - Die Macher, Republic of Rome and Magic: the Gathering (usually a booster draft).

Now, my game group likes playing games repeatedly. If I did a "5 and 10 list" we would have several of the meatier games on there, and almost none of the lights. In a regular game night, lasting from around 7pm to 3am, we would play 2 to 3 games. If we play 3/4ths of the Saturdays in a year, that would be 39 game nights. Let's say 40. So that's 120 games, max. Let's say we play the "event games" at least 20 nights. (Likely 12 x Macher, 6 x MtG, 2 x RoR.) That leaves 100 games.

There's no way we don't play Puerto Rico, Princes of Florence, Euphrat & Tigris, Modern Art, Traumfabrik, Clash of the Gladiators, RA and Taj Mahal less than 12 times in a year. No way. Those are our group 9s and 10s. They are asked for and get played. That's 96 games estimated. That leaves 4 plays for everything else. Now let's say that we get 6 "extra game nights" in a year, due to holidays or whatever. That yields an additional 18 games, for available time for 22 games.

22. Just 22 plays to share among such amazing games as Torres, Amun-Re, Pueblo, In the Shadow of the Emperor, Maharaja, Samurai, Goa, Java, Mexica, Through the Desert, Colossal Arena, and Power Grid. And this is assuming we get plays of fillers like Bluff, High Society and -ick- Bohnanza (when there are nongamers around) "between the cracks".

My friends also have games. They bring and ask to play other very nice games like Traders of Genoa, Ingenious, Lord of the Rings, Acquire.... ok, I won't play Acquire, but the math is clear.

I've hit the limit. I'm starting to accumulate unplayed games. Magna Grecia, a game I'm dying to play, has languished unplayed for three months. The borrowed Capitol and Keythedral are still in shrink. I'm planning to purchase Beowulf and Clippers from the FLGS, but I hesitate. I HAVE GAMES UNPLAYED. Shit.

That means I've hit critical mass with my very good to great games. Which sort of makes sense because my BGG Wishlist is very thin now - just waiting for Knizia classics to be reprinted (Medici and Stephenson's Rocket). My current game collection can keep my gaming group sustained for a full year without getting stale. That means I can be very selective in what I purchase and add to the shelf.

In a way, it feels good to realize this. This tells me that:

1) I'm no collector. I don't care if I don't have Game X and Y and Z because if we won't play them, they're not worth having.

2) I can wait on games. I don't need to get Caylus now because it won't see any table time if Magna Grecia is any indication. Give everyone else time to try it out and wait for the hype to die down so a good reading can be taken. Most of the games we enjoy are the older ones that I had the luxury of researching on the Geek. I have no total dogs (though For Sale was a very close call) and just a few mild disappointments - games that turned out to be just good, not great (Power Grid, Santiago and La Citta).

3) A game my group *really* likes is one that breaks into "the rotation" of titles that see the table a dozen times (at least) in a year. Everything else is "just ok" and will get 3 to 4 plays in a year. Not bad, but certainly not very good.

4) I'm very close to "completing" my Eurogame library. I have almost every title I want. There's the small matter of a few hard to finds (Macher and 1830 primarily) and a few smaller games (Intrige, to be Englishized by Mayfair in 2006 so that's solved). I want to have some of the Gipf series (YINSH, TAMSK, PUNCT) but those will be likely shelf-sitters like LOTR:TC since we almost ever have just 2P.

5) There are such things as "classics" in Eurogames. E&T, PR, PoF, RA, Torres, Modern Art, Macher, Taj Mahal, Traumfabrik, Clash of the Gladiators - none of these games were made in the last 3 years. So, faced with a choice between buying an older game vs a newer game, always go with the older game (likely a reprint). The new stuff hasn't really been up to the high standards of the old stuff.

6) It takes a lot to impress me now. I'm jaded, just like Solko and Siggins. It's a good thing because it reins in my wallet. It's not a good thing because I'm likely close to seeking out a new hobby because, perhaps, I now know them too well.

It Can Only be Magic

2005-12-06T23:50:00.000+08:00

(This was from a game night way back in October - it just took this much time to finish writing up the thing. - Rick)

Saturday night gaming at The Lily Pad rolled around, and my first words through the door were "let's draft!"

This could mean two things - either we were going to get our NBA fantasy basketball league draft going, or we were going to follow through on plans made the previous week.

The Frog pulled four chairs up to the table, and grabbed shiny packs from a box. Erik, Annie and I took the other three spots, and ripped open brand new Ravnica boosters.

I hadn't played Magic: the Gathering in years except for a duel or two here and there with other peoples' constructed decks. Erik and The Frog still played Type I on occasion, just to put their power stuff through the paces. The Frog got the bug a couple of weeks ago and sprang for a box of the newest MtG expansion.

The smell of opening a new booster brought back great memories when MtG was THE game for all of us. The smell was a little off though, sort of muted. The Frog told me that they had shifted production from Carta Mundi, long the printer for MtG, back to North America. I guess the strong Euro had something to do with that.

I pulled out the cards and flipped through the art. I'd been away a long time - no more Richard Kane Ferguson, no more Drew Tucker, no more Phil Foglio, no more Brian Snoddy. The art was still very good though, always a hallmark of MtG. A lot of the abilities were new, but true to form the ability text was usually on the card.

With that in mind, we began to draft.

Booster draft remains my favorite limited format, over Sealed Deck (unmitigated luck) and Rochester Draft (slow). Allowing for a bit of time to read the cards, we accelerated the pace. Ravnika is a set that explored cards with two colors. It used to be that these were Legends; not anymore, though many of the two-color cards are pretty nice.

Since I was definitely rusty, I defaulted to a removal/creature strategy, which meant either red or black for the removal and green or white for the critters. I didn't want to fiddle with tricky blue magic. Luckily, I got to draft some red cards, and some white cards. There wasn't a lot of good red removal early, but I took a couple of decent ones - Fiery Conclusion, which is a Goblin Grenade for all critters, and Galvanic Arc, an enchantment that fired a Lightning Bolt when you brought it into play. It would turn out that the first card I took overall, a red/white Legend named Agrus Kos, would be the strongest creature in my deck.

The second pack gifted me with the uncommon Lightning Helix, a combination Lightning Bolt and Healing Salve. This round also provided most of my useful creatures in both colors, including more of the pretty strong red/white Boros Legion.

The last pack provided two more big cards. One was very cool, but fairly unplayable - the Boros Archangel, Razia. The other was more important: the special land Sunhome, which gave a creature the double strike ability. It cost 4 mana to activate, but in a limited environment that usually wasn't prohivitive. (Unlike, say, Razia's 8 casting cost).

Construction time. I put in all of the red/white creatures I drafted, and a few choice reds and whites (the whites mostly for their flying ability). I also decided to play with the Crown of Convergence even if I had no green mana sources in my deck - even if I couldn't cycle my deck, the +1/+1 the Crown would grant would occur more than usual due to my two-color creatures. As usual, I toed the line with mana sources, going with a pretty low 14/40. My deck's mana curve was reasonable, with a couple of goblins and assorted smaller creatures to back up the 4s and 5s. If I manascrewed once in a 3-duel match, it would be ok.

We paired off.

Round 1: Rick vs. Annie

Annie was running a black and blue bruise deck that had a fair number of flyers and some nasty black creatures. This match was all about the Boros Trumpeteer, one of my red/white critters. It had the ability to prevent a creature from attacking or blocking, which helped immensely as Annie's deck threw out creatures fairly quickly. Argrus Kos appeared in both duels, and the match was mine. Rick 2-0.

Round 2: Rick vs Erik

Erik had a fun critter-filled green/white deck that had token creatures as a side-theme. I saw this firsthand in the initial duel as I got steamrolled due to slow mana development even after one mulligan. In the second duel, Erik got going quickly again but I had some removal. The Galvanic Arc and the Lightning Helix appeared, and my creatures held out long enough for Sunhome to appear. With enough mana to operate it, and with multiple creatures enhanced by the Crown of Convergence and Agrus Kos, even Erik's fat green creatures could not hold out for long. The third duel saw Sunhome appear again, and featured Razia for the first (and only) time that evening. Rick 4-1 duels, 2-0 matches

Round 3: Rick vs The Frog

Frog had lost his matches with Erik and Annie, so he wasn't feeling to confident about his black/green deck. All I recall here is that it went fairly quick. My deck's mana curve kicked in nicely and I won both duels without the help of Agrus Kos or Razia.

Postmortem:

My red/white deck was very powerful. In a booster draft, if you can get away with drafting a lot of the Boros cards, do so (though no one should let you). Sunhome in particular was impressive, as double strike combines with first strike to steamroll. The direct damage is expensive (Helix) and unconventional (Conclusion) or both (Galvanic Arc) but in general it is still potent.

Apparently, with a Grand Prix in December we will get to draft again. I dump boardgames in a heartbeat to do that. Even a game of Princes of Florence. :)

Game night - 3 December 2005

2005-12-05T13:35:00.000+08:00

I had been thinking and dreaming of Die Macher all week. I was raring to give it another go. However, real life laid a chop block on me, and I had to turn in three straight 17 hour days at work due to expected snafus. Ironically, my successful entrepreneur buddy and game night host The Frog also had a hellish week due to the holiday rush. We were both trashed come Saturday night, so when Nix arrived just recovering from being downed by an allergy, we decided that Macher wasn't something that we were going to do justice to.

So we picked something lighter.

In the Shadow of the Emperor (4P)

Yet another influence game. Quick rules review and we were off. Nix got to be Emeperor, and spent the next three turns defending his seat by snarfing up as many of the Emperor election cards as possible. Church influence was strong as he held Trier, and the empire cities gave him leverage elsewhere. G was concentrating on hanging on to Mainz and buying a VP each turn (which she got to do 4 times). Of course, the requisite game of musical chairs was ongoing. The Frog got caught without a chair for a couple of turns, which weakened his standing. We finally broke Nix's strangehold by voting The Frog as emperor on the fourth turn, but serious damage had already been done. Nix finished the game by building out, I decided to take a couple more electorates, and the endgame was close.

Nix: 20
Rick: 20
G: 18
The Frog: 14

In the Shadow of the Emperor is one of the more interesting area majority games, mainly due to the aging of the aristocrats and the entertaining gender selection of descendants. We don't feel that the emperor is especially overpowered, since there is not insignificant opportunity costs associated with hanging on to power. It may be musical chairs, but the ride is pretty damned good.

Okay, so that wasn't as light as was needed. Deej had arrived in the interim, and despite it being past midnight we wanted to get a 5P game in, so we broke out Traumfabrik (still with the modern tiles pasted on).

Dream Factory (5P)

I was running on fumes at this point. Still, I got to complete the first general entertainment film: Raiders of the Lost Ark with Nicole Kidman and Martin Scorsese at the helm ($180M at the box office). I thought I was in pretty good shape for some awards. Of course, since I was suffering from sleep deprivation I was unable to keep tabs on anyone else. That's pretty much fatal in T-Fab. The Frog, a master of this game even when half-asleep, not only completed the first comedy in the first season ($110M Galaxy Quest with Morgan Freeman), he also trumped me with an even better general entertainment offering - Gladiator with Russell Crowe, helmed by Peter Jackson, raking in $210M at the box office. He also completed a $140M drama - Saving Private Ryan with Halle Berry, Drew Barrymore and Harrison Ford. At the end of the game, The Frog's Dreamworks studio swept ALL the major awards. All of them. Except for the "it's so bad it's good" film which Nix took.

It's been a long time since I was able to complete four films in T-Fab. Despite that, my Paramount studios only grossed $580M, a distant second compared to the $1.15 billion that Dreamworks raked in.

'Twas a massacre.

Damn, I thought that this was good enough to challenge for the win.

Oh well. We called it a night while I was still capable of driving home. Next week, we plan to get Die Macher back to the table. My fingers will be crossed.

Game Night - 26 November 2005 - The First Campaign

2005-11-29T20:07:00.000+08:00

So Die Macher was on the table, set up and ready to go. Chester had thoughtfully shipped everything he had in terms of documentation with the game. I had also printed off every player aid the Geek had available. In the end I chose to use the colored "note blocks" Mark Coomey had recently uploaded, and Mark Blanco's phase-by-phase guide. I gave my usual theme overview, and this led into a side discussion on the recent German election which resulted in Merkel becoming Chancellor. We also had a discussion on the theoretical relationships of the game mechanisms, and what the paths to victory looked like. There was some discussion on the seven issues, and what would be relevant today as opposed to 1985. And there was a discussion on what other stuff Karl-Heinz Schmiel had done (the only one I really remember was Extrablatt, a game I also want to eventually play and own). This all took around an hour.

Just to prove we're a tight gaming group, we all invested a significant part of our setup resources into the third region, which had 80 seats up for grabs. (In hindsight I think it was a mistake.) The first couple of regions went fairly slow as we got a feel for the mechanisms, especially the regional opinion manipulation and the Tauschpool. Business picked up, and I decided to powder out of the running for winning the 80 seats, and focus on winning a couple of the smaller (20+ seat) regions. I ended up winning the second region, and in a winning coalition for the 80 seats anyway. Unfortunately I had not place a media presence there so I missed out on the points.

Initial thoughts on the opinion polls - strong, but you can protect yourself either by incrementally buying votes beforehand if you think your trend in a region is vulnerable. Or you can control the media, making you immune. Or you can win the poll yourself. Either way, it didn't bother me all that much.

We were slow to pick up on how useful holding an absolute majority in a region was - this was a trick of timing and resource investment. If no one else invests in a region when you do (usually way in advance) then you can make a change a turn, and when that region becomes current you'll have decent synergy with the regional opinion. The seats may not be great, but placing media and opinion on the national board is a reward in and of itself. My national membership kept ticking up because I tried to keep matching the big board, and altering what regions I controlled to match as well.

The whole deal took six hours, including frequent side discussions on game mechanisms, paths to victory and game design analysis. I won, mostly because I took three little (20+ seat) regions that the other folks didn't invest much in, while keeping a finger in the bigger pies (80, 60, 50). I enjoyed myself immensely.

Favorable comparisons from my gaming buddies to PR and PoF, from both a mechanism and stylistic standpoint. I have a better one. Macher's nature and rhythm, among all the games I've played, is closest to Kramer & Kiesling's Maharaja. You're planning and executing 4 elections simultaneously, and trying your darndest to insulate yourself from the inherent chaos of the game system while keeping your timing and resources as straight as possible. You're trying to make sure that you get close to your desired result in every region that matters, whether or not someone whacks you with a bad opinion poll when that region becomes current. (Or outright insulating yourself with media control, which is expensive to set up, but even more expensive for your opponents to undo when they choose to.) I would equate this to being able to do what you plan to do in Maharaja regardless of what hijinks people pull with your character card and the governor track. What Macher has over Maharaja is many, many more paths to victory at the cost of a significantly higher fiddle factor. However, given the theme the whole thing works, and in a surprisingly elegant manner despite all the moving parts.

In short, I (or should I say we) like it a lot, and I can see us polishing off a full game in 3-4 hours once we have the whole thing down and can take turns rapidly a-la Goa at full throttle. Clearly an "only game of the night" situation, but that was how it was when we first started playing 5P PR years ago (we were averaging 3.5 hours a game early on, and we still take 2.5 hours today).

The only trouble we had rules-wise was with the exchange pool. Playing it with Schmeil's "flood the pool" rules was rather counterintuitive, but in the end I guess it follows theme-wise since issues do get more muddled as elections get close to climax.

The Deal, and the Pilgrimage of Die Macher

2005-11-28T22:09:00.000+08:00

To start this story at the beginning, Chester Ogborn enjoys Die Macher. Loves it. It's one of his favorite games. Ches is one of my little "original" online (board)gaming group, The Four Friends, along with Mary Weisbeck and Gerald Cameron. We "met" on boardgamegeek.com - Mary wanted to learn Euphrat & Tigris so I set up a 4P game and invited Chester and Gerald to play. We've been playing online ever since.

Anyway, it's common knowledge to these friends of mine that Die Macher is my "holy grail" of boardgames. So one day, Ches says "hey wouldn't it be cool if I shipped you my copy of Die Macher and you could play it and write stuff about it?" I say "that would be cool, but you would be nuts to propose such a thing since I live on the other side of the world and all sorts of bad things could happen to the game enroute, not to mention the cost." Ches says "I don't mind taking a risk on it, it's only a game, and I'm happy to do it." I say "I appreciate the thought Chester but I'm a stranger living far away and Macher is a rare and expensive game so it's a really bad idea so I won't hear of it." "Ok," he says, "but I'm not going to get to play Macher in a while as I won't have time due to work. It's really something I'm happy to do."

I don't quite recall what happened, but I eventually agreed to the pilgrimage of Chester's Die Macher over to Manila. It cost him $25 to ship it, it took over 8 weeks to get here, and it cost me $25 to claim it from customs after it arrived. But arrive it did.

I'm glad to report that the game arrived in great shape. The box has a few dings along the edges, but nothing noticeable unless under close scrutiny. I kept the box for the game's return trip, though I'm secretly hoping that somehow, someway I'd get to hand the game back to Chester in person and get to play it with him.

Two people have asked Ches what possessed him to do such a thing as send a valuable, highly sought-after boardgame to a person he's never met halfway around the world. This was the answer: "It just seemed like the kind of thing I wish would happen more in this world."

So. My end of the deal is to write a review and a couple of session reports. Ambitiously, I'd like to attempt a strategy guide at some point, though that would seem to be on the order of my three-quarters finished guides to Euphrat & Tigris and Torres - daunting, and the games hold me in awe so much that I battle with myself to consider anything written in depth about them as "done."

Anyway, I took Macher straightaway to game night on the same day I collected it from the post office, stopping at a Starbucks to refresh the rules over an Extra Hot Peppermint Mocha. When I got to game night, I laid out the following games for the people present to select (there were only three other players that evening, fortuitously). They had not played any of the games I laid out - I had played 2 of the 4.

The Frog, our host, immediately identified Macher as "that German election game" I had been mentioning to be on a slow boat, sent to us from Missouri by a doctor who I had never met. Yeah, they think Ches is slightly mad too. But poor Magna Grecia once again got passed over, and Macher was the game of the night. Our only regret was that we only started playing after dinner, as I knew it was going to take time to get going.

(Next: The First Game)

It's Finally Here

2005-11-25T22:59:00.000+08:00

I got the notice from the post office this morning. I'll should be able to post something on it tomorrow. Question is, should I bring it to game night?

Thanks, Ches.

Finally Some Actual Gaming Content

2005-11-12T20:26:00.000+08:00

I realize that I haven't really talked about the games we've been playing. Blame it all on Magic: the Gathering. That night I picked up a sealed booster after years off, I went and started a really LONG post on the little 4-person pod booster draft we did with the new Ravnika set... and I never completed it. I promise to get that up soon, along with some catchup.

A quick summary of the past four gaming nights has a pretty interesting pattern - every night we've had Traumfabrik and Clash of the Gladiators on the table, and we've also had The Princes of Florence out on every night except the night we played La Citta instead. And last weekend, we found out that Louis XIV is the most difficult Eurogame we've tackled so far. Yes, it's way tougher than Puerto Rico, Power Grid, El Grande, Goa, PoF, La Citta and anything else that's hit the table. Anyway, more on the mentioned games in future installements. For now, all I'll say is that Traumfabrik was worth every dime of the US$70 I paid, and I have no idea why no one is talking about Clash of the Gladiators and why its rating on the Geek is a mindboggling 5.80, lower than such classics as Chez Geek, War & Sheep and The Powerpuff Girls - Saving the World Before Bedtime. Shades of Falling (rated even lower at 5.42) I think, being a misunderstood game, but also carrying the expectations of Knizia+Hans im Gluck. (For a similar situation, I think Tower of Babel is also getting a raw deal so I'm going to hazard getting that game, eventually. Trust in Reiner and Bernd.)

I just planed back into Manila from Singapore, and I had a blast two nights ago playing a couple of games with "my Singapore gaming group." Wow, that's a strange one to hear. Siow Hwee, Janey and Wilson graciously invited me for dinner and games. We were one short as Wilson's wife Shih Huei was home sick.

Siow Hwee did me a huge favor by picking up the uberplay RA before it was bought out at the FLGS. Thanks man! He also brought a game I've been wanting to play again - Intrige, the Amigo card version. Janey and Wilson, Siow Hwee's wife and good friend, had never played. After getting confirmations from them that they were aware of what kind of game Intrige was, I launched into the rules explanation, and we were off.

Predictably, Siow Hwee casts the first stone and screws me on the opening deal of the game. He got nothing out of me from then on. Wilson did the same thing to me, but flipped back when Siow Hwee screwed him. Janey was my early ally, trading $10k jobs, but soon enough I was abandoned and it was Wilson and I who were in cahoots. In the end, no one was spared, and a huge final round by Siow Hwee looked like it won him the game - or so we thought.

Janey - $103
Siow Hwee - $93
Wilson - $92
Rick - $85

The next game was KuhHandel. First time for Wilson. I used the quickstart with each player having a chicken, goose, cat and goat to begin the game, and we were auctioning off two animals at a time. There's just no way to narrate the game, other than to say that I completed a set of cows and just needed the horses, but Janey beat me for the equines and that sent me from potential winner to next to last place.

The evening was great fun and I always look forward to hooking up with this group. Just to make things that much more astounding, Wilson lent me three games - Flandern 1302, Capitol and Keythedral. Thanks Wilson! I'll take care of them and report on how they fared over here.

The Second Coming?

2005-10-26T08:28:00.000+08:00

Can Caylus become the #1 game on Boardgamegeek?

These are the discussions that certify people as boardgamegeeks.

So, speculation. Why is Puerto Rico the #1 game on BGG? Why was The Princes of Florence the #1 game before that? And why do people think Caylus is The Second Coming?

First off, Caylus has not been released in North America by Rio Grande Games. It looks like it will appear sometime in November, barring delays. The copies people have access to now came from Spiel 05 in Essen. Therefore, the pool of people with access to the game is very limited. It has 88 BGG ratings.

To challenge for #1 over the long haul (i.e., when it gets over 2,000 ratings) Caylus will have to appeal to a wide cross-section of gamers. This is the interesting quality of Puerto Rico, which has the second-most ratings in the BGG database with 4,636 (only The Settlers of Catan, currently ranked 20th, has more at 5,357). That's a huge number of ratings. From personal experience, PR can be enjoyed by everyone from casual players to those looking for a deep strategic game. Interestingly, wargamers seem to not be fond of PR since it's a system game - i.e., it filters interaction through a system and has no direct interaction. It's quite unusual for a game to be useful as both a gateway game and a serious, heavy Euro.

Another quality of PR is that it plays reasonably well throughout its player scale, 2-5 players with the alea 2P variant. This flexibility means that more groups are able to fit it into their gaming plans, and thus it sees a lot of table time. Along these lines, there is a nice scale to PR's speed. It can be played as a 20-minute 2P filler, a 45-minute 3P sprint, or as a 120-minute 5P defensive struggle.

The Princes of Florence shares many of the above characteristics. It's also playable as both a gaetway game and a deep thinker, it scales nicely from 3 to 5 players, and it can be a 60-minute 3P game or a 105-minute 5P game.

Both PR and PoF are also available online at Brettspielwelt, which helps.

Secondhand information indicates that Caylus plays a bit longer than PR or PoF, and its ability to scale from 2-5 players and its acceptability as a gateway game is still unknown. Time will tell. Fearless forecast: Caylus gets into the Top 10 briefly, then drops back down into the 15 to 30 range. Could be wrong, since I still don't understand why Power Grid is rated so highly. Oh well, that's what Geekbuddies are for.

The Gamewire ceases transmission

2005-10-21T12:05:00.000+08:00

In an announcement that stunned the boardgaming hobby, Rick Thornquist announced that The Gamewire (or at least The Gamewire by Rick Thornquist) is no more.

Adam Hill, the proprietor of Gamefest, has indicated that The Gamewire will continue, but without the full-time work that Rick put into it, the continued quality of the content is in doubt.

More than ever, gamers looking for news and information on boardgames will need to turn to Boardgamegeek, which is becoming increasingly difficult to use effectively as the influx of members continues.

I join the hobby in thanking Rick for his efforts over the past years in bringing us the latest and hottest news and information on the games we love. The Gamewire by Rick Thornquist will be missed.

Im Schatten Essen

2005-10-17T10:49:00.000+08:00

The whole boardgaming hobby stopped over the last weekend, with most of "those in the know" monitoring the web for information filtering out of Essen, Germany. Spiel '05 is of course the largest boardgaming event in the world, and many new titles are debuting there. Some of those able to make the trip have been generously providing updates. As usual, Rick Thornquist is on the forefront. The Gamewire has Rick's impressions of the hot releases, and of the event itself. Pierce Ostrander is maintaining a set of links to other blogs and news sources over at Boardgamegeek.

