June 03, 2009

Participants: Jon, Elijah, Nadine, Gili, Abraham, David K

Elijah had no play practice, or school tomorrow, I'm guessing.

Dominion

Jon 42, Nadine 39, Elijah 33

First play for Elijah, who liked it. This time Nadine didn't believe in the power of Chapel. I took it and used it thoroughly. It was still hard to get rolling, because there were no cards that gave any bonus coin (except Market) or bonus actions other than +1 (Market, Cellar, and Spy). I ended with 6 Provinces, 2 Duchys, and 1 Estate.

Nadine did much better than I expected, having slowly taken 9 of the Duchys, as well as 1 Province.

Magic: the Gathering

Gili, Abraham

I taught this to Gili last time (or the time before), and she came back with a lot of rules questions to clarify. Abraham showed up and helped her through many of them. They played with some random cards until we finished Dominion.

Antike

Jon 9, Abraham 5, Elijah 4

First play for Elijah. I figured it would be his type of game, and he liked it. Abraham also was willing to play, and we were splitting into 2 games of 3 players each, so that worked.

I played Germanic, Elijah Italy, and Abe Greece. I moved forward 1 level in Know Hows for defense, production, and army movement, and then built a massive army. Elijah built one temple close to me which I sacked, and then I move on to Abe.

Abe concentrated on temples, building 6 temples for his 6 cities, and moving to second level in defense. He couldn't build any more until he expanded. I built a temple opposite his and massed armies. He couldn't defend all of them, but thought to lure my armies off to one side and them strike back into my territory. Unfortunately, he miscalculated his defense. I had just enough movement and armies to sack two of his temples at once, and doing so put me over ten cities, for a net gain of 3 point in a single round, which was enough to win immediately (we played to 9 points).

After I sacked his temple, Elijah spread out to Africa and the Spanish coast, largely trying to avoid conflict and hoping that Abe and I would kill each other.

Power Grid

David, Gili, Nadine

While we played Antike, they player Power Grid on the Eastern coast of the US (wussies). I don't know the results, but I know they skipped straight to phase 3 from phase 1. And played with our house rule of the top four cards of the deck open for inspection.

[DK: I won by powering 17. I think Nadine and Gili both pwered 16 with Nadine having more cash. Nadine could easily have built more cities, but she couldn't increase her power (6 plants ran out). Gili could power 18, but couldn't afford more than 16 cities. I ended with about 70 cash (before powering). Throughout much of the game Gili had tons of cash and thought she could afford to pay top bucks for power plants. In hindsight she overpaid.]

It's Alive

Abraham 51, Jon 49, Elijah 35

Abraham suggested this. I know it sounds ridiculous, but after playing the game again I really liked it. I've played it hundreds of times, but I still feel like I'm finding new strategic ways to approach it. I considered my point counts with coins near the end of the game, for instance, and evaluated whether it would be worth it to end the game with no coins but get the 5 point bonus, which is what I did.

But I lost to Abe, who had a smaller board but a hoard of cash. I actually lost the game on his turn, right before my turn, by buying a card from him instead of letting him take his own auction.

Path

Elijah, Abraham

I introduced both of them to this, just to see if they liked it. It's not easy to get into, because of the huge decision space available at the beginning of the game on each move. They didn't get to finish the game.

Atlantic Star

David 47, Nadine 44, Abraham 37, Jon 36, Elijah 31

First play for David, Abraham, and Elijah. Elijah had to leave mid-game, so we tried to play out his hand for him as best we could.

No one ever wants to play this, so I asked if I should get rid of it. I didn't realize that so many of them hadn't ever tried it. In the end, there's certainly a lot of luck, more so as the game goes on, but still enough decision making and money management to make it fun. I think they enjoyed it well enough to play again (if not suggest it).

David won, despite having accidentally bought a high valued card for a route he had already completed about mid-game.

May 27, 2009

Participants: Jon, David K, Gili, Abraham

Night before Shavuot, Nadine is away, so low attendance expected.

Path

David+, Jon

Path is a new route planning abstract (think Metro, TransAmerica) from an Israeli publisher for two players. The board is a cloth board of 9x9 squares. Pieces are plastic (Bakelite-ish) with routes and colors.

