October 18, 2011 - Sukkot Games Day

Nadine, Emily, Eitan, Gili, Jake, Eliezer, Meir, Rochelle, Daphna, Eszter

Rochelle is from Australia and comes regularly to our evening sessions.

Gili, Emily and Eitan are regulars.

Eliezer and Meir came from Beit Shemesh, Eliezer attends the group there, Meir is in yeshiva.

Eszter is originally from Hungary and came a few times during the summer.

Jake is a new oleh from Boston, he's been here 3 weeks.

Daphna is in ulpan, she made aliya 3 months ago from LA. She heard about us from Eitan's mom.

People arrived between 1:30 and 2 pm, and most stayed until 10:30. One additional person emailed for directions, which I didn't see until the evening, but he could have called because my number was in the announcement that he had. My new neighbors who just moved here from Efrat combined their sukkah with ours, so we had a lot of space. And it didn't rain, though it did get cold later in the day.

Carson City

Nadine 44, Emily 40, Gili 35, Eitan 33, Jake 25

We picked this as easier for a new gamer than Amun Re with the auctioning. Jake has played Settlers, but this was his first more complicated game, and it took him a while to understand all the different implications. Emily and Eitan were also pretty new to the game. There was a lot of fighting for everything, and a lot of duels. Last round Gili, Jake and Eitan had 10 cowboys. I managed to get the white cowboy only once, by passing early, for the third round, but that was enough to put me far enough ahead. I had the building discount card the first two rounds, which helped me because I had good buildings and income from the start, and third round the available buildings weren't good and people didn't buy many. This is the first time I understood how the surroundings work for buildings other than mines and ranches, I thought it was buildings and houses, but it's actually only houses.

Eitan robbed people's income several times, Gili fought him but I didn't, he took half of my 15 for a saloon twice. Everyone except me fought for the guns on the last round; I had used all my workers to get money third round so I went last and took the plot card. Gili played well but had bad luck in dice rolls, which Eitan had counted on. Overall people liked the game.

GoSu

Gili and Eitan played during a break.

Taj Mahal

Eitan 61, Eszter 42, Gili 36, Daphna, Jake
Jake left partway through but they continued playing. First play for Jake, Eszter and Daphna, who all enjoyed the game. Eitan said he understood and liked the strategy this time.

R-Eco

Eliezer and Meir played when they arrived and we were still playing Carson City.

We played at the end also:

Eliezer 15, Nadine 10, Emily 7, Meir -1

El Grande
Nadine 30, 76, 107

Eliezer 26, 63, 99

Meir 35, 79, 92

Emily 14, 50, 86

Rochelle 23, 61, 85

First play for Meir and Rochelle, Eliezer explained the game.

Eliezer picked this and was teaching it as we were finishing Carson City, so I joined, and then Emily also did. There was a bit of confusion as we tried to start El Grande, finish and count points for Carson City, and select restaurants and order food. We tried a brand new one, Daisy where Shakespeare used to be, with mixed opinions, and some people ordered from Village Green.

I wasn't ahead until the end and didn't think I'd win. Meir was ahead most of the game, with Eliezer catching up. Other people did things at the end which helped me, such as special scoring. My region was New Castille which I don't like because it's competitive and in the middle, but someone put the 4-0-0 scoreboard there which helped me because then everyone stayed out of the region. Until the very end, when two others went there from the castillo, matching my 3 pieces, and giving all of us 0.

The scoring round before, no one challenged Meir in Granada because we all thought everyone else would go there, there was duplication in where we went from the castillo. Rochelle caught on and played well, but hurt herself by making her Old Castille region too competitive with the 9 point scoreboard. People put large numbers of pieces into the castillo, and then crowded small regions such as Aragon and Seville.

Lo Ra
Emily 8, 19, 39

Nadine 10, 13, 28

Meir 0, 9, 26

Eliezer 5, 3, 22

Eliezer really liked my Jewish theming and pictures, he had played regular Ra. It was hard to get everything we needed. Eliezer took a large set at the end of one round, and Meir got the three items he wanted at the end of the game before the last auction tile.

Tangrams

Daphna got this recently so we played a few cards after everyone else left. The wooden pieces are nice.

January, 18, 2011

Participants: Jon, Emily, Eitan

Game on Tuesday night since everyone is busy on Wed. Everyone except the participants were busy tonight, too. Emily and Eitan hadn't come in a while, so I was able to try some games with them that I had already tried with others, to see how they go.

Tobago

Jon 57, Eitan 38, Emily 30

First play for both of them. They picked it up quickly enough. Certain implications of play were not entirely obvious to them until I did them, however, which is why I did as well as I did.

It's a fun little game.

