Thursday 31 March 2011

Top Five for Next Term (b)

This being five new games that seem to have appeared in the vicinity of the GNN clubhouse, but have yet to be played . . .

1. Tigris and Euphrates
A venerable classic, I've long wanted to play this, and news that Sam has procured a copy means that I may soon get to do just that. I hear it's a game that you need to play a fair bit to make the most of; Ryan Sturm has done one of his excellent How to Play podcasts about it.


2. Tinners' Trail
Copper and Tin mining in cornwall; adits, steam pumps and cornish pasties, for heaven's sake! This, I think, is a good way to break Sam into the Brass experience. It plays in a little over an hour, and has a far simpler set of rules than its big brother, but has all of Mr Wallace's love of industrial history and economics. And wooden cubes. I'll read you all the last page of the rules before we play this; it explains how Martin Wallace came up with the idea, and where he got some of the mechanics. It's very funny, and provides a good intro to what looks to me like a bit of a winner. We shall see . . .


3. Hansa Teutonica
I'm not totally sure about this — have heard lots of good things — plays fast (60mins), lots of strategies etc etc, but I've had a few learning games on my own, and it's almost like there's too many possibilities. But we'll only know for sure when we all play it.


4. Glory to Rome
Technically Adam and I have played this already, at Stabcon. But speaking personally, that game sort of happened to me. SO I'm counting this as unplayed. It is apparently very good once you get past the bad Powerpoint presentation artwork. And won't take all night.


5. High Frontier
This is rocket science. Literally. A rulebook that reads like a manual for a particularly complicated printer, and a beautiful but faintly terrifying board. Not sure this has 'tuesday night' written all over it, more like saturday night and on into sunday. But who knows. I'll keep reading the rules on this, and only unleash it when I feel sure I know what's going on.

Top Five for Next Term (a)

First, five games we've all (mostly) played that I'd like to have another crack at — under-appreciated gems, perhaps? This doesn't preclude the fact that I also want to play some/all of the games we've mentioned as stand-outs of the last term — that goes without saying. These are games I can't quite give up the ghost on . . .

1. Endeavor
Doesn't get a HUGE amount of love, poor old Endeavor, but I like it. It has some screwage, but not so much that it's unpleasant. And it has a map. I could probably sell it a bit harder, but you know . . .

2. Cosmic Encounter
We gave this a shot one evening, played a couple of games, but didn't get as far as adding in all the crazy cards. It may not be a real tuesday night-er, more of a saturday night wind-up or wind-down game. Dunno. But it gets a lot of love on the geek. And a lot of hate.

3. Thunderstone
You knew this was coming, right? I just can't bring myself to give up on it. But maybe I'll just hold on until my girls and nephews are a bit older, and force them to play it.

4. Chicago Express
I never win this, and I don't understand it. And yet I'd be up for a few more goes of it. It may be little clinical, to pure an economic game. But it plays nice and quickly. Hmm, I'm talking myself out of this one.

5. De Vulgari Eloquentia
All I'm saying is don't rule it out. It's getting more and more positive feedback on the geek.
And there are games for all occasions — so when the occasion calls for a long, rambling wander round medieval Italy, muttering "Think I might go for Pope, what do you reckon?", this is the game.

Wednesday 30 March 2011

(My) Best of the Bunch

Going through the labels below I see we've played twenty plus games in the relatively short time we've been doing the blog. In the interests of not doing any work I thought I'd jot down my current favourites and see if anyone agrees. Here's my top five:

1. Stone Age
2. Ticket to Ride
3. Colosseum
4. Genoa
5. Seven Wonders

This isn't a desert island top five but one based on what I'd like to play next Tuesday, given the chance.










Stone Age
seems to be a hit with all of us and the reasons are simple - it's a less mind-melding Agricola with an element of chance thrown in, though not so much that you feel a slave to the dice. It's a nice board, a good length, a good mixture of pursuing your own plans and screwing up everyone else's.











Ticket to Ride
I've only played the once but I really enjoyed it. Again an element of chance - with the cards - but mainly strategy based, and what little boy doesn't enjoy playing trains, even
if the trains in question are 2cm long plastic ones.











Colosseum
has been a fave since I first played it, it's a game the completist in me would really like to buy - even though, as I was told at Area 51, Joe's got it - just so I can see it on the shelf, unplayed and box-fresh for all time. I really respect how they built a great game mechanic out
of the idea of putting on a show.











Genoa
I think is only really popular with me but I think we should give it another shot - now we're all (ok, most of us) familiar with the rules I think we could knock a good 45 minutes off
the lengthy play-time. I like it because it feels like a completely different mechanic to anything else and gameplay has an emphasis on trading, which is unusual. Joe felt there was too much interaction for him, but with the game played in two-thirds the time it took last time this might feel different.











