January 2008 Archives

Race for the Galaxy is one of the hot games right now. The fans - Brian Bankler, for example, his Tao of Gaming is a must read - are babbling about it a lot, and no wonder, as it really is an excellent game. I once said an ideal game would be a quick card-driven development game with a science fiction setting. Race for the Galaxy is all this.

Well, the theme of the game could be just about anything, as the cards and their functions don't really connect. I don't mind, but if you're looking for a strong theme, this isn't your game. At least the card art is quite neat and captures the generic science fiction theme well enough.

Production engines in space

Race for the Galaxy is a card-based development or engine game. Like in San Juan, players both build cards and use them as currency to pay for the cards they build. The goal is to get most victory points. Victory points are mostly scored by building cards, but there are also other means.

Each turn is split in five phases: explore, develop, settle, consume and produce. In explore phase players get more cards. Developments are built in develop phase and planets settled in the settle phase. Consume converts the goods on the planets to victory points and cards, while produce creates more goods.

Each player chooses one phase to do each turn. Only the chosen phases are played. Everybody gets to play every phase that is chosen, but the players who choose each phase get special benefits. In explore, for example, everybody draws two cards and keeps one, but the players who choose the action either draws five more cards or draws one more and keeps one more.

Planets and developments

Both planets and developments give bonuses for different actions. Planets may produce goods and both planets and developments can consume goods to produce victory points or cards. The biggest difference between planets and developments is different phases: planets are settled and developments are developed.

However, some planets are military planets and those are different. They aren't paid in cards, but need to be conquered. Each player starts with a military rating of zero. There are cards that give military bonuses (and minuses) and if your military power is equal or larger than the price of the planet, you can play it for free. That's an effective way to play worlds, but takes some infrastructure.

There are about 30 card powers and most cards have two or three different powers. That leads to a huge number of different combinations, and indeed, all cards are unique (there are two of some basic developments) even though powers aren't. If you've played San Juan, that would mean that each indigo plant, for example, would produce indigo and have another power (or cheaper price).

Simultaneous depth

The play mechanism is based on simultaneous action selection: phases are selected and played at the same time. That can lead to fast games. With newbies, the game can easily take 45 minutes. Really swift players make it in 15 minutes, while most people will probably take between 20 and 30 minutes per game. That's very efficient. Number of players doesn't make a huge difference.

Race for the Galaxy is a deep game, but there's a fairly strong luck element as well. Of course, better player will draw more cards and will succeed, but unusually good or bad luck can make or break the game. That's the price for lots of variability and I for one accept it. Flexibility is more important than a set strategy, but some strategic thinking is necessary to win against competent players.

The deepness means that for most folks, it'll take several games before they get the game. Experience with the cards is necessary and getting hang of the card iconography will take time. Once you get them, the icons on the card are very clear and effective, but it'll take few games.

Overview

This all means that Race for the Galaxy is not a good game if you don't want to give it enough effort. It's just not very good for random, casual play. Someone who plays with lots of different people might find the game frustrating, as it is best played with experienced players. Then again, world is full of easy, welcoming games, so I don't really mind. Instead I cherish this gem of a game, as there's plenty of learn and new things to figure even after several games.

Another reason for disliking the game would be the lack of interaction. Race for the Galaxy is by no means a multiplayer solitaire game. Only newbies don't care what their opponents do. However, there are only few things you can do to harm your opponent. Holding on to the key cards they need is one of the most direct actions. So, if direct interaction between players is your thing, look elsewhere.

To me, Race for the Galaxy was the best game of 2007. I'm a huge fan of San Juan, but from the first designer previews at Boardgame News, I knew Race for the Galaxy would be even better. I wasn't disappointed: this is indeed a rare gem and easily in my all time top 10, after only ten games. It's just that good.

It's been a while since I last visited the board game club. Bad timing and busy weekends... It was a real pleasure to go and to celebrate, I decided to play something heavier that doesn't quite work with our Thursday evening sessions. First game of the afternoon was something lighter, though: we played Verflixxt! with six players, using best bits from both expansions (same as last time).

It was great fun and quick enough, so definitely worth playing again, perhaps with even more players. With seven or eight players, I think adding the tiles you'd normally take away might be a good idea. There aren't that many good games for six players or so, so having flexibility is good. Also, I don't think I can stress enough how important the expansions are for this game.

Then, the main event: Antiquity. After a two-year break it was certainly fun to get back to this classic. Last time I wrote "I do know something: San Christoforo's time is up. I'm not using that strategy again, I'm done with it. I'll have to come up with something else the next time I play." So, that's what I did (even though I had no memory of writing that, obviously).