Gosu

Emily+, Eitan, Jon

Gili and Nadine didn't go for this, but I thought Emily and Eitan might; I was right. While they acknowledged that it had some problems, they both liked it.

The biggest problems are still the physical implementation: you can't read anything on the board without peering at it closely, and you have to read every card on the table and in your hand (and sometimes every card in the discard pile) over and over. You can't even read the card names at a distance, so even when you become familiar with a card by its name, it's not much help.


Another problem is the interminably long time you may have to wait after you pass before the next round starts.

Otherwise, it's a game of fighting against the rules and limitations imposed by the game itself, moreso than your opponents. This may float some boats, but I don't think it's going to work well in my group.

January 12, 2011

Participants: Jon, Nadine, Gili, Binyamin

Wow, we're back up to four people. Woot!

Gosu

Jon, Nadine, Gili

I bought this because I'd heard it was a cross between Magic and something, I saw some demo videos, and it looked like it might fit some of the group. It was not a hit with us three, and I'll tell you why.

You start the game with 7 cards and 2 tokens. On your turn you can play a card, play a token, or pass. If you pass, you can't play for the rest of the round. You play a card in front of you like you do in Fairy Tale, only here you have to play certain cards before you can play other cards, and you have strict limits on how many cards and how many of each type.

Most cards do something when they come into play, such as let you draw a card, or flip over or discard one of your opponents' cards, or they have some global effect.

You can play your tokens to draw a card (play both to draw three) or to activate certain cards' abilities.

The round ends after everyone has passed, and the player with the most points from cards in play gains a VP. Everyone un-flips all of their cards and gets back their two tokens. However, you do not clear the board or draw any more cards. You just start the next round.

The game ends when someone has three VP.

The game has a steep learning curve. We had no idea what was going on for a while. We had no idea how the second and subsequent rounds would make any sense if you didn't draw cards between rounds and you already had basically full boards; wouldn't whomever was winning just keep winning? We didn't know why anyone would pass if they had cards to play to increase their score; holding them back for future rounds didn't seem to make sense.

We were hampered in all of this by cards that are not intuitive or clear. The text of what they do is small and hard to read from any distance. A card's effect might occur when it comes into play, or out of play, or while it's in play, or when it is mutated, or some other event occurs, but there's no obvious way to know which card does what from the wall of 20 or 30 cards in play on the table at any one time. (We figure out that a yellow halo around a number means some kind of general effect, but that was the extent of it.)

It appears that the game was played and designed by a group of guys who knew the cards inside out and didn't take into account that new players don't have their familiarity. That's probably not true; probably all the new players they tested it on were teenage Magic geeks who have a greater love for figuring out how a game works than actually playing the game.

Despite all of this, I could tell that there was something to the game. As the first round went on, I began to see how cards interacted and the opportunities for making interesting combinations. When the second turn began, we got new cards through spending our tokens; they were never used to activate powers, because we would have needed some other way to get new cards at the beginning of the round ... think.

Gili was far behind at the end of round one, but she won round two, so it's definitely possible for a lot to happen from one round to the next.

There were two other problems. First of all, there's nothing to do on other players' turns, and these can take a long time with the wrong players. And second of all, there's nothing to do once you've passed until the end of the round, and that can take an even longer time.

We quit after two rounds. I'd like to get more familiar with the cards and try again with two players.

Tobago

Nadine 39, Gili 35, Jon 35, Binyamin 21

Second play for me, first play for everyone else. Tobago hits a light spot where Carcassonne, Settlers, and Ticket to Ride hit. It's got a light theme, pretty components - but not too many, and a quick, clear ending. It's got too much luck to be very strategic. While there are a lot of choices as to what to do on a round, there's not a great loss if you make a slightly worse choice or a slightly better choice: place your card here or there mostly doesn't matter, except near the end of the game.

The defining mechanism of the game is the most fun, and that's figuring out what spaces on the board get defined by the cards as they come into play. The other defining mechanism, the treasure distribution, is where the luck comes in, and it screwed over Binyamin once, which was once too many for him. Actually, as long as you have at least one amulet, it's not that big of a deal. All things being fairly equal, the winner is essentially random, You have to play quite well, or specifically well in the way the game is going, to win regardless of mild-swings of luck. Nadine managed to play specifically well for the way our game went, without knowing that she was doing it.

Gili very much like it.

Carson City

Jon, Nadine, Binyamin

First play for Binyamin. We only managed to get in two rounds of this before Binyamin had to leave for the night. However, it was enough for Binyamin to know that he wants to buy the game to have for the groups he teaches.

We played with 2 red cards and 5 yellow cards, and also with the three gun token worth only two guns as far as gunfights go but three guns as far as scoring and money and so on. It didn't matter too much; we really have to play this with four or five players.