Ridere, ludere, hoc est vivere.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Sand-blasted in Samarkand

(c) Queen Games - used by permission

In my last post, I mentioned that I'd picked up Robber Knights as an after-thought in the FunAgain Games spring cleaning sale.  But the game that I snapped up with deliberate intent in that sale as soon as I saw it was Samarkand: Routes to Riches (designers David V.H. Peters and Harry Wu, artist Jo Hartwig, publisher Queen Games).  I had put this game high on my wish list after reading good reviews and then realizing that its designers included Harry Wu, inventor of one of my very favorite games, Chicago Express.

As I read the rules the first time, I feared that S:RtR would turn out to be a warmed-over version of CE.  Camels replace trains, merchant families replace railroad companies, ... was it just a variation on a theme?  But now that Kathy and I have a played it through a second time, I realize that S:RtR is a different game altogether, one in which a few similar mechanics are combined in some altogether new ways to make for a completely different decision space.  

Each turn a player may take one of two actions:  Pay a dowry to marry into a merchant family, or expand the trade routes of a merchant family into which he or she has already married.  Merchant families form trade relationships when their trade routes meet for the first time.  Players earn points for forming trade relationships involving families into which they are married.  Among other things, points are also scored for trade routes that reach trade locations corresponding to goods whose cards they hold - with a bonus for being married into the family of such a trade route.  

Cocktails and camel trails
The result is a game that encourages network-building among trading families, with a premium on being married into the right families and on initiating the trade relationships.  I'm reminded of an article (or podcast perhaps) I came across some weeks ago that discussed the transitional course of some games, particularly network-building games, where things seem to happen in isolation early in the game and then reach a kind of tipping point in which every move seems to create another connection.  Acquire is an example of such a game, in which hotel tiles are added in bits and pieces around the board early on, until before you know it, medium-sized hotels are taking over other hotels and forming huge hotels over the course of just a few turns.  Ticket to Ride can be the same way, as train routes suddenly start to collide.  It's almost avalanche-like in the way the game accelerates into a phase-transition from the early stages to the end-game dynamic.
Dromedaries dot the landscape of the Middle East

The significance of this network-building effect is that players need to be alert to the fact that strategy changes drastically as the tipping point is approached.  In our game this afternoon, I played very conservatively early on, not wanting to deplete the resources of the families into which I'd married by expanding the camel routes too rapidly.  I thought I had a sound, methodical approach to the game.  Kathy and I developed trade routes practically on opposite sides of the board, and I actually worried at one point that we might not interact at all, and that the game would be very boring.

Kathy's mercantile in-laws
That changed rapidly when I married into the Alan (yellow) family, where Kathy already had an interest.  Suddenly neither of us could take for granted where the camels of the Alan family would go.  She soon responded by marrying into the Hun (black) family that had been my focus area for much of the early game.  Meanwhile, she also developed a number of trade relationships among her own families and snapped up goods tokens at every opportunity.  She made the point-gathering transition much faster than I did, and before long she was moving to trigger game-end.  Suddenly I found myself scrambling to grab points that I thought I'd be able to accumulate at my leisure.

The end result was that Kathy beat me in every category of victory points with a final score of 83 to 61.  Clearly I had been out-married, out-traded, out-cameled, and out-cashed.  We both had a great time with Samarkand, and next time I will be watching out much more closely for the network avalanche.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Boardgames in the backyard: Robber Knights

Now that the weather is nice, the annual challenge for Kathy and me is to find two-player games for our cocktail hour that work on the tiny glass outdoor coffee table that we have in the backyard.  We have a number of favorites that I'll discuss in the coming weeks, but today's game, Robber Knights (designer RĂ¼diger Dorn [website in German], artist Michael Menzel [website in German], publisher Queen Games) is a recent discovery that is quick, compact, and a tight game-playing challenge.

I came by Robber Knights as an afterthought during the FunAgain Games 2012 spring cleaning sale (which at this writing is still going on).  RK was one of those checkout-window, "hey, by the way, before you go, we're selling RK at 67% off - why don't you throw that one in your shopping cart, too?" kind of links (which at this writing is apparently still available at that price).  For ten bucks, based on a cursory review of the boardgamegeek.com entry, I decided to take a chance on it.

We've played twice now, and I have to say that RK is a clever little game-playing challenge.  Players lay up to three tiles in a turn.  Tiles depict various terrain, some of which (cities, villages, castles) are worth points if controlled by a player's knight at the end of the game.  At the time a castle tile is laid, a player may deploy knights from that castle along a row or column of previously laid tiles to claim them.  Previously claimed tiles can be subsequently claimed by an opponent's knight, but only if certain movement and stacking constraints are satisfied.  Once deployed, knights do not move for the rest of the game; they simply hold claim to the tile until it is taken by another player.  So the strategy comes in laying tiles in a way that allows one's own knights to lay claim to points while leaving tiles minimally vulnerable to knights of other players in subsequent turns.

I think of this game as a cross between Carcassone (tactical tile-laying) and Othello (row/column driven shifting control of spaces on the board).  The "robber knight" theme is minimally engaging; the game is abstract to all intents and purposes, and as it happens, that suits me just fine in this case.

Kathy and I have played twice.  In the first game a week or so ago, our scores were tied by pure luck of fumbling around trying to figure out the tactics and techniques of taking and protecting points and preserving resources.  The rate at which you use up tiles and knights is discretionary - one to three tiles laid per turn, and zero to five knights deployed every time you lay a castle tile.  Once you've deployed your last knight, you can gain no more points.  Once you've laid your last tile, you're done with the game while the other player(s) continue until all tiles have been laid.  We haven't quite established whether there is an advantage in harboring tiles for the end of the game, but it certainly seems important to keep track of how many castles you've laid relative to how many knights you've deployed.

