January 13, 2009

Participants: Jon, Nadine, David, Gili, Avraham

Game night moved to Tuesday, as I had an event on Wednesday.

Carpe Astra

Nadine 12, David 10, Gili/Avraham 10, Jon 5

First play for all of us, we took a little time to learn the rules as we started.

OK, rather than slam the game here in an open forum, I'm going to write to the publisher to see how many ways we screwed up the game. Suffice to say, our first play did not go well. Look for a review on my blog sometime soon.

Magic: the Gathering

Jon++, David+

Played at the same time as Carpe Astra and Bridge. A very rare win for me this evening; David usually wins.

We drafted as usual, and I just couldn't drop down to 2 or 3 colors, so I ended up playing a four color deck. I had 3 to 6 lands for each color, depending on requirement, plus three other cards that gave mana bonuses, including one that gave a multi-color mana bonus. Incredibly, I had no mana problems whatsoever during the game.

David played White/Black. He got the white from negative drafting against me, but his white cards weren't as good as mine. And he never plays white.

First game went down to the absolute wire. David won by a single point with an instant that boosted one of his creatures by one point. I would have taken him out on the next round.

Second game I slaughtered him, getting out an early 7/7 creature, and then making him a) fly, and b) every time I hit him with the creature, I get a number of 1/1 green creatures equal to the amount of damage I did. He resigned when I had 14 1/1 creatures.

Third game again came down to the wire, but was most unusual. I knocked him down to 3 points and then couldn't get any more through, which is when he began hitting me slowly.

The unusual part was that we both made a number of plays to help the other players creatures, for a a variety of reasons. I had a piece of equipment on one of my creatures, and I really wanted it on another creature, so I attacked with it, hoping David would just kill it. David couldn't afford to let it through, so he blocked it and then healed it.

Then, I cast my enchantment that makes a creature fly and also gives be baby 1/1 creatures for every point of damage the creature does onto David's creature that had been poking me. This neutralized him, as he could not now afford to give me swarms of creatures.

And so it went. I finally left my defenses open, and David took the chance to kill me by attacking with everything. Then I played an instant which canceled all combat damage and left his creatures tapped for an extra round. That let my 1/2 creature walk through for the final 2 points of damage that I needed to give.

Fun game.

Jambo

Gili 62, Avraham 58

Played at the same time as Carpe Astra.

Solitaire

Nadine ?

Played during Carpe Astra, while David and I played Magic, and Gili and Avraham played Jambo. Lot of downtime in Carpe Astra.

Bridge

David/Nadine+, Jon/Avraham

David and I also played Magic while playing Bridge. Second play for Avraham.

David and Nadine got the cards and did well, making a slam, and a doubled contract. In the other hands, Avraham made a number of beginner errors; he still plays well for a new player.

January 7, 2009

Participants: Jon, Binyamin, Nadine, Gili, Avraham, David K

I lost my notes.

Trias

Binyamin 26, Jon 24, Nadine 20

I simply love this game. Honestly, I was expecting to thing that it was an ok filler. But it's elegant mechanics and chaotic patterns are exactly my style. In the first game you have no idea what you're doing and why, but it soon begins to come clear.

Unfortunately, everyone else I've played it with at the group doesn't feel the same way. Especially, there are some people who take a very long time to take their turns, ala Carcassonne. Nadine is one such person. She also claims that it's simply not her style of game, being too spacial (yet somehow, she always seems to beat us at El Grande).

First play for Binyamin, who is especially irked when other people take a long time to play. I would like to play it 2-player a couple of times.

Jambo

Avraham+, Gili

Gili taught Avraham. The Kosmos two-player series is Gili's type of game; I think they're ok filler games. They didn't have time to finish, but agreed that Avraham was probably winning.

Antike

Jon 9, Avraham 8, Binyamin 7

My third game of Antike, and another game that I simply love a whole lot more than I expected to. Possibly it's because I'm playing with not too aggressive players; if I played with war-gamers I might feel differently. As for now, the game seems to be perfectly balanced, where the victory mechanics don't favor aggression over non-aggression, or vice versa.

