Welsh Rare Bits

For the first week of the Easter holidays, Charlotte, the girls and I went to Wales with old friends Rachel and Henry and their three daughters. Both R and H are keen gamers, and Charlotte will happily play a game in the evening, so while I was sure that Henry and I would find lots to get stuck into between days on the beach, long walks and cooking, I was interested to see which games would be hits and misses for the four of us.

We took a bevvy of two-player games, including Hansa, Manoeuvre, Commands and Colours: Ancients, and the big daddy, Twilight Struggle. The first game Henry and I broke out on arriving at the cottage near Pembroke was Manoeuvre. It's a game of Napoleonic-era battles, players assuming control of one of eight available armies, ranging from French, English, Ottoman all the way to the United States. Each army has eight units to go on the board, typically 6 infantry and 2 cavalry units, and a dedicated deck of small cards with which to battle and issue orders. The gameplay is simple; discard and draw cards, move one unit, attack with one unit.

A total rout by the French. Marvellous.

The typical attack by a single unit is very unlikely to eliminate its target, merely flip it to its weaker side, and next turn your opponent may well be able to restore it. So you really need to try and plan attacks so that you can add cards from your hand to strengthen the attack, possibly bringing in more units, leaders etc. The game plays in about 40 minutes once you know what you're doing, and is great fun. We tried out a few of the different arrmies - and each has it's innate strengths and weaknesses.

D6s, D8s and cartoon beer. Mmmm . . .

In the evenings, Charlotte and Rachel joined us. For the first couple of nights, the main event was a few rounds of Pickomino, which works brilliantly as a casual game with four - the perfect combination of push-your-luck, nicking each others tiles and not quite knowing who's winning until the final tally. It also allows for a lot of chatting in-between goes, which is certainly a plus as far as Charlotte is concerned.

Grubby dice. Unacceptable.

The first big game we all tried was Manila, which I got in the Euro Maths Trade the week before we went away. Though some of the mechanics (auction, worker-placement, a smattering of share-manipulation) are very familiar, it's nicely different from lots of the other games we play, definitely has its own niche, and plays in under an hour. It's essentially a game where you're playing the odds and betting on which boats will make it ashore and which will end up in the shipyard. It didn't quite catch fire for the four of us - though I can imagine it going down well with the GNN-ers.

We also played London, which is a favourite of Rachel and Henry's - it doesn't quite do it for me, and had a suspicion that it wouldn't be Charlotte's kind of game either, which turned out to be right. It's a game you really need to play a few times to get your head around and develop a strategy - there's simply no way a new player can hope to keep up, which can be dispiriting enough to put you off for good. I had played a couple of times with R & H before, and with Sam, enough to have a grasp of what to do, though that still put me in a distant third place. I can't quite put my finger on why it doesn't grab me; it's something to do with the complexity of the way city-size/boroughs/poverty/money formulae interact - it remains just a little too opaque for me to be enjoyable, though I can imagine getting into it as a 2 player over a few successive nights and finding it satisfying. I think it lacks the elusive 'fun' factor for me.

Another of our 2-player daytime staples was Hansa - a very stripped down Euro about trading in the Hanseatic League (not to be confused with recent GNN newbie Hansa Teutonica). In a way, it's similar to London in that the various components are symbiotically linked: money allows movement and buying of goods; goods allow placement of markets; markets allow conversion of goods into VPs, and get you more money. It's all wrapped up in a very pretty, refined package, and plays in about 20/30 mins. It can be played with four, but loses a lot of the strategy, I've heard.

Hansa by firelight.