In today's game, we played much more quickly than in our first round, albeit more thoughtfully and more conservatively.  We were not eager to spend knights or lay three tiles in a turn unless sure that the point return was worth it or the points acquired would be safe from re-claiming.  I won this afternoon's game by five points, owing in part to one turn of perfect tile luck in which I drew a city, a village, and a castle and was able to deploy five knights to score eight points (including a village that was already on the board) in a protected location that Kathy could not come back and claim later.

I should point out that although tile luck is a bit of a factor, it is tightly mitigated by a semi-ordered tile stack. I'm reminded of the cards in The Speicherstadt, which are divided into four "seasons" that are each shuffled independently and then stacked to form a semi-ordered draw pile.  Here in RK, a player's tiles come in five ordered groups of five shuffled tiles each (plus four specific tiles on the first turn), so there is a semi-predictable distribution of castles, villages, and cities that become available over the course of the game.

Given the relatively quick play of this game, the compact table-space it occupies, and the tight tactical challenges that it offers, I expect we'll play RK a fair amount this summer.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Hip-pocket wargames

(c) Z-man Games
Used by permission
My friend Grant and I had plans to play a three-player round of The End of the Triumvirate (designers Johannes Ackva and Max Gabrian, artist Andrea Boekhoff, publisher Z-Man Games) Friday afternoon, but our third player never showed.  Having lost an hour waiting, and me having to leave less than two hours later, we were faced with having to come up with a quick two-player game on the fly.  (We eschewed the idea of playing TEotT as a two-player game, which is possible but which, in our opinion, loses the essence of the game.)  Now, Grant has quite the collection, and I was quite happy with what we ended up playing - Traders of Carthage (which is on my "must have" wishlist) and Oz Fluxx (another in the series of light-hearted Fluxx games by Looney Labs).

Filler games like ToC and Fluxx accommodate this niche perfectly.  But both of us were wishing we'd had a wargame locked and loaded as a contingency to knock out in our hour-and-a-half window of opportunity.  In retrospect, we certainly could have played my miniatures favorite De Bellis Antiquitatis or the quick and dirty card game Down in Flames: Zero!  Even a game of chess might have worked, and I think we considered it.  Grant specifically mentioned he would have liked to have played a Columbia block game, if we'd had more time.  But when you don't have your miniatures handy or can't lay your fingers on the right game on the spur of the moment, we found it hard to whip out something that's both meaty and quick.  


So the situation spurred a conversation on Tuesday among some of us about what wargames would have fit this situation - something at hand on the shelf that can fill a contingency window of an hour and a half or so. "For short wargame, break glass."  Paul R. reminded me that Scenario 3, "Stuart's Raid," from Stonewall Jackson's Way is very quick.  He also told me that just the previous Thursday, he and Frank H. had completed a scenario of the Avalon Hill classic Caesar's Legions in two hours - including set-up, rules review, play, and clean-up.  PanzerBlitz also came up in our conversation. 

So I thought I'd review my own collection and see what candidates I have as "hot standbys" for spur-of-the-moment wargame options.  Here's what I come up with as good options from games I have on hand:

Image courtesy of
GMT Games
  • Down in Flames III: Zero! (designer Dan Verssen):  GMT's clever card game of World War II dogfighting can be knocked out in less than an hour pitting a flight of four American aircraft against four Japanese.  Always fun.
  • Memoir '44 (publisher Days of Wonder):  Richard Borg's fun, approachable World War II game that starts in northern Europe but whose expansions extend to all theaters
  • Wooden Ships and Iron Men (designer S. Craig Taylor):  One of my very favorite games, an Avalon Hill classic handling of tactical naval combat in the age of sail, from single frigate engagements to large fleet actions
  • Panzer Leader (designers Dave Clark, Randall C. Reed, Nick Smith) and
    PanzerBlitz
    (designer Jim Dunnigan):  Two more Avalon Hill classics, timeless treatments of battalion-level armor and infantry combat on the western and eastern World War II fronts, respectively
  • Battle Cry  (Avalon Hill / Hasbro):  Richard Borg's American Civil War predecessor to Memoir '44
  • De Bellis Antiquitatis (designers Phil and Sue Barker and Richard Bodley Scott):  The only miniatures game on this list, appealing for its small scale and rapid play time.  Our collections are 15mm scale, which means each army fits in a cigar box and the battle can be played on a two-foot-square board with a half-dozen pieces of terrain.  Simple, quick, and still tactically challenging.
  • Richtofen's War (designer Randall C. Reed):  A favorite of mine way back in high school, I haven't touched this Avalon Hill World War I dogfight classic in a long time, but I remember it was a quick play with a lot of tactical maneuver.
  • Saipan (designer Kip Allen):  The only folio game I have from the SPI "Island War" quadrigame, this is a nice treatment of the US Marines' invasion of the very toughly defended island.  Play balance issues need some treatment, though.
  • Ace of Aces (designers Doug Kaufman and Alfred Leonardi):  A true "filler" wargame.  This was a fun diversion when I was on a submarine in the Navy.  My department head and I had a decent campaign going during one deployment.
So I think the lesson learned here is that I ought to have two or three of these "at the ready" for any spontaneous opportunity for a wargame encounter.  I wonder if I should carry some of them in my car?  You never know when the mood will strike ... to kill some cardboard!

Monday, May 28, 2012

Another pounding in Puerto Rico

My wife Kathy and I went back to an old favorite tonight, a two-player variant of Puerto Rico (designer Andreas Seyfarth, artist Franz Vohwinkel, publisher Rio Grande).  Whereas I was thinking it was a pretty close game, in fact I made a major error in spending my dubloons on a Wharf instead of saving for a large bonus-point building.  Kathy bought both the Fortress and the Residence.  I ended up using my Wharf only once, to ship two corn - hardly worth the investment (not to mention the opportunity cost of a large building later).  We were very close on shipping victory points and building points, but the bonuses from her big buildings earned her a huge win, 52-36.
My wife's game-winning city - only two production buildings but beefed up with the Fortress and Residence

It was a very odd game, mostly traceable to the fact that most of the coffee plantations came out early, before either of us was ready to invest in a Coffee Roaster, and most of the indigo didn't come out until the end, when we were largely committed to other crops and neither was interested in starting something new.  So except for the very last Craftsman phase, she only produced corn and tobacco, and I only produced corn and sugar.  The Trading House never filled up, because the Office became unavailable (under the two-player variant rules).  The situation made for some very odd dynamics; I left my Small and Large Markets unoccupied for most of the game because I never had the opportunity to sell sugar or corn after the second Trader phase.  
My wife's shipping points and goods at game end (custom game pieces were a Christmas gift):  The indigo was the only one produced all game.