So far the games that I had my eye on appear to be in the "ok not great" class, which is about what I was expecting. This continues the trend of 2005 being a weak year for games, with no clear blockbusters or must-haves from major industry names and companies, and a lot of interesting niche from smaller publishers.

It's interesting to hear that the E&T cardgame is in fact E&T in cardgame form. While I think I'll eventually pick this up, there is not real motivation to play a card game when you can play the real thing. Hazienda is a more likely early purchase, but since it falls into the "same-y Euro" category (which I'm not opposed to, but the theme here isn't one that sets the world on fire), it's not a priority over adding reprints of proven older titles like RA, Stephensons Rocket, Medici and maybe Reef Encounter to your collection. Mesopotamia seems interesting, but since its designer is more known for fluff (Wrede) than for strategic games, and it's coming from a publisher with an unproven track record (Phalanx), it's definitely a wait-and-see situation.

Unexpected Gaming, and an Unexpected Game

2005-10-12T01:05:00.000+08:00

8 October 2005

The weekend looked bleak for gaming. I was flying out to Singapore early on Sunday for three days of meetings, and didn't think I could make game night at The Lily Pad. My dear wife prodded me to go, however, because she knew I needed the distraction. Game night charges my batteries and gives me the social and creative outlet that I don't get at work. I just had to make it home early to catch some sleep so I could catch my 8am flight out.

9 October 2005

Large turnout at The Lily Pad, but the game that made it to the table once again was Traumfabrik. Sadly, I found that my camera had died in the two weeks that I didn't use it, so I was unable to start taking my customary game night pictures again.

There were eight people so some teaming up was necessary since everyone wanted to play. We haven't had a hit this big since Puerto Rico. My memory is starting to fuzz out from the volume of T-fab plays we've been generating, but I do remember that Nix and Tala curned out the night's biggest film - a $200 million box office smash with Nicole Kidman starring as Maximus in the Martin Scorsese-directed Gladiator.

I was attempting to grasp the timing of T-fab but again it eluded me. I got one film completed early, a decent $100 million production of Braveheart with Ashley Judd in the lead role (hey, it was a night of strong female lead characters). After that I was unable to complete a second film, falling one tile short of getting my huge Raiders of the Lost Ark production into theaters. The film ran out of cash, and my pathetic total box office take of $300 million put me firmly into last place, over $200 million behind the fourth place WB of Erik and Annie. Pathetic.

T-fab is giving me the hot Reiner flashes that I got from Taj Mahal and Modern Art - I can't seem to win the damned game, and I struggle to do well. All the hallmarks of what usually is a great game in my book. It helps that we all have so much fun playing the game.

I had to leave just as Princes of Florence hit the table. Regretfully, I headed home, visions of jesters and builders dancing in my head as I listened to Mark Jackson talk to Mike Siggins about Freidrich in the car.

10 October 2005

Sunday, I arrived in Singapore. The first thing that appeared on my Blackberry after I turned it back on was a message from Wilson Tan confirming our meetup to play. Things were looking up. After settling in the hotel I grabbed a cab and heading for the best FLGS in Singapore, Paradigm Infinitum. I was famished so I stopped by the Burger King in the store building's basement and ran into the people I was to meet - Wilson and Siow Hwee and their loverly wives Shih Huei and Janey, plus little Becky.

The stop at Paradigm looked uneventful. They had some new stuff in, but it was uninspiring. They had Dungeon Twister, but I don't have a lot of use for 2P games. Besides, it's got plastic miniatures and is "expandable". Those are always warning signs. Adding those factors to the new designer and a publisher without a good track record and it's a pass for me.

The other game I was taking a good look at was the Face 2 Face Games reprint of Reiner's Rheinlander. Now this is a game that's got a decent reputation, but from the information on the Geek I was pretty sure that I didn't need it in my collection. Reiner's already staked out a sizable chunk of my mid-length, mid-weight games with Traumfabrik, Modern Art, Through the Desert, Samurai and Colossal Arena, plus Euphrat & Tigris to a certain extent. I knew I was going to get RA in a few weeks. I'd rather wait on Stephenson's Rocket and Medici in 2006. Besides, the SG$100 price tag almost made me choke considering the component issues of the game.

There were some other interesting items scattered around. A copy of Struggle of Empires was on display, but not only was it more expensive than Rheinlander, I wasn't interested as Martin Wallace is currently on might "don't bother" list until he puts out a game better than the tepid Age of Steam. Another interesting item was a copy of the OOP RGG reprint of Goldseiber's Mississipi Queen. Too bad I'm not into race games at all. I'll probably play it, but I wasn't about to buy it, OOP or not. Siow Hwee had it and wasn't too impressed. Finally, Wilson pointed out a copy of the lui-meme werewolf cards, The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow, on the shelf. I've always thought that having a nice set of werewolf cards just to drive the theme home when the occasion arose would be useful, so I took that.

While Wilson was off lecturing a friend of his he ran into on the salient points of our hobby (the fellow ended up with Bang! and Coloretto I think, which wasn't bad), I noticed a blue box with the Hans im Gluck logo on one of the shelves. Expecting some lame game, I pulled it out. Reiner Knizia. Clash of the Gladiators. Wow, another OOP game.

Now, this isn't exactly one of Reiner's Finer Games by the BGG rating scale. Not really surprising, because this is a Reiner Dicefest. Now, the good doctor does do dice games, and he does them well. Exxtra, Easy Come Easy Go, Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck... They're all light dice games. Besides, Reiner wrote the book on dice games. So this game, with its theme of gladiators duking it out with wild animals and each other in the Colosseum - yeah, that's right up my alley. The design appeals to the old-time AD&Der in me, so it became my purchase for this trip. I think the game group will enjoy it.

So, I paid for the games and they gave me a big pastic bag so I could put the Kosmos La Citta the Wilson gave me in trade for Java into it along with my new purchases. This was turning out to be a good trip.

We went over to Wilson's office to play a game. Wilson's office had a nice meeting room with a large table. The game of the day was Euphrat & Tigris, which I promised to teach complete with theme. :-) After about 20 minutes of rules, we were off. Siow Hwee had played before, so his seating to my right was something I took note of. Not that it much mattered in E&T but it was good to be prudent. After the initial Kingdom buildups, I erected a Political/Commercial Monument to the north of the Tigris. Siow Hwee waged war and succeeded in exiling my King, but my Trader held his ground, lasting the entire game entrenched beside the Monument. A huge was for Agriculture was waged to the east, and I successfully ejected Siow Hwee's Farmer from the area, following that up with destroying his Priest's power base. The gods were smiling down on the Archer Dynasty.

Siow Hwee attacked a couple of times, both ending in futility. Janey: "he's not a very good player." Laughs all around. Apparently Janey kicks Siow Hwee's butt in E&T.

Endgame had a couple of large wars smack in the middle of the twin rivers. Wilson was doing very well, but I knew he had the same problem as I did - we were both weak in agriculture. The difference was that I had accumulated three treasures. Hoping that that would be the difference, I ended the game by accelerating time.

I had barely won with a score of 8. Siow Hwee had 6, Shih Huie 5, and Wilson 4. It was a very good game for the first time of Wilson and Shih Huei.

We all had to be somewhere, so we packed up with promises of playing more games when I next made the trip to Sing.

The Games Journal

2005-10-11T21:49:00.000+08:00

A lot has been said about the decision of Greg Aleknevicus to cease production of the webzine The Games Journal. I think Yehuda Berlinger illustrated how I feel about it on the Gone Gaming blog.

It was indeed a serious issue that very few articles we being submitted. The Games Journal was driven by contributions - Greg, while an excellent and fairly prolific writer, could not have written all the content by himself. This was discussed in a recent episode of Mark Johnson's Boardgames To Go podcast where Greg was a guest. Yehuda had known for a couple of weeks that TGJ was shutting down. That means Greg might have already known that he was going to turn off TGJ when he talked to Mark on the show.

This is all pointing to the recent explosion of media on the German boardgaming hobby, which Mark has mentioned many times on his podcast. With so much creative energy being directed to individual gamer weblogs and podcasts, and into BoardGameGeek, The Gamewire and other boardgaming websites, there was less available energy that Greg could call on for submissions. It doesn't really matter that the content type is very different. Most weblogs are less formal than the average TGJ article. Most of us just type up the recent game night events, or dump current thoughts onto the electronic page. There's very little in the way of researched, edited material which was one of the most valuable features onTGJ (Yehuda linked to several of them above).

In closing, I'll miss having TGJ around. I was never one of the first to hit the site when publishing time came around, but when I did visit I burned through all the past issues that I'd missed.

I do feel that it's pretty silly for so many of us to be mourning its demise now when we never did direct any creative energy into submitting content. Now it's too late, and all we can offer is condolences and thanks.

Thanks to Greg, TGJ's editor, Frank Branham, TGJ's publisher, and all the contributors over the years.

The Games Journal, July 2000 - September 2005

The Second Coming

2005-10-06T16:51:00.000+08:00

RA is back.

Reiner Knizia's RA was the first game in alea's popular big box line, and it's been one of the most sought-after Euros since it went out of print. There was much rejoicing when uberplay announced that it was going to reprint it, followed by grave concern (as grave as you can get about a boardgame anyway) when a change of theme was explored.

In the end, RA returns almost unchanged from its original incarnation. There are minor component tweaks, such as a helpful little symbol on some of the tiles to remind the player that they're "permanents" and slightly larger tiles and board. Oh, and the box is not alea's box so you completists won't find satisfaction here.

For the people who just want to play the game with friends and family, a little glimmer of Christmas just arrived. For the game speculators, I hope you dumped your RGG RA for the old $100+ ebay prices because the new game can be had for under $25 online. That's a great price for a great game.

Kudos to Kevin from Eagle Games (who are uberplay's distributors) for posting pics of the new RA:

http://eaglegames.zeroforum.com/zerothread?id=5956

Awards - Yay?

2005-10-05T07:36:00.000+08:00

The International Gamers Awards, which is I try to equate to the Golden Globes (since the Golden Globes are given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press), have announced their Eurogame winners for 2005. Well, ok, maybe the IGA hasn't attained the status of the Golden Globes when ranged against the Academy Awards of this little hobby (aka, the German Spiel des Jahres). And they use a funky voting system to determine who wins the award (scroll to the bottom of the linked page to see it). It's sort of a least common denominator thing. It's as good a method as any other.

So. I'm going to ignore the 2P award since (a) I have no idea why 2P gets a category of its own while there is no 3P, 4P, 5P, 6P and 7+P award, (b) War of the Ring is touted on its box to be a 2-4 player game, which should disqualify it and (c) they just gave an award to a Risk descendant whose production values have utility issues. Aaaaanyway.

Ticket to Ride: Europe is perhaps the best representation of a least common denominator. It's a rehash of a game that's already won a lot of praise from the LCD gaming crowd. If the IGA was going to pick a "good game" as Greg says they aim to do, then I think they did their job. No one is going to argue with Ticket to Ride: Europe.

At least it was better than that horrible "me too" pick, St. Petersburg, in the previous year.

So, for 2005, the three awards were:

SdJ: Niagara (fits the high luck, "low thought required" family game profile of recent SdJs)
DSP: Louis XIV (does its main audience, the strategy gamers, a service here)
IGA: Ticket to Ride: Europe (the safest pick, a very effective LCD game)

Nothing surprising in the winners, all appealing to the markets/audience of the respective awards. No risks either, as all three come from major publishers (Zoch, alea, Days of Wonder). Was it only five years ago that the SdJ took a risk and picked the best award winner in its history, the Kramer/Kiesling masterpiece Torres?

As I said, 2005 is/was a crappy year for games (depending on which "season" you're using).

Postscript: There's a low buzz around Caylus. I read the rules. I'm not impressed. The whole thing seems fiddly to the extreme, with a lot of special things going on depending on where your "workers" are placed. Of course, this is all just from a rules reading. The game may be much better in play, but I'm not getting on the bandwagon just yet despite what Rick Thornquist's rating is. (And I can identify with Rick's tastes - the man has the correct opinion on Taj Mahal!) I wish there was more information on Hacienda, which is looking like the only hope for a good big box strategy game from Esson 2005.

Free Games (and good ones too)

2005-10-04T10:40:00.000+08:00

How often do you get a chance to win good games?

There are two contest running that have pretty good prizes.

The first is the Cafe Games TEMPUS giveaway on BoardGameGeek. Tempus is a Martin Wallace game that's going to debut at Essen. Those of you who like Wallace's games should be happy with the opp to win one of 12 that are going to be raffled off. All you have to do is answer the 10 multiple choice questions posed by Cafe Games guy Morgan Dontanville. Yes, they're not easy. Yes, you can Google. No, you're probably not going to get them all right even if you Google. Guessing also works I guess, I got 7 of 10 without consulting The Oracle. For each correct answer you get a chance to win. For those of us who aren't impressed with Wallace games, it makes great trade fodder, so why not join? All you need is a BGG account. (Who am I kidding, if you're reading this, you're already a BGGeek.)

The other is the contest Tom and Joe are running on the podcast The Dice Tower.

All you have to do is send Tom and Joe an email with the Top Five Games You Think Their Listeners Hate the Most. The contest is patterned after Richard Garfield's "What Were You Thinking." You get more points if your opinion matches that of the other people who send in entries. The prize? Reiner Knizia's Beowulf - The Legend, published by Fantasy Flight Games. Along with that you also get a poster autographed by Reiner and artist John Howe, best known for his Tolkein work. That's a damned good prize, and it's well worth the email.

As we say in Amun-Re, free is good. Unless it's an all-farmer province in the third year of an epoch.

A trip to the Game Store and Game night - 1 October 2005

2005-10-03T19:48:00.000+08:00

I haven't had the chance to drop by the local game store in over a month (but have dropped by game stores in two other countries - go figure). I was hoping that they'd have something new. Well, they did. Manila. At around US$60.

You have to be kidding. I know it's cool to have the name of your city on a nice looking boardgame, but $60? You'd think they were selling Traumfabrik - a German published, OOP game that's really really good.

I look around the store and there's nothing new other than the latest trivia games and Monopoly flavors. No one's bitten on the other Ravensburger Torres they had left (they marked it down 5% from the ~$60 I paid for the other copy). On the interesting side, they marked down slightly shelfworn copied of the RGG Bucket King (around $18) and the Eurogames Clippers with the much-maligned components (around $25). Bucket King isn't a game I'd keep in my collection, but it would make a nice gift to a casual gaming family, or one with kids. Clippers is intriguing, being perhaps the only Alan Moon game with no luck or randomness. There's the component issue that Alan himself was complaining about, and which Greg Scholesser panned. Still, some of the comments on the Geek say that the problems are solvable, and the game itself isn't bad.

I may go back for either or both of those sometime later this month. I'm pretty sure they'll sell out their Crainium before anyone else even picks up either of those Euros.

Anyway.

Game night had Traumfabrik returning to the table. This time, I had Noel Tiangco's modern english paste-ups on the tiles using weak sticker paper. I'm hoping that they won't do any permanent damage to the tiles. I tested them on the tile frames, leaving them stuck for close to a week before peeling them off. No problems.

Anyway, there were too many laugh out loud moments during the game. My first film had Samuel L. Jackson, Shaft, Mace Windu, Jules the Assassin... playing Peter Parker in Spider-Man. With Tim Burton at the helm (over $100 million at the box office). The most awful film of the night had Dana Carvey and Ben Stiller starring in Braveheart, with John Carpenter directing. Its box office take was as awful as that sounded ($30 million). The night's best film was Paramount's Raiders of the Lost Ark, raking in a cool $200 million at the box office, plus another $100 million after its Academy Award wins. That big film was powered by Tom Cruise and Halle Berry. My best film was the $120 million box office hit The Sixth Sense with Cameron Diaz and Toby Maguire. No, I don't know who saw dead people. Ask Ang Lee, he directed the thing.

Nix, who was heading Paramount, blew us away with $890 million in earnings at the end of all four sweeps. I came far behind in second place with $600 million. We agreed that Nix was able to time his forays into the market well, conserving resources and striking when the other four studios had depleted their finances. Traumfabrik is definitely not as light as its reputation portrays. While it's pretty simple at first blush, there's a lot going on in terms of timing, the composition of the lots, the closed economic system, and the way players try to complete their film projects. I'm sure we'll continue to play this every game night.

Next, we had a choice between playing a game new to the group (In the Shadow of the Emperor, Louis XIV, or Maharaja) or playing an old favorite. The old favorite won out so Puerto Rico returned to the table after an unusually lengthy absence.

Five player PR is not one of my favorite games. There's a noticeable lack of control, and the trading house timing can seriously whack you several times sending you to the back of the pack. This is exactly what happened to me, and I got locked out of the trading house for the first four trading cycles. Ouch. To catch up I did the only thing I could - craft repeatedly until the coffee boat (I had a coffee monopoly) cleared. From there the building timing was against me so I skipped the factory-harbor-wharf segment of the game and proceeded directly to the large buildings. Tala had the same idea. We each ended up with two of the big ones, while Nix was milking his factory/harbor setup on the boats. The game was very painful, as is usual for 5P PR, but the scores were close. Tala won, with myself and Nix right behind, a single point separating the first three places.

Next week: More Traumfabrik, and the Princes of Florence. It'll be a short night for me as I'm flying back to Singapore on Sunday morning. On the good side, I'll get to collect La Citta from Wilson and see what new stuff Damien has. Oh goody, more games, no increase in gaming hours. Sigh.

2005: A Crappy Year for Boardgames

2005-09-29T18:46:00.000+08:00

Yeah, I know it's only October, and Essen is around the corner, but isn't 2005 (and you might want to include the latter part of 2004) just a crappy year for boardgames?

I got this feeling when going over the SdJ, DSP and IGA lists of nominees and winners for the year. Ick, I say. So, I ask the Geek to give me a listing of all games published in 2005, with a rating of at least 5 and at least 30 raters. I'm chucking all the wargames and expansions, because those don't count. This is what I get:

TI3e - You have to be kidding. 2ed was better than this.
Ticket to Ride: Europe - A rehash. Didn't much like it's daddy either.
Shadows over Camelot - Wouldn't you rather play Werewolf?
Travel Blokus - Zzzzzz.
Arkham Horror - Horror is right.
Munchkin Fu 2 - Bayesian rating of 6.79, 35 ratings. What are these people smoking?
Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean - Brand new. Reports say and rules read: Too many cards, too much luck
Louis XIV - Won the DSP. Might be the best game on this list, which is a relief.
China - Reprint. Didn't much like Web of Power, so pass.
TATATA! - Haven't heard anything, don't know anything, don't really want to know.
Wings of War: Watch your back - Featherlight sequel. It's daddy was ok, nothing great.
Kreta - Steffan Dorra area control game. The dark horse on this list, flying under the radar.
Manila - Gambling game. I wish they called THIS Puerto Rico, and THAT game Manila!
Carcassonne: The Prin... awww fuck it's crappy Carc again.
Roma - New 2P Queen game. Interestingly good remarks from key people (Mike Siggins) but it's 2P so I don't care too much.
Nexus Ops - Hasborg dicefest kiddie dreck.
Tower of Babel - Reiner's Hans im Gluck big box game is an auction/area control middleweight. I think this should get better over time, sorta like Samurai.
Palazzo - Reiner's alea midi box game is an auctionish lightweight. What a letdown.
Fjords - 2P Carcassonnish game. Pass.
Axis and All.... yech.
FFFF - I'm not typing that, and it's Friedemann so pass.
Dungeoneer: Forsaken Desert - Forsake this game.
Control Nut! - Trick taking game, probably worth a look if you like that kinda thing. I don't.
Attacktix Star Wars Kiddie Game bleh
Manifest Destiny - Pass.
Diamant - If this cost as much as Bluff, I'd probably get it despite its parentage. It costs as much as a big box game, so forget it.
Risk: Star Wars - why do people still buy this thing?
Australia - Kramer+Kiesling+Ravensburger=pale shadow of the Mask Trilogy. Too bad.
Ars Mystery - LIttle publisher, but I'd try it if there was an opp.
Amazonas - Lightish card game. Too many of these things around.
Walk the Dogs - SimplyFun fluff.
Poison - Another light Reiner card game.
Monsters Menace America - See Nexus Ops
Go West - Hey it's a Colovini game. I'd play this given the chance.
Pickomino - Another light game.
TransEuropa - Given how bad TA is, why bother?
Anachr... CCG right? Pass.
Verflixxt! - Not bad. Not good, either.
The rest are the same: Gone Fishing, Ice Cream, Coloretto Amazonas, Sword and Skull, Pimp: the Backhanding, SPANC, Clout Fantasy.

Yep, 2005 stinks. And as I noted a few entries before, Essen looks pretty grim for good thinking-man's games, with just Hazienda and E&T das Kart looking promising.

Why Games Need Editors

2005-09-29T08:14:00.000+08:00

I was listening to the latest Wingin' It podcast from Michael and Evo over at The Dragon Page, and one subject resonated with me on more than one level.

One of their listeners called in and asked for advice on getting published. Having read more than one self-help book on the publishing and film businesses, I already knew what Mike and Evo and Joe and Summer were going to say. And they said it.

Take your first novel, short story, screenplay, what have you, and stick it in a drawer. Take your second effort, and do the same thing. And your third. And your fourth. Then maybe, maybe you can take your next effort and send it to an editor. Not your spouse. Not your friends. Not anyone who likes you. Send it to someone who'll look at it and take it apart and tell you exactly where it sucks and ask you what the heck you were thinking when you wrote scenes 12, through 28, and what were you smoking when you wrote scenes 33 through 41?

You need someone who'll tell you that your dialogue is stupid and that NOBODY TALKS LIKE THAT (hello George Lucas), and where your plotting is full of holes, and where your characters are so paper thin that you can read the newspaper they're holding through the back of their head.

If you give your draft to someone to read, and they don't tell you any of the preceding, then you can discount that person's opinion. They're not helping you.

What's this doing on BoardGameBlog and not Everyday Insight you ask?

It's here because there are so many games out there that need this kind of editing. Sure, a flawed game can have a cult following. You can equate War of the Ring to The Matrix Reloaded - it thinks it's good and smart and has a lot of shiny bits to keep the kiddies interested, but once you look at it from a structure standpoint, it falls apart. You'll never convince the kiddies of that though because The Burly Brawl (all the dice rolling and the theme and action cards) was So Damned Kewl and it Roxxored!

Look at games that I can assume have gone through an editing process, like the stuff published by Hans im Glueck (Bernd Brunhoffer) and alea (Stefan Brueck). They tend to be "tighter" than the indy stuff from, say Friedemann Freise (see Funkenschlag and even Power Grid). That's the additional value that an editing process can give. It doesn't mean that every game they produce is perfect - alea can have Mammoth Hunters, just as JK Rowling can have The Prisoner of Azkaban. Even Reiner has his clunkers and those go through his own stringent editing process along with that of his publisher.

Sigh.

Yes, yes. I know. You write for your audience. People who read Danielle Steele won't likely be reading HP Lovecraft, just as people who enjoy the superficially-themed War of the Ring dicefest won't likely enjoy a luckless, chromeless-themed brainburner like Torres with all 10 Action Cards in hand.

In the end, all is subjective, and Britney Spears (with her legions of fans) is just as valid a recording act as Coldplay.

Analysis Paralysis: When You're Not Smart or Decisive Enough

2005-09-29T07:56:00.000+08:00

(Warning: Those easily offended can piss off.)

Let me be blunt. Analysis paralysis is caused by a mismatch of a game which demands brainpower, and a player who lacks the brainpower to recognize what's going on AND make a decision on what he wants to do.

I'm tired of games being criticized for this. You choose to study rocket science, you'd better have the brainpower. You want to play Java? You'd better have the brainpower. Otherwise, please stick to Settlers where you toss the dice and ask people if they have wood for sheep (cue Butthead here) and don't need to think.

So, translating: If you see a comment about a game that claims it causes analysis paralysis, it means "this game is too hard for me and my gaming group." If you see a low rating along with that comment, that means "we're not smart enough to play games that demand more thought, in a reasonable amount of time." Or maybe "we're smart, but we're not decisive enough and need to spend gobs of time sifting through each option repeatedly."

Don't blame the game.

You know, if the game causes analysis paralysis, you should rate it HIGHER and aspire to be able to play that game in its indicated playing time. Once you do that, you can claim that you've either become smarter or more decisive or both.

Addendum:

I finish this post, look at BGG and what do you know, a Geeklist on analysis paralysis and timers. If I post this on BGG, the propriety police will jump up and down, so I'll say it here. If your players can't play the game properly without a timer (i.e., they're not smart or decisive enough), step down a bit. Try something will a lower difficulty level, then "graduate" to the real games.