I won the game, by the way. My first Antiquity victory ever, but this is one those games where beating three newbies doesn't really grant you any kind of bragging rights. However, I'm proud of my achievement: I managed to play the without any storage at all. None, whatsoever. And I only had to throw away few goods during the whole game, I was able to use most of the stuff I produced.

Of course I had a bit of a problem with feeding my folks, but as every Antiquity player knows, there are two ways to attack the problems of famine and pollution: prevention or cleanup. I simply chose cleanup. I first built a new city to house the graves, then hospital there, and finally a third city. If you accumulate six-seven graves each turn and have hospital and lots of space, no problems! Pollution was a bit of a problem, but strong expansion by lakes and alchemist in the third city and that's dealt with.

I have to praise the newbies, though. Tero played a very clean game, producing almost no pollution. He had his cathedral full of food and explored like crazy, driving the famine level up on purpose. That's just downright fiendish - but of course a brilliant strategy. Tero's choice of patron saint, Santa Maria, prevented him from winning, but I'd bet my money on him winning the game next time he plays.

It's a brilliant game, despite all the fiddling with the tiny counters. Our game took about three hours plus rules, not bad considering there were three newbies involved. The time went by swiftly, like it should.

Afterwards I relaxed a bit by playing two-player Race for the Galaxy with Robert and then a round of Set. Thursday's session left me hungry... This time I didn't make a single wrong call, winning the game. Great game, indeed.

For some reason I hadn't played Set before. After all, as a pattern recognition game it's right up my alley. I had tried it in some Helcon or other, but there was a mess and nobody knew how to play and it just fizzled. Now I had better luck, as Olli introduced us to the game.

I love it. The concept is pure and simple. There are cards with four attributes: shape, colour, fill and number. So, there might be three red filled ovals, or one blue empty rectangle, for example. Three cards form a set, if each of their attributes is either same or different. In other words, if exactly two cards share an attribute, the cards don't make a set.

I got a slow start and lost some points for wrong calls. In the end I got the hang of it and finished with the biggest number of sets, I think, but lost to Olli because I had too many minus points. I love the game, though it's certainly one of those tricky games that just don't work with most people. It's good enough that I just drew my own copy. Trifty me.

The main game of the evening was Age of Steam. We used Ted Alspach's Europe map. It's a pretty cool map, mounted and all, with only few rule changes. That was necessary, as my opponents were all newbies. In Europe, there are some sea routes, express links and new production method. Express links cost double to build, but produce double income. Each player can create one. Regular production is gone, but when someone takes the production action, they get to choose which cubes enter the board.

Simple changes, but I like them. The express links were particularly nice. I must've made about 10-15 income from mine, as I built it on the second round and used it a lot. The winner was clear on that second round, by the way - while the other players were still starting their game, I did two four-link five-income runs. Bye bye guys!

Well, all newbies and so on. Petri had a slow start, Hannu relied too much on getting urbanization but didn't get it until about four turns later... Raimo played the best game out of the three newbies, but suffered a bit from competing directly with me in the Central Europe. It's not a big deal to win against three newbies, but I think I did play well: I made a nice circular track in Central Europe and then made extension branches to get me to new markets when the cubes ran out in my old cities.

It was a good map, interesting and still easy enough for newbies.

Another good Thursday evening. While waiting for the crowd to gather, I opened the games with Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck. It was chaos, as usual. I failed rolls constantly, while Mari and Jaakko piled up worms. Well, Mari lost most of her worms by the end, but managed to win nonetheless. Heckmeck is nice, but then again, playing it again after a while kind of made me remember why I haven't played it much... The game certainly tends to overstay its welcome and after a while you're just waiting for it to end.

Halli Galli, on the other hand, is always a hoot. It is simply a brilliant game, pure fun. Obviously I won both of the games we played - perhaps I should introduce some handicap, start myself off with a smaller pack? Well, my opponents agreed to an immediate rematch, so it wasn't a disaster. Hannu was so keen he wanted his own copy immediately and played another game later in the evening: another convert won for the cause! I'm seriously considering giving the game a rating of 10.

The main course in our table was Cuba. The game looks very delicious, indeed, with gorgeous art from Michael Menzel and bits to match. The mechanics seemed interesting and did work out rather well in practice.

Cuba is one those engine-building games: there's resource production, resources are converted to other resources, money and victory points. Players can build buildings with various effects and have in general plenty of avenues to victory. There are just six turns in the game, so whatever you do, you need to be effective and preferably know what you're going to do.