Discovering Le Havre

I can't remember what prompted me to look into Le Havre (designer Uwe Rosenberg, artists Klemens Franz and Uwe Rosenberg, publisher Lookout Games [website in German]), but I remember getting very interested the more I read about it.  The comment I put in my wish list was, "So highly rated, so well reviewed, by the designer of Agricola, for 1-5 players ... what's not to like?"

So I was especially excited when my beautiful, loving, game-playing wife gave me a copy of Le Havre for my birthday.  We made a point of setting aside the 5:00 cocktail hour last Friday for us to learn and play this Le Havre game that I'd heard so much about and that my wife was interested in as well, if only for the Agricola comparison (inasmuch as she has been known to farm circles around me from time to time).

We have found that the best way for the two of us to discover a new game that neither of us has played is for me to sit with the game and read the rules cover to cover to get to the point of understanding.  Then I explain  to my wife how I think the game works in what I think is a reasonably organized fashion.  We have discovered that I can do this with about a 90% reliability of getting the rules right.  Invariably I will get at least one rule wrong in the first play, sometimes more, but since we treat the first run-through as a "learning game," the stakes are low, and the consequences of screwing up a rule are usually minor.  (Well, that's my story, anyway.)

Sample resources - image posted to
boardgamegeek by Jason  Begy
 http://boardgamegeek.com/image/854059/le-havre   
Now, I will say that as I read the description on the back of the box, I was afraid I was in for a warmed-over Agricola in a different theme.  But when 5:00 arrived, I made a drink for my lovely wife, and then cracked open the box to see what I was in for.  And I found that Le Havre seems to have a very different flavor indeed.    Certainly there is still the general Euro process of taking actions, accumulating resources, using those resources to acquire things to build victory-point-generation-engines.  But the mechanisms seem very different in this game, the methodologies quite original (to me at least).

As it happens, it took me so long to learn the game, and my explanation was so confusing, that we only completed two out of the eight rounds that a two-player shortened-version game is supposed to take (which the rules claim should run about 45 minutes).  So Friday evening we pretty much got as far as figuring out the processes of the turn sequence but really didn't understand the "why" behind the different actions.  (And the rule I got wrong that first time is that I missed the wooden ship that each player gets at the start of the shortened two-player game.)

Fortunately, my lovely wife was not discouraged but inspired to suggest that we try the game again on Sunday.  And we started at 4:00 rather than 5:00, and needed only the most cursory review of rules before we were able to jump into the game with both feet.  We definitely learned a lot more in today's session about how the game seems to work.

Construction and building firms allow
players to build new buildings - image
posted to boardgamegeek by Raiko Puust
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/1256076/le-havre 
 
Without going into detail on the rules themselves, suffice it to say that players may on each turn essentially choose either to take raw materials of one type (as many as happen to be available at that point), or to take advantage of the action of one of the buildings that has been built in the city.  The most common such action early in the game is to use raw materials to build new buildings, which are worth points and which expand the available actions in future turns.  Some buildings yield a guaranteed number of raw materials of a certain type.  Some allow conversion of raw materials to refined materials.  The Wharf allows construction of ships.  The Shipping Line allows the shipment of raw or refined materials on ships for money (which is both currency and victory points).  Other buildings allow a variety of other actions.

There is also a decidedly Agricolesque feeding concern at the end of each round of seven turns, which motivates players to convert fish to smoked fish, grain to bread, and cattle to meat for food.  Grain and cattle can also be "multiplied" (albeit slowly).  In Le Havre, unlike Agricola, the "feeding curve" grows very quickly from one round to the next.  Ships become important, because each ship provides free food every round to offset the feeding requirement.

Shipping Line - image
posted to
boardgamegeek
by "amp (beatrix)"
 
But my wife discovered - faster than I did - the real value in ships:  using them with the Shipping Line to sell refined goods.  In her case, she used the Abattoir to convert cattle to meat and hides, the Tannery to convert the hides to leather, and then the Shipping Line to deliver the leather to market.  I tried to outdo her success by using the Iron Works to acquire iron, the Collier to acquire coal, the Cokery to convert coal to coke, which in turn I used in the Steel Mill to convert iron to steel.  Steel sells for a great deal more than leather (twice as much, in fact), but because I needed extra steps to make it all work, I was too late to make it come together in time before the end of our shortened game.

So my beautiful wife beat me in our first complete game of Le Havre by the convincing score of 147 to 91.  Now we both understand the game better, and I expect we'll bring Le Havre to the cocktail-hour game table many more times.

Monday, March 5, 2012

PrezCon 2012 - Part Three

Image courtesy
of GMT Games
Down in Flames
While not strictly a wargame in the truest sense, I enjoy the dogfight card game Zero! (designer Dan Verssen; artists Mike Lemick, Rodger B. MacGowan, and Mark Simonitch; publisher GMT) from the Down in Flames series for its atmosphere as well as its quick play.  My friend Keith F. and I played a heat with only the occasional stumble over the rules, which were a bit rusty in my recollection but which the game master Richard Phares was happy to straighten out for us.  Each of us took a turn as an element of two Zeros against two F4F Wildcats, and each came away with one shoot-down apiece for a dead heat draw between us.  I didn't compete in any subsequent heats in the DiF tournament because I had too many conflicts with other events, but I was glad to have this old favorite make an appearance in my PrezCon experience this year.