Seven Wonders
is great because though it feels like a BIG game - a small big game, perhaps - you can just pretty much pick it up and go, and once it's started it moves quickly. And when
it's not moving quickly you can do the patented whacking-cards-on-the-table manoeuvre that hopefully no-one outside the games community will ever see us doing.

So that's mine. I should mention though I'm yet to play the famous/infamous Brass and I also missed out on St Petersburg and Steam. For some reason I'm often absent when the trains come out... one game I could happily not play again is Medici, really liked it at first but now feels very one-note to me. Maybe it's time for a maths trade...

Tuesday 29 March 2011

End of term report

A series of potential absentees on Tuesday meant that the last evening of this three-month season was brought forward to Monday. This meant that, although Quentin still could not make it, Hannah was able to attend. So it was me (Andrew), Sam, Joe, Adam and Hannah. At stake in this final evening was Andrew’s attempt at overtaking Joe on points scored, and Sam trying to overtake Quentin on points ratio.

We began with a new game, Blockers. This strategy game of placing squares in a grid was new to most of us, but simple enough that inexperience wasn’t an issue. It was accompanied by a lot of humming as people considered each move, and the final scores put Adam and Hannah joint first, since Joe forgot the tie breaker rule until later in the evening.

Hannah 4
Adam 4
Joe 5
Sam 5
Andrew 7

This was followed by Ticket To Ride. It’s simple, yet tense and with the option to be evil. Despite its popularity, this game is not played very often because Adam is worried that if he brings it, Hannah will complain that he’s practising without her. Joe put on some music which was more suited to trains, although it seems his idea of a train is one that derails and crashes down a hillside in a be-bop jazz style, causing distress to any witnesses.

Joe and Adam began by hoarding cards which made me panic and start building my longest route almost immediately. By the end, I was quite proud that my route from Brest to Sevastopol was the shortest possible. Halfway through, Hannah chose to pick up more short routes, but accidentally replaced all except one she had already completed meaning any chance to score big points had gone begging. Sam – the only newbie to the game today – quickly targeted the longest route with a long looping track that took in most of the eastern Mediterranean. In the end Adam won, with the rest of the rabble following behind.

Adam 127
Sam 119
Andrew 113
Joe 112
Hannah 106

Just to finish the evening, Blockers was brought out again. I wasn’t keen, but was outvoted. As it turns out, they did me a favour as I clocked up a win, thanks to Joe remembering the tie-breaker rule (marked with an asterisk).

Andrew 5*
Joe 5
Hannah 6
Sam 7*
Adam 7

And so we come to the end of the season leader board.

Thanks to two victories, Adam was able to extend his lead over all rivals in both points scored and points ratio. So he takes all the plaudits as undisputed champ of this trimester.

Regarding second place: Andrew ended one solitary point behind Joe in terms of points scored, giving second place to one of the best new illustrators in Britain. Meanwhile, Sam took full advantage of Quentin’s absence to increase his points ratio to take back second. But no one was expecting Hannah to suddenly steal up from behind and nab third from Quentin: the man who gave us this scoring system in the first place!

An extra light-hearted addition for the end of term is the absolute score. This was created by simply adding up the scores of the games (whenever mentioned in full, reversing the scores in games where scoring less wins). Obviously it's not to be taken too seriously since winning at Blockers gets you 7 points, whereas winning at Genoa gets you 700+.

Adam came fourth in this category, which is interesting since it shows he only wins low-scoring games. Meanwhile, I romp home in first thanks to me not having anything better to do with my Tuesday evenings. Hurrah!

And if there’s an absolute score, there has to be an absolute ratio. Right? Right! And it’s Sam who takes first place in this average-most-points-scored-per-game, with Joe in second.

But everyone’s a winner, babe, and that’s the truth!

The leaderboard...

PlayedPointsRatioAbsoluteAbs. Ratio
Adam1890.55.031,35375.17
Joe208041,89394.65
Andrew22793.592,06593.86
Sam17714.182,010
118.2
Quentin1041.54.1534234.2
Hannah6254.1725542.5
Jonny122NANA

Tuesday 22 March 2011

The Joe Must Go On

Despite adult Joe being away this week, a second Joe stepped in to monopolise the evening. Poorly Baby Joe's crying repeatedly interrupted Sam's game until he gave up on trying to get him to sleep and brought him down to the kitchen. It seems that watching four middle-aged men playing a board game is quite soporific for small babies, and after ten minutes or so (maybe a bit longer) Sam managed to get him back to bed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Without Joe, we were four in number: Sam, Quentin, Adam and myself. We chose Stone Age again – very much the jeu de jour – since Sam had gone crazy in a games shop that day and bought it along with Tigres and Euphrates.