The negotiation games like AGoT and ToG, you have the same problem as the fellow who asks "got wood for sheep?" ten times before giving up. Decisiveness is required. If the deal isn't there, more on instead of wasting time trying to harangue people because you think you're smart enough to pull to wool over their eyes (you're probably not if you're taking that long). Or conversely, tell the player who's badgering you to do what he wants to piss off, you're not interested.

But RoboRally? You have to be joking. After you've taken a bit of damage your moves get locked anyway. What's the problem? Wallenstein? TORRES?! Torres is a lightning fast game especially without all ten cards in hand. When you know the game and have all the cards, it gets even faster because you have the means to do stuff! Princes of Florence? Goa?! Sheesh.

The absolute worst one is Citadels. What the heck takes people so long to pick a role? It's not like you can guess which character is going to get assassinated or pickpocketed, so why the fuck are you waffling? Five seconds to choose a role, no more. That's why I gave this one up on BSW - the time it took people to choose roles was infuriating, simply because there THERE IS NO INFORMATION to base your pick on! It's a Faidutti game for crying out loud. Bruno doesn't make games with agonizing decisions! I think he'd go into convulsions if he knew that people were suffering from analysis paralysis over one of his games.

Game Night - September 23 2005

2005-09-26T18:09:00.000+08:00

It was a great relief to have a game night scheduled. We'd finally get to play some of the new games I'd been stockpiling over the past month.

The most anticipated game was my newly-acquired copy of Traumfabrik.

Some memorable things:
We popped the Traumfabrik CD into the player, and it was a wonderful mood-setter for the game. Form the opening strains of In the Mood, which almost everyone in the room surprisingly identified, to the Sinatra tunes that were playing while he was considering offers from the studios, the CD proved that little touches do enhance the gaming experience.

My highest-rated film was The Ten Commandments starring Grace Kelly, which was rather hilarious because Grace Kelly in a loincloth was good, but if she had a beard, that was bad.

The worst film for most of the game was a $5,000,000 box-office disaster filmed by a no-name director, starring Reiner Knizia.

That was unbelievably beaten by a $3,000,000 stinker filmed by another no-name director and starred in by Henry Fonda.

Eventual winners Frog and George had the film of the night - King Kong with a $3,000,000 special effects budget starring Marilyn Monroe. No, it wasn't the biggest box-office hit, but it was the most appropriate casting. They avoided the mistake of casting Norma Jean as the monkey and using CGI to animate the Fay Wray.

Final scores:
Frog/George - $71m
Rick - $70m
Nix - $60m
Erik/Annie - $58m
Monch - $56m

Post-game agenda - come up with custom tilesets. Make Keanu the Reiner of that set.

Nix, Frog, George and I decided to go for one more game, and I broke out my new copy of Verrater. I'd played the game a few times on BSW, some time ago.

It was an interesting game as we were all grappling with the quirky double-loop timing of the game, with the start player passing clockwise and the strategist and alliances flip-flopping the combat rhythm in a strange, disjointed waltz. I turned coat three turns in a row, sandwiched between a couple of building turns. Everyone else concentrated on being the Strategist or a flavor of the Diplomat.

When the dust cleared, the most traitorous one emerged victorious. I won the game with 27 points.

So, our all-German edition game night was a rousing good time. T-fab will almost certainly grace our table again next session, hopefully with some variant tiles.

When the Wishlist Runs Dry

2005-09-25T20:22:00.000+08:00

Gerald asked me an interesting question in the Geek of the Week feature on BGG. After my last buying spree, what were my top five games that I wanted to add to my collection that were in print?

I had this piddling little list to answer:

Meuterer
Intrige
Attribute
YINSH
TAMSK

So, three card games and two 2P abstracts are all I have left. 2005 has been a tremendously weak year in terms of meatier games that I'm interested in. Louis XIV and Shadow of the Emperor was the extent of additions. The Essen list is also looking very weak, with only Kramer's Hacienda, and Knizia's E&T das Kartenspiel looking like they would merit a second look.

(I must admit to being very cool on Martin Wallace games. Similar to Friedemann Freiese's games, Wallace games feel just short of being completed. His best game, Age of Steam, is a pale shadow of 1830 and has a theme-breaking mechanism that I can't abide. So I really have no interest in Tempus or Byzantium.)

The saving grace is the reprinting of Reef Encounter and RA in the short term, and Medici, Stephenson's Rocket and Taj Mahal in the medium term. (Though I already have the RGG Taj, and am wary of Reef Encounter because it might be like Power Grid - a good game, surely, but clearly not yet polished.)

One can only hope that Reiner has a gamer's game in the works. Otherwise, 2005 will be one of the weakest years for German games in a very long time.

I suppose that this is a good problem to have. My narrow interest in types of games keeps my collection (and related things like spending and space) sane. :)

Torres on Boite a jeux

2005-09-22T16:21:00.000+08:00

It's no secret that I rank Torres as one of the best games around. I enjoy everything about the game: the fun theme, the simple mechanisms, the elegant gameplay, and one of the most fitting graphic designs around. Torres is perhaps the best awardee of the Spiel des Jahres award ever. Considering the medicre picks that they have made since then, that seems unlikely to change soon.

I was ecstatic when the Franch gaming site Boite a jeux implemented Torres recently. I immediately recruited my online gaming group, affectionately called The Four Friends, and we launched into playing Torres. (The Four Friends are Mary Weisbeck, Chester Ogborn, Gerald Cameron and myself.) We've been playing multiple games of Torres, in different variations, for several weeks now and I haven't tired of it yet. I don't think they have either. I pray they haven't because this game has legs unlike any others.

A game of Torres on BaJ; as usual The Four Friends are locked in a tight struggle.

I can only compare my Torres fever with the other four top games in my rankings - The Princes of Florence (playing this occasionally on BrettSpielWelt is like giving a thirsty man a drop of water), Euphrat & Tigris (which we've played heavily on BoardGameGeek), Puerto Rico (which I've played heavily on BSW as well but have given up on due to my irritation with the other players on the site), and the unassailable Magic: the Gathering.

If any readers out there would like to play Torres, register on BaJ and drop me a line. You can even pick the variant; I enjoy them all.

Podcasts

2005-09-21T17:25:00.000+08:00

Derk and Aldie over at BoardGameGeek did me a huge favor when they started up their podcast, then known as GeekSpeak. It was a radio show on MP3 all about boardgames. Now I knew nothing about Adam Curry or the whole podcasting thing at that point, but the new car I had been given at work had a CD player that had an MP3 decoder, so I tried it out. I downloaded the first installment, burned it onto a CD, and have listened to every episode ever since. I even began doing a log of the shows as a Geeklist. (The list is no longer up-to-date, unfortunately. I may update it at some point in the future.)

Podcasts have now replaced radio and audio CDs as my companions during my hour-long drive to work. Several podcasts with boardgame content have joined GeekSpeak, now renamed BoardGameSpeak, on my car stereo. I thought I'd say a few words about each.

The Dice Tower (TDT) is hosted by those two funny boardgame-playing Americans based in Korea, Tom and Joe. TDT is a spiritual sibling to GeekSpeak in that you have two guys who play well off each other. Well, ok, I think Tom and Joe do it better as Aldie tends to disappear a lot during shows. Granted, GeekSpeak usually has a guest, while TDT is usually just Tom and Joe. The hook here is that Joe is primarily a wargamer, and Tom is primarily a Eurogamer. Warning - this show is not for newbies. Game titles are mentioned at an alarming rate, especially during the weekly Top 10 lists. Have BGG up and ready to search to figure out what games the guys are talking about. Recently, TDT has been running contests to give away games. So far, they've given away Conquest of the Empire, Santiago/Primordial Soup, and a couple of wargames from Wellington. That's more than enough reason to listen and participate!

Boardgames To Go (BGTG) is Mark Johnson's show. He started out with a one-voice format, and that still is his default show type, but lately he's been having various second voices on his show, from fellow gamers to his wife and kids. I found Mark's earlier shows to be rather boring, but since I could relate to the content, I kept downloading and listening. Lucky for me, as the quality of the shows has been improving rapidly to the point that BGTG is now the first show I listen to when I have a freshly-burned CD of podcasts in the car. Mark's recent innovation - whole shows focusing on just one game, are now the podcast I look out for. The first two, on Entdecker and Medici, were all about two games I haven't played and don't own. The Medici show that had Dave Arnott as co-host was outstanding, and I've placed Medici on my "will definitely buy" list as soon as the RGG reprint appears. I just downloaded the newer show, on Verrater, a game I just acquired last week and have played a bit on BrettSpielWelt, and I'm looking forward to hearing that one. Mark's shows are now can't-miss programming as far as I'm concerned.

BoardGameSpeak (BGS) has suffered a bit in its recent shows as Aldie and Derk concentrate on getting BGG.CON organized. The last few shows have been interviews with various persons during a convention, so the sound quality has been poorer than the studio-recorded shows. One weakness of the BGS format is that the show is only as good as the guest, and sometimes the guest tanks the whole show. I haven't been interested all that much in the last two guests, Friedeman Freiese and Andrea Meyer, so I skipped large chunks of those shows. Still, BGS has produced some excellent shows in the past, especially the ones that had Reiner Knizia, Alan Moon and Mark Jackson on as guests.

Have Games Will Travel (HGWT) is a newish podcast from Paul Tevis. This is a hybrid show that features both boardgames and RPGs, but the boardgame coverage is suited for people new to the hobby. (Unlike the three previous entries here.) Most experienced Eurogamers won't really care about a review on Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride, but for those who just happen on Paul's show, it's a good way to become familiar with the base games of the hobby. Paul uses a single-voice format. His latest show, which I haven't listened to yet, has a review of Reiner's mighty Euphrat & Tigris. That's going to be an interesting listen.

Geek Fu Action Grip (GFAG) is barely boardgame related. Host Mur Lafferty's background seems to be primarily in RPGs, but her husband Jim Van Verth is an old-school game designer. Mur adores James Ernest and his Cheapass Games, and crayon rail games. Not much for Eurogamers or wargamers here in terms of game content, but Mur is entertaining and her "being a geek essays" are fun to listen to so I keep tuning in.

Roll 2d6 (2d6) is a new podcast which also encompasses RPGs. They talk mostly about American-style boardgames and RPGs, but the last episode had a mention for Settlers of Catan so I'll keep listening until the content I follow runs dry.

All Games Considered (AGC) is a show I listened to when it first came out. Not only were the first few shows rather devoid of boardgame content, but the hosts were overly self-referential and there was far too little content delivered for the time the podcasts were taking. I no longer listen to this show.

BGGeek of the Week

2005-09-19T15:36:00.000+08:00

Jim Pulles dropped me a note last week asking me if I was willing to answer some questions in the new "Geek of the Week" feature over at BoardGameGeek. He had been the previous subject, and before him was my Aussie mate Melissa Rogerson (can you call Aussie gals "mate"?) That's pretty good company, so I said yes.

"Geek of the Week" was started by Andrew.

On another note, here's a link to Chester's article on the Die Macher saga that I referred to in the last post.

New games, no game time

2005-09-18T19:20:00.000+08:00

I've been working and travelling for work so much in the past couple of months that I've been able to buy new games in Singapore and Malaysia, but haven't been able to get them to the game table.

The last three trips to Sing, as partly chronicled here, netted:

Santiago
Through the Desert
Samurai
Louis XIV
In the Shadow of the Emperor

My more recent trip, to Kuala Lumpur, netted:

Traumfabrik (!)
Magna Grecia
Maharaja: Palace Building in India
San Marco
Verrater
and on a whim at the airport, Squad Seven.

I was very surprised when Mac Edwin, Kuala Lumpur's eurogame pimp daddy, mentioned over email that he had T-fab in inventory. Not even Fab-d-Traum, T-fab, which meant a 100% chance that the audio CD would be in the box. Even at US$70, the highest price I've ever paid for a eurogame, it was not something I was going to pass up. (Besides, T-fab goes for $50-60 in the US. With shipping to Asia and a small margin, it's definitely not unreasonable for a game that's OOP and unlikely to be republished in the same form in North America.)

Magna Grecia I owe to my good Geekbuddy Mary Weisbeck, who lists it as her #1 game. Despite her strange fascination with area control mechanisms, I consider her recommendations rock solid and MG already looks very good. I don't even think the graphic design is awful. It's not great, but it's not a dealbreaker.

I've already played Maharaja (John Peter's copy) and I like it. As I was telling Jasen Robillard on BSW the other day, it's a practice in creating order out of chaos. The blind action selection mechanism and the changing roles can be overcome with good, visionary play. Make no mistake, Maharaja does offer control. In this case, however, it is not straightforward and it has its pitfalls.

Speaking of chaos, my buddy Gerald Cameron wanted to know what the hell an Alan Moon area control game was doing in my collection. Despite the games of Mr. Moon having a dismal record in entertaining me, I had to have it for two reasons. First is the Alessandra Cimatoribus graphic work on the game, which is nothing short of gorgeous. Other than the original Torres, she hasn't done any other boardgame work. The other is the Solomon Draft mechanism, which makes the area control nature of the game an afterthought. I loved this mechanism back in my Magic tournament days, and it is enough to make this game good. I can even overlook the use of the die.

Verrater's a game I've played on BSW, and along with its sibling Meuterer, a game I'm happy to own for US$10.

Finally, Squad Seven. I had looked at the game's entry on the Geek via some Geeklist in the past, and recalled that it was a quirkly action game. It was priced at 25 Malaysian ringgit, which is something like US$7 or so. It was a lone marked down copy in the airport toy shop. How could I leave it there? Anyway, I check it ouot and stuff it into the game bag I was toting. As I approached the X-ray machine it occurred to me that Squad Seven ad a toy gun in it. Uh-oh. I quickly moved it between T-fab and Maharaja in my bag and hoped for the best. It went right through the KL X-ray check. Good. In the Sing stopover, it again went through the X-ray check with no incident. Phew. I had visions of having to explain a suction-cup gun to airport security by running around a table and shooting stand-up figures while listening to jungle sounds on the airport sound system.

The game and toy gun that might have gotten me detained.

Anyway, my gaming group is going to have to endure a steady diet of new games over the next couple of months. By then, I figure that we'll be ready for the arrival of Chester Ogborn's copy of Die Macher, slowly floating its way over here on the slow boat. More on that as the arrival becomes imminent.

Game Night - 13 August 2005 and other random thoughts

2005-08-16T20:48:00.000+08:00

I finally got to rejoin the gang for a pleasant evening of the company of friends and some good gaming. I came armed with my most recent haul from Singapore - FFG's Through the Desert reprint, RGG's Samurai reprint, and Louis XIV. I liked the bunch of games - they were of the lightish variety, and that was what I was in the mood for. We've been playing lighter games like Ingenious and Doom: The Boardgame (not me for the latter) lately and my new acquisitions fit the bill. I was still sort of tired from a 70-hour workweek but really needed to game to relax.

Frog was the only one around when I arrived, so I set up TtD. The candy camels got the usual comments about their cuteness. After a quick rules explanation, I promptly began cordoning off the corners. Rick 140-something, Frog 100-something. Learning game.

After the customary excellent dinner courtesy of our hosts, I pulled out Samurai. Nix, Erik and Jay John joined me in conquest of the Japanese Isles. First game feeling-out process took hold, but play rapidly improved. I thought I was way behind, but I had almost total control in Hokkaido while everyone was attracted to Edo. The two Swap tiles were quickly christened as "the Ninja tiles" for their sneakiness, and everyone recognized the power of the Ronin. In the end, the game was pretty damned close.

Jay John: Buddha Majority, 6 others
Rick: Rice Paddy Majorty, 5 others
Erik: High Hat Majority, 4 others
Nix: No majorities.

Yep, Samurai lived up to its reputation. Everyone thought it was a good game, and that the random tile draw wasn't a big deal since you had a 5-tile hand. Sort of like E&T.

I showed the rest of the crew TtD, and George kicked all our asses by squeaking in two long caravans.

Frog wanted to play Samurai or Louis, but it was 12:30am and too late to learn a new game that I knew was on the complex side for teaching, so Samurai it was again. Frog, George, Nix and Jay John prepared to visit the Land of the Rising Run once more as I joined Erik and Annie in saying goodnight.

It was good to be back in the saddle.

My ratings:
Samurai: 8/10 - excellent light game with lots of decisions and a shrinking decision tree which makes play fairly fast. Certainly one of Reiner's best.
Through the Desert: 8/10 - I'd played this a lot on Ludagora with my BGG buddies, so finally getting to use the real candy camels was a treat. I would consider this game one of the poster children for Euros - fast, easy to teach, simple to play, no randomness or luck involved. Yet another excellent Reiner gem.

Louis will have to wait until next week.

Gone gaming

2005-08-04T22:52:00.000+08:00

Koldie's started a new blog, and he's brought some friends along (including my buddies Mary and Joe). The new boardgaming blog, Gone Gaming, has kicked off with Robert "GROGnads" Wesley and Mary taking the first two turns.

Joe, I dare you to serialize "Fear of Gaming". :)

Paradigm Infinitum, Singapore

2005-08-04T22:19:00.000+08:00

Those of you who read my main blog, Everyday Insight, know that I've been flying in and out of Singapore a lot lately. While all this travel tires me out (Sing is a 3-hour flight, which is a 5 to 6 hour journey from my home to the hotel), it allows me to visit what's perhaps the best-stocked boardgame store in Southeast Asia - Paradigm Infinitum or simply PI.

PI is located at the Midpoint Orchard mall on the well-known Orchard Road. Its proprietor is a friendly fellow named David. The shop carries miniatures, CCGs, roleplaying manuals and boardgames. It's got tables for playing, which are usually occupied by minis. On the boardgame front, David carries a pretty good selection of games from all the major US publishers - Rio Grande, Days of Wonder, Z-Man, Fantasy Flight and Avalon Hill/WOTC/Hasborg. He also has a lot of the niche games from smaller publishers, like the Zombies! line, Lunch Money, Return of the Heroes, and so on.

There are usually people browsing the games on the shelves, and turnover seems to be pretty good. Singapore is lucky to have such a place to shop for games. On this trip (I'm in Sing right now) I picked up Samurai, Through the Desert and Louis XIV. I was looking hard at Tower of Babel and In the Shadow of the Emperor, but ultimately I left them behind. Titus asked me to look out for Shadows over Camelot but it's out of stock (pity, there were copies around last trip).

I hope I don't get the game boxes dinged on the way home.

Ingenious!

2005-08-03T23:31:00.000+08:00

It's been a very lean past two months. I've actually bought more boardgames in that period than the number of games I actually got to play, which is really weak. Oh well, things should pick up in September when I anticipate the New Job to start being kinder. (Although I have to admit that I love my new job.)

Anyway, last Saturday I got to pop over to Frog's. After Nix appeared and dinner was done, we set up Santiago and started to go over the rules. Titus and Mars arrived at that point, and instead of Santiago, we elected to set up Ingenious instead. (My idea; I wanted to try Einfach F2F and I really wasn't feeling up to a negotiation game.) From BSW play, I knew that Einfach would be lighter and less strenuous.

The FFG edition is excellent. Everything's made out of sturdy plastic. The only quibble mone might make would be about the thin boards used for scoring, but that's so minor that it's not worth it.

The rulex explanation took all of five minutes. I attempted by BSW strategy of balanced progression in all colors thoroughout the game. The Frog/George team and the Nix/Mars team both went for INGENIOUS and quickly outdistanced myself and the Titus. The two ouf us were completely shut off from the conglomeration of orange that accumulated early in the game. With very little in the way of orange tiles left, we struggled to catch up. The early leaders, Nix and Mars, found that they had INGENIOUSed all but one color in the homestretch. However, it was that shortage of blue that ultimately cost them the game as I prevented them from scoring that color again. In the end, the Frog/George team won the game.

Frog/George: 12
Nix/Mars: 11-11
Rick: 11-7
Titus: 10

Ingenious is a nice, inoffensive game that is easy to learn and play and is a pleasant way to pass an evening. I don't think that I'd ever look for a game, but it shouldn't take too much to get me to play. I might even call for it once in a while.

Game Night 9 July 2005

2005-07-10T13:21:00.000+08:00

This blog is resurrected via the power of my Blackberry, which is allowing me to post from the Manila airport while waiting for my flight.

I'm going to try to catch up on the events of the past few weeks as downtime allows me to use the BB. For now, I'll just mention last night's gaming which I wasn't around for.

The gang played Taboo thrice! That was out of left field. Annie again asserted her dominance in Taj Mahal, while Greg cleaned up in Puerto Rico. Someone won a game of RA as well. Thanks to Frog for the report.

Over the past couple of days I got back on BSW after a long absence. Gerald showed me the implementations of Einfach Genial (pretty good) and Verflixxt (a bit overdone). Won my first two games of Ingenious, and also won a game of Princes of Florence where we were joined by the always-entertaining Josh Adelson, better known as Mister Cranky.

I'll try to visit Paradigm Infinitum in Singapore this afternoon to see if there' anything new. I hope Louis XIV is in stock.

Wonders of the World

2005-04-09T06:22:00.000+08:00

It had better be good.

Game night – 2 April 2005

2005-04-04T08:39:00.000+08:00

We had planned on playing Traders of Genoa, aka “Divisoria” (we could so retheme ToG for local flavor), but Erik called in sick and we hadn’t asked Titus to bring his copy along, so that game had to be rescheduled. Blame it all on Peking Duck. Get well soon dude, hope to see you and Annie for some tiangge action next week!

I was leaning towards traveling light, but in another effort to get Vinci to the table I decided to bring a second bag. Damned Eurogames big boxes don’t fit into my regular game bag that’s perfect for alea big box games. Packed in Nix’s copy of Evo as well, since that’s not been at the table in ages either. This all allowed me to stick three bigger game into the main bag (Torres, which Titus was asking for, Princes of Florence, which Frog asked for, and the too-big Bluff, which I can’t leave home anymore). Modern Art took the top space usually reserved for Silver Line games, and I tucked a bunch of the card games we’ve been playing so much of lately into the cracks.

After dinner, I brought out Falling since Titus and Nix were around and Javy and Greg hadn’t tried the game yet. Javy found the game’s premise rather silly (hey, it IS silly), but was willing to give the game a shot despite dire warnings from Frog.

Falling [5P]

Greg won the first game, and immediately declared he’d retire from the game undefeated. Oh well, a game can’t appeal to everyone, especially one as unusual as Falling. :) I don’t think Javy was too impressed either.

We had enough personnel for two groups, so after a bit of confusion as to who was playing what, we settled comfortably into a 5/3 split. Javy, George, Nix, Greg and Mog set up for some art gallery action in Modern Art, and Titus got his wish. Frog and I joined him for another playing of Kramer and Kiesling’s best game, the fantastic Torres.

Torres [3P]

Prince Titus was kind enough to set up the King’s Day One accommodations in a central location. This allowed all three Princes to easily deploy a tower guard for His Royal Highness in one turn. This resulted in the King’s Tower having a pretty decent base to build on, so Prince Rick decided to make himself at home. Sir Verdant and Sir Emerald joined Sir Green in guarding the King, with Sir Green ascending to a lofty height of four stories, and Sir Verdant having his back. This gave the forces of Prince Rick control of the King’s Tower. Sir Emerald remained on the ground floor per the King’s command. Prince Frog decided to deploy most of his orange men to the western side of the realm on this first day. Prince Titus remained in the area of the King’s Tower and its surrounding environs. At the end of Day One, the King was pleased as all of his potential heirs had obeyed his command. A feast for all the brave knights!

Frog considers how to get to the King

Torres – Scores after Day One:
Prince Frog – 34
Prince Rick – 39
Prince Titus – 31

Prince Titus had earned the right to escort the King to his new chambers, and decided to house the King in a northeastern tower. Prince Rick dispatched Sir Moss to guard the King in his new quarters. Sir Moss was a slippery one, and despite the efforts of Sir Azure of Prince Titus’s command, Sir Moss made a mighty diagonal leap and landed on the second story of the King’s Tower, fulfilling the King’s command. Prince Frog eventually had Sir Tangerine in a similar position, but it took a bit more effort. Prince Rick continued to have the Royal Builders construct new stories in the former King’s Tower in the eastern reach of the Kingdom, and at the end of the second day, Sir Green was atop a lofty seventh story parapet with a majestic view of the countryside. Sir Sapphire was dispatched by Prince Titus to try to match the achievements of Sir Green, and with the help of the magical Royal Builders, he managed to claw up to the fifth story of the former King’s Tower, which Prince Rick renamed to The Tower of Leaves. The King was pleased once again as all three of the Princes had sent knights to protect His Royal Hide so there was much feasting once again.

