Game Night – 12 February 2005

After a nice dinner at the invitation of Frog and George, we cleared the tables for some Saturday night gaming goodness. Frog had been wanting to try Tikal ever since he’d seen it during Titus’s birthday bash. (I had Tikal, Mexica and Age of Steam on loan from Titus.) So, we set up the original Kramer / Kiesling Action Point game and 1999 Spiel des Jahres winner on the dinner table and prepared to explore the jungles of Guatemala for Mayan artifacts and ruins. Over at the other table, Greg, Nix and Erik prepared to explore the Far East for spices, fame and fortune in Rudiger Dorn’s Goa.

Frog, Javy and George had all played Tikal’s younger sibling Java and cousin Torres, so explaining I didn’t have to elaborate on the Action Point system. I did screw up one rule – the exchange of treasures. It didn’t really have a huge impact on the game, thankfully. We set up for the regular Tikal game; I didn’t want to bother with the auction since this was the first play of the game for my three friends.

Javy’s strategy was to isolate a couple of ruins and explore them to the maximum level. He used both of his temple guards early. The main thing he missed was accumulating artifacts, which ultimately cost him the game. Like Javy I deployed all my grad students and tried to get them all over the board. I established my private camps in opposite regions, though I got blocked from participating in a fairly fat temple when Javy capped it before I got there. Evil. There was a problem with my strategy. The guys I deployed early on got stuck too close to the common camp, and it was too far for them to hotfoot it to the better temples deeper in the jungle. After Javy secured the two largest temples closest to the common camp by massing grad students there, those guys had very little to do. Not good.

Frog and George waited a bit before bringing the main gaggle of their grad students onto the board. This game them greater strength in the deepest part of the jungle and more flexibility in gathering around the larger temples later in the game. They also had about as many artifacts as I did. While I was ahead for most of the game, it was only by a few points. When we entered the final scoring round, I had a problem redeploying my guys. I ended up scoring less points in the final scoring round than in the previous volcano scoring. Bleh. Frog won by a small margin over George, who took second.

Verdict – Javy felt that it was worth a second play after seeing the scoring potential of the artifacts and getting a feel for the game flow. Frog and George weren’t too impressed. My opinion of the game didn’t really improve from my last playing. It’s a nice looking game, but it’s been easily surpassed by the later Action Point games.

Over at the other table, Greg had gotten his expedition card cycle going and won the game handily.

With both games over, the call for a light and fluffy game to end the night was heard. Puerto Rico inevitably hit the table. With six players on tap (Erik had called it a night), I sat out and kibitzed for a few turns. Here’s the report from Nix on what transpired:

That PR game was a doozy, running out of VP chips and almost running out of buildings in the same round (turn? Governor cycle?) PLayers in turn order: Frog,
Greg, Javy, Nix, George. Opening was mainline... The first game I ever scored
more on shipping than building. Frog and Greg stole my factory (my favorite
build), I ended up with harbor-wharf, some 42 shipping, 22 building and 8 bonus
(72 total). Javy came in second, 60-something I think.

Overall, another satisfying night of gaming. We’re looking forward to the long weekend of the 25th to 27th to meet up again for dinner and games.

RA – The Review

Imagine that you were a high priest back in the heyday of the Egyptians. You had a direct line to the RA, the Sun God. You had the power to call on RA to bestow good fortune upon your section of the Egyptian populace. There were other high priests of course, and each of you competed for RA’s favor, in order to claim responsibility for bettering Egypt’s lot through godly favor. Of course, with the good comes the bad, and sometimes a high priest had to accept that catastrophes happen from time to time, especially of he wanted something really good for his people.

You don’t have to imagine all of this – you can just play Reiner Knizia’s RA.



RA was the first big box game to be published under Ravensburger’s new imprint for strategy-oriented German games, alea. It also remains one of the best. RA went out of print in the early 2000s, and has been appreciating in the secondary market ever since. The production qualities of the alea edition of RA are exquisite. The numbered suns that the players use for bidding are beautiful, as is the wooden RA marker. The cardboard tiles and point chits are thick and smooth. The board is a simple single-fold affair. The only thing that one might find missing is a bag for the tiles. One might say that the whole thing is a bit overproduced (a card game called Razzia appeared in 2004 with much the same mechanisms as RA), but for a game this good, it deserves this kind of treatment.

