November 2006 Archives
With the today's arrival of Yinsh, my Gipf collection is complete. It doesn't include Tamsk (hard to get, not very interesting behind the time pressure) or Pünct (a connection game) or most of the extra sets (none but number two with the Zèrtz rings).
Another collection was recompleted with the newfangled Buka Invasion set for Blue Moon.
Review of Crystal Code in Finnish.
Crystal Code is designed by Grzegorz Rejchtman, the designer of Ubongo. The two games are similar: in both games, players race against time and each other to solve pattern recognition problems for rewards.
What's most important, both games manage to avoid the most common pitfall of speed games. Often it can be fairly pointless to play these games, as skill dominates over luck and the skill (or natural talent) differences tend to be big - so big that it's often pointless to play at all. Turbo Taxi is a good example of a game hurt by this.
Fixing the pitfall
Ubongo and Crystal Code do the trick by separating the speed test and the scoring. In Crystal Code, all players who manage to solve the problem (line five pentagons so that matching edges have a total of six symbols of the same kind) win a card and a crystal. The fastest player gets two cards and two crystals. If one player is constantly the fastest, they should win, but basically all players who consistently solve the problems can win.
There's another bit of uncertainty: the cards and crystals are used to form machines, where power lines must connect to form a closed network. All crystal spots in the machine must be filled with crystals. The largest (most crystals) closed machine wins - so it's possible that the superb crystal-hoarder fails in the end to close their gigantic machine, and a smaller but closed machine will win.
Problem problem
That's all good and well, and fairly entertaining as well. However, the game fails at the problems. Their difficulty level (the amount of possible chains to make) varies a lot. Some are very easy (lots of solutions), some are very hard (perhaps just one solution) and some are, unfortunately, impossible. That can be seen as another balancing random factor, but I say it's too random and in completely wrong place. It's pretty much a deal-breaker for me.
It's not the only flaw, though. I found the machine-building kind of neat in theory, but quite bland in practise. The game is promising, but in the end fails to deliver. With the problems fixed (all of them possible to solve, perhaps more balanced difficulty levels), Crystal Code would be a decent game. Not great, but good. Now, there's no reason to get it, especially as Ubongo outshines it in every way. So, if all this sounds interesting, get Ubongo. Now there's a good game...
Review of Aqua Romana in Finnish.
Aqua Romana is a tile-laying game where players build Roman aqueducts. Theme doesn't make much sense, as usual - the players score points for the length of aqueducts, so efficiency flies out of the window. However, the Roman theme is used well in the art, and the board is a real treat for eyes.
Follow the masters
The game has an interesting indirect mechanism for laying the tiles. There are four types of tiles (straight, curve, crossing, parallel curves) and each of the type has few builders for them. The builders move on a track outside the board. The workers that build the aqueducts can build a tile, if they see a builder - seeing means being on a same vertical or horizontal row with the builder.
When a tile is placed, the worker advances to the end of the tile and the builder takes one step forward. Now the worker might see another builder. If no builders are in sight, the player misses a turn, but gets to move any builder one step. This is unfortunate, boring and happens too often. Sure, some forward planning can reduce the missed turns, but it's still quite annoying.
No space to score
One more twist: the scoring track has limited space. In each space there's only room for one worker (except three and seven points, which can accommodate three workers). So, when an aqueduct is finished, the worker is placed on the highest free spot on the scoring track starting from the length of the aqueduct. So, finishing your aqueducts fast is a good idea. It's also possible to quit an aqueduct early (otherwise the aqueduct is done when it runs to the edge of the board or side of a tile).
Aqua Romana is not a bad game, but I found it mediocre and boring. The four-player game is a bit too chaotic for my tastes, and the two-player game isn't much better. The game is fairly easy, though, and wouldn't be a bad choice for someone who's looking to advance from Carcassonne to something new. Seasoned gamers will find little new in this offering.
Celtica, a game by well-known designer duo Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling was published recently in Finland. I was curious to try the game; for background, I had read the less-than-favourable comments from the Geek, combined with Bruno Faidutti's recommendation.
The game certainly looks delicious, from the beautiful box cover to the shiny pretty bits. The lush green colour fits the Celtic theme well. The background story has druids, vikings and amulets broken in pieces - player rush around the board, collecting amulet pieces.
Druids on the run
The basic idea of the game is very simple: players move the five druids on the board by playing cards that match the colours of the druids. There are three possible outcomes when the druid stops moving: player gets few amulet pieces, player loses few amulet pieces and gains an experience card or player gains a card, if they want to. All players can move all druids, based on the five cards they are dealt each round.
It's simple, but not completely devoid of decisions. Sure, if the white druid is standing one space from a juicy spot and you have a white card, you play it and score the amulet bits. But what if there are two good spots in a row and you have two cards? Do you play both and leap to the last spot or do you play one and wish the opponents don't have any? These are fairly simple decisions, I agree, but they do make the game a bit more interesting.