Settlers of Catan
Image (c) Mayfair Games.  Used
by permission.  All rights reserved
Every year I harbor the fantasy that I will have a shot at winning at Settlers of Catan (designer Klaus Teuber, publisher Mayfair).  The PrezCon SoC tournament is a National Championship Qualifier, but with over 60 people competing every year, it's always a longshot.  This year I won in my first heat with some a very fortuitous initial settlement placement.  I had a nice variety of production with my first two settlements only four road segments apart, and I was able to build to a port as well as gain the Longest Road.  One of my opponents was Virginia C., a very friendly, expertly competitive SoC player.  Also at my table was Jason C., who'd beat me in SoC at PrezCon last year, as well as his father Gary.  Several times over the course of the game, Virginia openly preferred to trade with Gary and Jason before she would consider a trade with me, more out of respect for my board position than anything else.  Fortunately, everything panned out in my favor, and I qualified for the quarter final.

In the quarter final, my opponents were two very experienced players - Mark B. and Martin H. - and one novice, young Niccolo S., who had played and won his very first game of SoC earlier that morning.  What ensued was the wildest game of SoC I had ever played in my life.  Martin ran out to an early commanding lead by building five settlements, the Largest Army, and the Longest Road to gain a quick nine points.  Mark and I each had five or six points, and Niccolo four.  Young Niccolo was in the best position to steal Longest Road from Martin and knock his lead down, so we took every opportunity to trade brick and wood to Niccolo.  Longest Road went back and forth a few times before Niccolo locked it down for good.  Mark and I had each worked our way up to seven points, so the game was even and the competition got fierce.

Actual die roll during PrezCon 2012
Settlers of Catan quarter final
Meanwhile, the game had run so long that we ran through the entire deck of development cards (something I'd never seen happen before).  All trading pretty much stopped as we all got up to eight points each.  The dice rolling got pretty crazy, too.  At one point we'd rolled a "seven" six times in seven consecutive throws.  The craziest die roll was when a die actually landed on its beveled corner and stayed there.  The last three dice rolls of the game were "12," "12," and "two."  And the winner was young Niccolo, who eked out a victory over the three of us veterans who had essentially held each other down from winning.

Crazy game.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

PrezCon 2012 - Part Two

Small World
Among my goals at PrezCon this year was to learn Small World, which my buddy Grant Greffey is running as the Game Master.  I participated in his demo for new players, which was well-attended by upwards of eight people crowded around the table.  Small World  is a relatively easy game to pick up.  Grant is especially fond of it for its replayability.  The random combinations of races and special abilities make for some dynamic game interactions.

Later that evening, we played the first heat in the tournament.  I placed fourth at my table and learned (as I have so often heard but failed to incorporate) the importance of timing when it comes to placing a race into decline and starting the ascendancy of a new one.  I did reasonably well with "forest orcs" in the first several turns of the game but held on too long to "wealthy wizards," whom in retrospect I should have placed into decline after just a turn or two in favor of some more effective race.  The winner was Nathan Twigg, a regular face at PrezCon and a fun opponent.

The bottom line of course is that I learned how to play SW and found it to be a fun, light game.

Can't Stop
After my exhaustive statistical analysis of Pass the Pigs and the stark realization that I am mathematically too cautious in my approach to push-your-luck games, I vowed that I would approach Can't Stop with a more aggressive style.  That approach did not serve me well at all late Thursday night, where I busted on countless attempts to close out a category.  I really have to spend some serious number-crunching on that game to figure out the right approach.

Midnight gaming
My friends and I have taken to meeting at midnight to play together because, you know, 14 hours of gaming can't possibly be enough for one day.  So Grant, Keith F., Brian G., Tom S. and I were joined by Michelle H. (who was at my Can't Stop table) for a six-player round of Alhambra.  I did abysmally poorly.  It was so bad that at one point after the second scoring round, Eugene Y. (a very experienced and knowledgeable player) looked at our table and was astounded at how low the scores were - mine in particular at about nine points.  He asked me if I'd ever played before, or if I even knew how to play.  I told him that I'd placed in the semifinals the previous year, and he was just dumb-founded that we could have been so far into the game and have scores so low.  It was about the strangest game of Alhambra I'd ever played.

After Alhambra, we still weren't satisfied, so Keith, Brian, Tom and I stayed up for a round of Citadels.  None of the three of them had played a four-player round of Citadels before; Keith and Brian had only ever played three-player games.  The dynamic is completely different with four players (and a better game, really) since each player gets only one role, and two roles are visible face up and known to be out of play.  I built some substantial high-scoring buildings, but had only got to five districts before Keith finished with eight and won the game.

[Next post:  Friday's experiences going down in flames, settling Catan, learning to acquire, and bringing more people aboard trains, planes, and automobiles]

Friday, February 24, 2012

PrezCon 2012 - first day

I arrived at PrezCon first thing Thursday morning to demonstrate Trains Planes and Automobiles (artist Sean Cooke, publisher Blue Square Boardgames) at 9:00 a.m.  I shared the Promenade Ballroom with the Stone Age demonstration, but perhaps the hour was too early, because no one showed for either demo.  I have two more demos scheduled this weekend - one for this afternoon, and one for tomorrow morning, so I hope to get a little more visibility for TPA in the next couple of days.

Risk
Randy Dean found himself running the Risk tournament, and he hadn't even brought his copy of the game (nor had I brought my son's), so he ran out to Target and picked up a copy of the current edition before yesterday morning's first heat started.  I had assumed, since only two hours had been scheduled for the event, that we would play the new, objective-based rules.  As it turned out, neither Randy nor any of the other players at the table had ever seen the new edition before.  They were all surprised at the arrow-shaped armies and had no interest in playing anything other than conventional Risk.  So we adapted the new-edition components to the original rules.  Since the new-edition cards don't have the 19th-century infantry-cavalry-artillery symbols for reinforcement turn-ins, Randy established the rule for this tournament that four cards yields armies on the original progressive scale of four armies for the first turn-in, six for the second, then eight, ten, 12, 15, 20, and so on by fives thereafter.