The turn mechanism is good. There are five different character cards:

1. Worker lets you move your worker piece on your plantation board and produce resources (wood, stone and water, used mostly for building) and products (tobacco, sugar cane and citrus fruits, used to make goods and score victory points) according to the worker's location.
2. Tradeswoman lets you buy and sell products and goods (cigars and rum, used to score victory points) on the market.
3. Architect lets you build a building. There's a common stock, mostly one of each, so first come, first served and a player taking his turn before you can foil your plans.
4. Foreman lets you use your buildings. Which buildings you can use depends on the location of the worker.
5. Mayor lets you put your products and goods on the ship to get victory points.

Players take turns, playing one character card on each turn and doing the action. There are four rounds, so one character remains in hand. The last character played also dictates who's the starting player for the next round: it's a position worth striving for. The character saved in hand tells you how many votes you'll have: there's an election, you know.

Each turn, four new bills are proposed and whoever has most votes from his character card and from money used to buy more, gets to choose two bills to made into laws. Laws affect taxes and duties (pay the money or the stuff to get victory points), subsidies (own stuff to get victory points) and miscellaneous stuff. Sometimes these are very important, at other times less so.

So, plenty to do! There are many ways to score victory points and in our games we saw quite a few of them in use. I harvested sugar cane, made rum out of it and sold the rum in my rum café (nice euphemism for a bar). Eiska made cigars and used mayor to ship those cigars and various products. Petri had a hotel producing victory points for him - securing a solid lead for the early game, but not enough to win. Mari sold cigars, mostly to her cafe I think. In the end, the game was close: Eiska won with 78 points, while the rest of us had 76, 75 and 72.

Our game took 2.5 hours - a tad long, perhaps, but I can see the game run faster. The players we a bit slow and everybody was new to the game, so with faster players and more experience 90 minutes should be fairly realistic. Cuba is AP prone, so while the box says 75-120 minutes, prepare for up to three hours with five slow players. Sometimes you might have a plan, but then the previous player acting before you will foil it and you'll have to rethink - that causes delays.

In the end I did enjoy the game. There's plenty of action and I like how each choice means choosing not do something, that's something I felt unusually strongly in this game. The rules aren't perhaps as neat as they could be (there are quite a few rules questions on Geek, many of them rather simple in the end), but nevertheless, Cuba is a good game and definitely worth checking out if one likes these engine games. Time and replays will tell if it's a really good game - right now I'm rating Cuba as a strong eight.

One of my pet projects has been to create a metric to measure my success in various games. I'm not satisfied with the obvious choices: sheer number of victories means the games I've played a lot are on the top, despite the winning percentage, while winning percentage alone lifts the "one win of one game played" games on the top. Not good.

My previous method was pretty good, but still lifted Lost Cities high on the top. I've won Lost Cities 68 times, but 68 out of 112 in a two-player game isn't a record I'd advertise a lot. I'd rather see Sunda to Sahul (18 wins of 21 games) on top, for example.

Well, here's the latest take on the success metric:

Success = (Number of wins - Expected wins) * Winning percentage

That's it. Expected wins means 0.5 for a two-player game, 0.33 for a three-player game, 0.25 for a four-player game and so on - the expected result, if winning the game was based on pure luck. Winning percentage is put on a scale from -1 to 1 and as the first part of the calculation can be negative, there's some fuddling to make sure it stays that way even if the winning percentage is negative as well.

That works, pretty well. There's some oddness to it (for one, if you play a game with two, three and four players and win once, it doesn't matter which one you win even though it probably should), yet I find the results fairly satisfying.

Yesterday's session was the last one before the Christmas break is over and we can return to university. So, card games (not that we don't play card games at the university). We started with Cego, a curious German tarot game.

In Cego, the widow (or blind) is 11 cards. The first bid is solo: you play with your own cards. You can top that with a bid of Cego, where you discard everything but two cards from your hand and pick up the blind as your hand. The higher bids add some restrictions to the cards you keep: either you keep only one card, one weak suit card, two weak suit cards, two weak suit cards from different suits or the pagat, which you must then immediately play on the first trick.

So, solo bids are like any other game, but the other bids you make with hands you most certainly wouldn't bid up in other tarot games. Hand with four kings would spell trouble in many tarot games - in Cego that's a killer hand, you can bid real high with a hand like that, even against someone's solo. This reversal makes things interesting. I'm not thrilled by Cego, but it's certainly something I'll enjoy to play every now and then to get some fresh variation.

