August 2007 Archives
Another session! We started with Fairy Tale, which is the current favourite filler. It's indeed an excellent game, right now it's the hottest thing - I'm always up for a game. We even got a team game going, even though two of the guys thought they were paired with their neighbour, not the player opposite them. That made some strange results, but since both teams had traitors, everything worked out well.
Then, the main course: Slovenian Tarok (rules from ever faithful Card Games). We started with three players, played few rounds and got us a fourth player. It was very much a learning game, so it wasn't a big deal.
It's good. Like the Tarots in general, it's a trick-taking game (I guess you could see Tarot as a single game with plenty of variants). This one's played on a short deck, so there are 32 regular cards and 22 trumps, making the trumps rather important. One player becomes a declarer through bidding and chooses a contract. Then he tries to win more than half of the card points - with four players, he gets to name a partner by calling a king. With three, the declarer is always alone.
There are all sorts of tricky things about the game, but if you're an experienced trick-taker, it's not that hard. The bidding isn't that complicated, though evaluating hands is hard - but that's the whole point of playing new games, getting fresh challenges. I enjoyed the game very much, and I'm really looking forward to playing it again. I think my opponents enjoyed it as well. If you have access to tarot cards you can play games with, here's one to try.
Finnish gamers, head to Finnish Players' Picks 2007 voting page to tell me which games you enjoyed the most during the last year.
I got two shipments of playing cards today, and look, I have a start of a playing card collection. I ordered a various bunch of different decks, some for use, some for decoration. Here's what I have:
Swedish Öbergs cards. The Swedish standard. Found these in Clas Ohlsson, a Swedish hardware store that's spreading in Finland. These have beautiful, elaborate court cards.
French Tarot cards. The original reason for my card order. A full 78-card French-suited tarot deck, made for playing games, not for fortune telling. Gorgeous!
Bavarian cards for Schafkopf or Tarock (not Tarot!). Beautiful German-suited 36-card deck. Long and narrow cards, beautiful aces (twos, actually) and court cards
Swiss Jass deck. This one's quite a beautiful one, too. Genuine Swiss deck with twos for aces and banners for tens. The Swiss style is rather unique - my wife thinks these are really, really ugly cards, but I like them. That's actually not that uncommon...
These three were ordered from Somerville's Playing Cards. I got them pretty fast, even though they were shipped on a cheaper rate. Then, from Italian Alida Store:
Spanish Barajo Espagnole. Another beautiful deck with Latin suits in Spanish style, with just 12 cards per suit (court cards begin from 10).
Piacentine. This Northern Italian deck has Latin suits in a Spanish style - that's quite interesting, as Piacenza is a province in Northern Italy and the Spanish style is more popular in Southern Italy (Naples, Sicily, Sardinia) - but also in Romagna in Northern Italy
Bresciane. Brescia is in Northern Italy, too, and this is a genuinely Northern Italian deck. The cards are narrow and small. This one's not that good for games, because the cards lack indices and are fairly hard to read. It also seems I'm missing the ace of batons...
Salzburger. This is the only Italian regional deck with German suits. It has very nice court cards, though I'm a bit confused of which is over and which is under - there are two cards with pretty much identical soldiers portrayed. One has the suit symbol on top of the card, one has it in the bottom - it would seem obvious that over has the suit symbol on the top, but the ordering of the cards in the deck suggests otherwise. If anybody can enlighten me with this, I'd be pleased.
So, here's a start. I can definitely recommend both stores - Playing Cards is a good general-purpose store, while Alida has an excellent selection of Italian regional cards and the Italian tarot decks.
My collection is clearly missing a Wilhelm Tell deck, perhaps some Italian tarots and an Austrian tarot deck...
Another day, another game session, this time with Olli H. and Sami from yesterday. We kicked off with Blue Moon City, as requested by both Sami and Olli. I'm always game for this one! We played twice and both were quite curious games. In the first one, both Sami and Olli hoarded crystals, we actually ran out. Meanwhile I was actually scoring points: I got the first three seven-crystal points, then finished the game a bit later. Final scores 5-2-0. Lesson learned (hopefully): hoarding doesn't pay off.
Second game was basically the other extreme: we built everything and nobody was able to make the fifth offering. Olli got closest, so he won. I had to check the tie-breaker rule, as I've never needed it before. It was a close, tense match, Blue Moon City at its best. I like the game, it's getting better the more I play it.
One rules issue came up. How do the scales work, if the scale pool runs out in the middle of awarding the scales... Turns out this is not an issue, as I've happily missed the fact that the scale pool gets extra "imaginary" scales if it runs out in the middle of the building prize phase. So, it doesn't matter in which order the scales are handed out to players. I should probably add this clarification to my copy, since I remember this isn't the first time I've run into this issue.
Sami had wished for Bohnanza, another wish I was happy to fulfill. I've been wanting to play the game for a while now and no wonder - I checked, and it's over four years from my previous game! It was about time! It was fun trading beans, and I did well, too! I still got some touch left. I did get lucky, scoring full fields of garden beans and red beans.
