A long weekend dominated by games

[womzilla]

I have tomorrow off for a stock market holiday, and I'm stretching the weekend out by taking of Monday as a comp day (partial recompense for my 75-hour week at the start of March). I'm going gaming tomorrow evening, and otherwise am planning on spending the vastest part of the weekend attacking my game collection--culling it further and then re-packing and re-arranging it so that it can actually fit in the space allotted it. Fun!

Co-incidentally, I was recently asked to rank my top ten (proprietary) board & card games. Here's my top 25; winnowing it down to 10 was very difficult indeed. I'm sure that on another day I'd have come up with a different 10 and 25, but
I'm pretty sure my top 10 would definitely all be in this list.

Acquire by Sid Sackson
Age of Steam by Martin Wallace
Aladdin's Dragons by Richard Breese
Blokus by Bernard Tavitian
Bohnanza by Uwe Rosenberg
Borderlands by Future Pastimes (Bill Eberle, Peter Olatka, and Jack Kittredge)
Business by Sid Sackson
Can't Stop by Sid Sackson
Cosmic Encounter by Future Pastimes (Bill Eberle, Peter Olatka, and Jack Kittredge)
Dvonn by Kris Burm
El Grande by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich
Elfenland with Elfengold by Alan R. Moon
Euphrat & Tigris by Reiner Knizia
Klunker by Uwe Rosenberg
Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation by Reiner Knizia
Lost Cities by Reiner Kniza
Medici by Reiner Knizia
Melee/Wizard by Steve Jackson
Mü (from Mü und Mehr) by Frank Nestle and Doris Matthäus
Pampas Railroads by John Bohrer
Puerto Rico by Andreas Seyfarth
Titan by Jason B. McAllister and David A. Trampier
Wallenstein by Dirk Henn
Warhamster Rally by Frank Branham
Wiz War by Tom Jolly

I'm surprised that I had no individual games from several of my favorite designers--Alex Randolph (Twixt, Ghosts!, Sizimizi), Francis Tresham (Civilization and the 18xx series), Klaus Teuber (Settlers of Catan: The Card Game, Adel Verpflichtet), Thomas Lehmann (Magellan, Time Agent, 1846), Al Newman (Dynasties, Babushka, Winds of Plunder), Mike Fitzgerald (the Mystery Rummy series, including Wyatt Earp), Richard Borg (Liar's Dice, Wyatt Earp, the Command and Colors series), Greg Costikyan (Barbarian Kings, Pax Britannica, Web and Starship), or Grant Dalgliesh (Wizard Kings and most of the other Columbia "Block Games" wargame line). Part of that is that many of the games in this secondary list are longer or more fiddly than the games I get to play these days--especially the wargames and the Tresham and Lehmann titles--which makes them less dear to me now.

And, on another day, the list would be different.

Comments

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Have you played the Railroad Tycoon boardgame? I've got Age of Steam sitting on the shelf, but haven't played it yet, because I'm given to understand that it and RT are very similar, and RT looks about a hundred times better. (Yes, I care about aesthetics.)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Railroad Tycoon is based on Age of Steam.

Martin Wallace has designed about half-a-dozen games (Lancashire/New England Railways; Volldampf; Age of Steam; Railroad Tycoon) using the same basic mechanisms; they cover a fairly wide range of complexity and playing time. RT was an attempt to take Age of Steam and streamline it somewhat. It has a few good ideas, including a better end-of-game mechanism, but it also has a set of absolutely awful random-event cards which, to my mind, completely ruined it but wouldn't be easy to remove. And it took almost as long to explain and play as Age of Steam.

When I played it, I spent the entire time thinking, "This would be so much better if it were Age of Steam".

[montoya.livejournal.com]

By "absolutely awful" you mean "big luck factor"? Because to be honest, the people I play with tend to prefer significant luck elements. And we've definitely had RT games that were decided with a big route card coming up near the end, with someone in position to actually complete it, to no particular consternation...

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I don't mind luck in a game--most of the game on my list have a lot of random elements, and some are intensely chaotic or random--but there has to be a balance. I absolutely hate playing a thought-intensive, mostly strategic game for three hours to see it handed to the player who gets the first pick of cards on the last turn.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

My personal favorite of the lot is Australian Railways, which is similar to Lancashire/New England but improves the system significantly.

Mayfair is doing another streamlined Age of Steam game, which in theory will not have the randomness of Railroad Tycoon (nor the gigantic board which fits on no table I own).

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Also, I'd never heard of the Sackson games before (though obviously I'd heard of Sackson); after reading about it, it looks like Business is similar to Modern Art. Accurate, or completely wrong?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you've heard of Sackson but not of Acquire or Can't Stop--Acquire is his most influential game, and one of his best-selling, surpassed only by Can't Stop.

Business is much less well-known. It might have been the last game Sid finished and was not particularly well-published. Late in his career, Sid's designs were seen as somewhat dated--they are, generally, more abstract than the games coming out of Germany since 1990, and Business is no exception on that score.

It does bear a family resemblence to Modern Art, but not a very close one. The main focus in Modern Art is figuring out how to maximize revenue by choosing the auction subject and type; the focus in Business is on evaluating the worth, to each player, of several sets of objects on display simultaneously. In that way, it's more similar to Knizia's Medici, where being able to estimate the value of a lot of goods to other players is at least as important as understanding its value to yourself.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I have heard of Acquire, but was looking at the other two when I wrote that. The other games of his I'd heard of are Sleuth (which someone compared favorably to the utterly pointless and stupid Mystery of the Abbey) and Buyword (which I've played, and is okay).