Binyamin's first play, Avraham's second. I decided to try setting the victory condition to one less than the book indicates. It does make a difference. That one extra point would have dragged the game on into a lot more forced combat situations and probably close to another hour. We finished our game in under 2 hours.

I started with gold and the first Know-How, but Binyamin quickly stifled my hopes of getting a landslide of those. I played Arabia, and pretty much had my side of the board to myself for most of the game. Just once, Avraham who played Greece conquered one of my outlying cities in the south. And I won the game with a quick unexpected strike to destroy one of Binyamin's temples in the north.

Binyamin started with two legions and expanded into 12 or 13 cities as his first several rounds. He then hit up against Avraham who attacked a number of his cities. He then concentrated on acquiring the rest of the Know-hows (he got 6, I think) and building temples. But he was too slow to win. Avraham also expanded early, but he spent too much time on expansion, building no temples and achieving no points through know-hows. He was still poised to win the game two turns after me.

Year of the Dragon

David 74, Nadine 55, Gili 45

A favorite of all three of them, they consider it a tighter and less random version of Notre Dame.

Traders of Carthage

Avraham 15, Jon 14, Binyamin 12

Avraham taught this game to both Binyamin and me. It's a light filler game. To me, it seemed to fit into nearly the same space as R-Eco, with its point in four goods, piles of cards that appear and disappear, and low scoring. It's also fairly chaotic and low on the planning side, with just enough planning to make you feel that you have some relevant decisions to make. This is probably exacerbated in a four-player game, and lessened in a two-player game, like all similar games with chaos.

In our game, I probably should have one but I made two mistakes. The first one cost me a card. The second one gave Binyamin the shipment and lost me several cards and point opportunities. But Binyamin didn't quite grasp the right plays. Between the two of us, we let Avraham take a close but smooth victory.

Bridge

Jon/David 990, Binyamin/Avraham+Nadine 0

Avraham hasn't played this (he's played online? read the rules?), so he teamed up with Nadine to play one position with Binyamin as partner. I ended up with all the points over four hands. I played the first three hands, and Avraham insisted on stealing the last hand, but went down two.

December 31, 2008

Participants: Nadine, Moshe, Gili, Avraham, Jon, David K

Happy New Year's Eve, something we all forgot about until 11:58. Game night went on a tad too long tonight.

I came late, and Nadine opened up for me. Moshe is a newbie who came in for his first visit to the club, and his first exposure to new games. His previous game experience is Chess.

R-Eco

Moshe 12, Nadine 8, Gili 5

First game, Moshe won. He later said that he really enjoyed it, as it was the only game he played this evening that wasn't going to take several plays to understand the strategy.

It's Alive

Avraham 58, Nadine, Gili, Moshe

This was the game they were starting when I finally arrived. I told them to continue, since I like to see my game played, and so that I could get some Magic drafting in with David when he arrived. David arrived and we did some drafting.

Avraham completed his monster and scored well. Nadine came in second.

Pillars of the Earth

Nadine 54, David 53, Jon 44

This was my secret santa gift, which just arrived on Tuesday. So first time play for all of us.

I've never really liked Caylus, and this game is why. Caylus may be the standard game with the worker placement mechanism, but it's way too fiddly and long.

This game doesn't exactly replace Caylus' mechanics, but it fits in the same genre and it's simply better. A number of mechanics work together well, things are tight, but not TOO tight, and competitive but not TOO competitive. And there's always more available than what you are able to do.

It comes with some overproduced wooden pieces that probably drive the price up, but they're kinda cute, at least. There were also a few niggly rule issues that came up and can be found in hidden corners in the rule book, so it's not perfectly elegant. But, despite many random elements to the game, it's definitely a planning game, and lots of fun.

We played our first game without peeking at any of the cards, so we had no idea as to what possible events would occur or bonus cards would become available. Since none of us knew the best strategies, Nadine started the game off by going for the pretty blue cubes. I said at the beginning of the game that she'll probably win because of this, and she did.

