November 2008 Archives

Actually, I'll start with another session report first. Wednesday we went to see some of our playground friends. The kids - 5 and 7 years - don't mind Nooa much, but they are all over me. Well, Nooa had great fun playing with their toys (Bob the Builder Duplos, a guaranteed hit) and I played some games with the kids. It was fun, if a tad chaotic.

We started with some roll and move games. Duck Pond, a Ravensburger game by Heinz Meister, was one of them. We played it wrong, and it was terribly boring. When played correctly it's still almost decision-free, but at least three times faster and thus much better. Players move ducks in a pond to pick up cards; we had each player controlling a duck, while actually everybody can move every duck. For four-year olds, but adults will be nevertheless be bored dead by this game.

Tier auf Tier aka Eläinpyramidi is my latest acquisition. This Haba game won the Finnish Game of the Year for kids this year and when I saw it for just 15,16 euros (a strange price), I had to buy it. It was a great purchase, as Nooa loved the game immediately. He was all over it, playing with the wooden animals.

It's a simple dexterity game for kids. Everybody gets a set of seven different animals, a crocodile is placed on the table and players take turns putting animals on top of the crocodile. If something falls, the player who made the mistake collects up to two animals and game continues until someone is out of animals. Simple and fun.

The kids weren't thrilled. We played a game, but they didn't want to try it again. They were really keen to play with the animal pieces, so that's what we did - it was fun, though I prefer actually playing the game. Well, maybe other kids like the game more. I sure did.

We did play the game today, while waiting for more players to arrive. When Hannu and Sonja joined us, the first thing they wanted to do was to try the animal game, so once more... And why not, because this is an excellent little dexterity filler. It only takes about 10 minutes, tops, and while the game is really simple, it's also rather entertaining enough. The dexterity part is fairly easy, until the pyramid gets tall - the pieces are quite slippery.

So, a top-notch game: a nice small box, really gorgeous components, really easy to teach, plays fast, works with (at least some) kids, is fun enough for adults to play without children - what else can you wish from a game that costs 15 euros? I just hope Nooa likes the game as much as he loves the bits.

Back to Wednesday. We also played Candy, which is a rather entertaining quick perception game. A bunch of multi-colored candy tokens are spread on a mat. Three colourful dice are rolled and the players must race to grab the piece of candy with the correct colours. Simple, yet fun.

Here's another game that suffered from not playing by the rules. We played until the very end, or would've except we had to leave. The rules suggest playing until someone gets five, and I can see why: as the pieces are taken, more and more rolls are blanks, pieces that are already taken. It gets a bit boring. But if the game stops at five, it works much better (and then you start again and play for best out of five or something like that if you want a longer game).

In any case, this is a good game for kids, nice practise to make the kids ready for more adult reaction test games. The publisher, Beleduc, seems to be one of those companies making quality children's toys and games, like Selecta and Haba. It's a German company, no surprises there... The components in this game were nice, the candy is wooden and the mat is nice cloth.

Then, today's games. After Tier auf Tier, we played a quick game of Dominion - the less said about my performance, the better - and after endless discussions of what to play, ended up playing a three-player game of Attika followed by a four-player game.

Attika is one of those fairly rare games I've played constantly - it, Gang of Four and Age of Steam form a trio of games I've played every year for six years now. Not much Attika for the last few years, true, but still - every time the game hits the table I'm reminded of how good it is. It's such an elegant game, my rating of 9 is definitely valid.

In the first game I showed the novices Petri and Hannu how to play, in the next one first Petri was really close to win by a temple connections and then Hannu did it, right out of the blue. I'm actually fairly sure Hannu will eventually buy a copy, he seemed to like the game a lot.

We wrapped up the evening with a quick game of Die Dolmengötter. I was on a roll, played well and eventually won the game with few points over Sonja. Hannu seemed certain Sonja would win and she did play a good game, but I knew I did well, too. Funny enough, only Petri was left with dolmens, so it was fairly close game.

I now have 11 games of Die Dolmengötter logged and I really like it. I'm seriously contemplating a 10 rating. If the game was as good with three or five as it is with four, a rating of 10 would be close to obvious. Now Die Dolmengötter is simply one of the very best 20 minute games for four, full of wonder and clever moves. My record is strong: I've won 7/11.