Torres – Scores after Day Two:
Prince Titus – 128
Prince Frog – 114
Prince Rick – 127

Prince Frog decided that the King was not safe in the eastern reaches of the Kingdom, so he sent Sir Marmalade to spirit the King away to the southwest. Also, Prince Frog was very concerned that Sir Green and Sir Sapphire were generating too much favor for their Princes, so he pulled a significant number of strings to get Sir Orange into The Tower of Leaves. The valiant Sir Orange was conversant in the secret passages of The Tower of Leaves, having been a stonemason himself, and he found a way to emerge onto the sixth story of the mighty fortress. It was an amazing performance. Sir Sapphire and Sir Green were not idle, and each increased his presence by a story more. Over in the latest King’s Tower, Sir La Salle and Sir Ateneo worked on getting to where the King wanted them to be. They both succeeded spectacularly. Sir La Salle’s maneuver involved cajoling the Royal Builders into uprooting a nearby tower structure and transplanting it into the side of the King’s Tower. Two quickly-built new tower floors later, Sir La Salle was in position per the King’s command. At the end of the day, the reckoning of favor was very close between the mighty, cunning and debonair Princes. The King was pleased with the perfect safety accorded to His Royal Behind, so a sumptuous feast unrivalled in the history of the Kingdom was held. At that feast, the King announced his heir.

Note the huge Tower of Leaves near the top!

Torres – Final Scores:
Prince Frog – 251
Prince Rick – 263
Prince Titus – 258

So it came to pass that Prince Rick was named heir to the throne of the Kingdom. He eventually married Princess Jessica Alba, had many beautiful children and ruled the Kingdom wisely, ushering in a new Golden Age of prosperity.

While the succession of the crown was being contested, the art speculators at the other table had completed all four seasons with the following results:

Modern Art [5P]

Final Scores:
Mog - $511,000
Nix - $428,000
George - $309,000
Javy - $287,000
Greg - $282,000

Javy greedily fingers the cash

Myles walked in as the art galleries were closing their doors for the night. This led to Bluff being brought to the table for six-player lying, cheating and stealing. Deej arrived to fill up the table.

Bluff [6P]
Winner – Myles

Myles displaying his winning "game face"!

During the Torres game, while Frog was struggling with his entrée into the big tower, Titus and I broke out some Brawl decks. Titus was toting his promotional Ting Ting deck, while I decided to try one of the newer characters that we hadn’t seen in action yet. This would be the Catgirl, Nickie.

Brawl [2P]

Nickie is a tricky character to play, running an enormous seven Clears and sporting limited Hits in all three colors. She has a single Reverse and a couple of Doubles, so there’s a bit of sneaky potential, but without any Holds, Presses or Nulls it would be tough against Ting Ting. Ting Ting is a fairly straightforward fighter, dominant in Red, with a bunch of bases, a few clears, a couple of Doubles and her infamous three Wild Blocks. My lack of experience with Nickie showed in the final tally of a race to seven wins.

Nickie wishes she had a better player

Brawl – Final Record:
Ting Ting (4-1-2) d. Nickie (1-4-2)

Frog still wanted to play Princes of Florence. Hey, it’s my favorite German game, but it’s not exactly one that you’d want to start playing at 12:30 am. Titus and Myles begged off since they had to leave shortly (Myles had work at 1:30 am) so with assurances of brisk play, we launched into five-player Prince of Florence as our closer.

In the meantime, Titus and Myles had a few minutes of gaming left, so Titus pulled out the third Cheapass game of the night – the Tom Jolly and James Ernest collaboration Light Speed.

Light Speed [3P]

After all the ships had flopped onto the table from hyperspace, and all the shots had been fired, Myles emerged victorious.

Titus seeing who shot who in Light Speed

The Princes of Florence [5P]

If we were running on fumes at this point, it didn’t show. (Despite the hour, we hadn’t really played anything too taxing yet. Torres is a light, breezy game. It was Brawl that took a lot out of me due to the adrenaline surge.)

It was probably a mistake to allow Deej to take three Builders at reasonable prices early in the game. Another mid-round snafu allowed Nix to pick up a cheap jester. I don’t really know it that was a mistake though, as most of us had just three works left to play (Nix had four) and the jester sold for 600 florin. Or maybe we just screwed up at one in the morning. I’d managed to get a jester and a builder, and with four works and eight actions I was resigned to a one-building, one-work pattern for the rest of the game. I scored a Prestige that gave me 7PP for a jester, a builder and two landscapes, easy enough, but two other Prestige Cards that may have been useful to me later I buried in a fit of paranoia. That burned me later when I won another 200 florin Prestige Card and drew nothing but dreck. Stupid. Deej was happily filling up his Palazzo, and he also managed to pick up a Recruiter, giving him five available works. If he managed to get them all off he’d be in a great position. Nix was building up infrastructure to fire off his final four works, and eventually assembled four jesters.

When you have to pay 1,000 florin for a forest, all you can do is laugh

The pivotal play came in the turn six auction, where I needed a forest for my last two works to make the minimum, and to add power to my remaining Bonus Card. Frog picked a lake to auction off, and George bid on it. This stunned the table, but George was later revealed to be holding a Bonus card powered by lakes, besides not having any other landscapes so the lakes were the only thing that provided incremental prestige. Anyway, Frog bailed on the lake with much muttering, and picked a forest. Ack. So I bid on it and the whole table erupts in disbelief. The hell can I do, it’ll wreck my final two turns if I don’t get it. Frog bid it up to 1,000 florin and I’m forced to bail. So much for those plans. I still get my round six work off, but net three prestige less than I planned from it.

In the turn seven auction, I’m forced to go for the forest again, and George goes for a third lake for reasons already stated. We both win the landscapes, breaking Frog’s All Three Landscapes prestige card and reducing the power of a couple of his bonus cards. With all that carnage, the race for fame was down to Nix and Deej.

The Princes of Florence – Final Scores:
Deej – 58 (Most builders)
Rick – 54 (1 jester + 1 builder + 2 landscapes)
Frog – 40 (Most forests)
Nix – 56
George – 35

I whiffed on that second prestige, and it was pretty awful since I had zero chances to fulfill any of the five cards I drew. I sucked even more because the last two cards I drew were two top two I returned earlier. If I didn’t bury the other two, I’d have drawn them and gotten a card with a condition that I eventually completed (2 large buildings). Ah, well. Such is the story of a five player Princes of Florence game, which ended past 2 am and clocked in just over 90 minutes.
I still didn’t get Vinci to the table, sadly. Frog is going to take a look at A Game of Thrones to see if it’s something he’d like to play next weekend. I want another go at Princes. And a go at Vinci. We’ll see what turns up.

Review - Roberto Fraga's Dragon Delta

2005-04-04T08:21:00.000+08:00

In Vietnam, a traditional rite of passage has young men crossing the Mekong Delta. This is a race, and the first one to get to the opposite side wins. Unfortunately, something happened on the way from Europe to North America, and the Mekong Delta became the Dragon Delta, and now there’s some sort of dragon living in the water.

Dragon Delta is a game by Roberto Fraga, published by Eurogames. It comes in the standard Eurogames square box. The nice linen box is filled with mostly air, with the usual cardboard insert dominating the middle of the box. The nice, four-fold board is linen-finished with vibrant colors. The player pawns and flat, circular grey ‘stones’ are made of wood. The ‘planks’ are made of thick cardboard. Finally, the game comes with some smallish command cards for the players. On the whole, the package is very nice.

The Game

Dragon Delta is a programmed race game. Players choose five cards each turn, and then execute the commands one at a time in player order. The first player to reach the island opposite his starting position wins.

There are six islands placed around the edges of the game board. Each player starts on his own island, and his target island lies across a body of water that has several little outcroppings of ground scattered around it. The player needs to make his way across.

To do that, he has to place stones on the islands to serve as anchoring points for his planks. Then, he has to lay a plank of sufficient length to get from his starting island to the first stone, and then to the succeeding stones. The other players do the same until there is a veritable web of planks spanning the delta.

All of this work is accomplished by each player choosing commands from a set of personal cards. Players have cards to place stones (2), place planks (2), move their player pawn (3), remove a stone or plank (1), and nullify the actions of other players (5). From this set of 13 cards (assuming a six-player game), each player chooses five cards and lays them face down in front of him, in the order he wants them executed. Thus there are five rounds of actions per turn. Once all players are ready, the starting player flips open his first card and executes that action. Then the second player follows, until all players have executed their first action. The start player then does his second action, and the other players follow. This continues until all the players have executed their five actions. The start player pawn then passes to the next player, and the choosing of five cards is repeated.

Five of each player’s cards are colored dragons, the dragons matching the colors of the other players. If a player plays a dragon, he nullifies the action of the corresponding player for that round. A player can only play one dragon per turn.

When a player places a stone, that stone may no longer be moved unless it is removed by an action card. The stone may not be removed if there is a plank anchored on it. One of the small outcroppings may only support one stone.

Each player has six planks or differing lengths. When playing a plank, he must choose one of the planks in his supply and play it onto the supporting stones without pre-measurement. If it’s not long enough, then the plank may not be played in that spot. The player must find another place to play the plank or lose the plank. One stone can only support up to three planks. When placing a plank, it should be placed flat on the stone “when possible”.

One of the command cards allows a player to take a plank. He may take a plank of any color, as long as he only has one of each length of plank, and he cannot have more than two colors of planks (including his own) in his supply. He also cannot take a plank if there’s a pawn on it.

When moving, a player must fulfill the move indicated by his played card. If his is unable to do so for any reason, he falls into the water and must return to his start island and try again. I don’t know why the dragon, which eats any s that fall into the water, won’t eat the player.

The first player to get to his target island wins the game.

Strategy

Dragon Delta is supposedly a game of bluff and doublethink. With so much chaos, it’s nigh impossible get any kind of results from planning. Strategy? Just getting your first two actions in a turn to work the way you envisioned is a Sisyphian task.

Reviewer’s Tilt

First off, the theme of the game is really strange. You’re young men racing to get across the delta, right? How then are you able to place stones anywhere on the board? How do your guys take a plank from across the board? And how do you happen to be carrying six planks on your back? Finally, there must be some sort of magic involved somewhere, as it is not clear how these young men cancel each others’ actions. Do they chuck pastrami sandwiches at each other, which they can’t avoid eating due to the strain of carrying six planks around?

On to the mechanisms. Dragon Delta has some interesting ideas applied to the “programmed action” mechanism. Unfortunately, some of them just don’t work.

The first and most glaring is the dexterity “sub-game” of placing planks on stones. Since no one wants to lose a plank, players tend to choose long planks to anchor on the stones. Three ends of overly-long planks anchored on a stone tend to result in the topmost plank end falling off the stone at the slightest bump, upsetting a section of the board (especially if there was a pawn standing on that plank). Even worse, if someone plays the “remove plank” action and tries to take the bottom-most plank on a stone, there’s no way to do it without wrecking a whole section of the board. Imagine a plank that’s at the bottom of a stack of three plank-ends on both anchoring stones. How the heck are you supposed to take the plank without devastating that section of the board?

The plank idea is interesting, but the execution is a failure.

Then we have the programming. Five actions per turn is too much. Most other programming games stick to three actions. There’s a reason for that. Choosing blind actions takes a bit of guesswork. The first guess has a reasonable chance of being successful. Each succeeding guess built on the first has a lower probability of doing something productive or expected. By the time the third guess comes around, the board will look nothing like anyone planned on unless they were very lucky. The fourth and fifth actions are akin to sewage thrown at a ceiling fan – no one has any idea where it’s going to end up. All you know is that there is a high probability of random stinkage.

There’s also the element of directed “take that”. The null cards are another interesting idea, but in a game that’s already chaotic, they’re an unnecessary injection of direct screwage that makes the entire game a total schmozz. With up to five other players to screw, and five different actions to choose from to screw, and up to five other players who can choose to screw you, there’s just no way to use the null cards productively unless there’s a player that’s one step away from winning. By then, the game’s already in the toilet.

What eventually happens is that players take the first two turns to place stones and planks, and maybe move a space or two. Some players will start using the null cards just because they like the screwage. After two turns, the board is a mess of planks which tend to topple over. Come the third turn, players pour on movement, nulls and plank removal randomly, hoping that when their turn to move comes around they’ll be able to go somewhere in the general direction of their target island. The players have to tolerate repeatedly fixing up the board after some planks are removed. Some players fall into the drink, so move a bit, some move a lot. However, there’s no difference between the results of the guy who takes fifteen minutes to plan his sequence of moves, and the guy who chooses his actions randomly. If that’s the case then what’s the point? Everyone just choose some random non-plank, non-stone actions and let’s see the results. Better yet, let’s just play something else.

In the end, Dragon Delta is a pointless exercise. I don’t mind light games with doses of luck, chaos and screwage, but this game has too much of everything. It’s not even relatively short or light! There’s no satisfaction in winning since you know it isn’t due to anything you did in particular. It just ended up that way. Dragon Delta, sadly, just does not work.

Game Night – 25 March 2005

2005-04-02T16:09:00.000+08:00

Javy was around for this session, an occurrence that’s been in far short supply these days. It was good to have him aboard. Also joining us for the first time was George’s sister Mira. Always nice to have someone new to indoctrinate into the hobby!

With the personages assembled, I took the opportunity to haul Frog and George’s criminally underplayed copy of Pueblo off their shelf. Javy, George and I enjoy this game, and Nix wanted to try it after watching the game last Thursday. We elected to not use the always-entertaining Sacred Burial Grounds with two people new to the game. George signed up as Mira’s adviser, and play began.

Pueblo [4P]

I was feeling creative, so I attempted an unusual tactic. I had played a colored block near a corner, and that spot had some space left, enough to accommodate a couple more blocks. I decided to “waste” my next neutral block, leaving me space to cover my colored block with another of my own colored blocks, in an attempt to stay grounded as long as possible.

Not only was it a bad idea, but my timing was off and the other three players gleefully pounded that corner of mine with the Shaman. The old coot thwacked me with sixteen points of Shame in the first four turns of the game, making my task very difficult indeed.

It didn’t help that the other players were handling the game very well. Javy, who holds the record for worst Pueblo score EVER (it was something like 108 Shame, if I recall correctly), was doing very well. The sisters were pristine at this point, and Nix only had 4.

I managed to hold off any more damage until the Shaman came around, building into the cracks and creases that the others were leaving. It wasn’t much. This was the toughest game of Pueblo I’d played yet. After a couple more turns the score was 10-5-10-19, with Javy leading. The Shaman eventually made his way all around again to Rick’s Folly, and the other builders (damn them) stuck me with another 7 Shame. Aaaaah! At the end of the main building proper, Javy was leading the way.

Pueblo – Scores before Final Inspection
George/Mira – 18
Javy – 9
Nix – 19
Rick – 26

My only consolation was that other than Rick’s Folly, the rest of my building blocks were decently hidden. There were spots here and there, but I’d hopefully make up some ground. Shows you what I know about this game.

Pueblo – Final Scores
George/Mira – 38
Javy – 26
Nix – 36
Rick – 44

So Javy finally wins one, and a very nice win at that, while I lose my first game of Pueblo ever, coming in dead last. I hate this game, and I can’t wait to play again. It’s brilliant. But next time, we play with the Sacred Burial Grounds, hmmm? Stupid old coot hasn’t heard the last of THIS Master Builder.

Pueblo took less than an hour. Since Javy couldn’t stay a lot longer, we pulled his second most favorite game, Puerto Rico, off the shelf for a quick 5P game.

Puerto Rico [5P]

Seating: Nix, Rick, George, Javy, Frog

Ahhhh… second seat. Oh well. This installment of our ongoing Puerto Rico Wars wasn’t good for me. Not only did I get second seat, but my initial cash crop investment in Tobacco was headed off by both Frog and George, forcing me to switch strategies. In a fit of insanity, I took the Settler three times in the next five turns, piling up a bunch of quarries. Nix, who had invested early in a construction hut and a hacienda, made the most of it and ended up with four quarries himself. Of course, the other three people had all the goods. If we misplayed this, we’d get whacked with the shipping stick and it wouldn’t be pretty.

Nix eventually compiled all five goods via the hacienda, and got a factory out early courtesy of his quarries. I took a harbor, as did George who had the only other quarry. Javy built an office to leverage his coffee plantations. Frog was already shipping a lot early via corn, and ended up investing in a wharf to keep that going. It became a race, Nix and I attempting to build out as fast as possible while shipping a bit, and the others trying to get as many goods out as possible before the game ended.

The pivotal play came in what turned out to be the next to last turn. Frog had the opportunity to end the game via slave exhaustion (due no doubt to my settler frenzy and building boom) but chose not to, trying to get one more shipping round off on Nix. Nix had a strong position, having built both the residence (good) I had the fortress, and Javy had the Guild Hall. In the final turn, Javy took the Mayor early, to prevent any large buildings built that turn from getting manned. Nix built city hall, Javy and I built hospices, which eliMirated all the buildings that Frog could afford. With one final round of shipping done, the scores were tallied…

Puerto Rico – Final Scores (Shipping+City+Bonus):
Nix: 7+22+7 = 36
Rick: 11+19+5 = 35
Javy: 17+17+6=40
Frog: 26+13+0=39
George: 20+14+0=34

If Frog had gotten a hospice, he would have won. If he had ended the game the turn earlier, he also would have won. Nix wasn’t in the running after all, due to pathetic shipping. Javy took the win with a nice, balanced approach. Great game, the best we’ve played in quite a while. I still prefer 4P to 5P PR, but sometimes 5P produces really good, tight, nerve-wracking games.

Javy took off after the game, and we settled down for some dinner. Mikko joined us at this point. When the plates were taken care of and the huge tub of Blue Bunny was put away for the next week, we turned to some lighter games.

Falling [6P]

Nix took on the task of teaching the group James Ernest’s Falling, a really fun real-time game. Having played before, I was at an advantage, moving the Hits and Splits off of me to the newbies while stockpiling the Skips and Extras. As usual, the game didn’t last long, and we all hit the ground. I hit the ground last, giving me the “win”.

We played a second game, and this time Frog got the win. He hated the game though, so we chose a more traditional game next.

Mamma Mia [5P]

Nix again took on the task of teaching the game to Mira, who was the only one who was new to the game. I’ve got a really crappy memory, so when I play Mamma Mia I resort to hand management and short-term recall of what the last two players threw in. If a lot of recipes go into the deck, I’m usually screwed. As was the case here. Lots of recipes into the oven, really bad luck with the ingredients in hand, and the result is predictable:

Mamma Mia – First Round Scores:
Frog – 3
Rick – 0
Mira – 2
George – 2
Mikko – 3

The second round was no better for me, and Mikko lost his timing, resulting in him having no recipes played into the oven. Man, if there’s a recipe for sucking at Mamma Mia, that’s it.  However, I still had no complete recipes, so who am I to talk?

Mamma Mia – Second Round Scores:
Frog – 4
Rick – 0
Mira – 3
George – 3
Mikko – 3

To end the second round, only mushrooms were left in the oven. Six of them. Mikko had drawn the Mamma Mia card, so he took advantage and converted his Minimale. I ws next, so there was just enough of the Shrooms for me to complete my own Minimale. That avoided the shutout! Actually, I did ok in the last round, making up some ground. We couldn’t beat Frog though, since he had a good memory and was actually trying to remember everything that went into the over.

Mamma Mia – Final Scores:
Frog – 6
Rick – 4 (all in the last round!)
Mira – 4
George – 3
Mikko – 3

That took around 45 minutes, so we launched into another filler, this time a bit more stupid. Boy, we didn’t know the half of it.

Give Me the Brain [6P]

This is one of Nix’s and Tala’s favorite fillers. It’s got a fun theme, but the mechanisms of this game are fairly unstable, as this game demonstrated.

Nix explained the game for around five minutes. Ok, no problem (I had played before). So, we deal the cards. Then we bid. Nix wins the bid. He takes the brain. He plays Work Sucks, discarding his whole hand and drawing four new cards. He also fails the skill roll for Work Sucks, dropping the brain. We bid again. Nix wins control of the brain again (remember he dropped it so the 1-4 cards are 31s for him). He plays a one-hand brain job. He fails the skill roll, dropping the brain again. We bid again, and he wins yet again. He plays his last job. Game over.

Give Me the Brain
Winner – Nix, with no one else getting to do anything

I seriously doubt that we’re going to see Give Me the Brain again anytime soon. Sorry Tala.

In an effort to actually play a game where people got to do stuff before it was over, I brought out Bohnanza, which I had stuck in my bag for some reason that I no longer remember. It’s been a while since we played the bean game, and a lot of the folks at the table had never played (I think it was just me, Frog and Mikko that had played before).

Bohnanza [6P]

I actually find Bohnanza inoffensive, pleasant and just a bit boring. It’s better if everyone plays fast. Good thing that people caught on pretty fast, and the game proceeded briskly. People were harvesting beans a bit too early though, and more people bought the third bean fields than I would have expected.

I was in a color mood, nursing red, black-eyed and blue beans for most of the game, but made four gold from a nice full wax bean plantation. As is usual I don’t buy the third bean field. Nix compiled an impressive coffee plantation, perhaps leftovers from that Puerto Rico game. Mikko was in the running with green beans and chili beans.

There was a decent amount of donations since people had different plantations (six is probably the best number of players for Bohnanza), and the trading was brisk.

Bohnanza – Final Scores:
Frog – 7
George – 8
Mira – 6
Nix – 11 (4 cards)
Mikko – 11 (3 cards)
Rick – 7

Ooh, nice tiebreaker win by Nix. Bohnanza will never be a favorite of mine due to its languid pace and a tendency for players to lose focus, but at least it goes quickly. God forbid we ever add any expansions into this game. It’ll see some action a couple of times a year maybe, when we need a change of pace, or there are lots of newbies.

George took Mira home, so Frog and Mikko paired up to play the A Game of Thrones CCG. I pulled out its sister, the Call of Cthulhu CCG to play with Nix. He had the Mythos, I had the Investigators.

The Call of Cthulhu CCG [2P]

I had a pretty decent draw, expanding to four domains and drawing the Miskatonic Library early. This allowed me to get the tomes from the deck, giving an additional way to put early points on the stories. As usual, the Mythos deck was slow out of the gate, but was spitting out resources. My humans did well early, even getting some help from a Government Task Force while investigating certain rumors.

That was until some calamity occurred at the investigation site, and all hands working on that story were lost. (Nix played The Great Old One Rises – ouch). The Mythos deck had enough resources by then to bring in a couple of Shoggoths to augment the two cultists. I took a shotgun to the cultist named Tim, preventing him from murdering any more scholars and cops, but it was too late. The cultists eventually succeeded in summoning The King in Yellow, and with the Mythos ahead two stories to one, it was a lost cause.

I’m considering removing The Great Old One Rises from the Mythos deck, as it has the potential to completely ruin the day of the investigators. Maybe in a few more plays, if it keeps being the gamebreaker.

George had returned by then, so we played one more game as a closer.

Paris Paris [3P]

We’ve been enjoying Paris Paris a lot lately, having played it around six times in the last two weeks. It’s a perfect mediumweight game, requiring a bit of thought and planning, some spatial visualization, and it’s got just a bit of luck at the end. Not bad, it’s the best Michael Schacht game I’ve played.

The game was pretty even early on, with all three of us jockeying for business sites at the intersections. I had the blue special tour tile, but was struggling to maintain a position there due to the tile draws, so I had to diversify as best as I could. Nix was doing very well, spreading out and getting great results from the small tours due to great timing. With five stacks to go, the scores were very close 18-18-17, with George behind by just a tick. The grand tour display was full though, so several grand tours culMirated the main part of the game.

Paris Paris – Scores before Special Tours:
George – 32
Nix – 39
Rick – 36

We revealed our special tour tiles, and I got hosed. Not only was I unable to get a foothold in my own blue line, the other two lines I was into heavily, green and orange, were not going to have special tours. Ouch.

Paris Paris – Scores after Special Tours:
George – 50
Nix – 61
Rick – 43

We doubted that the bag bonus would help George catch Nix, and it turned out that Nix and I were tied with 5 houses in the bag, with George having 4. Nix wins.

Review - Eric Lang's The Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game

2005-03-31T20:44:00.000+08:00

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange æons, even death may die"

Welcome my child. You seek the secrets of the Great Old Ones?

You play with fire.

But, ‘tis not my place to judge your desires, but simply to enable them. Your journey will take you into the dark depths of the shadows, where Things That Should Not Be lurk, and your very perception of reality will be challenged. Some already know of the Dwellers on the Dark, and are striving to uncover the secrets as we speak. Other have already stared at the maw of horror. There are those that have gone mad. There are those that have taken a shotgun and emptied it into that which they do not understand, with varying results.

Of course, there are those who choose to worship the Things That Should Not Be. They will oppose you at every turn, with the power granted to them by the Great Old Ones.

Should you still wish to learn of matter that will eventually drive you to the brink of insanity, follow me.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

There are normally two ways into the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The first and most common way is through his stories, which have been published in many compendiums. The stories have also served as influences for many latter day horror fiction authors. The most famous of these works are “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and of course “The Call of Cthulhu.” The other entry point to Lovecraftian horror is the classic roleplaying game The Call of Cthulhu, published by Chaosium (a variation on the game was published later by Wizards of the Coast).

