July 2005 Archives

Just a quick game of Africa while we waited for the blueberry pie to bake. It was over fairly swiftly; actually, it was just on time. Johanna lead throughout the game, even though I almost caught her lead. However, good camp scoring in the end really finished the game for her advantage.

I asked how she liked the game and her views coincide with mine pretty much. Africa is nothing earth-shaking, but a good, solid game. It's fun to play: turning the chits over is entertaining, while the decision-making is almost obvious - you never have to tax your brain too much while playing Africa. It's quite luck-heavy, in the end, but with the right attitude it can be a lot of fun.

I think the game might be at it's best with just two. It plays swift and is a nice little filler to pass time with. However, it sure comes in mighty large box for its weight and it can certainly be a disappointment, if one adjusts one's expectations according to the box size. Inside a big box there's pleasant little game I expect to keep in my collection for a long time.

The guys at the Marektoy were kind enough to send me a copy of the Finnish edition of Around the World in 80 Days along with the games I've translated. It wasn't on my list of games to get, but sure I'll like to have it if I get it for free...

I tried it with Johanna yesterday. She liked it, as I expected. Around the World in 80 Days meets her criteria, I think: it's fairly simple, has a good theme and a scoring system that makes sense. We had a pretty good time playing it.

However, unfortunately it's not a very good two-player game. While the rules describe the two-player setting, the game box says it's 3-6. Good move, because most of the elegance this game has simply vanishes with just two players. You just have to keep on moving swiftly, because once you fall behind, you'll probably lose.

I fell behind already in Brindisi and sure, I lost the game. Johanna made it to London in 72 days, leaving me in New York. I was few days faster than her, but in this case it didn't matter: she was first, she won.

It was pretty quick though: I didn't time the game, but it couldn't have been much more than 15 minutes. Of course, I'll play anything Johanna likes, but otherwise two-player Around the World won't be high on my list. If her friends come over and want to play something, this will be a good option, however.

I coaxed Johanna to try the Monopoly Card Game. Designed by Phil Orbanes, it's basically a Monopoly-themed Rummy game. Players try to form their 10-card hands into complete sets of colour groups and bonus cards. First player to build a ready hand scores five extra cards, but everybody counts points.

The game is very much ruled by the bonus cards. Houses (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th house, they need to be played in order) multiply the value of the colour group, hotels add 500 dollars. Player pawns are basically houses without a number: they too act as multipliers. Chance cards are wild cards, but with a penalty: get caught with a wild card in your hand and you'll score exactly zero dollars - unless you're the first player to go out. Go! cards are 200 dollars cash, Mr. Monopoly cards are 1000 dollars for the majority of them.

It's a rather complicated game, really. The only way it works is because of the Monopoly connection; everybody is immediately familiar with the setting and the card groups. In the other hand, if you don't have that experience, you're lost.

Johanna was a very good example of that: my explanation of rules pretty much expected the Monopoly experience, but Johanna has never (I repeat: never) played Monopoly - only a Finnish ripoff version which takes the board layout and buying of properties, but which has no houses.

So, no wonder she was a bit confused. She won anyway (with a bit of help in the final round). Not that we care about the result: we both agreed the game stinks, real bad. It's simply put a very boring game. Since we both like Mhing, we just see very little point in playing something like this.

In this case it's probably good the game is over as swiftly as it. Rounds can be quick, as in many cases your hand is very much complete with bonus cards, you just need to finish a colour group. Going first is a huge advantage, as you get a completed hand and five extra cards you can use if they work for you. That was particularly annoying in a two-player game.

However, while we didn't enjoy our game, for someone this'll probably be a good purchase. If you like Monopoly and want something faster, slightly different but still nothing too daring or adventurous, Monopoly Card Game might be just the game for you. It certainly has lots of the Monopoly atmosphere, even if it lacks all the real excitement. It's also pretty simple game and easy to learn, if you know how to play Monopoly.

Gamers, however, should steer clear. That's a fairly pointless warning anyway, since the name Monopoly should work as an effective serious gamer repellent. There's no reason to make an exception here, even though the game is interesting enough to try once, just to see what you can do transforming an idea to completely different format.

Moving is nasty business. While board games aren't the worst hobby to move (bibliophilia is pretty bad), it still isn't fun. I had to haul something like three-four boxes and six or so bags full of big box games. That's a lot, and it sure makes me feel like reducing the size of my collection. Then again, I've moved them now, so why bother? But perhaps more aggressive selling is necessary before the next move, and meanwhile I should probably work to keep the collection in sensible limits.

I hear Ropecon went well. Board game loaning was a big thing, with something like 300-400 loans during the weekend. Multiply that with about three players for each game and you get pretty impressive numbers!

I'm writing this on Wednesday and I don't have a clue when this'll be online. We'll have to wait until next Monday or so to get our Internet connection together, which is very annoying... Meanwhile our precious PowerBook refuses to acknowledge GPRS modem connection through my cell phone.