Ok, so I did it: Die Dolmengötter is now rated 10. It simply is that good.

When I arrived, the guys were waiting and hungry: it was Wabash Cannonball time. Hannu and Petri, the two main Wabash fans in our group wanted to give the new Erie Railroad expansion a go. KJ and Tapani, both newbies to Wabash, joined us for another five-player game.

The Erie is a small expansion. It's just a single-share company with, what, 13 cubes. Once a certain trigger is reached - railroads have expanded enough - Erie can be capitalized. It starts in Buffalo and has enough cubes to reach Chicago. It can also build to New York to grab eight income there. Simple, rules-wise, but this has plenty of subtle effects on the game.

Tapani played a rather excellent game for a newbie, beating us hands down. The final scores were 106-84-66-64-41. The Pennsylvania was distributed completely on the first round, after which the company headed straight to Chicago. That was brutal. Tapani and Hannu, winner and second, were both invested in Penn. So was Petri, but he played too carefully and didn't buy enough shares - he went most of the game with that single Penn share - and I was able to cut to the third place before him.

I ran the Chesapeake & Ohio on the southern edge of the map, taking it to Chicago with - who else but Tapani. Hannu got both Wabash and Erie, and played both of them well. Tapani did a great job with Baltimore & Ohio, too - he didn't develop it, so no shares where sold until late in the game.

Five-player Wabash is a tough beast. There aren't many actions per player, so choosing what you want to do is very critical. It also led to problems with certain not-so-useful yet very important actions, such as diluting B&O and Wabash. You want to see that done, but you'd rather use your own actions for promoting your agenda - so nobody does it.

Next I force the others play Secret Blueprints of Steam. This is a curious expansion that is unlike any other. Each player has a personal board. All boards are identical, except the layouts are mirrored and the cities have different colours.

Bidding and action selection is as usual, but building and moving goods happens simultaneously. Everybody builds on their own map and moves goods and announces the results. Very simple! The maps are kept secret from other players, mostly because of the Production action: instead of drawing the cubes from the cup, the player with the action announces a colour and everybody else must give a cube of that colour from their maps.

It's very solitaire-ish, but there's some interaction. The auction is still there - and more brutal, too, as First Move and First Build are not available and Urbanization is really important - and the Production gives some interaction, too. But it's a lonely game and loses lots of the good fighting there is in Age of Steam. However, whatever is lost is gained in time: our game took about 90 minutes, but that included some really serious thinking and newbie players. With experienced players, finishing a game in less than an hour is likely.

So, it's pretty neat, with few caveats. Total Age of Steam newbies and Secret Blueprints don't mix. Just don't do it. Also, if there's any reason to doubt the honesty of your fellow players, this just won't work. The same goes with mistakes, if somebody makes mistakes, it's impossible to notice or fix afterwards. But that's not a huge deal, really, in casual play, and I wouldn't worry about it much. Just, you know, teach the newbies with something that has a public map.

The results weren't really interested, I won hands down and that's it. What is interesting is that Hannu did learn something from the last week's session - his second place was as strong as my victory and he managed to build quite a track.

While Secret Blueprints didn't win everybody's heart, Age of Steam is still requested for next week. I'm more than happy to comply.

Rust went flying when four very rusty Die Dolmengötter players met. It's been a while from the previous game, but from now on Dolmengötter will return to my every-week game rotation. It's a bloody excellent game. (Ok, so I got a surprise victory here.)

A quick hand of Strohmann and a game of Dominion wrapped up a rather splendid afternoon of games.

It's been too long from my last game of Age of Steam. Today I got some railroad action in the form of the Scotland scenario. So still no Secret Blueprints, unfortunately, but at least something!

I played against Hannu, who has played one game of Age of Steam, about year ago. He was a bit rusty, that is. I got two 2-link moves on the first round, which pretty much sealed the deal. I managed to build a nice track on the easy west coast of Scotland, then come down on the east coast. Hannu fought me a bit, but it was a pretty easy ride. At the same time, Hannu didn't quite realize the value of long connections. The final results were pretty clear.