Then there are the experience cards: they are like any other cards, but unlike the basic cards, you don't have to play them. You can hang on to them as long as you want to, and use them when you really need that extra step. Even better, if you can hang on to them until the end of the game, you can trade them in for amulet pieces.
Once the first druid makes it to the end of the 16-step track and the round finishes, the game ends. The player with the most complete amulets wins the game, extra amulet pieces breaking the ties. The whole affair should take about 30 minutes.
Recommendations
I like the game, I really do. The amount of decisions and mix of skill and luck tags Celtica firmly as a family game. I'd say the luckiest player wins, but the journey through the board is fun, exciting and offers just enough decisions and small gambles to make it worth the 30 minutes of your life. You'll curse your opponents when they move the very druid you were planning to move, try to gain extra cards to avoid the amulet-eating ruins and have a good time while you're at it.
I have played the game with two and four players and enjoyed both. With two players, the game is definitely less chaotic. I think this game could've been a small hit amongst gamers, had it been packed as a Kosmos two-player game. With four, there's more chaos, the game is shorter (there are about half as many rounds as with two players) and luck plays a higher role, but the timing of playing your cards gets more interesting. I'm fairly sure five players would be too much.
With the right expectations and attitude and enough tolerance for luck and chaos, Celtica is an enjoyable 30-minute filler for gamers. Celtica is also a good family game - easy enough, good luck beats skill and yet the game offers excitement instead of boredom.
I've been on vacation this week, and took the opportunity to have a small game session in a local pub. It was a decent environment for games, though there was exactly two tables on the non-smoking side that were lit well enough. Not an ideal environment, and if possible, I'll still prefer places where you don't have to buy anything (like the big university cafe I've frequented).
New games and review copies was the theme of the day. We started with Tower of Babel, which I traded from Tero in Helcon. This Reiner Knizia game hadn't impressed Tero at all, but I quite liked it.
The offering mechanism makes the building quite interesting. All players are constantly involved and the decisions are delicious. The games strategies seem subtle, and I'm very much looking forward to playing this more. I've rated it initially as an eight, but it could be nine with more plays.
One thing is clear, though: the action cards must go. I found their influence in the game somewhat disturbing. Their effects are just too random. Also, I'm not sure why completing the wonders should be rewarded like that. Well, the rumour says the action cards weren't a part of Knizia's original design, which I can believe. Anyway, removing them is the simplest thing and improves the game in my opinion.
The game had pretty huge point spreads while we played, but got somewhat closer in the end. Ilari managed a big lead in the end, though, winning the game 90-77-63-61.
Next up was Aqua Romana. I had played it in Essen last year, and now got it as a review copy when it arrived to the Finnish market.
With two players, the game didn't impress me much, but it isn't better with four. The game becomes quite a chaotic affair. There were also a bit too many turns with no moves or just one possible move, which pretty much removes all feeling of control. Nobody liked the game much, I think. I'm selling it.
Juho was doing pretty badly, missing lots of turns, but in the end, he got one good worker going, which rescued him from the last place. Ilari, who did much better during the whole game, ended up last for some reason. Interesting.
I wanted to try Celtica with more than two players. I had my expectations - not very good - but I was quite surprised: it was actually quite good!
I mean, of course the four-player game has a bit more chaos and less turns per player than the two-player game, but it also has more timing challenges and more excitement. Our game was definitely exciting! The game is lucky, but there's also risk management and a bit of a gambling.
I still think the game is better with less players, but it's not bad with four. It's probably best with three (like so many games - Aqua Romana is another where I think this applies - two is strategic but perhaps a bit bland, four or more is chaotic and three is the sweet spot).
Juho had to leave, but the rest of us remained to play a game of Der Elefant im Porzellanladen, the new filler card game from Michael Schacht. After first game, I'd say the game is chaotic, funny and ok; not great, but quite good.
The rules had a flaw: they don't mention what happens when the elephant cards run out (which will happen). We chose the obvious way and reshuffled the deck, but it was very annoying when the rules had nothing about it (particularly as the rules earlier said the elephant cards are removed from the game).
Despite this flaw the game was fun. I particularly like the scoring system: there are four categories and four scorings, and each scoring you choose one category to score (worst card in each colour, best card in each colour, total of one colour, total of all cards). That's clever.
Olli made a quick visit yesterday for some games. We started with Gipf. Now, played face-to-face with a real board and the correct rules, I think the game's actually pretty good. My play-by-email experiences didn't do the game justice, I suppose. Now it was definitely fun. I think I'll be playing more of this, especially as the game has possibilities for handicapping.
