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Games games games
For the last eleven years, I've done most of my boardgaming through a group which meets in various peoples' houses in Long Island, on either side of the Nassau/Suffolk line, about an hour's drive from my house. Meetings are regularly Friday evening after work and go from 7:30 PM to 1 AM or so. We also have a tradition of day-long events during long weekends, especially Thankgiving (Black) Friday, Memorial and Labor days, and July 4th. This past weekend we had regular gaming on Friday in Seaford (40 miles from my house) and all day Saturday in Bohemia (the most distant location, a full 60 miles from home but only 20 miles from Seaford). So, to eliminate 100 miles of round-trip driving between 1 AM Friday and 11 AM Saturday, I spent the night on the rec room futon at the home of the Friday night host, Steve "K-ban" Kurzban.
(This, incidentally, gave me the distinction of having the shortest trip to bed for the night--since K-ban actually had to walk upstairs to his bedroom, while I kipped down in the very room where we were gaming. A once-in-a-lifetime victory!)
Here are some comments on the games I played.
First, on Friday, chez K-ban:
Pack & Stack is dire. This has a fairly clever system of generating random loads of cargo to fit in the oddly shaped trucks, a system that is then completely ruined by an "everyone make a fast grab for the truck" mechanism. This feels like a game that was either a) developed by drunk people or b) ruined by the publisher. I mean, Six Takes/Category Five/whatever it's being called this year. which we played as an opener, is also a deeply chaotic game of getting completely screwed by random chance. In Six Takes, a round takes about six minutes, and there's a lot of room for thinking--you can often see how a trick will play out (even if you're often wrong), and you can complement yourself on your skill if you do well. By contrast, a round of Pack & Stack takes about six minutes to play because of rolling dice and picking pieces and scoring the trucks, and in that time you make one decision that isn't completely trivial, but it's usually going to be mostly trivial, and you have about two seconds to do it in. Avoid like death.
Small World continues to improve, and with experienced players it plays very quickly--four of us played an entire game while waiting for Alvaro, who got delayed by about an hour.
Steam is great. No surprise there--it's a slightly improved version of one of the best games EVAR.
Then on Saturday at Ward's:
So, After the Flood took us over five hours. But that's with rules explanation and a lunch break and three new players. I bet experienced players can easily get it under three hours. Oh, but it was so much fun! There's so much going on, every move is a tense "if I do this, then he'll do that and then the other...." Arms races and razing cities and clever combinations and chicken and eggs.... Now I'm hungry to play it again.
Mid-day, Al and I realized we had a little time for a two-player, so we grabbed Caesar and Cleopatra, which neither of us had played in years. We fought to an epic draw and remembered exactly how brilliant a little game this is. This is the game where one cries out, "Oh, no, not another damned orgy!", which, you know, is aces.
Because of my nasal surgery, I mostly missed the period when everyone else was playing Dominion to death, so I was behind the curve on playing it. We played two games with similar sets of cards, and I actually managed to build an effective deck the second time. Scored nine VP on my last turn, which was just enough to win--my first ever victory!
Wildlife Adventure was great fun, though with five it's *too* chaotic, and Expedition/Terra X is a marked improvement in gameplay. But this may be the only game any of us own that has a hairy-nosed wombat in it, so, geez. yes.
One of the games I printed out through ArtsCow is the Decktet, a custom deck of 36 cards in six suits--six aces, six "crowns" (kings), and three each of ranks 2-9, each of which has two suits in various combinations. (The "expanded" deck also has an unsuited, unvalued card and four "pawns", which have no specific value and three suits each.) There are a bunch of games available, some by the designer and some fan-written, and I did a terrible job of teaching Quincunx. This is a very chaotic and somewhat fiddly game built around an interesting idea, which is laying card to a 5x5 tableau and scoring for adjacencies. But it's maybe three-quarters-baked and feels very much like an unsuccessful adaptation of a folk game. Still, I want to try some other Decktet games--the cards are just so weird and neat. (And I want to try Quincunx solitaire and maybe with 2.)
We closed out the evening by teaching Ward to play Race for the Galaxy, in advance of the second expansion set due later this month. Despite a fast start, I stalled out mid-game and got completely crushed. I just wasn't cycling through cards fast enough to see the ones that would really work with my planets and only got out one bonus card. Must play better!
There it is--18 hours gaming in 28 on the clock. Yay me!
As a final note, I do have to say that I was quite surprised when, between the end of Friday gamenight and before the start of Saturday game day, my gracious hosts invited me into an overnight game of Find the Malfunctioning Carbon Monoxide Detector in the Rec Room. K-ban and Sandy (Mrs. K-ban) were such good sports about it that I had a good time despite my lack of interest in that family of games. I think Sandy won, because she followed the "go back to bed" strategy and was still sleeping when I left for Ward's.
What a great weekend!
(This, incidentally, gave me the distinction of having the shortest trip to bed for the night--since K-ban actually had to walk upstairs to his bedroom, while I kipped down in the very room where we were gaming. A once-in-a-lifetime victory!)
Here are some comments on the games I played.
First, on Friday, chez K-ban:
Pack & Stack is dire. This has a fairly clever system of generating random loads of cargo to fit in the oddly shaped trucks, a system that is then completely ruined by an "everyone make a fast grab for the truck" mechanism. This feels like a game that was either a) developed by drunk people or b) ruined by the publisher. I mean, Six Takes/Category Five/whatever it's being called this year. which we played as an opener, is also a deeply chaotic game of getting completely screwed by random chance. In Six Takes, a round takes about six minutes, and there's a lot of room for thinking--you can often see how a trick will play out (even if you're often wrong), and you can complement yourself on your skill if you do well. By contrast, a round of Pack & Stack takes about six minutes to play because of rolling dice and picking pieces and scoring the trucks, and in that time you make one decision that isn't completely trivial, but it's usually going to be mostly trivial, and you have about two seconds to do it in. Avoid like death.
