January 30, 2007

Participants: Jon, Gili, Nadine

These two were the only ones to brave the cold and snow to my house.

Odin's Ravens

Gili 5, Jon 4

We only played this until Nadine came. Once both players get the hang of it, each round can be fairly close. But before we're completely used to the patterns, rounds are still a bit too long. As a result, it wasn't an entirely thrilling game, but I expect that it will be a bit better with two more experienced opponents.

Notre Dame

Gili 81, Jon 72, Nadine 58

Both of them were eager to get to this game, again. It seems like a fascinating game with many avenues to explore, but well balanced; time will tell. In the meantime, we're all still exploring. Like the other best games, you always want to do so much more each round than you can.

Gili won with the cumulative VP track this time. I kept handing these cards to Nadine because they weren't useful enough to me, and she kept handing them to Gili because they weren't useful enough to her. I blamed Nadine for not keeping them anyway, and she blamed me for giving them to here. There may be a slight issue with the game if your RHO is overly nice or harsh.

I tried the Park VP bonus strategy again, but it couldn't compete with the amount Gili got from straight cumulative VPs. I also had lots of cubes at the beginning and picked up five messages. Once again I thought I was doing pretty well, but it wasn't well enough. Nadine followed something similar, but I made it more difficult for her, as she was my LHO.

Lost Valley

Jon 24, Gili 23, Nadine 21

When I first played this I really liked it, but after a while huge flaws in the mechanics began to appear. Or rather, abusable mechanics. Essentially, once you are comfortably ahead, which can be primarily due to luck, you can massively push forward the end game and solidify your victory. This is not only unfair but very frustrating.

While it didn't happen in this game, it's only because Gili was gracious enough not to do it, claiming that the game would have been boring if she had done so.

Even without her having done it, there's still something lacking in the game play, which is a bit overly fiddly and mechanical. I suspect that it's because of the very narrow path to victory relying entirely on gold chips. Like Thebes (which is a better game), it is annoying to play well but get unlucky when panning for gold. In Lost Valley, gold is your only source of victory points, and you don't get too many of them, so random victory points just sucks.

Designers take note: just because something is realistic doesn't make it a good game mechanic.

I'm thinking that I'm going to have to fix this game, somehow. First I'll check BGG for variants. But minimally:

- There has to be a limit to the amount of territory that may be explored while there are still unclaimed gold chips.

- Gold chips have to be more determined, or have to have less to do with victory points.

- While it is not a horrible mechanic that one fears expending resources on items that will benefit everyone (sawmills, mines, etc), it also isn't a great mechanic. Many other games at least give you some benefit for doing it, such as VPs when you build it, or VPs when others use it. LV needs a similar mechanic.

- And, as I already go, each player must start with 2 gold nuggets.

These should go a long way to helping restore the fun into the game.

September 05, 2007

Participants: Jon, Nadine, Yitzchak, Ben, Gili, David K, Dylan

Summer's about over and we're now back to a core group of people. A reminder: we all owe David money for dinner, as none of us had change.

Mississippi Queen

Yitzchak+, David K, Nadine, Jon, Gili

This game didn't look like much from the rules, and the "basic introductory game" looked like even less. We skipped straight to the full game. We started with three players and added others as they came in with suitable starting positions.

It turned out to be a neat and fun little planning game. I kept reading the rules and noticing things I got wrong. Since the game's rules are so simple, each little correction changed the tactics of the game for that particular turn. But the overall feel of the game itself didn't change.

There was thinking, not too much luck, yet it still moved quickly. By the end, most of us enjoyed it enough that we are willing to play again in the future. It's nice that the game can be shortened or lengthened by adjusting the number of tiles, and that handicaps are easily given.

Lost Valley

Dylan 20, Gili 9, Jon 8

This game continues to amuse me quite well, despite lots of squidgy rules issues, and despite heaps of luck that throw things around. Even with the luck, it's just fun to play. The game plays vastly different each time, and it's complicated. Again, thinking, without too much thinking.