The good news is that uberplay has announced that it is reprinting RA in 2005, and after some deliberation they have decided to retain the theme and the graphics. People who got into German gaming too late to have had a chance to purchase the alea edition at retail price are anxiously awaiting the final form of the uberplay edition RA. Will it retain the wooden suns and RA marker? Will the tiles and board be the same size? Stay tuned.

The Game

RA is an auction and set-collection game. Tiles are drawn randomly and laid out before the players. When an auction is called, players bid for the lot using numbered suns. Whichever player bids the highest-numbered sun wins the lot. The basic mechanism of the game is that simple.

Auctions are called in two ways – when a red RA tile is drawn, or when a player calls on RA himself. The auction is a once-around deal. The player to the left of the person who called on RA or drew the RA tile begins the bid, choosing to offer a sun or passing. The bidding goes once around the table, each player bidding a higher sun or passing. The player who called RA or drew the RA tile gets final bid. High sun wins the lot. If no one bid, players resume drawing tiles. If the lot gets to eight tiles (the maximum) RA is automatically called down. If no one bids on the 8-tile lot, the whole thing is chucked and play resumes.

Players are trying to collect sets of tiles. Certain sets of tiles score certain amounts of points. There are also bad tiles (catastrophes) that destroy tiles in the possession of the player who wins the lot with the catastrophe. Thus, lots are more valuable to some players and less to others depending on what has been collected by each. This is the heart of the game and what drives bids. Players may decide to bid on some lots just to deny the contents of that lot to a player who would score big if he won the lot.

The game is played over three rounds or “epochs”. A player has either three or four suns to bid with each epoch. A major twist of the game is that the sun a player wins a lot with becomes part of the next lot to be auctioned off. (A sun won in a lot can only be used in the following epoch.) Once a player is out of suns, he is out of the bidding until the next epoch. Thus, much of the time only one player will be left with suns at some point in an epoch, and the other players who have expended all their suns will be chanting “RA, RA, RA” hoping that the remaining player draws enough RA tiles quickly to end the epoch.

An epoch ends when a certain number or red RA tiles are drawn (depending on the number of players). At the end of each epoch, players’ scores are tallied based on what tiles they have collected. Also at the end of each epoch, some tiles are discarded, while some are retained. After the third epoch scoring, whoever has the most points wins the game.

Strategy

RA is a game of timing and opportunity. While the tiles drawn are random, players have control of their own destiny as they control the bid. Players can decide that due to the tiles that they win early in the game, they can “go short” and collect tiles that score once and disappear at then end of each epoch, or they can “go long” and collect tiles that are permanent and score repeatedly at the end of each epoch, or once at the end of the game.

A major decision point lies with the catastrophes. Sometimes, taking a lot with a catastrophe and sacrificing some tiles in exchange for others, especially if the price is right (a low-numbered sun), is palatable for a high priest. Other times, the presence of catastrophes can send an otherwise decent lot into the garbage bin.

RA has a certain pace which varies from game to game, depending on the appearance of the epoch-ending RA tiles. If many RA tiles are drawn early in the game, players are willing to settle for much less in the way of tiles, rather than get stuck with unused suns at the end of the epoch. One even sees players trading low numbered suns for the sun accompanying an empty lot, just to set up for the next epoch. Finally, there’s the “chicken” element in being the last player in the bidding, with just one RA tile left to end the epoch. How long do you keep drawing tiles before cashing out? It’s one of the most fun situations in any game I’ve ever played.

Reviewer’s Tilt

RA was a game that I first learned on the online gaming site BrettSpielWelt (BSW). My first experience with the game was ok, but nothing great. Then I learned a friend had the game, and he brought it to our next gaming session. We played the heck out of it for the next few months, with three and four and five players. Like most games, RA is best experienced face to face, with all the grimaces and cheers and curses and chants of “RA RA RA” accompanying the game. I also continued to play RA on BSW, and the more plays I got under my belt, the greater my estimation of the game grew. RA plays quickly, it’s very variable, and it’s always interesting.

I consider RA to be the evolution of Reiner Knizia’s High Society. It takes that excellent filler and adds several elements to make it an exceptional meatier middleweight game. The tension is always present.

Will someone call an auction before I get my next turn?
Will Jim use his 7
sun if I bid my 4 sun?
Can I force Jay to use his 12 sun by bidding my 10,
knowing that he needs that flood while I don’t really want this stupid
lot?
Will my 3 sun be enough to win this lot?
Where the hell is that
stupid flood? My 8-tile river is dying here!
Do’h, another RA tile, two more
and the epoch is over and I still have three suns!

