I have an Alibi

Image (c) Mayfair Games.  Used by
permission.  All rights reserved.

Seth Jaffee's misfortune is my good fortune, I must admit.  Seth (designer of Eminent Domain and Terra Prime) suffered a personal setback that motivated him to auction many of his games to raise money.  Among the things with which he was gracious enough to part was a copy of Alibi (designers Darwin Bromley and Jim Musser, publisher Mayfair Games) - a copy, as it happens, that he'd never got round to playing.

For my family, Clue has been a multi-generational favorite.  Whenever we'd go home to visit my mother, we'd play it on the kitchen table.  I lost count of how many different copies and editions we went through.  My kids enjoy playing it even today.  Clue is not what you'd call a great game in the context of the boardgame culture, but it has great sentimental value and meaning as a focus of family get-togethers.

Nevertheless, recently, we have been looking for another mystery game for some variety, as Clue has betrayed its  age and repetitive nature with so many playings.  Based on a review by BoardGameGeek "Tim," I had added Alibi to my wishlist as "a bit more interesting than Clue, though not compellingly so."  It seemed worth taking a shot to bring Seth's unplayed copy into our household and see if it couldn't get some attention.

My two teenage sons, my wife, and I played our first game this afternoon.  At first, the task of adding emotion (motive) to the customary questions of murderer, location, and weapon seemed only a minor complication - until we realized that there are ten suspects, 18 locations, 18 weapons, and 18 motives to eliminate, as well as time of day (morning, noon, or evening).  Whereas Clue has 21 cards from which to determine three, Alibi has 78 cards from which players must discern which four describe the murder.  Daunting, indeed.

But of course the game works very well, and in many ways very differently from Clue, which is what we were really hoping for.  Questions can only be asked that have a number as an answer, and only of one other player.  Rather than ask (as in Clue), "do you have Colonel Mustard, the knife, or the dining room," a question might be, "How many weapons do you have," or "How many blunt objects have you seen?"  Even more dramatically different is that players are required to pass one or more cards to the left after each question is asked, so that some cards eventually get seen by some or all players.  

Three "Auto" location cards.
(c) Mayfair Games.  Used by
permission.  All rights reserved.

Bonus points are awarded for exposing full sets of categorized clues.  Cards are organized in sets of three - for example, three different guns, three different "sharp objects," etc.  Players are therefore motivated to expose such sets of three to everyone at the table, e.g. "The victim was not killed in the Auto" while laying down all three Auto cards (Front Seat, Back Seat, and Trunk).  Finally, the winner doesn't have to make a perfect accusation - just outscore his or her opponents in the accuracy of his accusation (positive points for correct elements of the murder, negative points for incorrect elements).  

The result is a game that requires completely different approaches and strategies to deduce a near-correct answer well enough to outscore one's opponents.  In our game, our 16-year-old initiated the end-game with what turned out to be a correct accusation, but my wife tied his score because she had exposed higher-scoring card combinations.  Everybody agreed that it was a fun, approachable, and different take on deduction games, and we are likely to play it again soon.  I am sorry for Seth that he had to give it up, but he may like knowing that his copy has found some fresh life in its new home.

S. Craig Taylor

Don Greenwood included the following note in his most recent newsletter to the Boardgame Players Association:

S. CRAIG TAYLOR, Jr: I regret to inform my many friends in the hobby of the passing of our longtime friend. Craig was a prominent wargame designer who left his mark on the genre with designs for such varied concerns as Battleline, Yaquinto Publications, Avalon Hill and Lost Battalion, among others. His work was steeped in his background as a miniatures enthusiast and a keen interest in military history - an area of expertise in which few were his equal. He authored virtually dozens of games, but will probably be best remembered for his seminal work on Wooden Ships & Iron Men. I had the pleasure of working with Craig for nearly 20 years at Avalon Hill and admired him for the honesty and principles with which he lived his life as well as his obvious skills. My life is richer for having known him. He will be sorely missed.