Guess what! My copy of Antiquity began its journey from Essen (that's where Allgames4you is located) to Tampere yesterday. I'm hoping it'll make it here during next week, but we'll see - it was sent to my old address, which I'm leaving Tuesday. I hope the redirect service won't delay it until August... I'm quite excited, I hope it's a good game!

I wrote a review of FarFalia. My session report summarised the game pretty well already, but here goes again:

FarFalia is a trick-taking game for five players. It supports two and three with dummies and four with different arrangements, but it's designed for five and shines that way.

The game features a fairly standard deck (four suits, 1-13, special cards - butterflies - on each suit as 8, 10 and 12) and even more standard card play: dealer chooses trumps or no trumps, suit must be followed and that's just about it.

However, there are few twists. Players are formed in two teams; the dealer plays alone. Teams score together. Dealer gets two extra card and gets to choose trumps, so it's not a bad position to be in the end.

Players score points by collecting sets of five cards. Every time a player wins a trick, she gets to choose a card from the trick for her team. It must be one of the five target cards chosen at the beginning of the round. Target cards have suit or a butterfly on them. Butterfly cards are like any other card, except in the scoring, where they count only as butterflies, not as their regular suit.

In the end of the round, teams score points for the amount of target cards they collect. Full set of five is worth 15 points and it goes down from there. The scoring mechanism is clever and takes some thought, especially in the beginning of rounds, when you have to assess what you are likely to get during the hand.

The game can be played in two ways. FarFalia way is to have three rounds, where the new dealer is always the player with the least points. Teams are formed by seating order. Chinkway way is to play five or ten rounds with rotating dealer so that everyone plays one round alone and four rounds partnered with everybody else. After that a final round is played where seating order is manipulated so that the top three players all have a chance to win the game (which is not possible if, say, first and second players are paired as a team).

The biggest problem I have with the game is its dependancy on card luck. If you have a bad hand, there's is little you can do. However, FarFalia is anyway probably best played on a lighter level, where card luck is not such a big problem, but more a source for table talk.

Despite my concerns, FarFalia is a good game; it's pretty simple and thus easy to teach. It might not satisfy the hardened trick-taking veterans, though the partnership structures should be interesting enough. In any case, it makes a good introductory trick-taking game - if you have exactly five players.

We had a very good game session yesterday. It started with just me and four guys, but hey, we had a blast even if noone else joined us until much later.

After clicking through an absolutely dreadful game of Crokinole with Robert, rest of the guys arrived and I got us started with Manila. It was my second game and I like it, like it a lot.

It's very lucky and some of the moves are fairly obvious, but the dice manage to make the game very exciting, as well. Once again we played with the variant to start the goods at zero space. Works well, and our game took about an hour to play, which was pretty good for something this shallow.

I started with two silk shares, which can be bad. However, for some reason silk picked up fairly well. In the end silk was the key share, thus my two shares were worth 60 points each. Add to that a 20 peso share of ginseng and 46 pesos of cash thanks to a very good last round and you get a very handsome victory (126-107-93-69-60). The guys enjoyed the game, I think, and I'll bring it next time as well, because I want to explore the game a bit more.

We then tried another stock market game. Robert had played Dividends while he was in Singapore and wasn't too interested, but I think this time it was a bit better... Dividends is a decent stock market game. It's quite chaotic (might be realistic, too, but it's certainly a brutal simplification), but supports up to 12 players. We had five, which left me wanting to try the game with, say, eight or so.

Obviously I sucked at it. Final scores ranged from 12450 (Robert) to 6200 (me); you start with 4000. Ouch. I still enjoyed it, and would certainly play it again. Currently my rating is seven, but this game does fill a niche few games reside in, so for now I'm definitely keeping it. It's a pretty rare situation, though, having eight or so players in need of a game for the whole group, so we'll see if I'll ever actually end up playing the game.

Boomtown, a game from two Brunos (Cathala and Faidutti) was up next. It's a genre I like: quick and clever auction games. Boomtown is clever, that's for sure. When someone wins an auction, he gets the first choice of cards. Everybody gets one, going around the table clockwise. The money used is goes around the table counterclockwise, every player keeps half (rounded up) and passes the remain on.

It's a neat mechanic, where everybody benefits: you usually get at least some money or a decent card. I like it. Then there's a die roll mechanism, a bit like Settlers of Catan; it can be equally aggravating, but buying the right cards helps a lot there.

All in all, I quite enjoyed Boomtown, even if it's a bit more chaotic and random than some of the other small auction games I enjoy (which tend to be generally pretty unrandom).

Next up was FarFalia, which I've had for a while now. Yesterday we finally had five people willing to play the game. It's a trick-taking game with an interesting shifting partnership system. We played using the Chinkway rules, so we had five rounds so that everyone was partnered with everybody else and played one round alone.