All of this is packed into a game that goes 30 to 45 minutes when all the players are familiar with the tiles. RA plays well with anywhere from three to five. I like it with three as each player get four suns, and there’s more control as the turns pass around quicker.

It’s great that RA is being reprinted. With so many less exceptional titles regularly getting the reprint treatment, this is something that German game fans can rejoice about.

Clans – The Review

Leo Colovini gets a lot of flak for releasing games that are supposedly “abstract”. We’ll set aside the role of the game developer for a moment, and for argument’s sake lay the thing on Leo. Take Clans for example. People claim it’s abstract, but I see a pretty good theme here. No, the theme of Clans isn’t as rich as, say, Torres or Java, but it’s pretty good all the same.

You’ve got five tribes struggling to survive in an area. In order to survive, they group together. However, civilization in this period abhors weakness (I suppose it weakens the genes and makes it harder for offspring to survive), so a village will visit genocide on any clan that’s too weak. Villages are founded on fertile land, favorable to bountiful crops and good weather. Should a village be unfortunate enough to read the signs incorrectly and be founded on barren land, then the village perishes to a man.

I really don’t see how Clans has a weak theme, much less how it can be called an abstract.

Winning moves has put together a sweet package for Clans. The board of this game is amazing. It folds into the standard square Winning Moves box, but its six-part fold presents players with a board that’s six times its footprint. This is one of the most awesome boards I’ve ever seen in a German game. It’s linen-finished, and it’s got a clean, clear design. You also get a bunch of little wooden huts in the five tribal colors, plus a bunch of round yellow markers, five large thick tiles depicting huts of the Five Tribes, and five wooden scoring discs. Clans is one of my favorite “small game” packages, and it’s one of my favorite gateway games introduce non-gamers to German games.



The Game

Players represent the patron gods looking over the welfare of one of the Five Tribes. As such, they influence the formation of villages by moving all the huts in one region of the map into any adjacent region that isn’t empty. Once any inhabited region is surrounded by empty regions, a village is formed. The god whose move created the village gets a village token, and the village is evaluated. If the village contains a hut from each of the Five Tribes, a purge of weak genes is conducted. And tribe that has only one hut in the village has that hut destroyed (all that Tribe’s members in that village are slaughtered to maintain the strength of the genes in the village). Once this is done, the village is scored. Each tribe with a presence in the village after any purge scores points equal to the number of huts in the village.

That’s the main mechanism of the game. It’s very simple. There are a couple twists however.

Each region on the map represents a terrain type. Terrain may be fertile, neutral, or barren. Founding a village on neutral terrain results in what is described above. A village founded on favorable terrain scores a bonus for the tribes that are present in that village. The bonus increases as more villages are formed. A village that is unlucky enough to be formed on barren terrain (not really unlucky – some cruel god caused it to happen by design) is destroyed. The god that causes the village to be founded still gets his reward, but all the tribes perish to a man – no scores accrue. Which terrains are fertile, barren and neutral changes as the game progresses.

The other twist in the game is that the gods have no idea which tribe their rivals are shepherding. Which of the Five Tribes each player represents is determined randomly and secretly using the tribe tiles. Once the last village is formed, players reveal their tribe affiliating, and then add the number of village tokens they earned to the score of their tribe. The player whose tribe has the highest score wins.

Strategy

Clans is the game of Five Tribes, but is described as being for two to four players. This supports the secret tribe affiliation of the players, as one tribe will not have anyone actively supporting it. Part of the game is accumulating village tokens, but trying to mislead your opponents as to which tribe you’re behind. This is important as your village tokens are added to your final score; in a close game (and most are fairly close between at least three tribes) the village tokens provide the final margin of victory. Note that the less players in the game, the more possible confusion one can cause, but the more uncertainty one also has about who’s backing which tribe!



Each tribe starts with the same number of huts on the map. Thus, the objective of each player is to eliminate as many of the opposing huts as possible by subjecting them to tribal genocide, or dooming them by forming a village on barren terrain. Alternatively, a player should try to keep his own huts in play to be part of a successful village. One hut is sufficient as long as not all five tribes are going to be in the village. In fact, the more the huts of three other tribes in that village, the better as it reduces their opportunities to participate in other villages. When forming a village on barren land, it might be acceptable to sacrifice one of your own huts if it takes out more of the opposition’s huts.

The most challenging part of the game is tribal misdirection, if you can manage it. The only “leader” that’s obvious in the game is the tribe with the highest score on the scoring track. Since each player has village tokens, persuading your opponents that you’re backing the wrong village might persuade them to attack that tribe while inadvertently aiding you real tribe. Expect some finger pointing as to who’s really backing which tribe, which is part of the good fun of Clans.