OIli hadn't tried Zèrtz, so we tried that one as well. Here my experience showed, as I won both games. The second one was interesting: as Olli realised the danger of eating pieces, the game took a typical route, as both players placed marbles far from each other. Of course, this is unstable and has to break down at some point, typically resulting in lots of marbles captured. I was quite satisfied when I was able to stabilise the situation in my benefit. Zèrtz is a great game, but the lack of handicapping and the strong effect of a skill difference between players make it hard to play.
Crystal Code is a new speed puzzle game from Tactic and the designer of Ubongo. Players try to form chains of pentagons by matching a total of six similar symbols on the edges. Fastest player scores two crystals and two cards, while everyone else who manages to complete the chain gets one and one.
Then players must play cards to form a machine, where the crystals are placed. After a number of rounds, the player with the biggest closed machine (most crystals in it) wins. If you have a big machine, but it's not closed, a smaller machine will beat you if it's closed. So, there's a bit of a push-your-luck, too, you can take risks.
The game has few problems. Not all of the chains are solvable. In our game, one of us didn't solve the chain on almost every round. However, only two or so of these failures were caused by unsolvable chains. That's because some chains are a lot harder than the others. Also, I wasn't quite satisfied with the scoring. I suppose it works, and in some way it makes the game meaningful, you don't have to win every speed challenge to do well, but I don't know, it isn't great or even very good.
In the end, I think, the game is ok, but for most people, I'd rather recommend Ubongo. If you have Ubongo and want more, then maybe - and that's a big maybe - get Crystal Code, but be prepared, it's not nearly as good as Ubongo.
We ended the session with a quick match of Celtica. It's a good two-player filler, definitely.
Yesterday I got a bunch of games from On The Spot Games. All the games are designed by James Ernest and Mike Selinker, and aimed towards somewhat mass-market crowd, I'd say - they are very simple games, some definitely aimed for the party game audience, others for couples or families.
I already tried Kotsuku, which is a word game for two players. The game is played on a grid (typically 5x5), with few letters already placed. Players take turn to add letters to the grid (each letter can only be used once). First one to create a three-letter (or longer) word, wins.
I didn't like it. The game sounded a bit daft based on the rules, and a quick game confirmed that. The problem is simple: once you put two letters close to each other, your opponent can strike in and create a three-letter word. The game becomes one of avoidance: you use the hardest letters possible as far from each other as possible to prevent your opponent from creating a word. First one to make a mistake loses, or the one with a wider vocabulary of three-letter words (so your opponent thinks a word cannot be created with the letter he plays, but you know better and score a win).
Maybe someone enjoys that kind of game, but I found it frustrating, pointless and annoying. Won't play again, and neither will Johanna.
Trendsetters is a pure party game - it doesn't even have winners or anything. Unfortunately the game has a maximum of four players; I think the game could use more players. Players are asked multiple choice questions (things like "which is the best movie?", "which would you most like to drink?") and players answer in secret using voting wheels. Players try to predict what others will answer: if you're not in the majority, you get a strike. Five strikes, and you'll have to do a penalty (rules suggest singing a Barry Manilow song).
Sounds fun enough, though I wonder how this works with just three players. Even four sounds like not enough, as there are six alternatives to the questions. What if everybody chooses a different answer? Well, you can expand the game to more players, if you ditch the voting wheels, and I think that's probably a good idea even though the voting wheels are pretty neat.
Zero In is a game of guessing celebrities. Each card has four celebrities, and five clues for each. You get five points, if you guess the celebrity with the first clue (always the profession and the initial letter of the celebrity's last name), four for the second clue and so on. The goal is to collect 12 points.
It's a simple concept, and as the game is mechanically so obvious, it all boils down to the quality of the questions. I guess they're decent, though some of the celebrities involved are probably a bit too American for international use. There are 200 celebrities in the 50 cards, so it takes a while to go through them all. While you don't really need the game to have fun with this kind of activity, it definitely helps to come up with good questions. I think this is probably the most interesting game of the bunch.
Letter Hold'em is part of the Poker craze. It's a regular deck of cards, but each card has a letter. You play Poker using the regular rules, but with an additional restriction: you can't use the cards in your winning hand unless you can spell a word using them.
I'm not sure why I would want to play this game; to me, the concept of combining Poker and word games just doesn't sound attractive at all. But, who knows, maybe there's demand for something like this.
Helcon 2006 was a blast, and the most successful event of the Board Game Society history with almost 100 participants. I was there for the Saturday (limitation caused by being a parent; unfortunate for the gaming, but rewarding in other ways). I didn't play that many games, but as you will see, sometimes (well, often) quality is more important than quantity.
I got the first taste of games before the actual event, when I met Robert on the Tampere railway station. We got ourselves a table at the train and spent the trip playing games. Train left 30 minutes late, but hey, that doesn't matter when you've got games to play, right? We played few rounds of Blue Moon - always a pleasure, and Robert seemed to warm up for the game as we played too - followed by a round of Battle Line.