FarFalia is a simple trick-taking game with few twists. The goal of the game is to collect target cards of different suits (there are five cards, which can be of any suit). The teams score 3-15 points, depending on how many cards they can get. Players can choose one card of each won trick, so collecting the cards can get tricky.

However, FarFalia is a fairly simple game when it comes to strange trick-taking games. I wouldn't even call it strange. This means it's very easy to teach to anyone who knows trick-taking games and even to those who don't. In the other hand, it's perhaps a bit too simple: there are more interesting games to play.

One of the bigger problems is that FarFalia has good hands and bad hands. That's not nice, especially after playing games like Cosmic Eidex or Die Sieben Siegel, where the whole concept is alien: you just have hands that are played in different way. In FarFalia the only thing you can do if you have a bad hand is to hope your partner has a better one.

Well, skill plays some part: in our game, Robert scored on average 11.2 points on each hand, while I had just 6.4 and I wasn't even last. However, some of those low scores were clearly caused by useless cards.

Anyway, it's not a bad game, no, but perhaps a slightly mediocre one. I'm glad to have it, but it wouldn't get on my short list of the very best trick-taking games.

Those of you who know my taste in games might be surprised by the next turn of events: I requested Modern Art! I wanted to refresh my memory, since it's over two years since I last played it (I thought it was HelCon 2002, but it was Tommy's game weekend in 2003). I've disliked it a lot, but hey, I think it just might be a good game in the end!

This time I kind of figured it out better. I certainly did much better: final scores were 483, 384, 381, 368 and 260. I won! I made a huge blunder on the last round, but got lucky with it and scored almost 100 points there alone (I paid 50 for a painting worth 90 from myself, while it was in no way secure that artist would be in top three).

I don't know, I don't know... I like auction games and Modern Art is an important auction game. I enjoyed it a lot this time, the decisions are interesting. I complained when we started how seeing my initial hand meant nothing for me, but I think I'm getting closer understanding the game. I might even learn to like it; I certainly won't oppose a game of it anymore. I want to play more! How bizarre is that?

Our final game was a quick game of Louis XIV. We were fast: our four-player game with three newbies took just 60-70 minutes, including rules explanation! That was pretty swift, but hey, I had a strict deadline.

Despite the forced pace of the game, I enjoyed it. It was such a simple game, I had to actually spend most of the time waiting since most of the decisions felt very easy (not in a sense that I'd do the optimal plays, but finding satisfying moves was very easy and thus I could play the game very fast).

Guess what, I wasn't even disturbed by the end-game coat-of-arms deal. It's not that bad, I think, but then again, that's just after one game. I think the final result was just: Robert won, since he got the most stuff and Olli M. lost, because he had just four missions while the rest of us had six. Makes sense.

It was all pretty interesting, I enjoyed the game. However, I need to play more before forming a decent opinion of the game. I think all the limitations in the game made it feel a bit fresh for an influence game. It's certainly more to my liking than Goa.

Lots of good games this time, so it was a very pleasing session despite the lack of gamers present.

Ropecon 2005 is approaching fast. It's the biggest roleplaying event in Finland and boasts a wide variety of board game events.

There's the Finnish Championships of Catan and Carcassonne, where the winners get to go to Essen to represent Finland in the World Championships (no, the plane tickets are not paid for).

There's also lots of other activity: workshops on Settlers of Catan strategies (given by Lasse Rintakumpu, who placed 3rd in the World Championships) and board game design, including a prototype workshop.

It's simply an amazing event for board gamers and I must admit that no matter how much I disliked my previous Ropecon experience, I'm really tempted. Well, not this year - we're moving the next Tuesday after Ropecon, so I'm busy enough, but perhaps next year.

More information can be found on the Boardgame Society forum.

I got a review copy of Dividends from Fun Factory Games. For a new company, they've certainly got the production values right. Dividends looks very sleek and actually looks more modern than pretty much anything else I have.

The game seems interesting enough: it's a fairly simple stock-market game of buy, sell and earn dividends. The catch is the player amount: the game handles 2-12 and at least Tom Vasel says the game is best with five or more.

There are plenty of stock-market games out there - Acquire comes to mind - but there aren't many games that support over six or seven players. Party games, sure, but this is something else than your average party game.

Well, we'll see - next board game club meeting is soon and I hope to try the game, hopefully with lots of players.

I was asked a question by Jacob in the comments of an earlier post:

Hey, could I trouble you for your opinion of Industrial Waste vs Powergrid? I've played neither and I'm intrigued by both. Powergrid is ranked really high on BGG and when I read reviews, I keep feeling that the same negatives (i.e. endgame problems, feeling that the opening doesn't matter much, disincentive to grow, etc) pointed out by the reviewers would drive me crazy. But I can't tell for sure. Does I.W. get the nod between the two in your opinion?

