March 04, 2009

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

A low-key game night full of games.

Metropolys

Binyamin 42, Bill 39, Nadine 36

Binyamin taught this Ystari game to the other two. It looked like a typical Ystari game; I find their games to be clever and complicated, but soulless. I don't know how the others felt about this game.

Dominion

David K 34, Gili 29, Jon 27

First play for all of us, although David had played twice online. Dominion is The game of the last year or so (not counting Agricola), and it's deck-building mechanics made me fairly sure that the game would be well-received by our group. It was, for the most part.

I really like the deck-building, and the way adding, removing, and swapping cards makes such a difference to your play. I like how some cards are better early and some late, and so on. It's very clever, and the different types of cards seem like they will make for many interesting plays.

We played a number of different strategies, and many seemed to have possibilities. And, since many different ones will be available in future games, we'll always have to be on our toes.

However, there are a number of drawbacks.

The most glaring is that the game is quite obviously far far better as a computer game than a tabletop game. One, you constantly have to shuffle your cards, which is just insane, especially when you have so few of them. Two, you constantly have to keep track of how many actions and buys you have left. The buys usually don't matter too much, except when you accidentally buy two cards but are only allowed to buy one. But the actions can be confusing. Third, you constantly have to check how many cards are left in each deck, where a nice number over the deck back would come in handy.

A few other drawbacks: The game end is somewhat problematic. In our second game (see below), we all concentrated on three certain cards. As a result, the only person to buy any victory points at all won without breaking a sweat, as she could finish two piles with only one card each on her turn before any of us noticed. I guess everyone should play different strategies, but, unlike PR, you have to choose different strategies in order to prop the game up, not just because of the limited resources.

The interaction, apart from the two possible times that something can run out, is nearly non-existent. Often one of us just took his turn as the last player was finishing. Thank goodness for the few cards that add a bit of interaction, like the militia.

And as I mentioned on my blog, the box insert is supposed to help you keep your cards in order, but it's strange arrangement and differently sized slots are most confusing.

Lastly, I spent an hour trying to understand the game setup. It is very difficult to understand that the ten kingdoms mean "select ten of the card types and only play with those ten types." I couldn't figure out what a kingdom was for the life of me. Eventually I figured it out, about the time that David was explaining it to us. Very very poor instructions. They could have included an illustration of the setup.

In our game, we played with the suggested starting kingdoms. David played the Markets, while I played Mines and Golds. David won, but he also started with a better first draw (5/2 vs my 4/3) and also the markets let him buy 2 things (3 and 1 VP cards) when he had 7 coins, while I could only buy one thing with 7 points, since I didn't have a second buy.

Although David won, and I see how the markets are like free coin cards, I don't think they are a killer strategy; decent, but not killer. We will have to see.

Gili 9, David 3, Jon 3, Binyamin 3

As noted, this game ended way too quickly and quite unexpectedly for all players. Gili simply realized she could end the game by removing the last two cards from two piles, and she was the only one with a VP card.

Pillars of the Earth

David 58, Binyamin 57, Gili 45

Binyamin had only played once before, a few years ago.

Puerto Rico

Jon 63, Nadine 52, Bill 48

Bill hasn't played this much. I played the first half of the game and my second Dominion game simultaneously. Bill had tobacco and Small Market and eventually Factory and Wharf. Nadine on my left got coffee and eventually Harbor.

I got coffee and Harbor, too, in front of her. I also got all five goods, and several times passed over building or several coins on cards in favor of just pushing through victory points. I only abandoned this once to get Guild Hall (maxed out at 10) at the end of the game, although I suffered a small shipping point loss to Nadine to do so.

Fairy Tale

Jon 33, Nadine 32, Bill 28

I suggested this again, believing that I will continue to like it more and more each time I play, as I become familiar with what works and what doesn't. It's true, but the large random factor of what cards are available to me in the game are still so very high. Somehow this is ok in Geschenkt, but here it's frustrating to try something and have no chance to accomplish it not because your opponent thwarted it (which also happens) but because the card never even appears.

If you can let that go, the game is actually quite good, and pretty fast, which makes it a nice filler.

Bill 41, Nadine 37, Jon 35

In this game, I tried a variation: two rounds of picking from 8 cards and playing 6. It gave us more control as to our comboes (plus), but less cards entered the game making rarer comboes even more difficult (minus).