Since this isn’t a literary or RPG review, I’ll just try to impart the flavor of Lovecraftian horror, so that the game makes more sense a bit later on. To readers who have stronger grounding in the source material, my apologies if I gloss over facts and generalize a bit too much. There’s so much to the Cthulhu Mythos that it’s not possible to do it justice in a game review.

Earth, in the Lovecraftian universe, is not alone. Great star-spanning races exist, both far in Earth’s past and far into Earth’s future. We Earthlings are largely unaware of these beings. At some point in the past, several of these beings decided to come to Earth. They stayed a while, ruled over the planet, and eventually lost their ability to traverse space and time. Wars were waged between these beings for supremacy, until they did each other in. They weren’t all destroyed though, just put out of commission for a while.

The time is the 1920s. Strange things are happening in the fringes, the kind of things you read about in tabloids and whisper about when discussing conspiracy theories. Some people actually have to deal with these things in the course of their work. You know the types – cops and feds with weird cases on their hands, journalists chasing down a story that just feels wrong, criminals looking for an edge, scholars draws by knowledge of the strange and otherworldly and regular people who are just too nosy for their own good. These people ask too many questions which lead to answers which usually only raise more questions. Sometimes, they find an answer.

The answers can be as simple as strange cults with strange practices doing strange things. They can be musty old tomes written in spidery languages which seem to mean absolutely nothing. Or, the answers can say that there are godlike beings on earth, sleeping, and their servants are trying to wake them up so that they can take over the world.

The theme of The Call of Cthulhu is that of a shattered reality. When Occam’s Razor says that the answer is something that doesn’t mesh with what we accept to be reality, people go insane. Horror isn’t the dead rising to eat your brains, or ghosts haunting a mansion, or inhuman monsters terrorizing a town (though those can certainly be part of the big picture). Horror is realizing that what you knew to be isn’t.

The Call of Cthulhu CCG (CoCCCG) is published by Fantasy Flight Games. As of this writing, it has a base set, called the Arkham Edition, composed of 290 cards. It also has two expansions out – Unspeakable Tales, and the new Forbidden Relics. A second edition, called the Eldritch Edition, has been announced.

The game, like most CCGs comes in starters and boosters. There are two flavors of starters, the Mythos Deck and the Investigators Deck. Each starter consists of a set of fixed cards, some of which are required to play the game, and a set of random cards. The Mythos Deck is essentially a “bad guys” deck, composed of cards loyal to two of the Lovecraftian gods, Hastur and Cthulhu himself (itself?). The Investigators Deck has cards representing the “good guys,” the scholars and mystics of the Miskatonic University, and the gun-toting members and allies of the Blackwood Detective Agency. (This being Lovecraft, “bad” and “good” is relative.) The boosters contain 11 random cards.

The art is, well, remarkable, and is what led me to investigate this game. I’ve seen a LOT of CCGs over the years, with all sorts of themes. I haven’t seen anything better than the art of CoCCCG. It’s times like this when I wish that cards had more space for art, because some of the pieces are, well, insanely fantastic. Many are Lovecraftian pieces, of course, so by and large they’re equal parts creepy, spooky, dark and gloomy. Predictably, the Mythos cards have the more memorable art. The rest of the graphic design on the cards is very good, if slightly busy. The text is readable, and some cards have quotes from HPL’s works. The cards themselves are of good quality. They’re reasonably thick, smooth and shuffle well. Still, an investment in a good set of card sleeves is a good idea if you plan to play with them. Or you can just stick them in a binder and admire the art.

The rules that come with the Starters are functional, but I’d recommend getting the latest update from the FFG website. There are some clarifications and restatements that will help you follow the game flow.

Overall, the looks of CoCCCG represent a top-notch job from the folks at Fantasy Flight.

The Game

In CoCCCG, a player represents one or more factions that are vying for control over certain stories. The first player to take control of three stories wins the game.

There are seven “factions” in CoCCCG. Four of them are Mythos factions, representing four of the Great Old Ones – Hastur the Unspeakable, Yog-Sothoth the Keeper of the Gates, Shub-Niggurath the All-Mother, and of course Great Cthulhu. The other three factions are the humans – Miskatonic University (scholars and mystics, including some well-known Lovecraft characters), the Blackwood Detective Agency (mostly lawmen, investigators and journalists), and The Syndicate (criminals). The catch is that none of these factions need be allied one way or another. Thematically, it works. You can make a “corrupted cops” combo using Blackwood and Cthulhu, or “scholars who sold their sanity for knowledge” by putting Miskatonic into a deck with Hastur, and so on. The Mythos Deck out of the box is rather strange, since Cthulhu and Hastur aren’t the best of buddies, but I guess it’s possible for their minions to work in the same direction without actually being friendly.

The Story Cards are the object of the game. The players are trying to take control of these cards by sending their minions to “work” on the story. Stories are drawn from a shared deck of ten, and there are three in play at any time. Once a player wins a story, it is replaced by a new one. Each Story also has a game effect once claimed by a player; the player who claims it decides if the effect goes off or not. Once a player claims his third story, he wins the game. Stories have really nice art, and some of them take the titles of Lovecraft stories or settings, like The Innsmouth Threat and The Terror out of Dunwich.

CoCCCG’s resource system is interesting. A Starter comes with three Domain Cards, which each depict a third of one of the pieces of art on the Story Cards. Players take cards from their hand, flip them upside-down and stick them under the Domain Cards. For each card under a Domain, it provides one resource point. You “exhaust” the Domain, generating an amount of resources equal to the cards underneath that domain, and you can use those resources to play ONE card with a cost equal to or less than the generated resources. So, theoretically, unless you somehow create more Domains, you can only play three cards per turn. (Yes, there are ways to get more Domains.)

So, since your cards in hand are both your source of resources, and they’re the things that you play, there’s always the tough decision of putting down more resources for speed, or holding back for more options. A player only draws two cards a turn under normal circumstances, so there’s a card crunch all the time. It’s both a deck construction and a game play dilemma that players have to resolve.

There are three kinds of cards to play. Characters are the most important ones, and can be anything from a lowly filing clerk and a street thug, to the renowned Professor Armitage and Great Cthulhu. Support cards are the catch-all for things that stay on the board, and can be things that characters use (guns), places, arcane spells, curses and anything in between. Finally, Events are usually one-shot deals with all kinds of effects.

The Story Phase is where the action is. Players assign characters to engage stories. Their opponents also assign characters to oppose the active player’s minions within the story. Once the characters have been placed in the story, a set of four “struggles” is triggered. Struggles are resolved with icons; each character might have one or more of them, and support and event cards can also grant them or take them away. It’s pretty simple – the side with more of a type of icon wins that struggle. Ties indicate no winner.

I’ll go over them because I think they’re fun. The Terror Struggle is when characters meet things that challenge their sanity. The side that loses has one character go insane. Then there’s the Martial Struggle, where the sides duke it out with guns, claws and tentacles. One character on the losing side takes a wound. Most characters can only take one wound before expiring. Then, it’s on to the Arcane Struggle. The winner of the Arcane Struggle gets to untap one of his characters (characters tap when they engage a story). Finally, the Investigative Struggle occurs. The winner gets a story point. When that’s all over, the two sides add the total Skill (each character has a Skill rating) of their characters that are still active at the Story. If the active player’s Skill is equal to or higher than the defender, he gets a Story Point. If the defender has no characters left defending at this point, an additional Story Point is awarded. Five Story Points means that the story is won by that player.

Play then passes to the other player, who untaps everything on his side, gets a character back from the loony bin if he had any insane characters, and takes his turn.

Since this is a CCG, expect that gameplay can be modified by all sorts of cards.

Strategy

I won’t go into this too much since I’ve only played with a limited number of the 600+ cardset currently on the market. However, it’s clear that each faction has its strengths, and pairing different factions together creates different dynamics. The out of the box Investigator combo of Miskatonic and Blackwood produces a fast deck of lowish-skill characters with good martial skills and good investigative skills. Their out-of-the-box opponents serving Hastur and Cthulhu are heavy on the scary (terror icons out the wazoo), decent on the martial but not so hot on much else. They’re also slower, but they have some scary heavy hitting Mythos creatures that the humans will have trouble dealing with.

The basic CoCCCG game is a creature battle, with the humans trying to solve stories quickly before the ugly critters appear. Once they do appear, the humans have to be sneaky and get around the scaries without going nuts. Hopefully, they’ll have gained one or two stories by then, with enough of a lead on the balance they need that a couple of snipes and stealthy plays will get them the last story points to win.

The Mythos side has to hold out long enough by interposing cannon fodder into the way of the humans until able to summon the creepy-crawlies. Once older Deep Ones, Byakhees and Shoggoths start showing up at stories to drive the humans batty, it’s only a matter of time until the Mythos wins on sheer terror.

Again, since this is a CCG, there will be all sorts of combos and deck strategies available if you’re the kind of person that’s able and willing to spend on a CCG for power or completeness. As more expansions appear, more strategies will become available.

Reviewer’s Tilt

I guess the best compliment you can give a CCG is to spend money on it. CoCCCG is the first CCG I’ve spent significant cash on since Magic: the Gathering and I’d say that that’s a pretty good compliment.

CoCCCG is not a simple game, a fast game or an elegant game. It’s got a lot of moving parts, a lot of icons, and a lot of text effects even in its simplest out-of-the-box configuration. It feels clunky when you play it. Strangely, the clunkiness feels right for a Lovecraftian game, sort of like how the Chaosium Call of Cthulhu RPG feels. Neither game is the pinnacle of engineering as far as their genre goes, but they fit their niche just right.

I would consider CoCCCG as innovative, and most importantly, flavorful. The battle over stories is a great thematic element. The individual struggles are also a great thematic element. I enjoy the order in which they occur. After all, you have to maintain your sanity in order to shoot straight, you have to survive the combat before you can cast a spell, and you only get time to breathe and investigate after everything else.

Like many CCGs early in their card universe development, I’d expect that some balance issues would occur. CoCCCG has some of the benefit from following its older sibling, the A Game of Thrones CCG, and applying lessons learned (such as the huge “costless Events” problem). However I don’t think you’ll encounter these problems at a “casual player” investment level. You don’t even have to go by conventional deckbuilding wisdom. I’ve been enjoying playing my clunky “crazy dirty cops” deck featuring Hastur, Blackwood and the Syndicate. It’s slow, it doesn’t win a lot, but driving opposing characters nuts then blowing them away with firepower supported by dirty money is loads of fun.

If you’re a Lovecraft fan, you’ve got to at least check this game out, if only for the artwork on the cards. You can’t go wrong by getting just the two Starters; they’re playable out of the box. If you like good CCGs, then this is also a good one to look at if only for its thematic gameplay. Finally, yes, this is a collectible card game. If you dislike the concept in principle, then this isn't for you. If all you want is a fun Cthulhu Mythos game with great flavor, beautiful art and interesting gameplay, you might want to consider a couple of CoCCCG Starters.

Review - Michael Schacht's Paris Paris

2005-03-28T18:30:00.000+08:00

If I got to take a European vacation, Paris would definitely be on my list. I’m sure it would be on the dream vacation list of many other people that don’t live in France or the nearby EU countries. Until I can save up enough cash for a month in Europe, I’ll have to visit Paris by playing games on the Parisian city map.

Successful retail operations need good locations to thrive. Businesses catering to tourists need to be along the routes where tourists travel, which mean bus stops. Michael Schacht’s game Paris Paris is about putting up businesses where tourists frequent. You can’t make money unless you’re where your market is. The more they see of you, the more they’ll be likely to walk into your premises and spend their Euros or pull out the plastic.

Paris Paris is published by Abacus Spiele and Rio Grande Games. It’s a pretty package, with a linen-finished two-fold board depicting the city of Paris and its five bus routes. The bus stop tiles are also linen finished, and are pleasantly thick. The game even has a little stand-up bus for use as a starting player marker and a scoring guide. The package has a black cloth bag, and 80 wooden houses in four colors. The yellow and unpainted houses can be a bit difficult to differentiate under some lighting conditions; I wish they’d used brighter colors. Finally, there are five largish, oval-shaped, somewhat overproduced “secret bus route tiles”. All in all it’s a very nice product. I just wish that they’d made the board four-fold to reduce the game box’s footprint by 50%. Half the box is air, filled in with a cardboard insert. Yes, it’s a small quibble.

The Game

The players are Parisian business owners trying to grab as much profit as possible from the tourists who visit their fair city. The player who makes the most money by setting up businesses where the tourists are wins the game.

Players prepare for the game by randomly placing the 60 bus stop tiles into stacks. A stack has one more tile than there are players. Once the stacking is done, players each draw a “secret bus route tile” and keep that to themselves.

Bus stop tiles are one of five colors, the color representing the bus route that the stop lies on. Stops at intersections may appear tiles of different colors, since they lie on more than one route.

In a turn, one stack of tiles will be revealed and the tiles placed on the map points corresponding to their stop names. Beginning with the start player, each player selects one of the tiles in turn. At that stop, the player will open a business, placing one of his houses. If the location already has the maximum businesses allowed (two for intersections, one for all others), the player selects one business to displace. The displaced business goes into the cloth bag.

Once each player has claimed a tile and placed a business, one unclaimed tile will remain. At that stop, a “small tour” will occur and tourists will spend money.

If a player has a business at that stop, he earns one point. If there is no business at that stop, the closest stop with a business will be the one where the tourists go. If more than one business is of equal distance to the original stop, all of them earn a point.

Then, the tile is placed in the “grand tour display”. It will remain there until a second tile of the same color is placed in the display. The start player bus is passed to the left, and the new start player selects a new stack of tiles to place on the board.

Play continues until a second tile of the same color is placed in the grand tour display. Once that happens, a grand tour occurs on that bus route. Tourists go on a spending spree all along that line, concentrated at the intersections.

The start player takes the bus token and places it at the beginning of the line. He then drives the bus along the line, and stops at the first intersection. Any players with businesses at that stop earn one point, and an additional point for each business that they have at stops adjacent to that intersection. The bus continues the grand tour down the line, stopping at every intersection to disgorge tourists and score points for the business owners along the line.

Once the grand tour is completed, the two matching colored tiles are removed from the grand tour display and play continues. The game ends when all the stacks of tiles have been used.

At game end, two special scoring events occur. First, an additional “special grand tour” occurs on each of the lines indicated by the “secret bus route tiles” drawn by the players at the beginning of the game. These work the same way as the regular grand tour. Finally, the businesses in the cloth bag are revealed. If one player has more businesses in the bag than any other player, he gets a bonus to his score equal to the number of his houses in the bag.

The player with the most points after all of that is the most successful business owner, and wins the game!

Strategy

Paris Paris is played on two fronts, the map and the tiles.

On the map, forming networks of adjacent businesses is critical. Of particular note are adjacent intersections. These positions score their businesses twice on the same tour if they are on the same line. In the same vein, it is important to break up your opponents’ networks at adjacent intersections whenever possible.

While you try to select the tiles that give you an advantage on the map, you also need to watch the tiles that lead to grand tours. Many times, you will have the decision of allowing a grand tour which is not favorable for you, but will give you an advantage in future grand tours, as against denying a grand tour now but giving up board position. You also can’t forget that the unselected tile scores the business at that point or adjacent ones if that point is empty. It’s a point here and there, but it adds up.

The bit of luck in the game comes from the secret special tour tiles. A second scoring of a strong bus route can mean victory or defeat, especially in the two and three player game where only three of the five bus routes will get a special grand tour. If it bothers you, you can dispense with the special tours, or make them public knowledge at the beginning of the game. Either way works fine in producing a luckless, heavier variant of the game.

Finally, the “ejected businesses” scoring can be significant if you’re not paying attention.

Reviewer’s Tilt

The first time I played Paris Paris on Brettspielwelt, I disliked the game. It seemed too simple, too sanguine, and quite random. Months later I got to play the game face to face with my game group, who played it viciously. That unlocked the appeal of the game for me, and now I consider it to be an excellent 30- to 45-minute light-medium weight game. There are tough decisions, especially when it comes to denying scoring to other players or building your own network for future bus tours. Despite that, the game plays quickly. I attribute it to being a very visual exercise. Tracing the bus routes with your eyes can tell you rapidly which players a grand tour along that line would benefit most.

Paris Paris plays very well with two to four players. I like the game with four because of the competition to establish the business network. There is much more control with three, but networks are easier since you can have two businesses at each intersection. The game is weakest but still pretty good with two, becoming a relaxing game of optimization (the “ejected business” scoring is dispensed with in this mode).

By the way, this isn’t an area majority game as you may have read in some places. Players generally end up with similar numbers of businesses on the map, since you all get the same number of turns. Only business displacement will change that mix. It shares more in common with Power Grid’s city connections and Taj Mahal’s political power networks than it does with any element of the vastly inferior Web of Power.

If you’re looking for a 30- to 45-minute game with tough decisions, good theme and great presentation, you could do much worse than Paris Paris.

Review - Uwe Rosenberg's Mamma Mia!

2005-03-28T18:26:00.000+08:00

Most gamers survive on a diet of pizza and soda when on a gaming binge. Let’s face it, why waste time cooking when you can get a great meal by picking up the phone and calling the pizzeria? That time saved lets you play more games. And since you’re ordering pizza, what better game to bring to the table than a game about making pizza?

In Mamma Mia!, players are pizza chefs working with five ingredients, none of which is cheese. Since we can’t process that, we all turn the pineapple into cheese, which is fine since “real” pizza connoisseurs know that pineapple on pizza is verboten in civilized circles. (Ok, I’ll admit it, I like Hawaiian pizza.) The other ingredients are mushrooms (yum), peppers (yum), salami (yum) and olives (yuck). The chefs struggle to complete the orders being delivered by their own personal waiters while sharing one large oven. Why can’t these guys get their own ovens? We don’t know. Maybe they need their own cooking shows so the oven companies will give them complimentary ovens.

Uwe Rosenberg is perhaps best known for his curious bean farming card game Bohnanza. In Mamma Mia!, Uwe again regales us with a peculiar card mechanism revolving around the communal pizza oven. Abacus Spiele and Rio Grande Games publish Mamma Mia!, giving us 105 linen-finished cards and a black-and-white rulesheet in the package. The illustrations are simple and colorful, and the pineapple really does look like cheese.

The Game

The object of the game is to finish as many pizzas as possible. This is done by getting the better of the other chefs in the communal oven. A good memory is important, and a bit of strategy helps as well.

Players have their personal waiters, each with eight pizza orders which they will deliver randomly to the chefs. The waiters are represented by the recipe deck. Players have similar, but not identical recipe decks. This is because each of the five players will have his own “signature ingredient”, which goes into every pizza he makes.

The players begin the game with a random hand of six ingredients, and one random recipe drawn from their recipe deck. The rest of the ingredients go into the draw deck aka the supply. The oven is a discard stack in the middle of the table. On his turn, a player plays at least one ingredient (he may play any number of ingredients as long as they are of the same kind) into the oven. He then may play on recipe into the oven.

When a player puts a recipe into the oven, he is hoping (or he knows) that there are enough ingredients under the recipe to complete the requirements of that pizza. Once that’s done, the player draws cards to bring his hand back up to seven. He may draw from the supply or from his waiter, but not both. If the cards run out from either deck, he makes do until he gets to draw again next turn.

There’s a Mamma Mia! card in the deck, and the player who draws it puts it aside. He will be the start player on the next turn, and he gets to check out the oven contents at round end.

Once the supply runs out, the round is over. The start player takes the whole oven pile and starts dealing from the bottom. He arranges ingredients into stacks by type. Once a recipe comes up, he checks the recipe requirements against the ingredients that have been dealt out. If there are enough to make the pizza, the pizza is completed and the successful chef keeps that recipe card face up. The ingredients used in that pizza are removed from the oven display. The remaining ingredients are left for the succeeding pizzas. If the requirements aren’t fulfilled, the player gets one last chance to complete the pizza by playing the missing ingredients from his cards in hand. If he doesn’t have the needed ingredients, the recipe is uncompleted and the card is returned to the bottom of the player’s recipe deck.

Once all the oven cards have been dealt out, any unused ingredients form a new oven stack and play begins with the player who drew the Mamma Mia! card. All the used ingredients are shuffled into a new supply.

When the supply has been exhausted for the third time, the game is over. The chef who completed the most recipes is the winner! In the case of a tie, the player with the most ingredients left in hand is the winner!

Strategy

Obviously, a good memory helps. Failing that, rough estimates still help, especially if you just played enough ingredients before your recipe to fulfill most of the requirements. You can play a recipe that’s clearly one or two ingredients short; just remember to save the ingredients once you draw them so you can complete the pizza when the oven is being emptied.

Try to keep at two or three recipes in hand. If the recipes you’re holding aren’t working, dump one or two into the oven so you can draw the others from your waiter. When the supply is running down, dump as many recipes as possible into the oven so that you have five to seven ingredient cards for the oven emptying phase.

If you draw Mamma Mia!, you can usually cheese a recipe with the leftover ingredients from the previous round. This works best with the Pizza Minimale recipe, which is usually the most difficult to complete so cook it while you can.

Speak with silly Italian accents to throw off your opponents’ memories. You can burst into “Funiculi, Funicula” while tossing your ingredients into the oven. If you can’t remember anything, try to prevent your opponents from remembering more than you do. It’s only fair.

Reviewer’s Tilt

Mamma Mia! is a pretty good game to haul out for non-gamers. The theme is fun and rather silly due to the communal oven, so the game is non-threatening in most cases. The basic mechanisms are very simple, though the special pizzas (especially the Minimale) may take a bit of explaining. It’ll take a couple of oven-emptying demonstrations to get the hang of it. Learning game might take 30-45 minutes. Experienced players can get through a game in less than 30 minutes.

However, Mamma Mia! isn’t all that light. Some players may feel that trying to remember what’s gone into the oven is stressful, as has happened to us. To those players I’d sell that a bit of hand management can make up for memory deficiencies. Cheesing two or three recipes via set collection in hand prior to dumping them into the oven with the recipe helps people with poor memories compete. I should know; that’s the only way I can play Mamma Mia!.

The game is fun, mostly during the oven emptying phase when your recipe plays are validated or trashed like week-old leftover pizza. During the oven-filling phase the game is more reminiscent of heavier games; people are concentrating on remembering what’s gone into the oven. It’s a bit too quiet.

The sweet spot for the game is three players. This provides more control, allows shorter intervals between recipe plays and requires less memory work. Four is ok; five is a total crapshoot. There are so many recipes being played in a five player game that even the players with good memories will be challenged to determine what ingredients are available in the over when their turn comes along.

I consider the game ok, but it’s not a filler of choice. The memory element feels too much like work sometimes; I like my fillers light and uninvolved. I try to save my gaming brain cells for heavier fare, so a palate cleanser needs to not have this much weight. It’s not a heavy or even a medium weight game by any means, but Mamma Mia! is just a bit too involved for the niche that it should occupy.

Review - Alex Randolph & Leo Colovini's Inkognito the Card Game

2005-03-28T18:15:00.000+08:00

Ah, the Venetian Masquerade. There’s something about the setting that inspires mystery, be it ill-advised romantic interludes or secret agent skullduggery. This is the scene of Inkognito, designed by the pairing of designers Alex Randolph and Leo Colovini.

Players take the roles of secret agents, spies, thieves or any number of mysterious appellations. These personages are in search of the combination to a safe, which supposedly unlocks the way to a mysterious personage. It could well be rubies and diamonds, or the recipe to a world-destroying weapon. It doesn’t really matter. All the agents know is that they need that code, and that they have a friend out in the darkness.

This game, published by Fantasy Flight Games under their Silver Line, is based on the board game version of Inkognito. (I haven’t played the boardgame.) For your twenty bucks, you get 40 cards (it’s five sets of the same eight cards, with different colors) and 25 tiles (it’s five sets of the same five tiles, with different colors). You also get four small player screens in the players’ colors, and a pad of notation sheets. This is one of the sparsest packages in FFG’s Silver Line. The graphic design is excellent, and I like the portraits of the agents, but it’s just five drawings – four agents and one “safe dial” for the four combination numbers. The location tiles also seem to have nice art on them, but they’re too small to appreciate properly. The font they chose, while evocative of the game’s setting, is difficult to read. The rules to the game are on simple black and white leaf, and are easy to understand.

The Game

The object of Inkognito is to determine which player is your partner and to determine the correct code sequence. The first team to do so and meet up to enter the combination wins the game.

There are four agents in Inkognito, whose personas are assumed by the players – Lord Fiddlebottom (F), Colonel Button (B), Agent X (X) and Madame Zsa Zsa (Z). Each player takes one of the colors, and the set of eight cards of that color. Depicted on the cards are portraits of the four agents and four pictures of a safe dial each bearing a number (13, 28, 36, 47). F and B are always allied, and X and Z are the other team. (However, the players start out the game not knowing who is who.)