Wooden Ships & Iron Men is perhaps my favorite wargame of all time.  I remember buying it at K*B Toys in 1976, the year after it came out.  It was billed as an "Official Bicentennial War Game."  My copy is now "well loved," heavily worn from so many sessions of tabletop sea battles.

I met Craig Taylor at HistoriCon, I think six years ago, when he was with Lost Battalion Games and I was hawking my very first real game design, Diadochi.  I bought two games from him (Enemy in Sight and Task Forces at War) and sat in on his demonstration of the western front Sergeants! Expansion, which was just coming out that year.

Sad that people like him don't last forever.

Sergeants! (designer S. Craig Roberts) demonstration at HistoriCon 2006

Midway: Pyrrhic victory in the Pacific

My colleague Frank H. and I got together after work today for a game of Midway (designers Larry Pinsky and Lindsley Schutz, publisher Avalon Hill).  This was the very first wargame I ever owned, and the box shows that it has been a well-loved game over the 40 years that I have had it in my care.

Frank played the Imperial Japanese Navy, and I had the United States Navy.  We played the Basic Game with the Tournament Game fighter rule added.  We elected not to require the Japanese to reduce Midway before the invasion (because we agreed that it was a complication that made the Japanese position too difficult) and not to have surface combat (because that's just stupid in a carrier battle).

PBY Catalina - USN photo

I played a relatively conventional (to me) American approach.  I kept the American carriers and cruisers together for most of the first day, until I'd approached the theoretical limit of the IJN's advance, at which point I split out a couple of cruisers as pickets to augment the PBY Catalina efforts to track the Japanese fleet.  I was discovered by Japanese searches a few times and so backtracked to break contact and evade being tracked.  My maneuvers slowed my westward progress, and the IJN lead task force doubled back to await the arrival of more escorts, so there was no air action on the first day (3 June 1941).  We both spent the night fueling and arming planes in anticipation of the next day's battle.

We were able to find each other immediately upon daybreak of 4 June, which turned out to be a bloody morning indeed.  He had united the entire Japanese fleet - carriers and invasion force - except for two light cruisers for reconnaissance.  Our strike pilots must have waved to one another as they passed above the Pacific, each seeking to deny the other a place to land when the fight was over.  We had each split our fighters fairly evenly between Combat Air Patrol (CAP) and fighter escort, so the fighter pilots spent this first sortie jousting with one another but playing nearly no role in defending their respective fleets.

USS Hornet - USN photo

The Japanese strike force sought to inflict the most damage by drawing antiaircraft fire away from the protection of the carriers and inflict hits on escorting cruisers as well.  U.S.S. Atlanta came under tremendous pressure but devoted her AA firepower to the torpedo bombers that targeted Yorktown.  The Japanese were able to sink both Atlanta and New Orleans and heavily damage Hornet in that initial attack, but the strike aircraft were decimated in their dispersed, piecemeal approach runs that allowed every gun in the task force to find a target.

My tactical focus for the strike focus was exactly the opposite.  I focused all airpower on sinking the Atago, which served as the flagship for the invasion fleet.  Part of my thinking was that I had already shot down a lot of Japanese planes, so the carriers were already less effective.  But mostly I had my eye drilled on the prize - the protection of Midway Island from IJN troops.  As it happened, I heavily damaged Atago and suffered minor losses among my tightly concentrated aircraft, but sank no ships.

Our planes returned, and I decided that I was going to withdraw Hornet from the front line to save her from the brunt of the second Japanese wave.  So all fighters landed on Hornet to serve as a CAP home base, and all strike aircraft were divided between Yorktown and Enterprise.  Planes were fueled and loaded up, and they went at it again four hours later.

Mitsubishi A6M3 Zero

For the second round of air operations, I held all fighters back on CAP and sent the strike force out unescorted.  The Japanese had sent a third of their fighters as escort and held back two thirds on CAP.  The fighter battle in the vicinity of the American fleet inflicted tremendous casualties on the Japanese Zeroes and still left me with a few fighters to augment ship defenses.  But because I had divided my cruisers between two carrier task forces plus one on picket duty, I had only four cruisers defending two carriers.  Despite a sound AA screen formation and residual fighters, the Japanese dispersed attack method (and some fortuitous die rolling) resulted in the sinking of both Enterprise and Yorktown in a single battle.  It was not looking good for the Americans at all.