Reviewer’s Tilt

Clans is a deterministic, luckless game, which is unusual in a light, fast and simple game. Thus, it is a perfect title to introduce the uninitiated to German games, as it eliminates the usual crutch of the “classics”, dice and cards, and emphasizes decisions. It also shows off two of the strengths of German games – excellent graphic design, and robust gameplay without sacrificing a good theme. Clans can be taught in five minutes, and a game can be played in 15 to 20 minutes once the players are comfortable with the terrain and genocide mechanisms. It’s an excellent little game for up to four players. I suppose you can play with five and eliminate the “dummy”, but I feel that it would become a bit too chaotic. Still, it’s an option.

Of Colvini’s two best known games, the other being Cartagena, I prefer Clans. Clans plays faster, and does not involve the luck of cards (even considering the Tortuga version of Cartagena). It lacks the pirate trappings of Cartagena, but given that Clans involves tribal slaughter and there isn’t a hint of violence in Cartagena, the theme of Clans wins hands down. Finally, Clans is just a lot faster. Players make their move, score if a village is formed, and the turn passes. In Cartagena, players tend to take time planning their moves since the previous player’s turn may have changed the board situation substantially, and they can play up to three cards per turn. Cartagena’s decision tree doesn’t decline substantially. In Clans, the decision tree grows smaller as villages are founded, speeding the game towards its conclusion. It’s a definite plus when introducing non-gamers to the wonders of German games.

Once players have learned Clans and are ready to move on to weightier, meatier games, Clans still serves as a good palate cleanser between bouts of Puerto Rico and Euphrat & Tigris, or as an icebreaker or closer of a night of gaming. Of course, it still belongs on the shelf as a top-notch quick gateway game, ready usher in the next batch of new German games enthusiasts.

Titus’s Boardgaming Birthday Bash - 5 February 2005

Titus’s Boardgaming Birthday Bash
5 Feburary 2005
Monchot’s Place, 3pm on down

Well sure, I would make it. Once all the stuff I had to do for the house was over (and it all finished a bit later than I intended), I hopped into the car and drove over to Monch’s place. Traffic was cooperative, and I made it there in short order.



I arrived to find a whole gaggle of gamers seated around the big table, chatting away. It’s been too long since we’d had a gathering this large. Lessee: Carlos, Javy, Titus, Mars, Greg, Monchot, Manuel, Frank and John were already present, talking about all sorts of stuff. I distinctly remember a lot of Lord of the Rings film banter (hey, Carlos was around).

We broke the games out a few minutes later.

Puerto Rico (5P)
Javy, Monchot, Mars, Greg, Carlos



I understand that this was a semi-brutal game that ended with Javy notching the win.

Maharaja (5P)
Rick, Titus, Manuel, John, Frank

John had received Maharaja several weeks ago, and we’ve been meaning to play it, but it never got to the table until now. It’s an unusual Wolfgang Kramer/Michael Kiesling game, not because it doesn’t use their now-familiar action point system, but because of its inherent chaos. There’s a lot going on in terms of changing the board; couple that with simultaneous blind action selection and you have a game that might have been a Faidutti/Cathala production.

Each turn, players select two actions using a Pirate’s Cove style action wheel. The actions allow a player to take cash, build or move a house, take houses from supply, build a palace, switch a role or fiddle with the governor track. Houses allow movement on the map and provide income to the owner when built on roads and other players move through. They also allow scoring when built in a city. Palaces are built in cities, and score as well. If the player builds a central palace, those score triple. This all goes to city scoring, which occurs at the end of a turn. Scoring is a majority thing, and the player with the strongest city presence gets a lot of cash; other players present in the city get correspondingly less cash. When a player builds a seventh palace, the game ends, and the player who has built the most palaces wins. The two actions that lend the game a much of its chaos are the roles and the governor track. Each role has a turn order hierarchy and a corresponding power. You can switch these up on other players, taking their role away and using them for your own purposes. A player can also fiddle with the governor track, changing the order in which the palaces are scored.

All in all, it’s a game that’s not easy to get a grasp of quickly. There IS an opportunity to plan ahead, while sacrificing the current situation, but this can easily be blown up by other players. No plan is safe, and everything is iffy until you get to take your turn since even turn order is mutable.