The fifth set of cards, colored black, are dealt out randomly to the players. Thus, each player is assigned a persona and one-fourth of the code. The correct code is expressed in a fixed order – F’s piece, then B’s, then X’s, then Z’s.

Each player also takes a set of five location tiles in his color. Again, black is left out, to be used by the non-player Ambassador (in a four-player game).

The start player begins the game by selecting one of the five locations to go to, followed by the other players. Lastly, the Ambassador’s location is determined by turning over one of the black tiles.

If exactly two agents meet at a location, and the Ambassador is not there, they may exchange information. This is done by showing each other two cards, one of which must be true. The agents must note down what they have show to who – the same pair of cards cannot be shown to an agent more than once.

If an agent meets the Ambassador alone at a location, he may question the Ambassador, who apparently knows everything. The game effect is that the agent may ask any one of the other three agents to show him one of his black cards. (Since it’s a black card, it must be true.)

Once all information has changed hands, the start player passes to the left, and each player chooses a new location tile from the four remaining, again ending with the Ambassador. Location tiles are played until all five are used, after which everyone gets all five tiles back. Play continues in this manner until one of the players feels that he has all the correct information.

When a player is ready for the reveal, he needs to meet up with his partner alone at a location. (Remember that F and B are partners, and X and Z are partners.) If more than one player wants to reveal, the agent first is turn order gets to go first if both are successful at the meet up. The revealing player names which player is his partner (fairly obvious, since they met up for the reveal), and the correct code sequence. This is verified by the players all revealing their identities, and their code pieces.

If the player is correct, his team wins the game. If he is wrong, the other team wins the game.

The five player variant has a fifth player taking the role of the Ambassador. He will need to piece together all the identities and code numbers on his own.

Strategy

This is a game where being first in turn order is not an advantage, since you can’t select a location where you’ll be able to exchange information. If you go late in the order, you can choose to meet up with an agent, or try to find the Ambassador. As the location tiles are spent, it gets easier to predict where the Ambassador is going to be. Other agents can block you, but in doing so they waste their turn as well.

When revealing cards to another agent, go for the person-person and number-number pairs first, before giving up a person-number pair. On the fourth meet-up, the correct pair will be obvious. If it’s taking you that long to figure it out, you’re not going to be the one doing the reveal.

Meeting the Ambassador is very useful, but it’s risky unless there are only one or two location tiles left. Even then, you need to have the correct locations remaining.

Reviewer’s Tilt

Inkognito isn’t a pure deduction game simply because luck plays a significant part in who gets information, and what kind of information. If you get unlucky and the Ambassador spoils one or two of your meet-ups, the other players will have a huge advantage. Receiving information from the Ambassador once or twice is also a huge advantage, making Inkognito a battle of luck as much as a battle of elimination and deduction.

This is the kind of game that you’d play with non-gamers. The theme is cool, the graphic design is very nice, and the luck factor will lighten the game up from being a true brain-burner. The game is also fairly simple – there are only four agents and four numbers, and you already start knowing your own information leaving just three to figure out. A game shouldn’t last more than half an hour unless people get really unlucky with their meet-ups.

If you’re looking for a deep deduction game, Inkognito isn’t it. It’s a fast-playing filler-type diversion with some deduction elements and some luck. Should that description appeal to you, look the game up.

Review - James Ernest's Give Me the Brain!

2005-03-28T18:13:00.000+08:00

Have you even wondered what it’s like to be the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz? It would be hard to get anything done without a brain. No wonder that the Scarecrow went through so much just to try to get a brain from the Wizard. Your traditional zombies usually get along fine without a brain, though they do go around looking for some. They’d much rather eat the brains of course, since they have no use for them since they’re dead.

James Ernest has other ideas for his zombies. He uses them for manual labor. They’re not very smart, but at least they’re really cheap. So, James has this fast food place called Friedey’s, and it’s staffed with zombies. They’re able to do most of the work with just a few mishaps, but sometimes there are jobs so complex that they need a brain. So, James provided them with one to share.

Give Me the Brain puts the players in the shoes of the Friedey’s zombies, who need to get all their work done while time-sharing a single slippery brain.

Such a silly theme can only come from the mind of James Ernest and be published by his Cheapass games. This game’s original incarnation was a black-and-white light cardstock version packaged in an envelope. After winning the Origins award, it was given the “pro treatment”. Give Me the Brain is now available in full, glorious color. The brain-pink package with the zombie on the front contains 112 smooth plastic-coated cards and a rules sheet. Most of the cards have humorous text; some of them have funny zombie illustrations by Brian Snoddy. You need a six-sided die to play Give Me the Brain, but in true Cheapass fashion, the rules say to crib one from a game you never play. I’m sure your Risk set won’t miss the die.

The Game

The zombie-players begin the game with a hand of seven cards. The objective of the zombie-player is to get rid of all his cards so he can go home. There are three kinds of cards, bid cards (30 of these), objects (8 of these) and jobs (the rest of the cards).

Each zombie-player has two hands; so on his turn a zombie-player can perform two hands’ worth of jobs. A job is rated for either one or two hands. Some jobs, colored brain-pink, are beyond the non-intellect of a zombie and thus require the brain to execute. Therefore, the player must procure the brain.

The brain, represented by the aforementioned six-sided die, begins the game on the floor. Players bid using the bid cards for possession of the brain. High bid wins the use of the brain… for the moment. Each job that requires the brain has a skill rating. Once the zombie-player performs the job, he needs to match or beat the skill rating on a roll of the die to retain possession of the brain. If he fails, the brain slips from his noggin and falls back on the floor, allowing everyone to bid for it again.

The objects tend to help the possessors. There are a couple of animal brains, which a player can use once then must pass to an adjacent player. There are also extra hands that can be used to perform more jobs in a turn.

The jobs are a huge mixed bag of chaos and silliness. As the rules say, some are good all the time, some are good in certain situations, some are good in combination with other cards but are otherwise bad, and some are bad all the time. Good thing that a player can loaf instead of working.

When a player loafs, he does nothing. While loafing, he either draws a card (usually bad) or discards his entire hand and draws the same number of cards plus one. This can be good if all you have is bad cards.

The first zombie-player to empty his hand gets to go home first and wins the game!

Strategy

This is a hugely chaotic game with a lot of “take that”, especially with a lot of players, so strategy is very limited. You don’t really need the brain to perform a lot of jobs. If you have a bad set of jobs, loaf a turn and draw a new hand. High bid cards are important.

It’s happened to us that a player wins on the first turn by playing a card that drops hand size down to four, and he draws a couple of high bid cards and a couple of high skill brain jobs. Bid, win the brain, play job, drop the brain (ending that turn). Then bid again, win the brain, play job, game over.

Otherwise, there’s not much there.

Reviewer’s Tilt

My impression of Give Me the Brain is that it’s not “tight”. The game is rated for three to eight players, fifteen minutes. With the exception of the above-stated first-turn win aberration, games tend to last ten minutes per player, which is too long for a game of this weight. The huge amount of chaos and “take that” card play inherent in the system can make the game unenjoyable for some players in a large group. The turn-skipping mechanism of the brain (after the brain is dropped, play continues with the player who picked up the brain) is also a big turn-off when playing with more than four players.

Fillers, especially those relying on humor for a large part of their appeal, are expected to be fast and engaging. Give Me the Brain fails to deliver both of those elements consistently. Given that, I can’t recommend it unless you plan to play it with just three or four players. Even then, its appeal is limited, and you might be better served looking elsewhere.

Review - James Ernest's Falling

2005-03-28T17:59:00.000+08:00

FALLING is a frenetic card game for 4-8 players. Everyone is falling, and the object is to hit the ground last. It’s not much of a goal, but it’s all you could think of on the way down. – Blurb on the box of Falling

Say what you want about the game designs of James Ernest, but you can’t say that Falling is unoriginal. The premise alone is wacky. The gameplay is just as wacky, if not even more so.

The players are, well, falling. Come up with whatever reason you want. They could be stockbrokers who just invested in stock that went bust, skydivers whose chutes failed to open, aliens whose flying saucer just blew up… the possibilities are endless. As long as all the players are falling.

On the way down, the players try their utmost to hit the ground last. The flap their arms, they whack each other; they use every option they can find. In the end, everyone hits the ground, but the one that hits the ground last dies like everyone else, but he wins the game.

This is a James Ernest game, and it is also a Cheapass Game. While Cheapass has a reputation for using cheap components, the smooth plastic-coated cards of Falling are reasonably sturdy. For your ten bucks you get 54 cards and a rulesheet. The art by Brian Snoddy is humorous and fitting for such a silly theme. The rules are reasonably clear and well-written, but this is a game best learned from someone who already knows how to play and can act as the dealer the first few times down to the ground.

The Game

Falling requires one person to be the dealer. This person is not falling; he is not a player. He deals out the falling cards to the players, acts on the cards used by the players, and keeps the game moving (and sane). In general, the dealer is going around the table, to each player in turn, and is dealing cards to them throughout the game until the deck runs out.

Each of the players has a “stack” of cards to begin the game. The dealer deals cards onto this stack. At any time, a player may pick up the top card of his stack. This card may be used either on himself or on another player, depending on the card. A player may only have one card in hand at any time, and once a card is picked up for use it cannot be returned to the stack.

How are cards used? There are three types of cards. The first type is the “rider”. A rider is a card played in front of a player, and it tells the dealer how to deal to this player the next time he gets to the player. The three main riders are “hit” (deal an extra card to this guy), “skip” (don’t deal a card to this guy) and “split” (start another stack for this guy). There’s an “extra” card that’s played on a rider, doubling its effect. Remember, you can either play a rider on yourself, or on someone else who doesn’t already have one in front of him. Once a rider has been “used” (the dealer has followed the instructions once) the rider is discarded.

Then there are the action cards. There are three of these things: “grab” (take someone else’s rider), “push” (give someone else your current rider) and “stop” (cancel any rider, or delay the ground). Each action card is used once then discarded.

Speaking of the ground, that’s the last type of card. If you get dealt a ground card and you can’t stop it, you become a red splotch all over the pavement. The Falling deck comes with five ground cards, and these are always the bottom cards of the dealer’s deck. There’s an infinite amount of ground, so when playing with more than five players, the dealer can just point at a player and say “ground” when he runs out of cards. If everyone else hits the ground before you did, you win. Congratulations.

How does the game play? The pace is set by the dealer. For a bunch of newbies he can deal slowly, allowing the players to look at the top card of their stack, pick it up if they want to, then use it on themselves or someone else before the dealer gets back to them. As the players get more comfortable with the game, and they can assess the situation, pick up and play cards faster, the dealer can speed up. The cards fly across the table. There can be some timing issues, when two or more players try to play cards in the same place at the same time, but these can be resolved quickly by the players themselves. After all, Falling is a game which plays out in three to five minutes. You can play again.

Strategy

It’s a “real-time” game! What strategy? Isn’t it stupid?

Well, sort of, but not quite. Yes, you need fast reflexes and quick eyes to play well. If you have trouble picking cards up off the table, and you fumble a lot, you’ll probably get a bit frustrated. However, Falling is a game of stack management. All the turns before the dealer gets to the bottom of his deck are for “tuning” your stack to be nothing but skips (with extra skips) and stops, with maybe an occasional grab just in case. Get rid of hits, pushes and splits as soon as you can. Splits might actually be useful early on, since the extra stacks disappear if you empty them, but as the ground approaches, you’re playing with fire if you have more than one stack. (However, if you have a bunch of skips in both stacks that might work, since skips make the dealer skip all of your stacks.)

Timing is everything. You don’t want to play your skip in front of yourself too early, so that someone steals it with a grab, but you don’t want to play it too late either so that someone has time to stick you with a hit or unwanted split. Oh, and never pick up a push unless you’ve got a rider. If someone sees you holding a push he can stop your rider, freezing the push in your hand until someone else plays a rider on you. If no one does, you’re helpless.

So yes, there’s a bit of strategy. Seriously!

Reviewer’s Tilt

And yes, it’s a stupid game, but I think that’s the point. If you don’t take it seriously, you can have a good time with Falling. I don’t recommend playing with more than four players (excluding the dealer) with one deck, since it’ll be over too quickly. You can shuffle two Falling decks together when playing with five to eight players. If you’re new to the game and don’t have an experienced dealer, take it slow. Once everyone gets it, you can speed up. Of course, this is a game best played fast. I have to admit that Falling is lots of fun when you’re with the right crowd and in the right mood, filled with flying cards, cursing and yelling. You might even call it a party game.

There will be some people who will hate the game just because it’s stupid, or because it’s in “real time”. It’s surprising though that many people initially find the game disorienting, but once they give it a chance, they find that they’re played twenty games in a row.

Do I like the game? Yes, I like it for what it is – a different kind of filler for when no one really wants to do any mental lifting. That was unexpected, since I was fully prepared to hate Falling. It’s not going to substitute for meatier fillers, but if Falling is what the group wants to play, I’ll happily grab a spot at the table. Heck, I’ll even deal.

Gaming bullets 24-25 March

2005-03-25T03:39:00.000+08:00

Before my memory faddes like smoke in the wind...

24 March, Monchot's birthday bash

Played before I arrived:
Puerto Rico [5P] (Javy, Greg, Monchot, Eileen, Frank) - won by Greg

After I arrived:
Modern Art [4P] (Erik, Frank, Monchot, Greg) - Won by ?
Bluff [5P] (Titus, George, Annie, Cyndi, Rick) - Two games, both won by Cyndi
Modern Art [5P] (Same crew plus Tala) - Won by ?
Paris Paris [4P] (George, Annie, Cyndi, Rick) - Won by Annie
Call of Cthulhu CCG [2P] (Rick, Frog) - Won by Frog

After I left:
Puerto Rico [5P] (Greg, Frog, George, Nix, Monchot) - Won by Nix

25 March

The Princes of Florence [5P] (Martin, Nix, Frog, Frank, Rick) - Won by Martin
The Princes of Florence [4P] (Same crew less Martin) - Won by Frog
Pirate's Cove [4P] (Annie, Erik, Jay John, George) - Won by ?
Bluff [5P] (Pirate's Cove crew + Monchot) x 2 - Won by ?
Give Me the Brain [5P] (Bluff crew) - Won by?
Mamma Mia [4P] (Rick, Frog, George, Nix) - Won by Rick
Paris Paris [4P] (Annie, Jay John, Frank, Rick) - Won by Rick
Modern Art [4P] (George, Erik, Monchot, Nix) - Won by ?
Inkognito [5P] (Titus, Jay John, Rick, Frank, Annie) - Won by Rick and Annie
Modern Art [5P] (Annie, Rick, Frank, George, Jay John) - Won by Rick
Dragon Delta [6P] (Deej, Erik, Titus, Annie, Rick, Monchot) - Game called on account of stupidity
Torres [4P] (Rick, Annie, Deej, Titus) - Won by Deej
Puerto Rico [5P] (Frog, Nix, George, Erik, Jay John) - Won by Frog
Falling [4P] (Titus, Deej, Annie, Rick) 3x - Won by Rick (2x) and Annie
Pueblo [3P] with Sacred Burial Grounds (Annie, Deej, Rick) - Won by Rick

Corrections and details later...

Modern Art-induced Madness

2005-03-23T12:45:00.000+08:00

When we play Modern Art, it brings out very strange behaviour in some people...

:D

Game afternoon/evening - 19 March 2005

2005-03-23T12:37:00.000+08:00

Europe Engulfed – July 1942 One-map Scenario [2P]

I arrived at Mark’s to find no one else in attendance. We took the opportunity to give Rick Young’s July 1942 Tournament Scenario for Europe Engulfed another go, since I hadn’t gotten around to finishing the rules to Rommel in the Desert or Eurofront.

I took the Russkies this time, so Mark had a chance to play the Germans and their friends. I suppose defending comes a lot easier to me. Anyway, all we had to do was keep the Germans out of our key cities – Stalingrad, Leningrad, Moscow, and the oilfields.

Mark massed his forces at the line, and immediately thrust down the middle. I knew that I was eventually going to have to give ground, and hoped that I’d at least whittle down the superior German units. I’d spread my forces a bit too thin down the middle, having a bias towards protecting Moscow and making sure that there was support in case Leningrad was besieged. I’d left too few forces in the vicinity of Stalingrad and the oilfields, though Mark didn’t know that.

The Germans took possession of the center of Russia, in between Moscow and Stalingrad. Now Mark had a decision – should he blow his Special Actions assaulting Moscow or Stalingrad. After a while, he threw everything in the area against Moscow. I used my lone Special Action to reinforce Moscow, and we rolled the dice. Moscow held, and we inflicted a decent amount of damage thanks to the fortifications.

I made another mistake on my turn, just spending my WERPs but not really doing anything. Turtling in a wargame, as usual. I should be playing France. Anyway, I reinforced Moscow and Stalingrad with cheap Russian cadres, still making the mistake of lightly guarding the oilfields. On his turn, Mark took advantage and thrusted into the corer, taking the oil with Special Actions. That cost me six WERPs on my turn. Another turn of cheap Russian infantry cadres allowed me to have enough to take back my oilfields and decimate the eastern German forces. We attacked along the line, kicking the Germans out of a couple of provinces and generally causing a decent amount of damage.

It started raining, and the terrain turned to mud. The Germans and their allies brought in more forces, but there was no combat. Three hours into the game, we called it a day.

This is a neat little scenario that uses the most basic EE rules. We may be ready to step up to more rules soon, but it would be nice to have the time to play through the whole thing to see how the weather really affects things. Have to remember to buy all the Russian cadres next time, since the costs double after the third turn.

Over to Frog’s for dinner and evening socialization. I’d acquired more A Game of Thrones CCG cards for Frog, and in the process gotten myself into trouble with the Call of Cthulhu CCG. I thought it would be a nice pastime to play with the two starter decks, just because I like Lovecraft and CoC, but the game turned out to be pretty good. Whereas I’m just lukewarm on AGoTCCG, I picked up a bunch of boosters for CoCCCG.

For this evening, I’d also packed mostly lighter games. Dunno, I guess it was the mood. Amun-Re and Tigris & Euphrates were in the bag, but I didn’t think we’d play them.

After dinner, the first game on the table was Kuhhandel.

Kuhhandel [5P]

I used a start variant were each player began the game with two animals, except for player 5 who had one 90-point cat. That wasn’t all that hot. Kuhhandel should top out at four players. The other variant was that we auctioned two cards at a time. All this probably cut the game time in half. It still took just under an hour, but next time I’ll have a better idea on how to use the variants.

Erik won the game after I goofed and gave up a quartet of 40-point geese to secure my 1,000-point horses. The third multiplier gave Erik the win, since he also had the pigs and the goats.

It’s important to win a least a couple of auctions in Kuhhandel, because if you don’t have a variety of animals, you won’t be able to initiate horse trades for them. Frog ended up with just one set because he overspent early in the game and didn’t have enough seed for more quartets. That it was a five player game certainly didn’t help.

Titus arrived during the game, and while he and Frog talked about AGOTCCG, we finally got Annie into a game of Royal Turf which she’d been wanting to try.

Royal Turf [4P]

Erik and I found ourselves allied on a few bets, and George and Annie also found themselves betting on the same horses. The most memorable race was the second one, where Annie and George had bet on both Albino and Earl Grey. This allowed Erik and I to advance the two sprinters for short distances with our die rolls, handicapping them and making them finish sixth and seventh.

Erik secured the victory in the third race, where he had a solo bid riding on Carmello, who finished third for a nice solo double-payout.

Royal Turf – Final Scores:
Erik – 3,300
Rick – 2,200
George – 1,250
Annie – 650

Nix had arrived by the time the races were over, so we decided to try to get everyone into a game. Luckily Titus had brought Squint.

Squint x 2 [7P]

This cute Pictionary variant has players forming pictures by using tiles with shapes and symbols on them instead of drawing with pen and paper. It’s pretty fast, and is a decent party game. I’m not too happy with the “roll a die for the difficulty level which affects the scoring,” but it’s a party game so what the heck.

We played two games. Annie won the first one by a landslide, and Titus won the second one.

Nix needed to pick up Tala in a few minutes, so I pulled out a fast game.

High Society [5P]

Annie is unusually unlucky at this game, always ending up as the player with the least money. Bidding isn’t Nix’s favorite genre either, but he was willing to give this a try. At least it would be over quickly. J

I got the 4-point car rather cheap, but also took the -5 gambling debts tile so that didn’t matter. Erik didn’t have much going, while Annie managed to win the 10-point personal island and one of the 2x tiles. George got into early trouble and the thief made off with her yacht. In the end, Nix had the least cash, leaving Annie as the winner. Finally.

Nix and I went to pick up Tala from Greenbelt. When we got back, Erik, Annie and George were off to the Royal Turf races again, while Frog and Titus were configuring their AGoTCCG decks.

While waiting for the races to conclude, I introduced Nix and Tala to Carcassonne.

Carcassonne [3P]

I used the “personal 3-tile hand” variant to provide more options. We played with the Inns & Cathedrals expansion. Tala sprinted to a nice lead via a couple of sizable early castles. However, the game was sorta boring, and when the race at the other table ended, we decided to call it so we could play a better game.

Modern Art [5P]

Tala wanted to learn the AGoTCCG game which Frog and Titus had been playing, so she sat out while we were off to the art galleries.

This was a strange game with an unusual pace. I fell behind early, auctioning off relatively cheap stuff and not being able to buy anything until the fourth season. I didn’t get any usable double auction cards. In the fourth season, I double-auctioned off some Krypto that no one else though much of so I bought them for myself. Then I got a fixed-price double Karl Gitter from Annie that I could afford. That gave me a $300,000 sale at the end of the game, with about half that in profits, and it was just enough to win the game.

Final Scores – Modern Art
Rick - $422,000
Erik - $384,000
Nix - $381,000
Annie - $302,000
George - $212,000

Erik and Annie headed out, so I took the opportunity to test drive CoCCCG with Nix. I took the good guy “Investigators” deck with Miskatonic University and the Blackwood Agency, while Nix had the cults of Cthulhu and Hastur.

Call of Cthulhu CCG [2P]

The Investigator deck is faster than the Mythos deck, but when the creatures start appearing, they come in droves. Nix won the first story, but I took the next two. Then Hastur appeared, and it was a race to take the third while avoiding the King in Yellow. I managed to do it before Hastur took his first story.

Hey, it’s a new CCG so it’ll take time to familiarize with the various powers and strategies inherent in the factions and cards. I like the game system though; it provides a different feel from your typical “kill me before I kill you” CCG. I won’t sink a lot of cash into this, but I’d like to have enough cards to play a varied number of casual games. Stay tuned.

A Game of Thrones CCG [2P]

When I left with Nix and Tala, Frog and Titus were still struggling for domination of Westeros.

Torres 2000 vs Torres 2004, Part 2

2005-03-18T16:59:00.000+08:00

Torres 2005

Well, this was unexpected. The new edition of Torres has these nice tower pieces. The color isn't great, but they're taller and have fluted tops, which is really nice. Now I'm thinking about double-dipping. Damn, that's a good game. :-)

You can also see a bit of the board. So far, it looks rather plain, unlike the nice ground-colored board. Won't pass judgment until we see the whole thing though. It's looking like a nice reprint.

Torres 2000

Boardgamegeek Blues

2005-03-17T10:26:00.000+08:00

It's an unhappy thing when you experience the growing pains of a community. The WWW is a fascinating place where we can become members of an online community that meets only through words on a screen. Still it's no less distressing when the peace of that community is inevitably disrupted when its popularity increases and causes an influx of new people. Some people aren't as interested in preserving the community, instead being more interested in proving superiority over the other participants in the online community.

Arguments have been standard on the WWW as long as I can remember. They're also most worthless when executed without tact or restraint or focus. Boardgamegeek's front page is pretty much a bad place to be these days, due to this. That's too fucking bad, it was a nice place while it lasted.

Game afternoon/night – 12 March 2005

2005-03-16T18:49:00.000+08:00

I had another free afternoon, an occurrence that doesn’t happen often enough, so I got to drop by Mark’s place on very short notice. I arrived to find Manuel and Mark going through the rules to Europe Engulfed. I knew Mark and Titus had been exploring the game, but luckily Manuel was new to the game so I was able to join in for the rules explanation and the learning game. For this exercise, the scenario was 1942 to 1943, with the Russians attempting to hold off the Germans and their allies. Mark took the Russians, Manuel and I collaborated on the side of the Germans. (Actually, I mostly kibitzed and rolled the dice!)

Europe Engulfed (learning game) [2+1P]

I’d been slogging through the rules of EE on and off and found them to be a bit difficult to read through. Playing through a couple of turns made the base rules easier to understand. Granted we weren’t using the whole ruleset, but the basic flow of the game was clearer when actually playing it out with Mark’s guidance.