I didn't fare well, as my fellow players turned out to be thieves. In once case, I built a mine and didn't manage to collect a single gold from it when the others swooped in and carted it off. We had a very short waterway as everyone headed away from the river. As a result, this was the first time that I bought a horse.

None of the forest tiles showed up until well after half the tiles were laid, which made collecting both food and wood at the same time relatively difficult. Dylan won having mined a mountain undisturbed relatively earl on.

Power Grid

David 15+, Ben 15-, Yitzchak 12, Nadine 9

They played on the East Coast, which should have made for a shorter game, but it wasn't. Phase three seemed to come early enough, however. Nadine hoarded all the coal and coal plants; nobody else was producing any, and she had three plants using 3 coals each.

As usual, they played with the critical variation of having the four upcoming power plants from the deck face up in a third row.

Bridge

David, Ben, Yitzchak, Nadine

They tried to play a hand of this while simultaneously playing Power Grid, which didn't work too well. However, they also played with passing three cards, ala Hearts, which they found amusing.

Jon/Nadine, Ben/Yitzchak

After Power Grid, we played 4 more hands.

August 29, 2007

Participants: Jon, Yitzchak, Nadine, Adam, Gili, Ben

Nadine returns from chu"l. She played games at Yahoo's HQ in California with South Bay Boardgamers (San Juan and Aladdin's Dragons) and met someone who had already ordered It's Alive.

Princes of Florence

Ben 79, Nadine, Yitzchak

Ben won by around ten points over Nadine and Yitzchak, one of whom had one more point than the other, but I forget which one. That's what comes from not writing down the scores.

At one point, someone here expressed a desire to be allowed to move the buildings around after they have been placed, an idea at which Adam scoffed at as unrealistic.

Lost Valley

Gili 37, Jon 29, Adam 19

Again, scores are approximate. This was a rambling and full game, with a long river, a lot of gold mined, and a lot of explored territory. Gili stole from some of the work that Adam did. That should have been to my advantage, but my lack of equipment slowed me down. I had previous experiences of the game ending too quickly and so I didn't want to waste the time in investing. Since the game lasted for some time, my lack of investment hurt.

I eventually went back and got a boat, which is really nice. Gili had a cart, which is about as nice. I think both, plus fishing rod and axe, is probably the best set of tools.

It was pretty obvious that Gili was winning already with the last quarter of the game to go. I think that the biggest negative is picking a single or double gold nugget from an event, which is nigh useless.

We still have some rule issues. Can people drop or sell back equipment, for instance? And the rules for how and where you can lay out territory are still confusing. When you are required to add a water tile is confusing. Can you collect river gold if you are on the wrong side of a river but own a boat? And other issues that keep coming up.

At one point, Gili expressed a desire to be allowed to move mines around after they have been placed, an idea at which Adam scoffed at as unrealistic.

Modern Art

Jon 537, Adam 532, Gili

I think this is my first victory. Unlike other auction games, I think this game is better with three than with four or five, as you have more control and more chances to lay down cards, instead of being at the whim of what everyone else decides.

Bridge

Jon/Yitzchak, Ben/Nadine

We played a number of hands of this, and I got a lot of 4333 average hands. I also tried playing Bridge together with Modern Art, but that didn't work out too well.

Go

Adam++, Jon

We played on an 11x11 board, and even with handicap stones, it's clear that I am just not good enough to challenge Adam, yet. I need to go back and learn some basics again.

August 15, 2007

Participants: Jon, Yitzchak, Adam, Gili, Rachel A

Ah, the light heady days of summer, when most people are on vacation.

San Juan

Jon 43, Yitzchak 40

I plunked down a first turn Prefecture, which is fairly deadly in two-player. I followed it up with a Smithy, Silver, and a rare-for-me Tower. I got the three six-point cards and managed to hold on to them and build them by the end of the game.

Yitzchak had Library around building number four or so, so I kept taking Prospector to make his life difficult. Eventually he built Prefecture, Quarry, Smithy, and Carpenter. He built three big buildings, too, and one more building than me, but his Triumphal Arch wasn't as lucrative as my Palace.