The players went for building central palaces early. Because I was a bit more familiar with the game than the others, my initial houses were placed in spots where they gave me a bit of cash, which allowed a couple of central palaces to the east. Soon, all the central palaces were taken, and the fiddling with the governor track was introduced. With a couple of actions, I managed to set up three of my cities to score in five turns, which is a significant advantage as the central palaces go a long way to giving a top score when the cash is doled out. I protected the lead and built all my palaces, ending the game and giving me the win.

Maharaja is an interesting game, and when players are more familiar with the shenanigans possible, the “score all my cities in a row” trick will cease to work.

During the games, the hotdogs arrived. We also welcomed Nix, Tala, Myles and Mark to the party. After everyone had some eats, the second batch of games began.

Colossal Arena (5P)
Javy, Carlos, Greg, Monchot, Mars



The monsters took to battle in Reiner Knizia’s Colossal Arena. I have no idea who won, so I’ll let one of the players or spectators fill that one in.

Modern Art (5P)
Rick, Mark, John, Manuel, Frank

Titus had been wanting Frank to try Modern Art, and this was a perfect opportunity. Mark is a vicious, veteran Modern Art junkie – I think it’s the only German game he really likes. Manuel and John are no slouches either – we’ve played this game at Mark’s place a LOT.

Pretty typical Modern Art game, with Mark tying to play Jedi Mind Tricks on the rest of us. We remember that no one else can be leading a Modern Art game other than Mark if he’s in. Despite our best efforts, though, he still ended up being in the lead as far as I could tell. People just can’t keep away from giving him money. Don’t ask me why. It’s Jedi Dark Side Powers I tell you.

In the end, though, Mark ended up screwing himself by supposedly misreading a card in his had. Hey, don’t look at me, I just tell the story. So, he thinks a Christin P is a Krypto or something else in the “dim light” and buys a double auction for far more than any sane person would have paid.



I ended up winning the game by a few thousand dollars. Frank loved the game, and began looking for a copy to snap up.

No real pauses between the games now as they were starting up just as others were ending. Frog and George arrived in the meantime, so another Puerto Rico game was started up.

Puerto Rico II (5P)
Javy, Greg, Nix, Frog, Carlos

This was a long, drawn out affair featuring a lot of scoring. Nix won this one by the slimmest of margins over Javy. Nix, post the story sometime willya?



Liar’s Dice (6P)
Rick, Mark, Tala, Myles, George, Titus

We don’t get the opportunity to play party games a lot, because our group is composed of mostly gamers, but occasions like this lend themselves to Liar’s Dice. We were using the Richard Borg version titled Bluff, with the nice board and cups and starry dice.

Myles quickly lost a couple of dice on aggressive bidding. However, he managed to stay in the game until a lot later. There were exact bids three times in the game, quickly decimating the dice in the cups. The call of the night belonged to Mark, who bid three stars with around 14 dice left and five players still in. None of us had any stars – except for Mark, who had three. Ouch. We were the last two players in, but Mark had a 3 to 1 dice advantage and made quick work of my last die.

That was FUN.

We took a break for dinner as the Puerto Rico game raged on. When dinner was over, Carlos, Mark, Manuel, Tala and Frank took their leave, while Deej arrived for some late-evening fun.

Amun-Re (4P)
Javy, Mars, Titus, George



Adjourned after the Old Kingdom

Runebound (3P)
Myles, Greg, Monchot



Adjourned with no one killing the head honcho.

Java (4P)
Deej, Frog, Rick, Nix



We didn’t finish any of the games since they were still running at 3:30am. Java was yet another crazy game. It was the first play for Nix and Deej, so the going was slow (and hey, it was after midnight) but we still ended up with a decent distribution of water all over the board. It was a tough game with a lot of cities being locked up in terms of position, probably two to three turns before the expected final scoring. We never did get there, and called the game with a half-dozen three-hex tiles remaining. I had a slim lead over Frog, but I was again out of festival cards, which didn’t bode well.

We called it a night (day?) after twelve solid hours of gaming, chatting, friends and fun.

Torres 2000 vs. Torres 2005

I'm feeling very good about deciding to score a copy of the original 2000 Torres.

Rio Grande Games has posted a pic of the box front of the Torres reprint with Franz Vohwinkel doing the graphic design:



This is the box front of the original featuring Alessandra Cimatoribus art:



The like the original a lot more. If the board and card graphics follow the same pattern, then I'll be happy that I knew the original art could not be improved upon. It's distinctive, it's different from the scores of medieval art designs for games, and it fits Torres's theme to a "T".