So, each side got a beginning set of forces. We got most of the German units, plus a single Italian unit and s few minor Axis units which had placement restrictions. The Russians started with a lot of Russians. The game setup gave the Russians a front cutting through the middle of the half-map that the scenario used. In this scenario the Germans had already penetrated halfway through the center of Russia, but were yet to take Leningrad and the adjacent swamp area (annoying because that meant that Leningrad was still in supply, and that fortress is a very tough nut to crack due to the stacking limit).

The Germans moved first, and had 28 WERPs (wartime economic resource points IIRC) to buy stuff, primarily units and special actions. The special actions are the interesting part of EE. These cost a painful 5 WERPs each, but allow the side to do things like attack a second time, add units where they couldn’t normally be added, move an extra time, put out-of-supply units into supply, and so on. The Germans had up to four SAs available for purchase, while the Russians only had one. Of course, the Russians had their own little ability, which was they paid half price (or just one WERP) for the first step of a newly-built unit. The Germans had to pay two. Yikes.

So, Manuel and I decided to buy three SAs and a couple of extra units, and move into three of the front provinces of the Reds. This included an assault on Leningrad using four four-step infantry and the single allowable ground support airborne unit. Why just four? That was the max we could send in because Leningrad was a fortress, and you can only attack a Fortress with double the stacking limit worth of units. Russia had two units defending the fortress, both four-step infantry. Another problem – the Russians had a +2 modifier to hit while in the fortress. Since the defender attacks first in EE, this would prove to be very painful.

To cut a long story short, despite burning all three of our SAs to attack twice in Leningrad and the other two front provinces, we failed to clear out the Russians on any place in the first turn. We weren’t rolling all that poorly either. Our units in Leningrad were heavily damaged, while the Russians were just scratched. It’s tough rolling sixes to hit when the other guy hits 50% of the time, and you lose a die for every step of damage that you take, and he attacks first. We also decided just to stick to regular attacks rather than assaults, in a bout of conservatism. Need to try being more aggressive the next time out and see if the results would be different.

Anyway, on the Russians’ turn Mark bought a whole load of units and reinforced the whole Russian front. Most were probably just single-step units, but the number of blocks was impressive. Besides, all he had to do was hold out until the weather produced snow or mud, and he’d have a decided advantage.

On our second turn, we decided to just buy a single SA and spend the rest on units. We relied on strategic movement to get the units to the front, and resumed attacking the same three provinces we had hurt earlier. When the smoke cleared, we weren’t much closer to taking Leningrad, but the other two provinces finally fell.

After some small talk, I had to leave to run a couple of errands. I promised to read up both on the rules of EE and those of Rommel in the Desert for the next opportunity to play the block games. Mark also kindly lent me his for-trade copy of the first edition Paths of Glory for me to look at. (Mark isn’t fond of the card-driven games.)

I ran around town a bit doing the errands, then headed for Frog and George’s place for dinner and possibly some gaming.

One of the errands I ran was for Frog and myself! In anticipation of the long-delayed release of the fourth volume of George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels, Frog had been rereading A Game of Thrones and wanted to play a game set in Westeros. We briefly discussed the boardgame, which Frog hadn’t played, but due to expected difficulty in finding three other players that would be interested in playing (unlikely) we decided to get a couple of starter decks of the Game of Thrones CCG.

Titus had written briefly on his blog that he was playing the game, and that it played best with three. Since Titus was scheduled to join us that evening it seemed to be a good opportunity to give the game a try. I stopped by Neutral Grounds, the local Fantasy Flight Games distributor, and given the available selection I settled on the Premium Ice & Fire starter which had two preconstructed decks ready to go – House Targaryen (Frog likes Denerys’s story arc) and House Greyjoy (which I enjoy playing in the boardgame). Hey, I also like their silly slogan “We Do Not Sow”. (Yeah, it makes no sense if you don’t know anything about the story. House Greyjoy is a noble family in the land of Westeros based on a bunch of islands in the middle of the sea. This sea is rather salty, and the land of the islands is very ferrous, so they can’t plant crops or anything out there. Thus, We Do Not Sow. Yeah, it’s pretty stupid. The standard of Greyjoy is a big squid. Fine, it’s called a Kraken.)

Conversely, Targaryen is the cool exiled ex-ruling House of the land. Their standard is the Dragon, and they’ve got magic and stuff. Oh yeah, and real dragons. At least Greyjoy isn’t a cliché. :)

So I show up at Frog’s place, say hello to the hosts, and we settle down to try out the new game.

A Game of Thrones CCG [2P]

Ooh, this was brutal. We played our “name” characters early, Asha Greyjoy and Denerys Targaryen. Both characters are cool and strong and female, but Dany got her hubby Khal Drogo to join her soon after. Khal Drogo is really annoying, he kills a 2 strength character outright each turn. Okay, we could deal with that. Greyjoy seemed to be a tappy tappy pumpy pumpy combo kind of deal, which I could handle. Then, Frog played the Dragon, a 6 strength beast that tapped all the characters in the turn that he entered play. Ooookay. There was one card in the Greyjoy deck that might deal with the dragon, but since we were drawing two cards a turn and the deck was, like, 50 cards, chances are I’d be far behind (if not dead) before I saw it.

Erik arrived while my squidheads were being pounded by Frog’s Royal Assassin/Shivan Dragon combo. Frog was ahead 10-0 (he had won all three challenges the turn previous) when Nix arrived and I conceded the game. That was tres ugly; when I conceded I had one character in play (I forced Frog to kill two of his five characters using a plot card, but he still had Dany, Khal D. and the dragon) and had five locations in hand. Ouch.

I got Erik into a quick game of The Confrontation.

The Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation [2P]

As usual had Pippin up front sniffing around. The hairfoot located the Troll standing in Moria! Ha! Retreated Pip, and the Troll followed him in. Good thing Pip had a partner, and Erik picked… Aragorn. Traded pieces. Boromir took Shelob to the Abyss with him. Erik then made a strike with the Nazgul into the piece I had lagging in the back… and ran into Gandalf. Another attack by Dark had the Witch King running right into Merry. Gandalf advanced and cut a swath down the middle of the board. Saruman attacked my left flank, and the two pieces there were Frodo and Sam. Sam stepped up, so the old guy had to play cards. I played Elven Cloak to take out Saruman. With that streak of losses, Erik didn’t have enough pieces to stop Frodo and he conceded.

We had dinner and decided that we’d play Amun-Re after if Titus didn’t appear. After finishing off some Aristocrat Chicken Barbecue and talking extensively about the NBA and our fantasy league, we cleared the table and were just about to set up for some Egyptian pyramid-building when the doorbell dinged. Titus and Mikko walked in, and we changed plans.

Mikko was going to have dinner first, so we decided to break out a six-player game. We had never played six-player Elfenland, so that became the main game of the evening.

Elfenland [6P]

I’m still not enamored with the board of Elfenland. I know some people think it’s the nicest board ever, but it seems to be busy and cluttered to me. Never mind the art, this is supposed to be a family game so that’s ok. And what’s with the unpronounceable city names? And the rolling cylinders? Later editions could have replaced them with something more practical, like the Tikal or PR style hex barrels. The big boots are still cute, even if they’re not very elfin. You’d think they’d have tassels or bells or something like that.

Anyway, we draft transport tiles and are off to visit the queens. (The theme of this game might be cooler if we had each of the elves with a girl in each city, and they were off to visit each city and have relations with each of the elven wenches. Think about it, you could then characterize the cylinders as… I still don’t know what they are. We play nice with the initial transport placements, and Frog takes off to the northwest, towards the mountains. George takes a southern route. I follow Frog’s direction and end up in the exact same place, but with one cylinder less. Ow, not good. Nix goes fourth and ends up in the same city as me and Frog! Erik heads south as well, and Titus has the final turn. He ends up in the same city as Nix, Frog and me. Heh. Titus is ahead by one cylinder at this point.

With four elves in the same city, there was opportunity to be nasty since I’d be the first player of the four to take my turn. After drafting tiles, I knew I’d have to take a miss on the northwestern-most city and take the raft heading south. I ended up playing my obstacle down that route, and playing it last, hoping that I screwed up a plan or two.

So we each head our separate ways. There’s a lot of dragon play in the desert, the most annoying part of the board. I end up right in the middle of the sand dunes, hoping that as the start player in the third turn I’ll get dealt a dragon (there was a dragon tile in the opening draft) and be able to get out of there. Titus is still ahead by one cylinder after the second turn.

I get two dragons in the deal, but I know that I’m going to need them both because screwage starts happening around this time. I play my dragon exit from the oasis, and jam the entrance to the annoying dead-end city with a second dragon. Frog jams my southeastern route with an ill-placed (for me) dragon, and completes the screwage by sticking his obstacle on my desert exit route. Hey, I’m NOT ahead here!

Three of us end up in the northeastern corner of the kingdom. Titus has seventeen at the end of the turn, and seems to be comfortably ahead. All he has to do is take one step, save his cards, and screw the rest of us will crummy transport. Well, we all try to perform great acts of screwage, with the four remaining obstacle being placed in the northern reaches. In the end, we missed one.

Elfenland – Final Scores
Nix – 19
Titus – 18
Frog -17
George – 17
Erik – 17
Rick -17

Nix found a route that crossed diagonally through the desert from northeast to southwest, collecting three cylinders through all the crummy transport and fallen logs and earning the win. Titus had to blow four cards just to get his last cylinder and was stuck in the east. George made a furious comeback from behind the field to finish in the pack. I finished last, having to blow all my cards just to get my 17th cylinder.

Elfenland is only really interesting with five to six players, but then it just takes too darn long and has too much downtime for its weight. Sure it’ll play a lot faster with four, but then it won’t be as tight with less competition in placing the transport tiles and wth correspondingly less screwage. For that amount of time investment (120+ minutes) I’d rather play something meatier. Elfenland isn’t a bad game, but it’s best produced for newbies that need an intro to German games. I’d easily pull Elfenland out before Settlers.

You can also see the roots of Ticket to Ride here. The drafting mechanism is present, the “claiming of routes” is present, the luck of the draw is present, and the potential for a bit of blocking is present. The main improvement is in the rapid action-taking and corresponding decrease in downtime. Two Spiel des Jahres awards for the same core of mechanisms? Hey, not bad Mr. Moon.

We brought Mikko back into the fold. Erik was ready to call it a night, but wanted one more game. He’d never played Liar’s Dice before, so luckily Titus had brought along my copy of Bluff.

Bluff [6P]

After the usual compliments on the really nice Ravensburger components, especially the cups built for slamming, we were off. Frog was the first one out, followed by Nix, then me. Erik followed us out, leaving Mikko and George. Mikko was up five dice to one, an overwhelming advantage. Through judicious betting, George won two bids in a row with exact bids, cutting Mikko’s lead to 3-1. The streak ended there though as Mikko won the next bid, leaving him with the win.

Bluff (1st game):
Winner - Mikko

Erik liked it so much he asked for a second game. Titus joined us as Frog was off looking at all the Game of Thrones cards Titus and Mikko had brought along. Nix crashed out spectacularly in the first bid, taking my bait by raising a bid of 12 that I had made. Sorry Nix. :) Turnabout is fair play though as I went out next, losing three dice in one bid, then getting hosed by two exact bids by other people. George was the third elimination, leaving Titus, Erik and Mikko in. Titus had a three dice lead over Mikko and Erik, who had just one each. In a stunning upset, Titus was the fourth person out, losing all three dice to Mikko and Erik. In the final showdown, Mikko prevailed again.

Bluff (2nd game):
Winner – Mikko

Erik said his good-nights, leaving the six of us to mop up. Frog and Nix had started a Game of Thrones match while we were rolling dice, so the four of us decided on a Colossal Arena game to close the night out.

Colossal Arena [4P]

Four is a nice number of Arena. I like it with three, but with four there’s just a little more turn angst especially as the number of combatants declines and the timing of the game changes. Sitting out this staging of the Arena: Daimon, Ettin, Colossus, Seraphim.

Everyone placed a secret bid. The first elimination was the unsupported Cyclops. Ugly beast. The next elimination was the similarly unsupported Gorgon. I had control of the Wyrm and was making good use of it ability, while Mikko was abusing the Amazon. Titus joined me in supporting the Wyrm, so that was a good situation. Mikko and George were heavily invested in the Unicorn and the Troll. I placed my last bid on the Titan, taking over as backer from Titus. Before I could do anything with it, the Titan bit the dust because Titus and I misjudged the turn timing. Eh, that’s two of my bids gone. George played a Referee, forcing the Wyrm’s secret bids to reveal themselves. Turns out both Titus and I placed our secrets on Ol’ Green Scales. I retained my Wyrm backership, and combined it with the abilities of my Magus to leave just five cards, all high Magus cards and a high Spectator. The Troll bit the dust. The deck then ran out, and we were in the endgame. The Unicorn ultimately met its demise, leaving the Wyrm, the Magus and the Amazon as the survivors before anyone ran out of cards in hand.

Colossal Arena – Final Scores:
Rick -12
Titus – 8
George – 4
Mikko - 4

That was a nice game. I really like the way the tempo of the game changes as the number of creatures dwindles. It’s a nice feel for the field of combatants decreasing, and each creature no longer being able to get any breathing room before one of the remaining opponents is on them. Arena should always be played until three critters are left. The endgame condition with the deck running out is unsatisfactory. In this case, it would have left four creatures on the board, and a bunch of cards unplayed. That’s not as good as the game being completed with all the required carnage.

It was 2am, so we all said good night except for Nix, who continued to battle Frog for domination of Westeros.

Review - Alan Moon's Elfenland

2005-03-16T18:34:00.000+08:00

The story of Elfenland is well-chronicled in the Alan Moon episode of Geekspeak. This was the game that made Moon as a designer, won him his first Spiel des Jahres, and formed the foundation for many later successful games that used variations on Elfenland’s drafting and route claiming mechanisms.

Players take the role of young elves that embark on a coming-of-age ritual. They are to visit as many cities in the Elven kingdom as possible in four seasons, using a variety of transport available to them. The elf that visits the most cities at the end of the game wins.

As I understand it, Elfenland is a simplification of the original Alan Moon design Elfenroads, which had a whole economic system attached to the game. Perhaps the theme made more sense in that context. This component can be restored with the Elfengold expansion, which is out of print and is fairly expensive on the secondary market as of this writing.

Anyway, Elfenland is packaged as a family game, so it has bright graphics and storybook-style illustrations that appeal to children. They’re pretty enough, and many people think the Elfenland board is one of the best ever. (I don’t share that view – the graphic design of Elfenland is ok, but it’s not exceptional.) The components are very nice, as is typical of an Amigo Spiel production. The box is large and linen-finished, with a custom plastic insert with a place for everything. The board is of the large, four fold linen-finished variety. The city markers are small wooden cylinders on six bright colors. The cards are large and linen-finished, always a huge plus in my book. These cards hold up well under heavy use. The tiles are small and thick cardboard markers. Finally, the players’ tokens are large boots, a nice creative touch that’s just marred a bit by the propensity of the boots to fall over once in a while. It’s not really a huge problem though. The rules come in a large-type, full color booklet, and are very clear with illustrated examples. All in all, it’s a superlative package especially if you like the graphics.

The Game

The players begin the in the large castle towards the eastern section of the board. From here, they need to visit as many of the twenty cities on the board as possible in four seasons. Cities are connected by roads through various terrains, and by rivers or lakes.

There are six different types of transportation available. These are depicted on transportation cards, which are shuffled and dealt out to the players randomly to begin the turn. The types of transport are amusing, ranging from a pig, to a troll-drawn wagon, to traditional fantasy steeds like the Unicorn and the Dragon.

This is the part that doesn’t really work for me. What is this, some kind of random ticket-issuing machine? It jolts the game out of theme and emphasizes that this part of the game is random.

Once the cards are dealt, the players draft transport tiles. These tiles depict the same modes of transport as the cards. All the tiles are mixed up face down, then five tiles are turned up to serve as the draft row. First, players each take a random face down tile each, to serve as their “secret tile”. These are not revealed until played. Then, players draft tiles from the drafting row (new tiles are turned up as open ones are drafted, so each player always has a choice from five) until each has three open tiles. (Players may opt to take a face down tile, but must turn it up as it is drafted.) In addition, each player is given on “obstacle tile” – it’s the only one each player gets for the whole game.

Again, this part of the game doesn’t work for me. If the players are the elves, what are they doing determining what sort of transport is available all over the kingdom? It’s really gamey, and again jolts the players out of the theme.

Once each player has four transport tiles (one hidden and three open), these tiles are then played onto the board. In turn order, each player places a transport tile onto a route on the board. Each route may only accommodate one transport tile, which will determine what cards are necessary to traverse that route this turn. Thus, players should draft and play tiles based on what cards they were dealt. Players may play as few or as many tiles as they like, but they may only carry over a single tile into the next turn. Any excess tiles kept are discarded.

This part of the game is the major part of the turn angst. Will you be able to put your transport tiles on the route that you picked out? Will some other player gum up your plans by playing another type or transport that he has because he’s also heading that way? Or even worse, another player could actively block you by playing a non-optimal (two card) transport type right on your route, probably forcing you to an alternative route. This is the best part of the game, but again it’s gamey and out of theme.

When all the players have passed on playing tiles in succession, the elves begin traveling. In turn order, players play their travel cards to move across the map. The travel guide card indicates how many cards of each mode of transport are needed to move your elf down that route (from one to two cards). If a player does not have a card of cards matching the required transport, he may play any three cards to form a “caravan” to take him down that route. Needless to say, this is a huge bite out of a player’s eight-card hand. An obstacle adds one identical card to the travel requirement. Caravan travel over a route with an obstacle requires four cards of any kind.

In each city, a cylinder of the player’s color is placed at the beginning of the game. As players visit each city, they collect the cylinder of their color to indicate that they have visited that city. Visiting a city a second time has no further benefit.

It’s too bad that this part of the game, the heart of the theme, is an afterthought to the placement of the transport tiles. Sure, there’s some emotion here if your plans were wrecked, or satisfaction at being able to visit seven cities in one turn, but it’s all anticlimactic. You already knew what you’d be able to do when the transport tiles were placed.

The elves move from city to city until they are unable or unwilling to move any further. Each player takes his whole movement in one go. Once all players have moved, the starting player card is passed to the left and a new turn begins. Any leftover travel cards are carried over into the next turn. To start the new turn, players’ hands are refreshed back up to eight cards, the transport tiles are all removed from the board and returned to the face down pool, and players draft one secret tile and three open tiles again.

Four turns are played. At the end of the four turns, the player who had visited the most cities wins! In the event of a tie, the player with the most travel cards remaining in hand wins!

Strategy

Elfenland is a simple game of route planning, tile drafting and route claiming. It’s got a bit of randomness in the card and tile draws, and it has a touch of chaos in the route claiming. However, it’s a pretty good introductory game for players new to German games.

Most groups would start out playing Elfenland as a game of optimization. Try to draft tiles that match the cards you get, then try to put the tiles on the route that you plan to take. Ensure that you have a plan B since another player may put a travel tile different from what you planned on the route you planned to take. Played this way, it’s a relaxing game or activity, especially when played with just three or four players. The obstacle tiles may be dispensed with in a game with this mood.

More advanced players will add the element of blocking. In addition to claiming a route with the mode of transport you want, more discerning players will also sniff out the likely routes their opponents will take and play sub-optimal tiles (the ones that require two cards) into those routes. The obstacles are important in thwarting attempts to visit up to seven cities per turn. Finally, it would be rather boring to play with anything less than five players. Elfenland with six players is best, since it ensures maximum competition for routes, and also maximizes the blocking factor of the whole game.

Reviewer’s Tilt

Elfenland is an ok game to bring out for new German game players. It’s a good introduction to resource drafting and planning in general. It’s also attractive, and that’s always a plus when recruiting newbies. Don’t play with more than four players in this mode, and dispense with the obstacles. These kinds of games should be around the 60 to 90 minute range.

With regular gamers, six players is the only way to play Elfenland. However, that also stretches the game time to 120+ minutes, which is pretty long for a game without much meat on it. The game also gets repetitive after a couple of plays, and the randomness of the cards and tiles can take a lot of fun out of the game.

I find it disappointing that such a nice looking package fails so badly in the theme department. I was expecting a fun theme where players can get into the traveling elf mood. Unfortunately, the game is more about providing the transportation for the elves, rather than the elves’ journey. The theme, sadly, does not work.

If you play with a lot of casual gamers, then Elfenland is definitely a game that you should consider. Despite the head-scratcher of a theme, it’s light and pretty and plays at a fairly good clip with up to four players. If you like your games to have some depth and strategy to them, then Elfenland isn’t going to do that for you, so you should look elsewhere.

Boardgame article in Newsweek

2005-03-16T13:26:00.000+08:00

UberGames sale still ongoing

2005-03-08T09:42:00.000+08:00

If you're from my neck of the woods (Manila, the Philippines to be exact) then you should check up on the UberGames sale. Contact Titus at the number listed on the UberGames website to see what you can get! Great games like Pueblo, Royal Turf, Mexica, Ticket to Ride, Wings of War and Elfenland can be had at prices approximating US online store prices or even less (Royal Turf is priced at around $9 at current exchange rates), which isn't something you see everyday around here.

No I don't get anything out of this, I just want to see good games find good homes. :)

Review - Alan Moon & Aaron Weissblum's King Lui (King's Breakfast)

2005-03-08T08:48:00.000+08:00

Eat all you can buffet tables are evil things. They could be one of the causes of an escalating incidence of obesity in people. What’s the attraction in eating as much as possible until you’re stuffed to the gills? It’s not like the people who partake of buffets aren’t going to see another meal in days.

If we go by the premise of Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum’s King’s Breakfast it might be good to have a King at every buffet. It’d be better to have a scrawny King, but I guess even a perpetually hungry King like ol’ King Lui will do. At the very least, it’ll regulate how much each person is likely to eat.

The players are sitting down to breakfast with the King. There are seven kinds of food being served. The players get to eat as much as they want, as long as they don’t eat more than the King. That would be rude!

King’s Breakfast is published by Abacus Spiele and Rio Grande Games. The 110 cards are regular sized and beautifully linen-finished, providing an excellent feel. I wish all cards in all games got the same treatment. The cards come in a double-wide tuck box. The box even plays a role in the game! The art is simple, but appropriate for a humorous game like this one. I still wonder about the dragon – couldn’t they have used a big dog instead? And they passed up a chance to be funny by naming the dragon “Emerald”. Oh well. Overall, a good, high quality yet compact treatment was given to this nice little filler.

The Game

There are seven kinds of food, appearing on 15 cards each. The King’s pet dragon Emerald appears on the other five cards. All the cards are shuffled together into a draw pile.

A randomly-determined starting player (aka the course server) deals out cards equal to twice the number of players. Then, the server gets to take all the cards of a single type of food. Alternatively, if there’s nothing on the table that the player wants, he can choose to call to the kitchen for a mystery dish. (That means he just draws the top card of the draw deck.) The rest of the players follow suit, clockwise. The claimed cards are taken into hand so no one sees what everyone else has taken.

Any leftover food not taken by the players is given to the King, and laid out in front of the box for everyone to see. The role of course server passes clockwise, and the process is repeated.

If the Emerald is dealt out by the course server, the bugger is available to be selected by any player in lieu of taking food cards or calling to the kitchen. When selected, the dragon eats exactly two of the King’s food items, chosen by the player. The dragon then leaves the game to digest the meal. Emerald stays until selected (even multiple instances of him, which are taken one at a time unlike food) or until the game ends.

The game ends when there aren’t enough cards for the server to lay out a full course.

Scoring is simple, if a bit multiplication and addition intensive. Each food card of a player has a value equal to the number of food items of that type given to the King. However, if the player has more of an item than the King, he gets nothing for that food type. The player with the highest total points wins!

Strategy

We’re really not supposed to play with our food. We’ll make an exception here though. Since there’s fifteen of each food type, divide that by the number of players plus one (for the King) to get a rough estimation of how many cards the King might end up with. Three or four is usually reasonable depending on the number of players. When you’re in trouble and any selection will take you over what the King’s got in any item, pick one “bust” item (preferably one where the King has just one or two cards) and try to dump any overages there. That way, you don’t lose too much. I wouldn’t bother with the dragon unless you’re in a bust situation. Finally, never send out to the kitchen since that could really ruin your day if it busts your highest food type.

That’s it! This isn’t very complicated.

Reviewer’s Tilt

I kinda like King’s Breakfast. It’s a fast little 10 to 15 minute game that you can pull out and teach in two minutes. It works with kids or adults, and it’s got a goofy theme that you can all rag on. (Quit taking the pastries! You wanna get fatter than you already are? The chicken’s bad for your cholesterol man, lay off!) Sure it’s got a memory element, but why would you even bother? It’s over before you can finish one Krispy Kreme. Some people complain about the scoring, but it’s really not complicated.

