March 09, 2011

Participants: Mace, Gili, Jon

Game night at Mace's house, since mine was being painted and Nadine had other plans. I bought two games, and those are the games that we played. Once again, I didn't take notes.

Glory to Rome

Jon 21, Mace, Gili

The game took only an hour. Three players, so less sites, and this was our second play. Mace was hoping to do another Forum victory, but the rapid decline of sites, the lack of any supporting cards to quickly add to his Clients, and my stealing his Forum card scuttled that plan.

I saw the dwindling site supply and so I did an early Vault which was very lucrative for me; we didn't use Vault in the last game and so the other two weren't planning for it, I think. After I did mine, however, they started to catch up with Vault, so I ended the game by building the last four sites.

Shipyard

Jon 110ish, Mace 105ish, Gili 90ish

First play for Mace, second for Gili and me. I explained the game better this time, and Mace appeared to be up to speed already at the beginning of the game.

Once again, the game reminded me strongly of Le Havre, with all of its little bits overflowing the board, the constant trading of this for that, and the essential feeling of "you versus the board" rather than "you versus the other players". An Ameritrasher's nightmare. While the game has you intensely focused, it - as do other games that are Ameritasher's nightmares - seems to lack a little something in the way of soul. Too many cards, numbers, and bits to match, not enough "play".

I's still happy to play it, but I feel like I could read a magazine while doing so, which is the same way I feel about Caylus (actually, I liked Caylus less).

I produced a number of ships to match my required missions, but I needed propellers, and a) barely any of the ships had propellers and b) Mace and Gili took the workers who lets you add an extra propeller to any ship. Without that worker, and without ships that let you add propellers, you're pretty much sunk as far as producing ships with much value: they'll have little speed and little points for their trial run. At the end of the game, I looked at the remaining sterns and saw that 8 out of 10 had propeller space. I won anyway because I took the two ships that had the propeller space, and because I focused on my other missions.

Mace also did well with his missions, but poorly with his ships. Gili had a 29 point ship, but that was one of only two ships that she launched. After the first two laps, I planned out the rest of my turns; Mace tried to do the same, but Gili stole the one action he needed on the last round, preventing him from taking a smokestack and at least 10 extra points for his ship.