The first game of Power Grid was a bust for me. 4 player game, 2 newer players, followed by Loren, followed by me. Loren ended up getting the hookups from the newer players, plus I made a major gaff when I tried to set up a major indigo trade, only to realize that indigo was already traded. Just didn’t see it. Loren won by a huge margin of over 30 points.
The second game was much faster and tighter, with 3 experienced players. Didn’t win that one either.
Power Grid with 5 players was interesting. The resources become far tighter as the number of players increases, and competition for just enough resources to fire a plant is fierce. I ended up winning, mostly because I think I was able to stockpile money using clean power, and then I jumped ahead with the cash influx, purchased a ridiculous amount of capacity, and rode out the wave. I ended up powering 17 of 17 cities, though I could have also won the turn before if I had counted closer and powered 15 when no one else had the cities to do it.
We also got in a couple of lighter games, like Bang!
I got the whole shebang on Friday, so I schlepped all my new found lewt into my car and head over to a friend’s place.
Relationship Tightrope
We started with something light. “Relationship Tightrope” is a badly themed Renier Knizia game, where you take tricks (ala spades/hearts) but instead of just the high card doing something, the high and low take points. But points are bad. If you take the high of the trick, you get some blue sticks, and if you take the low, pink sticks Blue and pink cancel each other. The object of the game is to take as few points as possible.
We all felt like it wasn’t a bad game, it was just poorly themed. A solid 6.5-7.2 out of 10.
We went with another oldie but goodie, The Great Dalmuti. We played like 6 rounds, where I held the Great Dalmuti Seat for 4 of them. Meh. Dalmuti is always stupidly fun.
We had an over glut of players that night, so we ended up playing some WoW:TBG, where it just deteriorated from there, as people lost interest.
On Saturday, I got another gaming group in, and busted open both Shogun, and Wildlife.
Shogun
Feudal armies of Japan vie for control of the countryside, with the big gimmick being the “dice tower.” You dump both armies into the dice tower, and whatever comes out are the survivors. The tower has a little insert in it that can trap the armies inside. It’s short, and not light, but lighter than most wargames. I of course dominated everyone, ending up with 3 provinces guarded with a whopping 1 army each. I pretty much got whomped bad.
Tip: Fighting two front wars… not so good.
Rating: General liking by the group, though no one really raved about how awesome it was.
Wildlife
This was an interesting beast. It’s kind of a territory control game where (unbeknownst to us) has a Power Grid like mechanic thrown into it. Each player plays a different kind of animal, which can move into only certain types of areas. Your species can upgrade your ability to move into different areas by playing cards, of which you can play 3 a turn. One of those cards played must be auctioned to the other players for food tokens. Food tokens convert into points at a rate of 3 per point.
The kicker that we missed was the ability cards. There are these ability cards that confer crazy bonuses, and all you need to obtain them was to play the “get ability” card. The key rule we missed was that if you wanted to take an ability, and it was not available, you could take it from another player. You had to take from the person in the lead, though if two players are tied, then you can choose which to steal from. What happened in our game was one person took almost all the ability cards, and proceeded to go nuts. Luckily, I ended the game before he could totally go nuts, and I ended up winning for it.
Our opinion was this game was very interesting and different, and we rated it at a medium/medium heavy type game, though I suspect, this game will be put in the heavy category next time we play it witht he correct rules.
Rating: This one was slippery enough where we definitely want to try it again, but wasn’t sure exactly where it fits in the ole 1-10 spectrum.
]]>John and I got some games in with the new card set, Dissension. It’s fairly interesting. Both of us are fairly blown away with this current cycle of cards (Rav,Pact,Diss) Most of the cards are fairly interesting, yet deep, yet powerful. Lot of fun really. If I was a couple of years younger, and had a more money, and wasn’t already addicted to World of Warcraft… I might be persuaded to play seriously again.
Anyway… I finally got a chance to play a game of Railroad Tycoon, the board game. Let’s just say… the game is freeking humongous. Bigger board than WoW:TBG by another 50 percent. It comes with all these little cool track hexes and little trains. Anyway… we got a 5 player game going. The rules are very simple. Only took me 15 mins or so to explain everything. Strategy was harder. I made sure to read the little strategy blurb in the manual to everyone before continuing.
So I go on to try to do exactly what the manual tells me to watch out for… dominating the northeast. I go into some serious early game debt trying to fight for it, leading me to be the first to get to 5 shares, and end up unable to ship anything for several turns. Then suddenly, I upgrade my engine to level 3, then level 4, and start chewin it up… leaving everyone else in the dust.
I end up taking by far the most shares… (13) by the end of the game, with the next being like 5 shares, and then the lowest being 2 shares. A lot of players were very conservative, making 2-4 link deliveries, where as I went straight for 5 to 7 link deliveries between the northwest. It looked like I had a huge commanding lead, but in the end, after we tabulated the points… I was ahead by 8 points, 5 of which were gimmee points that were given to me because I got lucky with a railroad operation card that came up.
All in all, I think everyone had fun. Most people put it in the light heavy kind of category (both in weight and time investment), but the rules weren’t nearly as stupid as wowtbg was. I’m hoping I get more people to play. I’m hoping other people pipe in and give me their input.