I have several other ideas on how to fix the game. I'll have to try them.

Bridge

Jon/David, Binyamin/Nadine

We played only one hand before I kicked them out.

February 25, 2009

Participants: Jon, Gili, Nadine, David K, Bill

David suggested that we play a 2-player and 3-player game, rather than a 5-player game. Turns out he was right, but our game night was still enjoyable.

Fairy Tale

Jon 41, Gili 41, Nadine 37

We exchanged games from the Beit Shemesh group: they got Saboteur and we got this in return. I like this game, but I also knew that it wasn't going to be a big hit with our group, owing to the chaos of blind placement and card flipping.

It's pretty good for a filler game. It's lacking something: the flip and unflip mechanic is not that thrilling, but easy to grasp, at least. The first few games seem random, but by the end of the second I was starting to grasp that there is some control. Synergy is hard to achieve with drafting, since not all the cards are used in each game. In Magic, unless you're trying to get a specific combo, drafting doesn't kill you if you get it wrong; here it does. But it's also not impossible, and that's the point.

I played this once before a long time ago. First game for everyone else. None of us knew what would work and what wouldn't, and we struggled with the pictographs a bit.

Jon 45, Gili 39, David 36, Nadine 33

David had a super combo going, but my second-to-last card play screwed him out of one of the key cards in his combo and he lost 12 points. He would have won, otherwise. I think the other players didn't pay enough attention to attacking cards.

With my 12 cards and 45 points, it looks like 4 points per card is a good target score to shoot for.

La Citta

Jon 40, David 35, Nadine 28, Gili 26, Bill 23

First play for both David and Bill. Third game for the rest of us. This game ran a tad long at 4 hours - about 1.5 hours longer than it should. This was partially due to new players, five players, Nadine's calculations, and the game being chaotic and calculating. It's a little like the Game of Life: simple rules create complex interactions. Lots of recounting the number of people you have and are likely to get. Good thing they give you those food counters.

Ours was a strange game with much food grabbing by the others right at the beginning of the game, only later trying to grab markets and baths. I grew my food supply at a slower pace, and only held two cities throughout the game. This allowed my cities to be strong and steal people away from other players' little cities. I had to concentrate on food growth in the last few rounds, while others, who had enough food, were building arches and so on.

It worked, though I didn't think it would. After all, your score is equal to the maximum of the number of citizens / food that you have. I was simply going for food when they were going for citizens, and vice versa. I had no mines the entire game, and gained two coins twice by using cards.

Gili built an awesome first city that allowed her to get two mines each between two mountains, for four income in the first few rounds. But she didn't have enough food, and the city wasn't attractive enough to keep its citizens so she lost the mines in round 4. David built an awesome first city with several spots for 4 food production, which gave him massive food supply. But his lack of markets were limiting, and his central city kept losing citizens to mine; this was only his first game, after all. My central city was leaching 4 people a round in the last few rounds; one of the benefits of having a strong central city.

Because of our strange play, we ran into problems with the available power cards. At several points, none of the seven was worth anything to anyone. Which meant that whenever anyone took a card, he or she simply made the card that flipped up available to the next person, which was a boon for them. Gili was the one with the cash, so her buying a 3 arch building usually made a medium sized building available to me as I was sitting to her left. It helped; a lot less than others made it out to help. Sometimes a useful card flipped up, but people (including me) often didn't have the cash or food to utilize it.

Despite this, and the long game time, David liked the game, and would be willing to play again with less than five players.

February 18, 2009

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

Welcome back Bill from several months in the US.

R-Eco

Jon 15, Gili 15, Bill 5, Nadine -1

Played as an opener. Bill's first time. Gili doesn't really like the game. We played with my usual variant where all the chips are shuffled and placed randomly (face up); makes for a more interesting game, in my opinion.

Age of Steam

David 110, Bill 109, Jon 80

This is one of my top ten games, and only the third time I got to play it. First play for both David and Bill. I really love this game and Antique, both of which have a lot more direct confrontation than the usual Eurogames, so that must say something.

Unfortunately, I lost big-time, entirely because of Bill. Not only did he screw me three times during the game, but he screwed me royally three times during the game. None of that "Oh, I guess I have to pay one more coin" screws, or "Oh, I guess I'll have to deliver a sub-optimal good" screws. But a real heavy metal "I am out of the game; I lose 10 income points" screws. And not once, but three times. Kicked me hard when I was down.