Meanwhile, my strike force on the heavily defended Japanese fleet did not fare so well.  Although I succeeded in sinking the Atago, my efforts to divide the Japanese AA defenses and inflict damage on carriers failed remarkably.  In retrospect, my tactics were not well thought-out.  I exposed a significant portion of the attack wing to AA fire that they might otherwise have avoided in a more concentrated strike (my preferred tactic).  I lost a significant number of aircraft while scattering hits among three battleships and the Hiryu.  Having lost their racks, seabags, squadron support, and landing strips to the demise of Enterprise and Yorktown, the returning aircraft had to reach the more distant Hornet on the remaining fumes of their tanks plus a generous tail wind.  It was necessary to throw about six elements of F4F Wildcats overboard to make room for returning SBD Dauntless dive bombers.

IJN Yamato
Government of Japan photo

My third strike came at 1700, just in time to see Yamato and her "little sisters" join the Japanese fleet.  The IJN did not launch a strike against the American fleet, because her own attack wing had been so decimated that she need the arrival of Hosho to replenish her Kate torpedo bomber strike force, which was fueling but not yet ready to sortie.  All available Zeroes were waiting in CAP for the American strike force, which evaluated the Japanese deployment and eschewed attacking the damaged but heavily defended Hiryu in favor of the smaller but vulnerable Hosho with her flight deck full of readied aircraft.  This focus shift proved fruitful, as Hosho went down immediately, and her Kates with her.

The morning of 5 June, Hornet had backtracked east to get within staging range of Midway, whose aircraft deployed to the deck of the Hornet to replace all those planes lost in the Hosho strike.  Later that morning came one more exchange of air strikes, and it was at that point that we realized that the Hornet and the seven remaining cruisers defending her would never be sunk by the few surviving Val dive bombers in the Japanese strike force.  That meant that the Japanese had done all the damage they were going to do for the rest of the game.

SBD Dauntless
Public domain

The Americans, however, still had about a third of its original Dauntless dive bombers and a few Avenger torpedo bombers from Midway.  In the fourth attack, I shifted tactics completely to pick on the cruisers at the outskirts of the AA screen.  I heavily damaged Mogami with minor losses to my strike force.

It was clear at this point that the Japanese were going to get no more points for the rest of the game, whereas the Americans had enough fight left to take out at least one more cruiser.  That would suffice for me to pull ahead in victory points and win the game, so Frank graciously conceded and requested a rematch with switched sides at our next opportunity.

Final score:

Japanese (Frank H.)
10 for sinking Enterprise
10 for sinking Yorktown
 4 for sinking New Orleans
 2 for sinking Atlanta
26 total

Americans (Paul O.)
 4 for sinking Hosho
 4 for sinking Atago
 3 for (presumed) sinking of Mogami or another cruiser
16 for preventing invasion of Midway
27 total

It was a very fun game, but this was a narrow, Pyrrhic victory by any measure.  Nimitz would not be happy with Spruance if he had returned on Hornet with no other carriers and had meanwhile left the Japanese fleet largely unscathed.  But Frank believes, and I'm beginning to agree, that the protection of Atago and therefore the invasion of Midway is extremely difficult - perhaps impossible for the Japanese player.  That 16-point deficit therefore makes it necessary for the Japanese to sink at least two and probably all three American carriers to win the game.  And if the Americans sink one or two IJN carriers themselves, then the Japanese cause is daunting indeed.  As it is, I won a narrow victory despite some serious tactical errors.  I'm going to go back and brush up on some of the writing on this topic and think through how I need to attack and defend ships, as well as to revisit the Japanese position and strategy.

Submarines are so much easier to operate.