Quentin hadn't played Stone Age before, so he was given a quick course on the rules. I started building huts, Quentin and Sam got into the love-making business (not with each other) to gain more meeples while Adam played a quiet game. He was the last the register any points on the board, and at one point we joked that he'd be lapped if he wasn't careful. But this is Adam we're talking about. He had carefully been picking off the civilisation cards while everyone else scrabbled after multipliers.

Despite his uncanny knack of rolling fifteens, Quentin seemed convinced for most of the game that I was winning, but as a newcomer he was unaware of how deceptive appearances can be. I may have had plenty of huts and multipliers, but little else. He swept into a first place thanks to a large family and, if I remember right, some farms along with the relevant multipliers. Adam's big reveal of a hand full of civilisations was dramatic but not enough to close the gap on the leading two. Sam's duties as a father had had a knock-on effect as he ended the evening in last place.

Quentin 170
Andrew 160
Adam 152
Sam 124

Meanwhile, only one week after I said not much was going to change on the Leaderboard, I'm now within one point of Joe, and Quentin's points ratio has overtaken Sam's, putting him in second.

The leaderboard...

PlayedPointsRatio
Adam15755
Joe1766.53.91
Andrew1965.53.45
Sam1457.54.11
Quentin1041.54.15
Hannah311.53.8
Jonny122

Friday 18 March 2011

One Million Years BC (before Caylus)

For the second week in a row, we had double games. And just like last thursday, we played Stone Age, the new old favourite. Sam, Andrew and Joe jumped straight in to a first game, while waiting for Adam. Andrew replicated the strategy that won him the game last week, namely collecting the civ cards. This time Sam and Joe were on the case though, both collecting multipliers like crazy. Actually I was collecting multipliers like crazy, Sam was equally focussed on getting points on the board in the form of huts. It was tense, in a good way. There's some evil satisfaction in whipping cards from under the other players noses, but it's not out and out confrontational. Who knew cavemen were so passive-aggressive? In the end though, my multipliers paid off — final scores were:

Joe 196
Sam 171
Andrew 148

Adam had joined us about halfway through the game, and absorbed the rules, so we reset the board and bits and jumped straight back in for a first go at four player.

This made for a shorter game, as we all four concentrated for the most part on two of the stacks of huts. Little Joe woke up as the game was drawing to a close, and needed settling, so we played Sam's last go for him, letting him take the last hut in a stack and so ending the game.

I had gone for multipliers again, with a 4 x people multiplier, but even with 9 people I couldn't get out of last place. Still, it was fairly close, only 16 points between first and fourth places.

Andrew 115
Adam 105
Sam 101
Joe 99

Stone Age is fast becoming a favourite for Sam, Andrew and me (Adam may be a little ambivalent, but he's only played once). I like the combination of points on the board and collected cards being hidden — and the dice rolling adds just enough luck to keep things interesting. There's a Poker-like satisfaction to plonking down a handful of cavemen on a particular spot — cue Andrew's Bond villain playing euro-games impression — and for all of us there were moments when we pushed our luck and it paid off, which is immensely satisfying.

It's a friendly game, it doesn't hate you; nowhere is this more apparent than on the civ cards that give something to everyone — and these in fact provide an interesting extra layer of strategy. It's possible to incorporate the surprise resource you'll get from these cards into your plans for a turn, but you'll have to calculate at what point the player of that card will action it, which makes for some tense moments. Again! Again!

The leaderboard...

PlayedPointsRatio
Adam1471.55.1
Joe1766.53.91
Andrew18613.38
Sam13554.23
Quentin9364
Hannah311.53.8
Jonny122

Wednesday 16 March 2011

Four time's a charm

This week saw a rare five-way battle between regulars Joe, Quentin, Adam, Sam and myself, Andrew. And giddy with excitement at such esteemed companionship, we ploughed through four games in one evening.

Joe was a late-comer, so the evening began with a gentle Roll Through The Ages between the other four players. At least it was gentle until wave upon wave of pestilence swept across the kitchen table causing untold grief to everyone except Sam, who’d invented medicine. This evening saw a new side to Quentin that we’d previously not seen, as a remarkable series of freakish rolls of the dice meant he got no people at all until around the fifth round, with each failed roll or inadvertent disaster greeted with a slew of profanities. But in the end, it was Sam’s disease-free civilisation that won the day, comfortably beating Adam, Andrew and Quentin (in that order), who all struggled to get out of single figures.