Still can't wait to see the rest of the new Torres though. And I hope it brings a fantastic game back to the boardgaming fore. The sub-Top-100 rating Torres has on Boardgamegeek simply doesn't do the game any justice.

Game Night - February 12, 2005 - Capsule

Game night at Frog & George's Place

Frog, George, Javy, Erik, Greg, Nix, Rick

The Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation [Learning games for Nix & Javy]
Light (Rick) d. Dark (Nix) [2 games]
Dark (Javy) d. Light (Nix) [1 game]

Tikal [Learning game for Frog, George & Javy]
Frog 94
George 90
Rick 86
Javy 75

Goa [Learning game for Nix]
Greg 44
Erik 41
Nix 36

Puerto Rico
Frog
Greg
Javy
Nix
George
[Results to follow]

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Boardgameblog

Okay, false start there. For some reason Blogger created a shadow with no template oh well. Still surprised I got the boardgameblog addy.

This is just a place to dump stuff I've written on boardgames and boardgaming, for easy access of my game group and friends.

Modern Art - The Review

Modern Art - The Review

Ever been to an art auction? If you’re uninitiated, you’ll just go and bid on a piece that you like, without knowing who the artist is or what the painting is (or might be) worth. The only thing that will tip you off that the work is valuable (or might be valuable in the future) is the Japanese gentleman across the room who pushes the price of the painting beyond your budget. So you sit patiently, since there will probably be another piece that strikes your fancy a bit later. Perhaps the Japanese gentleman won’t be into that one…

Modern Art isn’t quite like that, and the angst you feel isn’t usually because someone else purchased something you want, but that rather he paid the auctioneer too much for it. It’s an interesting game, a pure auction, and it should be a one-trick pony. But it isn’t. More on that in a moment.

Mayfair Games and German partner Hans im Glück first published Modern Art in 1992. The original came in a huge box for a card game, with oversized thick cards and a largish board that didn’t have to be quite that large. It was still attractive (though expensive for what it was), as long as you didn’t have anything against the artwork (some people do consider the pieces “ugly”). The game went out of print and was an eBay star for quite a while. In 2004, Mayfair reprinted the game in a smaller form, reducing the cards to about regular playing cards size, and the board to around half its size. I quite like the new presentation, as it makes the game more portable, and the price point more accessible. This is a boon for the people who got into German games too late to be able to acquire Modern Art at a reasonable price. I’d still recommend that anyone who wants their 2004 Mayfair edition to last put transparent sleeves on the cards. The cards are black-bordered and no sturdier than a regular playing card, so they’ll show wear pretty quickly if you play this game frequently (and chance are good that you will).

Modern Art is one of Reiner Knizia’s now-misnamed “auction trilogy”, traditionally along with RA and Medici. The good doctor knows his auctions, however, and many of his better games have included some form of that mechanism – High Society, Dream Factory (Fabrik der Traum), Amun-Re and Taj Mahal are all highly-regarded Knizia designs. If you like Modern Art, you might want to check some of those other games out.

The Game

Well, you’re art dealers as well as collectors, so you are given a stock of pieces to begin the game. There are only five artists in this Modern Art universe, each with unknown potential except relative to each other. There’s the brilliant Lite Metal, the whimsical Yoko, the fastidious Christin P, the futuristic Karl Gitter, and the contemplative Krypto. Each has several paintings on the market, some of which might find their way into your hands to sell off.

In each season, players auction off works in turn. Each work must be sold off according to one of four methods: In the Fist (a blind bid), Once Around (each player gets to raise or pass once), Fixed Price (auctioneer names a price, first to be willing to pay it wins) and Open (your usual going, going, gone). Regardless of the method, someone ends up with the piece. There is a special method – the Double Auction. These works must be sold as a package deal – a matching painting of the same artist must be sold off along with it. If the auctioneer doesn’t have a match, one of the other players gets to match and sell the two as a lot. The proceeds are split. If an auctioneer buys his own piece, he pays the bank (those works are considered to be on consignment I guess). If someone else buys the piece, the auctioneer gets the proceeds (and these ones are from the auctioneer’s own collection I suppose).

Anyway. The season ends when five works of one artist have been offered for auction – the fifth piece (or fourth and fifth in the case of a Double) is not actually sold off. The artist who had his fifth work offered off has all his works valued at $30,000. The artist with the next most works bought is valued at $20,000, and third place is worth $10,000. Only the top three places are “in the money” and pay out in that season. If less than three artists are bought in that season, only they pay out.