I guess I left myself open to it. I'm not used to playing with aggressive players. We don't usually play games where this type of aggression is possible. It's not like he targeted me just for the heck of it; each time he played the right move for himself. I just got caught in his way because I started on the same side of the board as him. David started on the other side of the board, and so remained largely undisturbed for the first half of the game. Lesson learned.

Three player Age of Steam is not quite as satisfying as four or five player, but it's still a fantastic game of route planning, money management, and delivery. Our game took about 3 hours.

Stone Age

Gili 164, Binyamin 163, Nadine 147

First game for all of them. I didn't see this game play out, but the board looked a lot like the board from Pillars of the Earth. About 2 hours.

Louis XIV

Gili, Binyamin, Nadine

Second game for Binyamin. About an hour and a half. I don't know the scores.

February 11, 2009

Participants: Jon, Gili, Nadine

Small game night, but some nice games.

Traders of Carthage

Nadine 19, Gili 17, Jon 15

A light game as an opener, in case anyone else showed up. First play for both of them, second for me.

Last time I compared the game to R-Eco: not at all in terms of game mechanics, but in terms of weight, four color collection, and hand management. I think this game is somewhat heftier. R-Eco's randomness is very random; you do the best you can. There's a bit more going on here, with the several ways that cards can be played and denied to your opponents.

I like it a bit more on this play than I did after the first. Nadine was confused for the first half of the game but began to pick it up in the second. Gili also liked it.

Antike

Jon 9, Nadine 7, Gili 6

First play for Gili, second for Nadine. I continue to love this game, especially when played to one less victory point than marked: makes it both quicker and less dependent on conflict. If we had played to one more victory point it would have taken another half hour and involved a lot more armies, which is fine for the right people in the right situations.

Gili realized that she wasn't aggressive enough, and both she and Nadine think it's good but maybe not their type of game. My experience certainly gave me an edge. I destroyed one of Gili's temples mid-game, which gave me a decent lead, and made life more difficult for either of them. I played Greece and quickly swarmed the oceans with my vast knowledgeable fleet.

Notre Dame

Gili 58+2, Jon 58+0, Nadine 57

Gili won on the tie. A close game, as you can see. I started with 2 parks, which the others though was a great play, but of course I was struggling for cash and cubes mid-game. Nadine was flush with cash, but only went to Notre Dame once; she drove her car a lot. Gili played a very balanced game.

February 4, 2009

Participants: Gili, Binyamin, David, Nadine, Jon

I arrived late to find them playing on the wall outside my apt; sorry!

Apples to Apples

David, Nadine, Binyamin, Gili

They played a few rounds of this, and David said he enjoyed it. I guess any game played on a wall outside is probably enjoyable.

Merchants of Amsterdam

Jon, Nadine, Gili, David, Binyamin

This is a Knizia auction/area control game with a nice but mostly irrelevant 16th century Amsterdam theme. It's not bad in some respects, but the auction system sucks. Really.

The game uses the Dutch auction (naturally), which means that the price starts high and gradually falls until someone is willing to pay the price. Why is this so bad?

First of all, it uses a mechanical spring-loaded component which is almost guaranteed to break fairly quickly. Ours is new and seems fine. Second, the thing is loud. It doesn't just silently spin until it dings at the end; it makes an awful stream of clatter which my wife immediately banned from the house.

Third, it's terribly boring to sit and watch a clock tick down. I guess it's supposed to be tense, but that gets old after the first auction. And we're not talking 1 or 3 auctions per game. We're talking an auction on every player's turn! That means the vast part of the game is simply waiting for the damn thing to spin down to a reasonable price.

Fourth, it's just not an exciting auction type. It starts, there's one bid, and it's done. Only one person gets a chance to do anything.

So, one dutch auction in a game could work, but not every turn. Moving on ...

We considered alternatives to the auction given. We ended up having the first player count down from some reasonable starting point, but this gave the person counting down an unfair advantage to be first to call a certain number. We also had no way of resolving auction ties (with the clock, the first person to slap it wins, which should result in fewer ties).

David pointed out that the auction is actually similar to blind bidding, since each person simply chooses what bid they want to make before the auction starts. Our group isn't too keen on blind bidding, though (I kind of like it). It could probably be played with either turn or free-for-all auctions, as well.

