Quick gaming report
Feb. 12th, 2006 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaI managed to get out to my Long Island boardgaming group for the first time this calendar year. I had a great time, even if the two games I played were both somewhat unsatisfying.
Poison, five-handed: Not quite dire, not at all good. Reiner Knizia mashes together his own Too Many Cooks and any number of Klaus Palesh games like Sticheln and Hattrick and comes up with something almost, but not completely, unsatisfying.
Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean, by Andrew Parks and Jason O. Hawkins, Z-Man Games:
I bought this somewhat discounted from Fine Games in their year-end clearing sale. Z-Man's original titles have been steadily improving, so I thought I'd give this a chance.
The high summary is that this is a combination of Puerto Rico and Mare Nostrum, with some specific game play elements borrowed from Wallenstein and Civilization, There's little or nothing completely original in it, but the blend has its own virtues.
I read the rules a month ago and then again this week; I had most of them pretty well in mind as I taught them, but there are a lot of them and I didn't teach it as expertly as I might. In particular, the rules governing the Great Wonder buildings are fiddly, and no one understood them except me, which ended up being crucial in my victory. We got through with a fair minimum of difficulty, though, I think, to reach some conclusions.
The short version is that it has a lot of (at least apparent) randomness for a game as long and involved as it is. There was one random event card revealed toward the end of the game which everyone agreed was ludicrously unbalancing. But even at the smaller level, the high variability in sea travel and trading with foreign lands--which are absolutely vital to the game at least some of the time--are unsatisfying.
There are things you can do to ameliorate the risk--you can load up on Aegis cards which protect you from the hazards--and I think that more experienced players than we would have undertaken them. Also, the player who had the worst apparently luck--Marty--was right in the thick of the pack when we ended the game at turn 10. He was less than half a turn behind Al and Norbert. (Here's a digression which won't make much sense to those who don't know the game. In order to build my Great Wonder, I had to give my rare commodities to other players, which both held me back and pushed forward those players. Of the three who were fighting for second place, Marty is the only one who didn't benefit from my largess. I suspect that had more impact on the final standings than anything he actually did.)
On the other other hand, even though I had to give away three rare cards and never once bought an Aegis, I was at least a full turn ahead of all of the other players. Some of that is that I understood the game better than anyone else, but some of it definitely was lucking past some of the worst hazards.
The variability wouldn't be as big a problem if the game weren't so long. I apologize to Norbert and Victoria for roping them into a multi-hour game when Norbert had to be home at a reasonable hour. This left them in the awkward position of having to leave before the game was finished, but I think we had all played our fill by that point anyway, three or more hours after we began. Some of that was rules explanation, but a lot was just game play.
Again, there might be an amelioration. The rules suggest that experienced players simply skip the first four turns and start with turn five in a position consistent with high-average performance in the first four. I think that if I do end up playing it again, I will use the first four turns to teach the game and then set everyone's position to the starting position of the shorter game. That's when things start getting really interesting, anyway.
After thinking about it, I'm actually somewhat eager to play again under those circumstances: a group of players who have all read the rules or played before, willing to run through the first Year as a learning exercise, and then re-set to the advanced setup to start the second Year and really play.
I left my copy with Al (the session host) in the hopes that it gets played again even if I can't be there for it. Al says he's willing to lead it once if anyone is willing to play it. I recommend highly that anyone who wants to play read the rules in advance--the rulebook is actually very good, and can be understood with no reference to the components. The rules can be found online through the Z-Man website.
Poison, five-handed: Not quite dire, not at all good. Reiner Knizia mashes together his own Too Many Cooks and any number of Klaus Palesh games like Sticheln and Hattrick and comes up with something almost, but not completely, unsatisfying.
Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean, by Andrew Parks and Jason O. Hawkins, Z-Man Games:
I bought this somewhat discounted from Fine Games in their year-end clearing sale. Z-Man's original titles have been steadily improving, so I thought I'd give this a chance.
The high summary is that this is a combination of Puerto Rico and Mare Nostrum, with some specific game play elements borrowed from Wallenstein and Civilization, There's little or nothing completely original in it, but the blend has its own virtues.
I read the rules a month ago and then again this week; I had most of them pretty well in mind as I taught them, but there are a lot of them and I didn't teach it as expertly as I might. In particular, the rules governing the Great Wonder buildings are fiddly, and no one understood them except me, which ended up being crucial in my victory. We got through with a fair minimum of difficulty, though, I think, to reach some conclusions.
The short version is that it has a lot of (at least apparent) randomness for a game as long and involved as it is. There was one random event card revealed toward the end of the game which everyone agreed was ludicrously unbalancing. But even at the smaller level, the high variability in sea travel and trading with foreign lands--which are absolutely vital to the game at least some of the time--are unsatisfying.
There are things you can do to ameliorate the risk--you can load up on Aegis cards which protect you from the hazards--and I think that more experienced players than we would have undertaken them. Also, the player who had the worst apparently luck--Marty--was right in the thick of the pack when we ended the game at turn 10. He was less than half a turn behind Al and Norbert. (Here's a digression which won't make much sense to those who don't know the game. In order to build my Great Wonder, I had to give my rare commodities to other players, which both held me back and pushed forward those players. Of the three who were fighting for second place, Marty is the only one who didn't benefit from my largess. I suspect that had more impact on the final standings than anything he actually did.)
On the other other hand, even though I had to give away three rare cards and never once bought an Aegis, I was at least a full turn ahead of all of the other players. Some of that is that I understood the game better than anyone else, but some of it definitely was lucking past some of the worst hazards.
The variability wouldn't be as big a problem if the game weren't so long. I apologize to Norbert and Victoria for roping them into a multi-hour game when Norbert had to be home at a reasonable hour. This left them in the awkward position of having to leave before the game was finished, but I think we had all played our fill by that point anyway, three or more hours after we began. Some of that was rules explanation, but a lot was just game play.
Again, there might be an amelioration. The rules suggest that experienced players simply skip the first four turns and start with turn five in a position consistent with high-average performance in the first four. I think that if I do end up playing it again, I will use the first four turns to teach the game and then set everyone's position to the starting position of the shorter game. That's when things start getting really interesting, anyway.
After thinking about it, I'm actually somewhat eager to play again under those circumstances: a group of players who have all read the rules or played before, willing to run through the first Year as a learning exercise, and then re-set to the advanced setup to start the second Year and really play.
I left my copy with Al (the session host) in the hopes that it gets played again even if I can't be there for it. Al says he's willing to lead it once if anyone is willing to play it. I recommend highly that anyone who wants to play read the rules in advance--the rulebook is actually very good, and can be understood with no reference to the components. The rules can be found online through the Z-Man website.