Joe arrived mid-Stone Age, and so the first leaderboard-centred game was chosen: Seven Wonders. It was the first time in a while that we’d played this, and we had difficulty remembering a few of the finer points regarding strategy. There seemed to be a general lack of resources around the board, such that Adam and I both had a healthy stockpile of cash by the end. By the end of the game, a quick glance at the table left us baffled as to who had won and it was only after a tense round of totting up the scores that the truth was known:

Adam: 58
Andrew: 52
Joe: 49
Sam: 48
Quentin: 44

The night was still young, so a further game was suggested. No Thanks was chosen, and it was decided that this would also go on the leaderboard. Once again, my tactic of picking up low cards was mocked as never having got me a win, but frankly I didn’t get much of a chance as I ended up picking up middling cards, with little chance of linking them up. Sam’s run of five high cards was very tidy but it was cautious Adam who picked up his second win of the evening.

Adam: 15
Sam: 17
Quentin: 27
Joe: 35
Andrew: 43

At 10.20pm, blood was coursing through our veins and we weren’t about to meekly go to bed, so a fourth game was chosen. This time we decided to keep this off the leaderboard, and it was another bidding game: For Sale. It started well for Quentin who picked up the 30 point card for only $3000. But the bidding-for-properties part is only the first half of the game: it’s how you use those points that’s important. In the bidding-for-money part, in the first round I fluked a $15,000 bill for a bid of only 13 points! After that head start, sensible play was all I needed to ensure a comfortable first place to end the evening. Points (in thousands of dollars) were: Andrew 58; Quentin 55; Sam 49; Adam 45; Joe 41.

After such a concentrated session of gaming, Quentin could only rue the damage done to his points ratio, but Adam was more chipper after last Tuesday’s last place.

The leaderboard...

PlayedPointsRatio
Adam13675.15
Joe15593.93
Andrew1652.53.28
Sam1147.54.31
Quentin9364
Hannah311.53.8
Jonny122

Friday 11 March 2011

Queens of the Stone Age

A rare Thursday night meeting was hastily arranged, and three regulars (Sam, Joe and myself, Andrew) congregated around Joe’s wobbly kitchen table for some extra-curricular leaderboard action.

After the lengthy Genoa, our tastes were drawn towards games at the shorter and simpler end of the spectrum, and so we began with Animal Upon Animal. A kids game which involves stacking up animal shaped blocks of wood according to the roll of a dice. The first to stack all their animals wins. Joe took first place easily, having previously honed his skills against his young children.

Then came the main game of the evening – Stone Age. Although it was new to both Sam and I, the rules were simple enough that they could be picked up after just a few minutes of discussion. And so it was that the three players set off into prehistoric times, commanding their tribes to build huts, collect food and somehow get gold from a river using axes.

With a similar worker-placing mechanism to Agricola or Caylus, but with fewer convoluted options, the pace was brisk. This was the first game I’d played in a long time that used a set of dice as an integral part of the game (apart from Perudo) and it seemed quite fresh and exciting to have your decisions rely on chance, instead of it relying on the deliberate choices of your opponents who are all out to get you. As the last round arrived, we found ourselves weighing up probabilities of one option succeeding over another.

During the game, Sam made the early running but as it turned out, Sam’s collection of single multipliers didn’t help his cause, despite plenty of huts. Joe had a large family that totted up some points, but it was my canny combination of an axe x4 multiplier with a range of civilisations that put me in first place.

Andrew: 125
Sam: 118
Joe: 112

The general consensus was Stone Age is a fun strategy game and what a relief it was to play a game that offered enough options to allow a range of tactics, but not so many that you’re confused by the sheer number of choices.

Then, just to wind down while me and Joe finished our drinks, a game of For Sale was brought out. Short and sweet, the bids flew back and forth. As the dust settled, the money was counted and the results (in thousands) were: Andrew: 68, Joe: 62, Sam: 52

A rare double-header for me. Pity that only one counted on the board, but hey ho.

The leaderboard...

PlayedPointsRatio
Adam11555
Joe13524
Andrew1445.53.25
Sam939.54.38
Quentin7304.28
Hannah311.53.8
Jonny122

Wednesday 9 March 2011

Genoa? Of course I know her! She’s my wife!

The usual quartet were gathered at Sam’s tonight, and the newly-bought Genoa was chosen as the evening’s distraction from Arsenal losing to Barcelona. Andrew was given a quick run through of the rules, while the other three refreshed their memory from their encounter with the game at Stabcon.

