Gaming this week
Sep. 14th, 2003 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaJust notes to myself, really, though more detail will be provided if asked.
Quicksand: Lackluster multi-player race game from Fantasy Flight. Players have concealed identities and try to push forward or hinder the racing figures. Some slightly clever mechanisms which can't overcome a preponderance of luck and a lack of involvement.
Bohnaparte: The new Bohnanza expansion set, in which Bohnanza meets Risk. Will be better if played with the proper rules. I have no one to blame but myself for getting them wrong.
Ice Lake: I finally managed to explain this in such a way that everyone actually understood how the game worked before we began. It's amazing how hard it is to grasp given how simple it is. I love it anyway.
Euphrat & Tigris: Always fun. Three-player, with one new player who was a quick study, but who still ended up throwing the game to me because he "just wanted to see what would happen". No one took it too seriously; you cannot understand the implications of the actions on your first play.
Carcassone: First time I've played this in a long time. We played with the original farm-scoring rules, I think. (Okay, a historical footnote: Carcassone is a fairly simple game of placing tiles to create a countryside with roads, cloisters, cities, and farmland. Most of the rules of the game are elegant and straightforward, but the rules for how farmers score are not only somewhat confusing, they have undergone two major revisions since the game was originally published. Even on this play, I wasn't sure that I correctly understood what rules we were using, but I understood what I had to be trying to do.) I won, a first.
Dvonn: Brilliant abstract, owes a lot to Sid Sackson's slightly less elegant Focus. Like the earlier Zertz, the game shrinks as it goes along, constraining the players' actions. I managed to figure out how the endgame was going to unfold a turn or two before my opponent and manage to trap most of his pieces where they'd be isolated and die, die, die! Thus I managed to salvage a close victory out of what looked like a lost position. Yay me!
Quicksand: Lackluster multi-player race game from Fantasy Flight. Players have concealed identities and try to push forward or hinder the racing figures. Some slightly clever mechanisms which can't overcome a preponderance of luck and a lack of involvement.
Bohnaparte: The new Bohnanza expansion set, in which Bohnanza meets Risk. Will be better if played with the proper rules. I have no one to blame but myself for getting them wrong.
Ice Lake: I finally managed to explain this in such a way that everyone actually understood how the game worked before we began. It's amazing how hard it is to grasp given how simple it is. I love it anyway.
Euphrat & Tigris: Always fun. Three-player, with one new player who was a quick study, but who still ended up throwing the game to me because he "just wanted to see what would happen". No one took it too seriously; you cannot understand the implications of the actions on your first play.
Carcassone: First time I've played this in a long time. We played with the original farm-scoring rules, I think. (Okay, a historical footnote: Carcassone is a fairly simple game of placing tiles to create a countryside with roads, cloisters, cities, and farmland. Most of the rules of the game are elegant and straightforward, but the rules for how farmers score are not only somewhat confusing, they have undergone two major revisions since the game was originally published. Even on this play, I wasn't sure that I correctly understood what rules we were using, but I understood what I had to be trying to do.) I won, a first.
Dvonn: Brilliant abstract, owes a lot to Sid Sackson's slightly less elegant Focus. Like the earlier Zertz, the game shrinks as it goes along, constraining the players' actions. I managed to figure out how the endgame was going to unfold a turn or two before my opponent and manage to trap most of his pieces where they'd be isolated and die, die, die! Thus I managed to salvage a close victory out of what looked like a lost position. Yay me!