The Russian Campaign - Session report from the front

To commemorate the 22 June anniversary of the beginning of Operation: Barbarossa (when Germany violated its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and attacked Russia to open the eastern front of World War II), my friends Grant Greffey and Paul Rice got together for a game of The Russian Campaign: Fourth Edition (designer John Edwards, publisher L2 Design Group).

Lambasted in Le Havre

I got home early enough from work that Kathy and I could play a substantial game today, and right away I suggested Le Havre (designer Uwe Rosenberg, artists Klemens Franz and Uwe Rosenberg, publisher Lookout Games [website in German]).  We'd played once before all the way through, and we were learning as we went along.  Kathy won last time by a rather convincing score, but this time I figured I had the major points of the game worked out and thought I'd do better.

Well, not so much, perhaps.  Today we played another shortened version of the two-player game.  (Shortened?  Really?  We still went a solid hour and a half, even though we understood the actions and got into the rhythm of the game.)  Several times I lost track of the number of turns I had left before the end of the round, or the amount of food I'd need, or the amount of energy I'd need to build a ship or take some other action crucial to my master plan.  So, much of the game for me was two steps forward, one step back.  

I jumped to a pretty substantial early lead by focusing on building the most valuable buildings I could as soon as possible, so I ended up with the Steel Mill very early in the game.  It's a great source of 22 points, but if you aren't prepared to make coke or charcoal, convert a bunch of iron, and build a steel ship or sell the steel, well, then, there's not much point to having a steel mill, now, is there?  Oh, yes, Kathy paid me to use it once ... and shipped the steel using her Shipping Line for a whopping 32 Francs in one turn.  Well, so much for my commanding lead from a 22-point building.  

Kathy's winning array of buildings.  Note her action token denying me access to the Shipping Line,
so that my hides would languish undelivered and useless on my docks.

So as you might have guessed, despite my large building construction, Kathy ended up with a huge pile of money at the end and won the game by the score of 115 to 99 - a closer margin than our first session, but still an object lesson in the fact that I still have quite a bit to learn about this wonderful game.

Tale of Two Game Designs

Burton ship, image courtesy of
www.beer-pages.com

I've actually had two game designs in work.  I've already mentioned one, "East India Company," and today I typed up a number of rules changes based on the Father's Day playtest session that went so well.  I feel like just a few minor adjustments have really improved the initial setup (making sure that the initial commodity-colony tiles are not too far away from Europe), end game (going through two-thirds of the tiles rather than just half), dividend declaration mechanic (simplified to a table-read of dividends-to-points), cheaper ship construction, cheaper colony investment for taxes, and more appropriate physical component sizes.  I'm almost ready for another playtest.

I haven't mentioned the other work-in-progress, which I actually put together sooner and playtested a few times already.  This earlier design has the working title "Supply and Demand."  The board is a matrix with axes indicating supply (horizontal) and demand (vertical).  A cross-reference of each index yields a commodity price on the board.  A transparent marker on the board shows the current price of the commodity.  Players get partial information into cards that show positive or negative movement in supply and/or demand.  Players then buy and sell "contracts" among each other at whatever price they think will earn a profit when all the cards are played face up and the final market price resolved.  Players who bought markers have to sell them to the bank at the final market price; those who sold markers to other players have to buy them back at the final market price.  So a profit is made when a player bought lower or sold higher than the final market reconciliation price.  After two playtests (one at home, one with my local gaming group), I made some simplifications and other improvements.  I think the result is pretty smooth and ready for some serious attention.

The problem is that I just read on Seth Jaffee's blog about a very similar-sounding game called Panic by James Earnest, Greg Parsons, and Mick Sullivan.  This seems to be the story of my short game-design life.  I could dedicate an entire blog post to games I've designed just in time to discover another professionally made game that already does what I was trying to do, better than I did myself.

Oh, and now I find that there is already a computer game with the title East India Company, so I guess I will probably have to change the working title of my colonization-trade game, too.

Nature of the beast, I guess.