The result was an old-style game in which I started with positions in South America,  North America, and northeast Asia.  Randy got knocked out of the game by Joshua S., who took Randy's cards and ended up getting two consecutive turn-ins for armies.  In retrospect, I was in a position to try to knock off the other player at the table (whose name escapes me) to go after his cards and then face off Joshua in a super-power slugfest.  Instead, I tried to knock down Joshua first, which I didn't yet have the strength to do.  At the height of my position on the board, I controlled Europe, North America, and South America, while Joshua was holed up in Africa and the other player in Australia with a stronghold in southeast Asia.  But I couldn't deliver the knock out, and Joshua was able to get another big turn-in, break out of Africa, and take me out of the game.  At that point, the other player conceded the game, and Joshua won the heat.

Our game did in fact exceed two hours, so I was unable to make the first heat of Down in Flames.  I expect to play that later this morning.

Although the session was fun in its own right, I stand by my often-repeated position that the newer edition of Risk is a much better game.  I don't expect to return to any later heats of the tournament here at PrezCon.

Command and Colors Napoleonics
I attended a demo of Command and Colors Napoleonics in my effort to learn at least one new game and to play at least one wargame this year.  C&CN appears to be a more complex iteration on the series of Richard Borg card-driven wargames.  It includes the attached-leaders element of Battle Cry (as you might expect in a 19th-century wargame) as well as some of the command card innovations and unit-type specialties of Memoir '44.  The handling of infantry vs. cavalry seems particularly interesting, as well as the counter-strike element of close combat.

Unfortunately, my schedule did not allow me to participate in the tournament itself.  It may have been just as well.  Again, the game master was thrown into the event at practically the last minute, so he made the decision that the tournament would be handled as a single-elimination event.  My limited experience in competitive play suggests that a single-elimination format is not well suited for a two-player game, but I didn't stick around to find out how well it went.

A Few Acres of Snow
At the adjacent table to the C&CN event, my friend Keith F. was trying his hand at the hot new game A Few Acres of Snow.  What was disappointing to him, though, is that the game master, Bruce Reiff, told participants that AFAoS is "a broken game," that the British player can not be stopped if he uses a strategy called "The Halifax Hammer," and that even three or four recent game modifications to mitigate the problem do not fix the game.  Although Bruce felt that the game was not well suited for competition, he continued to run the event "for fun" and to teach it to newcomers like Keith to familiarize them with it.  Keith ended up playing as the British against a very experienced player; I think his experiences with it were mixed.  He said the comparison many people make to Dominion holds up as deck-building wargame.  For my part, the bottom line of this event is that I am taking AFAoS off my wishlist.

Chicago Express
I got very excited about Chicago Express when Kathy and I played with our friends Sheila D., Keith R., Rebecca E., and Jeff W. some weeks ago.  It struck me then as the perfect capitalist game in which players invest in railroad companies and direct their development in an attempt to maximize income and make the most money.

I got to play in the first heat of the tournament here yesterday against Jim [missed his last name], Pat D., and Demy McB.  As it happens, Jim and Pat had played once before each, and Demy had never played before (but is a quick learner, as I've played her in a number of other games over the years), so the level of competition was fairly even among us.  I ended up owning three of five shares of the New York Central plus one share of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and I won the game in a fairly close finish.

[More entries to follow as time allows, and I will add pictures, links, and details to this entry as well.  PrezCon continues...]

Monday, February 20, 2012

Personal Pre-PrezCon

PrezCon open gaming and pre-cons started this evening (President's Day, hence the name), though I won't be arriving there in Charlottesville, Virginia, until Thursday morning.  But I had the opportunity to play a lot of games this weekend in a kind of home-style pre-PrezCon warm-up.

My son's red empire extends from
Buenos Aires to the ends of Asia
My 15-year-old's friend from Maryland spent the weekend with us, so Saturday afternoon started off with a reprise of our three-player Risk session from last July.  Last time, my son and his friend got pre-occupied with Asian occupation, and I ended up achieving an objective in each of the first three turns and winning the game in short order.  This time, I was not so fortunate, and they were not so inattentive.  My capitol was in New Guinea, and my dice luck prevented me from seizing control of Australia in the first turn.  It was all slow going from there.  My son gained control of South America and Africa, his friend dominated Europe, and I could do little more than throw roadblocks in the path of one and then the other.  Eventually my son rolled up the "Control two continents," "Control 18 territories," and "Control Asia" objectives to win the game.  I definitely prefer Risk (designer Rob Daviau, publisher Hasbroin the new objective-based format (rather than the old-style player-elimination global-domination victory condition).  I haven't decided whether to throw my hat into the Risk tournament at PrezCon, though.

That evening my wife and I played a two-player game of 7 Wonders (designer Antoine Bauza, artist Miguel Coimbra, publisher Repos Production).  It's not quite the same crazy free-for-all that a four- or five-player game can be, but it's still a nice way for us to pass the time.  She had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; I had the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus.  I won by a fairly narrow margin, as I recall.

Image (c) Mayfair Games.  Used by
permission.  All rights reserved
Yesterday, our friend Sue C. came to join us for a couple of days, and we started with Cities and Knights of Catan (designer Klaus Teuber; artists Volkan Baga, Harald LieskeFranz Vohwinkel, and Stephen Walsh; publisher Mayfair), an expansion that I actually prefer to the original Settlers of Catan but which requires considerable familiarity to play.  Maybe I can develop some interest in C&KoC among my gaming friends.  With barbarians, knights, walls, commodities, city developments, and progress cards in lieu of development cards, the game takes on a richer level of complexity.  Dice luck is still a factor, but sound planning counts for a lot.  Kathy kept me from building a settlement on a contended road junction by occupying the corner with a knight.  Although I had a more powerful knight on the same road network, I hesitated to spend precious wheat to displace her knight and then have to move my knight out of the way again to make room for a new settlement.  My hesitation cost me in the end; she ended up building the settlement there instead, which left me to have to build new roads elsewhere and develop less productive locations.  Ultimately it was Sue, however, who stole Kathy's longest road and ended up winning, despite my late-game move to build a cathedral and get within two points of victory myself.