Lost Valley

Gili 13, Yitzchak 9, Jon 8, Adam 8

I almost started Industria, but these guys had never played Lost Valley, and I liked the game enough to play it again. Especially since I know that some of the members who didn't come don't like it as much.

Adam went off in one direction where there wasn't much mountain gold, although he eventually mined one mountain hex for three chips. Gili went off and mined her own mountain hex for four chips, which won her the game. Yitzchak followed me around a bit, which slowed both of us down.

Eventually, I mined three chips out of one mountain, giving him the last one. He went off to find river gold.

As Gili was ahead, she explored like crazy. With the last unexplored tile placed, the river was immediately capped. No one had been exploring the river, so it was only four segments long. The game then ended too quickly for me to open up a new mine.

Everyone appears to have enjoyed the game. I'm looking forward to playing again.

"Sawmill" in Hebrew is מנסרה (mansera). "Saw" is מסור (massor). --Adam

It's Alive

Jon+, Adam, Yitzchak

Adam suggested this, and we played the basic game. I massed a lot of money at the beginning of the game. I was also the only one to be hit with Villagers, first a 4 and then a 6. Then a few more to boot, which I ignored.

Despite this, I won the game, which only goes to show you that it's possible. I kept careful count of how little money my opponents had. They never had quite so little that I could abuse them, but still. I also got a little lucky pulling the card I needed after a few rounds at the end, although I had enough money to buy it from anyone's graveyard, too.

Puerto Rico

Jon 60, Yitzchak 57, Rachel 56, Adam 40

Rachel requested this, and may even have done better if her attention hadn't drifted for a few rounds in the middle of the game. We played the standard building set.

-1-
Y: Settler/Quarry, Adam takes corn, Rachel tobacco, I take coffee. I end up with a lucrative coffee monopoly during the game. Rachel does almost as well with her tobacco.
A: Builder/Small Market. Rachel builds Small Market.
R:Mayor
J:Prospector

-2-
A:Trader+, after some urging from me. If he does something like Settler and then Rachel takes Craftsman+, I will Trade+. If Rachel takes Trader+ and I Craftsman+, Yitzchak has no good and won't Captain+.
R:Craftsman+
J:Captain+
Y:Prospector

-3-
R:Builder+/Small Sugar.
J:Settler+/corn. After this phase, Adam and I have coffee plantations, while Rachel and Yitzchak have tobacco plantations.
Y:Mayor+
A:Prospector

-4-
J:Builder/Coffee. Yitzchak builds Tobacco.
Y:Mayor. Now, Yitzchak will be trading tobacco, and I'll be trading coffee. Rachel has Sugar and Small Market, while Adam has Indigo and Small Market.
A:Settler
R:Craftsman+. I thought this was rather a bad move, giving Yitzchak Trader++ next turn and a tobacco to trade. As a result of this move, cash was high for the rest of the game.

-5-
Y:Trader++/tobacco. Of course. Adam trades indigo, Rachel sugar, I coffee. Trading House empties.
A:Mayor
R:Captain++
J:Prospector+

-6-
A:Builder+/Factory. While Factory was indeed a scarcer resource than Coffee, this allowed my coffee monopoly to continue for longer. Rachel and Yitzchak both build Harbor. I's at 6 doubloons, so I wait.
R:Craftsman+
J:Trader/coffee. Another full round of trading.
Y:Settler+/corn. Yitzchak wanted to take another quarry, but Rachel and I convinced him that this was the reason he had been losing his last few games so badly. One quarry is more than enough, and he needed more shipping goods, especially with a Harbor (same would apply to Factory). I won the building point game, and I didn't have a single quarry (instead, I had coffee monopoly and Factory).

