April 2007 Archives

Yesterday I got a group together to play Pillars of the Earth. Last time I played, I wasn't thrilled about the two-player game. The four-player game is much better - yet still I dropped my rating from eight to seven.

First the good parts: with four, the game has plenty of tension. As just about every place in the village will be occupied by a master builder, there's some real competition. Being the first player in a round is important, particularly if you're looking for a good craftsman. Also, it seems the game isn't such a luck-fest some would have it: in our game the places went in decreasing order of earlier experience. With the craftsmen being same each time, knowing them is a big benefit.

Then the bad: there's still an annoying bit of luck there. The master builder draw is the problematic bit there... But it is a matter of taste, I believe, and not an objective flaw. Your best laid plans can be disrupted with some bad luck in the draw. Sure, it balances out to some extent, but if you get the bad deal on a critical round, it can hurt. Then again, I can see why the designers installed such a random mechanic there, as it indeed takes lots of long-term planning from the game, which I'm sure was the original intent.

The end of these thoughts is this: the game is good, but not great. It moves pretty swiftly - our game took 90 minutes and could've gone a bit faster - and offers some nice tension and some room for forward planning. Without a plan you're lost, but it is also important to realize your plans can go awry, so don't take things too seriously.

It was fun to play, even though I ended up on third place by the grace of tiebreaker. I'm still selling my copy, probably sooner than later.

I met Ilari today for games. Finally I was able to get Age of Steam Scotland - the free print-and-play two-player expansion - on table. Age of Steam in general doesn't seem like a brilliant two-player game, but with a good map, it turned out be a rather pleasant experience.

The thing about the Scotland map is that it's small. It's half the size of common boards, and quite constrained in other ways too: for example, there are no purple cities on the board. You can urbanize one, but that's it. There are also lots of mountains, which make cheap routes rare (and rivers spoil the rest of them). Rules didn't say anything about how to do the two-player auction; we decided to have second player pay half, which worked well.

I lost - it was very, very obvious. Ilari had better routes, and that's it. One of my weaknesses in Age of Steam is future route planning and making sure I have something to deliver few turns from now, and that cost me the game this time. Scotland is a small map and it's fairly easy to run out of cubes to ship, if you're not careful.

It was a fun game, nonetheless, and very quick, too. We finished in an hour. Very effective! There's no Geek entry for the expansion (should be), but you can find it in the file section of Age of Steam entry. There are two versions: A3 sized and A4 sized. I got the A3 one, printed professionally, laminated and creased. It fits in the box and works well.

We also squeezed in a game of Hive. Geek says 15 minutes, the box says 20 minutes, we took about 40 minutes. Maybe we're too good, but not good enough? We can defend, but not attack effectively enough? I was close to win the game at one point, but couldn't make it, then Ilari got the upper hand and finally, after lots of tugging and stalling, won the game.

I like the game much better than last time. It seems to be about controlling and restricting the movement of pieces - I know I had troubles mobilizing my forces, big chunk of them got stuck on one point of the game. Takes some practise, I think. Fun game, and the bakelite pieces are just great.

This was a pretty quiet quarter, with basically one hot game and bunch of other games with just one play each.

Previous quarter was a tad more active.

Combat Commander: Europe - The obvious one. I was enthusiastic, but now I'm a bit less so. Strong eight, still, but I'm really coming to think that war games aren't perhaps my thing after all. Lots of rules, yet the game is in the end not particularly challenging. That is, there are games that pack more punch to shorter timeframe and less complicated rules. The narrative aspect doesn't do it for me enough, I suppose. Still, I like this, but I don't think I'm going to buy every CC game in the system. Maybe CC:Med, but I'm not even sure about that.