The game involves trading commodities, sending messages, auctioning actions and completing deliveries in a nicely designed Italian Renaissance town (probably Genoa, now I think about it). On the plus side, there was a lot of interaction and discussion with each go. On the down side, the game dragged on a bit. Perhaps we discussed too much.

Also, I wasn’t sure what to do if none of the options seemed appealing – sit tight and do nothing or go for something and try and increase its price, but run the risk of having to buy it. Or perhaps not having to buy it. I was never quite sure when you could back out of a deal.

Play started timidly, with few indications of what was the best tactic to employ. Joe went for getting plenty of villas, Adam specialised in making multiple deliveries in one move, I picked up easy points on delivering messages but made very few big deliveries and Sam fretted over how badly he was doing.

As the evening progressed, we were starting to over-run the game’s suggested 2 hour playing time and with no one bringing any crisps or snacks, people started to flag. Finally, Adam ended the game abruptly on his go by simply making one last delivery and refusing to move his piece again. Totals were totted up and the final score came to:

Joe: 775, Andrew: 765, Sam: 725, Adam: 625.

While it was quite nice to have something meaty on the table for all of us to get our teeth into (metaphorically speaking) it was quite long. Three hours plus is a lot to ask of anyone when the box promises two hours maximum. Although that probably doesn't take into account toilet breaks and Sam's poorly baby. Meanwhile, there's little movement on the Leaderboard, with Joe whittling away at Adam's lead and I struggle to get my points ratio higher than Hannah's.

The leaderboard...

PlayedPointsRatio
Adam11555
Joe12494.08
Andrew1341.53.19
Sam835.54.44
Quentin7304.28
Hannah311.53.8
Johnny122

Wednesday 2 March 2011

Jury out on Thunderstone

Last night saw Quentin, Adam, Andrew, Joe and me (Sam) sat around the table for the second five-player games night in a row, a welcome return to bums-on-seats after a quiet February for the Tuesday night club. After a brief debate over which game to play - I had seductively popped out Genoa's cardboard thingies onto the table, to no avail - we elected to go with one of Joe's recent purchases, Thunderstone.

After Small World, which no-one really liked that much, this was only our second tentative foray into the fantasy themes that Quent loves and that make Adam nervous. Generally I'm a bit reluctant about fantasy themes too, though really there's no need to be as once the game starts it's all a bit abstract anyway. And unbeknownst to all I have been wearing my invisible chain mail armour with +2 hit points for many Tuesdays now.

So we cracked on with Thunderstone, where we take on the role of heroes setting out to slay dungeon monsters. Very similar to Dominion in it's mechanics, the game is about building up your hand of cards to give you a strong attacking capability, but at the same time not forgetting to actually use that capability and slay as many monsters as possible, as the player who achieves most kills - bearing in mind some kills are worth more than others - is the winner. The catch - as with Dominion - is that the cards that win you the game are the cards that clutter up your hand during it.

I was caught out by the first game; it suddenly ended while I was still intent on building a decent hand, when Quentin romped home to an easy victory with 21 points, Joe in second with 16, and Adam, me, then Andrew in distant 3rd/4th/5th placings:.

Quent: 21
Joe: 16
Adam: 9
Sam 8
Andrew: 6

Quent loved it; the rest of us newbies (Joe had played before) were less convinced, but as it was on the table we played again anyway and this time it was a tighter affair as everyone got to grips with their strategies. As we were playing a couple of house-rules we had a protracted finish to the game as everyone struggled to kill off the last monster - a frustrating but perversely entertaining variant, I thought - and it was Adam who shuffled his hand into the right combination to take down the Sleeping Lurk, or whatever it was. Adam then proved his capacity for heroism was matched by his potential for evil as he encouraged me to think I'd won, actually getting me to recount my cards before announcing he'd beaten me anyway. Shame on you, Hillmann!

Adam: 27
Sam 24
Quent: 17
Joe: 16
Andrew: 14

Quent, who'd initially said Thunderstone ticked all his boxes, was a little disappointed by the second game, whereas I grew to like it a little more. Can it be as simple as our final placings? Are we that shallow? Probably, although to be honest though I liked it more than Dominion it's still a bit heads-down, waiting for your turn, and as your turn is sometimes an exercise in frustration I'm not in a massive rush to play it again. However, in fairness Joe said there were some variants that brought some (nasty) player interaction to the fore, so I'm sure it will pop up on the table at some point.

Leaderboard: No-one dominated the points scoring though Quent and Adam will be happiest with their night's work.

The leaderboard...

PlayedPointsRatio
Adam1052.55.25
Joe1143.53.95
Andrew12373.08
Sam7324.57
Quentin7304.28
Hannah311.53.8
Jonny122