East India Company: Father's Day playtest

Image courtesy of
www.nostalgicbay.com

My wife asked me what I wanted to do for Father's Day, and the answer was easy:  I wanted the whole family to playtest my game design work-in-progress, "East India Company."  So this afternoon was the first true playtest of EIC with real people.

Rules explanation took rather a long while, and the game started slow.  I was really afraid that I was going to lose the attention of my 11-year-old altogether.  But as the game started to flow and he started to get the knack of how it worked, he really started to enjoy it.

EIC involves loading money on ships, sending them to far-flung colonies to buy products, and then sailing them to another location to sell for profit.  Early on, only a few colonies produce only a few things, and the only market at which to sell them is Europe.  Generally, the more distant colonies produce the more profitable goods, so there is something of a trade-off with respect to profit vs. opportunity cost.

One fear I had in the early design stages was that the game was too linear and that a few basic strategies would dominate the game.  That didn't turn out to be the case at all in our playtest.  My youngest son took the short route to West Africa, bought tobacco there, and sold it in Europe for a modest profit.  The up-front cost was so low that he could afford a second ship, and before long he had a tobacco profit engine going as a reliable source of income.  My wife went for the long-haul big-money strategy.  She sent a ship all the way to China for a load of spices.  Unfortunately, she ended up without enough capital to send a second ship anywhere else, so she spent a good part of the game (eight turns) waiting for her China spice ship to come in.  I took the middle ground, picking up ivory in East Africa.  My 16-year-old was the big gambler; he took out a loan, invested in new colonies, and levied tariffs all over the trading world trying to make money off other traders (or else keep the best markets for himself).  So I was very gratified that the system motivated multiple approaches.

I found a number of significant (but not back-breaking) flaws and took a lot of notes.  Perhaps the biggest was my wife's down-time waiting for her slow boat from China.  All of her capital was tied up in her Chinese venture, and because it took so long to make the round trip (and no other spice markets opened up until late in the game), she didn't realize her profit until halfway through the game.  Until that happened, she was just passing in every Market Phase, unable to take any other Market actions while we were all loading and unloading ships in ports closer to home.  Now, admittedly, an option she chose not to exercise was to take out a loan from the European banks and finance a second ship to develop an income stream.  She took a conservative approach in that regard, and I wonder whether loans are too burdensome to motivate borrowing.  It's hard to tell whether the game is flawed, or whether I just need to tweak the risk-reward balance so that players may reasonably finance trade ventures if the profit margin outweighs the interest.

I also had a few physical lessons learned, just in terms of game piece sizes and how they obscure information when placed on the board with each other.  Levying a tariff involves placing a poker chip and a player marker on top of the colony commodity tile; that placement prevents reading the tile without moving the tariff marker.  Also, the ships were so small relative to the poker chips that it was hard to tell the nationality of any ship with money on it.

All of us were reluctant or unable to build any ship bigger than a brigantine (the smallest size) until very late in the game, at which point the money invested in a bigger vessel is unlikely to be made back before the game ends.  I think I need to make ships easier to build.  Part of the issue in this particular session is that so few colonies produced timber, normally the most common product of all.  And cheap timber facilitates inexpensive ship construction.  In fact, six of the seven colonies could produce timber, but only one timber production tile came out during the game.  So timber was less common in our session than it would normally be.

Nutmeg from Spice Islands,
Indonesia - image courtesy
www.littlesmileorganic.com

But that uncharacteristic scarcity of timber actually evinces a strong positive feature of this game.  Tile draws determine which colonies produce or consume which goods.  I think the game gets a lot of replay value from the different trade relationships that can develop among the colonies.  In our game, it happened that China produced spices and consumed tobacco.  So we found great profitability in sending a ship to West Africa with just enough money for a load of tobacco, which it would bring to China and sell for more than enough money to buy a load of spices, which in turn brought a hefty profit back in Europe.  The net profit margin for the entire trip was therefore enormous.