The rest of the game is somewhat better, but still has some problems. For one thing, at different points in the game, certain cards are simply much better than others. If you draw them when you want to, you're lucky. If you don't, you're unlucky. That's the problem with many card games, but not all card games. There should be a more equitable distribution of cards so that all players can get roughly the same opportunities. Otherwise, the game simply devolves to chance.

The game looks like it has a decent progression. The beginning is investment, with payoffs on your investments coming later in the game. That seems to work. And there are just enough areas and types to make the choices of where to place what interesting.

Nadine didn't like that the time track moves forward at random times, especially that it disrupted people's turns. The cards themselves were repetitive; not actually that bad if the game moves quickly, but nothing really special.

It took all I could just to get everyone to agree to finish to the third scoring year, and then they all happily quit. Oh well.

Agricola

Binyamin 55, Nadine 32

Binyamin is till trying to figure out the game, and this was his first two-player game. He was not interested in winning, per se, but in pursuing a particular strategy. This game, the strategy was to get lots of bonus points. He succeeded, with an incredible 21 bonus points (to Nadine's 2). He also had all five members, and a 4 room stone house. He didn't plow once.

Nadine had a more traditional farm layout, but most of the game only 3 members, a simple clay house, and not near enough of everything else.

Pillars of the Earth

David 52, Jon 50, Gili 38

Meanwhile, we played our own worker placement game and had a great time. David was a little reluctant to play, remembering only sort-of amused by the game, but when our game ended, he said he really enjoyed it and would play again. Excellent. I didn't change my opinion, in that I still really like it.

However, I do note that the worker drawing mechanism really makes a big difference to the game if you're really unlucky/lucky, and it seems to be happening in nearly every game. I need to think if maybe something needs to be done about it, when some player gets drawn several times in a row for costs 6, 5, and 4.

In our game, I was doing super conversion and thought I was going to end well, but I realized at the beginning of round 6 that David was going to beat me my a few points. It was the first game that I acquired one of the "convert gold to points" craftsmen, but I wasn't able to use it in either 5th or 6th rounds. The other one wasn't bought. That makes the first time in my four games experience that one of these cards didn't swing the victory.

I'm not entirely sure how David won the game in the end.

Bridge

David/Jon, Nadine/Binyamin

We played a few hands, and the other guys got all the cards.

January 27, 2009

Participants: Jon, Nadine, Binyamin, Avraham

Game night moved to Tuesday due to scheduling conflicts.

Carpe Astra

Jon, Nadine

Carpe Astra is the next game produced by Reiver Games, who also produces my own game, It's Alive.

Carpe Astra is a simple set-collection, money-management game set in space. The game lasts ten rounds. On your turn, you can cycle cards, place one tile, turn tiles, place your workers in a connected string on the tiles, and collect chips for your cards if they match the symbols on the tiles on which your workers were placed. Alternately, you can force someone else to lose a chip, as well as optionally pay a coin to take the lost chip for yourself.

Most actions cost a coin each, other than refilling your hand up at the end of your turn to two cards and placing your first two (out of a total possible of five) workers.

There are six colors of chips, and at the end of the game the first or second place holders in each color score points. Winner has the most points.

As for the positive aspects of the game, which are only really relevant in a two-player game, you need to manage your money. This means that, like Taj Mahal, you'll skip one round of placing workers, maybe two. There are no positive aspects to the multi-player game (we tried two player and four players).

Unlike most of the other games we play, a) turns are long, b) there is nothing at all to do when it's not your turn, and c) in a four player game, you can't plan since the state of the board will have changed completely by the time it gets back to you.

In some instances, one of the players and I could pretty much plan what we were going to do the next turn, assuming that no one messed with our pieces on the board. When no one did, we made our moves fairly quickly. But that didn't happen often.

Turns are not short. You have to plan all your money and all your moves, and this can take some time. By the time three other players have done this, you're pretty bored. And this happens ten times. Our game took two and a half hours, bearing in mind that our players are prone to AP, that it was our first game, and that we were so bored that we started playing side games when it wasn't our turn.

For all the time it takes to check your choices, the choices are not interesting. The decision-making is "can I do it, or can't I?" That's not a choice; that's a calculation. A calculation is not a decision. Either you can play all your cards, or you can't. If you can't, you play N-1 cards. And so on. The only choice you have to make is which opponent to hit, but even that's not a choice: the vast majority of the time you have no choice, and when you do, you hit the one who's winning.