Next was Citadels (designer Bruno Faidutti, numerous artists, publisher Fantasy Flight Games), always a favorite of mine, and one that Kathy had never played three-player before.  I think that assassins and thieves are particularly dangerous in the three-player version, because when the roles pass around the second time, each player knows two roles that have definitely been chosen by someone - so the assassin and thief can guarantee that a target is in play.  I ended up running away with the win this time, in part because of an excellent hand at the start of the game.  Although I think Citadels is primarily a game of getting inside your opponent's head, card luck is still a considerable factor.


Box cover image courtesy
of Rio Grande Games
Today we opened with another favorite, Puerto Rico (designer Andreas Seyfarth, artist Franz Vohwinkel, publisher Rio Grande).  Kathy and I seldom get to play it in its original intended format of three to five players.  I had a pretty strong engine going with corn, sugar, and coffee, plus a factory and office that helped with the cash flow.  Kathy put her hospice to good use (as she likes to do), ending up with three occupied quarries that enabled her to pick up the fortress and capitalize on her excess population.  Despite one captain phase that saw me spoil a ton of product, I was able to eke out a one-point victory, helped by the guild hall.

After Sue left this afternoon, Kathy and I enjoyed our customary cocktail hour with a game of Ingenious (designer Reiner Knizia, publisher Fantasy Flight Games), which was a PrezCon acquisition last year and which I still appreciate both for its elegant gameplay and for its aesthetic appeal.  Kathy won, as she often does.  Although tile draw luck is a factor, I think Kathy did a better job keeping an eye on my scoring track and anticipating what I needed to do better than I did on hers.

So I got to spend this three-day weekend sharpening my teeth on some friendly competition before heading to Charlottesville later in the week.  I have to admit that I'm a lot better prepared to go have fun than I am to beat anybody; I think I'm a far cry from winning anything at the tournament level of competition that I expect to encounter.  But heck, it's all about having fun, meeting people, learning new games, and engaging with other designers and publishers.  I expect to do plenty of all of that.

Friday, February 17, 2012

PrezCon: The first casualty of battle is the plan



PrezCon!  I get excited just thinking about the name.  My favorite convention.  So convenient to northern Virginia, such a friendly and yet competitive gaming community.

I felt a little burnt out after five solid days of PrezCon last year, so this day I'm going for just four days; I'll arrive on Thursday and go through Sunday.  My gaming friends Keith F., Brian G., and Tom S. will arrive a day ahead of me, on Wednesday.  My buddy Grant plans to arrive in time for the first events on Monday evening and stay the entire seven days.  Hard core, baby.  I don't know how people do a solid week of intense boardgaming.  People like that must pace themselves better than I do.

Excerpt of my PrezCon
schedule ... for now ...
Every year I go to the PrezCon website and agonize over the schedule.  Every year I carefully prioritize my gaming preferences and put together a perfectly-crafted sequence of events that will take me from breakfast to midnight of solid gaming for the duration of my stay.  And it seems that every year my plan flies out the window within two hours of arrival.  I always seem to get re-directed to some new discovery and find myself playing something I never thought I'd try.  I think that's the magic of a game convention - the impetuous spontaneity of pick-up games and demos and vendors and auctions.  Grant said he's given up on even trying to make a plan.  He just plays as the spirit moves him.  All the world is his gaming table, and all of us merely opponents...

I've written this before, but I'm not afraid to repeat myself.  The best advice I ever got when approaching PrezCon came from Convention Director Justin Thompson:  "Learn at least one new game; buy at least one new game."  I have three demos in mind for games that I want to learn this year:
  • Acquire
  • Small World
  • Command and Colors: Napoleonics
1976 3M Edition
I'd actually seen a demo of Acquire (designer Sid Sackson, artist Kurt Miller, publisher Wizards of the Coast) once before, at my very first PrezCon, and bought a copy on eBay shortly thereafter, but never got a chance to bring it to the table.  But when Little Metal Dog Show explained why Acquire deserves the title of a "stone cold classic," he reminded me of how much I liked what I saw in that game years ago.  So now I'm going to blow the dust off the box and get reacquainted with this Sid Sackson masterpiece.

Grant is running Small World (designer Philippe Keyaerts, artist Miguel Coimbra, publisher Days of Wonder) at PrezCon, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never actually sat down and played the game before.  So I'm setting SW as a specific "learning goal" for PrezCon this year.

Cover Design by
Rodger B. MacGowan
Copyright ©2010
I also want to get my hand back into wargaming.  Now, the Richard Borg series of historical strategy games (Battle Cry, Memoir '44, Command and Colors: Ancients, Battle Lore) aren't exactly the kind of hard core Avalon Hill / SPI wargames I grew up on, but they will scratch the itch for now.  And I haven't done Napoleonics in a very long time, so Command and Colors: Napoleonics (designer Richard Borg, artist Rodger MacGowan, publisher GMT) seems like a good new title to learn.

As for buying at least one new game, well, I'll bring my wishlist, but there's no telling what I'll come home with.  Here's my top seven, in no particular order:
  • Fairy Tale
  • Le Havre
  • Chicago Express
  • Traders of Carthage
  • Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War
  • High Frontier
  • Saint Petersburg
Finally, of course, I'll be demonstrating Trains Planes and Automobiles three times at PrezCon.  I've mentioned before that PrezCon has a special place in my heart as the place I sold TPA two years ago, so it's nice to come back and show it off as a finished product.  The family game format is a little off the conventional PrezCon path, but I'm hopeful that for a few people, it will be the new game they learned at PrezCon, and maybe one or two will even pick up a copy.  I just want people to have fun playing it.



Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The game of marriage ...

... or (to paraphrase the immortal question posed in the introduction to The Odd Couple) "Can two people live together without driving each other crazy?"

Today I direct you to the blog of my lovely wife, K.B.Owen Mysteries, where she and I exchanged, you know, "observations" on each other's behaviors, those little things that make life together, well, interesting.  I hope you get a chuckle out of it.

As you read it, bear in mind that this is the lovely face that gazes at me from across the dining table and smiles sweetly just before she crushes me to fine grains of dust in Agricola, or Jaipur, or Citadels...

Friday, February 10, 2012

Gold on Mars: It's been done

The game that burst
my bubble
I was doing some market research today for my "Gold on Mars" game concept, and I've made that heart-sinking discovery that somebody has already done what I had in mind, better than I could have done it myself.  High Frontier (designer and artist Phil Eklund, publisher Sierra Madre) seems to have all the elements I wanted to manifest in "Gold on Mars," but (based on reviews) better than the prototype I've been crafting.

So, bottom line, I'll have to get a copy of HF.  It looks like fun.

*Heavy sigh*  Meanwhile, back to the drawing board.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Discovering Bohnanza

On business travel, I had the opportunity to visit long-time friend Stephen Craig and his wife Shelly.  Stephen had recently brought his prototypes of "Off to College" and "Staples" to UnPub2 and come back with a number of suggestions and ideas to work on.  But after a nice spaghetti dinner, the game that Stephen and Shelly really wanted to bring to the table was a card game I'd read many good things about but never played - Bohnanza (designer Uwe Rosenberg, artist Bjorn Pertoft, publisher Rio Grande).

I'm a big fan of Uwe R. because of Agricola, and I look forward to trying Le Havre sometime soon when I have the opportunity.  Bohnanza is in a completely different category, though, and I was surprised to see that Uwe R. had designed it.  At first glance, I was reminded more of Empyrean Inc. than anything else, but even that comparison is weak.  I'd read a number of reviews of Bohnanza, and while they were largely enthusiastic, none was particularly positive on it as a two-player game, so I hadn't really given it much thought.

Based on our session this evening, though, I've bumped it up on my wish list.  Bohnanza is a clever little game of shifting relative values among cards and tight decision constraints.  A lot of the fun is in the wheeling and dealing to trade off unwanted bean types for better prospects.  Whereas we tended to play a semi-cooperative, "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" approach, I can see how this game could be very cut-throat in a competitive environment (like a tournament).  As a social gamer, I appreciated the "benevolent negotiator" approach that we took at the table this evening.

I would imagine that a lot of the fun elements would be muted in a two-player game, which has no trading, but Stephen and Shelly insist that they have a lot of fun just playing the two of them.  Their copy of the game is "well-loved," which shows that it has had a lot of play.  So I think Kathy and I will have to give this a look.  Many thanks for Stephen and Shelly for turning us on to this new discovery!

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Chicago Express: Where has this game been all my life?

I gave our good friends Sheila and Keith a copy of Chicago Express (designer Harry Wu, artist Michael Menzel, publisher Queen Games) for a wedding gift.  I had never played before, but I was looking for something suitable for two to six players - something they could play together as a couple but that our occasional "game night" group of friends could play as well.  CE came up pretty high on the boardgamegeek rankings, and the reviews looked promising, so it felt safe as a gift choice.

Sheila and Keith hosted a dinner party last night, and we got to play a six-player session.  None of us had ever played before, so I read the rules beforehand.  The game struck me as the perfect implementation of capitalism in game form.  Railroad company shares are sold at auction.  Company dividends are distributed among shareholders based on earnings.  Stockholders - or board members, if you like - direct the investment of capital raised from the sale of shares to invest in railroad expansion and development to improve the company's earnings.  I have never played an 18xx railroad game, but I have the impression that CE is a kind of "18xx light."

We had a really great time with this game.  I was very pleased that it was a relatively easy game for all of us to learn even though we had no one at the table who had played before.  (The only open rules question for us was whether money is "hidden" or "open"; the boardgamegeek consensus seems to be that money in any game is open unless the rules specifically provide for hiding it, as in St. Petersburg.)  I think as we played, we all overbid pretty heavily for stock certificates.  More players chasing a fixed number of shares, which were the only source of income - supply and demand at its finest.  We had so many auctions that three railroads had only just reached Pittsburgh when Rebecca triggered game end with an auction of the last share of the New York Central after the Pennsylvania and B&O had already sold out.

Part of what struck me about this game is a complete absence of luck.  I didn't really think about it until the game was over, but there is not a single card draw, dice roll, or bag pull in the entire game.  As one reviewer mentions, the only "random" element (if you can call it that) is the seating order around the table and determination of starting player.  The rest of the game is determined entirely by the decisions of the players at the table.  Even more than Puerto Rico (which I consider a brilliant design), CE is entirely in the hands of the players.

The more I think about CE, the more excited I am about it.  I've put it on my "must have" short list.

1962 3M edition
Rebecca mentioned that CE reminded her of Acquire.  I have only played Acquire once, at PrezCon, and I loved it enough to buy it on eBay, but haven't had the opportunity to play since.  I had recently read mention of Acquire when Little Metal Dog Show called it "a stone-cold classic" in a post about ten days ago.  Rebecca and I agreed that we should bring it to the table at our next opportunity.  Since that conversation, I ran across an interesting boardgamegeek thread comparing the two games.  This is another game that I need to bring out soon.

So many games, so little time.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Games for four-year-olds

[This is a re-post of an entry originally published on 2 February 2012. The post was somehow corrupted, so I am restoring it for accessibility.] 

I was recently asked about games for very young kids.  I haven't looked at games in this age range in a while (since our youngest is eleven), so it was interesting to revisit the gamescape for the booster-seat set.