I had some ideas for player's aids as well.  Some mechanics (especially declaring dividends for bonus points) seem more complicated than they need to be, so I should rework those for smoother execution.  And the early game seemed (to my family at least) to be very slow, only to end abruptly just when it seemed to be really picking up steam.  So I'll probably adjust the starting conditions and game end triggers.

But the great thing about the whole experience is that my eleven-year-old said several times afterward, "I really like that game," all the more gratifying after his early-game confusion and difficulty.  Once he got the hang of it (which really started to click for him when his tobacco route kept making money), he really enjoyed it.  I think everybody did, and I really appreciated their patience and willingness to be my Guinea pigs for an afternoon.  The bottom line is that I think the game is fundamentally sound and that I just have some adjustments to make to get it in good running order.

I'm very excited about where EIC is going.

Boardgames in the backyard: Perry Rhodan returns

The first time we tried Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League in the backyard was the first time either of us had played.  It's not a complicated game, but it does take us a little while to come up to speed, so we never finished our first game.  But today we sat down out on the rocking bench in the backyard with our chips and salsa and cocktails, and launched right into outer space for our second round of PR:TCL.

Spring weather brings out the shorts and the backyard boardgames.

Before long, we were picking up and delivering all over the Rhodan solar system.  We came to understand the importance of acquiring technologies early.  We had essentially the same technologies in play by the mid-game, except that Kathy picked up an extra Replenishment card that I never matched.  That extra card draw might have made the difference in the game in the long run.  The lead changed hands several times before Kathy came up with several strong turns and pulled away for a big win.  

As I mentioned before, the game fits snugly on the little glass top table we have out back.  No board in the conventional sense, the play area consists of a sun for a point/money track, six planets in a line, and their associated goods cards alongside them.  There are not a lot of small parts that can get lost off the table into the paver gravel.  Card play is manageable in the available space.  The game play is pretty engaging despite a fairly small set of moving parts.  In our search for games that work outside, this one is a winner.

East India Company: First prototype playthrough

Sir James Lancaster, commander of
the first East India Company voyage

This new game design project "East India Company" really has lit a fire under me.  In two days I put together a rough prototype and conducted a solitaire run-through to see what works and what doesn't.  I took some notes for immediate rework, like adjusting the commodity market prices to make them more profitable.  (No sense in sailing all the way to east Africa and back if you can't turn a profit on a shipload of goods.)  I also need players to each have his own colored ships (rather than common ships with player markers to distinguish who owns which).

I finally learned why so many games use tile pulls rather than card draws for some randomization functions.  It's very difficult to shuffle cards that have information on both sides without inadvertently compromising the randomness and uncertainty.  So right away I know I'm going to replace the 21 colony-commodity cards with tiles in a tile bag.  (I'm not sure how I'm going to do home-made tiles for my next prototype; I'm open to ideas if any reader has some.)  Right away, that fixes the two-sided card problem, plus tiles will take up a lot less room on the board.  My first prototype map was enormous (three-quarters of the dining room table), but now I have a way to scale everything down to much more manageable dimensions.

A lot went right in this play-through, though.  The mechanic I came up with for pirates and rebellions works very well - significant enough to require some risk management, but not an outrageous random turn of fate that shifts the balance of the game.  I think I like the way I have trade routes laid out on the map.  There is a nice conundrum between shipping cheap timber in from colonies to build ships, or to pay for the timber in Europe at premium prices to save time.  Many things seem to have worked right the first go-round on the table.

I think I should type out all the rules before my next play-through.  I found that I kept changing the order of events in the market phase, which means I haven't got a clear idea of how it should really go.  Putting it down in writing should clarify my thinking on that part of the game.  I'm also happy with how the loan mechanism works.  I had one "player" go into debt to finance an expedition, but the interest payments started exceeding his cash flow, to the point where he needed a subsequent loan just to finance the first debt.  Classic money management problem.

The bottom line is that I've accomplished more in about three days with "East India Company" than I did in many months with "Gold on Mars."  I'm really excited about this project.  More to follow, I'm sure.

