Dixit 2 – played by Simon H, Phil, Bart, Simon M and moi.
In an exciting finish, Phil and I had tied, so we played off against each other, paying our best card that matched “The Opposite of The Holy Grail”. Needless to say, the best man won.
That would be me
.
We had an early start from Sydney. Picked up Simon the Later and folded him in to the car {along with everything else) and drove down to Albury.
StL kept us entertained with the Leonard Maltin game (guessing a film from details supplied from Maltin’s guide) and a ramble through Life’s Lottery (a choose-your-own-adventure by Kim Newman) where we had a near fatal car crash, a near death experience and spent the rest of our life squatting in squalor. Fortunately this was only in the book – but it was a good reminder to keep our seatbelts buckled.
Arrived at the Hume Inn, met up with folk we hadn’t seen since the last convention (Cancon in January) and knuckled down to the real reason we were all there, in Albury, in winter. Games.
Played: 2 x games of Glory to Rome with StL, Cyberkev & Ryan.
Then a long bloody game of King of Tokyo – Isaac, April, Cyberkev, Neil, StL and me. It came down to April and Neil – with Neil finally winning on points.
Then there was pizza.
Then the final game of the evening (for me, anyway) Eclipse, with Cyberkev, Jesus Kevin & AJ. We managed to make it to the end, finishing just after midnight. AJ winning and me coming a distant last – due to my antisocial behaviour.
This Easter we hosted two days of gaming on Sunday and Monday – which divided neatly into Ameritrash and light games on the Sunday, and the more complex Euros on the Monday.
Sunday:
The traditional opening of Apples to Apples – which works as an icebreaker more than a game.
Simon the Later had brought along The Resistance which is another good game for large groups.
Then lunch, then we broke into groups.
I set up Eclipse, but realised the table could only handle four players even though six wanted to play. We paired up, but the less active team mates drifted away to play something else. Eclipse soaked up most of the afternoon – we were half way through it when we decided to declare. I had taken the galactic centre, but I lost the dreadnoughts on the next turn. I was ahead on points, but would probably have lost had the game continued. Still, it was time for some of the guests to leave.
Also played Lord of the Rings (Knizia cooperative). I was Frodo, but successfully handed the ring on to Sam. I died as we entered Mordor and the ring didn’t make it to its destination.
A quick game of Scan whilst we waited for another game to finish. Scan was the first game I bought with my own money, and I still drag it out from time to time. It’s a simple, speed matching game that can take a large number of players and is over in 5 – 10 minutes, so it’s perfect for filling in those tiny scraps of time between games finishing.
My wife is determined to play the 40 Days around the world variant (now that we have all the games), so we’re going to attempt this at Bordercon. In the meantime we took the latest game in the series for a spin.
10 Days in the Americas requires more cruising – the bulk of the countries are in the Caribbean and are only accessible by ship. Flights could only take you so far, I found.
Most valuable player (or game in this case) must go to King of Tokyo. It’s fast to explain, fun to play and can really get down to the wire. It was played at least three times over the weekend and I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it.
Also played were:
Castle Ravenloft
The Princess Bride Game
10 Days in Europe
After dinner we watched “The Whisperer in Darkness” the latest film from the HP Lovecraft Historical Society.
Monday
Played Cthulhu Gloom
Gloom is a fairly ordinary take that style card game with transparent cards, so you can lay cards over each other to replace icons and scoring markers. It’s very much in the Addams Family/Lemony Snicket gothy style and okay for what it is, which ultimately isn’t much. Someone should put transparent cards to better use.
Of course.
One of last year’s Essen releases and a nice variant on the worker placement/card drafting/vp machine Euro games that are currently clogging up the shelves. Basically “Brewster’s Millions” the game, each player has to go into debt as quickly as possible. You can take your horse to the theatre, or have two cooks at your favourite restaurant, or have a couple of school chums hang around who are eager to please but never seem to have brought their wallets with them.
An absolutely charming game – I can’t wait to play it again.
And this is like the concentrated essence of Eurogames, boiled down into a tight tile laying, resource management system. Fairly unforgiving (but not as bad as, say, In the Year of the Dragon) this distills (because it’s got whiskey in it, see – distills!) many Euro mechanics down to their essence. It has elements of Carcassonne and Agricola in it in a very, very clever system. I was impressed by it, but not as charmed as I was by Last Will.
So all good things must come to end, but that end is not necessarily a good one. I’ve always been interested in card games where the cards have multiple uses (Glory to Rome being one of my favourite games of all time) and Landlord (from Friedemann Friese) is one of the earliest adopters of this mechanism.
