Like stumbling upon a idyllic glade with an ice cream van in it after several days hacking through the jungle, three gamers found the beautiful vista of an empty table before them on a Wednesday evening. What to play? We decided upon UR, the civilisation-development game of ancient Mesopotamia. This has been sitting in my cupboard for about a year now, biding it's time, waiting for us to declare it one of the great underrated gems of gaming.
However it's wait may go on a little, as the jury is currently out.
It's a game of contrasts. The rules are brief, yes, but they are badly written and fail to make clear at least two aspects of the game that we had to decide on ourselves. The game is - relatively - brief too, but it contains plentiful opportunities for AP. And the mechanics are actually very good - but they lie beneath a theme so flimsy that you can see the cogs turning beneath it. The rules may say you're developing politics or culture but when the upshot of it is moving the same cubes around the board as when you develop agriculture or go to war, what tends to happen is Adam says "I'll do purple" and Andrew says "I'll do green".
The board is made up of 6x6 tiles that you deal out randomly. The tiles are double-sided and each side contains an 'action'. You also have a tile in your hand, and on your turn you can either 'action' both sides of your tile, or just one of them (and add a cube to your presence on the board) or neither (and add two cubes to your presence on the board, or occupy a new tile with one cube). These actions are the four mentioned above, plus politics. All of them amount to cube movement. A final option is sacrificing both actions to build a 'ziggurat' on a tile you occupy, which guarantees you the tile it sits on and gets you points at the game's end.
After your turn you swap your tile with any unoccupied tile on the board, and someone else says "I'll do blue". And when the game ends you score the tiles you own: like the monuments in Ra, you score sets; and the ziggurats can either function as jokers or sneakily allow you to claim a set of six, even though there are only five colours.
After a first play we very much stroking our chins, and still coming to terms with all the ins and outs of the strategy:
Sam 28
Adam 24
Andrew 21
So we gave it another go. This time we expanded a lot more on the board, and got our heads around the advantages of the different actions. It was hard to say who was going to win, and as we went through a slightly protracted endgame, and at one stage Andrew looked very strong, with almost half the board to himself. But he was thinly spread, so both Adam and I nabbed tiles off him; and he didn't have a war action to claim them back.
I was hopeful of a second victory, but I should have known better:
Adam 43
Sam 39
Andrew 30
We all made significant improvements in our scores from the previous game, but none more so than the Curdled Whey, who begins his march up the leaderboard.
And Ur? Well, we're still scratching our chins on that one. It really wears it's mechanics on it's sleeve, and so is perhaps a little abstract for our group. But it has some neat things about it, like the changing board of tiles, and the fact you can guess what you're opponent is planning by which tile they pick up. I can see why it gets some love on the geek. If it doesn't get repeated plays from us, I can imagine keeping it as a very good two-player.
On the Leaderboard Andrew's brief sojourn at the summit is over, though he remains camped close by. They do say the cream rises to the top, don't they? Or is that custard?
| Points | ||||||
| Adam | 1 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 9 |
| Andrew | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 11 |
| Steve | 1 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 12 |
| Sam | 2 | 1 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 14 |
| Joe | 3 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 14 |
| Hannah | 1 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 15 |
| Anja | 2 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 17 |
| Jonny | 2 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 19 |
Why did I agree to another games night? I used to be the best! The champion! Now, that's all in the past and I'm left with only my memories.
ReplyDeleteAs for Ur, good bits and bad bits. As Sam said, the theme is tacked on as an afterthought and there's nothing particularly commercial about "commerce", although war was a bit war-like. Then again, there was a fair bit of planning, and when I made a mistake I felt like it was my fault and not due to some problem with the game.
Though it was intriguing, there was something quite painful about the end of the second game. I was in pole position to build the final ziggurat, but knowing Andrew and Adam would then have a turn each to potentially attack me, I kept putting off what would trigger the game end.
ReplyDeleteAnd as the tile options closed out, none of us could pick up the ideal politics/war combo (because they were all occupied) which would have allowed you to redistribute your cubes aggressively, and take a tile from a neighbour by force.
Curdled Whey? Explanation please.....
ReplyDeleteMaybe you should colonise a (few?) politics/war tile(s) early in the game, then empty and pick up the tile the turn before you want to go on the offensive?
ReplyDeleteStraight after the game I couldn't imagine playing it again, but thinking about it now it's quite appealing. Although I think I dreamt about putting together sets of six things last night. Urrrrr...
Yes it feels more appealing to me today too. And that's an interesting thought, a more attacking strategy.
ReplyDeleteCurdled Whey... this is just one in a long line of dairy-based nicknames for Adam, after we discovered Anja has long called him 'the creeping cheese' (due to his preference for yellow meeples).
Yeah, during the game we couldn't see much benefit to occupying a blue tile, but they do get more powerful as the game goes on. Especially the politics/war tile. Those two things are always a dangerous combination.
ReplyDeleteChris: curdled whey is just one of a long series of yellow-themed nicknames for Adam that I hope we will come up with in the coming months.
(and his ability to creep past you on the scoretrack)
ReplyDeleteuncanny, Andrew. We should write a script together
ReplyDeleteI was quite happy skulking behind Andrew in second place like the sniggering right hand man of the school bully enjoying my brief moment in the not-quite-limelight. But there's a new kid in the class, and he's wearing yellow....
ReplyDeleteThat's not a new kid! That's the same kid who took my lunch money last term and spent it on space invaders (the snack).
ReplyDeleteHey! I also have a preference for the yellow meeple or counter, but this is more to do with colour sight problems more than anything else.
ReplyDeleteAlso I'm a bit poo at board games so any comparison ends there.