There is a little choice as to whether to wait to play a card the following round when it will be more valuable. That's something, but not much. There is a choice as to when to conserve money, similar to the choice as to whether to pass a round of fighting in Taj Mahal. It's not one you have to make if you're lucky with your card picks, however. If you pick cards with matching symbols, you're going to spend less money.

In a four player game, the "choice" between networking cards and slander cards is not a choice. Networking cards are irrelevant in the last half, and much easier to use in the first half, of a four player game. And you NEVER want to slander and not pick up the slandered points, not only because you will lose them, but because you give them to the player on your left. In a two player game, this is not quite as clear; sometimes your opponent is out of one or two types of chips. If it's less clear, it goes back to having to manage your money. If you have enough money, there's no decision making. And if your opponent is our of several types of chips, he's losing anyway.

Without any blocking cards, "instants", or defensive maneuvering, you have zero control as to what happens to you in the game. If you're lucky, other people will be easier to slander and they'll get slandered instead of you. If you're unlucky, you'll get slandered multiple times. By the time it comes back to your turn in a four player game, you may have gone from winning to out of the game, without having done anything wrong. It's entirely random.

The symbols, colors, and name used in different places were confusing, especially with regards to the players also being of the colors used in the game. The yellows looked like oranges, and the oranges looked like reds. Not enough contrast.

The event bonuses for each round are not interesting enough. And, in general, we didn't like the mechanic of replacing other people's pieces with your own. Some sort of additional cost would have been nice. Or combat mechanism, or something. The publisher indicates that removing other people's workers is supposed to be a "strategy" to help protect you from slander; it costs nothing to replace your pieces, however, so it's just not the case. You were going to pay the same amount to move your pieces onto other spaces with symbols matching your card colors, anyway.

The two symbol cards are nearly always better than the three symbol cards, and thus unfairly give an advantage to those who draw more. In a two player game, sometimes a three symbol card will be better if your opponent doesn't have the symbols on the two symbol card with which you can hit him; this is never a problem in a multi player game.

Some of this criticism may be unfair: we have an AP heavy group, and we got bored with the game after a few rounds. In the four player game we finished the game, but we played side games in the meantime. We abandoned the two player game after a number of rounds.

Agricola

Jon 42, Binyamin 40, Nadine 34, Avraham 34

My first or second win, I think. Second or third play for Binyamin, and third or fourth play for Nadine and Avraham.

I am now more firmly convince that plowing and sowing strategies will always win against renovation and building strategies. While the earlier extra person/actions is nice, it doesn't quite up for the several actions you had to take in order to get those extra actions. While you were building extra rooms, I was plowing and sowing.

I'm going to get extra guys a little later than you did. In the meantime, I have solidified my food base, will score full points for fields, vegetables, and grain, and am free to take extra points at the end of the game while you are wasting those hard-won extra actions to get food.

Even so, it's a well-balanced game. You can't entirely ignore building your home and expanding your family. You just don't have to rush to do it first, that's all I'm saying.

Although I started with a field, I didn't get it planted until mid-game. I only played two occupations and two minor improvements, even through we booster-drafted them before starting the game. Binyamin played all of his, I think, which gave him lots of bonuses, of course, but also slowed his development. He still could have won if he had taken the right choice somewhere near the end; at least he would have tied me. Two or three synergistic occupations still make a world of difference, perhaps a little too much, in my opinion.

Nadine had a six room stone house, but no points in produce or animals. Avraham was first to five people, and even got an extra three point bonus for that, but was also produce and animal shy. I had only one sheep, but multiple point bonuses in all other areas.

Medici

Nadine 128, Avraham 111, Jon 107, Binyamin 99

First play for all of us except for Binyamin.

Medici is another "pure" auction game, or so they say, comparable to Modern Art, Ra, and Traumfabrik. It's certainly elegant and streamlined. However, it is subject to even greater swings of luck than any of the aforementioned (which is saying a lot).

There are three rounds to the game. In each round, you take a deck of cards, remove some of them at random, and bid on the cards in lots. The cards are in five suits, numbered 0-5, with a single bonus card "10" of no suit. Each player decides to flip over 1, 2, or 3 cards (deciding when to stop after each card). Players then bid cash to take the cards. You can't take the cards if it would give you a total of more than five cards. That's one thing to consider when deciding how many cards to flip up.