David seemed to be falling behind, with too much gold and not enough to do with it. Luckily for him, one of the bonus cards that came up translated every 3 of his gold into victory points, which allowed him to shoot from well behind to one point away from winning in the last round of the game.

I decided to use up my money and concentrate on vp production, which did me pretty well until the above last round, as I mentioned. I was a little money shy in rounds 4 and 5, but not too much to worry about; again, except for that one bonus card which David got.

Player positioning didn't seem to be too much of an issue in our three-player game. We occasionally considered it, but there was always something more directly worthwhile to do. It would have been nice if Starting Player came with a victory point or free cube or something. It could be that it's a more worthwhile choice in four-player game, when the better spaces are already taken, and when starting player may matter more.

Settlers of Catan

Avraham 10, Moshe 8, Gili 6

Settlers is a good game for a new player. Avraham had also only played it a few times, and Gili still loves to play it. I don't know what happened in the game.

Chess

Moshe++, Avraham

They played two games of this while waiting for us to finish PotE.

Magic: the Gathering

David++, Jon

We got to play Magic again, and David won twice, as usual. The first time in a short game, as I had the wrong mana and he had a great start. The second was closer, at least. I cleverly took out one of his annoying creatures, but he had another one going that I had to sacrifice against for several rounds, until he was finally able to remove my last defenders. I didn't draw any of several cards that could have taken it out.

Puerto Rico

Moshe 56, Avraham 47, Nadine 44

Nadine taught Moshe while I banged my had on the table listening to her. They played a straight set of buildings, and Nadine gave her usual new player advice, which meant that the new player did well while she suffered. Moshe had both coffee monopoly, Harbor, and guild Hall. Nadine would also like it to be known that she didn't pull any corn throughout the game, which weakened her Factory. Avraham had many early corns, in contrast.

And that was the last game of the year; technically, it was also the first game of the new year.

December 24, 2008

Participants: Jon, Gili, Nadine

A small gathering on Hanukkah.

Jambo

Jon 65, Gili 62

Our second game was very close. Gili had some good card-drawing engines, which are essential in a game where access to cards is a premium. I managed to win on the bonus turn after Gili hit 60.

Taj Mahal

Nadine 65, Gili 54, Jon 46

Approximate results. I wanted to play something older; I was getting tired of only newer games.

Three-player gives a better chance for connections, which Gili took advantage of. Nadine and I fought over commodities. Nadine had the upper hand. I managed to make mine count by only battling over the ones I needed, but I never had the card capacity that she did. In any case, that left Gili free to pursue her connections in peace, but they weren't connected in a good enough order.

Mexica

Nadine+, Jon, Gili

First play for Gili, second for Nadine, third for me. Mexica is another game that I loved when I played it at BGG.con but fell flat once I got it back home.

It has a few problems with it. The action point chips are simply a bad mechanic; I can't think if anything else to say about them.

The "end round triggers and then the game is played until the last person takes his turn" is also a bad mechanic. I don't mind a set number of rounds so much. And I don't mind a set number of rounds if the order the players play in each round is variable, such as the auction for turn precedence in Tikal. But in Mexica, fist player has a huge advantage in selecting the better province chips, and no such comparable advantage is given to later players.

In general, I still like the rest of the game, but neither of my opponents did, which made for an unhappy game experience. They were happy for it to be over. I suspect that this will eventually get traded away.

December 17, 2008

Participants: Jon, Gili, Nadine

Very light attendance, which was just as well, as I had gotten sick earlier in the day and needed to cut my activity short. I suggested that they play an additional game after I went to sleep, but they opted to leave.

La Citta

Gili 35, Nadine 33, Jon 27

Nadine's first play. I was rather hazy during the game, so I'm not surprised to have lost. Actually, it began to feel a little too much like work in rounds 4 and 5. Gili had the first successful influx of citizens, and I never really recovered from that, although I did steal a few from her on the other side of the board later.