The players are landlords (shock!) and construct buildings out of the backs of the cards that they put tenants in (the fronts of the cards.) At the beginning Steve bombed both Murray’s and my buildings and the game promptly stagnated as you require income to draw cards and you can’t build a habitable building without a roof, which you have to draw. We interpreted the rules about empty apartments to mean we were getting $1 a floor anyway, even though the building was uninhabitable and the game then sped up.
It has some good ideas, but was a bit of a mess of a game – mostly coming down to getting the right cards at the right time so you can mess with the others. In other words – I’d already played this game at the start of the day under the name of Cthulhu Gloom.
In summary
Hits: Eclipse, King of Tokyo, Last Will, Glen More
They have their place: Apple to Apples, The Resistance, Lord of the Rings, Scan, 10 Days in the Americas
Meh: Cthulhu Gloom, Landlord!
(though I’m not as big a fan of Dominion as he is, I agree pretty much with his take on Kingdom Builder – or House Placer as we call it.)
With so many new boardgames cycling through our gaming groups these days, it seems that it is easier than ever to “get it wrong” with their rules. Learning a new board game—like moving overseas—is to enter a new culture, a self-contained world that invites exploration, but also has its own rules and limits. Although the rules are all written down (or, at least, they should be), rules can still be missed when experiencing the game world for the first time. Our eyes are big as we stare at all the new scenery, wandering around slowly as we get our bearings. Only when we are lost, do we stop in the middle of the street and pull out our maps…or rule books. Confidence in the gamespace comes after repeated plays, and so does our knowledge of the rules…
…unless we don’t know that we got them wrong.
Jeff Allers from The Opinionated Gamers has an interesting post on getting rules wrong (one of my major issues.)
The first major con of the gaming year in Australia is Cancon, held over the Australia Day long weekend (i.e the weekend closest to the 26th of January.)
Cancon is mostly miniatures, war-games and CCGs now – there is some roleplaying (there used to be a lot more) – and the euro board games have slowly made their presence felt, through a tournament, then an ill-fated teamup with AGE, and now a game library and demo area.
Another reason to go to Cancon is for the sales – though with travel and accommodation costs it’s not really worth it. The main reason, though, is to catch up with gaming buddies, and make new ones, from all over Australia.
All in all, over the two days and two nights I was down there for (Friday and Saturday night, leaving Sunday afternoon) I managed to get a whole seven games in. Four at Cancon itself, 3 with a group of gamers who’d rented a house nearby.
so – play report:
Sleuth
Played with Jaime’s mob on the Friday night we got down. Phil and I found our way in the dark (after checking in to the Formule 1 – like a Japanese capsule hotel only smaller) to their rental house in Watson.
I think we played with the full complement of seven. I took an early stab at the result and eliminated myself. Phil and Rhiannon both guessed a card in my hand that they hadn’t seen and I think it was left to Ben, Benj and Jaime.
The game dragged to a crawl as question after question was asked and the players still in the game realised they were asking questions they already knew the answer to. Finally Jaime cracked it and we could crawl (or rather drive) back to our sarcophagi.
Drum Roll
Julian from Unhalfbricking was running demoes of the latest Essen releases (he also had a copy of Eclipse for me.) The most colourful one was Drum Roll a game about circus management from a Greek publisher.
(Pretty isn’t it?)
It had some interesting mechanics (similar in ways to Colosseum) but was ultimately ABE (another bloody Euro), turning cubes into stuff into points. Enjoyable whilst it lasted (and very pretty) but ultimately uninspiring.
Innovation: Echoes of the Past
Played this with Steve and Ben (from the Sydney mob) and Cyberkev in partnership.
Ben and I made a strong start but ultimately ground to a halt and was unable to stop Cyberkev from scoring the last achievement needed.
Hey, That’s My Fish
My wife had been after the deluxe copy of HTMF (one of her favourite games) so I snaffled one from Good Games and we broke it open to kill some time whilst we waited to find out what Jaime was doing.
After I got soundly beaten we went to a nearby vegetarian restaurant for dinner before going over to Jaime’s rental for the main event…
Fiasco
We split into two groups for Fiasco – Jaime and his table ran a Wu Xia styled playlet and we played Vegas Baby, in which I was a war vet security chief in charge of a (as we discovered) rather fragile casino. A family bible went missing (and was almost replaced with a forgery), the cash takings were almost stolen and I wound up running security for the whole chain of casinos – more fool them.
And finally – as a Cancon tradition, Phil and I decided to subject the others to the wonders of -
The Aristocrats
Unfortunately the others took it more as a get-these-obscene-cards-of-my-hand exercise rather than elaborating the joke, so I think a point was missed. Still, we got a play in with new victims and hopefully I can give it another run later on in the year.