My next game of Bohnanza must happen sooner than in four years!
We finished our session with three rounds of Fairy Tale. I've now played the game eight times without winning once! This time I did pretty well in all games, but each time someone was better. The advanced cards really add to the game, that's for sure. Here's a real gem, I really, really do like the game.
I think I should probably make a player aid for the game, it would probably help teaching the game to newbies. List all the cards that require other cards to work and explain all the symbols... There are probably some decent ones in Geek, but having one in Finnish might be useful. I'll have to think about that. Anyhow, right now Fairy Tale is my number one filler. I'd like to try it with just two players, though.
Today was a day for games. I've been meeting folks at the University cafe recently and it's been a good place: quiet (summer and all), food and drink service with no pressure to buy anything, decent tables, good light, easy to find - very good, very good. Today's company included both Ollis and couple of new guys, possible Board Game Club converts.
We kicked off the games with Fairy Tale - actually, we were going to play a quick game while waiting for Sami and Kalle to arrive, but they did while were setting the game up. We decided to play the game anyway.
Since there were five of us, we had to use the advanced cards despite the newbies. Didn't matter... The game's pleasantly straightforward to teach and the guys took the mechanics in simple enough. Of course, the strategies are another thing... The advanced cards add to the game, definitely, and I'll probably include them from now on most of the time.
I'm also almost getting hang of the game, second time around I was so sure I won, I fulfilled three valuable conditional cards, but no, Olli H. beat me by one lousy point. Fairy Tale is a bit of a luckfest, but the drafting is just so much fun and the game's so fast, I don't really mind. I'm definitely looking forward to trying the partnership game.
Next up was the main course, once again, Phoenicia. I love the game. There's been some discussion on the Board Game Society forum, and the consensus seems to be that the Dye House is very, very good. I kept this in my mind, bought two Dyers and then proceeded to buy each and every Dye House. Yep, I got them all, all three.
This took me to a lead I was able to keep for the rest of the game. I proceeded to buy Public Works, Port and City Walls, which were enough for me to win. Sami, a newbie, got Shipyards and used them well and got two points below me, so it was close. Curiosly enough, I didn't use the Clothmaking a lot - I never bought new workers, and only late in game assigned two of the three I had to Clothmaking.
Dye Houses are good. I was aiming for them and got them fairly easy. I had to pay 20 (minus the hefty discount) for the last one, but the first two were pretty easy to get. Perhaps I got lucky, perhaps I had planned my game well, but at least you don't get to put it on my opponents - even though three of them were newbies, I had warned them about the Dye House.
I like the game a lot. I do wish it had better graphic design, I could come up with some improvements on that area, but the game mechanics are just great. Some folks on the forum are somewhat annoyed by the random money cards; I'm not there yet, I still find them quite acceptable. It's also very simple problem to fix, if it ever starts to bother me (just 1) remove some four and sixes, 2) remove all fours, or 3) remove all fours and sixes, according to taste).
I don't remember when was the last time I played For Sale, but it's been too long. It's a great game, even though I'm not very good at it. It's super fast, fun and challenging, everything you need from a fifteen-minute filler, definitely one of my favourite games.
This new look is courtesy of Movable Type 4, the brand-new version of my favourite blogging platform. The new version is packed with interesting features and free for personal use - if you're looking for a good blogging platform, Movable Type is an excellent choice.
Stefu made a surprise visit. He charmed Nooa, we talked about kids a lot (he's got a daughter himself) and in the end played some games as well. Stefu suggested something heavier and we ended up playing Age of Steam on John Bohrer's Austria map.
It's a strange map, very small and constricted. There are no shares and three shipping phases. All building costs $4. I kind of liked it, but I did lose the game on the second round... Stefu was shipping fives and sixes a lot, while I got perhaps one five and mostly fours. He just got a wider part of the network. It's very constricted where you can build and I was blocked out a lot. End result was 182-144...
Next time I'll probably know better, but with the new Bézier two-player maps coming, I'm not sure when that next time is going to come. With my current maps, I'd rather play Scotland, really. Austria has pretty good ideas and it's not a bad game, but perhaps a bit too restricted (and I'm somewhat worried of the replayability).
After that - the game took snappy 45 minutes, which was nice - we played a round of Stefu's little game Deduxe. It's a simple pen-and-paper deal, where you fill 6x6 grid with numbers and try to form sets and deduce dead squares. It's simple, quite fun, but felt a bit odd. There are some possibilities for degenerate plays if players don't play "well". But hey, I won it, so...
Way of teaching Go is an instructional article describing a method of teaching Go to children (guess why I'm blogging this).
The article suggests playing Atari-Go (or Ponnuki-Go), which seems to be the recommended method of teaching Go to beginners. That is, play the simple capture game where the only goal is to capture one stone from your opponent.
Where the article gets interesting is suggesting to continue with Atari-Go to larger boards and upping the number of stones required. First of all, it can be used as a handicap: the better player needs to capture more stones. What's really interesting: when the game is played on a large board and both players need to capture, say, 10 stones, it's starting to get closer to regular Go.