-7-
R:Builder/Tobacco. I built Factory. Yitzchak could not be dissuaded from building Hospice, which didn't help him during the game. Adam built Large Sugar.
J:Mayor+. I was very wary of doing this, because it filled in Yitzchak and Rachel's Harbors, and they already had goods to ship.
Y:Prospector+
A:Craftsman+

-8-
J:Captain++
Y:Trader+. This time Adam doesn't have an indigo to trade, so one space is left in the Trading House.
A:Settler+
R:Mayor

-9-
Y:Builder+/Guild Hall. He ends up with a full Guild Hall by game's end. Stupid building. Adam and I both build Small Market. After building, I still have 10 doubloons on my board.
A:Craftsman+
R:Captain. Rachel and I begin blocking boats with our trade goods.
J:Prospector+. I'm now looking at buying two big buildings, as I was flush with cash.

-10-
A:Mayor+
R:Settler+, Yitzchak takes a sugar plantation. Rachel has had a sugar monopoly until now.
J:Trader+. I fill in the Trading House with an indigo.
Y:Builder/Small Sugar. I build City Hall.

-11-
R:Prospector+
J:Craftsman+. The 5 boat had 2 coffees in it, and Adam was going to be producing coffee soon. I produced 2 coffees, but elected to not take an additional coffee as my bonus good, even though anything else I would produce wouldn't ship. I preferred leaving the boat still partially full. I took an extra corn, beginning a long buildup of corn on my Small Warehouse.
Y:Captain+. Yitzchak always prefers to Captain when he is afraid he will be locked out, otherwise.
A:Mayor. Nobody has any monopolies anymore.

-12-
J:Builder+/Custom's House. Not as much for the points it will give me, but for denying it to Yitzchak or Rachel. Turns out to give be a fair bit, after all. No one else builds.
Y:Settler+
A:Craftsman
R:Trader+. I debated not trading my coffee. Adam and Rachel were pretty much sure to get the other two big buildings before I could, anyway. I had two coffee barrels, and I could only ship one. But the other one could be left over to start another coffee ship. I decided that I would be crafting again by then, anyway. Also, I had my eye on a Wharf already at that point, as I was accumulating corn.


-13-
Y:Captain+
A:Builder/Residence. Rachel builds Fortress. I'm one shy for Wharf. I build Construction Hut.
R:Mayor+. All big buildings are manned.
J:Craftsman. I now have 7 corn. I'm totally aware that I won't get to ship them on the next Captain phase, as Adam or Rachel or both will block me. But all three ships are going to empty, and the game isn't yet going to be over, leaving me clear sailing to ship them all on the next Captain phase. My next concerns then were whether to worry about Wharf and manning it, or simply go for sending them on the regular boats. Sending on the regular boats helps cut off Harbor shippers.

-14-
A:Captain. I keep my 7 corn.
R:Mayor
J:Builder/Wharf. For my City Hall, and just in case I can do it again.
Y:Prospector++

-15-
R:Craftsman+. Rachel has since regretted this move, as others cut off boats before she could ship and the game ended due to victory point depletion.
J:Captain. I chose to ship 7 corns on a boat and block it, rather than Mayor and Wharf. This nearly doubles my victory point total for the game. Game end triggered. Adam hands me the game now by shipping his three coffees, allowing me to do the same, instead of shipping one sugar or indigo, which would have given Rachel three more victory points instead. It's true that this is a slight flaw in the game.
Y:Builder. Yitzchak fills in his last production building. I build Hacienda.
A:Prospector. Adam is already ahead in any tie situation.

-Scores-
Y: 26ship + 21build + 10bonus = 57
A: 19ship + 17build + 4bonus = 40
R: 35ship + 15build + 6bonus = 56
J: 26ship + 21build + 13bonus = 60

August 01, 2007

Participants: Jon, Nadine, Binyamin, Zvi Yehuda, Ben, Yitzchak, Rachel A, Gili

A comfortable evening of games. Nadine did some game hopping. Every time a game opened up that she liked more than the one she was playing, I took over for her and she switched to the new game. Binyamin tried to do the same thing without any luck.

Samurai

Zvi Yehuda+, Binyamin, Jon, Gili

Samurai is a Knizia tile-laying game that I have been avoiding simply because of the little Buddha statue pieces, which irk my religious sensitivities. Binyamin bought the game and solved the problem by taking sandpaper to each of the little round pieces.