Sometimes it takes a whole new theme

I had not been able to make my interplanetary mining game "Gold on Mars" work in a way that made sense to me.  I was frustrated with trying to model space flight in a workable yet representative way.  Things just weren't making sense on the drawing board.  And the things that did make sense ended up looking too much like High Frontier.  I shared the difficulties I was having with my game-playing historical-mystery-writing wife, and she said, "instead of setting it in the future, have you considered setting it in the past?"

Coins of the Modern East India Company of England
Image courtesy of emeritus.ancients.info

It wasn't long before I had turned the theme around completely.  My working title is "East India Company."  Instead of CEOs of aerospace mining companies, players in this new design represent 18th century investment and trade companies. Players seek exotic commodities in far-flung places of the New World and the Far East, rather than rare earths among the inner planets and the moons of the gas giants.  Ships travel by trade winds rather than rocket fuel.  The result is a much more elegant design, eminently more playable, one that retains the commodity market elements that I really wanted to keep without a lot of unnecessary complications that I had adopted in the course of trying to make space flight investment work.

I've sketched out a basic map and typed up an initial set of cards, each of which describes a marketable product from a colony somewhere around the world.  Players will seek to monopolize colonies, build ships, and find ideal trade routes to maximize profits.  One element that I have just begun to consider is the ability to corner a market and how that might improve profitability.  Trade with the most active colonies will be threatened by pirates as well.

I've pretty much got the entire concept in my head and the most crucial, numerical elements on paper.  The next step is, naturally, a playable prototype, followed by playtesting.  I'm hopeful that I've got a good concept that I can develop into a game that crosses commodities trading with pickup-and-deliver in a fun, approachable way.

Boardgames in the Backyard II: Discovering Perry Rhodan

(c) Z-man Games
Used by permission

As a joint birthday gift, my good friend Grant G. gave Kathy and me a copy of Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League (designer Heinrich Glumpler, artist Swen Papenbrock [webpage in German], publisher Z-man Games).  Grant knows that I play more games with Kathy in a two-player format than I do any other format with anyone else, which makes PR:TCL a particularly thoughtful gift.  As it happens, I'd read a few reviews and already tagged it as a "must have" on my wish list, so I was particularly happy to receive it.

We finally got it to the table during one of our few cocktail hours this week, in the backyard on a beautiful spring afternoon.  (She had a French 75; I had a Margarita.)  We discovered that Perry R. sets up very comfortably on our little outdoor table - a sun with a spiral scoring track, a row of six planets, and five goods cards alongside each planet.  The game is compact, visually very appealing, and relatively quick to set up.  We both picked up the rules fairly quickly.  Money and victory points are equivalent; the first player to reach 70 currency units wins the game.  (The names of the planets, the races, and even the unit of currency are ridiculous and nearly unpronounceable, so I won't bother to look them up and repeat them here.)

Agent Infiltration intervention card
Image uploaded to
boardgamegeek.com
by David Gerrard

Each turn consists of a move action, two planetary actions (load a container with goods, unload a container to sell the goods, or buy a permanent technology), and two interventions (single-play action cards).  Those five steps can be taken in any order, so it is not uncommon to load a container (first planetary action), move to another planet (move action), unload a container (second planetary action), and perhaps play one or two intervention cards, such as delivering a passenger to his/her/its home planet.  Unloading containers and delivering passengers gain money, i.e. victory points.

Some interventions are innocuous, but others have a "take that" flavor, such as switching locations with your opponent or switching contents of containers.  Kathy seemed to get the knack of the game first, but I found my groove and caught up to her after a few turns.  The lead traded hands a few times before we had to stop the game prematurely for dinner.  (We had a late start from having to learn the rules - not uncommon when we pick up a game for the first time).

So we came away with a very favorable impression of PR:TCL as a light, compact, fun game with quite a bit of nuance and tactics to keep it interesting.  I think card luck might turn out to be a significant factor as we play it more, but tactical decision-making still seems to count heavily on the game progress.  We look forward to trying it again.

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.

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 Rüdiger 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.

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!

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.

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.