King’s Breakfast is really cheap, and can handle a nice range of players. If you’re looking for a simple and quick filler, then give it a look.

Review - Rudiger Koltze's Kuhhandel (You're Bluffing)

2005-03-08T08:32:00.000+08:00

Horse trade

1. (n) A trade of horses (accompanied by much bargaining)
2. (v) Trade accompanied by much bargaining and concession

There are only four horses in the game of Kuhhandel, but horse trading pairs with open auctions to drive this seemingly simple game from Rudiger Koltze.

Players have a hand of cash which they try to parlay into complete four-card sets of animals. This is done by buying the animals at auction, or by offering other players a trade of cash for their animals. The cash offer is blind, so you don’t quite know what’s being offered to you other than how many cards comprise the bid. Since the values of money cards scale from zero to 500, that’s not an easy task.

Kuhhandel is published by Ravensburger, with the English edition titled “You’re Bluffing”. The game’s 95 cards are standard-sized for this kind of game, and linen-finished, which I always greatly appreciate. These cards can take a beating, and they’re a pleasure to handle. The game is packaged in a simple tuck box that will wear out faster than the cards. The art of the game is cartoonish and humorous, which is sort of puzzling. It conveys that the game shouldn’t be taken seriously, and it’s rated for 8+ years old, which equates to a kid’s game. This isn’t a kid’s game. Precociousness aside, bluffing is a subtle mechanism that even early teens might have trouble with. Anyway, taking the graphic design decision at face value, it’s merely adequate. Overall, the game package is a bit lacking in presentation, but not in quality.

The Game

The object of the game is to complete as many sets of four animals as possible, with as high a value as possible. There are ten kinds of animals, with values ranging from the scrawny 10-point chicken to the studly 1,000-point horse.

Players start with a hand of money cards that includes a couple of zeros, four tens, and a 50. The 40 livestock cards (or I guess I should say animals since I don’t think dogs and cats qualify as livestock) are shuffled together into a draw pile. A start player is determined and the game commences.

On his turn, a player may either draw an animal from the deck and auction it off, or begin a horse trade by making a sealed offer for an animal type owned by another player.

The auction is a simple, open-ended affair, with players verbally bidding for the animal card drawn and revealed. The auctioneer may not participate in the bid. Once a high bid is determined, the auctioneer may match that bid and take the animal for himself, or accept the bid and give the animal to the highest bidder. The winning bid is paid to the auctioneer. There’s a twist – no change may be made, so if you bid an amount lower than what you can manage from your money cards, you pay the higher price.

There’s a special animal in the game – the “golden donkey”. When the first one is turned up to be auctioned, each player immediately receives a $50 money card. The second donkey to appear yields a $100 card to each player. The third one gives out $200 cards, and the final one $500 cards. This is the only time the money supply in the game changes.

Alternatively, a player may begin a horse trade. If the player has an animal also possessed by another player, he may try to trade for the animal. (You can’t trade for something you don’t already own at least one of.) If you have two of the animal, and the target player also has two, the trade is for both copies of the animal. The player opens the trade by choosing any number of money cards from his hand and offering them to the target player face down. The target player then has a choice: accept the money and surrender the animal, or make a counter offer. If he accepts, he takes the money into hand without showing anyone else what the bid was, and gives the offering player the animal card(s). If he chooses to make a counter offer, he likewise chooses money cards from him hand and places them on the table face down. The players both then reveal their offers to all players. The player who made the higher bid takes the animal card(s) of the other player, and the players take each other’s offered cash.

In a macabre twist, the tied offer rule makes the active player repeat the blind offer, and the target player repeats his counter offer. If the bids are identical a second time, the active player gets the targeted animals for free.

Players continue to auction off animals and make horse trades in turn until all 10 sets of 4 animals have been completed. At that point the game is over.

A player’s score is determined by totaling the value of his animal types, and multiplying that by the number of completed animal sets he has. The player with the highest point total wins!

Strategy

The auction is simple. Just be aware of the no change restriction when bidding. The interesting part of Kuhhandel is the horse trading. Since each player begins the game with two zero value money cards, it’s not easy to determine what’s being offered to you in a horse trade. This is why it’s important to pay attention when players bid, or get into a counter offer situation, since the money flow becomes visible at these points. The golden donkeys serve to make the game a bit harder by introducing very high value cards into the mix. So, there is a memory component to the game, but it’s not really easy to have perfect information since uncountered horse trades are hidden.

In a counter offer, keep in mind that whatever you offer is money you lose if you don’t win the horse trade. If you just kept your cash and took the offer you’d have ended up ahead. So, if you really think that the offer is legit, take the cash without countering. If you’ve been passed a bunch of zeros and tens, well, the game IS called “You’re Bluffing”.

In the end, it’s all about the high value animals. The horse is a potential game-breaker, since combines with one of the mid- to high- value animals, it provides a very strong chance of victory with just two sets. Even paired with the lowly chicken, the horse’s 1,000 points is still formidable.

Reviewer’s Tilt

This was a game that exceeded my expectations. It looked like a nondescript filler card game in a rather plain package which appeared to be targeted towards children. Looks were deceiving. Or perhaps the marketing department screwed up.

Kuhhandel does quite a lot with 40 animals and 11 money cards per player. Its basic mechanisms are set collection, open auctions and double-blind trading, but the result in this case seems to greater than the sum of the parts. There’s more than meets the eye going on when horse trades start being offered, accepted and countered. However, the game does take significantly more time than the 30 minutes indicated on the box. It can drag on up to 90 minutes or more since there are 40 animals to be auctioned off, and you can count on around 20 horse trades in a four player game. As mentioned earlier, I wouldn’t try to play the full game with eight year olds – the auctions and trades would be too much for them to handle.

Kuhhandel does have a “short game” variant in the rulebook, where four animal cards are randomly dealt to players. This random deal can be significant if a couple of horses are dealt to one player. However, this can be fixed by restricting the animals dealt out to the ones under 500 in value. (You can even have fixed sets of starting animals with approximately equal values, assigned randomly.)

To cut down even more time, animals can be auctioned off in lots of two, maybe even up to four if you’re in a hurry. This cuts down the time spent in the auction, focusing the game on the more interesting part – the horse trading.

Kuhhandel feels like a middleweight game, even when player with the fast start rules. There are tough decisions to be made in horse trades, and the auctions aren’t always easy with the limited money supply and the restricted denominations. I like the tension in the game, and the bluff dynamic. That’s rather unusual for a card game, and exceptional for a card game that looks like Kuhhandel does. For the price, which is surprisingly cheap, Kuhhandel certainly deserves a look if your play group likes auctions and games that involve bluffing.

Game Night - 5 March 2005

2005-03-07T08:53:00.000+08:00

Saturday night dinner and gaming at Frog and George’s place was a dual event this week, coinciding with Nix’s birthday. The first arrivals after myself were Erik and Annie, emancipated from the world of Tantra. We were happy to have them back at the gaming table. While waiting for the others to arrive, I decided to try Blue Moon one more time. I wasn’t hopeful though, since both Erik and Annie were both tournament-class Magic players. After a few turns of play, Nix and Tala arrived. After the expected “that’s it?” reaction to Blue Moon, now unavoidably known as “Magic for Dummies”, we aborted and decided to play a real game.

Modern Art [5P]

We devirginized my new Mayfair edition of Modern Art. It had been in shrink for quite a while since a lot of people now own this game thanks to Titus’s last shipment of 12 copies, now sold out. We broke out the components, and I began explaining the game to Nix and Tala who were new to the game. (Erik and Annie are Modern Art sharks, of course.) While trying to flatten the board, I applied a light amount of pressure and promptly creased the board right down the middle. Eek! Ah, who cares, we’re gonna play the thing to death anyway. I think everyone was more upset about it than I was. :)

After the rules explanation, we were underway. The first season saw just three artists auctioned: Yoko, the talentless hack Christin P and Karl G. The second season was just three artists auctioned: Yoko, the talentless hack Christin P and Karl G. The third season saw just three artists auctioned: Yoko, the talentless hack Christin P and Karl G. See a pattern? I thought so. In the fourth season, Lite Metal and Krypto finally broke into the scoring column. Nix was mostly just selling art. Erik was in the lead, or so we thought. Tala learned how to be a vicious Modern Art player in short order. She killed my Yoko investment by playing a talentless hack Christin P double auction. Sheesh, I should learn to card count. Or not. Anyway, that little snafu cost me $50k and sunk me to last place. Argh! Annie sneaked in the win with her usual underhanded subterfuge kind of way.

Modern Art – final scores:
Annie - $419
Nix – 388
Eric – 323
Tala – 305
Rick – 301

Another game of Modern Art, another new fan. Tala enjoyed herself. Ladies seem to take to Modern Art and do very well in the game, according to Erik. I can’t argue.

While everyone headed to the dinner table, I broke out Mexica at the request of Frog.

Mexica [3P]

I like Mexica so much I had a copy allocated for me from the Ubergames Ubersale. $22 for such a nice game is a steal!

After the requisite rules rundown, which was painless since Frog and George had already played Torres, Java and Tikal, we were off to build canals and neighborhoods. The large Calpullis were claimed early, as usual. George took a lead by founding two big ones, while Frog and I settled for a large and a medium-sized neighborhood each. There was a slight miscommunication on my part as I failed to make it clear that the first phase ends when the Calpulli tokens are used up AND one player builds out, not OR. Oh well, it’s a learning game. I built out to end the phase.

Mexica – midgame scores:
George – 52
Rick – 47
Frog – 41

The second phase had the large neighborhood going quick. George put up the 12 in the far eastern side of the island; I put the 13 in the far west. Frog put the 10 in the middle-eastern part, and then headed south for the other mid-sized ones. I chose to try to burn up all my monuments quickly, teleporting to the 12 on the other end of the board to try to take the 12 away from George. I failed, just tying her. That was the final margin in a very close game.

Mexica – final scores:
George – 116
Rick – 113
Frog – 112

It was good that Titus has enough of Mexica to put it on inventory sale. Anytime I can get a game this good, at that price (which is around what an American online retailer would charge, before shipping), it’s a very good thing. The only Kramer/Kiesling AP game that I now lack is Tikal, which I don’t really care for.

While we were playing, Erik, Annie, Nix and Tala were telling truly hilarious stories about the local MMORPG scene. It’s amusing how these virtual worlds gravitate towards imitating life, complete with all the small and large annoyances that accompany it. Really funny.

Nix blew out the little blue candle on his birthday cake, then we broke out Rudiger Dorn’s The Traders of Genoa as the night’s main course. Frog had been wanting to play this game again, and it’s one of Erik and Annie’s favorite games (we were playing with their copy). Nix and Tala had to split soon so they sat out.

Titus also arrived at this time, and we chatted with Nix and Tala about games the various fantasy series that Tala likes, particularly George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Yes, A Feast of Crows is still delayed. At least Neil Gaiman gives constant updates on Anansi Boys.

Oh yeah, the game.

The Traders of Genoa [5P]

This is not an easy game to talk about. It was the highest scoring game of Traders I’ve ever played, and the amounts that people were willing to give up were pretty crazy. The market was never rolled so we played all the turns. Erik was playing the ownership / message game, Frog was doing Large Orders like nuts, and the rest of us were playing some variation of the middle ground. I’m not great at this game because I can’t stand playing loose.

In the next-to last turn I had an interesting decision. I could end the game by playing the start anywhere tile to start in the market, or I could take my turn and deliver a large order and a message (I was last in turn order). However, that opened the door to the other people to cash in the cards they had in hand. Erik owned six buildings and had a handful of messages. I took the risk that no one else could generate 130 ducats in the final turn (I’d be tapped out and have nothing else to do.) Of course, Erik delivered a gazillion messages (okay, more like four) and collected even more rent. Frog delivered an large order that I didn’t know he could complete.

In the end, the decision I made didn’t help me, but it allowed Frog to overtake Erik and win the game.

The Traders of Genoa – final scores:
Frog – 835 ducats
Erik – 800
George – 765
Rick – 725
Annie – 625

Erik and Annie said goodnight after Traders, but we wanted to get a game in with Titus. After looking through the available games, we settled on Kuhhandel, or Call My Bluff.

Kuhhandel [4P]

Sorry, I don’t like the English name, as I confuse it with Bluff, which I call Liar’s Dice. Anyway, this is a bidding/bluffing game by some guy named Rudiger Koltze. You’re buying and trading animals. I’d say livestock, but there’s a dog and cat mixed in here. We played the short game by dealing out four animals to each player to begin the game.

The initial draw had three of the four “Golden Donkeys” which meant that we added three more money cards to our initial hand of seven. I had two of the asses, Titus had one. Titus had two horses, I had one. In the first turn, we each offered and succeeded in taking the third of our animals. It wasn’t exactly a fair exchange since the horse was worth twice what the ass was, but at least we were on the way to full sets. The auctions saw Frog threaten to complete five sets of animals. George tried to take a donkey from me, and anticipating that she’d offer me a huge amount, I just took it so she had two of them. I was next in order, and offered an amount I more or less knew she couldn’t match for the two asses and completed my set of four asses.

The pivotal play of the game was for the fourth 800 animal (I can’t remember what it was), which I had two of, and Titus had two of. I miscomputed and thought that I could win even if I let Titus have the set. Not close, and Titus won with two sets of 1000 and 800 or something like that.

Cute game, a bit long but it’s got some things going on that aren’t quite obvious. There are ways to shorten the game (deal out more cards to begin, or auction off animals in lots) so at its price (around US$5) it may be worth scoring a copy. The cards are nice, but I do agree with Titus that the presentation is questionable. The theme is cutesy-comedic, as if the game is targeted at kids. Kids will have trouble with the bluff element. This is more of a 12+ game than an 8+ game, and they should have used some other more mature theme.

Review - Richard Borg's Bluff (Liar's Dice)

2005-03-06T08:50:00.000+08:00

My dad once told me that they were playing Liar’s Dice was back in the 60s. It seems like this game’s been around forever. I suppose there’s good reason, because it’s sort of like a good snack food. In the right company, you can just keep playing the game. Liar’s Dice straddles the line between a party game, a drinking game and a non-gamer’s game. Its main driving mechanism is random, but there are decisions to be made. Those decisions become even more important if there’s an ante and a pot riding on the outcome.

I’ve got a couple of copies of Richard Borg’s take on the game, marketed by Ravensburger under the name “Bluff”. This version of the game won Borg the 1993 Spiel des Jahres award, not bad for a reworking of a traditional game. The game comes in a nice box, and like most produced versions of the game it contains a betting guide board, six cups and thirty dice. Bluff’s dice are a bit smaller than standard, are colored orange, and have a star in place of the six. The cups are really nice, made of hard molded black plastic. They can stand a good deal of slamming. The board is your basic no-fold gloss-finish variety, with a betting track running around it and an area in the center for the eliminated dice. That area is grouped in fives, making it easy to tell how many dice are out of the game. Finally, there’s one red die to keep track of the bid on the board.

It’s not hard to make your own copy of Liar’s Dice, but it’s also nice playing with a well-made mass market version. Considering I got Bluff for around $12 each, I think it was a decent purchase.

The Game

Each edition of Liar’s Dice has the same basic gameplay, but there are tweaks in the rules. I’m talking about Borg’s Bluff rules below. If you have any variations, feel free to post them in replies to this review!

Each player takes a cup and begins the game with five dice. Everyone shakes their dice and then peeks at the result, keeping the dice hidden from everyone else beneath the cup. A randomly-selected start player begins the bidding.

Players are bidding on total die results among all players. So, at the beginning of the game, players are betting on results on 30 dice. The bid is for a number of results for a particular number. So, the start player might say “I think there are three 4s”. Well, okay, that’s a really weak bid, since in Bluff, the star is a wildcard and will represent any number that was bid. Basic probability says then that each number on the die can appear two out of six times, or a third of the time. A third of 30 dice is 10 4’s, so that’s a really weak, safe bet.

Anyway, the next player has two choice. He can up the bid on the bidding track, or he can call the previous player’s “bluff”. (Actually, everyone I know prefers to yell “Bullshit!” in various accents, intonations and volumes.) Upping the bid is done in two ways. A player can increment the die face, say, upping a bid of three 4s to three 5s (a raise that’s even weaker than the opening bid). Or, the player can increase the number of incidences. When he does this, he may change the die face bid to anything he likes (say, he’ll raise to six 1s or six 2s).

Since the stars are wild, they appear in the bidding track in the correct statistical order. Compared to the other five results, stars only occur a sixth of the time, so bidding stars is riskier.

Of course if you personally rolled a lot of stars, it’s not really a risk.

Once a player has called “Bullshit!” everyone reveals their dice. If the results are less than what was bid, the bidding player loses dice. If the results are more than the bid, the player who called Bullshit! loses dice. In both cases, the dice lost are equal to the difference between the bid and the results. If the results are exactly equal to the bid, each player other than the bidder loses one die, and is free to call the player who called Bullshit! whatever he wants for the next 30 seconds, in addition to whining and moaning.

Once that’s over with, the eliminated dice are placed in the center of the board, and everyone rolls again. Bidding begins to the left of the player who called the bluff.

The last player with any dice left wins!

Strategy

Hey, it’s all in the probabilities, the personal information (the dice under your own cup) and the expressions of the other players. Other than making the safest bids possible while making sure that a bid doesn’t come all the way around to you again on the same bid so you’re not in jeopardy twice in one sitting, there’s not much “strategy”. Moan and groan when someone makes you lose one die, complain that the dice are screwing you, and have fun!

Reviewer’s Tilt

If you can consider Liar’s Dice a party game, it’s one of my favorites. It’s also one of those games that can work with any kind of crowd, especially in a party atmosphere. I mentioned that I’ve got two copies, because the game can expand to any number of players. Just give a person a cup, some dice, and go. If the number of players somehow exceeds your production set, just find a paper cup and crib some dice from Risk. No, this isn’t a deep thinker, but it’s loads of fun, and because it’s easy to teach anyone can learn how to play in one minute. As fillers go, this is a game that belongs in every game collection.

Review - Wolfgang Kramer & Michael Kiesling's Mexica

2005-03-01T12:47:00.000+08:00

The third and youngest member of the Action Point-driven “Mask Trilogy” of Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling is Mexica. After Tikal took us to the jungles of Guatemala, and Java took us to the largest island of Indonesia, Mexica takes us to the ancient city of Tenochtitlan. In this game, players are Mexicas, powerful holy men traveling the length and breadth of the Aztec Empire to bring civilization to the island. They build canals, waterways that allow rapid travel through the island, aiding them in their work. The canals form the boundaries of neighborhoods, within which they order monuments built.

Mexica comes in the same size linen-finished box that its older siblings did, complete with the amazing insert with a place for everything. The board stunning, a four-fold linen-finished affair depicting and island subdivided into squares. The players’ Mexicas and scoring cubes are colored wooden pawns. The game’s tiles are well-made smooth cardboard pieces. The game has the familiar Action Point menus. The highlight of the package is the colored plastic monuments, with one-story to four-story models. The plastic is nice and sturdy, and has a nice detail of the monument designs. (All they’re lacking are the virgins and bloodstains.) All in all, Mexica is another luxurious package from Ravensburger and graphic designer Franz Vohwinkel.

The Game

Each player is represented by a Mexica on the board. Each player also receives a set of monuments to be built. Finally, a set of Calpulli tokens are laid out. Funny name, what do they do?

The Calpulli tokens (these are hexagonal tiles) define the objectives of the Mexicas. Each token has three numbers, in descending value. The first number defines the size of a district (in squares) that must be delineated with canals in order to found it as a neighborhood. This is also the number of points that the founding player gets for the neighborhood. Once a player encloses a district of the requisite size, he takes the appropriate Calpulli token and places it anywhere within the new neighborhood. We’ll get back to the Calpulli tokens later.

On his a turn a player gets six Action Points to spend on actions. Players can move their Mexica, lay down canals (which are a common resource, and come in one-square or two-square varieties), build bridges across canals or build monuments. They can also save their points, max two per turn, for later use by buying action tokens.

The heart of the game is Mexica movement. These guys are relatively slow of foot when traveling overland. It takes one AP to move them one square, and they can only move orthogonally. They can’t swim (which explains the bridges). However, they have two special modes of movement that get them places fast. The first is the bridge move. Mexicas have the power to travel down waterways, from bridge to bridge. All they have to do is get on a bridge, and find another bridge that can be traced directly down canals or even through the sea. For one AP, they can then use their power over the waterways to get them to the target bridge. This is a very interesting mechanism, and figuring out how to use the waterways to save movement AP is one of the most entertaining parts of the game. The other special movement ability is the island teleport. By channeling their power (expending 5 AP in the process), Mexicas can teleport to any empty land square or bridge on the island. It’s really expensive, but sometimes it’s the only option, especially if your Mexica has been trapped by his opponents.

So. Mexicas play down canals to enclose spaces that fit the requirements of the Calpulli tokens, and found neighborhoods. Once the neighborhoods are founded, the game’s secondary mechanism comes into play. Control of the neighborhood is determined by how many monument stories each Mexica is able to build in it. At the end of the phase, the Mexica with the most monument stories in a district earns victory points equal to the highest number on the neighborhood’s Calpulli token. Second and third most earn the two lower point awards on the Calpulli token. Tied players earn the higher award.

The game is played in two phases. The first phase ends when all eight Calpulli tokens are used to found neighborhoods, and at least one player has built all his monuments. At this point, monument scoring occurs, and a second ration of monuments is handed out. Seven more Calpulli tokens are laid out, and the game continues. The second phase ends when all Calpulli tokens have been used (or the remaining ones can’t be used due to how the board played out), and at lest one player has used all his remaining monuments. The game can also end when none of the players wishes to take any more turns. All the neighborhoods are scored as in the end of the first phase. Finally, any unfounded districts are scored. This is done by counting the number of squares in that unfounded district and awarding the points based on the majorities of monuments built in that unfounded district.

At the end of the final scoring, the player with the most victory points is proclaimed the land’s most powerful Mexica and wins the game!

Strategy

In most cases, it is initially a race to establish the larger neighborhoods. Care must be taken to not allow the player following to found a larger neighborhood than what your Mexica was able to do. When this is not possible for some reason, you can stall by moving your Mexica towards a coastline (to make founding a district easier by using the sea as a boundary) and saving two APs for use next turn. However, you may lose the initiative to build the juicier neighborhoods, so be careful. Remember that the Calpulli token becomes an obstacle when placed. You can use it to block convenient access points into your neighborhood.

Once all the larger neighborhoods are gone, it’s time to start staking out the place with monuments. There are three things to consider when building monuments. First, monument placement. Like the Calpulli token, monuments are obstacles that cannot be traversed by Mexicas. Use them to make access to your neighborhood more difficult. Second, the squares within a neighborhood are limited. If there are no more squares, no one else can build monuments and take the neighborhood away from you. (There will always be one empty square since a Mexica needs to stand in the neighborhood to build in it.) This is where the single-story monuments can come in handy – they can eat up space. Conversely, the four-story monuments are best used when the opponent has eaten up a lot of space with small monuments – you’ll need your larger ones to try to earn points. Finally, monuments are a component of timing the game end. If you’re ahead on points and control in the second phase, once the rush for the large neighborhoods is over try to see if building out will end the game before the other players have a chance to use all their monuments.

Mexica movement is fun and important. Once maneuver that can be overlooked is moving Mexicas down a canal feeding into the sea and reentering the island through another canal somewhere else. When considering a long journey across the board, weight the cost of teleporting against building a bridge and surfing. The surf maneuver might be cheaper. When the end of a phase is imminent, try to see if you can get your Mexica back to the staging area – the five points can be the margin of victory.

Reviewer’s Tilt

I like Mexica. It’s a fast game compared to its sibling, playing at about the same speed as its cousin Torres – 60 to 90 minutes for a four player game. However, that’s an important consideration – Mexica only works will with four players. Due to the scarcity of real estate, the three-tiered monument majority mechanism and the interesting situations created by blocking tactics, it loses a lot when played with three. I wouldn’t recommend it at all with two.

Another important characteristic is that Mexica has no luck at all. There’s a bit of randomness from the Calpulli token layout, but it favors no player and serves to make each game different. At that, it succeeds admirably.

There is a lot of opportunity for defensive play. This makes Mexica a decent middleweight strategy game, much more so than Tikal, but just slightly less than Java. It also has a touch of the spatial nature of Java and Torres stemming from the founding of neighborhoods and the movement of the Mexicas.

I’d rate Mexica to be the second-best entry into the Action Point trilogy, significantly better than Tikal, but just less interesting than Java due to less depth. It does play to completion in 30 to 60 minutes less time than Java, so if deep brain-torching games aren’t a staple in your game group Mexica should be a good candidate for your shelf. Look up Torres first if you’re new to the Kramer/Kiesling Action Point games – Torres is still the best of them by far.