I almost managed to get a second city to score for me, but I was vastly shy in food, so instead had to spend my last actions building more farms instead of little arches. Nadine stocked up to the gills in food, ending with much more than she needed.

Nadine thought it was a good game.

December 10, 2008

Participants: Jon, Gili, Nadine, David K, Avraham, Adam, Binyamin

Welcome back to a few irregular regulars.

Jambo

Jon 63, Gili 49

First play for both of us, I taught this new game to Gili who liked Odin's Ravens. Jambo is in the same niche of two-player light games.

Jambo is a card game for two. Each player starts with a six space market and several cards. The market contains six types of goods. The main cards have 3 goods on them and two numbers: the smaller number is how much the goods cost if you buy all three at once, and the larger one is how much you earn if you sell all three at once. So the essential mechanic of the game is getting the cards to match up correctly.

A whole lot of other cards do special actions, like add more space to your market, start an auction for some cards or goods, take something, swap something, cause your opponent to discard something, and the like.

Each round you get five actions, of which you can only add to your hand one card. We found this to be a very harsh limit, and it provided a slowdown for us in midgame after we both had basically nothing left in our hands. Hand management is therefore very important.

It was a nice game, about as nice as Odin's Ravens was the first time I played that. I still like OR, but I don't usually suggest it. We'll see what happens with Jambo.

Tichu

David/Avraham, Adam/Nadine

They played this as a starter game.

La Citta

Jon 35, Avraham 25, Gili 20

First play for all of us. This is a nice game, reminiscent of other games, but not quite like any other. You build cities by adding various buildings to your cities using money or actions or both. You need to add quarries to increase you money supply (or take an action to get money). You need to add farms to increase your food supply to feed the people on your buildings. You need to add markets and fountains to allow your city to grow beyond a certain point. And you need to add buildings in three different colors for two reasons: 1) at the end of each year, people move from cities with less of one of these colors to cities with more of one of these colors, and 2) a city scores at the end of the game if it has at least one building of each color.

In the first place, your actions are limited, so you have to make trade-offs. This is nicely done. And in the second place, having extra people is more buildings and more power, but if you exceed your food production, you are hit hard. That makes acquiring extra people dangerous. In fact, forcing other players to take your people is often a tactical powerhouse of a move. Quite the opposite of common sense, but nicely in keeping with the theme.

The board and bits are pretty, if a bit much and over-produced for what was really necessary. It's a nice game, and I look forward to playing it several more times soon.

In our game, I realized a bit ahead of Avraham how more people is not necessarily better. Especially on the last round, where too many people equals a lot of negative points, I made sure to keep some extra food around. In fact, Avraham tossed me an extra guy and I had exactly enough. I also had the most cities. Gili was drained too much by Avraham's nearby cities and so had the opposite problem: not enough people and room.

Agricola

Binyamin 47, David 36, Nadine 29, Adam 23

First play for Binyamin and Adam, and look how well Binyamin did. I heard a lot of voices saying that while Agricola is a nice game it is simply too long. Well, with new players it is definitely longer. My last games haven't been too long, but it takes four or five playings before you get to that point.

Again, a plowed field strategy beat a stone house strategy.

Netrunner

Jon 8, Avraham 0

I taught this to Avraham. I was thinking of selling this (or sending it to my secret santa recipient) since no one around here wanted to play it (i.e. David doesn't want to play it). And it's true that there's a different type of luck factor in the game, but Magic also has a tremendous luck factor in it; most of our Magic games end by mana screw, after all.

Once a Netrunner game gets going, it's always a great game, regardless of what cards come out. The only thing to watch for is if the runner has no icebreakers of the type he needs. Then he's in trouble.

In our game, I messed up the rule for activating Nodes, but even so it was an excellent bit of fun. Well, for me, as I won. But Avraham liked the game, too, and will play it with me again if the opportunity arises.

December 03, 2008

Participants: Gili, Jon, Nadine, David K

Game night was at Gili's, who had to stay home and watch the kids. Game night was interrupted by a small accident with the sink in the bathroom. It broke and spewed hundreds of gallons of water over the floor before we managed to turn it off from outside the apt. Then we did a little mopping. Exciting.