We used the tactics cards, because Robert was familiar with the Schotten-Totten version and wanted to try the game Battle Line style. I've been avoiding them, and this game reassured me my decision has been good. I find that the tactics cards add relatively little to the otherwise clean and elegant game.
We finished the games with a match of San Juan, played almost at a BSW pace. San Juan as a speed game, that's something I quite like.
The definite highlight was the first actual game of the event: 18VA. I ordered the game a long time ago, and finally got it in my hands. The production values are surprisingly good: the game looks really good. It's all very well done.
The game was great, just great. It took us about 30 minutes to figure out the rules (I had studied them, but we had some problems; some things could've been explained better in the rules, I think) and four hours to play the game. I know we had a ton of minor rules mistakes (very difficult to avoid in a complicated and fiddly game like this) and lots of blunders caused by the freshness of the players (all newbies, two having some 1830 experience from the PC version). Still it was great.
I won, too. The scores were very close: 5682-5393-5234-5148. I had the second best stock portfolio in the end (Tommy who was second had the best) and most cash in hand. I was a bit surprised by my victory, as I didn't feel like one of the power players in our game. I was the president of my small Virginian Railways from SR 1 to the very end, and that's it. I did have two of the privates, which my Virginian bought with the full price (and one of them was the $200 discount on trains, making sure I hadn't visit my personal cash reserves to buy trains like Tommy), that pretty much makes up the difference to Tommy I think.
Next time I'll know the rules better, and maybe it'll be even better. The playing time is a bit tough, but I think it can be squeezed to four hours including the rules explanation. I'm looking forward to have another go, I just don't know when that's going to be possible. Anyway, I'm now happily in the 18xx world, having perhaps dived in a fairly deep end, but I'm glad I have the game. As of now I feel no need to buy more 18xx games, but we'll have to see about that.
After a Nepalese dinner (quite like Indian, really), it was time for more trains. The game was Age of Steam, with JC Lawrence's London expansion. It's a really neat map - both in artistic and gameplay sense. The only problem is the huge size: the map doesn't fit in the box.
The game had two newbies in it, so I couldn't properly enjoy the cruelty of the map, as my game was fairly easy cruising. When you can get Locomotive for $1, you know everything's just fine... Well, the proper appreciation of engine power is something new players tend to learn towards the end of the game, which was the case this time as well. The new players got to five links on the last round, when I had already ran many rounds of five-link runs and got some six-link runs on the last round.
I like the new stuff on the London map. The instant production (new cubes arrive immediately after a cube is delivered, either to the begin or the end of the run) is fun, as is the ability to build up to five tracks, but with a heavy cost. We got the Urbanisation action wrong (there was a limitation I didn't notice) but that didn't matter much.
I had asked a friend to bring Reibach & Co he had bought from Essen. I've been talking about playing Union Pacific without the map, and here it is: Reibach & Co (or Get the Goods) is basically the stock mechanism of Union Pacific. I enjoyed it; it's not a great game, but good, and definitely better than Union Pacific.
I bought an used copy of Gipf and played a match, but with so wrong rules that it's a different game. Well, maybe next time I'll have the correct rules. I also bought Gipf Project Set 2, which contains the very necessary extra rings for Zèrtz.
Two Werewolf matches made it into my schedule. Those were fast and hilarious. Once again it was proven that I look guilty and werewolfish, even though I was innocent in both games. In the first game werewolves were able to take the victory, while in the second, we lynched a wolf on the first hanging and got the second one in the end. Good times, good times, particularly thanks to Anna, whose semihysterical defense speech after getting one vote in a test vote (not the actual voting round) was just excellent - of course she was hanged after that, and of course she was innocent.
Markku (JoeLamer from BSW) had bought a copy of Mauer Bauer and needed someone to explain the rules. Well, here's a Colovini game I'm always willing to play! Hopefully the rules got through; at least I beat the opposition neatly. It was a curious game with a huge megacity, which made things interesting.
Stefu had challenged yours truly and the world champion Markus to a speed game triathlon; that dwindled down to a match of Turbo Taxi between me and Stefu (and Phil, whose participation in the game was quite minor, in the end). Stefu got a good lead, but in the end made few blunders and I was able to even the score. I consider that a quite perfect result.
That's it, pretty much. There was a superb raffle with good prizes, with some very interesting games to win (and less interesting, as well). I got lucky and won a copy of Um Reifenbreite (which I played with Johanna yesterday; she didn't like it, and I don't think it's a particularly good two-player game). Not a bad prize at all!
The last game of the evening was a three-player game of Gang of Four at Tommy's, where I smoked the opposition. Overall my Saturday was full of victories, which was nice.
So, another Helcon gone. The quality of the event is better each year; it's definitely my favourite game event. Thanks to all organisers and people I played with!