Each tile is unique, other than the black starting tiles and the black blocking tiles. Each tile has four corners, each of which is in either green or orange. Each tile has silver or black pathways crossing from side to side, between the colored corners. All possible variations are also represented. Paths are silver; black indicates no path.

Your job is to create a path from your starting point to either of the two opposite corners.

Nine black tiles with silver paths are place on the board to start. The remaining tiles (color tiles and black blocking tiles) are drawn randomly from a bag. The center tile has four silver tiles leading into it, but a black obstruction in the middle, so cannot be used as a crossing point.

On your turn, you have four random tiles to place (think of what to do with them on your opponent's turn). Each tile must be placed so that it continues your path from your starting tile (eventually the two players' paths may merge), so that adjacent colors match at corners (black counts as both orange and green), and so that paths match (black to black, silver to silver).

You must continue to place all of your tiles, as long as you can. However, you may choose to place them in an order that does not let you place all of them. If you have no legal moves at the start of your turn, you may rotate or replace a tile on the board (it must still be legally placed), or you may place one of your tiles off of any black tile on the board (I doubt that this action will ever be chosen).

That's it.

Reactions: Hard to tell after one game. The majority of our time was trying to figure out what our legal plays were. Having to match both corners and path colors is hard enough, let alone having to do that with four pieces in a row. And that's before considering if the plays are more beneficial to yourself or your opponent. For us, it was all tactical. With players who are very experienced and can count which tiles remain in the bag, I imagine that there will be actual planning involved.

Both David and I are reasonably intelligent, and were also willing on our first game to offer advice to our opponent if we saw better moves than the ones made. It should be noted that the four tiles that your opponent will play on his turn after yours are public, and therefore also must (if taken seriously) be considered when placing your tiles.

So there is room to explore. On the one hand, it didn't really give much of a bang. Most of the time was spent figuring out "what" you could do, not "whether" to do it. On the other hand, tile laying and route planning is one of my favorite mechanisms, so I'm happy to try it again. It's not one of David's so I don't think he enjoyed it as much.

A note must be made about the rulebook: it pretty much sucked. For pete's sake, non-English speaking designers, get your translations and rulebooks done by professionals. We ran into a number of questions that the rulebook didn't answer or only obliquely hinted at. Like, where we could put the blocking pieces, whether a tile could be placed that adjoined your tiles but didn't extend your path, and a number of others. We eventually figured most of them out, but on some we're still scratching our heads.

La Citta

David 34+, Abraham 34-, Gili 28, Jon 27

We played with a random setup, and Abraham managed to snag not only a prime food location (2 spots with 5 food), but a prime mining location (2 spots with 2 mountains each). David managed as well as he did because he was somewhat of to the side, and only lost people from his dead middle city; Abraham had to fight with both me and Gili a number of times in the middle.

I thought I was doing reasonably, but David and Gili managed to kill one of my cities and I had a hard time recovering from that.

Dominion

Abraham 33, Jon 16, Gili 16, David 12?

We played with (2) Chapel, Moat, Workshop, (4) Thief, Militia, Feast, (5) Festival, Market, Library, and the guy that draws 4 and everyone draws 1.

I had never played with Chapel and was eager to abuse it. In my first game, I was way too tame in my abuse. I dropped 2 estates, but nothing else. There were a bunch of thieves walking around which discouraged me too greatly in getting silvers and golds. I took a Festival and a Militia, which did well. In the meantime, Abraham took silvers and golds, two libraries, and a few thieves of his own, and was able to clean up.

Abraham 38, Jon 34, Gili 31?, David less

I realized my mistake, and asked to play the same set again. This time I dropped estates and coppers, leaving myself only a few golds and silvers, some moats, and some festivals and one library. I did much better, but I should really have had two libraries. I might have won, then. Actually, I might have won also if Gili hadn't militia'd me when Abraham had a library in hand (and so didn't care) and I didn't have a moat, or had David not ended the game right before my play.

David claims that the following is the correct strategy: buy libraries and festivals and NO treasure at all. Chapel away every single estate and treasure. Use only the Festival bonuses for buying. Every round should give you a Province, assuming that you have at least four Festivals (could pick up a militia if they run out, I guess. This strategy is immune from the thief and the militia.