Hacienda

Jon 113, David 98, Gili, Nadine

First play for all of us.

Hacienda is a deluxe version of Through the Desert. Each round, you place tiles on the board trying to balance reaching as many markets as possible (instead of oases) and securing long routes. The added feature to Hacienda is that you have to buy your tiles: slightly cheaper if you pick them randomly, but in any case the ones you really need might not be available, which adds some luck to the game. You have to balance placing tiles to earn money vs placing to earn points; but often these were the same action.

In our game, money was not that tight, so the latter is not much an issue. A tighter money game might have made that part more interesting.

The seemingly main path to victory, which is the one I chose, is to connect to as many markets as possible; you earn a triangular bonus for each connection, so 10 markets is 55 points. It's also the main way to get money. You get a lot more money if you invest more tiles at each market, but you get far less points. And you don't really need that much money.

The second problem is that a route length of 3 or more is worth 2 x the length of the route. Only one type of route is counted, and there's no bonus for having a single route of length 6 versus 2 routes of length 3. That made the large route strategy slightly less effective than the one of getting to every market. Of course, if everyone simply tries to get to every market, the game is balanced; but it is a little less interesting.

The third problem, and it's now the second game where we've hit this problem, is that the game end triggers after someone does something, and then the last player gets the last move. This is simply a bad game mechanism. The idea is to give all players an equal number of turns, which is a decent idea. But when some turns are spent planning and others placing, the person who triggers the end game has the power to end it right after you planned. That makes planning for players earlier in the starting order very difficult. The advantage they got for going first doesn't make up for it.

Games should avoid this mechanic, and instead go for a) ending after a set number of turns, or b) ending on the turn after the end condition is triggered, or c) the game goes around until it gets back to right before the person who triggered the end game.

Despite these problems, the game is slightly less dry than Through the Desert, and quite enjoyable if you like route-planning and light mathematical games. We'll definitely play again.

In our game, as I mentioned, I promiscuously hit every market. I was light on cash, but I still had two land routes with four tiles, which gave me emergency cash when I needed it. I didn't buy any haciendas, but they were not worth enough points overall.

Tichu

Jon/David 300, Nadine/Gili 0

We played one hand of Tichu while we were also playing Hacienda, which annoyed me to no end. David bid Tichu, and both of us went out first.

Agricola

David 38, Jon 36, Gili 30, Nadine 29

We played this one, even though it takes a tad too long for a game group such as ours: close to three hours. We started by drafting occupations and then minor improvements. We used all the cards.

Nadine had a nice card that allowed her to add a family member whenever she added a room, which she used to add two family members at once. She was unprepared to support them, however, and spent a lot of the rest of the game struggling for food. She ended up getting two begging cards as a result.

David complained about his occupations and minor improvements, and then ended up playing 5 occupations and 3 minor improvements, nearly all of them in the first half of the game. They gave him so much wheat and vegetables, that we actually ran out of wheat coins. [DK: Actually Jon missed a few. I played two minor improvements in the last round, and 1 occupation in the round before. In toto I played 12 out of my 14 cards!] 

Gili played a balanced strategy with a lot of sheep. She also played an annoying card that required anyone who wanted wheat to pay her a food when they took it, which made gaining wheat no immediate benefit food-wise for the other players. She only got to three family members, which hurts.

I wanted to do farming, but I only ended up farming vegetables, playing a single occupation and a single minor improvement, both of which boosted vegetable acquisition and production. Otherwise, I focused on building a stone house, expanding my family, and acquiring major improvements for the points. I almost had to beg in the last round, but I ended up selling my cow instead (for a loss of 2 points, instead of 3). I had 10 bonus points, but still lost to David's fields, veggies, grains, and family members.

So far in all the games we've played, an active farmland beats the stone house route by just a few points each time. Unfortunately, to get an active farmland requires the right minor improvements and occupations, which makes that avenue only available to those that get them. If only one person gets the right card comboes, the game is going to be a lot easier for them.