]]>San Marco is moderately interesting and pretty fast — it’s what you would call a Solomon choice game. One player divides things into piles, and they the other players get first choice. Piles have good things in bad things, so the game takes some familiarity to make good decisions.
Caylus is as Caylus does. Having played it several times now, and having watched it a bunch, I am starting to think the game doesn’t live up to the hype. The more players you add, the more instability there is the game, reducing the minimal strategy to begin with (but still keeping the huge tactical component). I am going to say the big problem with the game is the setup and bookkeeping — there is way too much going on, and it’s easy to goof something up.
Right now, I think the best way to play Caylus is 2-player, and on BSW online. BSW has a huge negative in that you don’t get to do a takeback, but it has the huge positive of being 100% accurate on the bookkeeping, which lets you concentrate more on the game.
]]>We finally got in our game of Caylus. Kat and Chris duked it out for first, with Kat winning. Five player is harsh, especially if you are the last to go first round. In a very weird coincidence, we all placed in initial turn order, with about 5-10 points between each player.
We snuck in a game of Titan: the Arena with a new player, Ken, squeaking in a tie-break win (without a secret bet).
Then we busted out Amun-Re, with me sitting out to be game adjutator. It was the first time for the majority of players, and they were getting the basics down. Kat realized being pharoah was good, and slapped everyone around, but, iirc, Chris got in the win based on Temple points.
What is a game day without a quick Apples to Apples game, that Chris was able to get to 5 points first. This had the notable play of Barney beating out Romeo & Juliet in the category Melodramatic… never try to outsmart the mother of a two-year old!
We ended the game with seven player Shadows over Camelot, with good King Brian as our leader. We more or less kicked ass at the start, winning the Grail in record time, and piling on Excalibur for an easy win. Chris decided to reveal himself (through a special card) as the traitor and taunted us mercilessly. We came close to defeat by Seige Engines a couple of times, but were basically able to stem the tide until we had lost enough quests to get 12 swords total on the board for a lose-to-win win.
]]>Alhambra (Tim for the sneaky wall-win)
Antike (Kat for the sneaky oh, I don’t attack people win),
BANG! (Brian the Sherrif guns down Quyen the Renegade for the sneaky win)
Shadows over Camelot (players sneak in a win with no traitor)
Ticket to Ride (Kat for the sneaky Euro-express win)
Citadels (Brian with a sneaky sneak win)
Apples to Apples 3 games!!! (Quyen for 2 sneaky wins, and Brian sneaking away the 3rd game from Quyen)
Shadows of Camelot round 2 (King Arthur (aka Quyen) sneaks a win by tricking his loyal knights into making false accusations).
A fun time was had by all and we are looking to try and do another game day before KublaCon. You may have noticed that we got in zero games of Caylus, so it must have been Quyen’s fault…
]]>
It’s here — I was able to find an online store in the good ol’ US of A and snag their last copy. Hopefully we will be playing it this weekend (along with Caylus)
]]>I picked up the Scandanavian version fo Lost Cities because the English version is out of print. The Scandinavian verison is basically the same game, cept the rule book is in Scandinavian. But since the rules are available online in English, might as well save a couple of bucks.
Lost Cities is kind of a rummy game for two players. In essence, there are 5 locations to play cards at, and all the cards are numbered from 2-10, and correspond to the locations (just think of the locations as suits). There are also 3 “investment” cards per suit. You take turns either adding a card to a location (and the only rule is that you must play cards in ascending order and investment cards are treated as 0’s) or removing the top card from a location. Then you draw a card either from the draw pile or the discards.
So if I’m playing in the desert, and i already have a 3 down in that location, then I can only play a 4 or higher.
The round ends when the last card from the deck is drawn. You take the sum of the cards at a location (unless you have nothing at that location), then subtract 20, then you multiply by the number of investment cards +1. It’s a very simple and lightweight game, but there is enough strategy to make it not feel like you’re playing war. Great buy for <15 bucks. I haven't gotten a chance to play Caylus yet, but I have to say, the production value of this game are amazing. The board is well designed, with very easy to read tooltips for all the areas of the board, the tiles are beautiful, with a very cool multi language background with the name of the tile, and all the wooden bits are very distinguishable and easy to see. The money that comes with the second edition is the same type of money that you get from Puerto Rico, a huge improvement to the little plastic bits that came with the first edition. I'll try to post up a report of Caylus fairly soon.
]]>Products
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1 x Ticket To Ride Europe (DOW 7202) = $25.97
1 x Railroad Tycoon (EGL 070) = $40.19
1 x Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation: Deluxe Edition (FFG LTR-08) = $29.96
1 x Traders of Genoa, The (RGG 181) = $25.97
1 x Samurai (Reiner Knizia) (RGG 116) = $25.97
1 x Alhambra (RGG 040) = $22.72
1 x Citadels (FFG MA-04) = $12.97
1 x Deluxe Illuminati (SJG 1305) = $22.72
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and
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Order Summary:
============================
Order Placed: Mar 23, 2006 12:40 PM
Qty. Item name Each Total
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1 Lost Cities $13.50 $13.50
1 Caylus $39.95 $39.95
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SUBTOTAL $53.45
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SHIPPING $10.27
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ORDER TOTAL $63.72
I went to funagain even though they were more expensive because they had copies of Lost Cities and Caylus.
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