You place tiles with numbers and pictures, and whenever a space with a piece is surrounded, the person with the highest valued tiles of the appropriate piece type surrounding the piece takes it. Placing tiles that affect multiple spaces, joker tiles, and two special effects tiles make the game tactical enough.

It's pastoral like Through the Desert, but I think a slightly better game. TtD was nice and simple, but nobody really loved it. T&E is a heavy weight game, of course. Samurai is lightweight, but possibly more interesting.

Unlike these other two games where the scoring was neat and interesting, the scoring here is the one thing I don't like about the game. It is convoluted and arbitrary. One other drawback is the easy possibility of giving things away to your LHO, which makes your RHO feel rather frustrated.

Zvi Yehuda won mostly due to luck. I played senselessly, as it was my first game and was just experimenting with the pieces. I expect I will do pretty well in this game hereafter.

El Grande

Nadine+, Gili, Binyamin, Zvi Yehuda

Nadine took a commanding lead early on, and the other players resigned after the second scoring phase, rather than drag on the game.

Lost Valley

Nadine, Zvi Yehuda, Binyamin

Nadine taught this to Binyamin and Zvi Yehuda. We discovered that we had gotten a number of rules wrong the last time we played, the most major of which would have extended the game a bit longer to good effect.

Since the river ended very quickly, the game ended up being rather short. A shorter game means more luck. Binyamin complained about the luck in the game for the whole game.

Puerto Rico

Rachel 54, Ben 50, Yitzchak 43, Nadine/Jon 42

I took over Nadine's high shipping point but otherwise pathetic position as she switched to El Grande. I wasn't able to make up the money differential and so lost rather decidedly. Rachel swept to another victory with Discretionary Hold and Factory.

Power Grid

Yitzchak 1, Jon 16, Ben 14

In this rather unusual game, I did everything counter-intuitively and ended up losing by a hair. I raced ahead in cities that I couldn't power after the first several rounds.

In a three player game, goods are rather scarce, and coal and oil essentially ran out while garbage and nukes hit the 1 to 3 cost range. Only then did we start switching.

Being ahead in cities, Ben and Yitzchak were somehow convinced that it was within my power to end the game by building too many cities. As a result, they bid fiercely over some high powered plants, trying to convince each other that they should get the plant or I would win. For instance, Ben bought the 30 for 99.

I didn't feel like I was anywhere near winning, but I admit that I got all of my plants, slowly but surely, with almost no fighting.

In the end, Ben and Yitzchak had more capacity in plants. But Ben ran out of money to build cities. Yitzchak had just enough to build to his capacity in cities, plants and fuel. I lost to a single mistake in the last round.

I replaced my 5 triple coal plant with a 7 triple garbage plant, instead of replacing my 4 double garbage plant. The reason that I did this was because I thought that if I left myself with coal/oil requirements, then Ben and Yitzchak could buy out all the fuel before I could get any, which was true. However, I didn't realize that if they did that, they wouldn't have had enough money left over to buy cities.

Bridge

Binyamin, Zvi Yehuda, Nadine, Jon/Ben

Ben or I (depending on whose turn it was in Power Grid) played with Nadine against Binyamin and Zvi Yehuda for a few hands.

July 25, 2007

Participants: Jon, Nadine, David K, Adam, Gili, Yitzchak

A relatively quiet evening. Actually, I kind of like it that way.

Lost Valley

Nadine++, Jon, David

This was one of my few recent unplayed purchases, and I was happy to get it to the table.

Lost Valley is a game of discovering terrain, acquiring resources to swap for gold, trading the gold in for better equipment, and getting even more gold. The one with the most gold wins. Like other games of this sort, a person who is ahead has a tendency to stay ahead, but not entirely, as resources become depleted in the area you are working, and your cart becomes fuller giving you less maneuverability.