Coney Island (aborted due to time constraints.)
The next morning I was able to fit in (most of) a play of the latest Michael Schact game, before rushing off to lunch with my mother. The graphics are delightful and it’s a rather brutal game of building fairground attractions at the expense of the other players. I learnt this too late and so my absence probably improved my score.
(image snarfed from and © Surya @ BGG)
It’s a tighter game than Drum Roll, and nastier. Maybe I should have picked it up.
Instead I
Bought:
Eclipse
I really, really can’t wait to get this to the table. The rules are very well done (FFG could learn a lot from the layout) and the game itself looks very clever, with some very ingenious mechanisms for maintaining clarity of player information – normally the first thing to be sacrificed in 4X style games.
Intrigue & Race For the Galaxy (with expansions)
I bought these from Cyberkev. Somehow he manages to collect and sell games I’d been after for a while, like Intrigue. I also bought his copy of RftG with expansions, though it’s a game I appreciate more than like.
Show Manager
Another grail game – finally reprinted by Queen. I couldn’t resist the theme of putting on a show (even though the last show I put on put me in hospital.) Can’t wait to play this.
Kingdom Builder
The new hotness, still steaming from Essen. Cyberkev, Gregor and Ajay all highly recommended it so who was I to argue?
I’ve played it twice so far and I’m still not entirely sold on it, but it’s a deceptively light looking game.
Landlord
I think I basically picked this up for the theme (kicking hippies out.)
Hecatomb
More strange transparent pentagons for my collection
Jump Gate
And my traditional indy game – though this one won the Games Magazine Game of the Year award last year.
Confusion
A Bob Abbott game I’ve been after for years – fortunately reprinted by Stronghold Games.
And that was Cancon 2012! Not enough games played, too many games bought. Next year we’ve contemplating staying in Sydney and having our own mini-con – just to get some more games in.
The “lads” (my wife’s term) came over last night for some Indian home delivery, alcohol, conversation and most importantly – board games.
We started with one of my latest acquisitions – King of Tokyo – or Kaiju Yahtzee. Amazingly this came down to the wire, with three of us one roll away from absolute victory. Poor Steve had bought lots of power cards but didn’t get into Tokyo once, I think. It wound up with Bruce being the victor (he had “I Come in Peace” so he was desperately trying not to attack people just to get the guaranteed victory point) but Murray and I were hot on his heels.
This is great opening game – doesn’t outstay its welcome and can (as we found) get really tense towards the end.
Bruce has a background in geology so I arranged with him over Twitter to play Erosion, a rare card game from Sierra Madre games (who also produced the fantastic High Frontier.) Erosion has the one of the more bizarre themes available – each player is a mountain trying to erode the other mountains and collect their debris in their delta for points – though they can score more points by having fossils in their mountain exposed by weathering.
Due to the rather phallic nature of the card structures many jokes were made – especially as Bruce won with only a pathetic nub to his name at the end.
The last game was a Reiner Knizia I’d heard of but never played – Genesis. An incredibly simple (yet strategic) tile laying game. Each player is a species (dinosaurs, lizards, mammals and humans – Bruce was aghast at the anachronisms) with tiles in four colours. You roll two dice on your turn which have either colours or wild cards on their faces (representing any colour) and you place the colour tiles on the map – attempting to get a majority of your species in each block of colour (each block had to have at least three tiles of the same colour in them to score.)
It felt like a kind of amalgam of Through the Desert and Acquire. The game play itself was straightforward – roll the dice then place tiles of that colour on the board – but the strategy was not immediately obvious.
As is typical with Knizia – the end of game scoring is what makes the game. Only areas with three or more contiguous tiles of the same colour are scored and the majority species gets 4 points, the second majority gets 2. The largest area over all triples the points and the largest areas of the other colours double the points. So, similar to Acquire, you’re “investing” in areas – but may have to abandon the investment and go somewhere else if the dice don’t fall your way (and the other players get ahead in the majority.)
Some of the squares on the board had volcanoes and tarpits that were no go zones, so they became choke points to prevent the growth of areas and there was constant re-evaluation of the potential scoring of each area as the tiles came down. Much to my surprise my species (the lizards) tied with Murray’s species (the humans) for first place. And that, dear reader, is how the Royal Family came into being.
It’s a clever game, but a little dry for my liking. I think it’s been overlooked to a certain extent as it could easily be a family game and is certainly better than Knizia’s current output – but it didn’t really take off for us. Still, I was glad Bruce brought it along.
And that was it – hopefully we’ll be able to get together next month to play our Cancon and Maths Trade acquisitions.