As well as London, Henry had brought Ora et Labora with him, the latest big game by Uwe Rosenberg. Having bought it during last half-term, he and Rachel had not got round to playing it, despite a couple of attempts - on opening the box I could see why. If the number and variety of resources and playing boards weren't terrifying enough, the combined rulebooks, covering set-up, general rules, specifics and a multi-page glossary of buildings are positively fearsome. We decided not to attempt this with the women, at least not without a thorough playthrough between the two of us, and so we tackled it on a grey afternoon.
As it turns out, there was little to fear, and lots to enjoy. The rulebooks, if taken in the correct order, have you set up and playing within 20 minutes, and we found we could happily ignore at least half of them.
It is very much in the vein of Agricola, with players building up their monastery in either Ireland or France, felling forests, clearing peat bogs, brewing beer/making wine and gradually amassing victory points. It is apparently closer to Le Havre than Agricola, though graphically it definitely takes its cue from the earlier Rosenberg game. It took us a couple of hours to play, and at the end I was a little bit underwhelmed - it's very wide-open compared to Agricola, and consequently felt a bit flabby. In Agricola, you're operating at the bleeding-edge of subsistence, and every action counts. The world of O & L feels altogether more of a cornucopia, and whilst there are clearly strategic paths aplenty to amassing VPs in bulk, the fact that they are floating around from the very beginning and relatively easy to come by makes it feel less focussed. However, though we didn't manage to get it to the table again during the week, something about it has stayed with me; building your little cloister into a vast, all-encompassing monastery; brewing fine beer and distilling barrels of Irish Whisky, all wrapped-up in the cosy, inviting Agricola-esque hues. I want another go, and if any GNNers have their eye on a new game, I'll happily play it (not buying any more games, see?)

On wednesday evening, the four of us got to Lords of Vegas. I had my concerns, especially since the 'gambling' aspects of Manila had been a bit of a damp squib, and I couldn't remember quite how straightforward the mechanics of LoV were. As it turned out, it was a perfect fit - tense, exciting reversals-of-fortune, enthusiastic dice-rolling and a close finish with Rachel (I think) eeking a win against Henry. Henry particularly took to the risk-reward spirit of it, at one point betting $25 million on a single roll in Rachel's casino in a bid to scupper her plans. He lost.

Lords of Vegas: busy board, busy tablecloth.

We played again on thursday night, and it was even better, and closer, me edging in to first place on the final strip pay-out by virtue of my newly-acquired four tile casino. It was more coherent than when we played it at GNN, and I think we should give it another go. There are subtle strategies for staying in the game in the face of what seems like a runaway leader, which may have eluded us on the two outings we've given it.
On Friday night, we played Catan for old times sake, and R & H cleaned up, Rachel eventually squeaking the win from Henry, Charlotte and I languishing 3rd and fourth.

Ah, the familiar coastline of Catan. With an off-shore stockpile of cities.

Back on the two-player front, Henry and I had dabbled in a bit of Commands and Colours: Ancients, which felt a wee bit fiddly compared with the ultra-streamlined Manoeuvre, though with a more epic, majestic sweep, and probably a bit more depth. We'd also played a few games of Igloo Pop with the older daughters, and they played a few games of Alhambra and Mr Jack amongst themselves. We also played 6 player Shadow Hunters, though that was a bit unsatisfying - four of the six players won . . .

And in amongst it all, Henry and I found time to take on not one, not two, but three games of Twilight Struggle. We got to it a couple of days in to the holiday; Henry had hankering for a game since their last visit to us in September 2011, when I had just received it in a Maths Trade (we took one look at the rules back then and put it away). Since then I've only played it twice, so we were both eager to explore its intricacies.

In actual fact, we found it to be nowhere near as daunting as its reputation might suggest, especially since, on advice gleaned from Ryan Sturm's most recent How to Play, we all but ignored realignment rolls, further streamlining the learning curve. It is an awesome game, and we found that the game lasted longer, getting to later rounds without an outright winner, the more familiar we got with the cards and strategies. That said, Russia won all three games, though Henry, determined to break the Soviet stranglehold, put up a valiant fight in the last game (and enjoyed getting to prod me in the chest as he played the Kitchen Debates). And it's not stupidly long - all three of our games lasted between two and a half and three hours; though none lasted beyond turn six - an epic struggle that went the full ten rounds could last four, even five hours. In that sense it bucks the general trend, in that the better both players know the game, the longer it will take.

All in all an awesome week of gaming, perfectly intertwined with a very lovely week away, thanks to Henry and Rachel and their delightful girls. Roll on the new season of GNN, my loins are girded!
JB