This was a bit of an extreme case, but I'd still say the recommended eight turns is probably one turn too much. We finished the game one turn early (but could've quite probably two turns earlier, it was that obvious), and at that point the map was pretty much completely built.

Age of Steam isn't the most exciting two-player game there is, but this was certainly a fun way to spend 60 minutes or so.

Dominion is a hit. We played four games in a row, and that's rare. It was pretty fast, too, all were three-player games and moved fast. We used random setups every time and that worked well: we got some pretty interesting setups. Witch with no Moat or Chapel (but with Remodel) was interesting, but not as nasty as it could've been: we were all fairly high in positive points, even though the Curse pile ran out.

Thanks to a tip from the Board Game Society forums, I did some remodeling to the Dominion box insert. I cut the four bits that stick out from the bottom and removed few millimeters of the bottom edge. That way the insert is slightly lower in the box and the sleeved cards fit in better. Now it's just about excellent. The sleeves made the game more pleasant to play, I just like shuffling sleeved cards.

Dominion is excellent fun, now I just need to figure out how to win the game against non-newbies. We played four games and I wasn't really close in any of them...

I wrapped up the evening with some Strohmann-Tarock and Le Truc with Hannu. The tarock was a disaster, but the Truc game was really, really good. I won the first game 12-0, then lost 12-8 and finally won the decisive round 12-11. It was close, but I had good cards and nerves of steel.

Truc is an amazing game, but it takes a while to appreciate it. Random game with someone you don't know isn't going to make it. It gets much better once you play repeatedly against the same players and start to get inside your opponent's head a bit. Excellent fun, particularly with Hannu...

Someone should introduce Truc to all those poker pros who play Chinese Poker a lot for amazingly high stakes. That game's complete rubbish, after all... Truc is much less luck and much more bluffing, personality and skill. It's trick-taking, but I'm pretty sure most serious poker folks should see the shine.

After a quick hand of Le Truc with Hannu, Petri arrived and Container hit the table. Petri is interested in modern-day business games and Container hits that niche pretty well. After all, the setting is definitely contemporary and the game is all about buying and selling.

This time I managed to avoid embarrassing blunders and actually everybody made pretty good money. When we started, the guys were slightly confused, but figured out the works before the game was over. I think my one-game experience gave me enough of a head start to win the game, but Petri got close (115 vs 92). Hannu had the wrong colours of containers floating around and lacked cash in critical times (and didn't realize to take a loan), and ended up with 56 points.

Three isn't probably the sweet spot of Container - I think more is better, as there's more action going around, but the game works this way, too. It was a pretty fast, too, clocking in at 60 minutes. Petri loved the game and Hannu seemed to enjoy it, too. My rating is also on its way from 7 to 8.

Thursday's board game club was a Dominion party, pretty much. I played three games of Dominion during the afternoon, first two times in a row and then a third game just before leaving with some other folks.

It's a popular game, let me tell you. Ok, everybody didn't love it, but the game got some "I've got to have this" response, which is after all fairly rare. In the first game we used the basic setup and I beat everybody else hands down, in the second one we tried a randomized setup and things were much closer. Hannu won that one. I tried using a Chapel and didn't do it quite efficiently enough, but it was an interesting experiment. In the last game we used the Village Centrum (or whatever it's called in English - the difficulty with translations...) setup which was nice, too.

I'm enjoying the game more and more. I've still got it rated as eight, but nine is probably closer to truth. The game has plenty of potential, but the question is will it become stale? The designer has played it a lot, which would suggest there's enough staying power. Well, I'll just have to see and I'm definitely going to enjoy the game for now!

By the way, I just sleeved the game today. Based on some of the complaints, it would seem like a really difficult task, but I got the Ultra Pro basic soft sleeves, 1,50 euros per pack, and put the cards in those. The cost was minimal, the size of the cards matches the sleeves well enough, the sleeved cards fit in the insert and the box lid can be shut. Works like a charm, that is.

I also played a game of Russian Preference, a three-player favourite of me and Hannu. We got Gargoyle, another friend of the game, to join us. It was another reminder of why I don't play games for money. I lost badly: 130, 99, -229. I was deep in the hole after the fairly quick game was over.

Despite my terrible performance, I still really like the game. It's one of the better traditional card games and my favourite when there are exactly three players around.