Players play for four seasons. Each season (except the last) players get a few more pieces to sell. The twist here is that artists’ work values are cumulative from season to season, and pay out total value as long as that artist finished “in the money” for that season.

Player with the most cash at the end of the game wins!

Strategy

You might want to skip this if you’re just interested in games and Modern Art for the fun of it. You don’t need to read this part. If you’re interested, read on. Ever heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma? Go ahead and Google it for a bit. If you’re lazy, here’s the Wikipedia definition:

The prisoner's dilemma is a type of non-zero-sum game. In this game theory problem, as in many others, it is assumed that each individual player is trying to maximise his own advantage, without concern for the well-being of the other player. This Nash equilibrium does not lead to a jointly optimum solution in the prisoner's dilemma; in the equilibrium, each prisoner chooses to defect even though the joint payoff of the players would be higher by cooperating. Unfortunately (for the prisoners), each player has an individual incentive to cheat even after promising to cooperate. This is the heart of the dilemma.

There are some uncommon terms there (“non-zero-sum game”, “Nash equilibrium”). If you want to learn a bit more, see the film “A Beautiful Mind”. Who says gaming isn’t educational?

Ok. Modern Art is like an evolving multiplayer Prisoner’s Dilemma. When a when a buyer purchases a piece from an auctioneer, he wants to make a profit. The problem is, the auctioneer will make a profit too. How much profit each makes is dependent on two things – how much each thinks the painting is going to be worth at the end of the season, and how much of an advantage the buyer is willing to cede to the auctioneer relative to himself. It becomes a game of brinkmanship, depending on how the game group plays. The more of an advantage a player is willing to cede to the auctioneer, the closer he will bid to his expected value. Whatever the final bid ends up as, that’s the profit of the auctioneer. The buyer makes whatever the difference between the expected value and what he paid is. The “looser” the group plays, the more of an advantage the auctioneer gets in each auction. If a group plays “tight” then no buyer should be willing to give the auctioneer much more than he’s getting – ideally 50%+1 of the expected value. But people being people, and people being naturally greedy, this never happens, and someone will be upping the price.

So there are two skills at work here. First is predicting the expected value of a painting with the information on the table, in your hand, and in the words and actions of the other players. Second is evaluating the bidding behavior of the group and maximizing your take as an auctioneer while ceding as little as possible when buying (the latter of course being mostly out of your control – the best you can do is refrain from bidding up but you can’t stop others from doing that).

That’s the basic engine that drives Modern Art. The various auction types serve to keep the game different and not repetitive, and Reiner did a good job there. What can drive you batty is the way your game group bids. Especially if you just read this part of my review. Sorry about that.

Reviewer’s Tilt

Modern Art is one of the best pure auction games out there. If you have any interest in game theory, or just like games where players interact directly and there’s a lot of personality and gut involved in a game, the Modern Art is one of the best games out there. I need to stress that it’s highly group dependent, as this type of game usually is. If you have real “players” among you (the poker nuts usually), Modern Art stands a good chance to captivate them. It works really great with non-gamers as well. I’d be cautious about mixing the two audiences, however. As a mediumweight game, I believe that Modern Art has few peers, and it belongs in the library of most German game enthusiasts.

Torres - The Review

Torres – The Review

Overview

Torres was the 2000 Spiel des Jahres winner. It’s also the most unusual of the SdJ winners, because behind its excellent theme lurks perhaps the best game to win that prestigious award. The game has more than enough depth to keep gamers interested, while having a theme and colorful presentation to catch the eye of the non-gamer. The rules of Torres are simple, and can be taught and learned in fifteen minutes. The game also comes with several optional rules and variants to keep you playing, even if the base game is so good that it wasn’t really necessary. Torres was designed by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, who also won the SdJ the year previous for Tikal, which is a cousin of Torres due to some similar mechanisms, notably the Action Point system. Kramer and Kiesling subsequently designed Java, which inherits some of its mechanisms and feel from Torres.

Torres is a beauty of a game, with striking, whimsical art by illustrator Alessandra Cimatoribus. This graphical design must have contributed to the SdJ win, as it gives the feeling that the players are in a fairy tale, and the towers and little portly knights running around are part of the dream landscape. The wooden knight pawns are fat and have a personality that few wooden pawns can impart in this environment. The interlocking tower blocks are made of sturdy plastic, and have a nice, solid feel. The board is just fantastic. The cards are plastic-coated and should withstand a decent amount of handling.