There are dozens of little things you can buy to enhance your powers, three types of resources needed to do things on the board, random event chips you can pursue, and common buildings you can build that anyone can use. The idea of the latter is to gain more benefit than any other player by building them in an area where you are and others aren't.

We first started by playing out a round or two to get the feel of the game and then restarted. Nadine is somewhat impatient when it comes to new games, and was fairly convinced already that the game had too much luck or didn't make sense. Patience!

We then played a game out. Nadine took an early lead having gone first and acquired the early river gold without much trouble. Unfortunately, she kept hanging around in my area. This is a problem in the game, because you don't want to expend resources building access to treasures only to have someone else then waltz in and take them.

Meanwhile, David was by himself slowly panning for and collecting gold. Only when we managed to convince Nadine that she was better off striking out on her own did she move ahead. She then mined some gold out of the mountains and won fairly easily.

The first several moves were played extremely slowly because the players kept trying to figure out how to do way more than they could in a single turn. They kept reviewing and reviewing what could be done hoping that there was some way to do a lot really quickly.

Eventually we realized that this was not how the game worked. Finally we just did our teeny single action each round, and the turns became very quick.

When the game ended, we were all convinced that somehow Nadine had received a huge advantage from her first turn. And this was complicated by having received twice as much from her random gold chips as we did.

These face down treasure chips are a favorite among designers, but, while they advance the theme, they don't really advance the game play. I prefer the Through the Desert idea where the chips are placed randomly but are placed face up.

In addition, the random discovery aspect works fine so long as it always provides at least something to do, like when you draw tiles in Tigris and Euphrates. In games like this, however, if you draw tile after tile of the same thing that is useless to you, you can't get much out of it (which is what happened to Nadine in the second game).

You could just play the game the way it was designed and write up the results to the story of the game, which is fine for some people. Our little group likes better play and planning to be more obviously rewarded, however, so we try to mitigate these types of random events.

One way would be to always assign the gold chips in a certain order to newly discovered lands (e.g. a single gold for the first two chips, and then 2 golds for any additional chips on a land). And/or have players decided which type of terrain or terrain type they will be discovering next.

In our second game, we didn't do anything that radical. Instead, we looked at the startup of the game and decided that the initial discovery of a few gold while everyone else remains poor is too much of a swing in luck. To mitigate this, we gave each player two gold to start with.

The result of this is that each player could start the game by buying something which will color the strategy he will be taking (a sieve or a fishing rod, for example), or set out hoping to be the first to gain the easier gold.

Our second game was much tighter and more balanced than the first. Nadine had some bad luck with her tile draws, and the river closed into a loop quickly, which made the game end by ice flow. David bought a sieve initially, but then failed to use it properly. We thought that maybe the events were very powerful, so he found and used four of them. While the events are good, the time and material he lost in pursuing them ended up not being worth his while.

Bottom Line: I think it's a really good game. After two games, we still have many many avenues of strategies and tactics yet to explore, and the changing nature of the game is always enjoyable. While the rules are not always thematically sensible (a cart can carry extra stuff but a horse can't?) most of them add to the game play.

There are a number of rules issues not covered entirely well. I had to make up some of the rules as we went. I'll look online to see if our questions have already been covered by others.

It was fun, and we were all willing to try it again, even Nadine.

Caylus

Yitzchak 121, Adam 111, Gili 92

This game took four and a quarter hours and I'm glad I wasn't involved in it.

We build six prestige buildings among us. I build three, Yitz built two, and Gili built one. --Adam

Power Grid

David 17, Jon 16+, Nadine 16-

We always play the game with the top four plants arriving from the stack face up. This eliminates the biggest element of luck from the game, which is one person getting a better plant while others have no idea if another large one is coming or not.

Even so, David managed a coup in acquiring the best plants. Nadine's situation looked hopeless - her income was generally only two cities for most of the game, and she powered none - while I would have been fine except for my production capacity.

We were ready to throw in the towel early, but we decided to play it out. Somehow, even though David still won fairly handily, Nadine and I both made a good comeback before it ended. I ended up beating Nadine by a single dollar.