Saturday 10 November 2012

Bright Lights, String Theory

Last night Sally and I entertained Katie and Mark, gamers in every sense bar the enormous collection, card-sniffing habit etc. On a recommendation from Joe we'd bought Mark Vegas for his belated birthday present, so after a hefty helping of cheese we cracked it open and dived straight in.

It's a very simple game of allotting your dice to different casinos and collecting cash when they pay out (when everyone is out of dice). The numbers on your dice are irrelevant; it's about how many dice you have in each casino... the catch being that if more than one player has the same amount of dice in the same casino, they are all rendered null and void.

the fun never stops

In the end it Katie "the chiseller" Daniels who took first place, with some canny die-play that picked up a lot of $60 and $50k cards while the rest of us fought over the odd $90k:

Katie $480k
Mark $430k
Sam  $390k
Sally $340k

With the night still young and lactose surging through our veins, I took the plunge and broke out String Railway. Like Vegas it's very simple, but the friendly feel of round one was clouded by growing analysis paralysis over subsequent rounds as the 'board' became more and more crowded. We didn't help ourselves by playing one more round than the game recommends for four, but anyway... I was barricaded in by the river and spent the first four rounds fretting, but my final play into the mountains finally got me a decent score and I leapfrogged Katie into third place...

the fun stops

Mark 25
Sally 24
Sam  22
Katie 20

The tactical challenge exhausted everyone, but I managed to convince Mark into a game of Monza to finish off - it's a very simple racing game, a little like Ave Caesar but with almost zero strategy. Basically you can move your racing car according to the colours on the dice you roll, so though it says ages 5-99 on the box, I somehow can't picture Wallace sitting at home exclaiming "Hey! Who fancies a game of Monza?" We won one race each, then in the decider Mark found himself stuck on the second corner, rolling a series of useless dice as I skidded to an unlikely victory.

Monza!

We decided to start a little KMSS leaderboard and see who was doing best between the four of us, so here it is, based on our games from last night (ignoring Monza), and previous games nights in August and April. As you can see, Mark is the man to beat, heading the form table by some distance.

KMSS




Points
Mark
12115
Katie
413210
Sally
241411
Sam
332311








I do feel a bit ropey today though. Too much cheese.

2 comments:

  1. Ah lovely, more news - well done Sam!
    Vegas is a very good social game; you can talk around it, a bit like Pickomino or coloretto.
    As we've subsequently discussed though, you had a rule wrong - the numbers on the dice are relevant - they must go in the casino of their number, which adds a further restriction.
    Interesting variant though, the way you were playing it - now I'm even wondering if we had the rules right, but I think we must have, otherwise there's no reason for the casinos to be numbered 1 to 6...
    String Railways is almost too heavy for a social occasion, despite its light appearance - as you mention, the AP in later rounds can bog down proceedings. I guess that's due to its non-discreet nature, something you rarely get in games in fact.
    I want to play both again!

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  2. Yes I was erroneously concluding that the dice in the casinos were just for thematic decor. That makes sense... good game either way though!

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