While copies of the original edition of the game are readily available under multiple imprints; those of FX Schmidt, Ravensburger and Rio Grande Games (RGG), RGG is preparing a new edition of Torres for release in 2005. The new edition will have a new graphic design by Franz Vohwinkel, who is best known for magnificent work on Java, Mexica and Tikal. Personally, Torres wouldn’t be the same without the Cimatoribus illustrations transporting the players to a magical land.

The Story (told from the point of view of the player teaching the rules)

"Hello friends, you're in for a treat. Today, I'll be teaching you Torres, a Spiel des Jahres winner from the acclaimed duo of Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling.

Each of us is a prince or princess! Our kingdom has recently been beset by natural disasters, which have ruined the towers that serve as our nation's defense. It is up to us to ensure that the builders are able to reconstruct the towers, and the Knights that serve us must protect the towers as they are built! Whichever of us has the knights guarding the greatest towers at the end of the third day hence garners the most prestige, and our father the King will hold a great festival in his or her honor in addition to making him or her the heir to his throne!

By the way, our father is skittish, as you know, and he will be looking favorably on whichever one of us has a knight guarding the entrance to his tower bedroom at the end of each day. He'll be touring the towers, so it might be a different tower each night!

These are your doughty knights. (Hand them the fat little Knight pawns.) They're all a bit rotund and had one too many feasts - we haven't had a war in a while thanks to the towers - so this little tower-guarding activity should whip them back into tip-top shape! Good luck, and may the best sibling win!"

(Reviewer’s Note: I took out the stupid part about wizards and the depressing part about our father the King dying at the end - wholly unnecessary!)

The Rules

The rules are expressed as simple either commanding a knight (onto the board or on the board) or commanding the Royal Builders. (I try to avoid using the words "Action Points", but that isn't always possible.) Gaining the King's Bonus is simply a reward for guarding the castle where this King is resting at the end of the day, on the floor where the King commands. The Action Cards are feats of strength, dexterity and skill that the well-trained and noble knights can perform in pursuit of their duty. The Master Cards give rewards for disciplined knights who can maintain orderly formations while tending to their normal guard duties. A detailed rundown of the rules can be had from Greg Schloesser’s excellent review on BoardGameGeek here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/33

The Feel

Torres is King of Action Point games because of its simplicity. Therefore, players have a brief menu of choices on their turn – do they order their knights on the board to occupy (a) tower(s), do they order more knights onto the field to do the former, or do they build towers. This is the game’s strategy. How and where these actions are executed is the tactics. There have been two schools of thought – one is to concentrate on one or two towers, build them high and wide, and take the topmost post while preventing other knights from pursuing. The other is to occupy as many towers as possible without necessarily having your knights on the topmost floors. This is all tempered by having to take into account what your rivals are up to. I would submit that a certain amount of opportunism is always good – take what your opponents offer you in terms of scoring off tower they build, while trying to keep all your own work as much as possible for yourself. This mindset seems to be successful much of the time. However, it is always how you plan to achieve this supremacy that the spanner is thrown into the works.

Action Cards are precious things. Since we always play with all ten in the hands of each Prince(ss), this is the variation that I will address. Again, there are two schools of thought. The first demands that a card be used each turn as much as possible, in order to maximize their use. After all, using a card is free, and there are ten cards – exactly one for each turn of Torres. The other is to hold on to all your cards until there is something you need to do on the board that would normally be impossible. Then you try to find a way using the Action Cards. Thus, a game may go by with the use of three, perhaps four of your Action Cards, and mostly in the last day of the game. However, each card use counts for great effect. I subscribe to the latter school, but I have seen the former be very successful so I cannot claim any superiority.

Indeed, Torres does feel like a waking dream when we play. For an hour and a half, you are Princes and Princesses, commanders of a small troop of Knights in service to a King and Country. You try to do your best to discharge the wishes of your Father the King, and in the doing execute curious and clever maneuvers to rebuild your Kingdom’s Towers and man the most prestigious posts in them.

Reviewer’s Tilt

Torres is an excellent game that seems to have been undeservedly overlooked in the years following its SdJ win. It possesses the depth, the looks, the flexibility and the simplicity to charm and hold the interest of players, whether they are gamer or non-gamer. The greatest hurdle seems to be in the teaching of the rules and the orientation of the players towards the game. I feel that if the game is presented with the inherent theme, and the rules to the game are taught using this theme, that Torres will find a greater audience and that audience will gain a greater appreciation for the game. With the 2005 reprint forthcoming, it is hoped that this fantastic game will find new life among German game fans.