Well, for starters, I think the games fill different niches. They share a common theme and both have a lot to do with money and optimisation of resources, but they are still quite different. Industrial Waste is a quick game for me, 30-45 minutes of swift efficiency practise, while Power Grid is a longer project and has a very different feeling to it thanks to the auctions and the network building.

I don't think the games have endgame problems. Well, Industrial Waste doesn't have a proper endgame and that might be the problem. Industrial Waste is bit of a flat game, there's very little "arc" in it. You just keep on plodding and when someone grows their factory to level 18 or 19, you start preparing to end the game at any moment. Power Grid has distinct phases, so the game has more structure. The end can be somewhat dissatisfying, but I'm not bothered by it. There's certain tension to it, after all.

In Industrial Waste, the opening doesn't matter much, nor does any single phase of the game. It's all about small steps, there won't be big swings at any points. Is that a problem? I'm not so sure. Sure there's little drama to it, but I like working in those small steps, doing a bit of process every turn. In Power Grid it's good the opening doesn't matter that much - you can't ruin a long game in the first round... Unlike Industrial Waste, Power Grid has moments of big importance (there can be immensely significant power plant auctions, mostly) and those occur at various points during the game. The opening doesn't make a world of difference, but I'm not so sure if it should.

I don't think there's an disincentive to grow in Industrial Waste. It's all about balanced growth. Being in the position to end game is power. In Power Grid, the game-balancing method of increased prices for the leader is a limit to growth - unless one can take such a lead that the other players just can't reach you. That's hard, so usually it's a better idea to hang with the pack, collecting resources to make a big leap at some point. Once again, I don't think that's an fault of the game, it's an obstacle that creates interesting tension in the game.

In general, I think Power Grid is a slightly better game, but Industrial Waste will probably see more action because it's so fast. I enjoy both a lot. They share a similar theme, but are two quite distinct games. In my opinion, either one of them is a good catch.

I've been writing little game reviews recently. When I spend most of my time at the computer writing, that isn't the most attractive way to spend my free time, right? However, now I just had to get these few games out of my system.

Bug Bluff - This must be one of the pretties card games I've ever seen. Too bad it's not great fun to play. It's a game of bluffing and reminds me of Finnish card game Valepaska. It's good for light entertainment, but I prefer games of skill instead of psychological games. Poker is, also, quite superior psychological game compared to this. I'd still recommend this for someone who's looking for light, fun game of bluffing. Review in Finnish

Doom: The Boardgame - It's a big box full of goodies, but the game isn't so great. The system is too heavy for occasional playing, it needs some real commitment. For someone willing to commit to the game, it's the ultimate sandbox with a good mechanics that can be tweaked a lot. It has good atmosphere, but for me it's just too long for what it offers. It ultimately feels like a waste of time. It's definitely five-star material, but not for me. Review in Finnish

Industrial Waste - Well, you know how I feel: this is a very good game. It lacks some tension other similar games can offer, but in the other hand, Industrial Waste has fairly weak feedback loop. There's little rich-get-rich, but there's also less dynamic gameplay. It's pretty much the same thing repeated until the game's over, but hey, it's a fun thing. I like Industrial Waste, but I can see why the game hasn't such universal appeal. Still, it's a must for fans of optimization games. Review in Finnish

Here's a small puzzler for you. Mikko played some two-player games in the various board game events during the year with different people. Mikko played once against each person, different game with each player and only one game in each event. With the following hints, can you figure out which games Mikko played with who and when?

Players: Robert, Tommy, Reko, Olli and Stefu
Games: Roads & Boats, Memoir '44, Battle Line, Ta Yü, Hammer of the Scots
Events: KinkkuCon, FinDipCon, Ropecon, Essen and Helcon
Times: 10:04 AM, 11:00 AM, 2:50 PM, 5:23 PM, 10:00 PM

(All connections with real individuals, games, events and times are purely coincidental.)

1. Roads & Boats is a very long game, thus it was started before 11 AM to get it finished.
2. Mikko met Robert in Essen just at the hour.
3. Mikko was late from train on his way to Ropecon, so he wasn't able to start the first game before 2:50 PM.
4. When Mikko met Tommy, he was leaving for a wilderness hike at 2 PM, so they had to play their game before that. At Helcon Tommy was so busy organising the event that he didn't have any time to play at all.
5. Mikko played Ta Yü with Olli. The game was scheduled on early morning, but got delayed - Olli didn't wake up before 3 PM.
6. In KinkkuCon Mikko played Hammer of the Scots. Stefu, by the way, hates the game and doesn't like Battle Line, either.
7. Mikko and Reko met in FinDipCon.

This should be enough. Answers can be sent to msaari at iki.fi for checking. Please do not post your answers in the comments here.