That is, territory starts to count. In the end, the player with the bigger territory will win and sooner or later, you can start to quit games when you can see that one of the players will win, because they have more territory. When you reach that point, you're basically the ko rules away from playing regular Go.
This is something to remember. Oh, and if anybody has any practical knowledge of teaching Go to small children, I'm interested.
Review of Portobello Market in Finnish.
Portobello Market won the Hippodice game design competition as East India Railways. Schmidt picked it up, switched the theme and here we have a game set in the London's famous market street. Lautapelit.fi was quick to publish this in Finnish.
Portobello Market seems to be designed for Spiel des Jahres. It's family-friendly, easy and accessible; it plays fast, looks neat and simply works quite well. In the other hand, it might feel a bit too safe and familiar, especially if you're an experienced gamer.
Streets of London
Players try to place their stalls on the streets. Each spot on the streets is worth 1-3 points. Once a street is opened, players must play their stalls in order, so you can't automatically rush to the best spots. When a street is full and the squares in its both ends have a customer on them, the street is scored. There are three kinds of customers: gray servants, pink bourgeois customers and one lord. The combination of customers determines the factor, 1-4, which is then multiplied with the point value of the stalls.
The main ingredient of the game seems to be lack of time. Each turn one can take 2-4 actions, which are used to placing stalls and drawing customers out of a bag (the only random element in the game). Twice during the game you can use your entire turn to score a whole district, which can provide a huge number of points. You want to save the district scoring as late as possible, but if delay it too much, you might miss it.
Quick action
You see, the thing is, the game's over pretty swiftly. Especially with four players, when each player has only a small number of stalls. Once someone places their stalls, the game's over. You can expect about six turns, and that's an awfully small number of turns to have. Since unfinished streets only score if you get the lord to score them, it definitely takes some cooperation with other players to score major points.
There are nice ideas in the game. You can only place stalls where the bobby, street police, is. He moves around, with a point cost you have to pay to other players when you cross the streets where they have a majority of stalls. The bobby placement offers some interesting possibilities.
Overview
So, what's good about this? Portobello Market plays fast, has no big random elements, there are some clever ideas and I definitely like the way the game puts on tension by limiting the number of actions. In the other hand, the game does feel a bit like yet another Spiel des Jahres contender. Nothing too special here, really.
While I didn't keep the copy I had, I still recommend this as a quick family game. Experienced gamers probably won't be too excited, but if you have less experience of games and are looking for a quick, easy game that'll still challenge you, Portobello Market is a good choice.
Another game of Phoenicia, this time with five players and just one newbie. It was a roaring success: most people got it and enjoyed it. It only took us 70 minutes, too, and that with no particular rushing and pushing.
It was a good, close match. I was almost there, fighting for the victory with my huge cloth-making empire. I bought both city walls and a port, but it wasn't enough in the end. It wasn't many points... Riku played a curious game: he had serious lack of production, collecting three cards when the rest of us were picking up six or seven cards. He didn't win or really compete for the victory, but his score was still surprisingly good, over 20 points.
It was fun and the game definitely works really well with five players.
I bought Fairy Tale recently (well, with Phoenicia) and after Raimo left, we played two rounds. Both took exactly 15 minutes. I was glad to get back to this game, I've only played once before. It's a good filler, so swift and still offers some nice decisions. Sometimes the choices are trivial, sometimes not, but it's good fun nonetheless. I expect Fairy Tale will get plenty of table time.
There's a new Age of Steam blog, run by Alban Viard and Michael Webb. The initial entries are mostly about the designs of their expansions, which is always interesting. There's an RSS feed, too.
I've started a new blog myself: Mikko reads has short book reviews in English.
I met the boys at the university for games. First up was my second go at Leonardo da Vinci. This one solified my opinion and dropped my rating to six. I can see it's a good game and I would recommend it to people who like resource optimization games, but I don't like it myself.
It's just so frustrating. The game takes some kind of forward planning combined with rather tight resources and little room for error that I just don't like. I'd like to see someone play the game really well, though - I wonder what kind of scores people get. We were all (except Riku) in mid-fifties or so. It's a deep game, but in a way I don't fancy. I could see myself playing this again (I'd like to give the advanced setup a go), but I won't make the effort myself.
Phoenicia, in the other hand, is a really good game. I had my first go with the board game. It looks nice, but there are some usability issues. Nothing really bad, but things could be a lot better. Still, it's remarkably good work for a JKLM Games game.
Our game suffered a bit because we had to rush it a bit in the end. The end game flew by and would've been more enjoyable with a bit more time. We finished in about 60 minutes (with four players), and I think experienced players can quite easily play the game in that timeframe if they're not particularly slow. With newbies I'd reserve more time.
It's good, that's basically it. Our game was pretty easy, nobody had particular problems with the storage or anything. Riku was in the lead pretty much the whole time and did win the game, but with sharper play, I'm sure one of us could've beaten him. I'm hoping to get another session going next week and get Phoenicia on the table again.