Small World continues to improve, and with experienced players it plays very quickly--four of us played an entire game while waiting for Alvaro, who got delayed by about an hour.
Steam is great. No surprise there--it's a slightly improved version of one of the best games EVAR.
Then on Saturday at Ward's:
So, After the Flood took us over five hours. But that's with rules explanation and a lunch break and three new players. I bet experienced players can easily get it under three hours. Oh, but it was so much fun! There's so much going on, every move is a tense "if I do this, then he'll do that and then the other...." Arms races and razing cities and clever combinations and chicken and eggs.... Now I'm hungry to play it again.
Mid-day, Al and I realized we had a little time for a two-player, so we grabbed Caesar and Cleopatra, which neither of us had played in years. We fought to an epic draw and remembered exactly how brilliant a little game this is. This is the game where one cries out, "Oh, no, not another damned orgy!", which, you know, is aces.
Because of my nasal surgery, I mostly missed the period when everyone else was playing Dominion to death, so I was behind the curve on playing it. We played two games with similar sets of cards, and I actually managed to build an effective deck the second time. Scored nine VP on my last turn, which was just enough to win--my first ever victory!
Wildlife Adventure was great fun, though with five it's *too* chaotic, and Expedition/Terra X is a marked improvement in gameplay. But this may be the only game any of us own that has a hairy-nosed wombat in it, so, geez. yes.
One of the games I printed out through ArtsCow is the Decktet, a custom deck of 36 cards in six suits--six aces, six "crowns" (kings), and three each of ranks 2-9, each of which has two suits in various combinations. (The "expanded" deck also has an unsuited, unvalued card and four "pawns", which have no specific value and three suits each.) There are a bunch of games available, some by the designer and some fan-written, and I did a terrible job of teaching Quincunx. This is a very chaotic and somewhat fiddly game built around an interesting idea, which is laying card to a 5x5 tableau and scoring for adjacencies. But it's maybe three-quarters-baked and feels very much like an unsuccessful adaptation of a folk game. Still, I want to try some other Decktet games--the cards are just so weird and neat. (And I want to try Quincunx solitaire and maybe with 2.)
We closed out the evening by teaching Ward to play Race for the Galaxy, in advance of the second expansion set due later this month. Despite a fast start, I stalled out mid-game and got completely crushed. I just wasn't cycling through cards fast enough to see the ones that would really work with my planets and only got out one bonus card. Must play better!
There it is--18 hours gaming in 28 on the clock. Yay me!
As a final note, I do have to say that I was quite surprised when, between the end of Friday gamenight and before the start of Saturday game day, my gracious hosts invited me into an overnight game of Find the Malfunctioning Carbon Monoxide Detector in the Rec Room. K-ban and Sandy (Mrs. K-ban) were such good sports about it that I had a good time despite my lack of interest in that family of games. I think Sandy won, because she followed the "go back to bed" strategy and was still sleeping when I left for Ward's.
What a great weekend!
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The new cards in Dominion: Intrigue are wild, though. All of them are more complicated than the cards in the original set, so even though you could play the new set by itself, I wouldn't use it to teach new players.
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A. There's competition to grab the largest empire. Having a lot of soldiers is tremendously valuable, because soldiers can block other players from trading (by inhibiting workers). You also can gain a lot of territory quickly, and unless your opponents outspend you on equipment, it's not trivial to fight you back. Gaining territory cheap is especially valuable if you have Nippur, which gives you +1 VP/Sumerian territory--holding two additional territories is the VP equivalent of spending a fourth luxury good on upgrading a city. Also, extra soldiers are tremendously useful once another player has passed.
B. The earlier you start an empire, the cheaper it is to become the best-equipped. The earlier players wins ties in spending on technology. I spent a lapis to equip my army in round four, IIRC, and it was money well-spent--no one wants to spend *six* just to get the tech advantage.
C. If you're set up at the beginning of a round with a plurality of workers in a potential empire site, you want to launch an empire early to avoid a costly dollar-auction of worker in the area from someone else thinking of taking the same empire.
D. There are definite positional differences among the empires, and some of them just plain work better with your current board situation than others. Getting the right empire can be very important. (The player who came in third in our game got completely hosed by starting Egypt in turn three when I had the tech advantage and planted two soldiers in Amoria, forcing him to spend four or five soliders to dig his way out. A more experienced player wouldn't have made that mistake, of course--he would have bought better weapons, but that would have cost him.)
I think one key is, after the first round, hold over resources instead of spending them all on city upgrades, so that you can expand and equip an army ASAP in the subsequent rounds.
(The difference in size between the best and worst empires in the first round is a strong argument for grabbing early--seven soldiers can theoretically mean a 21-VP swing, though that's really unlikely.)
Counterbalancing this, of course, is the fact that going later is an advantage. But it's not enough of an advantage, I think, to overcome all of these pressures.
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The other points sound quite reasonable, but... none of that seemed to make much difference. Granted, we only played one game, so we could have just gotten into a groupthink situation, but I at least was trying different things early in the game, and they simply didn't work. So I stopped.
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All of us pumped a *lot* of resources into city improvements, though. It's possible that if one of us had taken a late empire and spent all the goodies on soldiers and equipment, it would have been a dominant strategy.
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I am more interested in playing the game again than I was, but I don't know if or when I will manage it.