Thanks for the explanation (which also made realize I've never played Medici, even though I thought I had; I had apparently confused it with either Princes of Florence or Traders of Genoa. And now that I see what it is, I'm not sure if I want to: I love Modern Art, but don't understand where the game is located in Ra).

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Medici is a game I absolutely adore (as evidenced by its presence on this list), but I feel much the same way you do about Ra, if that's any help in figuring out if you would like it. You can read the rules to Medici here (http://www.gamecabinet.com/rules/Medici.html), but that won't give you much of a sense of why it's as good as it is. You can make your own set relatively easily if you have five-colored cards, and any set you make on your own will probably have better ergonomic design than any commerical edition; for some reason, all three editions of Medici have been plagued with bad human factors design. I think it's a curse.

Sleuth is a reasonably brain-burning deduction game. This sets it apart from Mystery of the Abbey, which is a chaotic special-event-fest wrapped around a simple deduction game. I'm not very good at deduction games or I would probably rate Sleuth higher.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

That's definitely useful information about Medici. (And yeah, I'm sure the rules wouldn't help much; it took a few games of Modern Art before anyone really understood how we were supposed to be playing (I think it's particularly hard to figure out when you have all new people playing it, because everyone's doing such random things that things that would normally be sensible strategies don't really help, making it feel even more random and ungraspable).) I'll put it on my list.

As for Mystery of the Abbey, we (this was with my parents and sisters at Christmas a few years ago) played it expecting something like Clue for adults, and ended up with this bunch of unplayable randomness that had people frustratedly trying to figure out if there was anything they could do that would in any way help them at all. I think we actually quit without finishing the game.

[mneme]

Medici kicks ass, but definitely agree on the human factors. Bleh.

Of your set, I'm curious about the ones I haven't played. That would be:

Aladdin's Dragons by Richard Breese
Borderlands by Future Pastimes (Bill Eberle, Peter Olatka, and Jack Kittredge)
Business by Sid Sackson
Dvonn by Kris Burm
Melee/Wizard by Steve Jackson
Pampas Railroads by Martin Wallace
Wallenstein by Dirk Henn
Warhamster Rally by Frank Branham

Hmm. Not that long a list. :) And Business has already been touched on in-thread (and I've heard about Wallenstein -- though I've not yet seen a copy, except in passing at the Thursday night NG meetups).

-Clue- is Clue for adults -- but I'd love to see a game even better (which IMO, Mystery fails at; the lack of negative deductions, as Clue has, makes the game a grinder without much to recomend it, IMO).

The stuff on your list that's not on the above which -wouldn't- be on my list would be Titan (a bad experience, too much time watching many hours of play -- and the human factors in the game are pretty horrid), Age of Steam (the "sorry, you must be this high to play this game" approach turns me off, though I need to play the game more. It's still pretty brutal, though), and Bohnanaza (which while I'll still play it occasionally, I've cooled on -- not enough fun for the time it takes, IMEX).

[montoya.livejournal.com]

I'm given to understand that the recently released Shogun is a rethemed Wallenstein.

[mneme]

I'd heard that too, just forgotten it. Should try to seek out Shogun.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Titan is a staggeringly brilliant game with two or three. With more, there is, indeed, a lot of sitting around waiting. And you've mentioned before your distate for the human factors design, but I'm not sure that it's possible to do the extremely complex movement system much more elegantly. Color coding the movement blocks might help. Anyway, I play it exclusively on-screen now, using the Colossus (http://colossus.sourceforge.net) client.

I always play Age of Steam with a bankruptcy protection variant--you can sell shares for $3 to avoid bankruptcy. Most people don't need it after the first few turns of their first game.

Aladdin's Dragons is a game of blind bidding at a bunch of special event kiosks; this makes it sound dry, but it's very rich and funny.

Borderlands is sort of like Risk-meets-Settlers, except it came a decade before Settlers and was a clear influence on it.

Dvonn is a really clever abstract that is sort of like Sid Sackson's classic Focus with a disappearing board--itself like Claude Soucie's brilliant but almost forgotten Quick.

Melee/Wizard were the magic and combat systems of The Fantasy Trip published as micro wargames. TFT is a lot like a simpler version of GURPS. It's on the list because I played it again and again and again and again in junior high; I haven't played it in decades but I suddenly realize I miss it.

Pampas Railroads is a relatively bare-bones rail game with an interesting contrained action system. Hard to summarize why it's so good, but it really is.

Wallenstein/Shogun is what wargames look like when invented by German eurogamers.

Warhamster Rally makes much more sense under its original (prototype) title Aquarium Derby. It's a clever game of chariot racing in an arena with heavy currents.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

We have several of these and love most of them. One or two we've almost never played, though! LIke, "Wiz War," is a sleeper in our collection -- played once, sat on the shelf ever since. Maybe we should re-examine the rest.

I found on online variant on Acquire called Cold Cash Risk. It combines the Risk board, scoring and units, the Acquire stock cards and buildings and the money from a Monopoly or similar set into a game of global corporate domination. We've only played it once, but I thought it was awesome. We didn't have enough time to play it right through, but I'm really hoping we do so soon. You can find the rules as a PDF file here (http://interformic.com/ccrrules.pdf).

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I spent much of last night (Friday night) playing Imperial, which is mostly a cross between Diplomacy and a financial takeover game--though more like Phil Orbane's Cartel than like Acquire. I've printed out the rules to Cold Cash Risk and will read them soon. Thanks!