We still have two in our house that our kids enjoyed back before kindergarten:


Husker Du is essentially Concentration in a kid-friendly format.  The board consists of a number of small round "windows" through which symbols on a single rotating disc are visible.  Game set-up consists of covering the windows with checkers, then rotating the disc so that new symbols are lined up in the windows under the checkers.  Players remove checkers two at a time looking for matching symbols.  If they match, they keep the checkers; if not, the checkers cover the symbols again.  An old standard memory game, always a good parent-child past-time.

Launch Across is a cross between table-top basketball and Connect Four.  Each player has a launcher that propels colored balls against a backboard and down into one of several stacking columns.  The first to get four in a straight line row (horizontal, diagonal, or vertical) wins.  I'm not usually a fan of dexterity games, but this one is entertaining.

A search of the boardgamegeek.com database turned up a number of good options that are still available on the market:
  • "Animal Upon Animal is a simple stacking game, listed for ages 4-99, with 29 cute wooden animals."
  • Kids of Carcassone is a tile-laying game patterned after the phenomenally popular Carcassonne with simpler dynamics but, according to some parent reviews, engaging gameplay.
  • "Viva Topo! is a [roll-and-move] family game that has players balancing risk and rewards as they attempt to outrun the cat and score for cheese. Players attempt to advance their mice to various goals. The further the goal, the more cheese it is worth. Pursuing the mice is the cat that removes the mice from the game should it catch the mice.  Movement is regulated by a die that also moves the cat. Initial cat moves are only 1 space, but become 2 spaces after once around the track, so when the cat speeds up, it's almost all over!"

  • Boo Who? (originally Geistertreppe, now available as Spooky Stairs) has a clever feature in which players' pieces are magnetic and become hidden by "ghost" pieces over the course of the game.  Players try to remember where their pieces are and get them to the top of the castle stairs to win.
  • "Being afraid of monsters is a normal part of growing up.  Go Away Monster! encourages kids to conquer that fear by acting it out and taking control.  It also lets them experience some of the apprehension and excitement in deciding what is real and what is imaginary.  Reach in the bag to find the puzzle pieces that fit your bedroom game board. Try to distinguish between the different puzzle pieces and decide which one feels like the size and shape of a piece you need. If you pull out a monster, don't be scared... You take charge, and the monsters will take off!"
I'd be curious to know what other games have become family favorites among parents of the pre-school generation.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

A couple of funny little card games

As a get-well gift, a friend gave our convalescing family member the card game Angry Birds (Mattel), based rather tangentially on the popular app.  As games go, it's largely a function of dice and card luck, but it's a fun diversion with young kids.  We played a three-player round this evening, and we got some good laughs out of it.

Kathy's winning manipulation of the
time continuum in Chrononauts
Because Angry Birds went so quickly, Kathy and I then turned to another card game with a different bent of humor, Chrononauts (designer Andrew Looney, artist Alison Frane, publisher Looney Labs).  We like this game as an interesting twist on the Fluxx line of shifting victory condition card games that Looney Labs has put out.  As time travellers, we saved the lives of Abraham Lincoln, the Archduke Ferdinand, and John Lennon.  Kathy (as "Timmy") managed to travel back to 1918 when, thanks to the Archduke Ferdinand's narrow escape, Europe had avoided a destructive war, enabling her to "patch" the timeline with a European economic boom.  Then she traveled ahead to 1980 and saved the life of John Lennon from his would-be assassin.  She then traveled on to 1999 and engineered Senator Lennon's success in passing a Constitutional Amendment to repeal the Second Amendment and institute a nationwide gun ban.

Although some of the alternate timelines in Chrononauts are a bit tortured, the game itself is fun.  Besides manipulating history, the game can be won by collecting artifacts from history (or the future), some of which make me laugh every time I see them (such as the "Obvious Forgery of the Mona Lisa," depicted with a mustache).  The fairly simple gameplay features some tricky decision-making and risk-taking, which makes for a good overall card game.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Gaming in a hospital room - Monopoly Express

Some months ago I wrote a post on what kinds of games work when keeping someone company in a hospital room, and what kinds of games don't.  I had the occasion this week to while away time in similar circumstances, and we settled on Monopoly Express (designers Garrett Donner and Michael S. Steer, publisher Hasbro) as a not-bad alternative when conditions don't allow the kind of space that board and card games typically require.

Monopoly Express
photo Hasbro 2007
First published in 1991 as Don't Go to Jail, the dice game Monopoly Express was re-released in 2007 in a round plastic container that is rather difficult to open.  This inconvenience is a blessing in disguise, because it allows ME to be thrown into a bag and taken anywhere without concern for lost pieces.  The container also serves as a dice tray, and it was this feature that made the game work so well in a surgery waiting room.  My wife and I were able to play this game on the seat between us without worrying about pieces rolling onto the floor.

Monopoly Express board
photo posted to boardgamegeek.com
by Chris Blakely
The "board" is a round plastic disc with recesses for placing dice to score points.  The game itself is a "push your luck" game along the lines of Pass the Pigs, $GREED, or Can't Stop.  Three dice have only "Go to Jail" policemen, "Go" green arrows, or blank faces.  Seven other dice have colors and denominations on each face that correspond roughly to familiar properties on a Monopoly board.  A player's turn consists of rolling the dice, putting any policemen on the board, and then also placing on the board a combination of colored denominations that offers the best prospects for scoring points.  Completed sets are worth more points than the sum of individual dice and also offer the opportunity to add the "house/hotel" die to the mix on the next roll; houses and hotels add greatly to the score.  A player can re-roll remaining dice or stop at any time and score the results of the turn, but if a roll turns up the third policeman, then the player scores nothing that turn (like a "pig out" in PtP).

The value in this game isn't the twist on the push-your-luck format, and certainly not its very small addition to the deluge of Monopoly titles in the world.  Its real value is its extreme portability and quick play.  This week it got more action than PtP because it doesn't even need a flat playing surface.  At a time when we all needed a little cheering up, ME helped pass the time in a pleasant, undemanding way.