Our numbers had grown to six. We had a lack of six-player games, until I remembered that Troggu, another tarot variant, supports up to eight. Too bad I didn't remember the rules: I've read and even translated them, but that was weeks ago. I came up with something - well, I checked, and it's most certainly not Troggu, but it was certainly Tarot and actually worked pretty well.

Take a 78-card pack, deal 12 cards per player and six as the widow. If someone chooses to play, they choose a partner by calling a king, pick up the widow and discard six. Then play, with the regular Tarot rules (f,t,r). Use standard scores, count in threes, so there's 78 points in the pack (I like that: 78 cards, 78 points). If declarer's team gets more than half, declarer scores 2 points and the partner scores 1. If they lose, they lose as much.

Simple, but works. One addition is needed: when nobody bids, playing misére is of course the right thing to do. In misére, player with most points scores -2, perhaps -1 for the second most. That's it, there's a quick and simple Tarot game for you. Works well with six!

We played few rounds, then switched to Citadels. Last time I played Citadels was in 2003 (looking at my blog, it was at FinDipCon V with William Attia). Well what do you know! Eiska's game had the expansion, so there were some new districts and we used two new characters (Abbot and Diplomat, both quite nice).

This didn't change my opinion of the game, really: nice, but... not bad, in any case, and there aren't that many games that work well with six players, so considering the situation it was a good choice. But it's not a game I'd actively want to play.

We played a round of Fairy Tale, after which I had to go. Board games next week, that much is certain. But Agricola, Cuba or Age of Steam? Who knows...

And here's the one final bit of trivia for 2007, the hot games for Q4. Shouldn't be any surprises in store, but it's good to have this one link in the chain of quarterly reports! Goodness continued from the previous quarter as the Thursday games were still in.

Agricola is hands down the hottest game of the quarter. I put in extra effort to get it on the table many times and succeeded quite well. One personal triumph was the three games I played with Johanna. I'm very glad of that, and she did enjoy the game quite a bit. My mother also enjoyed the game we played at Jyväskylä.

Race for the Galaxy was the other game that got many playings: eight like Agricola, though those eight games took a lot less time, as they included three rather fast games. Hopefully the fast games will prevail over the 45-minute ones.

Slovenian Tarok - My tarot-playing friends love the Slovenian game, so that's what we played. I wouldn't have minded if some of those games would've been games of the Hungarian game, but I did have a blast playing Slovenian, so I don't really care. Tarot is good.

These three games dominated the quarter: Agricola in particular was played so much that other games were left in its shadow.

I've been a fan of Matthew Gray's month metric. Now I happened unto his Every year 2007 update, focusing on the year metric. I haven't been bothering with that, believing I wouldn't have many high-scoring games. Well, I thought, why not - it's a simple thing to add to my game stats package.

I was surprised to see I actually have few every year games, going for several years now. I'm positively dumbfounded.

Six years out of six

Go - Face to face it only gets four out of six, but I've been playing it constantly online (play-by-web, which doesn't get captured in my stats).

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation - First four years basic, last two Deluxe. I'm a bit surprised here (and probably should get this one on the table this year, at least once!).

Six years out of seven

Battle Line - One game in 2005, 2004, twice in 2006.

Lost Cities - Once in 2006, twice in 2005 and 2004.

Five years out of five

Age of Steam - Last game of standard Age of Steam was in 2003, expansions since. Steady pace of few games per year. Likely to continue: even though I really suck at getting Age of Steam played (particularly considering the pace of new expansions), it'll be strange if I don't play it even once.

Attika - Few games a year, for five years now. Surprising.

Gang of Four - Lots of this in 2003 and 2004, less since, yet still every year. Likely to continue, as this gets probably played at least once a year when I'm visiting Jyväskylä.

Five years out of six or seven

Modern Art - This inspired me to add the code so I could check sessions by game, because I just can't believe it. But it's true: once in 2002, once in 2003, then twice in 2005, once in 2006 and twice in 2007 with my own copy.

Puerto Rico - No surprises here, I missed last year. As the game's no longer available at BSW and I kind of prefer San Juan face to face, misses like that are likely to happen again.

Samurai - Few games every now and then, starting from 2001.

Tichu - Very irregularly over a long period.

Tigris & Euphrates - Most of this was in 2001, but I've played it occasionally ever since. Missed last year and 2005.

Trivial Pursuit - Not a single game last year and missing 2003 as well, but fairly regular play since 2001 with Johanna secures the spot on the list.

Web of Power - Tons of this in 2002, then slow dwindling and missed last year.

This is a good list and like Matthew Gray says, a good measure of quality and longevity, especially when you get plenty of data (Matthew Gray has eleven years, I only have seven).