Once all but one player has five cards, the last player simply fills his collection up to five cards from the top of the deck for the cost of 1. That's where a lot of the luck comes in. In the first round, Nadine took all five cards from the deck, having won no other cards, and the cards she flipped up were better cards than all of ours; Binyamin's collection was destroyed entirely because of what Nadine flipped up for herself. And the funny part was that I suggested that this might be an optimal strategy at the beginning of the game: paying nothing and taking five cards at random. Turns out that I was right.

Anyhoo, after all players have their cards, players score first based on how big their take was this round (by the highest numbers). Then they move their marker forwards on each color track once for each card they have of that color (numbers don't count here). This track is cumulative from round to round. Players further along the track gain points, but less than the number scoring. The exception to this is if you hit the last two spaces in the color tracks, in which case you gain some good scores.

Nadine had the most points numerically in the first round, and hit the last space in one of the color tracks in the last round. I repeated her performance, gaining my last cards in the second round entirely by luck and doing extremely well because of it, but then I bid too much in the third round. If I hadn't bid so high, Nadine probably would have won anyway, but I would have been much closer.

Since you don't know what cards will be flipped up next, you have no idea of the absolute value of the cards you're bidding on. If the 10 flips up next after you bid high to get high numbers, you're screwed. Similarly, if you bid high to get certain colors, and then those same colors flip up again, you're screwed.

And you have to bid high to prevent others from taking cards low, but it's a game of push your luck. In particular, I didn't like the "fill your hand with random cards" mechanic after everyone else has cards. That's push your luck taken way too far.

So I don't think I'll get the game, but I wouldn't refuse to play it. In fact, I feel the same way about Ra, Modern Art, and Traumfabrik.

January 21, 2008

Participants: Gili, Jon, Nadine, Avri

Game night in Gili's house as she had to babysit her kids. Avri from the Beit Shemesh group was in town so he came over for the night.

Pillars of the Earth

Avri 46/6, Nadine 46/2, Jon 46/0, Gili 39

First play for Gili. First four-player game for Nadine and me.

I loved the three-player game. I see it as a far better worker-placement game than Caylus, which is just fiddly, long, and tiresome. On the other hand, I can see how others could like Caylus better, as Caylus has less luck and more meat.

There is luck in PotE, not just randomness, 'tis true. But the better you get in the game, the less the luck affects you. I was hit by one instance of bad luck because I didn't plan well. Unlike other games, planning for the bad luck is not a "waste", because you can usually convert all of your reserved cushions for victory points on the last round, anyway. There is, perhaps, a bit more luck in four-player than in three-player. The order the master workers are drawn can be a problem.

In our game, my instance of bad luck was that I needed either of the two metal converting craftsman to be available for purchase on the last round, since I grabbed first-player position on fifth round. Unfortunately for me, neither one showed up on the bottom row for purchase, and instead both were only available for master worker acquisition in the second phase. And, my master workers were not drawn before others could grab these craftsman in the second phase.

But the reason that the bad luck affected me was because I let my money drop so low. If I hadn't, I would also have benefited just as much from the craftsman who converts gold to victory points. Instead, Nadine picked up one of these and Avri picked up the other. So my bad luck was partially my fault.

And as you can see, we ended in a three-way tie, with me losing the tiebreaker even after all the cash conversion by Nadine and Avri. Gili was the one who picked up the nice bonus card that let her look at the upcoming events, but most of the events were good events, and the ones that weren't didn't really hurt anyone.

Rook

Jon/Gili+, Nadine/Avri

I taught all of them how to play Rook. Rook is a nice partnership, trick-taking, kitty card game, not particularly better or worse than any other partnership, trick-taking, kitty card game (such as Whist). The Rook card is not really a great mechanic, especially if played with the real rules, but we played with the standard variation that the rook could only be played as a usual trump card. Then we decided to limit it even further, by making the rook only function if it is played in response to, or starts, a trump trick; i.e. it cannot be used to ruff another trick. It's still not a great mechanic.

I think the point was to encourage a particular dynamic from an age that appreciated it. Modern gamers would prefer the 1 of trumps to be worth 20 points - not the top trump which is guaranteed to win the trick anyway. That gives you more need for careful tactical play.